Dave’s Mailbag: Why do you deny the existence of God?

I received the following from “Anon Imity”:

Hi Dave,

I came across your name on the CS website where you scored 100% on a religious quiz.  I only scored  94%,

I missed two questions. Anyway, it made me want to know a couple of things about what you believe and why.
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I am curious to know why you deny the existence of God.  What makes you so sure that God does not exist, and

above all, what if you’re wrong.  Please tell why you are convinced, and what evidence you may have that makes

you willing to bet your eternal destination that you are right. It has to be pretty compelling, eternity is a long time

for any of us to be wrong.
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I know that you’re probably very busy, but I really would appreciate it, if you would take the time to reply to me.

I just want the best arguments for your denial of the existence of God. I truly am looking forward to hearing from

you.  I hope you take the time to write.
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Thanks Dave.
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Anon

Here is my reply:

Hi “Anon”!
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Thank you for your email. I appreciate you taking the quiz and hope you enjoyed it.
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I wouldn’t say that I deny the existence of gods. I’m simply not convinced that any gods actually exist, the same way that most people simply aren’t convinced that unicorns or Santa exist. If I were to be presented with good evidence that a god or gods exist, I would readily change my stance. Despite years of searching for such evidence, I haven’t found anything that I consider even remotely convincing.
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I would never make the claim that God does not exist – I have no way of knowing that! I think that is a common misunderstanding of what the word “atheist” means. Atheists do not claim God does not exist; rather, it’s a question of what we believe.
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As far as wagering eternity, I would say to you that you too are wagering eternity. If you are a Christian, you are wagering that Islam is not true. If you are a Christian and Islam is true, you are going to the Islamic hell. If you are a Muslim, you are wagering that Christianity is not true. If you are a Muslim and Christianity is true, you are going to the Christian hell. And so on and so on for many other religions.
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To quote Stephen F. Roberts, “When you understand why you dismiss all other gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Or another good one from Richard Dawkins: “We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
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As far as the best arguments for the non-existence of gods, I think the single best line of reasoning is simply that god is unnecessary to explain the world. Science does an excellent job of that. In the past, before we had the scientific method, it may have made sense to attribute certain things we didn’t understand to gods – lightning was caused by Zeus throwing down lightning bolts, or Thor striking his hammer, for example – but now we know where lightning really comes from and we no longer think a god did it. It’s the same for every mystery throughout history so far and we have no reason to think this won’t continue.
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I hope this has been helpful to you. I encourage you to continue asking questions, and feel free to keep the conversation going if there’s more you’d like to know.
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If you’re looking for reading material, I recommend the website http://www.godisimaginary.com, and the book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. The aforementioned website has 50 simple explanations of different reasons we can feel confident that there are no gods. “The God Delusion” is quickly becoming a modern classic and is a favorite among American Atheists’ membership.
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Thanks for writing!
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- Dave Muscato
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Public Relations Director
American Atheists

Until next time,

Dave

Dave Muscato is the Public Relations Director for American Atheists based in Cranford, New Jersey. An atheism activist, blogger, and public speaker, he is also a board member of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday; twice monthly for the Humanist Community at Harvard, and monthly or more on SkepticFreethought.com. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com

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A response to Richard Carrier

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In Richard Carrier’s recent post at FreeThoughtBlog, http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/87, he takes aim at arguments for vegetarianism.  He spends most of his time responding to arguments for vegetarianism from economics considerations, like the inefficient use of water, grain, and other resources, and responding to arguments from environmental concerns, like the impact of factory farming on global warming.  I think there are good responses to his claims in those extended sections, but I won’t be able to address them here.  Instead, I’ll look at his brief treatment of why being a vegetarian for moral reasons is irrational.  I’ll state upfront that I’m a vegetarian on moral grounds, so I suppose I have a dog in this fight (maybe that’s a bad metaphor, what with animal welfare being the topic…).  I’m a grad student studying deontic logic, the logic of moral obligation, so whether a moral position is rational or not is near and dear to my heart anyway.

