Non-Believers Giving Aid
Just a quick note to let everyone know – the red button at the right, for Non-Believers Giving Aid, is focusing their efforts on the flooding and devastation Pakistan. Here is the press release:
The situation in Pakistan is grave. The UN estimates that 20 million people have been affected by the worst monsoon-related floods in living memory, with tens of thousands of villages entirely under water. 8 million people are in need of immediate assistance, including food and medical aid, and 4.6m of these have been left without shelter.
With 700,000 hectares of crops destroyed or under water, severe food shortages are inevitable and this, together with concerns about outbreaks of cholera and other potentially fatal diseases, is leading aid agencies to warn that the death toll is likely to rise dramatically.
You can find out more about the crisis from the Special Report on the BBC News website.
Non-Believers Giving Aid and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science are once more partnering with Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders to bring much needed help to people whose lives have been torn apart by natural disaster.
Every cent and penny of money donated via Non-Believers Giving Aid will be forwarded to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders – and if you are in the UK and you complete the Gift Aid Declaration along with your donation, we will pass that on in its entirety too.
We urge you to give generously in support of this much needed humanitarian relief effort. Thank you for your support.
Please click on the link to the right or go here now if you’d like to give. Thanks.
The Center for Inquiry needs our help
Many of you may have heard that CFI is having a little budget issue due to a disheartening turn of events. Below is the full press release from Ronald Lindsay, Barry Karr, and Tom Flynn
For many years, an anonymous donor has provided very generous support to the Council for Secular Humanism, an affiliate of the Center for Inquiry (CFI). In recent years, this donor has given $800,000 annually. This sum is equivalent to about 25% of the annual combined public support for CFI and its two operating affiliates, Council and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).
It appears this donor will not be providing any gift this year. No information has been forthcoming from the donor concerning the donor’s intent, and repeated efforts to contact the donor have elicited no response.
In recent years, this major donation has been received within the first few months of the year. Through the first four months of this year, the deficit for our combined operations has been over $300,000, so the absence of the donation is already being felt. Moreover, without the donation, we are on pace to have a deficit in excess of $900,000. We cannot possibly maintain operations with a deficit of this magnitude.
Given the significance of this donation, and the silence of the donor, CFI and its affiliates have had no choice but to undertake immediate drastic reductions in expenditures. It has been extremely difficult to do so because last year we made a concerted, successful effort to streamline our operations and make them more efficient. In fact, we reduced costs by over $600,000, without materially affecting our work, with the exception of the suspension of The Jesus Project.
Now we are forced to cut down to the bone. We are making very painful decisions — we are laying off several employees, and, although programs will continue, we are moving out of our offices in Tampa and Washington, D.C. We are reluctant to take these measures, but as indicated, we have no choice.
We are trying to take as conservative an approach to this crisis as possible. Our cost-saving measures will save us only about $120,000 in 2010 and about $330,000 in 2011. We are reluctant to slash more because of the adverse impact further reductions would have both on our programs and our staff.
But this means that if we are to sustain our operations and avoid further reductions, we need our supporters to rally behind us. Given the extraordinary situation, we need an extraordinary outpouring of support.
Religious dogma and pseudoscience are not going away. Today, more than ever, there is a need to defend science, secularism, and humanist values. Together, CFI, CSI, and the Council do more to advance humanism and science than any other organization.
And together, the supporters of CFI, CSI, and the Council can ensure that this important work continues.
Please click here to make a donation to the Center for Inquiry. You can also click here to specifically donate to the Washington, D.C. CFI (my “local”).
Come and see Christopher Hitchens Live
If you live in the Washington, D.C. area (or like me, live two and a half hours away) you should seriously consider coming out to listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about his soon to be released memoir Hitch-22: A Memoir on Sunday, June 13, 2010. This event is sponsored by the Center for Inquiry:
English-born and American by adoption, bohemian, all atheist and partly Jewish, Christopher Hitchens has held to a consistent thread of principle whether opposing war in Vietnam or supporting intervention in Iraq. As a foreign correspondent in some of the world’s nastiest places, a lecturer and teacher and an esteemed literary critic, Hitchens manifests a style that is ironic, witty, and tough-minded while his contradictions contain multitudes.
