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Beta Culture: New Intro — Part 4

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

Beta-Culture-JPGThe Flaw in Unbelief

Compared to religion, atheism is really rather fragile. It has sprung up and died out several times in the U.S. alone. Its recent resurgence is probably due to the existence of the Internet. Outside that, there’s really not a lot to support and preserve it.

Here’s the eye-opener I realized a few years back: Under the lash of strong emotions, humans become less intelligent.

Scary, right? But true. If the Internet goes down for some reason — a solar flare or some such event — if there is an incident of nuclear terrorism anywhere in the world, if even some small version of the imagined Dark Singularity happens, a majority of our panicked fellow humans will leap toward the certainty of religion and churches and authoritarian government, utterly supported by a pliant, uncritical corporate-owned media.

Churches will gleefully snatch up these new devotees, telling them to clasp their hands and close their eyes, to read their Bibles and chant its magic verses, to get down on their knees and pray, to give and give and give in order to bribe that Big Magic Juju Guy in the sky into letting them and their loved ones live.

Anyone casting the least doubt on that mindset will be the enemy, unAmerican traitors to all things good, and a lot of scared, angry fellow citizens will jump in to intimidate them into silence.
That would be the end of the noble mind-adventure of atheism. Bye-bye, outspoken atheists, hello religious fascism.

You’re sitting there right now, intelligent and educated, and you probably can’t imagine a mob coming to your door and dragging you out, or a riot that sets your home or business on fire. But I can imagine it, because I grew up in the Deep South among people who were not all that far advanced from the lynchings and murders of the KKK’s worst days. The witch burnings of yesteryear are absent today not because we humans have evolved beyond them, but because our culture disallows such acts at this moment.

But that culture is maintained by humans. It can be abandoned and replaced by humans, sometimes in days. You saw what happened after 9/11 — suddenly we were discussing the merits of torture, arguing whether we had too much freedom in public places, and launching off into a war that killed and terrorized hundreds of thousands of real people who also thought nothing bad would happen to them on any near-future day.

The more afraid and desperate we are, the crazier it will get.

Making It Happen

Here’s the rub: How do you create an entire culture?

I suspect it would take very little effort. Cultural creation already happens, and on a near-daily basis. At the least prompting, people take on actions and beliefs that become cultural traditions, perpetuating them indefinitely. Some years back the song ‘Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ made a splash on the radio, triggering a sudden leap onto the public stage of ribbon-tying as a way of welcoming returning soldiers. Now ribbons and ribbon-shaped magnets are everywhere, tasked for every social cause.

The way attendees at Reason Rally 2016 reacted with smiles and selfies to a strolling Flying Spaghetti Monster, it was obviously already a much-loved icon of the movement. Yet it arose sheerly out of a sense of fun.

We figure out the basic framework and put it out there. If it’s a good idea, people will show up and be part of it, commenting, contributing, coming up with fun or useful things to include, arguing over the details and the aims, and one day there it would be. The short-term challenge might be in laying down the foundation, the basic concepts, before its growth outraced the underlying goals of reason and reality.

The larger challenge would be in creating something that was livable long-term, and paid off on the promise of enhancing the lives of people who join in it.

For years and years, evangelism was a taboo in the atheist community. Deliberately trying to get people to give up religion was seen as a self-thwarting shortcut. If people were seduced into atheism simply because it was the latest fad, without working it out for themselves, they’d be no better than religious people, right?

But in this case, that’s not a problem. People coming into it would either want to be there, or they wouldn’t. Besides which, we’ve already started selling atheism. We know we have the right; our problem is in believing we have the duty.

Moreover, considering that religion and religious observances are such an integral part of even modern cultures — Catholicism for example — and that most prospective atheists will come from such cultures, by inviting them into atheism we’re basically asking them to give up not only their religion, but their home culture, and often even the loving closeness of their families. To offer them none of the same tribal inclusion in return seems both morally shabby and counterproductive. How many who might otherwise be open atheists stay where they are in order to enjoy the continued safety and warmth of their home traditions and tribe? For millions, especially the weaker and more vulnerable among us, atheism by itself might seem a poor trade.

Where and how do we get the features and attributes of our own culture?

Two ways: 1) Make them up. 2) Steal them.

Make them up: If we decide every Beta middle schooler should go off every morning with Great Humanist Quotes fortune cookies to share with other kids, that’s doable. If we want every partner bonding (wedding ceremony) to include a traditional bat’leth fight with designated champions to determine who cleans the bathroom for the first five years, nothing would stop us. The limits are human nature, and our own imaginations.

Steal them: The entire world, now and for all its history, is a mine of ideas for designing our own unique cultural environment. We can borrow, copy, or shamelessly expropriate customs and lifeways from any and every culture on Earth, past and present, real and fictional. So yes, we could all wear Star Trek uniforms. Or sporrans and black plaid kilts (with underwear, my people, please!). Or leather jackets with flaming skull insignias and embroidered patches saying ‘Born To Raise Questions.’

Borrow cultural goodies from the Amish. Steal from the Catholics. Copy good stuff from the Romans, the Mormons, the Japanese, the Italians, the Navajo. Borrow, copy, steal … and make it ours.

Cultural appropriation? —Eh. No. Nobody has a copyright on culture, and borrowed traditions take nothing away from the source. I wouldn’t expect the group to flaunt yarmulkes, feathered headdresses or dreadlocks, but cultural appropriation is a moot issue, it seems to me. Lots of people wear cowboy hats, and—as someone who grew up with real cowboys, a group no less fiercely proud of our cultural apparel than Hasidic Jews or Sikhs — I find some of them fairly annoying. But I would never tell people they have no right to wear a cowboy hat, that I’m somehow mortally offended by it. I wouldn’t join in any screaming chorus of thin-skinned offense junkies, demanding those people instantly cease all cowboy-hat-related activities and apologize to us delicate, sensitive cowpokes.

Other than registered trademarks (which might be an issue with the Star Trek uniforms), nobody owns body decorations, hats, clothing or customs. What one or more groups in history have done, others can do, and the original doers lose nothing.

Hazards

We face two hazards already in our own psyches — complacency and misplaced optimism.

Rich and safe and well-fed, we’re prone to be complacent about dangers. Hey, nothing could really go wrong, right? We went to college, we know how to read and think and figure out this atheism stuff, and pretty much everybody else is just like us — same values, equivalent intelligence, same fearless approach to life. All we need do is be patient and rational, and explain things to them, and they’ll come around.
Living in the modern age, we’re optimistic that someone else — Brighter People Out There in the World — will work out all the problems. Scientists will solve the challenges of food and water and energy; educated, Empowered Women will spontaneously have smaller families and solve the population problem; Environmental Activists will save the whales; and the coming generation of smart, engaged Youth will burst out into the world and fix everything else that’s broken. Yeah, and all those public-spirited multi-national corporations will pitch in and help, even if it means reducing their bottom line.

Riiiiight. All we have to do, we happy optimists, is sit back and live our lives, go green and recycle, pick up our litter, continue to drive our SUVs to the grocery store to buy organic fruits and vegetables, and it’s all going to work out.

