Service, sacrifice, and atheists in foxholes

Today is Memorial Day in the United States, designated for the remembrance of Americans who lost their lives while serving in the military.  I may not always agree with the decision to go to war, but I recognize the fundamental necessity for a free society to maintain a strong, committed military to defend itself and its interests.  Essential to such a military are individual human beings willing to risk life and limb in defense of their society, a sacrifice requiring an extraordinary amount of bravery.

There are atheists in foxholes!

One group within the military that seems underrepresented are the atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists who serve fully aware that no Valhalla awaits them if they are killed in action.  Military service in general takes guts; I personally think it takes a great deal more for godless soldiers to knowingly risk the only life they have to fight for the things they do believe in.

The foxhole atheists don't go entirely without recognition. The Freedom From Religion Foundation put up a monument (pictured) to nontheistic servicemen and servicewomen, and the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers keeps a roster of open atheists in the military.  People like Sgt. Justin Griffith stand up for other nonbelievers in the military amid the heavily religious culture our country perpetuates.  I hope that the atheists in our military continue to gain recognition for their service.

Why don't I join up, then?

Last month, writer and atheist soldier K. Syrah posted a thought-provoking entry on her blog about the hypocrisy of able-bodied people thanking soldiers for their service while being reluctant to serve themselves.  As I think today about what this holiday represents, I can't help but have K's post come back to mind.  What kept (and still keeps) me from serving in the military?


I wasn't deluded by any notion that I'm somehow "too good" for it; I know servicemen/women who were better students than I was in high school.  It wasn't even my opposition to the invasion of Iraq; I still supported the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and supported the military in general.  Was it simple cowardice?  Is it still cowardice today?


I would like to think that there's more to it than that; perhaps I never felt the military was my calling in life, though I have yet to figure out what my calling is.  Maybe it's not so much my fear of dying on the battlefield that has kept me out, but rather the fear that I'd be out of my element and thus a weak link in the chain.  Maybe I'm making excuses.  I'm still young, and I shouldn't rule out military service while I figure out what I want to do with my life; someone has to do it, after all.

Another annoying attempt to inject religion into government

I've learned via Friendly Atheist that the great State of Ohio is looking to revamp the "I voted today!" stickers routinely given out at the polls on Election Day.  Normally this wouldn't be news, but upon closer inspection I find something even tackier than usual about two of the proposed designs...

"With God, all things are possible."  Now, I fully understand that many religious people hold their god near and dear to their hearts, and that they feel that even a task as mundane as going to the polling station is accomplished through said god's grace.  You're entitled to that belief in a free country, but why oh why must my tax dollars go toward printing it on millions of stickers?  A sticker with a slogan that said "With godlessness, all things are possible" or "Without religion, all things are possible" or anything to that effect would be just as tacky and just as much of a minuscule erosion on the First Amendment (though I suspect many Christians would find it downright offensive as opposed to simply irritating).


Of course, "With God, All Things Are Possible" is our state's motto, and therefore can be flaunted on anything the state wants to print without any legal grounds to oppose it (the ACLU already tried that and failed).

Fortunately for those who believe that government should be secular, they're selecting the new sticker design solely by online poll.

So begins another week like any other

A few items of interest as we end this non-Rapture weekend:

• Razib "David Hume" Khan has a unique hypothesis about Harold Camping's bible studies.
• Atheist high school student Jessica Ahlquist, who kicked the metaphorical hornets' nest when she asked her school to take down its prayer banner (pictured), has started a blog. She seems to have a lot to say, and has the writing skills with which to say it.
• Another atheist high school student, Damon Fowler, kicked the hornets' nest and got stung.  He challenged the legality of the traditional school-led graduation prayer at his high school, even getting the ACLU involved; he has only harassment from his classmates, scorn from the teachers and administrators, and being thrown out on the street by his parents to show for it.  At least his brother is being supportive.

I would like to think that the Rapture story has been beaten to the point it's no longer recognizable as a dead horse, but it's just a matter of time until the next crazy doomsday prediction.  As for all the high school atheists out there, keep standing up and speaking out!  Public school officials shouldn't be endorsing any religion, period. Hold them accountable to the law, because you can bet that other Christians aren't going to.

Our world will be erased/our kin will be immaculate ejaculate in space

I'm guessing that an absence of reports from the eastern hemisphere of Christians spontaneously ascending into the sky or vanishing outright means that Harold Camping's prediction of the Rapture failed.  It's possible that we just might not have noticed because there are so few True Believers in the world.  We can't truly say they were wrong until the world doesn't end in October.