Christopher Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England and worked in Britain as book reviewer for the Times and chief foreign correspondent for the Daily Express. After emigrating to the United States in 1981, he wrote the “Minority Report” column for The Nation. Since 1992, he has been columnist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair and, at different times, Washington editor and columnist for Harper’s magazine and American columnist and correspondent for the Spectator, the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement, Sunday Today, and the Sunday Correspondent. Hitchens writes regularly for the Atlantic Monthly and Slate, and is the author of God is Not Great, Letters to a Young Contrarian and Why Orwell Matters.
Christopher Hitchens will be interviewed by Austin Dacey, author of the The Secular Conscience and former United Nations representative for the Center for Inquiry.
The event runs from 6pm to 8pm at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, 600 I Street, NW, Washington, D.C. Get your tickets here and while you’re at it, consider becoming a Friend of the Center. After all, I’m one!
Have we got a video? Richard Dawkins – Absolute Morality
Richard Dawkins – Absolute Morality, thanks to @MrRudyRude.
Adam Savage: Food for the Eagle
If you’ve not read Adam Savage’s speech to the Harvard Humanist Society, here you go.
Good evening.
I hope you don’t mind, but I’m going to read my speech from my new iPad.
Yep. I’m not only a humanist, I’m also an early adopter.
I want to start by saying that, to me, any discourse from me about how one can live a moral existence without religion or the church would sound improperly defensive. That there’s an opposite to be defended is absurd and based on a provably false premise. So let’s dispense with that.
(To be clear: I’m referring to the humanist axiom “Good without God,” whereby “good” means morality. It’s provably false that there exists no morality outside of religion, therefore the statement sounds defensive to me.)
By what route does anyone come to believe what they believe? We all like to imagine that it’s based on a set of logical facts, but it’s often a much more circuitous route.
For me it was pretty simple. I’m actually the fourth generation in my family to have no practical use for the church, or God, or religion. My children continue this trend.
Here are a few things I’ve learned.
Prayer doesn’t work because someone out there is listening, it works because someone in here is listening. I’ve paid attention. I’ve pictured what I want to happen in my life. I’ve meditated extensively on my family, my future, my past actions and what did and didn’t work for me about them. I’ve looked hard at problems and thought hard about their solutions.
See, I order my life by the same mechanism that I use to build things. I cannot proceed to move tools around in the real world until my brain has a clear picture in it of what I’m building. The same goes for my life. I’ve tried to pay attention. I’ve tried to picture the way I want things to be, and I’ve noticed that when I had a clear picture, things often turned out the way I wanted them to.
I’ve concluded by this that someone is paying attention—I’ve concluded that it’s me. I’ve noticed that if I’m paying attention to those around me, to myself, to my surroundings, then that is the very definition of empathy. I’ve noticed that when I pay attention, I’m less selfish, I’m happier—and that the inverse holds true as well.
I think one of the defining moments of adulthood is the realization that nobody’s going to take care of you. That you have to do the heavy lifting while you’re here. And when you don’t, well, you suffer the consequences. At least I have. (And in the empirical study I’m performing about interacting with the universe, I am unfortunately the only test subject I have complete access to, so my data is, as they say, self-selected.) While nobody’s going to take care of us, it’s incumbent upon us to take care of those around us. That’s community.
The fiction of continuity and stability that your parents have painted for you is totally necessary for a growing child. When you realize that it’s not the way the world works, it’s a chilling moment. It’s supremely lonely.
So I understand the desire for someone to be in charge. (As a side note, I believe that the need for conspiracy theories is similar to the need for God.) We’d all like our good and evil to be like it is in the movies: specific and horrible, easy to defeat. But it’s not. It’s banal.
There’s a quote I love: “Evil is a little man afraid for his job.” I always thought some famous author said it, but I asked my 200,000 followers on Twitter today, and it turns out that Roy Scheider said it in Blue Thunder.
No one is in charge. And honestly, that’s even cooler.
The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don’t need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It’s not just an idea, it’s reality. We’re discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.
The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable. Truly unfathomable. But it is logical. We don’t know all the steps in that logic, but we’re learning more about it every day. Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.
As far as I can see, the three main intolerant religions in the world aren’t helping in that mission.
For all their talk of charity and knowledge, that they close their eyes to so much—to science, to birth control education, to abuses of power by some of their leaders, to evolution as provable and therefore factual (the list is staggering)—illustrates a wide scope of bigotry.
Now, just to be clear. If you want to believe, or find solace in believing, that someone or something set these particular dominoes in motion—a cosmic finger tipping the balance and then leaving everything else to chance—I can’t say anything to that. I don’t know.
