Before the War

Interestingly, I was just reminded of something that I had written on March 17, 2003, at the start of the invasion of Iraq.

I had posted this on the Internet infidels Discussion Boards.

What if Saddam is telling the truth?

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What if Saddam has no weapons of mass destruction?

What if he destroyed them as he said (because he knew that they would be of no use to him -- he could not use them, as he had done in the past, without foreign governments invading).

What if, the only reason he did not make it easy for the inspectors was out of spite.

What if his plan is to have the USA attack, and then embarrass itself by finding none of the items which the USA claims justifies the invasion?

I think that the chances of this are very, very small. But, this evening, it came to be as an interesting possibility.

Funding

I would like readers to consider an important fact about contemorary society.

Let us assume that I wanted to create a creationist museum, or build a new church, or create a road show to sell the virtues of religion in Africa. For all of these, I would have no trouble collecting money. Everything from megachurches to televangelists to religious magazines, I would have a huge set of resources to draw upon to raise money.

What if somebody wanted to do something on the other side of the equation? Where are the institutions to fund activities meant to sell non-religion?

One of the clear advantages that theism has over atheism is funding. Theists are more than eager to give up their money to spread the word of their religion. Atheists are not only shy about using their money and time to communicate to others, some are completely hostile to the idea. One thing that many atheists dislike about theists is the 'preaching' - so an atheist who 'preaches' is just as bad as a theist.

This is an excellent philosophy for making sure that the atheist voice remains silent, and to give the theist control of the microphone. This attitude turns the public debate between theism and atheism like a trial where only the prosecutor is allowed to speak, and the accused decides to simply remain silent when it comes to his own defense.

One should not be surprised if, in such a situation, the jury is more likely to convict than they would be if the defense actually speaks to the accusations made against them.

Without funding to suport the voice of reason, religious forces will continue to control the microphone. With religious forces continuing to control the microphone, the bulk of the population will continue to see theism as the dominant - and, through this, these beliefs will be seen as the most plausible.

I am writing this to suggest to readers to go on a campaign to raise money that will enable atheists to take control of an ever larger and louder microphone.

Video Games in Church

I have seen a few people post about the use of video games to draw young people to church.

For example, there is the posting in Scientia Natura, How lame can despirate theatards get?

And Phstyngula's laughing my evil laugh at those decadent churches.

Only, these types of marketing work.

It is like the business owner who scoffs at the fact that his competitor decides to advertise, saying, "Let them advertise. The inherent quality of my product will be enough to drive them out of business."

Or the political candidate who decides that he will not waste any time campaigning because, "as soon as everybody hears the quality of my ideas, they will certainly turn to me over my opponent."

Not . . . I'm afraid . . . in the real world.

My answer to those who want to mock marketing is to say, "Yeah, right. Marketing is a $300 billion industry in this country because it doesn't work.

So, go ahead and mock the competition that actually decides to campaign and to advertise and to market its products. This will, nonetheless, allow them to maintain their dominance. An unwillingness to do the same thing is a short strategy for helping them maintain their dominance.

Causes of Atheism

Atheist in a Mini Van pointed readers to an article that said that one of the causes of the growth of atheism was the events at 9/11. These events allegedly caused some people to give up on religion.

Atheist in a Mini Van expressed doubts that this was true - that few people in fact became atheists as a result of 9/11. In other words, there were few people who said in their mind, "9-11 happened; therefore, no God exists." She did not say that it never happened, only that it was a weak influence.

However, what 9/11 clearly caused was for some atheists - starting with Sam Harris - to stop their habit of sitting back comfortably and say "Religion is not important. I don't have to take a stand against it." For a number of people, 9/11 delivered the message, "Religion kills."

Of course, they already knew that. However, until 9/11, religion only killed people - strangers - and not even white anglo-saxon strangers "over there". Suddenly, religion killed people over here, and that was much more difficult to tolerate.

Of course, religion had been killing people over here as well - millions of people - by promoting ignorance and raising religious objections to medical research that could have otherwise saved lives, by promoting the suicide of homosexual teenagers, and the like. However, we had grown accustomed to this - had decided to live with it. After all, the problem of correcting this problem was just too big to worry about. We did not (or, at least, we believed we did not) have the power to change it, so we learned to accept it.

With 9/11, some atheists started to demand that their fellow citizens rethink religion. That voice was contagious, until a large (and growing?) number of people joined in. With this voice, some who were on the fence have climbed down off that fence on the side of atheism.

Every day we see reminders of the message, "Religion kills." Which feeds the message. Some people try to shout back, "Atheism also kills," but one does not have the daily reminders of atheism killing that one has of religion killing.

Unfortunately, I continue to worry about the fact that atheism does not prevent killing, and that there must be a vigil against the idea that religion is the problem that leads to the conclusion that anything a person can do to rid the world of religion is good.

In fact, the idea, "religion kills" is a bit too simplistic. "Irrational beliefs kill," and religion is only one set of irrational beliefs. There are others, and some of them are available to atheists. I continue to argue for broadening the battle to include not only the most dangerous beliefs within religion, but the most dangerous beliefs outside of religion as well. It would be foolish to be so blindly fixated on the former (religion) that the latter (non-religious wrongs) end up conquering us without us even knowing they are there.

Religious Messages in Public Schools

An article on Alternet, The Religious Right's New Tactics for Invading Public Schools mentions several ways, and several instances, where the religious right has tried to use the public school system to recruit children into their fundamentalist mythologies.

They spoke of valedictorians who have used graduation ceremonies as opportunities to deliver a religious message, and Texas' new "Religious Viewpoints Antidiscrimination Act" which says that schools must give students the freedom to inject religious messages into any student-lead school event.

