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Atheists at Albany Pride

My atheist Meetup group, Capital Region Atheists & Agnostics, rented a booth for Albany, New York’s Gay Pride Day.

Whew! Fantastic event! My own personal thank-you to all who organized the thing, and all who attended, and especially to the members of CRAA who made it all happen. (I’m hoping some of them will chime in here and tell me who sent all the great atheist/agnostic/humanist stuff that covered the table and caught so many eyes.)

Photos follow. In order to see these large, you have to click on a photo, then click again after it opens in its own page. (I’m sure there’s some easier/better way to do this, but I haven’t figured it out yet.)

There was an eye-catching banner donated by one of the founding members, Rick Martin, “Why Are There Atheists at Gay Pride Day?” fliers written by Mike McElroy and designed by me, and just a whole mess of people who showed up to man the booth and offer moral support. Rick, Mike, Nick, Rich, Rajesh and Dan were some of the core booth-minders and crowd-schmoozers.

I’m ashamed to say that I had a “Proud to be an Atheist” button that I didn’t put on until I got into the city park where the event was held. Old habits, I guess, grown out of the goddy Deep South swamp I grew up in. But I’m proud to say that I did wear it all the way home.

There were plenty of people who came to the booth and asked questions or voiced support. There were also a certain number who came by and looked but walked away without speaking, some with doubtful expressions. But at least while I was there, there were no strongly negative reviews.

One thing really caught my eye — the number of churches and goddy organizations in the parade, all with messages of inclusion. I noticed it for two reasons — one a criticism, one a speculation.

The criticism is that churches were definitely part of the historical problem with acceptance of gay rights, and it’s interesting and wonderful, but also sort of annoying that some of them are now so big-tent buddy-buddy. That this group once cast out of churchy society is now welcomed in makes me feel less that there’s some inclusionary goodness happening, and more that a predator running short of its natural prey has decided to accept new kinds of meat.

The speculation is in regards to that very inclusionary phenomenon: If churches can evolve to accept and welcome the LGBT community, they can evolve to accept others. Except that’s not ever going to happen with atheists, is it? Because by our very nature, we’re not a group subject to that sort of inclusion— not by a church, anyway.

Which means, again, that we have to build our own culture, our own venue of social inclusion.

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Side note to all the dog owners and dog lovers there today: MOST of the dogs I saw there weren’t having a very good time. It was a bit too hot for dog comfort (I hope you were all giving them nice cold water when I wasn’t there to see), but the music was also screamingly loud. Hey, it hurt my ears sometimes, and I have some hearing loss; can’t imagine what it must have been like for sensitive doggie ears.

I saw some dogs dragging on leashes looking like they wanted to be somewhere else fast.  I guarantee you, your dog would much rather be hiking in the woods with you, somewhere near a nice cool creek, than in a crowded city park on a hot, humid day.

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A Window Into Past Lives

Here’s a video simply titled “England, Edwardian Era around 1900 (enhanced video).” No idea of its provenance, but it was apparently uploaded on May 17, 2011. The caption reads:

This video has been dramatically enhanced in quality, using modern video editing tools. The film has been motion stabilized and the speed has been slowed down to correct speed (from 18 fps to 24 fps) using special frame interpolation software that re-creates missing frames. Upscaling to HD quality was done using video enhancer software.

I have been told that at least part of this film was shot in Cork (Ireland). The music is “Chanson du Soir” and “Arco Noir” from Harvey’s Strings of Sorrow album.

The phrase that ran through my head as I watched it was “Everybody you see here, and everybody who ever knew them, is probably dead.” That may not be strictly true — some of the youngsters in the film probably produced grandchildren, or even children, who are still alive. But it’s mostly true.

It’s a moving piece, for me. I see attractive slim-waisted women, handsome mustachioed men, happy children, and even old people, everyone wearing fantastic hats and all vigorously moving through their days and lives — long-passed days and temporary lives. How many of them are gay? How many are servants of the others? How many would be atheists today if they’d had that choice? Dressed in what would otherwise appear to be costumes, but which are everyday attire for them, they stride busily about, thronging the streets in numbers that make it look as if some special event is happening, but which is probably just everyday street  traffic in their time and place.

