Sunday Special: 10 Harsh Truths About Religion

Atheist Group Suing To Get ‘In God We Trust’ Off US Currency

from Liberal America

A group of Atheists in Ohio has filed a federal suit to get the slogan “In God We Trust” off of the money. The attorney leading the group of 41 atheists, Michael Newdow, also sued to get “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance, although that campaign ended unsuccessfully. The plaintiffs are people that handle money everyday. Newdow is arguing that handling the money that has “In God We Trust” on it imposes on them every time they do so.

He argues that the plaintiff is having to spread a message she doesn’t believe in everytime she handles U.S. currency:

“Rather, her beliefs require that she trust in her own abilities and a general responsibility to lead an ethical life. In handling the money, therefore, she is repeatedly unwillingly confronted with the words ‘In G-d We Trust.’ Thus, she is forced against her will to accept and re-distribute to others a message that goes wholly against her beliefs. Yet it is neither realistic nor reasonable for her to abandon the nation’s currency and use other forms of payment for all of her transactions.”

Naturally, he has rustled a few feathers among Christian groups. We have a constitutional guarantee to the separation of church and state despite what the fundies try to say. This time, the Christians are saying he is trying to tear down our nation’s motto. No matter how many times conservative groups say it, we are NOT a Christian nation.

But, is it really our motto? It has not always been on the money. It was first put on coins in 1864 during the Civil War. It did not make it to the paper money until the 1950s.

There is a deeply ingrained distrust of Atheists in our culture. Research at Nottingham Trent University has concluded:

“Anti-atheist prejudice is not confined either to dominantly religious countries or to religious individuals but rather appears to be a robust judgment about atheists.”

They told a hypothetical story of a man finding a wallet on the ground and taking the money. The participants were told to guess what religion the man is. Most thought that the man was an atheist. We need to get the word out that not all atheists are bad. Taking God out of our money is a great start to a more inclusive society.

I think it's unfair, and disgusting to have government offices and government papers to be adorned with faith based language.

-GEF

for you Sunday: Atheism has ancient roots and is not ‘modern invention’, claims new text

from the GUARDIAN

Cambridge academic’s new book disputes that atheism is a ‘modern invention’ and sets out evidence that ‘disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills’

Atheism is not a modern invention from the western Enlightenment, but actually dates back to the ancient world, according to a new book by a Cambridge academic – which challenges the assumption that humanity is naturally predisposed to believe in gods.

In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh, professor of Greek culture at Cambridge University, lays out a series of examples showing that atheism existed in polytheistic ancient Greece. It is, according to its author, partly “an attempt to excavate ancient atheism from underneath the rubble heaped on it by millennia of Christian opprobrium”.

Whitmarsh, a fellow of St John’s College, believes that the growing trend towards seeing religion as “hardwired” into humans is deeply worrying. “I am trying to destabilise this notion, which seems to be gaining hold all the time, that there is something fundamental to humanity about [religious] belief,” he told the Guardian.

His book disputes that atheism is “a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment” and a mode of thought that “would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth”.

It is a myth, he writes, which is “nurtured by both sides of the ‘new atheism’ debate. Adherents wish to present scepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science’s progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent western world consumed by capitalism.

“Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills. It is only through profound ignorance of the classical tradition that anyone ever believed that 18th-century Europeans were the first to battle the gods.”

“We tend to see atheism as an idea that has only recently emerged in secular western societies. The rhetoric used to describe it is hyper-modern. In fact, early societies were far more capable than many since of containing atheism within the spectrum of what they considered normal,” said Whitmarsh.

“Rather than making judgments based on scientific reason, these early atheists were making what seem to be universal objections about the paradoxical nature of religion – the fact that it asks you to accept things that aren’t intuitively there in your world. The fact that this was happening thousands of years ago suggests that forms of disbelief can exist in all cultures, and probably always have.”

In the fourth century BC, he points to Plato, as the philosopher imagines a believer chastising an atheist: “You and your friends are not the first to have held this view about the gods! There are always those who suffer from this illness, in greater or lesser numbers.”

“We may balk at his disease imagery,” writes Whitmarsh, “but Plato was surely right in his general point. There have been many throughout history and across all cultures who have resisted belief in the divine.”

These range from Carneades, head of the Platonic academy in the second century BC, who argued that “belief in gods is illogical”, to the Epicureans, who were often called atheoi in antiquity, and the atheistic writings of Xenophanes of Colophon.

Other examples are texts found regarding the healing god Asclepius from around 320 BC, including the case of a man who had lost the strength in his fingers, but who mocked the stories of the miracle cures found there, and refused to believe in them.

“When he slept in the sanctuary (a common type of ritual activity, known as incubation), Asclepius appeared to him in a dream. His fingers were cured, but the god chided him: ‘Because you disbelieved things that are not unbelievable, your name from now on shall be Disbeliever (Apistos).’ Aside from the story’s wonderful self-consciousness – a miracle inscription about someone who didn’t believe in miracle inscriptions – it also provides precious evidence for religious scepticism in practice, as espoused by a regular, everyday Greek,” writes Whitmarsh.

Whitmarsh argues that the diversity of ancient Greece’s polytheistic societies meant there was no such thing as religious orthodoxy, and no clergy laying out how people should live. This meant, he said, that while atheism could be viewed as mistaken, it was usually tolerated – although not in the case of Socrates, who was executed in Athens for “not recognising the gods of the city”.

While Whitmarsh is not setting out to take a stance on the truth or falsehood of atheism itself, he does state in his preface, his “strong conviction – that has hardened in the course of researching and writing this book – that cultural and religious pluralism, and free debate, are indispensable to the good life.

“Most cultures in human history have had a form of supernatural belief, of one sort or other. It would be hard to deny that that is the norm. But that’s not to say that every person in every culture has subscribed to that,” he writes.

The Perils Faced by an Atheist Family in their God-Obsessed Community

"My children are surrounded by other kids' prayers and patriotism, but I'm determined to teach them to ignore it."

By Julie Drizin

from Salon.com via AlterNet

“Goddammit!” “God bless you!” “For God’s sake!” “God forbid!”

My children have heard me take “the Lord’s name in vain.” These expressions slip out as easily as expletives and are part of my vernacular, even though I don’t believe in God.

God is not exactly welcome in our home.

I’m not a hater (at least not anymore). I’m an atheist. My daughters know I’m the tooth fairy; they have no use for Santa Claus; and would consider the Bible a collection of boring, inaccessible stories (at worst) or fables on par with Greek and Roman mythology (at best).

I’m raising good kids. They are good without God. They will not go to hell … because there is no hell. Neither will they go to heaven … because there is no heaven. I have taught my girls that “heaven” and “hell” are what we humans create for ourselves and each other right here on earth.