Of course, the religious right is dominated by hypocrites who will only find these methods acceptable to the degree that they are being used to deliver Christian messages. Let somebody use these opportunities to deliver a non-Christian message, and let the howling begin.

It would be interesting, I think, for a valedictorian to introduce into his speech a claim that goes something like this:

There is no God, and the universe is indifferent to our survival as individuals and as a species. How well we live, and even whether we live at all, depends on our ability to understand and predict the real world. More importantly, because no God exists to protect us and answer our prayers, we must depend on each other. If we waste time and effort waiting for some sky daddy to save and protect us, we might not even notice the lost opportunity to save and protect ourselves. So, I encourage you, each day, to make this a better world for yourself and for those around you.

Of course, large numbers of the religious right will protest. However, they will also be exposed as the hypocrites that they are in doing so. And that, itself, may pay in dividends.

I would then like to hear this person say afterward, "I recognize that people come to a graduation ceremony to celebrate their child's celebration, and not to be preached at by people who have beliefs other than their own. I recognize that this is important. Hopefully, because of what I did today, other people will better recognize that as well, and will quit trying to interject their beliefs into these types of ceremonies."

Boeing's Orbiting Gas Station

One of my concerns is the survival of the human race. This is combined with the fact that the universe is indifferent to our survival and will destroy us without a second thought. This means that it is up to us to take those steps that will reduce the possibility of our own destruction.

(This is in contrast to certain rapturephiles who are gleefully awaiting the end of civilizaiton.)

In this area, Boeing has proposed the idea of an orbiting refueling station.

One thing about a refueling station is that it can take deposits in any number of sizes. If somebody shows up with 100 gallons of fuel, and another person shows up with 10,000 gallons, they can be combined. The missions are simple, meaning that they are cheep.

The advantage of a fuel depot is that missions going further out into space (the moon, asteroids, Mars, Titan) can pick up the fuel from the station.

Also, a station can collect fuel from a number of different sources. We can expect that the first deposits of fuel will come from Earth. However, there is a possibility that somebody can figure out how to manufacture fuel on the moon or from an asteroid, and ship that to the refueling station.

I would like to combine this with another idea that I think is interesting - the idea of the government offering 'prizes' to organizations that can accomplish certain tasks, rather than making all space missions government projects (with government mismanagement, government cost overruns, and government need to spread the money across everybody's congressional district). With this type of fueling station in orbit, the government can simply announce a 'prize' to any company that delivers fuel to the orbiting station, and let the private entrepreneurs figure out how they can do this for a profit.

Those entrepreneurs will likely figure out ways to reduce the cost of getting things into space, or of using the resources that are already in space, in ways that NASA would never imagine, and could never get funded.

Red Skelton's 'Pledge' Case in the Classroom

A Dover-New Philadelphia paper Times Reporter carried an online article about a teacher Sharon Ricklic, who received an award fror being Ohio's 2007 Preserve America History Teacher of the Year.

The story mentions:

Ricklic uses a variety of methods to teach her students about American history. While students study the Pledge of Allegiance, she plays a compact disc by comedian Red Skelton in which he gives a recitation explaining the meaning of the pledge.

Unfortunately, I fear that what she plays is probably This piece, which is a propaganda piece in defene of 'under God' in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Since the Pledge, with the text 'under God' is a denigrating piece of propaganda whose purpose is to declare that those who are not "under God" ought to be considered as anti-american as those who would promote rebellion, tyranny, and injustice, it has no place in the public schools.

It certainly does not make Ms. Ricklic deserving of such an award.

I do not know all of the details of this presentation, of course. It is a historical fact that Red Skelton did make this presentation. At the same time, it is a historical fact that the words were added to the pledge to denigrate those who did not believe in God in the eyes of school children everywhere. So, one can wonder whether Ms. Ricklic's students are getting an accurate account of history, or whether Ricklic is arguing in favor of the denigration of any atheist students she might have.

Happy Sputnik Day

50 years ago today, the former Soviet Union launched the first satellite into Earth Orbit.

Many people who speak about today will discuss it in the context of the Cold War conflict between the United States and USSR. However, these mundane and earthly reasons are not why I think that this day is significant.

Before Sputnik, we (humanity, and all of the flora and fauna of earth) were limited to the surface of a small speck of dust in the cosmos. Sputnik cracked open a door that made everything else - the moon, asteroids, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and even other stars, available to us. Not only to us, but to every form of life that we decide to take with us (or can stow away).

The whole universe is now available to us.

That is something to celebrate.

Atheism, Antitheism, *theism?

In the online web site "On Faith", Greg Epstein made a distinction between atheism and 'anti-theism'.

While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.

So . . . I have to ask:

What word do we use for the view that the worst aspects of faith and God apply to no religion. Because this seems to be a position that some people adopt.

It is as if to say that so long as one person does not have a particular quality, that religion itself is beyond reproach. It is as if to say that Dawkins and Harris are saying nothing worthy of concern, as long as only some religions fit their descriptions.

Which, of course, is nonesense.

So, what is the word we should use for holding that, for the good of humanity, there are some or many religious beliefs worthy of condemnation?

Atheist Convention

I read Friendly Atheist's recap of Atheist Alliance International with a great deal of frustration, bordering on anger.

What I read gave the convention the appearance of a science-fiction convention; a lot of talk, but absolutely no indication of any 'positive action'.

So far I have not heard mention, on this account or others, of any recommendation for positive action.

The convention gave a number of instances where the individuals could have actually done something useful.

They could have passed a resolution praising the students at Boulder High School for taking a stand against the Pledge of Allegiance, and/or they could have used their time at the podium to denounce Bill O'Reilly's response to that issue.

They could have protested the fact that two local stores refused to serve atheist customers.

If there was any actual attempt at the convention to take a stand on any specific real-world event, I would like to hear about it.