Except it isn’t. Complacency and optimism, when you have real problems, can kill you.

Forging ahead, we’ll make mistakes. Not every bright idea that pops into our heads for inclusion will be viable. Not everything we add at the beginning should stay forever. Continuous discussion and self-checking has to be a part of it. But hazards and all, we shouldn’t be afraid to make the experiment.

Target for Tomorrow

Sooner or later, there has to be that civilization that embraces science and reason and rejects superstition, don’t you think? I mean, really, shouldn’t we have that at some point?
But we don’t have it yet. We do not live in that civilization.

Get that? You do not live in a rational society. No, it’s not a living hell. Not for you. But for a lot of other people, and the planet itself, it’s pretty bad. Rather than casually accepting this status quo, I think you have to reject it almost violently. Every one of us has to reject it, to establish some bare minimum for being humans on Planet Earth. And until we start figuring some of this stuff out — for instance, “What is the basic intellectual and moral set every person must be required to have?” — we’ll continue on as we have been.

On a planet of diminished resources, radical human overpopulation, vicious inequality and mistreatment of women and minorities, all that, there’s a demand for this basic human society. But we don’t have it yet. Considering present-day politics and media, we may even be moving away from it.

Some of us might say “People have the right to believe whatever they want.” And I’d say yes, that’s true — if they stay home and don’t buy anything, don’t participate, don’t vote, don’t have kids they will subject to their idiot beliefs and behaviors.

In a real world, we can have a civilization based on reason and science and reality in which everyone participates, or we can have one based on fantasy and suffer the very real consequences. So far, we’ve had one based on fantasy and — in my opinion — it’s been an utter disaster. And it’s going to get worse, probably quickly.

I want a society that survives the disaster-in-progress, that picks up the pieces afterwards with this new way of thinking. What I don’t want is a society that reboots using all the old software. I want something that kicks us out of the cycles of mystical thralldom, something that allows us to live on this planet into the distant future, without wrecking it or ourselves.

Who do you want at your side in the midst of a civilization-wide disaster, working to live through it and later repair it? Goddy mystics who will react with screaming panic, or fall to their knees and pray for the Rapture? Or people who will look at the falling bits with, yes, deep regret, but also with calm determination and say “Let’s fix this, and then find a way to never let it happen again”?

I know who I want. I want a community of cooperative, rational individuals. What I emphatically don’t want is a bunch of faith-professing strangers telling me I need to get right with Jesus or, equally poisonous, a bevy of “Don’t tell them the truth; they might panic” government officials.

We’ve already taken a step back from the negative religious fantasy culture. Now we need to take a step forward, with a positive reason-based culture of our own making.

I expect the movement to have enemies. There are people — even a lot of atheists — who will instantly hate the idea of creating an atheist culture. But it’s a club you don’t have to join. Nobody has to be a part of it. It’s also not some sort of horrifying nightmare that needs to be stomped with lug-soled boots. It is one option among many in response to an uncertain future.

But reality-based thinking and living is not just a luxury to be possessed by the few, or some flickering candle that can be allowed to go out every few years. It’s important. It’s a light that must be kept burning, that must grow.

In the end, I believe atheists have a lot to offer the world. I think people would see that. If we did this thing, we might be surprised at the number of people who’d want to be a part of it.

Onward …

So here’s this airy-fairy fantasy someone had, right? This impractical utopian dream. Probably best to sneer and turn away. Get back to the real world.

Except the real world — as it really is — is why we should be thinking about this. Look around and tell me everything you see is all peachy-keen with you, and all we need is more lovey-love-love, kumbayah. That things will all work out in the end because of fate or something. Because stories always have happy endings, and because somewhere out there, the smart, rich people are working out all the problems. Hey, any day now we’ll all have flying cars and robot housekeepers, immortality and world peace.

Except sometimes — too often, as every mom and dad knows — the person who has to fix things, or pick up the mess, or be the grownup, is you. Or it doesn’t get done.

Someone has to be the responsible party, the person or the group with an eye on the future of Planet Earth, a planet that could be unburdened by irresponsible consumption, irrational beliefs, blithe lies and destructive craziness.

It could be you.

It could be us.

It could start now.

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Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4

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Randall Eades: Culture and Chaos

Guest Post 2This guest post by Randall Eades follows an online conversation about Beta Culture. 

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Okay, I’ve read enough of your Beta Culture to get an idea of where you’re going with it. It’s interesting. But before I get into that, I’d like to back up a bit to where we began — the end of the world as we know it— to fill in a little history of my point of view.

Twenty-five years ago I read a piece by some science fiction writer in which he described some predictions for the future he’d made years before, about our society, our lifestyles, our technology, and how they’d turned out. His point, based on his many failures, was that it is damned difficult to predict our future. On a whim, I thought I’d give it a shot, just to amuse myself for awhile. It wasn’t like I would ever tell anyone, so failure wouldn’t be an embarrassment.

I started with the proposition of prediction itself. Is it even possible? It occurred to me that, of course, it is. We do it all the time. We are designed for it. We take in sensory information from the world around us, predict the future based on that information, and modify our behavior accordingly. The whole game of baseball is based on our ability to accurately predict the ever-changing location of a small ball in space/time. Our transportation system is possible only because of our ability to simultaneously predict the trajectories of multiple masses moving at variable rates of speed in multiple directions. Our agriculture system is only possible because of our ability to predict weather. On and on, ad infinitum. No problem. I can do this.

Prediction is the projection of current trends from the past into the future. Accuracy depends on the length of the trend line and the number of variable forces affecting it. Since I wasn’t doing a scholarly dissertation, for my purposes I thought it best to make the timeline as long as possible and keep the number of variables small and rather broad.

I started out 200,000 years ago, give or take, back to our roots. At the time the only variable creating significant change in human society was population growth, and that wasn’t much. Resources were plentiful and renewable. Every individual could know everything necessary to survive. Indeed, if a small tribe wandered through a time portal and came out the other side 150,000 years in their future, they might not even notice the difference. The climate might be a bit different, but within the range of normal variability. The topography might have changed some, because of floods, earthquakes and such, but as wanderers they wouldn’t have noticed. The only thing they might notice, eventually, was that they seemed to be running into more people than they used to, and in larger groups. And the new people had slightly better tools and weapons, and more complex chatter. Still, the tribe could have continued their lives as they always had, if they so chose, or join the new people and quickly adapt to the new ways.

Eventually, over more thousands of years, those growing groups would have created another variable — resource exploitation. Herds of migrating animals were becoming smaller. Choice plants were becoming scarcer. Their wandering was curtailed as tribal territory was marked off. They had to start managing their resources. And I had to start tracking that variable.

As they settled down into communities and started domesticating their plants and animals, the rate of change was becoming noticeable from century to century. New variables were introduced — politics, religion and economics. Those had to be tracked. Then communities became cities, which became states, which became empires. As the complexity of the society grew, the knowledge an individual needed to survive became more specialized and incomplete, which created a new information variable. As the economic and political variables became more complex, a communication variable had to be tracked, how long it took to move an idea from one point to another. As we developed and became dependent on machines, a technology variable had to be tracked. And the length of time one passing through that time portal could jump into their future and still fit in became smaller and smaller.