I’m not a dogmatic vegetarian.  I read Peter Singer’s book, Animal Liberation, and it convinced me with its philosophical and scientific arguments.  To cease being a vegetarian, I’d need a good argument against Singer’s case.  I don’t think Richard Carrier has presented such a case.  This disappoints me, as I much enjoyed the taste of meat, when I ate it.

Carrier is responding to a question posed by a commenter regarding the application of Carrier’s own moral philosophy.  Carrier holds that it is a moral fact (empirically discoverable by science) that compassion is a moral virtue.  The commenter asks if it follows from this that one ought to be a vegetarian.  Carrier denies the implication, stating instead, “being a vegetarian merely out of compassion for animals is irrational (it’s just another kind of phobia based on false associations between animals and people)…”  His argument is as follows:

Accordingly I think being a vegetarian out of “compassion” is irrational. I mean that in the classic sense: it’s a non sequitur, and thus illogical. It’s to treat animals like people, which they are not. I’ve looked and listened far and wide and there is just no logically valid argument that proceeds from “I ought to be compassionate” to “I ought to be a vegetarian.” Farming and eating animals is simply not evil, for the reason I stated: our own overall life satisfaction depends on being compassionate, and compassion compels us not to enjoy or want pointless torment to exist, no matter what or who is experiencing it. It would cause you pain, and thus diminish your life satisfaction, to be a cruel or wholly indifferent person. But destroying an animal humanely is not cruel. And it is not destroying a person. Again, an animal’s life is indifferent to when it dies, because it does not become anything and has no awareness of being something. Thus eating animals is fine as long as you aren’t torturing them (see my brief on this as the atheist correspondent for GodContention.com).

He must mean that there is no logically sound argument that goes from “I ought to be compassionate” to “I ought to be a vegetarian.”  It is easy to construct a valid argument.  Something like:

1. I ought to be compassionate.

2. If I ought to be compassionate, then I ought to care about some non-human animals.

3. If I ought to care about some non-human animals, then I ought to be a vegetarian.

4. Therefore, I ought to be a vegetarian.

This argument is valid.  But, it probably has a false premise, like maybe premise 3.  That must be what Carrier means when he says he has seen no valid argument: he hasn’t seen a valid argument with all true premises.  So, he hasn’t seen a sound argument to that effect yet.  Maybe not, but I think I can give a sound argument for a slightly weaker position, that one ought not contribute to factory farming.

1.  I ought to be compassionate.

2.  If I ought to be compassionate, then I ought to care about the suffering of beings other than myself.

3.  If I ought to care about the suffering of others, then I ought not contribute to any sources of unnecessary suffering of beings other than myself.

4.  The factory farming system in America is a source of unnecessary suffering of beings other than myself.

5. Therefore, I ought not contribute to the factory farming system in America.

I think that the moral reasons offered in defense of vegetarianism can really only establish this weaker conclusion.  It does not say that eating meat is morally wrong, and it does not say that killing animals is morally wrong.  Neither does it say that these things are permissible; it doesn’t speak to them.  I think the best way not to contribute to factory farming is to stop purchasing its products.  The easiest way to be sure that one is not purchasing factory farmed products is to become a vegetarian.  Of course this applies only to the normal American who is in my position.  If you own a farm that raises livestock humanely, then the argument simply does not apply to you; it is easy for you to avoid factory farmed meat.  For the rest of us, it is easiest to just abstain for the most part.

If Carrier is to reject the above argument, (1-5), he’d have to argue that one of the premises is false.  It is a valid argument.  Which premise might he reject?

Premise 1 is his claim.

Premise 2 is based on any reasonable definition of ‘compassion’.  I went to wikipedia.