I challenge you to count the fat people. I noticed three who might qualify as overweight, but nobody really fat. It may have been thrift with food, but it was most likely the daily exercise required of average people living in their time. There are a certain number of horses and bicycles in the streets, but the vast majority of people are walking, walking, walking.

The Rochet Cars sign surprised me at 1:02 — “Motor Vehicles — Electric, Steam and Petrol System.” Even though there’s an electric car in an engineering museum here in Schenectady from 1917, I still have a hard time thinking of electric cars in earlier times. And steam cars? Isn’t it intriguing that you can’t even get them anymore?

The panoramic shot of the city (how did they get that?) shows air filled with smoke. See if you can catch the wagon sign “Henry O’Shea’s Bread” after the pan.

I love the open looks of curiosity on so many of the people, and how casually they bump into each other in their desire to know more. I wonder just what they were seeing — something like this stilt-legged hand-cranked movie camera?

Heh. Looking at all the horse-drawn vehicles on the streets, I know that if I was dropped back there into that past, with my years of draft horse driving, I could at least find a job.

Then again, maybe I would have been one of the legions of shovelers.

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Prairie Dogs are Calling You Fat

I don’t think I ever got to meet this guy when I lived in Flagstaff and edited an arts and entertainment magazine for 3 years, but I wish I had. He’s doing some amazing work.

Dr. Con Slobodchikoff, Ph.D., assisted by students at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, has managed to decode some of the content of prairie dog language. As it turns out, they’re pretty expressive.

You might not think it to look at them, but prairie dogs and humans actually share an important commonality — and it’s not just their complex social structures, or their habit of standing up on two feet (aww, like people). As it turns out, prairie dogs actually have one of the most sophisticated forms of vocal communication in the natural world, really not so unlike our own.

After more than 25 years of studying the calls of prairie dog in the field, one researcher managed to decode just what these animals are saying. And the results show that praire dogs aren’t only extremely effective communicators, they also pay close attention to detail.

Working with Gunnison’s prairie dogs, Dr. Slobodchikoff studied their alarm calls, recording and analyzing the calls, but also noting the conditions during which the calls originated. What he discovered is that prairie dogs can not only tell the difference between a coyote and a similar-appearing domestic dog such as a German shepherd, they can express that difference clearly in distinct warning calls.

Turns out they can make similar distinctions between humans wandering into their territory, even going so far as to describe the human’s size, shape and clothing color!

Watch the video (or read more about the critters at Wikipedia).

 

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Neuroscientist: Fundamentalism As Mental Illness

A HuffPo article from yesterday (Friday, May 31) says:

Kathleen Taylor, Neuroscientist, Says Religious Fundamentalism Could Be Treated As A Mental Illness

An Oxford University researcher and author specializing in neuroscience has suggested that one day religious fundamentalism may be treated as a curable mental illness.

Kathleen Taylor, who describes herself as a “science writer affiliated to the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics,” made the suggestion during a presentation on brain research at the Hay Literary Festival in Wales on Wednesday.

In response to a question about the future of neuroscience, Taylor said that “One of the surprises may be to see people with certain beliefs as people who can be treated,” The Times of London notes.

“Someone who has for example become radicalised to a cult ideology — we might stop seeing that as a personal choice that they have chosen as a result of pure free will and may start treating it as some kind of mental disturbance,” Taylor said. “In many ways it could be a very positive thing because there are no doubt beliefs in our society that do a heck of a lot of damage.”

Though in this story she’s quoted as saying she’s not speaking of “obvious candidates” such as radical Islam, another story on the subject is titled Science ‘may one day cure Islamic radicals’.

Muslim fundamentalism may one day be seen in the same way as mental illness is today and be “curable”, according to a leading neuroscientist.

