Expanding Your Group in Harsh Territory

Here is Gordon Maples speaking on how atheist groups can thrive in the South. This is from a Secular Student Alliance conference, so his focus is on atheist groups at high schools and universities in the South.



He has some good ideas:

• Exposure. Simply exposing Christians to atheist ideas is an important start. Chalking campus sidewalks is a popular method used by all sorts of campus groups. I see it every day.
• Collaboration. Meeting atheists from other campuses and hearing about what has worked for them can be a great source of ideas. Check out S.E.C.A.A. as an example of what this could look like.
• Persistence. Sticking with it and not giving up are critical. Initial efforts will often be met with unpleasant reactions; however, sticking with it and standing one's ground can lead to success.
• Expand. Get your group's name out there and keep it out there. Constant recruitment will preserve the future of the group when current leaders graduate.

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Contemplating Nonexistence

This post was submitted by Doug from Ocean Springs, MS.

Darkness... Emptiness... Nothingness...

What awaits us after death?

It's one of the two major deciding factors in religion. It's only second to whether or not there is a God. But for those of us that have decided our answer (at least for the time being) on the 'God' question, what answers do we provide ourselves to the 'afterlife' one? At first glance, perhaps you'd think that it was a moot point; that since there is no God, there is no afterlife. I find it hard to automatically attach these two answers, however. Why do we not believe in a God? Because there is no good enough evidence of one, of course. And since we don't have any reputable evidence of an afterlife, it would be logical to come to the same results. I get that. The thing that bothers me is this whole idea of non-existence. Have you ever really tried to consider what it might be like to simply not be? I don't think the human mind can even conceive of such a concept. But does that mean we've got it figured out? I mean, we don't remember anything before our births, yet we know there was time before us.

"The Shame of College Sports"

This one is a bit off topic, but something I wanted to share with my fellow Mississippians being that college football is our Saturday religion. This article in The Atlantic by Taylor Branch has been getting a lot of media attention since it was published a couple of weeks ago. Essentially, it speaks to the inequities of college athletics and the utter corruption of the NCAA and predicts that the NCAA, in its current form, won't be with us much longer. It is well worth the read for those of you who follow college sports.

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On Parenting Without Religion

Raising children to be freethinkers, free from dogma and superstition, is, to put it mildly, a challenge. Superstition permeates our culture. It is just the way of things, taken for granted. It is just how things are done.

I have a four-year-old, and for my part, I am continually endeavoring to raise her to be an independent thinker, spared the challenges and guilt and worries that were given to me as the byproduct of coming up in a fundamentalist home. I want to encourage her intelligence as opposed to anti-intellectualism. I want her to understand that as a living thing, she is a part of the natural world, related to all living things, not something divorced from nature. I want to nurture her inquisitiveness, her wonder and awe about the world around here. I don't want her to waste one iota of mental energy contemplating ancient mythology as truth.

But, as I said, I can do my part, but the culture works on her, too. At her secular pre-school, they say God-is-great-god-is-Good before they eat lunch. That might seem pretty benign, but that's how it starts. It is in those seemingly trivial rituals that the Christ-haunted culture propagates itself. So then she wants to say it over our supper at home, and I have to attempt to explain something that is really too complex for her to understand at her age. I'm given a battle I never asked for.

It comes from friends at school, who talk about church and prayer and things like that. She comes home and wonders if we should pray to Jesus, because, you know, Jesus loves all of us.

I don't know how many parents there are among the readers of this blog, but I'd love to hear some of your experiences with raising children to be freethinkers and how you've coped with the default Christianity that is continually foisted on our children.

My tactic to combat it has been the truth. I read her bible stories because there's nothing better than a bible story to teach how gruesome and awful the bible can be. I mean, the first few stories in the bible contain mass murder, violence, sexism. Cain slaughters able. Abraham is willing to murder his son. Sodom and Gomorrah. Noah's ark. I read those stories to her and she was horrified.

"Why did god kill every body?" (noah's ark), she asked.

"He killed all the babies, too?"

But it is a necessity that she know more about the bible than her bible-soaked friends. It is imperative that she see it for what it is, not as literal truth, but as a cultural artifact of a brutal and violent age in which human life was cheap.

I pair the bible stories with the wonderful stories of Greek mythology, not that it is any less violent, but the violence is a bit more cartoonish, in my view. Greek myth is a lot more fun. But the parallels strike her, and she sees common threads. (Zeus, like Yahweh, murdered everyone).