He may disagree with 3.  He knows that when I say “beings,” I mean to include many non-human animals in the class.  I don’t think he wants to deny this, though, because he seems to tacitly accept the idea, when he says, “for the reason I stated: our own overall life satisfaction depends on being compassionate, and compassion compels us not to enjoy or want pointless torment to exist, no matter what or who is experiencing it.” [my emboldening].  So, premise 3 seems to gain Carrier’s endorsement.  The issue of what beings count for moral consideration is not as simple as drawing a line around all and only humans.  I think Bentham proposed the best solution when he said,

What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog, is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month, old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Well, can non-human animals suffer?  This is a question of biology and a reasonable agreement of what counts as suffering.  We do not anthropomorphize non-human animals by stating, “A negative response to noxious stimuli that reaches the hippocampus and amygdala indicates the capacity to suffer,” or something similar to that.  One is not merely looking at non-human animals reactions, projecting emotion onto their behaviors, and deciding they can suffer.  The relevant parts of our brains are similar enough to cows, pigs, and chickens, that we can reasonably expect that they operate similarly.

Here is a great post by PZ, responding to William Lane Craig’s assertion that non-human animals can’t suffer in any morally relevant way.  He gives pretty good reasons to think non-human animals are capable of suffering.

Clearly Carrier thinks 4 is false.  Premise (4) is mostly an empirical question about the actual living conditions of non-human animals in American factory farms.  It is difficult to collect reliable data on this issue, because both sides of the debate have reason to exaggerate in one direction or the other, and it is difficult to simply go look and see for oneself. Clearly the factory farmers want to release only images that make things look chummy and healthy, the epitome of the idea evoked by “farmland”, with cows lazily grazing, a handful of chickens clucking around the coop, and maybe a few pigs rolling around in their muddy pens.  Clearly PETA wants to release only disturbing images that evoke something close to the horrors of war.  Which side is more capable of producing misleading information?  The owners of the system, or the people banned from the premises, who must go undercover, risking felony charges in several states.  I think Singer makes a compelling case that the animals do in fact suffer from the living conditions institutionalized by factory farming.

The key to Carrier’s argument above is the following claim:

But destroying an animal humanely is not cruel

I agree with this, although I know many angry, evangelical-type vegetarians would disagree.  Definitely Peter Singer would agree.  The trouble is, the moral argument against factory farming is not about how the animals are destroyed.  But even if it were, Carrier produced no evidence to support his claim that the current system does implement humane methods of destruction.  I’ll just assume he’s right, that the methods used by factory farms in America to destroy the animals is humane.  This still misses the moral argument’s point, that the living conditions for the animals are what cause the unnecessary suffering.  Now, he has poisoned the well a bit by declaring in his post that the conditions of factory farming are misreported.  So, I’m sure no matter what evidence I produce, it will be an instance of misreporting.  He claims that “When you investigate the actual conditions on most farms, especially those vending major industries like KFC or McDonalds, you find they are not as bad as PETA videos claim,” but he does not produce any evidence to this effect.  He claims that, once one ignores the outliers where atrocities occur, we see that animal welfare activists often misconstrue what is actually good for the animal.  He doesn’t provide any evidence for what the actual statistics, sans outliers, are.

A lady sticking her arm into a cow's stomach.

pigs in a factory farm.

A cursory Google search of “living conditions in factory farms” produces a plethora of images and videos, not all from PETA.  Are we to assume that these are all mere outliers, somehow planned and exploited by the subversive animal welfare groups?  Are we to assume that all the websites documenting the ethically unfit conditions are spreading falsehoods?  Even wikipedia???!! I will concede that it is possible that all of these resources are misleading, but it will take a lot more than Carrier’s word that an investigation yields ethically permissible conditions to convince me, due to the only evidence I’ve been able to find showing otherwise.

Responses like Carrier’s are the norm in the skeptic community, as far as I can tell.  It is the consequence of a strange cultural bias in America for large amounts of meat consumption, and what Peter Singer calls “Speciesism.”  An objective, dispassionate reading of both Singer and Carrier make it pretty clear that Carrier’s response to the moral arguments is a hardcore case of special pleading, with little substance, and much rhetoric. Rather, Singer’s argument rests on solid science and compelling moral principles.

