The Second Mouse’s Guide to Life

barakobama.com asked me to share by views after I sent them $25 to defeat McSame. This is what I submitted:

All my life I have felt disappointed in our political process. Its like I could see that all our political leaders were talking sideways out of their mouths and while my peers agreed with me that they could detect hypocrisy and double talk out of all our leaders, we were constantly frustrated that no one, the media, the establishment, our educators didn’t detect the same thing.

We allowed leaders to make ridiculous assertions and no one called them on it. We allowed abuses to the separation of church and state and no one said anything. We allowed leaders to use misleading language or make false promises or utter uneducated statements and it seemed that the whole world was complicit in their phoniness.

Not before Barak Obama have I ever felt that a candidate for president truly understands the world as I see it. I don’t mean merely as a political moderate, but as someone who wants to apply reason and rationality to the process; someone who knows that the answers are not always black or white or politics always left or right; someone who understands that people don’t just fit into two categories, good and evil or that our opponents and enemies aren’t always wrong and that we aren’t always right; someone who doesn’t confuse love of country and political complicity, who understands that we are a great nation because of political dissent.

In short, Barak Obama speaks for a generation who grew up understanding that things aren’t always as easy as our leaders make them out to be, that it’s not right to dismiss people because they don’t share our politics or our religion. He speaks for the first generation in the world that grew up without the assumption of eternal prosperity and the very real challenge of sustaining our future and the very real prospect of global crisis.

In these times we can’t afford people who assume they are right based on ideology. We can’t afford people who fail to recognize that facts, not ideology, come first when making choices about our actions. We can’t afford people who aren’t willing to admit their mistakes and change course because they are afraid of looking weak. To me, real weakness is failing to do everything you can to make the best choice based on the facts. Real weakness is worrying about political expedience instead of making the lives of Americans better. I admire a leader who is willing to change course based on new intelligence. I want my leader to have studied, nuanced positions on everything. I want my political solutions to require more time to understand that a 10 second sound byte.

As an atheist, I applaud Barak’s commitment to the separation of church and state and completely agree with his vision for a revamping of the Faith-Based initiative and his view of how religious people can bring their values to bear in public policy. He is the first politician who’s got it right as far as I’m concerned. And while I wish he would reach out to directly to America’s secular population, some 15% of Americans who don’t believe in God and yet consider themselves patriots, I ask no more than to treat all Americans, regardless of their theological positions as valid citizens capable of morality and whose opinions are valued when making policy.

A letter I wrote to Mary Eberstadt who wrote this piece of tripe:
Query: Do Atheists Know Any Human Women, Human Children, or Human Families?
LOSER LETTER VI.
By Mary Eberstadt

I’ll admit to missing the point or the context of the “Loser Letter” series. Quite frankly this link showed up on my Google Alerts for “atheism” and it’s all I’ve ever read of your work. So I apologize if I don’t get the joke or something, but it’s clear to me that this is written by someone who is neither an atheist nor bright.

It makes the mistake of assuming that all atheists agree on anything past the lack of a belief in God and that we (yes, we) are somehow a homogeneous group of stogy, nearsighted rationalist dodo heads.

I love my kids, and while I understand that they are in fact successful DNA propagating itself into the future, I think they are cute as buttons, and precious beyond words and I would sacrifice myself for them in a second if I thought that it would allow them to be happy in life.

The ignorant assumption of people who think all atheists are virtue-less heathens (and the assumption that the jist of your letter is based on, apparently) is that because THEY have attributed the source of all their values and morals in life to supernatural causes, that anyone who doesn’t hear the voices they hear and heed the rules they heed, must also not have any of the values and morals they have.

Countless religious apologizers either pose as atheists or try to pass themselves off as “former” atheists to lend their perspective credibility, thus pretending some authority to speak on the perceived faults of atheism. It’s a sad and, quite frankly, pathetic attempt to aggrandize their point of view and embarrassing because just about everybody beyond the choir can see right through it.

If I’m mistaken and you don’t actually believe in god, and this is your truly your self-loathing view of atheism, then I’d love to suggest some material to counter your assertions that atheists are nothing but debased materialists without morals or concern for the inherent value of life, children, love and families. Granted nothing in my list below has made on to a best seller list, but you can’t judge a whole group of people just by the material that has made the biggest splash. That’s like assuming that you are qualified to comment on the structural deficiencies of the Titanic just because you saw the movie or can lecture of disease pathology because you have seen every episode of House M.D. Some stuff only gets discovered by those who care to search for it.

Some suggestions of things to investigate: (sorry the atheist publicity machine hasn’t blown these up yet, The Christian publicity machine had about a 1,700 year head start)

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

The advice column “Sweet Reason” by Molleen Matsumura http://sweetreason.org

Parenting Beyond Belief by Dale McGowan

Camp Quest (summer camp for atheist kids) http://camp-quest.org/

Institute for Humanist Studies http://humaniststudies.org

Secular Student Alliance http://www.secularstudents.org/

And FYI -“new atheism” is a disparaging term and a misnomer, meant to discredit the four authors who have had bestselling books in the last few years, Harris, Dennet, Dawkins and Hitchens. There is nothing new about their atheism. They don’t believe in God just like all atheists of all time, what’s new about that? The only perceived newness lamented by the religious detractors is that most people are tired about being quiet about their lack of belief in God and are starting to communicate with each other and advocate for their positions, which they are entitled to do in our free society. “New” assumes it’s a fundamentally different type of atheism than before. There is just a critical mass of bullshit a society can hold before people decide to speak up for themselves.