She comes to a better understanding about Western culture. She gets a foundational awareness about why things are they way they are. She gets the "truth" that these are stories, not to be taken literally.

There are a couple of good non-religious parenting books out there. I recommend the Parenting Beyond Belief series of books.

Parenting for reason and freethought is a challenge. It would be far easier to just take her to church and say to hell with it. But, I think it is a noble task, and I hope that it pays off. I hope she becomes a woman capable of thinking for herself, capable of seeing the world as it is.



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Does Christian Extremism Keep You Away From the Republican Party?

This post was submitted by Doug from Ocean Springs, MS. I thank him for submitting it. It is great to hear from atheists across our state!

If there’s one simple reason I can call my default deterrent from any conservative politician these days, it’s that I pretty much expect them, at some point, to not only push a Christian fundamentalist agenda, but use it to fuel their politics altogether. Now, I do realize that not all conservatives are fundamentalists, or even Christian, for that matter, but this does bring up a few points that we can’t ignore in today’s politics.

First, there’s a sort of faux-concept in the general populace that every atheist is a liberal. And while I am sure that many are liberal-minded, there’s certainly plenty that would otherwise side with the conservatives on many issues. Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, etc., have had no problems publicly presenting their religious motivations. Perry has even gone on record as saying that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re going to Hell, plain and simple. Now what would make me believe that he had any concern for me or my interests if he believes that I am intrinsically wrong and am ultimately destined for eternal damnation? I realize that he is an extremist, but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking there’s not plenty more where he came from.

How Many Mississippians Ever Hear About the Problem of Evil?

Over and over, I am reminded that Mississippi is not exactly a hotbed of education and critical thinking. It is a fair assessment. Each semester, I encounter a shocking number of college undergraduates who have never heard of philosophy and have no idea what it is. If they are lucky enough to have a good professor in their introductory psychology course, they are usually exposed to some material on critical thinking, and yet, classic subjects like the problem of evil can be escaped altogether unless they opt for a philosophy course. And can you guess what students can take in place of philosophy to meet the same requirement? If you guessed religion, you were right.

In spite of all this, I have a hard time imagining myself giving up. If we keep asking questions, more of our Christian neighbors may realize that their pastors do not have any answers. If we are willing to discuss our atheism openly and explain why we do not share the religious beliefs of the majority, we provoke thought and model the application of reason. If we reach out to the youth to demonstrate that it is quite possible to live one's life without gods, we leave a lasting influence.

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Reaching Out

As I have perused the history of this blog, I've noticed posts by vjack expressing frustration that the blog hasn't grown as much as he would have hoped. I don't have access to the numbers, but I infer that they are disappointing.

Though I am not the administrator of this blog, I am a Mississippian and an atheist living in Mississippi, and I experience all of the isolation and loneliness that comes having so few social outlets to have fellowship with others like me. That is where the theists have such a tremendous advantage: Their numbers. Church provides an important sense of community and vitality to its members, and I've always thought that was one of the reasons why people go to church in the first place. In North Mississippi, we have no atheist club at all, and I know of no other atheists in my hometown of Tupelo (though no doubt there are some out there).

So, in a nutshell, my online social networking is all I have, and I would like to do what I can to build and grow this blog. I could envision it as a go-to place for the godless of Mississippi for social contact and conversation.

To that end, and I hope I'm not stepping on vjack's toes here, I am asking for suggestions about how we could grow this blog and reach out to more people like us.

Thanks in advance for your comments.

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Christianity Kills

The GOP drama about HPV vaccinations is yet another glaring example of how Christian anti-science is not only harmful to people, but outright deadly.

I'm referring to the drama between Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman. In the last GOP debate, Bachman criticized Perry for his executive order that mandated all the girls in Texas get the HPV vaccine. Bachman accused the governor of cronyism and of abusing his power, that he issued the order in exchange for large campaign contributions and that he overstepped his authority.

Now, cronyism, no doubt, is often a bad thing, but in this case, it is hard to argue with the outcome. Girls who receive the HPV vaccine, statistically speaking, have zero chance of getting the cervical cancers that are caused by certain strains of HPV. You read that right. Gardisil, the brand name of the vaccine, is "100% effective in the prevention of cervical precancers and noninvasive cervical cancers caused by HPV-16 and 18."

It doesn't matter if the governor was doing some quid pro quo. It doesn't matter if his motivations were the health of women in Texas or the gathering of greenbacks. What matters is that vaccinated women in Texas will not die from cervical cancer.