Because I know skeptics care not one shit about what I think, but do care about what Carrier thinks and Richard Dawkins thinks, I leave you with a quote from Dawkins about the cultural roots of speciesism, from The Blind Watchmaker,

Such is the breathtaking speciesism of our Christian-inspired attitudes, the abortion of a single human zygote (most of them are destined to be spontaneously aborted anyway) can arouse more moral solicitude and righteous indignation than the vivisection of any number of intelligent adult chimpanzees! [...] The only reason we can be comfortable with such a double standard is that the intermediates between humans and chimps are all dead.

This continuum from the human species, through chimpanzees, and on through other species, is a clear lesson that we learn from evolutionary biology.  Dawkins mentions chimpanzees, but the point stands equally well for pigs, cows, and to a lesser extent chickens.

Here are Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer discussing the moral lessons we can learn from Darwin.

_________________________________________________________________________

Seth Kurtenbach is a philosophy PhD student at the University of Missouri.  His research focuses on applications of formal logic and game theory to questions about knowledge and rationality.  He is growing a mighty beard, in order to increase his philosophical powers [EDIT: He recently shaved his mighty beard, and has thus lost all of his philosophical powers.    ].  Feel free to contact Seth at SJK7v7@mail.missouri.edu with inquiries about philosophy, logic, guest blogging, or visiting to give a presentation!

Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick, Rationally Speaking.

Blasphemy Day!

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Hello everybody!

Dave here. As our regular readers know, I study the evolution of morality in cooperative species, and the subject of today’s article happens to be one of my all-time favorites.

Today is Blasphemy Day, and SASHA will be tabling at Speakers’ Circle on the Mizzou campus beginning around noon. Blasphemy Day is important because it seeks to educate people about the importance of freedom of expression, even when these expressions are contrary to others’ religious beliefs or offensive to religious people. In the words of Justin Trottier:

“We’re not seeking to offend, but if in the course of dialogue and debate, people become offended, that’s not an issue for us. There is no human right not to be offended.”

Now, if I can say what I was going to say in such a way that it does not offend someone, of course I will attempt to do that. If you have what I consider a legitimate reason for being offended at a certain wording – structural violence, for example – I will say what I was going to using words that don’t offend you instead. But I will still say what I was going to say if I still have a good reason to do it. It’s illogical to set an idea aside as beyond criticism without any good reason; that’s called the fallacy of special pleading. And that’s what Blasphemy Day is about.

I think we do need to address the subject of mockery in all of this. Mockery is NOT what Blasphemy Day is about. Although I do think there is a place for calculated mockery – as a device in rhetoric – within atheist activism (or any type of activism, for that matter), I want to make it clear that the purpose of Blasphemy Day is not simply to mock religious beliefs. Speaking your mind – including mockery of an idea – even if others are “offended” is one thing; mocking a person (rather than their beliefs) is quite different, and not what we seek to do. Mocking a person is verbal harassment and one step shy of bullying.

Mockery evolved as a conformity enforcer; there is some really interesting research on mockery within the fields of neuroscience, cultural anthropology, and sociology/social psychology. Embarrassment and shame are fascinating emotions. Embarrassment originates in the amygdalae and the insular cortex, very old parts of the brain responsible for some of our baser functions like fear conditioning & memory, social interaction, & awareness of personal space (in the case of the former) and the processing of disgust & norm violations (in the case of the latter). According to Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at NYU and author of the excellent book Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are, “Anatomically the emotional system can act independently of the neocortex [the higher-order, "thinking" part of the brain responsible for conscious thought, language, etc]. Some emotional reactions and emotional responses can be formed without any conscious, cognitive participation…because the shortcut from thalamus [which regulates, among other things, wakefulness & emotional arousal] to amygdyla completely bypasses the neocortex,” a process called amygdala hijacking.

A classic gesture of mockery. A variation appears in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 1: "Nay, as they dare. I will bite my thumb at them; which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it," followed by the famous exchange, "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" "I do bite my thumb, sir." "Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?" "No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir."

