BoingBoing | Adam Savage’s Speech to Harvard Humanism Society

I would love to see the MythBusters take on some religious myths…  But I somehow doubt if their lawyers would let them.  It would probably be too dangerous.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a religious guy.  So I don’t really care whether it’s Easter or not…  Except that it gets me a day off from work and it’s a good excuse to break out the candy.

So, Happy Easter!

This week has been painful, to say the very least.

My Grandmother died last weekend.  It wasn’t a surprise…  Her health has been failing for a couple years now, and she’d been in the hospital for several days already.  But it still hurt.

Terri is in the hospital.  I spent all day on Tuesday sitting with her in the Emergency Room.  Then she finally got admitted…  I ran home to pick up some things, and then spent most of the evening with her as well.  Didn’t get home until later and still had to come up with something for dinner.

Then I had to be up early in the morning, to get Christopher off to class before I went in to work.  Had to get the kitties to the vet.  Went right over to the hospital to visit Terri after work.  Left there around 8:00, stopped to buy some groceries, didn’t get home until about 9:00.  Had dinner and crashed.

And that day set the pattern for the rest of the week…  I’ve been up early every day to get Christopher off to class.  I’ve been working my ass off all day long.  I’ve been visiting Terri after work and getting home late.

I’m not sleeping well.  I’m stressed.  I’m tired.  I’m scared.  I’m definitely hurting.

And every morning, as I take Christopher in to class, we drive by a church with a sign out front…

Hurting?

Jesus understands better than anyone.

And it makes me angry.

They don’t know me.  They’ve never met me.  They have absolutely no idea what I’m going through.  And they smugly presume that their dusty old book is going to solve all my problems.

I’ll readily admit that it would be nice to have someone to talk to.  A sympathetic ear would be great…  Maybe a shoulder to lean on…

But that’s not what they’re offering.  I’ve heard the kind of answers they provide…  “God works in mysterious ways.”  “It’s all part of His plan.”  “Have faith.”

I can come up with more reassurance than that with a quote of the day!

Examiner.com | Atheism holiday exhibits physically attacked

You know your position is weak when you don’t dare let the opposition speak…

There’s an interesting story over on Salon.com, by a Christian who’s a bit embarrassed by her beliefs.  It’s a truly interesting article…  But, of course, I have to disagree with some of it.

The idea of an eternal community brings me comfort: I like the image of a long table extending backward and forward in time, and everyone who’s ever taken Communion is sitting at it. The Bible at the 1920s stone church where my husband and I were married was filled with the names of people in the community who’d married, been born and died.

I’ve seen this sense of community given as a reason for religion more than once.  It kind of falls into the whole it’s comforting argument.  And I can certainly agree – it is comforting to feel like you’re part of a community.

That’s why we’ve got LGBT communities, and atheist organizations, and political movements…  That’s why we group ourselves into families, and nations…  That’s why we’re constantly drawing lines between us and them…

But, in the face of all that, I don’t understand why you would need yet another way to categorize yourself.  It isn’t enough to be part of your family?  Your city?  Your state?  Your nation?  You need something bigger?  What about the community of primates who’ve been eking out existence on this tiny ball of mud in a vast and uncaring universe?

And yet, atheists are at least as fundamentalist and zealous as any religious people I know

Let’s take a look at the definition of fundamentalist…

1.

(sometimes initial capital letter) a movement in American Protestantism that arose in the early part of the 20th century in reaction to modernism and that stresses the infallibility of the Bible not only in matters of faith and morals but also as a literal historical record, holding as essential to Christian faith belief in such doctrines as the creation of the world, the virgin birth, physical resurrection, atonement by the sacrificial death of Christ, and the Second Coming.

2.	the beliefs held by those in this movement.

3.	strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles: the fundamentalism of the extreme conservatives.

I’m really not sure what basic ideas or principles atheists are supposed to adhere to…

There’s the basic idea that there are no gods.  And most atheists think the scientific method works pretty well.  But that’s really about it.

Some atheists are still very “spiritual” even though they don’t believe in a god…  Some think that religions are OK…  Others feel religion should be abolished outright…

Frankly, if you think all atheists believe the same stuff, you haven’t been paying much attention.

and they have nothing good to show for it: no stained glass, no great literature, no great art

There’s plenty of non-theistic stained glass out there.  And it looks just as pretty as the theistic stuff.