But there's more going on here than meets the eye. Bachman is not as much concerned about cronyism as she is with throwing a slab of red meat to her fundamentalist Christian base.

This one sadly, downright appallingly, illustrates the morbid fixation that fundamentalist Christians have on human sexuality and how that fixation not only harms people, but kills them. If you didn't follow this, I'm sure you could guess that some fundamentalist Christians oppose this vaccine and refuse to have their daughters vaccinated. Not only that, but they make that case publicly so as to influence others to follow their lead. As put by Salon.com, and I'm paraphrasing, those Christians worry more about their daughters having sex than they worry about them getting cancer.

Sex is worse than cancer.

Oh . . . My . . . God!

Words cannot express how depraved, how utterly depraved, one must be to think like that. It is a perfect example of how Christianity perverts even the most basic human drive to care for children. They believe that getting girls vaccinated will encourage them to have premarital sex, as if hormone-addled teens ever needed encouragement to have sex.

So, what Bachman was really doing was giving a sly wink to her fundamentalist base. Cronyism was merely the Trojan horse.

And I have to tell you, give me a money-hungry pragmatist like Perry over an unhinged fundamentalist like Bachman any day of the week. The love of money is completely understandable and perhaps manageable. Hell, it is outright logical. But the love of the invisible sex-hating sky-god scares the bejeezus out of me.

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On Embodying Atheism

Invariably, when in conversation with a theist, who are usually quite comfortable discussing their beliefs, I am asked the question about what I am, the assumption being that I am some form of believer. The answer expected is probably methodist, catholic, etc. When I say that I am an atheist, my conversation partner's eyes grow as big and round as moons. It is utterly shocking, not only that I'm an atheist, but that I would freely admit it. Then, almost always, the next question is: What happened?

Theists, by and large, are so immersed in the status quo of theism that they assume everyone shares their belief in God, so naturally, if one doesn't believe in God, something terrible must have happened. He or she must have endured some awful calamity that forced them to abandon their faith.

Of course, I would wager very few of us came to our atheism in such a way. With me, it was a gradual process of questioning, and I like to say, waking up. It was the realization that, simply, I couldn't believe in fairy tales anymore.

My response is usually just that: No, I've had a relatively comfortable life as far as it goes. I just reached a point that I couldn't believe that stuff anymore.

Being open with my non-belief in gods was not something I came to overnight, though I believe I have a natural disposition to be myself, out and open and honest. It is not in my nature to hide. Despite that, we atheists face a great deal of social pressure to stay closeted and to acquiese to the prevailing wisdom that God exists. The cultural default is theism. Atheists are subversives in that context.

That's the upside-down nature of our culture in America. The logical default is treated as the aberration. In other words, no one is born a believer. He or she has to be taught belief. In that sense, atheism is the human default. And that position is logical. I am justified in disbelief of the supernatural until the supernatural is empirically proven to me. I do not believe in gnomes or unicorns, and that belief is justified until the proof for such is given.

vjack made that point when he posted to his atheist revolution blog that a proper response to "what happened?" should be something like this:

I do not believe in gods for the same reason you do not believe in unicorns. You do not have an argument against unicorns; you need no argument. You simply realize that there is insufficient evidence to support their existence and so you do not believe in them. And you are absolutely right to do so.

And I couldn't agree more. We have no argument to make. Ours is the position of default. We have nothing to prove.

But it can be frustrating to live in a culture in which the default is demonized. And that is where, I think, being openly atheist is important. Being closeted gives theists the power to control the conversation, but being out changes the conversation, instantly.

So, all of this was to make that point: If you're not out, consider taking steps to get out. Atheists everywhere benefit when we stand in the open together.

Not long ago, it was socially acceptable in among white people to assume everyone in the room was a racist, as in, racism was the cultural default. That is no longer true.

Not long ago, it was socially acceptable to assume everyone in the room was heterosexual. That is no longer true.

Yet, today, for most people, it is still acceptable to assume that everyone in the room is a theist, and changing that is a modest goal that is realistically achievable. Being out hastens that change.

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The Insanity of Mississippi's Personhood Amendment

In November, Mississippians will go to the polls to determine if a newly fertilized zygote will have the same legal standing as a fully formed human being.

I am referring to Proposition 26, the so-called "personhood amendment", the most recent tactic of anti-choice, or "pro-life" zealots to ultimately overturn Roe v. Wade and make abortion illegal, the equivalent of murder.