I spent several weeks playing with this, plugging in real data where I could get it and filling in with general information I’d picked up here and there. I soon noticed that the rates of change for all my variables were tracking together and they were all accelerating. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I knew it was important. Though I didn’t yet know I was autistic (I’d never even heard of it at the time), I knew I’d always had an affinity for systems. And I realized that human civilization was acting like a gigantic, complex system.

Along in there somewhere, about the time I was reaching the end of my timeline, I happened to read James Gleick’s book, “Chaos: Making a New Science.” At that point, my autism kicked in big time, with every analytical circuit in my “disordered” brain firing, and I “saw” what I was looking at. It all fell into place and it all made sense.

Civilization is a non-linear, chaotic system. But it isn’t just “a” system. It is a fractal, with systems within systems within systems, way too complex for any human mind to comprehend. A set of conditions, a system, is set in motion, changes over time until the rate of change hits infinity, it goes chaotic, the conditions are shuffled and the whole thing starts over. The little systems are accelerating up and going chaotic all around us, every day. All these mass shootings are chaotic systems, building up over time, then exploding. Every war is a major system popping, taking years or decades to develop, each one setting up the conditions for the next. But the system I had been tracking, the one that really began with the first hominid, was a humongous mother of a system that has never reached the moment of chaos, and every variable I was following indicated that the rate of change was likely to reach the point of infinity within my lifetime, if I was careful. And when it explodes, it is going to be big. Everything is going to change. Life as we know it is going to end.

Once upon a time, I could have time jumped thousands of years with minimal adaptation to my skill set and the stuff I surrounded myself with. If I had jumped from the date of my birth to today in one jump, only 67 years, I would be totally lost and likely go insane. I have had to make major adaptations to my lifestyle several times in one life span. I look around my home and I am amazed by how much of the stuff I have collected, that defines my life on this planet, not only did not exist, but the very materials it is made of did not exist in the wildest dreams of anyone on the day I was born. I am stuck inside the time portal, with changes coming faster than I can understand or adapt to them. I look around the world and I’m reminded of the old saying: Everyone is crazy expect me and thee, and I’m not so sure about thee. Frankly, I’m not even sure about me.

I had set out to predict the future, and I did. It was not what I expected. It is not a guess that I might chuckle about in a few years, when it is proven wrong. I am as certain of our future as an all-star center-fielder plucking a lazy fly ball out of the air at precisely the right time. It’s a system. It works how it works. It does not have an OFF button. It does not have a rheostat that can be dialed back. It has been chugging along for more than a million years, doing its thing. The only variable of any importance is the accelerating rate of change, and it’s right there for everyone to see. Plotted on a graph, it is the hockey-stick curve familiar to everyone who deals with non-linear systems, and we are clearly well up the short end of the stick.

Chaos is coming. That is certain. What is not certain is when or how. Chaos is, by definition, absolutely unpredictable. From here on out, we can only guess.

The first thing to really hit me was that, when humans get involved with chaos, somebody usually dies. With a system of this magnitude, with this level of complexity, best guess is that a lot of people are going to die very quickly. Possibly everyone I know. Possibly everyone. That threw me into a bout of depression for months. But in this case, the hope and the fear are the same thing — unpredictability. Playing the probability game, there is an equal chance that everyone will survive and no one will survive, but the most likely outcome is somewhere in the middle. When the system goes down, a lot of people are going to die. We have no way of guessing how many until we have some idea of the how. And in the nature of chaos systems, the how is likely within the system itself. In other words, getting wiped out by an asteroid or attacked by aliens, while remotely possible, would not have anything to do with the system. We are going to do it to ourselves.

Chaos is coming. Then what? Can we prepare for survival and affect the starting conditions of the next iteration of the system? My guess is probably not. Preparing for the future requires predicting it to some degree; you can’t prepare for the unpredictable. We can’t train hand-picked survival groups, because we don’t know who will survive or what they will need to know. At any rate, such groups would become targets for every nut who resents being left behind.

One thing we might be able to do. All around the world, we could build knowledge repositories, structures that might survive every conceivable possibility of chaos. Fill them with books made of plastic or ceramic, something that could last for millennia, that contain what we have learned over our long trek, including lots of pictures. We could also throw in some seeds and basic tools.

But even at that, a good portion of the knowledge we pass on will be useless to them. One thing we can be sure about, whatever comes next, it will not be anything like our world. Even with all our knowledge, they can’t rebuild our infrastructure and technology. We didn’t leave them enough resources in the ground to do that. For example, they will never have oil, because what we have left is so hard to get to, they will never be able to build the equipment to reach it. All the metals they will have will be what they can salvage from our dead civilization. We’ve dug up most of what was in the ground, and again, what is left will be impossible from them to get to. Their world will have to be based on renewable resources. And in the end, they, like us, will have to adapt and evolve to fit the conditions they find themselves in. The best we can do is to make the best of the days remaining to us, and wish them well with theirs.

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Beta Culture: Culture Itself

Beta-Culture-JPGIn pursuit of my Beta Culture concept, I’ve been thinking a lot about Culture over the past couple of years, and I’ve recently been making some interesting connections. I like to think I’m getting close to understanding the meat of it. Here’s a recent thought:

Your culture offers you Values, Ways, and Place.

VALUES are obvious: Honesty is the best policy. People are suckers and deserve what they get. Hard work is the stuff of life. Honor your mother and father. Family above all. Never stop learning. Being gay is an abomination. A wife must meekly obey her husband.

WAYS are all the things your people do, and the way they do them: Wear boots, a big silver buckle and a cowboy hat. Volunteer to serve your country. Every funeral must include a lengthy sermon about Jesus. Cut the end off your little boy’s dick. Go to school only until you’re 14, then work on the family farm. Hold your fork with your left hand, your knife with your right. Shave your hair into a Mohawk and braid feathers into it.

PLACE is the home your culture provides you. It’s where your People accept and welcome you, protect and defend you, and where you do the same for them.

There are “full cultures” that provide Values, Ways and Place for every aspect of life. You could live on an island with a full culture, totally isolated from the rest of the world, and still live a full life. Think of the Amish, or Hasidic Jews, who actually create isolated social islands for their people.

There are “fractional cultures” like Nascar culture or Star Wars culture, gamer culture or Jimmy Buffett fandom, which offer Place, but not a great deal in the way of Ways and Values. In other words, they offer some specialized Ways and Values, but not the full set for all of life. Most of the people in Nascar culture, for instance, wouldn’t have a Nascar wedding, and few Star Wars fans would consider a Star Wars funeral. But on the plus side, there’s the Place: You feel comfortable — you feel HOME — when you’re with your fellow enthusiasts.

Then there’s something I call “U.S. Overculture,” which provides a huge Chinese menu of Values and Ways, but almost no Place. You can live in it, as most of us do, but it includes no welcoming “tribe” of your own.