In the earliest groups of humans on through today, mockery (or its friendlier cousin, teasing) triggers embarrassment. This triggering sets off a pattern of emotional responses, independent from rational thought or even conscious control. People do not like being mocked, and we can show this empirically with fMRI scans of people’s brains – it causes amygdala hijacking. People respond to mocking by shutting down logically: Literally, as in their responses stem from their amygdala, without asking the neocortex first. People may become very quiet or stammer – remember, fear conditioning & social interaction exist in the amygdala; language and conscious thought in the neocortex – or they may become defensive or angry if the logic is against them and cognitive dissonance takes over, as can happen in heated debates, e.g. religious ones. Mockery causes vasodilation of the face (blushing), causing our cheeks to appear red and feel warm because of the elevated volume of blood, which Darwin called “the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.” There is some really interesting research into why humans evolved this response (we are the only animals to do so), but that’s a topic for another article!

Humans evolved to form tribes, in the same way that dogs form packs, fish form schools, and birds form flocks. There are excellent scientific reasons for this, especially when you start getting into game theory (my personal focus within economic anthropology). The point is that we thrive when we work together, and die when we don’t, literally. One person cannot fight off a sabertooth cat by him or herself, let alone accomplish something like international trade. For that, you need high-functioning groups. And studying how people interact with each other in groups is the field of group dynamics. Among human groups throughout history, status has been a vital part of our existence. Status is relative, and so irrelevant for solitary creatures (except when mating). I mentioned earlier that mocking enforces conformity. The neurological mechanism for this is by triggering a fear response via the amygdala and a norm-violations response via the insular cortex. We evolved this response to mocking because mocking helps people in a group work together better. When everyone is on the same page – when everyone follows the same norms – we get a lot more accomplished, and gene proliferation is maximized. Now, this is only true for workers.

For innovators, conformity is bad news. In fact, all innovation – ever – is borne in nonconformity. This goes for mutation at the level of individual genes all the way through scientific progress at the societal level. Mocking an idea, a belief, a behavior, or a person lowers its/their status. Because lower status equates to fewer mating opportunities (among other things), we have a hard-wired, evolved desire not to be associated with ideas, beliefs, behaviors, or people of low status. This goes back millions of years to the first animals to develop norms. And even today, millions of years later, a quick dose of mockery can instantly put us back in line.

Status is very important between groups, too. And this is where blasphemy comes in. When you have a group of believers and a group of non-believers – whether we’re talking about Christians versus atheists, Christians versus Muslims, ancient Jews versus Babylonians, etc – you are going to encounter fights over status. The reason for this is easy to explain from an evolutionary point of view: We can demonstrate empirically that groups are more successful (in the genetically relevant sense of maximizing their populations) when they not only have group loyalty, but when they have high status. Being around people who are not like us – who do not share our beliefs, worldviews, language, culture, etc – makes us produce more cortisol, that is, we feel more stressed. We have a strong biochemical incentive to be around people we like and who like us (Note: PDF link to biological anthropologist Helen Fisher’s research in evolutionary cognitive neuroscience).

We feel attachment more easily to people we feel tied to. If you have ever been to another country where no one spoke your language, and you meet another English-speaker, you know what I’m talking about. It doesn’t matter that you are strangers, it doesn’t matter that if you passed this same person on the sidewalk in your hometown, you wouldn’t even notice him/her – when we’re in a strange place among strange people, we are naturally drawn to familiarity. The more stress we feel, the more we are drawn to familiarity, and the more fear we feel for the unfamiliar. It’s a survival mechanism, an adaptation: Proto-humans without a strong sense of loyalty to their groups were quickly dispatched with (converted or killed) by other groups comprising members with a stronger sense of loyalty. And just having a strong sense of loyalty to your group isn’t enough to out-compete other groups, for the first group to develop the idea that it is a shining beacon of light versus all other groups will quickly out-compete all others: To really be at the top, your group also has to have a sense that it is elite, that it is high-status, and that all other systems are low-status.