Though a primary mover is the most complex and thus (given Occam’s razor) the least likely of all possible solutions to the particular problem of how we got here, I can’t prove it true or false, and there’s nothing to really discuss about it.
If Daniel Dennett is right— that there’s a human genetic need for religion— then I’d like to imagine that my atheism is proof of evolutionary biology in action.
There may be no purpose, but its always good to have a mission. And I know of one fine allegory for an excellent mission should you choose to charge yourself with one: Carlos Castaneda’s series of books about his training with a Yaqui indian mystic named Don Juan. There’s a lot of controversy about these books being represented as nonfiction. But if you dispense with that representation, and instead take their stories as allegories, they’re quite lovely.
At the end of The Eagle’s Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there’s no point to existence. That we’re given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call “The Eagle,” named for it’s cold, killer demeanor. And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.
He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they’re granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible. This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one’s life.
And that, to me, is a fine mission.
Thank you.
Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage were selected by the organization as this year’s recipient of the Annual Oustanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism because they “take on the task of separating truth from urban legend.” Previous winners of the award are Sir Salman Rushdie, Greg Graffin and Joss Whedon.
Who Would Start A Religion?
philhellenes is one of my favorite YouTubers. He was recently made much more popular from the Laugh at Islam YouTube video, which sadly has been taken down. If you have a few minutes, I recommend you watch the video below which sheds a little light on the humanistic qualities of the invention of religion, and how what may have been a great comfort to primitive peoples can eventually become a dangerous strain on humanity. The sentiment in this video reminds me of the recent Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying, and the touching scene where he “invents” heaven to comfort is frightened dying mother.
Religion had a great purpose once, to explain away the unexplainable. But we are now living in a world where a great deal of the mysteries of the universe have been solved, and those mysteries which have not yet been solved are dangling at the edge of scientists’ fingertips.
A good time was had by all
This past weekend I had the opportunity to meet some amazing fellow skeptics and nonbelievers in Washington, D.C. while attending two exciting events at the Center for Inquiry (D.C.). To those of you who do not know, CFI is a fantastic nonpartisan, nonprofit organization attempting to “foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values.”
D.C. is not that close to me, but close enough to make a special day of it, despite the torrential downpour I drove through to get there on time. Not only was I excited about the two events planned, but I was also really eager to finally meet @briandgregory, @skeptonya and @brucefp who were also expected to be there.
The first event was a three hour workshop on Scientific Paranormal Investigations hosted by Ben Radford.
Benjamin Radford is a Research Fellow with the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, columnist for LiveScience.com, and author of five books and hundreds of articles on skepticism, investigation, and the paranormal. He will share his experience and insights gained over a decade of first-hand field investigations of mysterious phenomena. Drawing from dozens of case studies involving monsters, psychics, and ghosts, Ben will explain the step-by-step process in investigations, including critical thinking, evaluating unusual claims, interviewing eyewitnesses, and conducting field experiments.
The three hours went by quickly as we learned several techniques used to scientifically investigate paranormal incidents, such as exposing logical fallacies and unwarranted claims. Radford went into detail on two recent investigations he was involved in, one of which was the examination of the “best” photographic evidence for the Lake Champlain legend of Champ the lake monster. After careful rational inspection, Radford and fellow investigator Joe Nickell, were able to proclaim the photo of Champ was probably and logically nothing more than a floating log.
The second event was a kick off for a local Independent Investigations Group. Jim Underdown, the CFI Los Angeles Executive Director, and Brian Hart, senior Independent Investigations Group Steering Committee member, discussed how exactly their group works, and how we can begin to form a chapter of our own.
After both events most of us that had gathered trotted off in search of food and alcohol, and eventually found a restaurant willing and able to accommodate such a large group of us on such short notice. We ate and drank at the Fusion Grill, and then later a smaller group of us had drinks at Mr. Henry’s down the street from the CFI office.
It was a fantastic day, aside from the rain. But most of all I found it incredibly refreshing to be in the company of like-minded people. Aside from Twitter, I’ve never really been surrounded by such down-to-earth, intelligent, friendly people like I was on Saturday (well except when it’s just my husband and I in a room alone together 
). It gives you a little hope that there are more of us out there.
Speaking of which…anyone interested in working on a Skepticamp in the Baltimore/Washington area soon?
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Don’t feed the trolls