Atheist. Say it over and over again and it sounds like a meaningless label. I prefer to call myself a humanist, which expresses what I embrace rather than what I reject. Humanism is my religion. I have faith in the higher power of people – our capacity, indeed our yearning, to do good. If you think sustaining faith in an invisible God or his sacrificial dead son is challenging, try being a spiritual humanist. People fuck up all the time: We disappoint, we hurt each other, we fail miserably. To err is human. But to forgive at least feels divine.

So I forgive all of the evangelicals who’ve come knocking on my door to share the “Good News” with my family and save our souls.

I forgive my former next-door neighbors – a Baptist minister and her husband ­– for having a “Veggie Tales” video marathon while baby-sitting for my non-Christian kids. I forgive my mom’s Orthodox Jewish friend for “gifting us” with a mezzuzah when my first daughter, Sophie, was born. A mezzuzah is a little box that houses a teeny-tiny scroll with a Hebrew prayer on it that many Jews hang on the doorposts of their homes as a sign of their faith. I would hang one if it could ward off Jesus’ traveling salesmen, but it doesn’t. And I forgive Kayla’s dad for suggesting that I solve a childcare crisis by sending my 11-year-old daughter Jessie to Bible camp with his children. Thanks, but I would rather her binge-watch reruns of “I Love Lucy.” Finally, I have to forgive myself for many years of ruthlessly judging those who believe in God as gullible, fearful children holding on to the security blanket of an imaginary friend.

Parenting has transformed my perspective on religion. I don’t want my children to face prejudice for their beliefs and I don’t want them to feel prejudice toward anyone else. On some fundamental level, I think world peace begins with me teaching my children respect for freedom and diversity. So how did a nice Jewish bat mitzvah girl become an outspoken believer that Dieu n’exist pas? Feminism made me do it. Sure, let’s blame feminism. Everybody does.

A women’s studies class at Penn introduced me to the religious origins of gender oppression. I concluded that God didn’t create man, rather mencreated God in their own image. Patriarchy strikes again! So, God was yet another male authority figure to reject.

I dabbled with the Goddess ­– Mother Earth – and found the concept of a female divinity empowering. But she didn’t stick.

Still, I had a spiritual awakening. It didn’t happen inside any houses of worship or appear to me in the shadowy curves of a bagel. It happened, actually, during political demonstrations, when I felt a soulful connection to a larger group as we joined together to promote a common vision of justice. And I experienced an epiphany again during pregnancy and after giving birth, when I felt my own power of creation plus a deep connection to all women, across cultures and throughout time, who have grown a human life inside them, pushed a baby out of their bodies, fed that child from their breasts, and felt love of divine proportions.

Many people find God in these moments of mystery and clarity. I found my way to the Washington Ethical Society (WES). [3]What looks like a church, acts like a church but isn’t a church? A congregation of spiritual humanists.

Both of my daughters had baby naming ceremonies at WES. These rituals don’t feature holy water or the drawing of blood. Instead, parents stand before the congregation, promise to love and accept their child’s uniqueness; and the congregation pledges to support our family, to know and care for our children, too.

My daughters have also attended Sunday School at WES and (like most parents there) my partner and I have taught our kids and others in class. The kids engage in social justice work, like campaigning against slave/child labor in the cocoa industry and serving meals at a shelter for homeless women. Instead of Valentine’s Day, we have Pay Attention to Love Day. We hold a humanist seder at Passover and celebrate Spring Festival in place of Easter. “Stone Soup” is our Thanksgiving and Winter Festival is our end of year holiday.

But God wormed his way into my children’s lives anyway. (He works in mysterious ways.) Where? At public school, of course, where my kids have been required to recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag every day, a ritual I find nauseating both for its nationalism and its invocation of God.

I decided that perhaps my children should have more religious literacy than I do. I purchased a series of books called “This Is My Faith,” which are first-person journals of children explaining the symbols, rituals, tenets of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism and how their family practices their religion. One summer, I tried to get Jessie interested in creating her own “This Is My Faith” book about humanism/ethical culture, but like many projects launched with great enthusiasm, we never finished.

My older daughter hasn’t really asked about God. But I’ve asked her plenty. Most recently:

“Sophie, do you believe in God?”

“I don’t know!”

“You don’t know if there’s a God or you don’t know if you believe in God?”

“I don’t know! Now, leave me alone!” (She is 15, after all, and has better things to do, usually involving earbuds and a palm-size screen.)

Jessie, at 11, is surprisingly clearer on her beliefs. While rehearsing at home for a school chorus concert, she admitted to me that instead of singing “God shed his grace on thee” during “America, the Beautiful,” she silently mouths the words, just as she’s been doing for years, ­she confessed, during the pledge of Allegiance.

This summer, Jessie went to a week of overnight camp, where they sang songs before meals and bedtime. At the end of the week, Leslie, the camp director, asked the girls for feedback on what they liked most and what they would change. My daughter pulled Leslie aside and explained that she is an atheist and wished that they didn’t sing songs that mentioned God. Leslie thanked her and said that she usually tells kids they can substitute “Earth” for “God” but just forgot this year.

This past year, Sophie participated in the Coming of Age program at WES, a year-long rite of passage that educates parents about adolescent development. It includes spiritual experiences, like camping alone on a mountain. The program concluded with a moving graduation ceremony in which the teens gave speeches about how they had grown over the year and we parents tearfully sang songs to our children.

It’s been a challenging year. Sophie and Jessie are the only two of their vast brood of cousins who aren’t having bar or bat mitzvahs. We’ve been to so many of them, I wondered if Sophie felt like she was missing something, a special event that focused just on her transition from childhood to young womanhood. So, I offered to throw her an alternative quinceañera. “We’re not Latino, Mom,” she reminded me.

No, we’re not. We’re Jewish(ish). We’re liberals. We’re a two-mom family. We’re vegetarians. We’re not “nones,” that growing population of Americans who are disconnected from religious affiliation. We aren’t going it alone. But still, somehow, the thing that seems to push our family over the edge of mainstream America is our atheism.

[3] http://www.ethicalsociety.org
[4] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The Perils Faced by My Atheist Family in Our God-Obsessed Community
[5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/religion-0
[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/atheism
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/children-0
[8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

"The God Who Wasn't There"Sunday Sermon

bonus:

From Bible-Belt Pastor to Atheist Leader

from The New York Times

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Late one night in early May 2011, a preacher named Jerry DeWitt was lying in bed in DeRidder, La., when his phone rang. He picked it up and heard an anguished, familiar voice. It was Natosha Davis, a friend and parishioner in a church where DeWitt had preached for more than five years. Her brother had been in a bad motorcycle accident, she said, and he might not survive.