U.S. Overculture has two very significant features to it:

1) It contains a blended mess of pieces from all the cultures and fractional cultures within it, but ALSO contains a very high percentage of artificial features, Ways and Values which are created by the marketing departments of big corporations, or faddish movements that sweep through the population somewhat spontaneously. —No proposal is complete without a diamond ring. Collect all the Pokemons! Wear your pants sagging below the curve of your butt. Cigarette smoking is what the really cool people do. Take the grandkids to McDonald’s. Oh my GOD, you have to see the TWILIGHT movies! They’re, like, SEW KEWUL!!

2) As it contains no specific People for you to belong to, no Place to welcome and protect you, you’re pretty much on your own as far as figuring out what’s good and bad for you and yours. Standing full in the blasting fire hose of stuff thrown at you every day, you’re at such a loss to evaluate it all, you end up thinking nothing is all that bad, everything is pretty much okay. Sugary sodas, cigarettes, heroin, tongue piercing, riding a motorcycle without a helmet, throwing garbage on the sidewalk, Donald Trump for President, joining a street gang — it’s all just a matter of personal choice, right? And there’s nobody, no wise elder or more-experienced cultural peer to tell you any different.

It seems to me Culture is a need roughly as important to us as breathing, but without Place, the need for Culture can, in the modern world, be easily diverted and perverted to serve the needs of corporate parasites.

But Culture itself can control you to your detriment. Full cultures buoy you up in times of difficulty, but they also cut off all your wild flights of creativity. For instance, though artistic and musical talent is probably evenly distributed in every race and people, there are no Hasidic Jewish rock bands, or internationally known Amish photographers.

Regarding which, I know of no specific culture that focuses as strongly on empowerment of its members as it does on control of those members.

Even my own East Texas Cowboy Culture was pretty strict on what you could and couldn’t do, and in a fairly repressive way. For instance: Cowboys don’t read books, or if they do, it darned sure isn’t science fiction. Cowboys drive pickup trucks and not, Lord save us, Volkswagen Beetles. Cowboys don’t fly on planes, and Cowboys would never, ever eat sushi.

Another thing most cultures do not seem to have is goals — other than the obvious one of keeping people in line, or serving as that protective Place. Some of my recent thoughts about where Culture sits in the world, though, have it as something of an equal social force — in the sense of how much effect it has on our lives — with Government and Business. But Government and Business DO have goals. And I want Beta Culture to have goals.

So: In the design of Beta Culture, two more topics to think about — Goals and Empowerment.

Anyway … still thinking.

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Pile-On Against ‘Rationalia’

via Wikimedia Commons

Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) fired out a tweet on Wednesday, June 29:

Earth needs a virtual country: Rationalia, with a one-line Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence

… and the response was weird.

I know absolutely nothing about Tyson’s motivation, but I suspect he put it out there in mild and humorous frustration at how utterly NON-rational current society and government is. Suggesting ONE way it could be better — with a more-rational, rather than more-religious, or more-politically-factional, approach to social problems.

This is also a TWEET — you know, 140 characters? — so if he meant something beyond that, there was no way to explain it IN THIS ONE TWEET. It’s ludicrous to expect otherwise, don’t you think?

Some people took the suggestion not only seriously, but as if it was a dire threat to all mankind. They lost their collective shit, not just saying it was a bad idea, but likening it to the French Revolution, Hitler, and eugenics. Some even took swipes at Charles Darwin for good measure.

A rational nation ruled by science would be a terrible idea

Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s ‘Rationalia’ Would Be A Terrible Country

Is A Rational Nation Ruled By Science A Terrible Idea?

Neil deGrasse Tyson proposes a terrible new political policy called ‘Rationalia’

The Road to Rationalia

Terrible! Terrible! Terrible! Terrible! It’s like they all got the same memo.

Random excerpts:

“Scientism” is the belief that all we need to solve the world’s problems is – you guessed it – science. People sometimes use the phrase “rational thinking”, but it amounts to the same thing. If only people would drop religion and all their other prejudices, we could use logic to fix everything.

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Scientism refuses to see this. The myopia of scientism, its naive utopianism and simplistic faith, bears an uncanny resemblance to the religious dogmatisms that people such as Tyson and Dawkins denounce.

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The republic of reason Tyson thinks will logic away the world’s problems has been tried before. It was called the French Revolution, and it caused a lot of people to lose their heads—literally and figuratively.

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Tyson, too, has a philosophy, whether he realizes it or not. It’s called “scientism,” the belief that science is the only valid source of knowledge. The rule-by-self-identified-experts he envisions for the happy land of Rationalia is scientism’s logical outcome. But when you insist that facts and evidence speak for themselves, it has a funny way of silencing everyone else. As one intrepid Twitter user replied to Tyson’s initial tweet, “Convenient how the ‘evidence’ always seems to line up with Tyson’s personal beliefs.”

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Politicians already misuse science, construe evidence, or outright ignore evidence to get what they want. Do we want scientists doing the same in their studies if they think their findings could influence laws based on their own beliefs?

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Professor Tyson, who may be the dumbest smart person on Twitter, yesterday wrote that what the world really needs is a new kind of virtual state — he wants to call it “Rationalia” — with a one-sentence constitution: “All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence.” This schoolboy nonsense came under withering and much-deserved derision. Conservatives, who always have the French Revolution in their thoughts, reminded him that this already has been tried, and that the results are known in the history books as “the Terror.”

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Man, I’m glad we settled that. Now back to the utterly perfect world we currently live in.

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Negroes! Jews! Muslims! Martial Law! Listen, I Tell Yuh!

Facebooking this morning.

I have some fairly conservative friends out west. And when I say “friends,” I’m not kidding, or speaking in the Facebook sense. I mean people I love, good people, people I want to have in my life forever.

But THEY have friends, and those friends have friends, on and on outward on Facebook Planet, and I occasionally see posts my own friends liked or commented on, that are — let’s say — non-contiguous to me on the Venn Diagram of socio-political views.

So here’s this shooting in Dallas — Five cops dead, others wounded, Black Lives Matter in the mix, all manner of anger and righteousness and conservative vs. liberals swirling around.

And I see this:Dallas 1

Not even gonna comment on it, but the reactions to it were … interesting. These are all verbatim, typos and all:

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Jesse Ross: hmmmm , just in time to take the heat off of Hillary .Be very skeptical of what the media is putting out right now , just like the last shooting at the gay night club , it was busted as a false flag , it was part of the summer chaos crisis acting to push the Gun control issue , and the actors were found out , that is why you no longer hear it in the news. they are running out of time to get their agenda in place..if it is true , I feel bad , but I no longer trust the things we are being told by the media.

Jesse Ross: and while this kept everyone watching the right hand , the left hand signs EXECUTIVE ORDER To Take Over America yesterday…don’t believe me ..google it.

Marta Verissimo: Where is he? Busy preparing a speech that will further inflame and divide America. What does he think he’s going to accomplish by calling America racist every time he gets a chance? Violence that’s what. And no he will not blame guns. He will now blame us Americans for being racist. Again serving his political agenda. Wake the hell up people!

Mary Lessigne: All those strategy sessions with Obama & BLM leaders at the White House finally paid off for him

James Randolph: Obama has destroyed this country. Racism was never as bad as it is know. And all you will get out of Obama and his administration and the Democrats is more gun control. Worst President ever.