-Brian

Ben Stein squanders his credibility in an unfunny and barely-veiled attempt to apologize for Creationism to a captive audience.
Movie Review of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Let me start by saying, I had to see this movie. No, I wasn’t forced by some physical means but I did feel compelled to see it even though that meant contributing $9.50 to its box office totals to do so. Of course I felt I couldn’t let this movie go by without reviewing it for Rational Alternative, and with it being such a big story on the atheist blogosphere, and its panning by the National Center for Science Education, it was, quite frankly, a train wreck I had to gaze upon myself.

Most of all, I was morbidly curious what my sometimes-hero, Ben Stein, had to say about the Intelligent Design debate in his movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I have to admit, I like Ben Stein; I really do. “Win Ben Stein’s Money” was my favorite show at the time it was on the air and I even attempted to get on the show as a contestant. I was taken by the personal mythology of a really bright guy who had crossed over from politics into showbiz, usually a one-way street heading the other direction. I have to admit I didn’t know anything about his politics or his theology, but I knew that he was one of the few celebrities who embodied intellectualism. His professorial image, tempered by his hip penchant for wearing sneakers with a suit and tie is a refreshing sight when so many stars that Hollywood offers up are dullards and bimbos.

But who knew he’d show up on the Intelligent Design side of the evolution debate? I assert that this is what he’s done, but if you were to ask him, he’d probably claim that this isn’t a movie that champions Intelligent Design per se, but rather a movie that tackles the apparent wall in science and academia that keeps out anybody even suspected of considering Intelligent Design a legitimate area of inquiry.

Stein begins and ends the film with a claim that this issue is really about freedom and liberty, the liberty of people to consider what they’d like to consider, and the freedom of inquiry to lead wherever the evidence takes them. Because, as the case is made in the film, where would science be if the academy refused to accept anything that contradicted established norms, such as accepting only Newtonian physics, and precluding the insights of Einstein. The film maintains through several interviews and episodic examples, that Intelligent Design is a valid point of inquiry that’s being suppressed by a conspiracy of Darwinists who deny tenure to, fire, or otherwise inhibit the work of apparently smart and innocent professors and teachers who are simply giving ID its due consternation.

The only problem with that possibly valid premise is that the rest of the film is a ridiculous hit job on the idea of Darwinian evolution and the academy that embraces it. Not during one second of the film is the evidence for Intelligent Design displayed, discussed or even so much as mentioned. Not one of the ID proponents even says they have ever seen any evidence for Intelligent Design. I guess they figure the evidence for ID should be self-evident to those who disbelieve Darwinian evolution.

Much time is devoted to how apparently silly and completely incredulous Darwinian evolution seems to the lay person, how utterly impossible such odds would be to even get a cell functioning by chance. One snarky animation portrays a hook-nosed Richard Dawkins trying to pull a slot machine lever to “roll” a working chain of amino acids that must be in a correct sequence, thousands of times over to work. The idea of Panspermia, the hypothesis that the blueprint for life was seeded on Earth by an extraterrestrial source, be it intelligent or otherwise, was trumpeted to the skies by the film, casting the well-respected scientists who related the details of the hypothesis as wacko alien theorists, a deliberate misrepresentation of what they were really saying, not that they believed it, but that it was remotely possible, and as scientists, they had to be open to considering it, a nuance lost on (or deliberately ignored by) Stein and surely lost on the film’s intended audience. Interviews with Daniel Dennet, P.Z. Myers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, to name the few I recognized by sight, were quote-mined for their most damning and aggressively anti-religious sounding words to paint a picture of atheist-scientists as soulless and uncaring and as unreasonable tyrants.

I have to consider that quotes from Dawkins such as “Evolution is a fact,” which I completely agree with in the context of evolution as an undeniable observable phenomenon, will play as venom to the film’s intended audience. And it is quite clear who the film’s intended audience is. Not needing to be explicit here, this is a Michael-Moore-stylized film made for those who are usually on the other side of such attacks who probably don’t care that the film wasn’t what you’d call, “unbiased.” The end scenes cut shots of Ronald Reagan saying “Tear down this wall!” with Stein making parallels about the apparent wall erected to keep ID out of academia. The founder of Planned Parenthood, obviously cast as a villain, was connected with Social Darwinists and the purveyors of the eugenics programs of Nazi Germany while the film makes the case that evil things happen when people, not God or nature, I assume, are allowed to decide who qualifies as a valid person or not and who is allowed to live. A not-so-casual correlation is drawn between a person’s interest in science and their eventual path to atheism; each of film’s scientist interviewees willingly admits to that being true for them. Of course, comparisons to Hitler and Stalin are nothing new for atheists, however the movie reaches a new low by giving that tired argument a fresh twist: not that Hitler was merely atheist (which he wasn’t) and therefore evil, but rather that Hitler was evil because he applied Darwin’s theories in his regime and by association, all others who believe Darwin’s theories have the same capacity for such evil.

At 1000 theaters, Expelled had the widest release of any documentary ever, breaking the previous record holder, Michael Moore’s Sicko. One wonders what feat of distribution got this film into so many theaters, considering that it was withheld from critics in advance of the April 18th release and any pre-screenings were closely-guarded affairs, such as the one that P.Z. Myers got kicked out of at the Mall of America. (Richard Dawkins, who didn’t pre-register wasn’t recognized and saw the film along with Myers’ family.) It’s interesting to note that this movie is playing on very few screens in large metropolitan areas and is concentrated instead, in theaters in small towns and in the rural areas of the country.