DeWitt knew what she wanted: for him to pray for her brother. It was the kind of call he had taken many times during his 25 years in the ministry. But now he found that the words would not come. He comforted her as best he could, but he couldn’t bring himself to invoke God’s help. Sensing her disappointment, he put the phone down and found himself sobbing. He was 41 and had spent almost his entire life in or near DeRidder, a small town in the heart of the Bible Belt. All he had ever wanted was to be a comfort and a support to the people he grew up with, but now a divide stood between him and them. He could no longer hide his disbelief. He walked into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror. “I remember thinking, Who on this planet has any idea what I’m going through?” DeWitt told me.

As his wife slept, he fumbled through the darkness for his laptop. After a few quick searches with the terms “pastor” and “atheist,” he discovered that a cottage industry of atheist outreach groups had grown up in the past few years. Within days, he joined an online network called the Clergy Project, created for clerics who no longer believe in God and want to communicate anonymously through a secure Web site.

DeWitt began e-mailing with dozens of fellow apostates every day and eventually joined another new network called Recovering From Religion, intended to help people extricate themselves from evangelical Christianity. Atheists, he discovered, were starting to reach out to one another not just in the urban North but also in states across the South and West, in the kinds of places­ DeWitt had spent much of his career as a traveling preacher. After a few months he took to the road again, this time as the newest of a new breed of celebrity, the atheist convert. They have their own apostles (Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens) and their own language, a glossary borrowed from Alcoholics Anonymous, the Bible and gay liberation (you always “come out” of the atheist closet).

DeWitt quickly repurposed his preacherly techniques, sharing his reverse-conversion story and his thoughts on “the five stages of disbelief” to packed crowds at “Freethinker” gatherings across the Bible Belt, in places like Little Rock and Houston. As his profile rose in the movement this spring, his Facebook and Twitter accounts began to fill with earnest requests for guidance from religious doubters in small towns across America. “It’s sort of a brand-new industry,” DeWitt told me. “There isn’t a lot of money in it, but there’s a lot of momentum.”

Not long ago, the atheist movement was the preserve of a few eccentric gadflies like Madalyn Murray O’Hair, whose endless lawsuits helped earn her the title “the most hated woman in America.” But over the past decade it has matured into something much larger and less cranky. In March of this year, some 20,000 people marched through a cold drizzle at the “Reason Rally” in Washington, billed as a political debut for the movement. A string of best-selling atheist polemics by the “four horsemen” — Hitchens and Dawkins, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett — has provided new intellectual fuel. Secular-themed organizations and clubs have begun to permeate small-town America and college campuses, helping to foot the bill for bus and billboard ad campaigns with messages like “Are You Good Without God? Millions Are.”

The reasons for this secular revival are varied, but it seems clear that the Internet has helped, and many younger atheists cite the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as a watershed moment of disgust with religious zealotry in any form. It is hard to say how many people are involved; avowed atheists are still a tiny sliver of the population. But people with no religious affiliation are the country’s fastest-growing religious category. When asked about religious affiliation in a Pew poll published this summer, nearly 20 percent of Americans chose “none,” the highest number the center has recorded. Many of those people would not call themselves atheists; “agnostic,” which technically refers to people who believe that the existence of a higher being can’t be known by the human mind, remains the safer option. The godless are now younger and more diverse than in the past, with blacks and Hispanics — once vanishingly rare — starting to appear in the ranks of national groups like the United Coalition of Reason and the Secular Student Alliance.

The movement has also begun cultivating a new breed of guru in men like DeWitt and Nate Phelps, the son of Fred Phelps, the leader of Westboro Baptist Church, which pickets military funerals and gay-pride events with signs declaring “God Hates Fags.” Nate Phelps, a big, barrel-chested man who delivers fierce rebuttals of his father’s theology and narrates the agonies of his fundamentalist upbringing, has become a star speaker at atheist rallies and gay-pride events around the country. At the Reason Rally, crowds cheered as he declared that the Sept. 11 attacks played a critical role in blasting away his lingering belief in any sort of deity.

Because they started out as fervent Christians, unlike Dawkins and Hitchens and company, Phelps and DeWitt are seen as heroes within the movement. They tend to live and work in the country’s most Bible-soaked places. “I think what’s happening is that nontheists are realizing we can’t just leave this cause to Ivy Leaguers and intellectuals,” DeWitt told me. “We’ve got to convey the secular worldview in a more emotional way.”

At the same time, DeWitt is something of a reality check for many atheists, whose principles rarely cost them more than the price of “The God Delusion” in paperback. DeWitt refuses to leave DeRidder, a place where religion, politics and family pride are indivisible. Six months after he was “outed” as an atheist he lost his job and his wife — both, he says, as a direct consequence. Only a handful of his 100-plus relatives from DeRidder still speak to him. When I visited him, in late June, his house was in foreclosure, and he was contemplating moving into his 2007 Chrysler PT Cruiser. This is the kind of environment where godlessness remains a real struggle and raises questions that could ramify across the rest of the country. Is the “new atheism” part of a much broader secularizing trend, like the one that started emptying out the churches in European towns and villages a century ago? Or is it just a ticket out of town?

DeRidder is a four-hour drive northwest of New Orleans, near the Texas border. It is a tiny place, surrounded by thick forests of long-leaf pine, where many of the 10,000-odd residents have known one another all their lives. There is one major commercial strip lined with fast-food restaurants and chain stores, and in the rest of town it is difficult to drive a block without passing a church. Many of them are Pentecostals, part of the revivalist Christian movement in which worshipers often speak in tongues — babbling in what is thought to be a sacred language — sometimes while writhing on the floor. In the local Walmart, it’s easy to recognize the more conservative Pentecostal women, who wear modest, long dresses in a high-waisted style, their hair, which they do not cut, pulled neatly into buns.

When I first met Jerry DeWitt, I half expected a provincial contrarian hungry for attention. Instead, he was mild and apologetic, a short, baby-faced man with a gentle smile and a neatly trimmed dark beard. He was earnest and warm, and I soon discovered that many of his fellow townspeople cannot help liking him, no matter how much they dislike his atheism. He appears to have reached his conclusions about God with reluctance, and with remorse for the pain he has caused his friends and family. He seems to bear no grudge toward them. “At every atheist event I go to, there’s always someone who’s been hurt by religion, who wants me to tell him all preachers are charlatans,” DeWitt told me, soon after we met. “I always have to disappoint them. The ones I know are mostly very good people.”