Ricardo Brown: All presidents since Kennedy have been puppets of zionism. Obama is no better or worse. He’s just folliwing orders.

Janice Wagoner: Our race bating president is glad this happened, it got the news media talking about something other than the turncoat FBI director who gave a total pardon to Obama’s hopeful replacement, Hillary.

Lee Veatch: Our p.o.s. president doesn’t give a damn about cops dying. That’s just 5 less enemy soldiers his army has to fight when his war starts.

Alan Kinsman: All part of Obama’s agenda. There is much more to this story than we will ever know.

Ricardo Brown: It’s not obama’s agenda, he’s just following orders. All presidents since Kennedy have been Zionist puppets. Kennedy’s assassination was a warning to future presidents.

Paula Griffin: Our president is a Muslim and a black terrorist that’s why he supports all this violence

Sandy Otto: What, no comment yet, what a surprise. Where is he and the family on vacation now?

Bill Sitter: Out of the country like he always is when this stuff happens.!!!!!!

Susan Day-Schisler: In Polland, is it strange to anyone else that he’s almost always out of country when disasters hit OUR COUNTRY?

Matt Duc: Bull shit post last night was flase flage u cant buy that caliber sniper rilfe legally if they pull anoth gun control law shit ima laugh cause the only way to buy guns like that are black market or deepweb for alot of bitcoins and yes this shit is real problem these people are not using the guns we as citizens use to protect our selfs these weapons that these criminals get are alot more powerful on par with guns our own amry has i used to no people that had fully atomic rilfes and im not talking ar 15 im talking shit like ak 74s and up shit thats banned and these people have no trouble geting more either i think our country would suffer more if we outlawed guns for citizens to protect them selves with

Dianne Johnson: That bastard is sitting in the White House laughing!!!!!

Emanuel Oshana: Scumbag is too busy dividing this country . He’s got plans for all of us come this election, does anyone else hear Martial law coming ?? We need to clear this trash out of the White house and take our country back . All these shootings one after another are all red flags

Daniel Ohls: Probably chilling with his ISIS buddies.

David Cobb: He is talking the same BS about Gun Control, when are these Idiots realize thugs and criminals don’t care about Gun Control other than taking guns away from law abiding citizens. They, these thugs and criminals will get guns no matter what, the Obama Administration has provided guns to drug Cartels and Terrorist, but they want to disarm Americans who obey the law. Liberals are idiots.

Vickie Hibbard: He staged it so he can take our guns

John Mccann: He is one of the black lives that doesn’t matter

David G. Patterson: LISTEN Folks!!!! Too much talk and not enough decisive action. Just like obama being president for two terms…….it was becouase the powers to be wanted it to be. It had nothing to do with your vote, black vote or electoral vote. It is all due the the corrupt, greedy, selfish, none patriotic assholes that just continue to get richer at our expense and do nothing for our Nation. It’s all about them and to hell with us and our Constitution and Bill of Rights. Now………….LISTEN……we can talk, bitch, complain, post etc all we want. Someone has to get to the actual ROOT OF THE PROBLEM or we are in laymen terms “FUCKED”!!!!!

Don Hanson: HE IS BUSY PRAYING FOR MORE DEAD AS LONG AS THEY ARE NOT MUZZIES BUT IF THEY ARE THEN HEW WILL DENY THEY ARE ISIS OR RADICALS.

Paul Showalter: THE FULL BLAME IS ON THE WHITE HOUSE TERRORIST, AS THIS IS WHAT HE HAS BEEN WORKING ON FOR TWO TERMS. NOTHING SUCH AS THIS EVER TRANSPIRED BEFORE HIS PRESIDENCY. THIS IS WHAT HE HAS LEFT AMERICA WITH.

—————————————-

Paranoia, conspiracy, Obama, Muslims, gun grab, heroes in blue (!), scary black people (!!), EXECUTIVE ORDER TO TAKE OVER AMERICA (!!!).

But really, those Jews who Rule The World, they’re to blame.

Oh, and Hillary. It’s Hillary’s fault. Or maybe Obama AND Hillary.

Hillary 1Hillary 2

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Thoughts on the Fourth of July

PatriotI’m not very big on saluting the flag, or flying one at my house. To a lot of people, that would probably spell a serious lack of patriotism.

But my view of America is probably different from yours. To me, America isn’t about a flag, or soldiers marching in parades, or posts on Facebook about “Support the Troops.” It isn’t even a country. It’s this whole other thing, something you can’t see or point to or wave overhead.

America is a body of ideas. As such, it can be anywhere. It’s the idea of freedom of speech. The idea of a free press. The guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to a speedy, public trial. It’s about freedom from slavery, and the right of women to take full, fair part in all aspects of public life. It’s about the right to bear arms. And yes, it’s about freedom of religion, but it’s also about this much greater religious right, the hidden one, the right we have yet to really understand or embrace, freedom FROM religion.

It’s this one more idea, to me — something you won’t find in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

It’s The Idea of Something Better. A better life. A better chance. A better range of possibilities for yourself and your kids. THAT is what drew — and draws — immigrants from all over the world.

And the thing is, once you adopt that idea, in that moment you become an American. You might be a homeless El Salvadorean, an uneducated African, or a Syrian refugee with literally nothing more than the clothes on your back, but the minute you set foot on the road toward the U.S., the road to Something Better, you’re an American IN THAT MINUTE.

I do expect the people who come here to aim for something more than their home country and home culture provided. Frankly, I expect them to learn English — not because I hate the poor immigrants, but because I know their BEST chance of succeeding here is to speak the language, and speak it well. I don’t begrudge them the right to honor their home culture, if they choose, but I also darned sure expect them to learn all these OTHER values and ideas that make up America.

But frankly, I’m not too worried about immigrants. And though I don’t like or respect Islam, I’m also not all that afraid of it. Hey, if you have to threaten your own people with death in order to keep them, what does that say about you? It’s a crappy second-rater on the world stage, and all the second- and third-generation Muslims in the U.S., whatever their parents were, are probably going to be ordinary American kids.

The heart of America, to me, isn’t soldiers and guns. It’s ideas. As such, my heroes — the REAL heroes of America — are librarians and teachers. My heroes are scientists and thinkers, writers and reporters and yes, even protesters and whistle-blowers — the warriors of conscience who fight in their own ways for The Idea of Something Better.

So don’t expect me to salute when you drive by with a flag on your truck. I’m less impressed with the mere symbols of America, when I can see, and partake in, the real SUBSTANCE of America all around me.

I wish you a happy Fourth of July.

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The Hillary Campaign. No, the OTHER Hillary Campaign.

HitleryAs a lifelong wordsmith, I notice the nuances of language — how the words are used, and the sometimes hidden implications behind them.

So I think you should read this:

The Great American Brainwash: Half a Billion Dollars to Turn the Public against Hillary

For some years now, I’ve watched this thing happening out in full public view, wave after wave of attacks on Hillary Clinton. I figured out eventually that there was something deliberate behind it. I didn’t know who, exactly, was doing it, but I had no doubt there was some one person or conservative group operating a coordinated campaign to — metaphorically — assassinate her.