For those of us with reality-based worldviews, this is scary, scary stuff. However one feels about abortion, and I'm certainly no abortion cheerleader (though I believe access to legal abortion is, by and large, a good thing because it respects women and gives them control over their reproductive destiny), surely the reasonable among us can agree that a zygote is not a the equivalent of a fully formed human being. To give a zygote equal standing with a fully formed human being is nonsensical, and dangerous.

Think about the ramifications.

• In a world in which zygotes are "persons" abortion in fact becomes murder, the equivalent of killing a human being in cold blood. That means life imprisonment and the death penalty are on the table for women who would, and you better believe they would, have back-alley coat-hanger abortions.
• The morning after pill becomes an instrument of murder.
• Miscarriages carry criminal penalties.
• The lives of mothers will always be sacrificed for the life of the fetus. In other words, if a woman dies in childbirth, that would be natural causes, but aborting a baby to save her life would be murder. So, in effect, the child's rights would be elevated above those of the mother.

I could go on, but I think I've made my point. The personhood amendment is pure insanity, pushed by fundamentalist Christians who are obsessed, literally obsessed, with all things related to sex. Nothing fires up the faithful more than women's reproductive rights, the possibility that homosexuals will get equal standing with heterosexuals, premarital sex, etc.

For fundamentalist Christians, all sex outside of heterosexual wedlock is pure, unadulterated evil.

And Mississippi, ever on the cutting edge of backwardness, is leading the way. From the personhood amendment to abstinence-only sex "education", Mississippi seeks to control the sex lives, to legislate the morality, of its citizens. But the reasonable among us in Mississippi, rather than be discouraged, should view this as an opportunity. Our battle lines are clearly drawn, and our impetus for action is clear.

So, even though I predict the "Personhood" amendment will pass with something like 75-80% of the vote, perhaps its passage will put the reasonable on the offensive. Vote "NO", write letters to the editor, and talk to people when and where possible. Let's make it clear that we Mississippi atheists are on the side of reason in a state that desperately needs more of it.

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Rick Perry and the Rhetoric of Anti-Science

For my first post, I offer greetings from Tupelo, Mississippi, birthplace of Elvis Presley and home of everyone's favorite hate group, the American Family Association. Known for their vicious anti-gay rhetoric, the AFA recently funded, to the tune of a cool mil or so, a prayer rally for Rick Perry, governor of Texas and presidential hopeful. Apparently, homophobia and Christianity are a profitable combination.

But Christian homophobia is the subject of a post yet to come. Today, I'm more interested in the anti-science rhetoric of the Christian right, which is every bit as hate-filled and full of outright lies as its homophobic rhetoric.

It no doubt started with the fear of evolution and how it, let's be honest, demolishes the literal interpretation of Genesis, but today conservative Christians fear practically all science, and they will attack it and misrepresent it whenever the chance arises. And they are getting good at it. Very good. Scary good.

Take, for example, while trying to explain his doubts about the science of climate change, Rick Perry said, "Galileo got outvoted for a spell."

Yes, you read that right. Perry has commandeered the reason-based opposition's favorite religion vs. science anecdote. He is using Galileo to support an anti-science position.

Sheer rhetorical brilliance.

Sarah Posner over at Religion Dispatches notes:

Of course Galileo, considered the father of modern science, wasn't "outvoted" by other scientists, he was subjected to an inquisition by the church for being a heretic.

I've used the example of Galileo many times to illustrate what happens when dogma trumps scientific inquiry, but here we have Perry completely turning the tables. Now Galileo is used to bolster conservative Christian anti-science.

The mind reels.

Galileo is spinning in his grave.

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But Its Sunday

I was in the grocery store this morning rather early. The guy in front of me, who appeared to be in his early 50s, did not have much to buy. It looked like he was getting ready for a day of football. He had a couple bags of chips, hot dogs and buns, and a 12-pack of beer. But this being Sunday in Mississippi, he would not be leaving with the beer.

I found myself feeling sorry for this man. Even though it has been several years since I bought alcoholic beverages, I remember well the annoyance he experienced when the cashier informed him that she could not sell it to him. "But its Sunday," she said. Right, he probably thought to himself. That's why I'm in here stocking up before the game. He didn't seem to understand. "I can't sell it to you because its Sunday."

9/11 Ten Years Later

It is as true today as it was 10 years ago.

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