DeWitt is a native son in every way, and this must make his apostasy all the more difficult for others to make sense of and to accept. He is descended from a long line of preachers on both sides of the family. His paternal grandfather helped establish at least 16 different churches­ in Louisiana, including one in DeRidder, he told me. (I found 69 churches in the town directory, though some may be inactive.) DeWitt grew up in the church, but it was only at 17, after being “saved” during a weekend visit to Jimmy Swaggart’s church in Baton Rouge, that he became a passionate Christian. Weeks later he spoke in tongues for the first time. Soon after that, sitting in church, he heard his pastor call on him to deliver a homily. Terrified, he asked if he could have a few minutes to pray for guidance. He stepped to the pulpit with his finger on a passage from the Gospel of Mark, and spoke for 15 minutes on the “seed of David.” The crowd loved it. “It was the biggest high I’d ever had,” he told me. “I knew right then that preaching was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.” He married a local girl at age 20, and two weeks after the wedding, he received an invitation to speak at a camp meeting in Lucedale, Miss. There he preached to overflow crowds of whooping Pentecostals who were speaking in tongues.

He and his wife began touring the South, building a reputation for the power of his sermons. It was a tremendous ego charge, especially for a short, chubby young man with dyslexia. For the first time, he was treated with respect, even awe. “I had this whole prophet persona going on. I wouldn’t really mix with people before the sermon,” he told me. “All kinds of people were seeing miracles, and I believed it 100 percent.”

For the next few years, DeWitt preached across the South, doing itinerant jobs to pay the bills. In 2004 he became a full-time preacher at a church near DeRidder. By that time, though, he had drifted away from the literal claims of Pentecostal doctrine and espoused a more liberal Christianity. He had begun reading more widely (he never got a college degree), starting with Carl Sagan’s books on science and moving on to Joseph Campbell and others. But equally, he told me, he found it unbearable to promote beliefs that only seemed to sow confusion and self-blame. He recalled how one middle-aged woman in his church who was suffering from heart disease asked him anxiously: “How am I going to believe for salvation when I can’t believe enough to heal?”

Finally he began to feel that his rationalist impulses were alienating and hurting his flock, and he resigned — reluctantly, he said, because he loved the human side of being a pastor, “playing Mr. Fix-It for the community.” He continued preaching part time for a while, invoking an ever more misty and ethereal God. By now he had also read Dawkins and Hitchens, and even weak-tea Christianity was becoming hard to swallow. He preached his last sermon in April 2011, in the town of Cut and Shoot, Tex. A month later, Natosha Davis called, and DeWitt found himself unable to pray at all.

DeWitt never meant to go public with his unbelief. He figured he could “stay under the radar,” he said, and continue working as a buildings inspector in DeRidder, where, over the years, he had gained a reputation as a community champion and was talked about as a future mayor. But when he heard that Richard Dawkins would be attending a Freethinkers gathering in Houston, he couldn’t resist. He took a day off, without telling his boss where he was going. He got a picture taken of himself and his son Paul (who was then 19 and who has never been religious) with Dawkins. DeWitt posted the photograph on his Facebook page, assuming that “nobody in DeRidder knew who Dawkins was.” He also, perhaps unwisely, updated the “religious views” box on his Facebook page to read “secular humanist.”

It was his grandmother’s cousin, an 84-year-old woman he knew as Aunt Grace, who saw that page and outed him. Word spread quickly. On Dec. 1, his boss asked to meet him at a diner in town. Sitting at the table, the man took out two printouts from secular Web sites with DeWitt’s name on it. “He told me: ‘The Pentecostals who run the parish are not happy, and something’s got to be done,’ ”DeWitt recalled. “Half an hour later I was out of a job.” (His former boss did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.)

Almost at once, DeWitt became a pariah in DeRidder. His wife found herself ostracized in turn, and the marriage suffered. She moved out in June. He received a constant stream of hate messages — some threatening — and still does, more than seven months later. He played me a recent one he had saved on his cellphone as we ate lunch at a diner in town. “It’s just sickening to hear you try to turn people atheist,” a guttural voice intoned. It went on and on, telling DeWitt to go to hell in various ways. “I’m not going to sit around while you turn people against God,” the voice said at one point.

But DeWitt also hurled himself into his new role as a faith healer in reverse. He became the first “graduate” of the Clergy Project, discarding his anonymity and giving the clandestine preachers’ group its first dash of publicity. It was formed in early 2011 with a few dozen members, mostly recruited through Dan Barker, a former pastor who is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and through Linda LaScola, who in 2010 co-conducted a study of nonbelieving pastors with Daniel Dennett, the atheist philosopher. The project now has more than 300 members, with about 80 applicants awaiting clearance (the group is very careful about admissions, to secure the members’ privacy).

DeWitt also became the executive director of Recovering From Religion, formed in 2009 by Darrel Ray, a Kansas-based atheist proselytizer. The group grew quickly under DeWitt’s leadership and now includes at least 100 local chapters scattered across the country, each one typically with 10 to 12 participants. Like other public figures in the movement, DeWitt also serves as a one-man clearinghouse for religious doubters via Facebook and e-mail. During the four days I spent with him in DeRidder, he was almost constantly checking his cellphone and tapping out messages.

There is more involved in this work than sympathy. The transition away from faith may start with an intellectual epiphany, but it runs through a difficult reinterpretation of your own past. For believers, this often involves what DeWitt calls a “hook,” or a miraculous story that helps anchor your faith. He gave me an example: he was born again in Jimmy Swaggart’s church thanks to his former elementary-school teacher, who persuaded him to come along with her to Baton Rouge. He later discovered that his teacher almost died while she was being born, and that she had emerged safely from the womb only after a preacher from a neighboring town was roused from sleep to offer a blessing in the delivery room. That preacher was DeWitt’s paternal grandfather. This coincidence had seemed providential to DeWitt, a sign that he was meant to be a preacher himself.

“This story has kept you feeling that God has a destiny for you,” DeWitt said. “So now how do you reconcile that? How do you make sense of your life? It’s not easy.”

I heard parallel stories from a number of other participants in post-religion networks. “People have a really difficult time making decisions after they’ve lost their faith,” said Amanda Schneider, who organized a local Recovering From Religion group in Santa Fe (and also helps manage the broader organization). “They used to always base it on ‘What is God’s plan for me?’ They are still looking for something miraculous to guide them.”

One former pastor named Teresa MacBain told me that when she began doubting her faith last year, she ran through her list of friends and acquaintances and realized that every single one of them was religious. With no one to confide in, she began recording her thoughts into her iPhone when she was alone in the car. “It was a huge encouragement when I finally found other people to talk to online,” she told me. Like DeWitt, MacBain joined the Clergy Project. Then, earlier this year, she resigned from her pastor’s position in Tallahassee and went public as an atheist. She was promptly defriended (in the literal and Facebook sense) by almost everyone she knew. But like DeWitt, she has begun receiving frequent messages from doubting pastors and churchgoers, seeking her help in making the leap away from God. “It’s all new friends now,” she said.