There were no solid claims to wrongdoing, it was more of a whisper campaign. Accusation after accusation, most of them baseless. But it never stopped, never let up.

And I saw the effects. People I knew very well — even Democrats! — were repeating that Hillary was untrustworthy, deceitful, slick, calculating, over-ambitious, cold. Facts supporting those evaluations were thin on the ground, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Once you believed the STORY, you could link her to ANYTHING. Benghazi, emails, selling U.S. uranium to the Russians, murder, laughing about getting a rapist off. No claim was too absurd, no link too remote. She was Killary, Shrillery, Hitlery. The vicious bitch she was, that was something people just KNEW.

Except *I* didn’t know it. For a while I kept digging for the factual grounding on each new claim, but once I figured out the facts didn’t matter, that the thing wasn’t really even about facts, I flipped around and automatically discounted every new claim and story UNLESS there was some sound corroborative evidence. Which there never was.

The whole thing was like … well, like the girl you might have known in junior high school that everybody said was a stinking slut, but you knew her personally and knew she wasn’t anything like that. But you couldn’t get anyone to actually listen to you, because the very act of defending her made YOU smell bad.

My view of Hillary Clinton is based on quite a number of things, but ONE of those things is the fact that this vicious whisper campaign exists. The second I notice a multi-million-dollar ad campaign, that’s the second I start to trust the product less. The product of “Hillary Clinton — Cold, Calculating, Murderous Bitch” is just not something I’m willing to buy.

In the deepest part of me, I know I can’t trust a product sold through lies and emotional manipulation. If you’re manipulating people with flummery and falsehood, if you’re trying to manipulate ME with fear and rage and paranoia, you are SO not someone I want to listen to.

One last thing I’ve said many times:

Fact 1: The GOP hates Hillary Clinton with a blinding passion.

Fact 2: In the years Hillary has been in the crosshairs, the GOP has controlled the White House or Congress or BOTH for some large fraction of that time.

Fact 3: IF IF IF Hillary had done something illegal — even arguably illegal — she would have been arrested and indicted so fast it would make the Roadrunner’s head spin. Even if the charges were flimsy, she WOULD HAVE BEEN charged. And we all know it.

Fact 4: If she hasn’t been charged with something, with anything, it’s not because the fix is in. Read Fact 2 again — the GOP would have pounced on her like a pit bull on a Christmas ham. —It’s because THERE’S NOTHING THERE.

That goes for all the non-criminal accusations. You think she got those four men killed in Benghazi? Well, you’re wrong, for many reasons. You think she conveyed classified information via email? Wrong again. You think she laughed when she got a rapist off early in her legal career? No. Sold uranium to the Russians? Uh-uh. Had her license to practice law taken away? Nope.

What she is, is this: She’s a woman who’s just about to break through the highest glass ceiling. A lot of people don’t like that, not for any reason of fact, but because she’s a woman who’s just about to break through the highest glass ceiling.

But I happen to like that.

I like it quite a lot.

The fact that she’s qualified, WAY qualified, that doesn’t hurt either.

I’m not voting for her because she’s less horrible than Donald Trump. I’m voting for her because she’s good all on her own.

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Reaction to the Orlando Shooting

Orlando Gunman
Omar Saddiqui Mateen

There was a shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, last night. Described as the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, the 3-hour-long incident left 50 people dead, more than that hospitalized.

The shooter has been identified as Omar Saddiqui Mateen.

Interesting thing in the tone of most of the early articles I read on the incident: People were LEAPING to declare the shooting had absolutely no connection to Islam, the Religion of Peace™. The fact that some of us were frantic to absolve Islam, even before the facts were known, is telling.

My initial cynical estimation was that we’d come out of all this even more firmly convinced as a nation that Islam is this fluffy, friendly personal philosophy totally compatible with American values and lifestyle, and which can in no way encourage or promote violence.

But let’s call a spade a spade, okay? We atheists are free at talking about the societal dangers of Christianity. Let’s be equally free at admitting that Islam is AT LEAST that dangerous.

The gunman, identified as 29-year-old Omar Mateen, made a 911 call before the attack identifying himself and declared allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State, according to U.S. law enforcement officials who asked not to be identified to discuss the ongoing investigation. Mateen, whose family is from Afghanistan, also cited the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon during that call.

For myself, I view Islam as a threat to civilization itself. It poses a clear and present danger to human safety, freedom and dignity. I cannot see anything graceful or good in it.

According to TheReligionofPeace.com, so far in 2016, there have been 1,035 Islamic attacks in 48 countries, in which 9,776 people were killed and 11,920 injured.

In 2015, there were 2,865 Islamic attacks in 53 countries, in which 27,626 people were killed and 26,149 injured.

Yeah, let’s all be generous, compassionate liberals, and understand that most Muslims no more want these things to happen than we do. Let’s also realize there are a number of issues involved, among them 1) continuing irrational hatred of gays and 2) too-easy access to automatic weapons.

But let’s not kid ourselves about this other issue — in this case, in the shooter’s own words, the central issue — Islam.

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Reason Rally: The Speech That Didn’t Happen

SkettymonThis is a repost from 2012, some things I wish had been said back then. (Look at the fifth paragraph in the Given Future section. Was that prophetic, or what?) Fortunately, Lawrence Krauss and Bill Nye addressed some of it this time around, but here I am anyway:

Hank’s Reason Rally Speech

Just as we still talk about the Enlightenment, or the discovery of fire, a thousand years from now, people will still be talking about this moment.

Because this is the moment when civilization left the launch pad. This is the moment when we broke free from the restraints of unreason, when the umbilical of religion finally fell away, the moment when the rocket of our true capabilities really began to thrust up into the sky.

There’s still that long, long journey ahead of us. But this is the moment when we made our final break from the insanities of the past, and people a thousand years from now will know it, and talk about it.

Or … they won’t.

We’ve had a great time today with speakers who’ve inspired us to laugh and applaud, whistle and shout, stand up and cheer.

But behind everything said today is this deeper thing, a proposition about the larger world, about your place in it, and about where all this is going.

That proposition is a sales pitch, and as every good salesman knows, you have to do these two things to make a sale:

One, you have to tell the customer about all the features of your product. And that’s what has been done by our speakers today, and by the entire secular movement of the past ten years or so.

They’ve shown you the great features of secular thinking, and of banding together as atheists – clear thought, better education, an enhanced consciousness of the rights of individuals outside the majority.

They’ve helped you appreciate the understandings that come from abandoning religious and superstitious mindsets, and helped you see churches and religious organizations in this new light.

They’ve shown that you can assume a level of power you’ve never known over your personal life, over your own mind and destiny.

Most of all, they’ve served as courageous examples, helping you see the directions in which you yourself can grow, and the influence you can have, both as an individual and as a member of a larger community of people who, when presented with the challenges of civilization-wide craziness, of social injustice and the poisoned thinking that makes it possible, stand up and act rather than sit back and watch.

But the second thing a good salesman does is this: He asks for the sale. You have to get the customer to commit to buying. Get them to commit to being the person who sits in the driver’s seat of this shiny new mode of thought and says “This is mine now.”