Few of the circumstances cited above on their own can be shown to demonstrate a less than noble attempt by the film’s makers to release a modern day propaganda film under the guise of an intellectual documentary about freedom of inquiry. Alone, they simply equal bad and biased film making. But in concert together, they betray a very clear and undeniable motive to send a message to a very specific audience. Cultural, political and social “dog whistles,” coded language and images calculated to seem unremarkable to the average person but are shrewdly designed to resonate with specific audiences, are blown from the very start of the movie until its end. It’s crystal clear that this film’s intended audience is from small towns and rural America, audiences for whom Ronald Regan is a hero and Planned Parenthood, a villain, audiences who’d love to hear proof that interest in science causes atheism and Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes are what arise when people embrace Darwinian ideas and audiences who are desperate for someone with a bit of intellectual credibility to take their side and create their own slick mock-umentary to fight back against the liberal elite. That is quite a captive audience indeed. I’m sure this film’s captive audience is eating this up, taking notes and forevermore when scientists attempt to have an argument about the validity of ID, they’ll hear apologizers citing freedom of inquiry and making claims that proponents of evolution are suppressing their liberty and perhaps the most horrifying prospect of all, is that we’ll hear quotes from this movie parroted over and over again.

A worse sin than any of that was that this movie was boring. It lingered on minor details far too long, much is made out of Ben Stein’s walk around a city block looking for the Discovery Institute, they spend at least a tenth of the movie on a tour of the place where the Nazis euthanized the undesirables in the eugenics program; here and there were pointless animations, cuts to ridiculous stock footage of old-timey people punching each other and doing other silly things, apparently pantomiming where the film’s makers felt the ideas were a little too complicated. Stein is known as a jokester and most of his previous roles have been in the comedy genre, but the only laughs to be had in this film, for me anyways, were surely unintended by the filmmakers; I was laughing at the movie, not with it. The Angus Young-inspired, rebellious school boy image that was plastered all over this film’s posters and website was wholly absent in the film, no jokes were cracked, only a somber and patronizing Stein knowingly smirking when he hears juicy quotes from unsuspecting scientists on the record that he knows will make great fodder in his movie.

There is always something creepy and disingenuous when the establishment tries to paint itself as the oppressed minority and avails itself of the tools of the powerless: satire, wit and caricature. This sort of guerilla-style, one-sided documentary is only tolerable when the filmmakers are truly underdogs. Picture a fat, unkempt Michael Moore in Roger and Me trying to land interviews with CEOs by accosting them on street corners because security wouldn’t let him near the building. That’s not a deliberate style, it’s because he is a fat, sweaty guy and they really wouldn’t let him in the building. It’s credible because you can see the guy’s determination on his face and its bias is acceptable because the audience understands that the deck is stacked so far against this underdog that we can allow the filmmaker a few liberties to even the playing field. That’s what satire is about, allowing the little guy to undercut the big guy with the only tool he has, his earnest wit. Stein, in his suit and tie, cozying up with college professors while jet setting around the globe, jaunting about picturesque campuses and quaint European streets, is hardly an underdog in this undoubtedly well-financed and expertly-marketed film. When this sort of film comes from the ground up, it’s empowering, when it comes from the top down, it’s propaganda.

What reasonable person can swallow for a second that the Judeo-Christian worldview is held by some sort of persecuted minority in America, arguably the most religious nation in the developed world led by an outspoken evangelical Christian? Doesn’t Stein know that a majority of the American public already doesn’t believe in evolution and churches are funded many times moreover than universities? What imaginary battle does he think he’s fighting? The scientific academy isn’t some tyrannical institution poised to crush the puny little churches with its heavy elephant leg, forcing them out of the scientific debate once and for all. That image would be laughable if only it weren’t so ironically and lamentably backwards; the scientific academy is truly a much-besieged bastion of free inquiry. This film could be seen as a signal that the faithful intend to invade and, with this film, its financiers, directors, producers, and yes, even Ben Stein, may intend to rally their captivated troops to storm the ivory towers.

When I was 15, I decided to read the Bible front to back. I started in Genesis and gave up somewhere the middle of Exodus about a day and a half later. I covered a lot of familiar territory, Adam and Eve, The flood of Noah, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and the trials of Moses, those few stories which every child in Sunday school is familiar with, but what struck me was how much of what I was reading was completely foreign to me, lists of unknown kings who slew this army and that guy and this wife who betrayed that guy and went on to beget so and so who sold this goat to that guy and on and on. In fact I was struck by how much cultural hay is made of so little of the Bible and how there were rules and various stories that I’d never heard about in all of my years of Catholic Catechism.

It would be about 10 years before I came to understand what my 15-year old eyes had glimpsed but failed to recognize: the Bible is full of crap. And I don’t mean full of crap in the colloquial sense of being useless or unreliable, I mean it in the much more literal sense of being stuffed with the outdated cultural vestiges of thousands of years of questionable history that serves absolutely no moral, academic or cultural purpose other than to make said Bible a hefty bludgeon or a makeshift shield against bullets or knives in a pinch. No wonder we only reference a handful of stories as still culturally and, heaven forbid, morally relevant; what are we to possibly make of the rest of it: endless genealogies, rules for how to discipline your slaves, tend your goats and why not to make fun of bald people, as they may sick she-bears after you? And beyond the she-bear bit, it’s utterly devoid of humor.