That kind of abrupt excommunication is a fairly common experience, and many atheist networks — including hundreds on college campuses — become replacement communities and de facto dating services for many people involved. “Community is a huge problem for people wanting to leave religion,” DeWitt told me as we drove through DeRidder. He pointed to a church as we passed, then another, and another, and another. “How do you escape it?” he said. “It’s not like you can avoid driving past the church every day.”

In late June, Jerry DeWitt allowed me to accompany him to church in DeRidder. It was the first time he had attended since his apostasy became public, and he half-jokingly predicted that we would be attacked, or that the service would turn into a prayer session for our wayward souls. But he also made clear that he had no desire to hold religious doctrine up for ridicule. He wanted me to witness the emotional power of the ceremony and the music. He wanted me to understand why people are drawn to church, not just why they leave it. The church we attended — known as Grace — was one of the most liberal in town, multiracial and less orthodox than hard-line Pentecostals. He had delivered sermons there himself, and he was known by many, perhaps most of the parishioners.

As we arrived outside the church’s white porticos on a hot June morning, I could tell DeWitt’s fears were unfounded. “I’m praying for him” is the refrain when his name comes up, his mother had told me. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Sure enough, everyone we met was gracious, though there was often an undercurrent of unease. The service, by my own etiolated WASP standards, was an orgy of religious passion: people of all ages praised themselves hoarse as a high-decibel gospel band and choir shook the walls with heartfelt rhythm and blues. The preacher then delivered a homily about the risks of being a “catch-and-release Christian,” and I couldn’t help wondering if this was aimed at DeWitt.

Afterward, we met with the church’s founding pastor in an elegantly appointed office adjoining the main auditorium. He was a 79-year-old man named George Glass, with a wrinkled face and a magnificent deep voice full of warmth and gravitas. He hugged us both as we came in, chiding DeWitt for having stayed away for so long. We sat down, and over the course of an hour, he spoke movingly about his own struggles as a younger man, when he lost his first ministry and had to start from scratch. He reassured DeWitt that he understood his doubts and did not think any less of him. As we said our goodbyes at the door, Glass spoke again in his slow, Southern cadence, fixing DeWitt with his gaze. “The thing of it is,” he said, and we all waited as he allowed a weighty pause to fill the air — “you’ve just got to keep your mouth shut.”

Everyone laughed. But I did later wonder if all the public atheism had done DeWitt more harm than good. Couldn’t he have remained a nominal Christian, as so many others have? Even the old pastor, George Glass, acknowledged that others in the church had had problems with literalist claims about the Bible, and prefer not to talk about it. It is easy to see why. Open confrontation with faith, some would say, just provokes angry gestures from the faithful. In DeWitt’s case, those gestures had taken a wrecking ball to the life he spent 42 years building. He was once seen as a potential mayor of DeRidder. He helped clean up some of the town’s uglier spots when he worked at City Hall, and he knew the insides of almost every building in town; he knew and cared about most of the residents. Now many of them, he was told, believed he was a Satanist. During my short stay in DeRidder, I heard him take a call from the lawyer handling the foreclosure of his house, and I saw his wife’s moving boxes on their living-room floor. She’d had enough.

Was it possible, I wondered, that he was doing this deliberately? DeWitt is an intensely curious man, a homegrown intellectual who seems a little stifled in DeRidder. Was this a way of moving on? Would he really still want to be mayor of DeRidder someday, if it were possible?

“I’m so entrenched in this community, I feel like I’d be lost if I went anywhere else,” he said. “As for being mayor, who knows, stranger things have happened. I’d like to stay.” The town had changed a lot since his childhood, he explained. The old Pentecostalism had mostly softened into a more open, tolerant Christianity. He said he’d been amazed by the number of quiet atheists he discovered in towns throughout the South, looking for congenial voices online. Perhaps his community would one day welcome atheists, too.

DeWitt stood thinking as we waited in a stone garden outside the church (he said he wanted to make sure Glass and his wife got off safely in their car before he left). He said he admired the Glasses­, and the congregation, and many aspects of the church itself: its good works, the beauty of the music, the community it fostered. “Religion does a lot of good, especially the loving kind, like at Grace Church,” he said. “I know people who went to a more liberal kind of Christianity and were happy with that. The problem is, for me, there was a process involved in moving from Pentecostalism to a more liberal theology, like Grace Church. What makes me different is that process didn’t stop, and it took me all the way. In the end, I couldn’t help feeling that all religion, even the most loving kind, is just a speed bump in the progress of the human race.”

Robert F. Worth is a staff writer for the magazine. He last wrote about militias in Libya.

Editor: Jillian Dunham

What Happens When Atheists Confront Mortality?

from AlterNet By Tom Jacobs

Two sets of researchers ask whether nonbelievers turn toward God after contemplating death.

Are there atheists in foxholes? That timeless question (the literal answer to which is yes ) is a shorthand way of asking whether, when confronted by their own mortality, even nonbelievers’ thoughts turn to God.

Research published earlier this year tentatively concluded that they do . But a new study , conducted by scholars from three countries, reports that death-related thoughts lead us to reaffirm whatever belief system gives our lives meaning—and for atheists, that’s something other than religious faith.

“Our tentative conclusion is that even nonreligious people are tempted toward religious belief, if only implicitly, in the face of death,” writes Oxford University psychologist Jonathan Jong . He is lead author of a paper entitled “Foxhole Atheism, Revisited,” published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

“The psychological comforts of religion do not appear to be of universal necessity,” counters University of Missouri psychologist Kenneth Vail . He’s the lead author of the paper “Exploring the Existential Function of Religion,” published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Both papers provide evidence that reminders of death increase the religiosity of believers. This supports one of the basic tenets of Terror Management Theory , a school of thought built on the insights of the late anthropologist Ernest Becker.

According to TMT, a basic function of religion is to provide a buffer against death-related anxiety. It does this, primarily, by promising believers an ongoing existence that transcends earthly mortality. So it’s no surprise that both sets of researchers found a link between thoughts of mortality and increased devotion.

In the first of three experiments Vail describes, death reminders enhanced the religiosity of both Christians and Muslims. Christians were more likely to express belief in Jesus and deny the divinity of Allah and Buddha; conversely, Muslims were more likely to express belief in Allah and deny the divinity of Jesus and Buddha. (Buddhists do not, however, claim divinity for Buddha, and Islam’s Allah is usually seen as the same monotheistic God worshiped by Christians and Jews.)