You can see this played out in history. Consider the ancient Greeks: The Greek word βάρβαρος (cognate to English “barbarian” and used the same way) literally just means “non-Greek.” Greek historians regularly used other pejorative language to describe other cultures and it’s clear from reading Herodotus et al what they thought of people who weren’t awesome enough to be Greek. This in a time when the Greeks were at the height of their accomplishments scientifically, politically, economically, architecturally, and aesthetically in literature, poetry, sculpture, etc. Ancient China, as well, is famous for its view of outsiders – witness the Great Wall – but this is not unique to ancient societies: Despite ranking quite far from #1 in pretty much every measure (education, health, happiness, income equality, longevity, literacy, GDP per capita, infant mortality, etc), I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a Republican voter who wouldn’t agree with the statement, “The United States is the greatest country in the world.”

Blasphemy is a special category of criticism. Imagine I were to show a hard-line Republican presidential candidate all the statistics in the world that this country is NOT the greatest in the world, by any quantifiable measure one might care to name. Do you think any of them would even come close to saying, “The United States can learn from the example of other countries, particularly the ones that beat us out on these quantifiable measures (e.g. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, France, Singapore, South Korea, etc)”? It would be career suicide!

Just like an atheist presenting a factual, reasoned, logical, evidence-backed case against the claims of this-or-that religion, in politics, particularly for those on the right, nationalism turns honest criticism into blasphemy. We’re not allowed to say that the United States is not the greatest country in the world, regardless of what the every single quantifiable measure out there shows. We’re not allowed to say that Christians worship thin air when they pray. We’re not allowed to say that Muhammad was either delusional or a liar. To do so is transgression on the sacred, to borrow a term from Michael Taussig, an anthropology professor at Columbia.

Blasphemy is, quite simply, the lack of reverence for the sacred. This can include gods, people, documents (the Torah itself is considered sacred by Jews; if you accidentally drop a bound copy on the floor, you’re supposed to kiss it as a sign of apology), rituals, or even words: The word “Yahweh” is considered so sacred by orthodox Jews that they do not say it aloud, but instead call their god “Lord” (“adonai” in Hebrew) during prayer, or “the name” (“hashem”) when speaking about God rather than to him. If you ever see the this in writing somewhere:

“G-d”

the reason is that it’s considered improper (by Jews) to write out God’s full name on a piece of paper, since you don’t want that piece of paper to end up in the trash, or even electronically, since that file may end up being deleted!

As rational people, we are free to say that there is no good reason to think that these ideas and practices have any basis in reality. The meme of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god has developed the fascinating self-defense mechanism of declaring it blasphemous to criticize it openly. Can you imagine if a virus [a literal one] infected our brains in such a way that it specifically targeted our desire to combat it? That is what the meme of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god has done, and unbelievable effectively, for thousands of years, successfully infecting roughly half of the world’s population (!).

Fortunately, this self-defense measure is only applicable if you’ve already been infected, or partially-infected (in the case of those who “respect others’ beliefs”). In the words of Richard Dawkins, “Stop being so damned respectful.” Religious ideas are ideas like any other, and if they cannot stand up to scrutiny, it’s because they’re not very solid to begin with. This is not to say that, normatively, we should mock people who believe these ideas. Far from it. But positively, we are free to question the beliefs themselves, and be demanding of evidence and good reasons when it comes to why someone thinks something is true.

Asking hard questions, and being free to ask hard questions, isn’t something to be ashamed of, or something to fear. It’s just part of being diligent, being rational, and being honest in our paths as seekers of knowledge.

Looking forward to seeing you at the table!

- Dave

mail@davemuscato.com

(573) 424-0420 cell/text

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, Dave posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

If you like this article, please upvote it on Reddit.

Follow Dave on Google+
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Helpful resources:

Godisimaginary.com
Iron Chariots Wiki
Skeptics’ Annotated Bible / Skeptics’ Annotated Qur’an
AtheismResource.com
TalkOrigins.org

YouTubers: Evid3nc3, Thunderf00t, TheAmazingAtheist, The Atheist Experience, Edward Current, NonStampCollector, Mr. Deity, Richard Dawkins, QualiaSoup

Blogs: Greta Christina, PZ Myers, The Friendly Atheist, WWJTD?, Debunking Christianity, SkepChick

and don’t forget… other SASHA members! We are here for you, too!

Making headway!

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Hello everyone!