I’m here to ask for the sale, and to tell you why this purchase is more important than anything you ever imagined. Look …

The Sale

Here we are at this point in time. (gesture: hold up right hand, with finger and thumb pinched together to illustrate “point.”)

… And somewhere out here is this other point. (gesture: hold up left hand likewise, but lower.) This is the point we’re headed for, that future moment we’ll all live in. It’s the future of 10 years from now, or 25 years from now, or 50. The future that most of us, and all of our children and grandchildren will live in.

We’re not talking about the moment that might be, in some nebulous fantasy of the future. We’re talking about the future that will be.

If you have kids or grandkids and desire for them a good life, this is the future they will live in. If you have long-term plans or projects you want to see to completion, this is the future in which they will, or will not, be able to take place. If you’re saving money for retirement, and have bright plans for travel or leisure or new avocations you plan to take up. If you dream of a human future in space. If you’re an environmentalist, and treasure the beauty of the earth. Even if all you want is for some nebulous “good thing” to happen at some future moment. This is the future that all those dreams and desires will face.

That future is not some fantasy. It’s a real place, a real time, and it’s where we’re all going. There’s a real path between where we are, and there.

But really, there are two futures, and two paths by which we’ll get there.

One of them is a straight path. It’s a path so easy all you have to do is sit back and watch. This path is a greased chute that will decant us into its future.

This is the path we are on.

The Given Future

Let’s think for a moment what things are going to be like in that greased-chute future.

You already know some of it. A warming climate. Rising sea levels. Accelerating deforestation. Accelerating extinctions. Growing human population. Resource depletion and worldwide shortages of critical raw materials. The end of cheap petroleum, cheap energy. Wars and more wars. Public offices in the hands of corporations. A draconian, sometimes murderous, police presence in all our lives.

This is a future in which the new “people” will be corporations, and the rest of us will become little more than “units.” Work units, buying units, vote units, prison units.

Even if you’re fantastically rich and think you might escape most of this, I’ll give you a tiny example that will affect your life directly, something you probably haven’t thought about. At the supermarket where I worked last year, I pitched in briefly in the pharmacy, and I was surprised to learn that certain drugs and medications were being discontinued by pharmaceutical companies, because of shortages of raw materials, or rising production costs. We had customers come up and say “No, I have to have this one. The substitute doesn’t work as well.” Sometimes there wasn’t even a substitute. I read an article a few days ago that said anesthetics are becoming increasingly difficult for doctors and hospitals to get. It scares me to think there are effective medications, something *I* might someday need, that will just vanish off the market.

Think about politics in that future. You think things are nutty now on the right wing? Picture a presidency even dumber and meaner than that of George W. Bush. One in which people like Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich win the White House and use it as a narrowly-focused religious pulpit, a right-wing political bulldozer, rather than a seat of public service. I’ll point out that these candidates are on the national stage not as some sort of wild accident, but because of historical forces moving in American politics, and starting to pick up speed. Bush was president because half the voters wanted him. Or at least couldn’t see anything wrong with him.

In that future, the one that will be, we will be fighting, again and again and again, battles that have already been won. Creationism vs. science in schools. The Constitution vs. the Bible as the foundation of the American future. Social security vs. lottery tickets. Reproductive freedom for women vs. (gesture: big comical shrug) voting rights and jury duty for fertilized ova.

And again, here’s what you have to do to get to that future: Nothing.

You just have to sit back and watch it happen. We are on this straight, slippery path and we are headed there. You better just enjoy the journey, baby, because that’s all you’re going to get. The destination is going to suck.

The “Other” Future

There is this other future, the “maybe” future. (Holds up right and left “points,” this time with left higher than the right.)

What might this “maybe” future look like? Well, it looks like all the things we’re here today talking about, doesn’t it? All the things the progressive movement has been talking about for the past 50 years. It looks like a post-racial time, a time when issues of sexuality and gender no longer have to occupy public discussions, a time of real equal rights. A time when we really work on alternative energy. A time when corporations don’t run things, and when we don’t spend half our wealth paying defense contractors to build weapons to kill people, which then must be used to kill people, so we can keep paying them for new stuff. It’s a time when vicious freaks like Dick Cheney don’t make millions upon millions of dollars from wars he helped lie us into.

It looks like a time when nobody is starving, but also a time when population ceases to grow, and drops back to a level the planet can sustain. A time when there’s room on the earth for humans, but also for tigers and whales, for mountain gorillas and joshua trees. A time when decisions are made by officials who care less than zero about genuflecting to religious authorities and phony right wing pressure groups, and more about taking care of people, and the planet. A time when every kid in the world can get a science-based education, untainted by the blind faith of his parents’ traditions. A time when real criminals, the kind who kill thousands or millions with poisoned food, deadly public policies, or outright war, can be recognized, identified, and stopped. A time when young women – and young men – can enjoy the benefits of full education and choice in reproductive matters. Maybe even a time when we look up at the moon and a city looks back at us.

No, and Why Not

Before you get too happy contemplating that future, understand me: It’s not coming. Instead, we’re getting that first future. I don’t want to live in that first future. And neither do you. But we will.

There isn’t going to be some miracle, some happy accident that prevents it. There aren’t going to be any wiser, better people off in some distant government office making sure it doesn’t come upon us. We’re not going to have space aliens dropping down and giving us the keys to clean, limitless energy and zero population growth. The mountain gorillas aren’t going to pull through all on their own, the glaciers aren’t going to suddenly pop back into existence. Corporations aren’t going to say “Damn the expense! People need this stuff.” And as we all know, a supernatural superbeing isn’t going to come down from Heaven in a blazing chariot and clean up all our messes, fix everything we’ve broken, hand the entire human race a Get Out of Fail Free card and set us back on the board in time for our next round.

The path to the first future is straight and easy and we are on that path.

The Crooked Path

And do you know why we’re on that path? Because bad things happen automatically …

But good things have to be imagined. And then planned for. Worked towards. Aggressively fought for. And then, even after you get them, fiercely defended.

Good things have to be sought along a completely different type of path, not a greased chute down, but a crooked, difficult path up.

Any of you who has ever accomplished anything worthwhile, you know the kind of path I’m talking about. If you have this goal you want to pursue, obstacles snap into place almost the first moment you imagine it. You don’t have the time, you don’t have the money, you don’t have the expertise. You have to work your way through or around those obstacles. Then more obstacles appear. Another battle, another detour. More obstacles. More cutting through them. Still more obstacles.

The path to good things is always crooked. It’s never straight and easy. But if it’s a dramatically better place to get to, whether it’s your own career, building a family, or changing the course of the world, traveling that crooked path is worth doing.

People who desire better things always face a crooked, difficult path, a path scattered with obstacles. And in our case, the list of obstacles is even worse. We waited too long. The leverage is bad – the pivot point we have to swing things around, the sociocultural fulcrum, is close, very close. We have limited time, limited power, to swing the entire mass of humanity, the forces of history and complacency, onto this new path.

The obstacles are already here before us. We wouldn’t even be here as atheists if we hadn’t first faced the fact that too many people don’t want us to exist, or to speak, or to have any say in how things are run in the system under which we have to live.