Heh, that’s gonna go over really well in the middle East.

But it’s an idea I’d like to see propagated. I’ve long said I think it’s a shame there’s no category of mental illness named “religious illness” (as far as I know, anyway). I mean, look at some of the more obvious examples in the U.S. — the Phelps clan, Pat Robertson, Ken Ham — some of those people are crazy as hell. I couldn’t say whether it’s that mentally ill people frequently model religious memes, or whether religion drives people bonkers. Either way, it should be addressed, don’t you think?

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Time for Serious Outreach into Islam?

Here’s a story from the United Kingdom’s online news site Mail Online, the heated subtext of which is “OMG MUSLIMS!!!”

One country, two religions and three very telling pictures: The empty pews at churches just yards from an overcrowded mosque

It’s a story in pictures, with a small amount of text:

What they show are three acts of worship performed in the East End of London within a few hundred yards of each other at the end of last month.

Two of the photos show Sunday morning services in the churches of St George-in-the-East on Cannon Street Road, and St Mary’s on Cable Street.

The third shows worshippers gathered for Friday midday prayers outside the nearby mosque on the Brune Street Estate in Spitalfields.

The difference in numbers could hardly be more dramatic. At St George’s, some 12 people have congregated to celebrate Holy Communion.

When the church was built in the early 18th century, it was designed to seat 1,230.

Numbers are similar at St Mary’s, opened in October 1849. Then, it could boast a congregation of 1,000. Today, as shown in the picture, the worshippers total just 20.

While the two churches are nearly empty, the Brune Street Estate mosque has a different problem — overcrowding.

The mosque itself is little more than a small room rented in a  community centre, and it can hold only 100.

However, on Fridays, those numbers swell to three to four times the room’s capacity, so the worshippers spill out onto the street, where they take up around the same amount of space as the size of the near-empty St Mary’s down the road.

 The overheated punchline:

What these pictures suggest is that, on current trends, Christianity in this country is becoming a religion of the past, and Islam is one of the future.

Yes! Christianity is becoming a thing of the past! But ooh, scary Islam is the one of the future.

Maybe, maybe not. Not a big fan of Islam here, definitely don’t think it’s a good thing. But … the people caught up in it are just people. And people’s minds can be changed.

The newfound visibility of atheism alone, as one of the many choices young people will be presented with, can make a difference. But making an actual effort to outreach into the community of young Muslims — that could make a BIG difference.

Seems to me we need to do a lot more atheist proselytizing.

 

 

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Finding the Real Villain in [Churches Hate Gay Boy Scouts]

Thinking about this story, Some Churches Say They’ll Cut Ties to Boy Scouts Following Its Lifting Ban on Gay Scouts, a first reaction might lead you to lambaste the people who’d do such a thing.

“If the Boy Scouts are going to support gays, we’re not going to support the Boy Scouts.” Of course they have every right to say that, to act that way, but it’s not a decent reaction, not a reaction that recognizes equality and fairness. You’d be prone to blame the people who’d do such a thing.

On the other hand, they’re not acting, they’re REacting. There’s something in their heads that causes them to do so. And it’s THAT, the thing that drives their behavior, their actions and thoughts, that’s the real villain.

Our real enemy is religion itself, the poisonous-fantasy-group-think that drives the actions of the people who do these things.

Yes, we have to fight these social justice battles in the arena of human flesh, human acts. The wars of civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, atheist rights, face real human adversaries who — with muscle and words and acts — work to oppose our goals and values.

But the real enemy, the enemy that serves as the foundation of all this strife, is not strictly people. The real enemy is ideas.

That realization is making me rethink Daniel Fincke’s Civility Pledge.  (I was never opposed to it, but I wanted to think about it at length before committing.)

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Followup 1:

Interesting. Google “civility pledge” and you get a variety of hits, including this one from Chris Clarke:

The Desert Tortoises With Boltcutters Civility Pledge

We’re all still working on it.

