2014.01 Opportunity: Survey of Atheists

Researchers from the University of Tampa and Iowa State University would like your opinions for a study. Their survey looks at the perceptions and attitudes of both affiliated and unaffiliated nonbelievers, concerning the functions and activities of secular, freethought, humanist, and atheist organizations, and also the conduct of individuals and groups in the broader atheist movement/community in general. It'll take about 10 minutes, and you need not answer every question.

2014.01 News: Pastor Decides To "Try" Atheism, Loses 3 Jobs

For some reason, Rev. Ryan Bell's employers at various ardently Christian institutions came to doubt his commitment and sincerity when he announced that he was going to try spending a year living as an atheist to see what it was really like. Their general attitude? Don't let the door hit you on the hinder on your way out.

2014.01 Education: Social Awareness Quiz

Over at CNN.com's Belief Blog the commenters are having a swell time with today's story "After Schism, Can Atheist Churches Last?". This comment in particular seemed to stand out above the crowd:

A quick 10-question quiz might help explain why young Jews and Christians are deserting religion in droves. The core problem the priests, ministers, and rabbis face is the Internet. Suddenly they no longer have a monopoly on what they tell these kids while they are too young to know any better. The kids can fact check themselves and, of course, religion is soon exposed as having a lot to explain. So:

Q1. The completely absurd theory that all 7,000,000,000 human beings on the planet are simultaneously being supervised 24 hours a day, every day of their lives, by an immortal, invisible being for the purposes of reward or punishment in an “afterlife” comes from the realm of ...
(a) bad science fiction
(b) children’s fairy tales
(c) hallucinogenic psychology
(d) religion

Q2. What is the only thing capable of making 40% of the country utterly stupid enough to think the entire Universe began less than 10,000 years ago with one man, one woman, and a talking snake?
(a) a horrid mental disease
(b) a failed educational system
(c) a successful al-Qaeda plot to undermine academic advancement in the USA
(d) Christianity

Q3. Complete the following sentence: “It is not uncommon in many parts of the world for a young man to strap a suicide vest to himself and blow up himself along with members of a rival __________.”
(a) corporation
(b) university
(c) street gang
(d) church

Q4. It is only acceptable as an adult to believe Bronze Age mythology like talking snakes, the Red Sea splitting, manna falling from the sky, a man living in a whale's belly, a talking donkey, superhuman strength, a man rising from the dead, and angels, ghosts, gods, and demons in the field of ...
(a) history
(b) literature
(c) anthropology
(d) religion

Q5. I have convinced myself that gay sex is a choice and not genetic, but then have no explanation as to why only gay people have homosexual urges. I am being obstinate and closed minded due to my ...
(a) heterosexuality
(b) DNA
(c) nationality
(d) religion

Q6. I honestly believe that, when I think silent thoughts like “Please God, help me pass my exam tomorrow”, some invisible being is reading my mind and will intervene and alter what would otherwise be the course of history in small ways to help me. I am ...
(a) a delusional schizophrenic;
(b) a naive child, too young to know how silly that is
(c) an ignorant farmer from Sudan who never had the benefit of even a 5th-grade education
(d) your average Christian, Muslim, or Jew

Q7. Hundreds of millions of Catholics believe that bread and wine turns into the actual flesh and blood of a dead Jew from 2,000 years ago because ...
(a) there are obvious visible changes in the condiments after the Catholic priest does his hocus pocus
(b) tests have confirmed a divine presence in the bread and wine
(c) now and then their god shows up and confirms this story
(d) their faith tell them to believe it’s so because that’s what the priest said

Q8. The only discipline known to often cause people to kill others, whom they have never met, in its furtherance is ...
(a) architecture
(b) philosophy
(c) archeology
(d) religion

Q9. What differentiates science and all other intellectual pursuits from religion?
(a) Religion tells people not only what they should believe, but what they must believe under threat of “burning in hell” or other divine retribution, whereas science, economics, medicine, etc. have no “sacred cows” in terms of doctrine and go where the evidence leads them.
(b) Religion can make a statement such as “God comprises the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit” and be totally immune from experimentation and challenge, whereas science can only make factual assertions when supported by demonstrable, repeatable evidence.
(c) Science and the scientific method are universal and consistent all over the world, whereas all religion is regional and a person’s religion, no matter how deeply held, is clearly nothing more than a matter of upbringing.
(d) All of the above.