It's not like this is the first time, after all.

Of course, the mainstream Christians out there are rolling their eyes and quoting Chapter 24, Line 36 of my biblical namesake.  Obviously we'll never know when Christians are going to spontaneously ascend into the sky or vanish outright until the day it happens.  It definitely wasn't supposed to have happened already (hint: don't read the two lines immediately preceding line 36), which means it's going to happen any day now.

If you'll open up the door, we'll all come inside and eat your brains!

It may well be that all this talk of a two millennia old zombie rising again to reap millions of fresh victims today is really the harbinger of the Zombie Apocalypse. Even the CDC has acknowledged that we should be prepared for this eventuality.

Annual Zombie Walks seem to be ever-growing in popularity, a sure sign of how people will behave once the plague of undeath is upon us.  If people will wander the streets en masse in tattered clothes smeared with grime and gore while their brains are still intact, just imagine what they'll do with their executive functions impaired!

This past Tuesday, I attended a Columbus Science Pub meetup for a very informative and entertaining talk about the neurobiology of slow-moving zombies by Dr. Steven C. Schlozman, author of The Zombie Autopsies.  I now have a better understanding of the level of brain damage it would take to turn a human being into a rabid, flesh-eating monster.  Perhaps it was fate that this event was scheduled just days prior to the Rapture?

The signs are clear: we are mere hours away from being overwhelmed by hordes of voracious, pitiless, mindless zombies who will bring an end to civilization as we know it.  And if it doesn't happen today, be prepared for it to happen any day now.

On the Drawing of Self-Proclaimed Prophets

Islam was founded in the early 7th century by a mortal man who we know today as Muhammad. The fact that his religion fundamentally shaped the history of Asia, Africa, and Europe, and that some 1.5 billion people alive today revere him as a prophet (whether through genuine faith or at the point of a sword), arguably makes him an important historical figure.


Unlike other historical figures (and indeed even other religious figures), there is an explicit prohibition against drawing a caricature or even a benign depiction of him in most of the Islamic world, and an implicit prohibition against it in much of the rest of the world.

The explicit prohibition in the Islamic world is due to theocratic rule and its criminal (sometimes capital) penalties for blasphemy.  The right to draw a picture of a particular man is the least of your worries when the separation of mosque and state is nonexistent.

The implicit prohibition in the rest of the world is due to two distinct fears: an altruistic fear of being seen as a bigot by cloying multiculturalists, and a practical fear of violent retaliation by fanatical Muslim hardliners.  We thus see Raptor Jesus become an amusing internet meme, boxing nun puppets on sale in the checkout aisles of stores, and corpulent Laughing Buddha statuettes serving as paperweights and lawn ornaments, yet any depiction whatsoever of an influential 7th century self-proclaimed prophet gets you lumped in with the likes of Terry Jones and simultaneously puts you in some extremist's crosshairs.

Secular Student Alliance, in MY city? (It's more likely than you think)

Apparently the Secular Student Alliance Annual Conference is being held right here in Columbus, Ohio, which happens to be where the freakin' SSA is headquartered.  I'm not sure how this slipped my notice until now, but it's pretty thrilling to know that so many leaders of the secular movement will be speaking at an event I could attend without traveling across the country, let alone on OSU campus!


It'd be a great opportunity to meet fellow atheists from around the country (hopefully I manage to not be awkward and shy around them like I have at local meetups so far).


Over the past few months I've given a lot of thought about what I want to do with my life.  With that comes a lot of thought about the kind of impact I want to make on the future, particularly on the future of the country I happen to call home.

When I think hopeful thoughts about the world in which my descendants will live, a recurring theme is a secular society with superstition absent from public life. I hope for a future in which:

• religion is never called into question in politics, and elected officials' speeches don't all seem to end with "God Bless (America/Our Troops/etc.)" or other such religious frippery;
• schools freely teach modern science, without parents and politicians forcing them to push a false parity between scientific theory and mythological speculation;
• atheists and agnostics don't even need to be "out" about what they are, nor fight for their right to abstain from religious practice, because belief or disbelief in any god's existence is a non-issue;
• the holier-than-thou evangelicals who whine that they're being persecuted because they have to tolerate the presence of homosexuals or pray on their own time are just an annoying fringe group instead of a major Republican voting bloc.