Similarly, Jong found that when reminded with death, “participants explicitly defended their own religious world view, such that self-described Christians were more confident that supernatural religious entities exist.”

But when it came to nonreligious people, Jong found a disconnect between conscious beliefs and unconscious ones. Like the believers, the nonreligious responded to death reminders by strengthening their commitment to their world view—in their case, the firm belief there’s no such thing as supernatural entities.

But using an implicit association test, he found that after thinking about death, nonbelievers “wavered from their disbelief.” Specifically, 71 students from the University of Otago in New Zealand were presented with a series of 20 nouns, which they were instructed to categorize as “real” or “imaginary” as quickly as possible.

Jong reports that “while believers strengthened their beliefs, non-believers wavered from their disbelief” after thinking about their own mortality. Specifically, they were slower to label such concepts as “God” and “heaven” as imaginary.

In other words, when death was on their minds, “believers more readily judged religious concepts as real,” he writes, “while non-believers found it more difficult to judge religious concepts as imaginary.”

While respectful of Jong, Vail takes issue with his methodology; he isn’t convinced a less-rapid response time necessarily denotes increased doubt. Furthermore, he notes that all nonbelievers are not created equal.

His research, conducted with Jamie Arndt of the University of Missouri and Abdolhossein Abdollahi of the University of Limerick, Ireland and Islamic Azau University in Iran, distinguished between atheists and agnostics, and found they reacted to death reminders quite differently.

Specifically, in one experiment, death reminders “motivated agnostics to increase their religiosity, belief in a higher power, and their faith in God/Jesus, Buddha, and Allah.” Basically, they were more open to immortality-promising deities of any stripe.

But in a separate experiment, the notion of death did not increase atheists’ very low levels of religiosity or belief in a higher power.

In Vail’s view, this suggests people who strongly reject religious belief find other ways of dealing with “the psychological problem of death,” such as devoting themselves to some secular cause that will endure beyond their lifetimes.

So while the larger conclusions of the two papers “largely converge,” as Vail notes, they point to different answers regarding whether, say, Christopher Hitchens started to waver from his firm disbelief in his final days.

“Implicit religious belief is a difficult thing to sample,” Jong concedes, “and we hope that more work is done on this in different samples, including more militant atheists.”

Any volunteers?

Bertrand Russell Explains ‘Why I Am Not A Christian’- Sunday Sermon

from our friend Richard Metzger over at DangerousMinds

"I am as firmly convinced that religions do harm as I am that they are untrue."

Lord Bertrand Russell’s famous (or infamous if you prefer) 1927 essay “Why I Am Not A Christian” is one of the “classics” of “atheist literature” and one that is still likely to be read to this very day by budding unbelievers trying to inch themselves out of the church pew (It was just such a rite of passage for me, a religious skeptic by the age of twelve).

Russell felt that religion itself was “principal enemy of moral progress.” Saying something like that took a lot of guts back them!

In part, due to his reputation as a “freethinker” and for his controversial positions on matters of sexual morality, Lord Russell, who is today regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest minds and humanitarian activists, was judicially declared “unfit” to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York in 1940. The great philosopher was defended by a host of intellectuals, including John Dewey and Albert Einstein (Einstein’s famous line that “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds ... ” came from his open letter in support of Lord Russell).

In the clip below, taken from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s archives, Bertrand Russell gives a short but sweet answer to the question he posed himself over 80 years ago, in what is probably today his best-known popular work.

Science & Religion A Comparison

I don't know who made this, but i like it. Thanks!

via Hip Hip José

Florida Atheists' Xmas ad campaign

from BoingBoing

After years of hearing the Christian right complain about the nonexistent "War on Christmas," the Florida chapter of American Atheists have decided to finally essay a skirmish. They'll be placing bus-ads in Florida this season advertising the fact that millions of Floridians are atheists and inviting atheists to attend their Ft Lauderdale convention Dec 18-19. I'm assuming that religious fundamentalists will oblige them by going crazy and make a huge stink, which'll ensure that the news of the convention is spread far and wide.

"Every year groups like The Catholic League and American Family Association told Americans about a war on Christmas that simply did not exist," American Atheists Communications Director Blair Scott says in the announcement. "Last year we thought we would give them what they seemed to want and fired the first shot in the war on Christmas. To both groups we say, 'Happy Holidays!'"

Atheist Group's New Florida Billboards About to Piss Off a Whole Bunch of Jesus Fans

This Kid Is On It.

thanks, DangerousMinds

Richard Dawkins explains the 3 kinds of magic

from BoingBoing:

The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins, is an illustrated book for readers age 12 and up. Each chapter opens with a question: "What is a rainbow?" "What is an earthquake?" What is the sun?" Dawkins then presents the religious myths that some people think explains these things. He follows that with the scientific explanation.

Bonus:

Atheism U? A New Elite University Focuses on Spreading Humanism

from Religion Dispatches via AlterNet:

By Jessica Weisberg

A.C. Grayling has an impressive resume. He has been a philosophy professor, a representative to the UN Human Rights Council, the Honorary Secretary of the Aristotelian Society, and the author of twenty-some books.

He has even written his own bible: The Good Book, a 600-page compendium of his favorite philosophical texts, released last March. As if that weren’t enough, though, he’ll soon assume yet another title: the founding headmaster at the New College of Humanities, in London. With some of the world’s most prominent atheists signed up to teach (including Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Niall Ferguson, Laurence Krauss, and Steven Pinker), the school looks like a seminary for nonbelievers.

One doesn’t rack up so many honors without attracting a few detractors. For those who insist that Grayling is power-hungry and overhyped, the New College of the Humanities makes for a succinct case study. It will be a for-profit institution, elite and very expensive; its tuition is twice that of British public universities, including Cambridge and Oxford. Grayling once stated that “university education should be provided free of charge to all those suitably qualified for it,” but now he is charging students $30,000 a year.

In the United States, expensive private universities are common, but in the UK there is only one precedent—Buckingham University—and Grayling’s outfit is not only private, but for-profit. Terry Eagleton, one of Grayling’s (and Richard Dawkins’) most persistent critics, has called the new university “odious” and “disgustingly elitist”; professors at Birbeck college have accused Grayling, their former colleague, for launching an assault on public education; protesters set off smoke bombs during his reading at a London bookstore; there were several online petitions circling through the web. The fact that the original faculty list included only one woman did not help the image of elitism and exclusion.