Q10. If I am found wandering the streets flagellating myself, wading into a filthy river, mutilating my child’s genitals, or prostrating and abnegating myself in the belief that an invisible being is somehow reading my innermost thoughts, I am likely driven by ...
(a) demons
(b) an irrational fear or phobia
(c) a severe mental degeneration caused by years of drug abuse
(d) my religious belief

2013.12 Humor: Really, It's ALL Made Up, You Know

Click to enlarge:

2013.12 Book Report: The Trouble with Christmas, by Tom Flynn

The Trouble with Christmas
by Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry magazine
(Prometheus, 0-87975-848-1, 1993, 244 pages)
Summarized by Richard S. Russell
Where do our Christmas traditions come from?

• Pre-Christian sources: evergreens (tannenbaum, holly, ivy, mistletoe, Yule log, strenae); candles; giving gifts; feasting; wassailing
• Christian sources: midnight mass (Yup, that's all, folks!)
• Post-Christian sources: everything else, almost entirely derived from the 6 DWAMQs (dead white Anglophone males and a queen) — Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria, Clement C. Moore, Thomas Nast, and Francis Church, from 1830 to 1910. Subsequent, tho lesser, customs include the poinsettia (timed to bloom red on Christmas Day), electric lights for the trees, a national tree (Eisenhower), and innumerable TV specials.

How accurate is the Biblical account of Jesus's birth?

• Neither unique nor original: Pre-Christian god-men sharing 1 or more of these characteristics — angelic annunciation, peri-solsticial birth; virgin mother; divine father; birth attended by signs and royal visitors; youthful prodigy acts; wonder stories as adult; persecution; grisly, untimely death; return from land of dead; silvan symbolism; solar symbolism — Osiris (Egypt), Horus (also Egypt), Attis (Phrygia), Adonis (Syria), Dionysus (Greece), Perseus (also Greece), Mithra or Mithras (Persia), Krishna (Hindu)
• Unsupported by historial evidence: No historical record of Caesar Augustus’s great census, star in the east, or Herod’s massacre of the innocents. Also ahistorical is shepherds watching their flocks by night at any time of year other than lambing season, usually around April.
• Contradictions between gospels: Jesus’s genealogy, whether Joseph and Mary lived in Bethlehem or Nazareth, whether there was a manger, who attended the birth, and where the family went afterward.
• Contradiction within a gospel: Matthew’s “fulfilled prophecy” that the messiah should be named Emmanuel.

Are Christians generally fond of birthdays?
Actually, no; death is more Christian. Early Christians thot it blasphemous to celebrate birth (entry into the mundane world) and instead marked feast days of the saints on the much better recorded anniversary dates of their deaths (their entry into the divine world of the afterlife), including the biggest of them all, Easter.

Surely all Christians agree on the central importance of Christmas?
No, as usual, they leap at any excuse for a good fight. Puritans, Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists tried to squelch Christmas celebrations as unholy and unseemly in England and its colonies thruout the 17th and 18th Centuries. Anglicans, Catholics, and Lutherans, OTOH, reveled in the occasion, which is why George Washington chose Christmas Eve to cross the Delaware River, expecting to find the British and Hessians inebriated via celebration.

Who are those DWAMQs you mentioned?