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Followup 2:

Lest we forget, the Boy Scout Oath says:

On my honor, I will do my best
To do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law;
To help other people at all times;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

That second line is interesting, isn’t it? In this quintessentially American organization, God comes before country.

 

 

 

 

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Wikipedia Does Days: May 26

Didn’t like history in school. Did. Not. It was just this droning recitation of dates and wars and such, people I didn’t give a hoot about doing obscure things to each other while wearing weird clothes and armor and stuff.

I don’t know why it never got across to me that it was all real — real people doing real things. Probably it was all the fault of my teachers. Yeah, that must be it! Anyway, I dutifully memorized the dates and the events, and fired them back on tests, and did pretty good, despite having no feeling for the material.

It was only in about 1986 or so that I first understood the realness, that there had been actual people back there in the past, living whole lives and doing interesting, history-making things. People like me, and unlike me, but people. People you could walk right up to and talk to, if you lived back then.

Now I’m interested in it, but don’t really have time to study it. Probably why I found this little Wikipedia feature interesting: Every calendar date has its own unique history, and the Gods of Wiki have gathered them on their characteristic pages.

For instance, on today, May 26, I think it’s obscurely cool that in the year …

47 BC – Julius Caesar visits Tarsus on his way to Pontus, where he meets enthusiastic support, but where, according to Cicero, Cassius is planning to kill him at this point.

I think I recall some sort of play about this. I don’t want to spoil it for you, but it didn’t turn out well for Caesar.

1328 – William of Ockham, Franciscan Minister-General Michael of Cesena and two other Franciscan leaders secretly leave Avignon, fearing a death sentence from Pope John XXII.

While shaving the next day, William was heard to shout “Honey, have you seen my razor? I believe it to have been stolen by Gypsies, or possibly spirited away by elves! Maybe even rendered invisible by witches!” to which his wife replied, “It’s wherever you left it! Really, William, select the hypotheses with the fewest assumptions!”

1830 – The Indian Removal Act is passed by the U.S. Congress; it is signed into law by President Andrew Jackson two days later.

Proof that our modern Congress has no monopoly on a-holishness, nor has the White House.

1897 – Dracula, a novel by Irish author Bram Stoker is published.

To think we have a guy from the 1800s to thank for the Twilight series! Wow!

1908 – At Masjed Soleyman in southwest Persia, the first major commercial oil strike in the Middle East is made. The rights to the resource are quickly acquired by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

Hey, whatever happened to Persia, anyway? Someone said those damned Iranians moved in and took it over. Probably wanted to get control of our oil.

1938 – In the United States, the House Un-American Activities Committee begins its first session.

They really saved us from those Un-Americans! And finally, striking a blow for cartographic justice, in

1998 – The Supreme Court of the United States rules that Ellis Island, the historic gateway for millions of immigrants, is mainly in the state of New Jersey, not New York.

Additionally, these people where born on this day in history:

1264 – Prince Koreyasu, Japanese shogun (d. 1326)
1478 – Pope Clement VII (d. 1534)
1886 – Al Jolson, American singer, comedian, and actor (d. 1950)
1907 – John Wayne, American actor (d. 1979)
1912 – Jay Silverheels, Canadian actor (d. 1980)
1913 – Peter Cushing, English actor (d. 1994)
1920 – Peggy Lee, American singer-songwriter and actress (d. 2002)
1922 – Troy Smith, American businessman, founded Sonic Drive-In (d. 2009)
1923 – James Arness, American actor (d. 2011)
1926 – Miles Davis, American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer (Miles Davis Quintet) (d. 1991)
1928 – Jack Kevorkian, American pathologist (d. 2011)
1941 – Reg Bundy, English drag queen performer, dancer, and actor (d. 2003)
1945 – Garry Peterson, Canadian drummer (The Guess Who and Bachman–Turner Overdrive)
1948 – Stevie Nicks, American singer-songwriter and musician (Fleetwood Mac)
1949 – Ward Cunningham, American computer programmer, developed the first wiki
1949 – Pam Grier, American actress
1949 – Hank Williams Jr., American singer-songwriter and musician
1951 – Sally Ride, American astronaut (d. 2012)
1954 – Danny Rolling, American serial killer (d. 2006)
1962 – Bobcat Goldthwait, American actor
1964 – Lenny Kravitz, American singer-songwriter, musician, producer, and actor
1966 – Helena Bonham Carter, English actress
1972 – Kylie Ireland, American porn actress, director, producer, publicist, and radio host