It’s obvious to me that the Bible, the artifact that it is, is the catalog of several cultures’ oral mythologies and self-aggrandizing histories, written over thousands of years, by dozens of hands, through a haze of endless translations, assembled by political committee and only to be accessed through a trained intermediary who should be commended for such valiant attempts to assemble any sort of coherent message out if its pages.

The Bible has taught me that its possible to justify just about anything as long as one is capable of selective reading. Heck, just a few years ago, the Bible Code phenomenon taught me you don’t even need to read whole words anymore, you can just go through any passage and just use whatever letters you need to make up whatever message you want to see, like a Rorschach test for all of Western Civilization.

I can appreciate the Bible as a historical document, as a source of cultural mythos, but I can’t fathom that any sort of literal interpretation makes any sense to anybody looking to the Bible as a standard of morality. It does well as a cultural touchstone and a bludgeon, but as the inspired word of God? I think it’s seriously lacking.

My mother collects bouncy balls, those solid rubber balls that mostly come from supermarket vending machines. She buys them mostly from garage sales. . She displays them in a giant red gumball machine in her living room.She comes home every weekend with four or five more or sometimes bags full of them and puts them in the machine.

She told me a story about finding a giant bouncy ball at a garage sale, somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 inches in diameter a few weeks back. It had the classic rainbow swirl design inside the clear rubber with sparkles. A small child about five years of age had grabbed it and bought it for a dollar right before her.

She saw that the child was also eying some videos that cost a few more dollars and the child’s mother refused to buy anything else. My mom approached the mother and child and offered to buy the ball for $5 so the child would have the money to buy the videos.

The mother said it was up to the child; the child hemmed and hawed about it until my mother offered $10 for the ball. The child accepted $10 and gave my mother the ball.

My mother, who was waiting for my grandmother to finish browsing at the garage sale, stood by her car and was happily bouncing the ball up and down, of course looking happy as a clam for having found such a prize, certain to be the crown jewel of her bouncy ball collection. In retrospect, she should have just gotten in the car and drove off.

The child ran up to my mother, no doubt seeing how happy she was and understanding only that she now had the ball and he didn’t, handed my mother back her $10 bill and grabbed the ball. My mother started to protest, but what could she do? She couldn’t stand there and have a discussion about fair trade or choices with a five year old child and it was clear that the child’s mother wasn’t going to be an ally in her quest to reclaim the ball.

She approached the mother and offered $20 for the ball. The mother stammered and said she could not dissuade her child and would not force it from him. My mother gave the woman her phone number and said if the child ever tired of the ball that she would be willing to buy it from her.

We all had a laugh about this later as my mother related the story to us and we all agreed that my mother’s first mistake was not bolting as soon as she had the ball in hand and then playing with the thing in plain sight of the child.

I’ve been scouring the internet for a toy shop or novelty store that sells such a ball so I can give it to my mom for Christmas. I can’t find anything like it on eBay or Craig’s list and it’s apparent that the people that produce such balls for vending machines only make the regular sized ones.

If any of you know where I might acquire such a ball, if you knew of a store where I could buy one or manufacturer that produced them I would be grateful for the info! Heck, if any of you have a ball like this laying around and would be willing to part with it, let me know!

by Brian Parra with contributions from Bobbie Kirkhart, Victoria Parra and Ingemar Hulthage

So you’ve come to understand that you are an atheist. Now what? To the uninformed, it might seem that there isn’t much to do as an atheist. You’ve just decided to not be religious, time to get on with your life right? Well, in fact there is quite a bit to do as an atheist that encourages community, support for church/state separation issues and the national understanding of atheism. The following is a partial list of constructive and useful ways to positively demonstrate your atheism and lend your energies to a national movement. By no means is this a complete list and for the most part, they aren’t ranked in any particular order. Read on to find the ways that best suit your interests and above all else, be steadfast to your ideals.

10. Stay current on atheist matters.
Are you still trying to bash religious devotees over the head with the whole, “Can God create a stone so heavy he couldn’t lift it?” line? The current state of atheism is vibrant, intellectual and most of all, growing and developing. Due to several best-selling books about atheism, there is a newfound interest in the movement and atheists have an increasing profile in the media. Pick up a book written by a well-respected atheist in the last five years and read it. Verse yourself in the current politics and social movements related to atheism. Subscribe to the action alerts from the Secular Coalition for America or free e-mail newsletters of any one of numerous atheist related news sites. Frequent and support on-line resources for atheists such as SecularWeb.org and the Humanist Network News. In short, stay on top of what is going on and refresh your understanding of what it means to be an atheist today.

9. Respond when people assume you are religious.
Have you received the indignant e-mail forward about retail associates resorting to whispering “Merry Christmas” to shoppers because they’ve been prohibited by company policy from saying such things out loud? Do you always find the Gideon’s bible in your hotel room? Are you constantly greeted in such a way that the person speaking to you assumes that you and they share the same faith? You can respond to overt religious overtures by revealing that you don’t share their faith and don’t appreciate their assumptions. For e-mails, you can reply back to the sender with a link from a myth-busting website like Snopes.com that exposes these e-mail myths. You can let hotels know that you don’t appreciate their assumption that you need a bible in your room. When someone absent-mindedly says, “May God bless you,” you can say, “I’d be happy with your blessing, alone.” Every one of these is an opportunity to open a dialog about faith and morality by saying “I don’t share your faith, but since you took the time to share your beliefs with me, let me share mine with you.”