I've come to the conclusion that, for the time being, supporting an organization like the SSA is going to be the most effective way for me to help achieve that goal.  The atheists, agnostics, and humanists among the students out there are future of the secular movement, and helping them organize will help us all have a greater voice in the world.

This should be an interesting week...

It's been an eventful Monday.

• Trump dropped out of the 2012 Presidential running, ending a joke that stopped being funny a while ago;
  
• Facebook has been peppered with reports that scientists have "cured" cancer, which would be awesome except that they didn't;
  
• Pakistan is no doubt preparing to block major social networking sites in anticipation of "Everyone Draw Muhammad Day" (post about that subject coming later this week);

• Stephen Hawking dismissed the afterlife like a boss;
• Harold Camping and his acolytes are counting down the hours until Jesus comes back nothing happens on Saturday;
  
• apparently a cult of Russian women believe that Vladimir Putin is a reincarnated apostle.

That's all for now.

Facepalm of the Month: "To Kill A Mockingbird" Censored

2011 has been an interesting year for cases of idiotic censorship.


In a classic episode of missing the point, a school superintendent in our great state has banned a stage production of To Kill A Mockingbird, adapted from Harper Lee's famous novel.  The reason?  It's not because of the violence or the fact that the crux of the plot is a rape trial.  No, the play was cancelled because, true to its profound indictment of the irrationality of racism, it features characters who utter racial slurs, and that's not school appropriate.

Seriously.  We might as well ban George Orwell's 1984 because Ingsoc's propaganda could be seen as pro-Communist.  Oh, wait, that's been done.

I suppose this is to be expected in an age when a prominent scholar censors the same slur out of the dialogue of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (The late Mr. Clemens would be bashing his head on his keyboard in Hell right now if there were an afterlife).  Apparently we can depict black slaves being savagely beaten, treated like subhuman beasts, and deprived of every opportunity in life, and that's perfectly fine - but if we candidly depict their tormentors calling them "niggers" it makes too many people uncomfortable.


Censoring the ugliness of our past hinders future generations from learning from their ancestors' stupidity and from preventing history from repeating itself.  When we take the sting out of human cruelty by censoring the nasty words, we're left with only statistics about death and disenfranchisement.  We're left without a moral lesson to derive from the way humans have used language to dehumanize one another, and without such poignant depictions in literature, we're left without a way to empathize with the victims of injustice.

Why I stopped tiptoeing around religion

Out of the desire to be more open-minded and worldly during my college years, I conditioned myself to give the benefit of the doubt to Muslims, members of eastern religions, and neo-pagans while liberally criticizing Christians. Such was the norm among college students.

It took me years to realize the irrationality and hypocrisy of this air of immunity my mind had placed around non-Christian religions. After all, you can disparage a religion as a whole without condoning discrimination or violence against its adherents; why should certain religions get a free pass while others are legitimate targets for condemnation? Furthermore, why should any religion at all be exempt from the same scrutiny we afford political and economic ideologies?

Muslims selectively interpret Quranic verses to suit their own attitudes, and the moderate Muslims liberally use No True Scotsman to distance themselves from extremists and terrorists. Even Hindus are just as prone to irrationality as their Abrahamic counterparts, forming lynch mobs to attack and kill Muslims and Christians in India, and starting an international clamor over an Australian swimsuit bearing the image of one of their deities. Do the particulars of theology make a difference in human behavior, or are reactions like these inherent in our nature?
I cringe at the credulity I once gave neo-pagans and their "choose your own reality" worldview, which like other religions is at best a delusional fantasy and at worst a deliberate deception of others.

We've all seen the actions of officially atheistic China in its crackdowns on Christians as well as its brutal campaign against Tibetan Buddhists, the same heavy-handed tactics one would expect from an oppressive theocracy. To me, this seems like evidence that even the absence of religious belief doesn't strip away this aspect of human nature; we will regardless cling irrationally to ideologies and turn against anyone who challenges them.

I think it makes sense to file all permutations of religion under the same category as other in the annals of human irrationality. It doesn't matter that some faiths have yielded beautiful artwork and music and contributed greatly to many modern cultures. All claims are subject to test by the cold, hard facts of reality, and we are right to dismiss any that fail that test regardless of emotional value to the claim maker.

Rain, rain, go away...