Today we set up the Ask an Atheist table again at Speakers’ Circle, and handed out approximately 150 of these flyers:

We got overwhelmingly positive responses at the table; we had a few very good discussions and helped several people understand what we mean by the word “atheist”/”agnostic,” why we do what we do, how atheists make ethical decisions, etc. We told a lot of people about events we have planned for this year, and I think we’re going to have even more people at our next meeting than we did at our last one, especially considering we haven’t put up the bulk of the posters yet!

Coincidentally, there were independently two (unrelated) street preachers at the circle today, as well. The first up was a 40ish man with a thick Alabama accent and a VERY loud voice who read from his bible incessantly for several hours. He was completely uninterested in opening a dialogue and simply yelled bible verses at students. A few people sat and listened, but he didn’t really have a crowd going. I went over and tried to start a conversation with him, but gave up after about 5 minutes – every time I asked him a question, e.g. “You quote the bible, but why do you believe in the bible?” or “What’s your name?” he simply said “Not now” and continued reading his bible to the open air. I don’t think he really reached anyone.

Sister Cindy preached next, but honestly I didn’t get a chance to listen to her, since I was back at the table by then. I did see that she was holding up a condom, so I imagine she was talking about “fornication!!!!!” I do think it’s interesting that, according to Brother Jed’s journal about today, he was worried about a young guy named Marcus who all set to get saved, but changed his mind at the last minute because he realized that he would have to obey the bible in its entirety (according to Jed), and believing and obeying the Christian bible meant turning against his sister, who’s gay. (Jed quoted Luke 14:26 in his journal, which reads: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”) I think it’s ironic that Sister Cindy was preaching today, considering that apparently she believes it’s alright to pick and choose from the bible (see 1 Timothy 2:11-12).

We’ve discussed this before at meetings, but I think it’s worth mentioning: Our table has a big sign that says “Ask an Atheist” (see yesterday’s post for a photo), and we’re wondering if we’re really approaching our tabling with the right goal in mind. Although we do want to chat with people who are curious about atheism and help them understand better what it means, we are also—primarily, even—seeking other atheists who are interested in joining our group. The sign we’re using now doesn’t really work well for that purpose. We get a lot of people giving us thumbs-up as they walk by, or taking pictures of our sign and waving at us, or telling us “Keep up the good work!” and so on, but we want those people to stop at the table and learn about our group! Those who did approach us, often, didn’t even realize we were part of a group that has regular meetings, as much as just taking it upon ourselves to answer people’s questions about atheism. I think we’ll need to make a new sign with something more direct, for example, “Atheist? Join the club!” or something along those lines to accompany the one we have now.

After we finished tabling, we went to the LGBTQ Resource Center‘s welcome pizza party. It was great! So many people having fun, getting to know each other, and knowing that have a safe place on campus to learn, read, and not have to worry about people not understanding them. This is the type of thing of which we need more, not Brother Jed telling people that they are “not worthy” because they’re not willing to “hate” their sisters simply for being gay. I am honestly tired of Christians, mostly who haven’t ever read the bible, trying to convince me that Jesus was all about love and peace. The character of Jesus as portrayed in the bible doesn’t exactly match the glowing beacon of acceptance your youth pastor told you about, guys… sorry to burst your bubble!

People who use reason, logic, and evidence to decide how to weigh what’s acceptable or not are the people I want to hang around, and an ethical (and legal) system based on critical examination and rationality is the kind of system under which I want to live. Richard Dawkins explains it well in this clip, I think (and gets a round of applause, as well):

Until next time!

- Dave

Dave Muscato is Vice President of MU SASHA. He is a vegetarian, LGBTQ ally, and human- & animal-welfare activist. A junior at Mizzou majoring in economics & anthropology and minoring in philosophy & Latin, he posts updates to the SASHA blog every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. His website is http://www.DaveMuscato.com.

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Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins: Darwin’s Influence on Morality.

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This is a great discussion between Peter Singer and Richard Dawkins about the ethical conclusions we can draw from Darwin.  It’s a bit long, but well-worth the time.