8. Broaden religious traditions.
Traditional ceremonies, rituals and celebrations are part of what make life so enjoyable and meaningful. Unfortunately, these types of events remain square within religion’s dominion for the most part. You can find ways to help your family, friends and coworkers broaden their religious focus to include many different perspectives and traditions in each celebration. Instead of saying Grace before meals, try thinking of the long list of people who actually produced your food, “Thanks to the farmer, to the grocery store clerk and the produce truck driver, etc.” It’s a fun exercise that the kids enjoy and it serves to remind them of the real process of producing food and of the value of human effort. Make it a point to initiate a conversation with your friends about the history of each holiday, why it’s celebrated and how different people observe it. You can include other cultural references, such as reminding people of the pagan rite of Eostre, from which Easter is drawn or highlighting the Yule tradition of Germanic tribes which influenced Christmas. Not to subvert religious tradition, these practices serve the more noble purpose of reminding people that there is more than one source of cultural tradition and what is truly meaningful is the exhalation of human value, not the supernatural pretense.

7. Be a watchdog in your local community.
Does your community allow groups with religious missions unequal access to public services or city property for demonstrations, fundraising or other events? Inquire with city officials how their fair use policy applies to atheist groups and how you might gain the same level of access that a church group has. Is it possible, given the same amount of planning and permits, that you could gain equal access for atheism or any other cause under the law? A single person, upon noticing a inequality, need do nothing more than make a phone call to the proper city official to inquire if they could, in the name of atheism, have the same access to city resources and property that a religious group has. Many times, a phone call is all that is required to remind the city that mixing religion and government is unconstitutional and that may be enough to correct the policy or practice. If the practice persists, you can alert local secular organizations which can pursue the matter at a higher level.

6. Join a membership group.
Being an actual dues paying member of a non-profit group goes a long way toward making you feel like a legitimate member of a movement. In a world where, quite frankly, money matters, it’s a concrete affirmation of your commitment toward change. These group membership numbers are published and the more dues-paying members they have, the more political will these groups gain. Beyond being a way to put your money where your mouth is, becoming a dues-paying member of a group provides you with invaluable access to a community of like-minded individuals and can be a way to coordinate your energies with a national movement. Annual memberships for most of these groups are in the $30-$40 range.

5. Support political lobbying.
Make sure that a percentage of the membership dues you pay, money you donate, funds you raise, in some way, ultimately supports the political lobbying of national organizations like Secular Coalition for America and the Institute for Humanists Studies. Paid lobbyists in Washington are gaining the atheist movement inroads toward being a recognized part of the political process when traditionally we have been left out. While we have quite a long way to go before the wall between church and state is shored up indefinitely, having lobbyists walking into congressional offices every day on behalf of the secular movement strengthens that wall one brick at a time.

4. Volunteer your time to support an atheist cause or any good cause in the name of atheism.
Spend some time passing out flyers or staffing an info table for an atheist organization at a holiday festival, hold a blood drive for the National Day of Reason, and coordinate a toy collection to help needy children or even make a donation to a charity in the name of your atheist organization. Time spent working directly to support and advance atheism or just time spend working in the name of atheism are invaluable as they serve to accomplish many goals by supporting, in a direct and measurable way, the cause of atheism in your community and raising the awareness of outsiders that atheists are charitable, compassionate and active. It also helps to expand the community of atheists by establishing a public face of atheism where we will inevitably meet and encourage others who share our ideals and, more importantly, our enthusiasm.

3. Share your atheism with people you know.
Of all the things that can be done to demonstrate your atheism, a simple conversation with a family member, friend or coworker is one of the most effective and most useful activities that any atheist can engage in. By simply identifying yourself as an atheist, you replace their assumptions of what an atheist is. Your family, friends and coworkers already love and respect you and by identifying yourself as an atheist, you make it hard for them to maintain their assumptions about what an atheist is. This resonates with people you know because they already have a sense of who you are and may come to understand that atheists can be decent, ethical people, who are warm and friendly.

2. Share your atheism with other atheists.
The importance of raising the consciousness of others is superseded by building a community of atheists who can consolidate their message and coordinate their efforts to effect real change. There is almost a tangible effort among religious leaders to convince atheists that they have no message, no reason to meet, no reason to communicate and no right to advocate on their own behalf. If atheists never meet each other, they will always be convinced that they are alone. Recent statistics show that non-religious people make up more than 10 percent of America’s population, more than Muslims, Jews and Mormons combined. The only reason they don’t wield the same amount of social and political power as one of those major religious groups in this country is because, for the most part, atheists haven’t developed a group identity. This can be as simple as making it a point to meet other atheists in discussion groups, secular school clubs, participating on blogs and internet message boards, attending secular events and local and national conferences. Breach the topic with people you know and see who among them might sympathize with your cause and encourage them to talk to you about their atheism. A sense of community among atheists legitimizes the movement and satisfies one of the most basic human needs: friendship.

1. Be a living ambassador of your ideals.
Above all else, demonstrate in your every day life that being an atheist is conductive to being a decent, socially responsible human being who is capable of compassion, tolerance and wisdom. Ultimately, people are drawn to those they admire and if you’d like to consider yourself an activist for anything, including atheism, you need to be worthy of their admiration and demonstrate that beyond being able to parrot atheist-related arguments, you are living your ideals. Atheism does not need a hoard of devotees with the charisma of cult leaders, but each who hopes to be an asset to the movement must first be confident, well-spoken and intelligent and above all else, live the moral and ethical ideals which he or she is expounding and understand every facet of what he or she professes to believe. Your intended audience will respond to your conviction and confidence. Be the model of what you believe and demonstrate that being an atheist is not the abdication of our goodness but rather that each and every person who comes to use reason and intellect to navigate truth is better and happier for it.