And these people died:

604 – Augustine of Canterbury, Benedictine monk, 1st Archbishop of Canterbury
735 – Bede, English historian and theologian (b. 673)
1647 – Alse Young, American woman executed for witchcraft (b. 1600)
1651 – Jeane Gardiner, English woman executed for witchcraft
1703 – Samuel Pepys, English naval administrator and civil servant (b. 1633)
1904 – Georges Gilles de la Tourette, French neurologist (b. 1857)
1933 – Jimmie Rodgers, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1897)
1943 – Edsel Ford, American businessman (b. 1893)
1976 – Martin Heidegger, German philosopher (b. 1889)
2005 – Eddie Albert, American actor (b. 1906)
2008 – Sydney Pollack, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1934)
2010 – Art Linkletter, Canadian-American radio and television host (b. 1912)
2012 – Rudy Eugene, American criminal and cannibal (b. 1981)

Browsing elsewhere on the calendar, I’ve discovered I share a birthday, Sept. 6, with:

1766 – John Dalton, English chemist and physicist (d. 1844)
1860 – Jane Addams, American social worker, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1935)
1879 – Max Schreck, German actor (d. 1936)
1937 – Sergio Aragonés, Spanish illustrator and writer
1937 – Jo Anne Worley, American actress
1947 – Jane Curtin, American actress
1958 – Buster Bloodvessel, English singer-songwriter (Bad Manners)
1958 – Jeff Foxworthy, American comedian, actor, and author
1963 – Mark Chesnutt, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
1967 – Macy Gray, American singer-songwriter, producer, and actress
1974 – Justin Whalin, American actor
2006 – Prince Hisahito of Akishino

And yes, I leaned heavily on my meager, U.S.-centric knowledge of historical figures and geography. Go to the page, or check the link-map at the bottom to find all those famous figures and events from your tiny native nation such as Tunisia, Tierra del Fuego, Australia, Brazil, or some of those other obscure, minor countries.

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Helping A Tornado Survivor, Atheist-Style

There’s a rather amazing story coming out of the Oklahoma tornado-aftermath.

Moore, Oklahoma, resident and mother Rebecca Vitsmun, being interviewed by  CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, responded to a spray of goddy rhetoric:

Blitzer: “Well, you’re blessed, Brian your husband is blessed, Anders is blessed. […] I guess you gotta thank the Lord, huh? Do you thank the Lord, for that split-second decision (to leave her home and get to safety)?”

Vitsmun: “I uh, I am actually an atheist.”

Amid general good feelings at finding a spectacular role model, a bright, cheerful woman standing amid the destruction of her town and her home, Doug Stanhope of Atheists Unite has created an Indiegogo fund-raiser.

What We Need & What You Get

We don’t know the exact cost of putting a family back together when you don’t even have a toothbrush anymore so we randomly chose 50,000 dollars as a goal. And that’s probably low-ball.

The Impact

The impact of getting Rebecca and her family properly housed by the atheist community will do far more good than sitting in bars or chat rooms mocking people of faith. Like religion, free-thinking will be more easily spread through compassion and decency.

Here’s the amazing part:

As of Friday 24th May we have cleared the initial $50,000 target. In truth, we had no idea how generous and giving our community would prove to be. We reached our goal within 17 hours of starting.  An Indiegogo deadline cannot be changed once it has been set. So this campaign will continue until July 22 2013. At that point the financial cogs will turn and the moneys raised will be delivered to Rebecca Vitsmun. There is no reason for us to stop raising funds. The median cost of a home in Moore, OK is $125, 250, and that was back when they had homes. More importantly, the more money we raise the better the example we set.