Central Ohio has been experiencing copious rainfall during the past few weeks.  I've been blogging with increased frequency and increased snark during the past few weeks.  Coincidence, or evidence of a death threat from divine providence for my brazen incredulity?  Today's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic makes me think that the beautiful double rainbow my wife and I saw the other day may have been more than just sunlight refracted by raindrops...

We are, after all, a mere two weeks away from Judgment Day according to some.  Heavy rainfall at this latitude during April and early May couldn't have any logical explanation, right?

Knowledge vs. Belief: Open Letter to Agnostics

The postcard to the right was among the Sunday Secrets on Postsecret this week.  It may be a secret for the person who sent it in, but it's a sentiment many self-labeled agnostics openly express toward atheism.


I personally think that splitting hairs over such labels is pointless; the bottom line is that people who call themselves atheists and people who call themselves agnostics are all not theists, period.  They don't believe in the personal gods or metaphysical forces of the various religions.  The agnostics intent on distinguishing themselves from atheists focus their argument on the ideas that 1) Postulating that no gods exist is a belief, and 2) It is impossible to know that there is no higher power, especially if you make its definition sufficiently vague.

Can you get up off your knees?/Are you brave enough to see?/Do you wanna change it?

Tomorrow, many members of our nation's Christian majority will "observe" their National Day of Prayer (status as a government holiday in dispute) by doing something their Bible says they should also be doing the other 364 days of the year: dropping to their knees, clasping their hands, and talking to the god they believe is listening.  The NDoP Task Force has even been gracious enough to invite members of all religions to do the same (they do have to pander to the religious left, of course), though their instructions are specifically tailored for praying to Jesus.


Good for them.  Their praying does me no injury, and I would strongly oppose any measure to restrict it.  What I do oppose is having a legislative mandate for the President to lead it.  Obama can lead it if he wants to - that's his right as an American, and he can say whatever he wants to the country when he has a microphone in front of him.  It should be his choice, just as it's his choice to acknowledge other religious holidays throughout the year.

While the judicial battle over this event's status as a government-recognized holiday carries on, many atheist and secular humanist groups throughout the country are organizing "National Day of Reason" events in protest.  Many are dedicating the day to volunteer projects to show that two hands working are worth a hundred million clasped in prayer.  Atheists in New York City are organizing to donate blood, which I would have arranged to do tomorrow had I not just done so last week.


I'll be spending the day on the job, so volunteer work is probably out of the question.  I'll make an effort to use my brain to solve a difficult problem, though that's something I try to do every day.  To be honest, I don't think reason needs a special day, and it shouldn't have to be seen as an antithesis to a federal law.  Here's hoping that the courts rule to privatize prayer and take this silly mandate out of our law books for good.

bin Laden is dead... So what?

Thanks to social media, the news of Osama bin Laden's death has spread around the world, even before the major news outlets have had a chance to get the President in front of a microphone.

Well, they win this particular match, anyway.
(Image credit)

I do feel some faint satisfaction that the world's most wanted terrorist finally got what's coming to him, but he seems like more of an afterthought now.  Al-Qaida isn't some monolithic organization that will crumble without the Dark Lord's leadership.  The seeds of Islamist terrorism have been planted in dozens of nations, and those groups will continue to be a threat regardless of how many hydra heads we cut off.


The Taliban has once again begun its spring offensive in Afghanistan, kicking off with a 12 year old suicide bomber in a marketplace.  Lone wolf terrorists still spring up everywhere, a unique threat distinct from the terrorist cells that have splintered off from Al-Qaida.  They've lost a figurehead but possibly gained a martyr.  Time will tell whether this development demoralizes or emboldens them.


Side note: Obama, thanks for reaching out to all Americans in remembrance of 9/11 regardless of "which god we pray to" and implicitly showing that nonbelievers are still outsiders in the eyes of most of the nation.

They see me rollin'...

My blog has officially been added to The Atheist Blogroll, courtesy of Mojoey.  See the sidebar for the nifty little graphic linking to the Big List of Atheist Blogs.  It's a free community-building service that links atheist, agnostic, and skeptic bloggers from around the world.  See this link for instructions on how to join.

It's a bit thrilling to see the spike in pageviews I've had since my addition to the blogroll.  I started this blog just to provide an outlet for my sometimes frustrated thoughts about politics and religion, not thinking anyone other than a few friends might read it.  Now I'll (hopefully) have the opportunity to share ideas with fellow nonbelievers from around the world!  Or maybe I'll get a few more hits than usual and then fade into obscurity.  Either way, it's exciting.