Please feel free to link to, copy, repost, republish or otherwise distribute this article for non-commercial purposes. All I ask is to include a writing credit and/or weblink back to this site.

Printed in the Rational Alternative, Atheists United Newsletter, June 2007

I never got why the traditional religious wedding ceremony included the promise, “till death do us part.” So, the faithful acknowledge that death is a terminus of sorts? Are they promising to love up until a natural break point and afterwards all bets are off? For the faithful considering eternity, wouldn’t they want to promise instead, to love each other for all eternity, past death, regardless of what comes after? Or is promising eternal love treading into Jesus’ turf a little too far? “Till death do us part,” seems a little, I don’t know, realistic for a believer. Or at least that’s where my mind’s wandering’s left me. It was clear that as I approached my wedding, Victoria, my bride-to-be and I would have to sit down and hash out this whole traditional wedding ceremony business to have a wedding that was clear, meaningful and in line with our beliefs.

The first bit of contention came from my mother, who just happens to be the executive assistant to the pastor as our local Catholic Church. In planning for our wedding, considering all sorts of locations and ceremonies, my mom sought to entice us to have a traditional Catholic wedding, with a church and crucifixes and a priest and everything, on her, free of charge. She could book us the date, the church and the banquet hall. A hasty “No, thank you,” was what she got from us. Over the next few months of wedding planning, her offer came up a few more times, but my mother, crest fallen that her oldest son wouldn’t be married in a Catholic church, came to be resigned to her fate.

However, her disappointment became an impetus for us to create a perfect, meaningful wedding. Practically all of my mother’s family is Catholic and on my father’s side, they are a collection of Christians of the “non-denominational” variety including a hint of the charismatic movements. These are people for whom the words, “wedding,” and “God,” are inseparable. My fiancée and I, being atheists, didn’t want to concede any of it. It wasn’t a rejection of them, because obviously we love them very much, but wanting to make every part of our wedding ceremony perfect and have what we promise exactly what we mean. As an aside, we felt no such pressure from Victoria’s side of the family.

I felt I had a duty to not merely accept the delivered “non-denominational” wedding that any Las Vegas wedding pastor dressed as Elvis could perform in his sleep, but to present what our marriage meant to us, to tweak the ceremony to include something special that proved that the love we shared was real and based on our complete understanding of each other. We wanted to preemptively answer any questions about how love exits outside of the existence of God. Now, to be clear, no one had confronted us about that, but I felt like I had a little chip on my shoulder. We wanted our ceremony to not only be perfect for us, but to be eye opening to those who might think that atheists and marriage don’t mix.

Victoria and I did a lot of talking specifically about what the definition of love was, and inspired by a working definition of love gleaned from the pages of
Sense and Goodness without God by Richard Carrier and the notion of genetic altruism as hypothesized by Richard Dawkins, we shaped this idea that love is the recognition that someone else is the embodiment of one’s innermost values. That idea provided the basis for many conversations between us about love, life and our relationship and we got a lot out of talking with each other about it.

At a wedding shower hosted by my co-workers, my boss toasted us by quoting Khalil Gibran, “The oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.” We looked up the original poem, The Prophet on Marriage and we’re delighted by its theme of marriage being the perfect complementary combination of two beings, and not simply the union of those two beings. It insisted on maintaining independence and giving each other space. In particular, being music aficionados, we were taken by one particular line: “Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.”

A few days before our wedding we contacted the pastor that would be performing our ceremony. We made it very clear that we wanted a “non-religious” ceremony which differs from “non-denominational” ceremony in that a “non-denominational” ceremony may still mention an all-purpose God. We made sure he understood that we were atheists, and we wanted none of the “G” word. He was very professional and talked us through all our options of which we chose the contemporary wedding ceremony which focused on commitment and effort to build a lasting love and life. And we were fine with all that stuff. We requested that the father “present” the bride to be married, instead of “give” her. We wanted to promise to “love and cherish” one another and not to “honor and obey.”

We decided to perform the unity candle ceremony where two small taper candles are lit by our mothers, and then we each lift them to light a single, larger candle symbolizing two lives becoming one. In many weddings I’ve seen over the years, the two individual candles are snuffed out leaving the larger candle to symbolize the complete union of two lives (and, by the way, the complete eradication of your former self.) We chose to leave the original candles lit to show that our relationship created something new, and yet we still remain.

Victoria and I composed a short piece of prose that encapsulated the ideas of love and marriage that we had encountered in the months prior to our wedding. We wanted to capture images important to us and ideas that illustrate how love exists naturally and beautifully. We managed to include some levity so people would be laughing too. We asked the pastor read it before our vows:

Our Understanding of Love

This marriage is the artful combination of these fine ingredients. On a stringed instrument, two separate chords will make a distinct sound when plucked, but will only make music when they are played together.

Everyone cried, everyone laughed, we had a wonderful wedding that was uniquely ours and was meaningful and perfectly stated, and as atheists, promising to build the only life we have together, we literally meant, “till death do us part.”

So I wrote this diatribe in response to this video blogger who posted his own take on the “I found a pocket watch at the beach” proof for the existence of God. He asserts that upon inspecting a computer, it’s obvious to everyone that it is designed by intelligence. I tried to post this response but I found that I had to be registered to post, and so I posted it here.

