Brilliant satire of religious proselytizers

Via Blonde Nonbeliever:

Just watch it. I couldn't stifle my laughter.

Abortion is a complicated issue

My state is once again making headlines: yesterday the Ohio House of Representatives approved the so-called "Heartbeat Bill" (HB 125), which would ban all abortions in the state after the first detectable fetal heartbeat (normally 6-7 weeks along, often before a woman knows that she's pregnant), except in cases where the life of the pregnant woman is in danger. This naturally has provoked the "pro-choice" camp into a defensive frenzy, stepping up the campaign to defeat the bill in the Senate.

In my opinion, the debate over abortion and the restriction thereof is the most legitimate controversy we have in our society. It's an ethical dilemma at the collision point between two rights: that of human beings not to be unlawfully deprived of life, and that of human beings to retain sovereignty over their own bodies. It's an ugly debate convoluted by tough questions and mired by personal insults thrown from both sides, and it needs to be talked about in a rational manner.

Before discussing further, I want to give a curt admonition to each of the opposing factions:

Pro-lifers: Stop disingenuously talking about an embryo with a circulatory system as if it's biologically equivalent to a live toddler. It's not.

Pro-choicers: Stop disingenuously saying that this bill "threatens women's lives" when it makes a clear exception for medical necessity. That alarmist catchphrase should be saved for cases when it truly applies; the issue in contention here is women's privacy and control over their own bodies.

*** EDIT:  As Ginx correctly points out, the bill's passage could indirectly threaten Ohio women's lives by making it more likely for them to seek out potentially risky and unsanitary "back alley" abortions; if the embryo they're carrying has a pulse, then no Ohio doctor could legally perform the procedure.  What the bill directly threatens, however, is their rights regarding their bodies. ***

Is the slogan "Good Without God" controversial?

The series of billboards around Columbus showing the smiling faces of friendly neighborhood atheists doesn't seem to have generated any notable controversy until just now.  It turns out that one of the billboards happened to go up on a church's property on the East side; it appears that the church was leasing the land to the billboard company, and must not have been aware of the new content being displayed there this month.

The church didn't take kindly to a billboard on their premises proclaiming that people don't need what they're selling, so they complained to the billboard company and the ad was moved to another site.

To be fair, a steakhouse probably wouldn't want an "I'm good
without beef" billboard displayed in their parking lot either.

So, a billboard got moved.  Not censored, not stolen, not vandalized, just moved.  I have to say that it's an improvement over what's befallen similar ads in other places (and I must give thanks to Hemant Mehta for diligently calling out such acts of sabotage).  If this is the worst thing that happens, then I'd say this was a pretty successful campaign.  People know that we're here and they seem to be wising up to the fact that we're not evil.  I sincerely hope that one day atheism will be such a non-issue in public life that we won't need to announce our presence like this; perhaps these billboards and even atheist-themed blogs will one day be a thing of the past because they've served their historical purpose.

On a related note, I decided that I'm not sure how well I like the "Out of the Closet" banner that I made previously on the FFRF website, so I made a new one:

I'm still not a big fan of the font they use for these, but eh. ~shrug~

I think that I like the new one better, but the old one has its merits too.  Any thoughts, my tiny band of loyal casually interested readers?

A Supreme Court victory against censorship

Via my brother, Josh:

Video games qualify for First Amendment protection.  Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium.  And “the basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary” with a new and different communication medium.

Today, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 7-2 vote that California's law against selling or renting violent video games to minors is unconstitutional.  I'm personally glad to see this decisive blow to the bipartisan Nanny State proponents who think that government, rather than parents or the entertainment industry itself, should restrict what material children are allowed to access.

This article about the ruling from Fox Business touches on an important point made by Justice Scalia:

"Certainly the books we give children to read--or read to them when they are younger--contain no shortage of gore," Scalia said. "Cinderella's evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven."

I personally find it interesting that they didn't mention another particular book containing no shortage of gore that our society values giving to children, in which people are mauled by bears, castrated, stoned to death, and crucified... 

No honor among thieves, no credulity among atheists?

Even setting aside the incessant hair-splitting between professed atheists and professed agnostics, nontheism is far from being anything close to a coherent ideology. To be united by unbelief is a fragile alliance at best, and many of us are as skeptical of one another as we are of religion.

Take a look at some of the other atheist blogs I link to on my sidebar - Pharyngula, Friendly Atheist, BlagHag, Secular Right, The Intersection - and you'll see that we're scattered widely across every layer of the ideological map excepting theology. We don't just differ on politics and economics, but also on how to relate to religious people and even how atheists ought to live their lives.

