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Doing My Part: Cory Brunson

[ This is a response to Doing My Part for the Godless Future . If you’d like to submit one of your own — what you’re doing to help the world, or just yourself, get free of religion — email me via the link in that post. ]

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I do a lot of the familiar stuff at the personal level: I sit at Ask An Atheist tables, i write letters to the editor, i regularly post religious commentary on Facebook. I cross out “In God We Trust” on dollar bills and write in “E pluribus unum”. These things matter. but they feel reactive, and marginal, like online comments on an op-ed.

Here’s something i wish more people would do: Continue reading “Doing My Part: Cory Brunson”

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Doing My Part: Stephanie

[ This is a response to Doing My Part for the Godless Future. If you’d like to submit one of your own — what you’re doing to help the world, or just yourself, get free of religion — email me via the link in that post. ]

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I’m 25 years old and I’ve been calling myself an atheist officially since I was about 19. I stopped believing in God before that, but the word atheist was scary at first – so final. It’s understandable to me why people are afraid of atheism. I was at first, in my early teens when I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong and why everyone had told me God was real when more and more evidence was piling up in my head to the contrary. I feel like religious people clutch their religion to their chests like a child with security blanket. The blanket is all ratty and worn out and dirty. So an adult goes to them and says, Continue reading “Doing My Part: Stephanie”

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Doing My Part for the Godless Future

Read Dear Friends, Bloody on the Highway, before you read this.

In this followup post, I’d like to ask readers what we’re all doing to make that better-time-to-be happen.

I hope to raise consciousness among the people who read this …

First, that fellow readers are taking various actions in their own lives. In other words, that you and I, ordinary people, CAN do things that make a difference.

Second, that each of us really NEEDS to be doing something to make  a difference. Continue reading “Doing My Part for the Godless Future”

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Dear Friends, Bloody on the Highway

As I’ve said here in the past, I still get emails from old friends in Texas. Some of those people have gotten so goddy over the years that we seem to have nothing at all in common anymore.

Every time I get one of these things, it’s like waking up in a cold cabin with the fire gone out. I remember how warm it used to be, and some part of me hopes there’s still an ember in the coals. Thinks that if I go back to Texas someday and feed it new fuel, the flame of our friendship will burn again. Continue reading “Dear Friends, Bloody on the Highway”

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Top Five Regrets of the Dying

This Guardian article must have been written by a nasty atheist, because there’s no mention of all those people who must have said “I wish I’d spent more time in church.”

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

If you don’t want to read the short article, the Top Five Regrets are: Continue reading “Top Five Regrets of the Dying”

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Rewinding Religion, Recreating Science

Any serious writer could tell you: Not everything you write ends up on a page somewhere. Some of the stuff just isn’t good enough. Some of it is good enough, but not germane to the piece you’re currently writing. And some of it is good enough but … just doesn’t fit anywhere.

This is a piece of a piece that never made it into my book. It’s sort of a double reject — the chapter in which it appeared was edited out of the book, but even before that decision was made, this bit was edited out of that chapter. Still, it struck me as worth saving. So, here: Continue reading “Rewinding Religion, Recreating Science”

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Babies. Lemons.

Ah, if only we had this instinctive reaction the first time we were spoonfed the family religion …

Also: I still have this same sort of reaction when I bite into a lemon.

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What Will YOU Do When the Angry Voices Come?

One of the most riveting quotes from the Reason Rally stage was this one:

I will continue my fight until I die.

That was said by author/speaker/activist Taslima Nasrin.

Unlike most of us, who might say such things in the naive, comfortable bravado of our safe and secure lives, Nasrin has been under threat of death, under sentence of death by Islamic decree since 1993.

In her case, as I mentioned in Rusted Pickup at the Senior Prom, her statement is a fully-conscious admission of the possibility of murder.

As I also said in that post, I am in awe of such courage. I mean, I have my little adventures, parasailing and cliffside hiking and such, and they scare me, but nothing in my life comes anywhere close to this.

She is an avatar of courage that is both fantastically admirable and, in its example, personally demanding. Her entire life grabs you by the lapels and says “What will YOU do when the angry voices come?”

Most of us will sit back and shut up. A very, very few of us will stand in place, look death in the eye, and demand change.

Taslima Nasrin, this incredible human being, is  joining FreethoughtBlogs under the banner No Country for Women.

Welcome, Taslima!

For all of us here, and for all of you reading, the bar is raised.

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Think About This at Easter

One short thought on freedom of religion:

If we continue to define “freedom” as the right to believe and spread to others without opposition, all these myths, superstitions, fantastic stories – lies, to put it bluntly – that’s a damned poor freedom, isn’t it?

If we redefine it to designate the absolute right of every person, and especially every child, to know true things, that is a VERY different take on freedom.

As far as U.S. and broader world culture is concerned, it’s also a freedom we have not yet had.