Looks like someone needs a lesson in natural selection. A seventh grade science book, my friend, explains exactly how a complex structure like the mind can evolve from something seemingly simpler than itself. You completely ignore that a computer wasn’t simply created in one day by one person but rather is the sum total of all simpler computers and analog information devices that came before it. It’s a collection of the best parts of the pen and paper, the abacus, the punch card machine, the calculator, the Speak ‘n Spell and every invention that came before it, all much simpler that the computer. No one person designed it whole but rather improved it one part at a time until we have the version we have today.

You are correct, the computer has many creators, each one improving one or two elements that by themselves required no great genius, only a moderate bit of intuition and each providing the baseline for the next generation of innovators to start thinking about new improvements. The computer gives the illusion of being designed because in no single computer can you appreciate the history of computer, but if you study the history of computers, it is apparent how they slowly came to be and “design” isn’t quite the right word.

The human brain is indeed the most complex instrument of all known existence, but there is absolutely no reason to assume it was created by something greater than itself, but is the result of the very much accepted and understood process by which small improvements are preserved and passed forward, each incarnation saving the best parts of the last and improving itself one or two pieces at a time. Over the span of geological time, when the right circumstances exist, as they surely do in billions of places in the universe, this process isn’t even miraculous, it’s inevitable.

I offer for you a simple lesson in natural selection. I thought of this last week while walking my dog and have been hoping to finds someone to spring it on. I hope you are familiar with the game of poker. In poker the absolute best hand is the Royal Flush: a straight to the Ace, all of the same suit. It is the highest hand in poker because it’s the most unlikely combination of cards to be dealt. As an analogy, let’s assume a single life is one hand of cards. Your hand happens to be the Royal Flush, the highest hand of cards you know to exist. How did you get dealt that hand on your first try? It’s far too unlikely to be random, a religions person might assume. It makes more sense on one level to assume that to be dealt a Royal Flush on the only hand in life that matters, there must have been some intervention, say the dealer stacking the deck in order to make sure you got that hand. However, there is a special circumstance in this game of poker that one player, taking one hand, cannot see from his vantage point intuitively: each player before him was given the option of keeping the best cards from the last players hand to build, over the course of many hands, the best hand in poker. There was a time when the best we had was a King high, then a pair of Queens. But later we gave up the Queens when there was the chance to get three 6’s and the time when we sacrificed the three 6’s to get a Flush and the time we gave up the Flush to build a Full House and finally a Flush to the 10. Each hand dealt, each play making one or two incremental decisions to better the hand of poker until there was collected, one at a time, over the course of the entire game, a Royal Flush.

To the person given the Royal Flush, with no sense of how it came to be, it seems like providence. However, knowing the circumstances, of the game, taking the time to really understand how each small improvement culminated to the whole, enables that player to truly appreciate his place in history and not merely assume that either he was the lucky beyond comprehension which almost no one assumes about life, or that the dealer stacked the deck.

Thus in my analogy, natural selection is the process by which the best genes pass themselves forward, while the less advantageous genes are lost to the card pile of history. The ground is literally full of the bones of lesser designed, those that came before and had played their hand as it was received by them and, by one or two genes at a time, improved their lot as they passed on themselves. If we take the time to study those creatures, we understand the culmination of what we are. Any divine stacking of the deck is just as incredulous as ending up this way randomly. Both are inconceivable and yet those inclined to believe the creation model somehow jump to the conclusion that those who opposed them favor the random model. This is more indicative of the creationist lack of imagination and less to do with the random generation model having any reasonable advocates. It’s not true. Natural Selection makes sense when put in context and is the only model supported by the available evidence we have.

As an aside, I don’t think humanity is quite the Royal Flush yet. I think we tend to be more like four 8’s with a 9 kicker. We’d beat most other hands, but let’s not get too comfortable.

Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
By Richard Carrier
Authorhouse, 2005

I was first given a copy of this book encased in a fabric doll of myself as a birthday gift from my then girlfriend, now fiancée. Being the eternal narcissist, I refused to destroy the doll to retrieve the book and thus now own two copies of Sense and Goodness Without God. One still inside the effigy of me and the other purchased at a talk given by Richard Carrier, the Columbia University scholar who is probably best known to the atheist community as one of the founding members of the Secular Web and the Ancient Roman historian featured in the documentary “The God Who Wasn’t There.”

In Sense and Goodness Without God, Carrier undertakes the tremendous task of defending what he calls “Metaphysical Naturalism,” a moral system he champions as the most valid and complete understanding of human morality as shaped by evolution and indeed the laws of the physical universe. This claim answers the common charge against atheists that morality comes from God, and if atheists are without God, they cannot possibly be moral. Carrier sets about to exhaustively prove to how every action humans make is according to natural motives and that human morality is not the product of divine inspiration, but rather a natural product of our development in societies and that being moral is a logical choice for those interested in living fulfilling and meaningful lives.

To be clear, Metaphysical Naturalism, as described here, does not try to become another religion; indeed, the claim is that it is truly the only ethical system that describes human morality as it exists and provides for the complete potential of human happiness. The word “religion” is discarded here for the word “philosophy” and a theme throughout the book is a call for each individual to use reason, science, critical thinking and logic to develop his own philosophy and arrive at a way to live morally. The search for happiness, the book claims, is at the center of all human struggle and Carrier believes it is possible to codify how to achieve happiness through the scientific study of ethics and morality, by taking the valid parts that have empirically been proven to work from every religion, philosophy and moral system and discarding the rest, including the unnecessary and malignant belief in supernatural deities

Religion bashing is kept to a minimum in the book; however, one of the most poignant parts of the book is Carrier’s ten reasons why being an atheist is actually more moral than being a theist. These points, like all of the claims in the book build on the solid foundation of reasoning and logic that Carrier begins the book with. Indeed the book is a progression of understanding, one point dovetailing into the next.