Those of us who feel inclined to blog tend to be opinionated and outspoken individuals. It comes as no surprise, then, that when one notorious atheist blogger makes a post disagreeing with other notorious atheist bloggers, my RSS feeds are flooded with diatribe and discord.  Here are a few examples from this year alone:

Marriage equality in NY: at last, a glimmer of hope from the Republican Party

With the aid of four reasonable Republicans, New York's legislature has officially legalized same-sex marriage in the state.

Photo credit

The law includes an exemption for religious institutions, specifying that they don't have to recognize same-sex unions as marriage.  Good for them; they're entitled to their own beliefs and can exclude anyone they want to from religious services.

I'm happy to see that at least some of them have realized that fighting culture wars is a waste of taxpayers' time and money.  Last time I checked, same-sex couples in loving and committed long term relationships weren't causing an economic crisis; shouldn't politicians focus their energy on bigger issues instead of trying to preserve archaic discrimination against this minority group?

It would be nice to see Republican legislators around the country (and on Capitol Hill) take note, but that's wishful thinking.  Fanning the flames of anti-gay sentiment is an all to easy way to distract their constituents from the fact that they aren't doing anything to trim down government spending.

At least four in New York got it right.

Something positive for a change of pace

A lot of what I see going on in the world tends to grind my gears, and thus inspires many a ranting blog entry to vent my frustrations. The problems of civilization are numerous, tangled, and complicated; it's easy to forget about the good things in life, from simple pleasures and amusements to grand gestures of kindness. It's also easy to take for granted all of the progress our species has made.

It might be stating the obvious, but so are a great deal of my complaints. This post is dedicated to a few things that I think we humans are doing right.

I'm materialist, call me a humanist

I finally stopped procrastinating about it and went to a Humanist Community of Central Ohio (HCCO) event - a Sunday brunch, quite appropriate for a demographic not otherwise engaged that day of the week.

I'm glad I went. They're a group of amiable, approachable people, they're all at least a little bit nerdy, and I felt welcomed among them as a fellow nontheist. I'll be going to more HCCO events for sure - next up is a "Bleed & Feed" at the local Red Cross Donation Center.

One of the humanists at the brunch was showing a printout of images of a very familiar design - billboards for the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "Out of the Closet" campaign, featuring the smiling faces of atheists from right here in Columbus!  The billboards are going up around town this week; I'll be sure to look for them and cheer silently to myself when I see them. Atheists cease to be a scary bogeyman or a scorned fringe group when we stand up and make ourselves known as friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues among the religious majority.

It's obviously a little late to be selected as one of the few faces going on the billboards, but I did make my own mini-banner on the FFRF website:

I'm excited to see the atheist community gaining visibility in Columbus, and I'm excited to be involved with a group like the HCCO that unites the nonreligious to go out and do good.

Unfair censorship, or upholding secular decorum?

Damon Fowler's fight against school-imposed graduation prayer sparked a firestorm of controversy, and it's understandable that other high schools with similar traditions might be rethinking them now.

Another high school decided to play it safe and censor its valedictorian's speech because the student wanted to talk about his Christian faith.

I have mixed feelings about the school principal's decision and the discussion surrounding it.

It really infuriates me that people in this country can't find a happy medium between hateful traditionalist chauvinism and spineless PC-obsessive expurgation.  Having an exclusionary Christian prayer as part of the graduation ceremony in a public school is a violation of the non-Christian students' rights; forbidding a student speaker to mention the effect his religion has had on his life is a violation of his rights.

Using religion as a scapegoat for bigger problems

I have, and things wouldn't be any better.

A trope I've noticed among fellow "New" atheists, particularly of the blogging variety, is the blaming of society's evils on people taking orders from an imaginary being.  The sentiment is that if all people embraced a naturalistic worldview, then things like war, terrorism, pseudoscience, sexism, and homophobia would all but vanish from our civilization.  

I think that's a naive attitude.  Just as all of religion's positive effects (charity, volunteering, community, etc.) could easily come from secular sources, isn't the same true of the evils it has produced?  Is belief that you are acting at the behest of an almighty spirit necessary to torture dissenters? To enslave and/or rape those weaker than you? To ritualistically starve your children or deny them medical treatment? To crash airplanes into occupied buildings?

I suppose it depends on how broadly you define "religion"; should it include cults of personality? We've seen people do some awful things in the name of charismatic leaders, never applying a skeptical mind to their sovereign's claims.

Officially, most North Koreans are nontheistic, but is the Juche philosophy really so different from a religion apart from its answer to the "god" question?  The Dear Leader promotes an air of veritable divinity around himself even as his country's citizens starve, and he need not appeal to a higher power to keep it that way.