Critics also object to Grayling’s school on religious grounds. Giles Fraser, a philosophy professor at Oxford, complained on Twitter that the New College of the Humanities was a “new atheist school.” The Church Mouse, a popular Christian blogger, suspects that it will shut out religious students and faculty:

It seems difficult to imagine how they would consider the CV of a religious professor seriously when looking to fill teaching roles. And how would they respond to a student candidate in an interview who professed a deep belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus, when asked about how they formed their ethical views?

This school, the Mouse argues, will be equivalent to a fundamentalist training camp for atheists. For some critics, the school’s atheist links only compounded its elitism. Academic institutions are well-known bastions of the wealthy, white, non-believing, and smugly rational. Grayling’s school almost looks like a parody.

Grayling, whose long, gray hair looks almost like a barrister’s wig, is defensive about the economics of his new education venture. In interviews and editorials, he points to the fact that government cuts have forced many public universities to privatize informally by accepting greater number of foreign students, whose tuition costs are double that of domestic students. He insists that many scholarships will be available. But when accused of religious intolerance, he just laughs. “How can you be a militant atheist?” Grayling said in an interview with the Guardian. “How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don’t collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It’s like sleeping furiously. It’s just wrong.”

The New College of the Humanities “is not an atheist institution,” Grayling and other spokespeople for the university have stated repeatedly. But it’s hard to imagine Richard Dawkins soft-pedaling on the topic of religion. Grayling insists that he’s not as vehement as his colleague. “I’m the velvet version,” he likes to say.

Bible of Self-Help

In The Good Book: A Humanist Bible, “unwise” is perhaps Grayling’s harshest insult. He believes, for instance, that it’s “unwise” to fear one’s own death, that one should pursue what makes one happy, and that showing jealously towards one’s friends is deplorable. He’s a strong advocate of pets (“the brute is more content with mere existence than is a human”), good manners, and “eating and drinking proportionately.” In the final chapter, “The Good,” he provides a long list of the necessities to live “a good life”: “honour, self-mastery, wisdom, loyalty, justice, sympathy, and kindness.” It’s hard to argue with that.

The Good Book doesn’t call for a new religion in the manner of August Comte, who tried to found a “religion of humanity” in the mid-1800s, complete with its own priests and holidays. It’s more self-help than manifesto. The book, as the inside cover reveals, was “conceived, selected, redacted, arranged, and in part written” by Grayling. The content, arranged in numbered verses, comes from over a hundred mostly-classical authors, including Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, and Diderot. The concept, however, seems to be borrowed from mash-up culture. There are no footnotes; none of the authors are cited. The Good Book is a megalomaniacal gesture, but it’s humble and disciplined in practice.

If this is is any indication of Grayling’s teaching philosophy, he will have a respectfully hands-off approach to his students. The book places considerable confidence in its readers. “All who read this book, therefore, if they read with care, may come to be more than they were before,” he writes in the introduction. “This is not praise of the work itself, but of its attentive readers, for the worth to be found of it will come from their minds.”

Grayling’s creed, as revealed in his bible, is more liberal pluralism than merely negative atheism. “The wise man is he who learns from all men,” he writes. According to a reviewer for Thinking Faith, an online journal for British Jesuits, for instance, believers “might also find that the good in The Good Book sits well with their belief and begs for hospitality.” As Stephen Colbert put it, “There’s nothing in here that makes me want to kill someone.”

An Elite Humanism?

Grayling’s new university seems to be approaching religion with the same gentle omission as The Good Book. All students at the school will be required to take four courses: logic and critical thinking, science literacy, applied ethics, and professional skills. For their majors, students have a choice between law, economics, history, English literature, or philosophy. History students will have a course on the “birth of Western Christendom” and philosophy students may take an elective in “medieval philosophy,” but there is no religious studies department. There’s a required elective on “the nature of good and the good life.” The curriculum bypasses cultural history and postmodernism in favor of a more rigorous study of the classics.

“My guess is that religion will be included in a similar way that it would in most liberal arts curricula—that is, as professors deem it to be relevant in history, philosophy, and history-of-ideas courses,” says Steven Pinker, who will balance a part-time position at the New College of the Humanities with a full-time position in the psychology department at Harvard. “Religion is included as a topic in many courses with the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard, where relevant, and I can’t imagine that that would be different at NCH.” During the 2006 standoff at Harvard about the necessity of a religion requirement for undergraduates, Pinker was a leading opponent.

Some critics of the New Atheists, especially Terry Eagleton, have suggested that Grayling and his comrades are “zealots” of “Western cultural supremacism” and free market economics. Most of them, it is true, teach at private universities. But Grayling’s The Good Book at least seems to suggest that his beliefs are well-tempered for a headmaster of a diverse academic institution. Grayling’s good life is accessible for believers and atheists alike. If only he weren’t perpetuating a system in which so few people can afford it.

Jessica Weisberg is a freelance writer living in Chicago, where she writes about education for the Chicago News Cooperative. Her website is www.jessicaweisberg.com

© 2011 Religion Dispatches All rights reserved.

SUNDAY SERMON: How To Stop Your Kids From Becoming Atheists

(click on the image to see it more clearly)

thanks, DangerousMinds

Ricky Gervais: Why I'm an Atheist

Funnyman Ricky Gervais pens a cheery holiday editorial for The Wall Street Journal:

Why don’t I believe in God? No, no no, why do YOU believe in God? Surely the burden of proof is on the believer. You started all this. If I came up to you and said, “Why don’t you believe I can fly?” You’d say, “Why would I?” I’d reply, “Because it’s a matter of faith.” If I then said, “Prove I can’t fly. Prove I can’t fly see, see, you can’t prove it can you?” You’d probably either walk away, call security or throw me out of the window and shout, ‘’F—ing fly then you lunatic.”

This, is of course a spirituality issue, religion is a different matter. As an atheist, I see nothing “wrong” in believing in a god. I don’t think there is a god, but belief in him does no harm. If it helps you in any way, then that’s fine with me. It’s when belief starts infringing on other people’s rights when it worries me. I would never deny your right to believe in a god. I would just rather you didn’t kill people who believe in a different god, say. Or stone someone to death because your rulebook says their sexuality is immoral. It’s strange that anyone who believes that an all-powerful all-knowing, omniscient power responsible for everything that happens, would also want to judge and punish people for what they are. From what I can gather, pretty much the worst type of person you can be is an atheist. The first four commandments hammer this point home. There is a god, I’m him, no one else is, you’re not as good and don’t forget it. (Don’t murder anyone, doesn’t get a mention till number 6.)

When confronted with anyone who holds my lack of religious faith in such contempt, I say, “It’s the way God made me.”