The structure of the book is as much a part of its genius as its claims, assuming nothing about the starting beliefs of its readers and leading them by hand from his elementary epistemology through the final conclusion that moral behavior is the only reasonable choice for those who want to be happy. At times, the author sacrifices eloquence for thoroughness, but this should matter little to a pragmatic reader. Carrier takes great pains to describe the exact meanings of his words in very plain, direct language and is careful to make sure there is no doubt in what is being discussed and read. Along the way there are many tangential history lessons, points of order, logical expounding and a bit of aesthetic critiques of art and politics, wistful fancy and personal indulgences.

The academic defense of any philosophy is a critical step in its ideas becoming accepted and influential. Any future defense of the belief that God is the source of morality must refute Carrier’s claims or else be woefully incomplete. Sense and Goodness Without God, reads like an academic text book and its not likely the kind of book that will inspire the masses of the atheistic movement but it is absolutely required reading for its leaders.

Alrighty peeps (and by peeps I mean my fiancée Victoria because I have come to accept that she is the only one who reads my blog anymore) I did about ten seconds of brainstorming and have decided to start documenting all the tequila I’ve been drinking lately.

So some back story: for about the last year or so, I’ve been drinking a lot of tequila. To the average observer that sounds like an odd statement. Most people, I think, assume that tequila is like the frat boy fire starter, that fiery and dangerous drink that is done by groups of reckless college co-eds standing around the kitchen counter, lime wedge in hand, slammed back as a ritual, a rite of passage, almost as a dare. It has become the avatar of drinking with reckless abandon, diving headlong into a night of debauchery and sexual excavation. I do confess that that I’d come to understand that about tequila too.

It was the round of shots I’d order when I felt the night wasn’t quite moving fast enough. Things were a little too quiet…the solution? Tequila shots. It was the catalyst to many a night of raucous howling and vomiting. Many a story from my social groups’ collection of folklore starts with the line, “So we were drinking tequila…”

My own low point in my drinking career, the one night I consider to be my lowest most alcoholic point, the night I only recall because it preserved in precious digital video and in the long term memories of ALL of my closest friends, that night with signaled to me that I probably need to drink a little less than I have been, started when, at the wedding reception that Joe, Stick and I organized for Travis and Valerie, we ran out of Jack Daniels and I started drinking Jose Cuervo Gold.

What followed is one of the most embarrassing, disgusting and quite frankly, hilariously funny episodes of my adult life. I blame the Jose Cuervo. It’s easier, I think, than just blaming myself.

So I start my tequila blog where I think most people start with tequila, Jose Cuervo, the ubiquitous stock tequila that every one in the world is familiar with. It’s the McDonalds of Tequilas; the biggest and most recognizable, the comfortable go-to default, and hardly the best.

Jose Cuervo is, to their credit the most popular tequila in the world. In terms of volume sales each year, it’s the biggest producer and seller of tequila in all of Mexico. The story goes that a Spanish aristocrat (Jose Cuervo, achem) got the first commission from the Crown of Spain in 1795 to start mass producing and exporting tequila. In the 1970’s, tequila exploded in the United Stated and Cuervo’s mass produced liquor expanded to fill the void.

Now no tequila made in the traditional distillation and resting process has the deep amber color of Cuervo Gold. I snickered when I saw on the Cuervo website that they claim that the color of tequila comes from aging the tequila blanco (white) in oak barrels. While that is true, it’s misleading because Cuervo Gold gets it color from adding caramel to the process, thus diluting the agave. By Mexican government standards, up to 49% of the content of tequila can come from other sugar sources like cane sugar and carmel. Any experienced drinker knows what that means: hangovers, like serious rum-induced hangovers.

Jose Cuervo Gold is harsh. It has the slightest hint of that distinctive agave flavor but it’s quickly overshadowed by the harder flavors of pure liquor and the cane sugars. The carmel flavors are that sickly sweet aftertaste and the burn. It needs to be mixed with orange juice or in a margarita just to be tolerated. No wonder the college kids of the world only drink the stuff by shooting it as fast as they can. The salt and lime serve to temper the acids and sooth your throat. It’s become a rite of passage because one needs courage to drink it.

I’m not sure if its irony or poetic justice but on Cuero’s own website, shooting tequila with lime and salt is self-labeled as the “Cuervo Shot,” as if that’s something they are proud of. The only reason to drink tequila like that is because its horrible tequila and you want to get it over with as quickly and painlessly as possible. It’s like Neiman Marcus trying to play off the cookie urban legend by embracing it with its website. The e-mail isn’t really about the cookies; it’s about how people want to get back at pretentious and needlessly expensive retailers.

Anyways, it’s not like everyone in the world needs to shell out $40 for a 750ml bottle of 100% blue agave tequila every time they just want to make some margaritas or tequila sunrises, but the tequila snob in me has been turned on recently to a better tequila for everyone’s stock tequila needs: Sauza. Still a big company exploiting, I’m sure, the natural resources of Mexico for its own profit and power, but side by side with Cuervo, it’s a much better tequila.