Religious obedience, or tribal loyalty?

Even religious fanatics like the Muslim extremists assaulting and killing non-Muslims in the Middle East are not too dissimilar from criminal gangs; it's tribalism in its most extreme form.  We see its benign cousin every time there's a major sporting event, though the disdain that one team's less sportsmanlike fans express toward the opposing team tends to subside after the game (the violent and destructive episodes of football hooliganism being a notable exception).  Belief that violence against the "other" makes some invisible being happy is unnecessary; it only requires pent-up anger, often brought on by socioeconomic factors, to be channeled as hatred toward another individual or group.

Now there's the matter of suicide terrorism.  The promise of an eternal paradise after death is certainly a useful tool for convincing people to sacrifice their lives, but is it the only way?  I think it's entirely possible for someone who accepts that death is followed only by the end of consciousness to willingly die for what they think is a good cause.

If you were utterly convinced that your people were at war with an entire civilization, a monolithically evil enemy whose every member was like a worker wasp supporting the nest you want to destroy, could you be persuaded to commit a kamikaze attack that would take out thousands of them?  Would you need to believe you would be rewarded for it in the afterlife, or would it be worth it solely to aid in the defense of your loved ones back home? It's really only necessary to unquestioningly hate those you perceive as enemies, to believe that every last one of them deserves to die, to carry out an attack like 9/11.  

A disease, or merely a symptom?

Christopher Hitchens claims that "religion poisons everything"; I can't help but wonder if it's analogous to potassium cyanide sprinkled atop the arsenic cocktail we'd be drinking anyway.

Perhaps a better analogy is that many atheists see religion as a disease when it may well be merely a symptom of other ills to which the human mind is inherently susceptible.  I'll dare to assume that most people are not skeptics, and even people who consider themselves skeptics are fighting an uphill battle against their own desire for certainty.  This gives the masses a tendency toward blind obedience of authority, whether that authority is a manufactured deity, an ideology, or an individual psychopath.

Even if religion vanished overnight, we'd still have no shortage of man-made problems. Hateful people create hateful gods in their own image, and those people would remain hateful even without their imaginary friends egging them on.

Something else I missed over the weekend

Graduation was last week at my (high school) alma mater.  It apparently used to be a tradition for the A Capella choir to sing "Beautiful Savior" as part of the commencement ceremony; that stopped in 2002 (the year before I graduated).


This pro-Christian tradition ended because Kate, a Jewish student who was both a choir member and a graduating senior that year, objected to having to sing it at her graduation and fought to have it removed from the ceremony.

I don't recall it being sung at my commencement, but back then I was an apathetic agnostic. I tended to shrug off the school's occasional sanctimonious pandering to the Christian majority.

Nine years later now, Kate left a comment on our hometown's Patch blog asking if that change had stuck.  I noticed the comment last Wednesday and wondered if it was going to spark controversy. Remember all the venom being spewed at Damon Fowler and Jessica Ahlquist for standing up against school-mandated prayer?


Then again, surely no one in my hometown would stoop to such spiteful ad-hominem over something so minor, especially nine years after the fact; I was sure that her question would probably be answered by someone in the know and otherwise ignored.

Well, I was proven wrong. Watch the drama unfold in response to Kate's comment.

Weekly Recap: Kevorkian, antimatter, Reapers, and a facepalm!

The past week has seen me making a road trip to Chicago with my wife and being miserable with a head cold, and it looks like I missed out on a few developments during my hiatus from the news and the blogosphere.  I've been playing catchup since Tuesday.

• Dr. Jack Kevorkian, infamous for assisting in the suicides of patients with terminal or otherwise incurable degenerative diseases, has himself shuffled loose the mortal coil; atheist bloggers across the ideological spectrum seem inclined to agree with his assertion that people ought to be allowed to choose a quick, painless death over a slow, agonizing one.

• The crew over at CERN managed to trap 300 atoms of antimatter for 16 minutes, long enough to get some serious science done.  (Side note: what does a photo of someone looking through a low-power microscope have to do with studying subatomic particles?  I expect better science reporting, Telegraph.)

• New gameplay videos of Mass Effect 3 were released this past weekend at E3, showing the devastation wrought by untold legions of colossal Reapers descending on our planet.  I normally don't like to geek out on this blog, but I am (to say the least) very excited for this game to come out next year.
  
  

• PZ Myers has showcased what is quite possibly the dumbest thing ever sent his way.  The stupid, it burns.
  
  
• Anthony Weiner.  Obvious jokes abound, but there have been worse scandals.  All that aside, I've generally been impressed with debate he's given on the House floor.