• Washington Irving wrote the “Knickerbocker history” of New York, describing a supposed Dutch cult of Saint Nicholas, who would ride a magic horse thru the sky distributing presents on his feast day. Irving later described an “old-fashioned Christmas feast” set in a fictional English manor.
• Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, with its soppily sentimental conversion of the miser Scrooge. Even so, upon awakening from his dream, “In no time flat, [Scrooge] finds a little boy walking down the street who, on Christmas morning, has nothing better to do than run an errand for a stranger. Scrooge gives the child some money without the slightest worry that the butcher’s shop might be closed. His confidence is justified.”
• The young Queen Victoria was wildly popular in England and set many social standards. A descendant of the German House of Hanover, she and her family celebrated the holiday with an indoor tree. “In 1847 few English households had trees; by Christmas 1849 trees were everywhere.” The silvacide has continued unabated ever since.
• Clement Clarke Moore claimed to have written the poem A Visit from Saint Nicholas (AKA ’Twas the Night before Christmas), and Flynn is willing to concede authorship despite considerable doubt, but its influence on the legend of Saint Nicholas — essentially transforming it rapidly into a recognizably modern Santa Claus, complete with “8 tiny reindeer” — is unmistakable. But Claus was rotund, jolly, and secular, not the gaunt, severe Nicholas of the Christian tradition.
• Thomas Nast was the greatest editorial cartoonist of the 19th Century. If an ordinary picture is worth a thousand words, his depiction of Santa Claus was probably worth a million. It gave form to the somewhat vague word picture of Moore’s poem. His first Claus appeared in an 1862 issue of Harper’s, delivering presents to the “good” Union soldiers. But he kept it up almost every year thereafter for 3 decades. He’s the one responsible for siting Santa at the North Pole.
• Francis Church, an editorial writer for the New York Sun, was called upon by his publisher in 1897 to pen a response to 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, who had inquired whether Santa was real. Under the heading “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”, Church opened with the observation that her friends “have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see.” and thence proceeds to lay waste to the scientific method.

Miscellany

• A fair number of Christmas carols aren't as "traditional" as commonly believed. Jingle Bells (1857), We Three Kings of Orient Are (1859), I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day (1863), Joy to the World (1872), Away in a Manger (1887), Little Drummer Boy (1941), Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1949).
• The solstice is a holiday magnet. Christmas, Hanukkah, Saturnalia, Festivus, Yule, Dies Natalis Solis Invicti, Kwanzaa, Brumalia, Sankranti, boar's head feast, Dongzhi, Soyal, Yalda, Modraniht, Pancha Ganapati, HumanLight, Hogmanay, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day.
• Should we celebrate any holidays? Flynn himself does not and recommends against doing so for people in general and atheists in particular. He especially disparages the idea of celebrating the solstice (a pagan holiday) or made-up alternative holidays like Festivus, because he says we're fooling nobody; everyone knows we wouldn't be doing it if it weren't for the big fuss being made over Christmas.

Thomas Nast's First Santa Claus Cartoon (1862)

20th Century Sanitized Commercial Santa Claus

2013.12 News: AHA! FSM at the Wisconsin State Capitol

The imaginative folx at the University of Wisconsin's AHA! (Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics) group have added a Flying Spaghetti Monster to the rapidly growing collection of solstice-seasonal observances at the Wisconsin State Capitol.

2013.12 Opinion: Proper Season's Greetings

Have you heard that some people are taking offense at being issued the "wrong" kind of season's greetings? For pity's sake, people, nothing to get all snippy about. It's not that hard. Here's the short course:

 • If you know somebody is a Christian, say "Merry Christmas".
 • If you know that they're Serbian, like my mom's side of the family, say "Khristos se rodi" (or "Joyeux Noël" or "Felíz Navidad" or whatever the appropriate ethnicity is).
 • If you know they're Jewish, go with "Happy Hanukkah".
 • If you know they're Wiccan, say "Blessed Yule".
 • If you know they enjoy Kwanzaa, say "Joyous Kwanzaa".
 • If you know they celebrate Festivus, say "Happy Festivus".
 • If you're talking to me — “Are you talkin' to me?” — “Go, Pack!" gets a big grin all year round.
 • And in all other cases (that is, when you don't know), go with "Happy Holidays" and you can't miss.

Do you detect the common theme here? It’s about spreading cheer to the other person. It’s not all about you.

Now please pick your favorite season's greeting and pretend it came from me. 8^D