As far as literature goes…  Well, there’s always Mark Twain.  Most folks agree that he wrote pretty good stuff.

I have to admit that I’m not a big art buff…  So I really couldn’t tell you which artist believed in what…  But I’m fairly certain atheists are capable of making art.

no comfort in the face of death

Personally, I find more comfort in the face of death from atheism than from any theism I’ve ever looked into.  I mean, how comforting can it possibly be to know that your ultimate fate is in the hands of a capricious deity who, in the author’s own words, suggests things like stoning people for using the wrong salad fork.

I don’t really want to spend eternity burning in hell because I ate some shellfish…  Nor does spending the rest of eternity singing about how great some god is sound terribly appealing.

I told a priest at my church that my friends equated religion with horrible things. I expected her to tell me I had some obligation to stop hiding my faith, but she said, pulling a scarf around her neck to hide her priest’s collar, “Those preachers on the subways make me cringe.” She said she prefers Saint Francis: “Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words.”

A truly novel idea…  Actually walking the walk, instead of just talking the talk.

I think if more “Christians”  followed their own doctrine – no killing, no coveting, loving your neighbor, etc. – they could be a real force for good in the world.

Unfortunately, most “Christians” seem more interested in the dogma and pageantry surrounding their religion, than the actual guidelines for good living that it gives.

Maybe, though, apolitical Christianity is on the rise. The Obamas are now in office — a good Christian family in the truest sense of the term — and the right wing is more marginalized than it was a year ago. My friend, the young (and kind of ridiculously hot) priest the Rev. Astrid Storm, whom I used to edit at Nerve.com, says she’s sensing more acceptance:

“When I said I was a priest, it was always a conversation stopper,” she says. “Recently someone asked what I did, and when I told him he said, ‘How interesting. There are a lot of exciting things happening right now in the Episcopal Church, aren’t there?’ The diversity of opinion people are reading about in the news — about gay marriage, female priests, poverty issues — are showing how Christianity isn’t monolithic.”

It’s always interesting to see religions folks act like they’re the oppressed minority.  Here this priest is talking about it being more acceptable to be religious…

While here in the real world we’ve got an atheist being barred from office in North Carolina.  We’ve got atheist billboards being defaced all over the place.  We just got rid of a president who stated that atheists were neither citizens nor patriots.  And that’s just here in the US…  If you look abroad you’ll find all sorts of examples of atheists being treated like second-class citizens.

But also, increasingly, I wonder: When I’m getting a ride from some friends and they start talking about how stupid religious people are and quoting lines from “Religulous,” do I have an obligation to point out how reductive and bigoted they’re being, the way I would if they were talking about a particular race? Increasingly I wonder if I should pipe up from the back seat and say, “Excuse me, but these fools you’re talking about? I’m one of them.”

Well, first of all, if they’re friends worth having there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to tell them you’re religious.  The author of this article mentions how she’s literally hiding her religion from her friends because she’s embarrassed…  Which suggests to me that her friends are a bunch of intolerant assholes.

Sure, I think theism is wrong.  I might very well tell someone that.  But, unlike some Christians, I’m not going to go around trying to convert people.  Should a discussion head in that way I’m sure I’d have plenty of things to say…  But I’m not going to foist my beliefs on someone who doesn’t want to hear them.

So it kind of sounds like the author needs some new friends.

But equating religious belief to racial identity is just plain wrong.

Religion is a statement about how the world works.  Religions claim, for example, that some omnipotent deity created the universe and everything in it.  And that we need to live our lives according to this deity’s rules.

That’s a statement about how the world works just as much as the laws of thermodynamics are.

Such statements can, and should, be evaluated for truth.

I can go around proclaiming that I can fly…  But that doesn’t make it true.  And it’d probably be a good idea for me to run some small-scale tests before I try leaping off a building.

Choosing to believe a statement about how the world works, despite the fact that it doesn’t match up with reality, is just that – a choice.

And while you’re certainly free to make that choice…  You shouldn’t be too terribly surprised to find yourself lumped in with other folks who choose to ignore reality – like the moon landing hoax folks, or the people who insist that the Illuminati are secretly controlling the world by putting fluoride in our drinking water.