At the moment I write this, the campaign has raised $80, 232.

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Annnd … there’s this from Glenn Beck:  ‘Forces of spiritual darkness’ at CNN plotted Blitzer’s atheist gaffe

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Beta Culture: Bridges and War and All Things Daft

I know there are people who don’t like driving across long, high bridges. I’m one of them, I guess, but my job requires me to gird my loins and cross the huge, 3-mile-long, almost-60-year-old  Tappan Zee Bridge across the Hudson River near New York City twice a day.

The collapse of the Interstate 5 highway bridge in Mount Vernon, Wash., on Thursday, brought that roaring to mind over the past few days.

On days when traffic is slow and you’re standing still on the Tappan Zee — like yesterday evening during rush hour, with the roadway packed with the multitude fleeing the City for the Memorial Day holiday weekend — you can feel the thing flex and rumble under you. Not a day passes that I don’t think about what it would be like to fall 150 feet into the deep river, with deadly beams collapsing all around me.

Wikipedia says the Tappan Zee “was constructed during material shortages during the Korean War and designed to last only 50 years.” The really freaky thing about the Tappan Zee is that the roadway sometimes develops holes THROUGH WHICH YOU CAN SEE THE RIVER BELOW. They even have a name for the holes: punch-throughs. Sheee-it. Maintenance and repair crews work on the thing pretty much 24/7, but the beams overhead are covered with rust.

Wikipedia again (bold emphasis mine):

In 2009, the Tappan Zee Bridge was featured on The History Channel “The Crumbling of America” showing the infrastructure crisis in the United States. Many factors contribute to the precarious infrastructure of the bridge, which has been called “one of the most decrepit and potentially dangerous bridges” in the US. Engineering assessments have determined that “everything from steel corrosion to earthquakes to maritime accidents could cause major, perhaps catastrophic, damage to the span,” prompting one of the top aides in the New York state governor’s office to refer to the Tappan Zee as the “hold-your-breath bridge.” A 2009 state report noted that the bridge was not built with a plan that was “conducive to long-term durability” and that the Tappan Zee’s engineers designed it to be “nonredundant,” meaning that one “critical fracture could make the bridge fail completely because its supports couldn’t transfer the structure’s load to other supports.”

You catch all that? THE GOVERNMENT KNOWS IT’S DANGEROUS.  They haven’t fixed it. Just as so many bridges and overpasses in the U.S. haven’t been fixed.

But meanwhile, the United States spent close to a trillion dollars in destroying civilization in Iraq, at the orders of that brainless, gutless little shit George W. Bush. While our own infrastructure here at home was known to be crumbling, corporations that make weapons and military goods toddled off home with enough gold to make a pharaoh look like a filthy street beggar.

War has a price. Aside from the thousands of needless deaths of American’s young men and women, there’s the actual cost of war, and it is dramatically non-trivial. Estimates of the cost of the Vietnam War range from $150 billion to $584 billion. The cost of the combined Iraq-Afghanistan wars is upwards of $1.5 trillion. (Here’s a PDF with more on the cost of wars.)

Kids, if we’re counting the things we could’ve had if we hadn’t spent the  money on recent wars, that’s a FUCK of a lot of new bridges. High-speed rail routes and trains. Schools and teachers. Libraries. Parks and playgrounds. Hell, we could have thrown in free college educations for a million young Americans. So much, much more.

The reasons for this are way-hell more complicated than anything I can winkle out, but down at the most basic level, it seems to me it’s a failing of intellect, of the understanding of facts, of the desire to know true things and live in the real world. It’s the poison cranked every day out of a vast well of fantasy, wishful thinking and studied ignorance — plus the by-no-means-minor  willingness to be commanded, even owned — bequeathed to us by our thousands of years of religion.

None of this is anything we can afford for very much longer.

Nothing will stop it except sane, conscious effort.

By, you know, SOMEONE.

 

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