Obstacles

Let’s talk about a few more of the obstacles we face.

The main one? Apathy. The emotional inertia of the steady state. If a 20 foot wall of water comes flowing down the canyon toward your house, you and your neighbors run screaming because the dam broke and you’re facing a devastating flash flood. But if it’s still flowing like that a year from now, to the neighbors who weren’t affected by it, it’s just another river. A couple of thousand years after the flash flood of religion, the crazy time we live in now isn’t crazy to most of us, it’s just life like always.

We face the obstacle of enemies. It doesn’t matter what positive value or admirable goal we might choose to adopt, there will be people who hate it like it was … (gesture: smile, shrug) a radioactive dog fart.

Our enemies are working, actively and vocally, against us. They’re working not just to keep the system they have, they’re working to roll back the progress that’s already been made. Every freethinker in this audience has seen evidence of it. Every woman in this audience has seen actual presidential candidates speak against her rights.

We face obstacles in our own human nature. Under the lash of strong emotion, human beings become less intelligent. And oh boy, we have some very vocal salesmen of fear and hate in our media, working day and night to dumb us down.

Speaking of which: Who do you want working alongside you when things get scary? Do you want calm rational people, thinking as clearly and calmly as possible, or do you want excitable dullards, whose compass for action defaults, at the first sign of trouble, to the galaxy-sized fantasy in their heads?

Assets

However! We have some powerful assets, assets that come from just being who we are.

First, we have this very cool asset, the reason we’re all here – we have freed ourselves from the insanity of religion.

We have intelligence. We have compassion. We really believe in fairness. We have a culture of education. We believe in bettering ourselves by our own efforts rather than using others to get what we want.

Very importantly, rather than a narrow range of voices and experience, we have an extremely diverse array of experience and voice. Especially, we have legions of women on our side.

I’ll tell you why this is important. If we want full equality and self-determination for women, so that women make the decisions about their own reproductive health, the first roadblock for us men is that we don’t always notice how bad things are. We don’t always see what has to change.

But if we have women on our team, all we have to do is listen. Because for women, the obstacles have been clear for the past century. They already know what to do! They know what we’re going to have to do to get there, and they know it won’t be easy. But if we team up, not only can we know the right answers, we have twice as many of us working on them.

Speaking of which (again), let me ask you: How stupid is it, how stupid is it, that there are still places on this planet where the most basic cultural rule is this: Faced with any real-world problem or challenge, the first thing you do it silence and ignore the intelligence of half the population.

Who do you think is going to win that cultural battle, huh? Us, with the women on our side? Or them, with their stupid little Stone Age clique of male-only privilege?

We have the huge and growing asset of the Internet. This is the first time in history that the counter-culture, the intelligent underlings, the people who are not rich and powerful, have been able to reach out to each other to discuss ideas and make plans. Our minds are able to rally together, and take action, for the first time in history. (Rush Limbaugh knows about that, doesn’t he?)

Corporations are powerful at least partly because they have top-down direction of their full economic might, but we are powerful because we have this bottom-up crowd-sourced activism amping up our individual might. And because there are more of us. Because now we’re able to join together, to talk with each other, in a way never seen in human history.

Public vs. Private

We all came here today for our private reasons. Because we wanted to gather in a place where we weren’t alone, a place where we could laugh and cheer and smile, right out in the open, without shame or fear, over the fact that we’re atheists.

And doesn’t that feel gooood? Let’s wallow in that for a second. Atheists! (gesture: pause for reaction)

But we also came for this larger reason: Because we can’t go on like this — the way things have been. We have to build the secular, reasoning, brave, moral, forward-thinking society that can shepherd us into that better future.

Reason and clear thinking is not just a fun toy for your private life, it’s the tool that’s going to save all our lives or, by its absence, kill us. It’s the tool by which our entire society has to be run. Socially. Economically. Politically.

Which is not the case now. We have so much unreason at the heart of our current political climate that we have little will for considering our future. With entities like Fox News turning the crank, we have no breath to spare for talking about where we’re going.

We are literally rudderless, approaching a future that consists of a deadly waterfall.

Warning: The Balloon

I’d like to toss a personal caveat into this before winding it up.

I was talking to a 10-year-old girl a year or so back about writing. She wanted to be a writer, and was working on a book. When she started to tell me her story, in detail, I stopped her. I said, look, your story is sort of like an inflated balloon.

There’s this pressure inside you to tell that story. There are two ways to let it out. One is, you can write down the story. The other is, you can tell the story, tell it with your voice. You can only do it one way or the other, because once you let the pressure off, you don’t have enough left to do it the other way.

That same thought applies here. We all came here to be atheists. To enjoy the freedom and pleasures of mingling with like-minded people. This rally is a way to meet each other and gather allies, to share ideas and determination, to understand that we’re not alone, and to make ourselves visible – to publicly reinforce the fact that we matter, that we have rights, that our voices and concerns are an important part of the American, and worldwide, dialogue on religion and society, and our shared future.

The danger is that we’ll all go back home feeling satisfied. Feeling that the pressure is off. The danger is that we’ll feel like we’ve done all we need to do until next year.

Let me be clear: Coming here and assuring ourselves that we exist, and that our private understandings are supported by a larger community, that is not nothing. But it’s also not everything.

It’s not all we have to do.

The Final Pitch

Here’s where I’m asking for the sale: We have to go back home now and talk to people. We have to write letters, we have to teach. We have to create more videos, more blogs, more events, more camps and schools for secular thinking. We have to talk to the young people in our lives. We have to donate, and volunteer. We have to join the organizations, and be active. We have to go to public meetings. We have to vote. We have to sue. We have to create campus atheist clubs at every college in America.

We have to have the courage that Taslima Nasreen demonstrated today when she said “I will continue my fight until I die.” And we have to understand what Jessica Ahlquist meant when she said “What I did can be done by anybody.” We have to risk arrest, if that’s what it takes, risk our reputations, maybe even our lives, in order to actually make good things happen.

We have to come out. We have to work it. Work it with care, work smart and hard and long to make things happen, not just in our own lives, but on the broader societal stage on which these changes must take place.

We have to create and attend other rallies, we have to find visible ways to show people who we are, and what we care about. And we have to share who we are and what we’re about with our loved ones, with our families and neighbors.

We have to do more than just be here today.

This is a fight – and it’s been made clear to us that it is a fight – that will extend into the future, probably for decades. We’re talking about the necessity of getting religious culture out of the driver’s seat of Planet Earth, and putting our culture in its place.

We’re going to win it, though. We will win it because we’re right. We will win it because the tide of history is with us. And we will win it because giving up, sitting down and letting religion and complacency be the forces that guides our future, is just too damned dangerous.

I don’t think we have much time. I think we atheists and freethinkers came along almost too late. It would have been better if we’d started 50 years ago, or 100, and stuck to it so that we really made a difference.

But we are here now because, here and now, we are necessary.

In the end, everything you did here today, and everything you do after, is an affirmation of yourself. An affirmation of the person you aspire to be, and of your better vision for the future of Planet Earth, and humanity itself.

The crooked path starts here.

But that’s if, and only if, we all go home and do what’s necessary to make it happen.