Read the whole thing at The Wall Street Journal.

via DangerousMinds

Have some Carl Sagan today! BONUS: Atheist Ten Commandments

A few cool Richard Dawkins clips

here's the BONUS:

Atheists Debate How Pushy to Be

from the New York Times By MARK OPPENHEIMER

LOS ANGELES — Energized by a recent Pew Research Center poll showing that atheists are more educated about religion than religious people, 370 atheists, humanists and other skeptics packed a ballroom at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel last weekend to debate the future of their movement.

They agreed on two things: People can be good without religion, and religion has too much influence. But they disagreed about how stridently to make those claims.

The conference, sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism, drew members from all the major doubters’ organizations, including American Atheists and the American Humanist Association. The largely white and male crowd — imagine a Star Trek convention, but older — came to hear panels that included several best-selling atheist pamphleteers, like Richard Dawkins, author of “The God Delusion,” and Sam Harris, who wrote “The End of Faith” and is a rock star in the atheist world (he traveled with bodyguards because he receives death threats from both Christians and Muslims).

The conference came on the heels of a change in leadership at the council and a rumored rift there, which some described as a standoff between atheists, who focus on God’s nonexistence, and humanists, who are also nonbelievers but seek an alternative ethical system, one that does not depend on any deity.

Some of the weekend’s speakers alluded to the turmoil at the council, where several longtime employees have resigned or been laid off. But in general they emphasized unity: They shared common enemies, like religious fundamentalism and “Intelligent Design.” And they believed morality was possible without God.

The presenters did differ on where a secular morality might come from. In his new best seller, “The Moral Landscape,” Mr. Harris argues that morality is a product of neuroscience. (The good, he argues, is that which promotes happiness and well-being, and those states are ultimately dependent on brain chemistry.) Others believe morality is bequeathed by evolution, while still others would argue for ethics grounded in secular philosophy, like Immanuel Kant’s or John Rawls’s. But all agreed that nonbelievers are at least as moral as believers, and for better reasons.

The disagreement was not, then, between atheism and humanism. It was about making the atheist/humanist case in America. A central question was, “How publicly scornful of religion should we be?”

Here even the humanists got less humane, as each side stereotyped the other. Those trying to find common ground with religious people were called “accommodationists,” while the more outspoken atheists were called “confrontationalists” and accused of alienating potential allies, like moderate Christians.

At the liveliest panel, on Friday night, the science writer Chris Mooney pointed to research that shows that many Christians “are rejecting science because of a perceived conflict with moral values.” Atheists should be mindful of this perception, Mr. Mooney argued. For example, an atheist fighting to keep the theory of evolution in schools should reassure Christians that their faith is compatible with modern science.

“They resist evolution because they think everyone will lose morals,” Mr. Mooney said. “Knowing this, why would you go directly at these deeply held beliefs?”

The panel must have been organized by someone mischievous, because the next speaker was the biologist and blogger PZ Myers — a confrontationalist, to put it mildly. In 2008, to make a stand for freedom of speech, he publicly desecrated a Communion wafer, a Koran and (for good measure) a copy of Mr. Dawkins’s book “The God Delusion.” He likes to say that he tries to commit blasphemy every day.

“I have been told that my position won’t win the creationist court cases,” Mr. Myers said. “Do you think I care? I didn’t become a scientist because I want to impress lawyers.

“The word for people who are neutral about truth is ‘liars,’ ” he added.

That seemed close to the view held by the physicist Victor Stenger, the last speaker. He accused those who live without God of cowardice: “It’s time for secularists to stop sucking up to Christians” and other religious people, he said.

Afterward, Mr. Mooney and Mr. Myers quarreled about a figure frequently cited as living proof of accommodation between science and religion: Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health and an evangelical Christian. In the past, Mr. Myers has called Mr. Collins “a clown” because of his religious beliefs.

According to Mr. Mooney, Mr. Collins, who was not at the conference, is an important ally for atheists: a leading proponent of the theory of evolution and a supporter of embryonic stem cell research. “By what metric is that a clown?” he asked.

“When it comes to the way he’s thinking about science, everything I’ve read that he’s written has been complete garbage,” Mr. Myers replied, adding later that he “will continue to call him a clown.”

But for many in the audience, Mr. Collins’s clown status was not the pertinent issue.

Rather, as atheists in a very religious country, they were looking for solidarity.

For example, I had lunch on Saturday with two young lovers who met earlier this year at “Generation Atheist,” a meet-up for young people at a pub in Hollywood, where they had gone looking for like minds.

“I’m not ‘out’ at my workplace,” said the woman, Claire, a 27-year-old arts administrator who asked that her last name not be used. “Because most people think atheists have no morals, I could damage the organization if I’m honest about where I stand on the issue,” she said.

Mr. Myers and other “confrontationalists” surely do alienate some potential Christian allies. But they may also give comfort to people like Claire, who feel like an invisible minority. Mr. Myers is way out of the closet as an atheist — proudly, outrageously so. We’re here, he’s saying. And we don’t believe. And we have science and reason on our side. Get used to it.

American atheists and agnostics know more about religion than professed believers

from BoingBoing

A new Pew survey on religion in America finds that atheists and agnostics are more likely to be well-versed about different religions' beliefs and practices than people who profess a belief in those religions. For example, atheists and agnostics are more likely to know that during Communion (Catholicism's central rite), the wafer and wine are meant to transubstantiate into the literal flesh and blood of Christ -- they aren't merely symbolic, as 40% of Catholics believe. Atheists and agnostics are also more likely than Protestants to know that Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation (the majority of Protestants could not identify him).

Interestingly, Mormons are, on average, better versed on the traditional New Testament Bible than evangelical Christians and mainstream Christians, many of whom consider Mormonism to be apostasy.

A new Pew survey on religion in America finds that atheists and agnostics are more likely to be well-versed about different religions' beliefs and practices than people who profess a belief in those religions. For example, atheists and agnostics are more likely to know that during Communion (Catholicism's central rite), the wafer and wine are meant to transubstantiate into the literal flesh and blood of Christ -- they aren't merely symbolic, as 40% of Catholics believe. Atheists and agnostics are also more likely than Protestants to know that Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation (the majority of Protestants could not identify him).

Interestingly, Mormons are, on average, better versed on the traditional New Testament Bible than evangelical Christians and mainstream Christians, many of whom consider Mormonism to be apostasy.

Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says

Novice level monster on Fox News fails to defeat atheist

In this Fox News segment about the recent U.S. District Court decision banning the National Day of Prayer, Dan Barker (author of Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists) handily parries a Fox News announcer's clumsy blows.

Unless the Fox News character learns how to devour his prey like the Ayperobos and Ghargatulas who command the prime slots on Fox News, he won't be long for the network.

from BoingBoing