I was in the suburbs a fair amount of time during the AAA convention, being a “handler” for Jeff Tayler and Inna Shevchenko, so I didn’t take a ton of pictures of the meeting itself. Fortunately, Mark Gura did, and posted a lot of them on his Facebook page’s AAA album). I’ll put his photos first, and mine toward the bottom.
Our master of ceremonies for the two days was none other than our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, played by Harry Shaughnessy. He had some kind of mechanized skateboard and glided around like a divine being.
These were all speakers at the meeting. First, Dale McGowan:
Dave Silverman, president of the American Atheists:
Herb Silverman, who debated Dave Silverman in a “Silverman vs. Silverman Smackdown”, the topic being “Can you call yourself a Jewish atheist?” Herb said yes, Dave no. Although people seemed to think that Dave got the upper hand, I’m not going to stop calling myself a secular atheistic Jew.
Left to right: JT Eberhard, Richard Hayes,Hugh Mann and Tim Branin.
Mandisa Lateefah Thomas:
Richard Hayes (my photo):
Outgoing AAA President Jana Weaver and her husband Richard Halasz (they were married by Dan Barker at an FFRF convention).
And my photos. The hotel is very near the Atlanta airport, and since I got up early I could see the planes stacked up to land before dawn. Here they make their final approach as the sun comes up:
Below are the strident atheist Jeff Tayler of The Atlantic (and author of Sunday Secular Sermons on Salon), and his colleague and friend Inna Shevchenko, head of the activist organization FEMEN (Jeff wrote about Inna and FEMEN in his book Topless Jihadis: Inside FEMEN: The World’s Most Provocative Atheist Group. They’ve both had fascinating lives and both gave great talks. Inna got a standing ovation at two of the three talks she gave in the area.
Jeff and Inna doing a joint Q&A after their separate talks at the Southern Crescent Freethinkers meeting. I can’t find a YouTube video of Jeff talking about religion, but there’s a recent one of Inna giving a TED talk, “I will not stop speaking out loud.”
This was only Inna’s second visit to the U.S. (she’s originally from Ukraine, and is now a political refugee in Paris), and Jeff’s first visit to the American Deep South (he’s lived most of his life overseas, the last 23 years in Moscow). I had great pleasure in introducing them an echt Southern barbecue meal at The Barbecue Kitchen, which I highlighted the other day. We all had chopped BBQ pork, with three vegetable “sides”. Inna also essayed sweet tea, the “table wine of the south.” And they both cleaned their plates. (The place is good!)
The night before that, we exposed our visitors to another Southern food experience at Mary Mac’s Tearoom, a famous place to eat down-home Southern food in a fancier atmosphere. It’s an Atlanta institution. Here we all are about to chow down (the waiter took the photo). I had chicken and dumplings with tomato pie (a fantastic side) and squash souffle. And sweet tea, of course. At the right is Melissa Dawn, the brand-new president of the Atheist Alliance of America.
The bread basket at Mary Mac’s includes corn muffins, cinnamon rolls, and yeasty dinner rolls. Uncharacteristically, I forgot to take pictures of our main courses!
From that angle, Shaughnessy looks quite like a former French Prime Minister and dominant politician for decades: Jacques Chirac. Disguised as Jesus, it makes it even more hilarious.
Hotel function rooms all look the same! 😉
Regarding FEMEN & their struggle – new research says MEN are ALSO better off in more equal societies –
http://jmm.sagepub.com/content/17/5/515.abstract
Nice to see the picture of Richard Halasz and Jana Weaver. They were at the FFRF convention a couple of weeks back.
Richard and I share in the history of getting Milwaukee ethnic festivals to stop the practice of offering Catholics free admission on after attending Mass on Sunday mornings. (FFRF represented us against Mexican, Irish, and Italian festivals.) Now, either nobody gets in free after Mass (Mexican) or everyone gets in free on Sunday mornings (Irish and Italian).
I always wondered what Taylor looked like…quite dapper.
And yes, Jews are my homies…they are about as religious as the band structure in crystalline carbon.
Well, some a ridiculously religious (and obnoxiously so – see those that won’t sit next to women on planes) but the ones that are friends with me tend to be atheists. I do have a couple non atheist Jew friends but they are very liberal. 🙂
I guess I should confess: I never met a Jew who was not a functional atheist. Albeit, I have not met this guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Prager
“Left to right: JT Eberhart, Richard Hayes, Hugh Mann and Hugh Mann.”
So, it was a hughmannism conference?
/@
😀
Ugh.
The second ‘Hugh Mann’ is Secular Nation podcaster Tim Branin.
Inna is “originally from Ukraine, and is now a political refugee in Paris.” Fleeing from whom?
Sorry! I couldn’t resist.
Baggettes!
I would have loved to eavesdrop on the conversations of the surrounding tables who no doubt were eavesdropping on your conversations.
edited to add – I mean at the restaurants. As a meek and hungry atheist, I’ve always focused entirely on the food at bbq joints. I would let the waiter baptise me if the cornbread is good enough.
That sunset picture looks eerily similar to the Quebec health card.
Looks like you had a lot of good atheism to soak up. Thanks for sharing- I’m glad it was held in the south. They are in desperate need of secularism down there.
Nice to see how things are different there, and the same too.
And that’s fine — Herb Silverman made a fair case for doing that. But just as there are atheists who call atheism a ‘religion,’ equate ‘God’ with nature, use ‘spiritual’ as a secular term, and insist that ‘free will’ is consistent with determinism, the significant thing isn’t really whether or not someone can use a term a certain way — but whether or not it makes best sense that they should. Much as I admire Herb, I think Dave managed to flip my agnosticism towards the ‘no’ side on this one.
But it was a friendly, albeit lively, debate. One of the highlights.
OK, I have to ask, did you dance with Harry, aka Jesus the Christ? He said he danced with an evolutionary biologist(he may have said he “asked” one to dance with him, I don’t recall exactly!).
Harry is a great guy, who’s very, very funny. He’s well known for his costumes!
I’ve been to Mary Mac’s tea room. Good stuff. It’s nice to know that my birthplace serves as an oasis of secular reasoning in the deep south. Unfortunately, the same can not be said of the region I’m heading to for Thanksgiving, about 50 miles northeast of there. I’m only half kidding when I say arriving in the area with New York license plates makes me a bit nervous…
I also consider myself a secular atheistic Jew. I have disagreements with David’s argument from what I understand of it, but beyond that, I don’t see any negative implications of atheists with Jewish heritage referring to themselves as Jews that makes this argument anything more than semantic. I feel my life is more enjoyable by immersing myself in Jewish community and(Ashkenazic) culture. I also feel that referring to myself as a Jew is one way of paying respect to my ancestors, who were persecuted for their Jewishness yet still fought for it. I don’t see anything wrong with this.
I think Silverman thinks that if atheists say they’re Jewish, that somehow gives Jews the right to claim that we’re not really atheists, and thus weakens the “movement.” I don’t see that: I, for one, have never been claimed by religionists as one of theirs. Plus there are so FEW open secular Jews that the effect, if any, would be small. Finally, Silverman thinks that the definition of a “real Jew” is someone who holds to the Torah: the first five books of the Old Testament. But even many reform Jewish rabbis probably don’t hold to the Torah, or see it as a metaphor, so Silverman would have to tell these rabbis that they’re not really Jews.
I agree, I don’t see the “secular Jew” label weakening the atheist movement at all. I’m very open about being a secular Jew (I largely share your views on religion), and no one has ever told me that I’m any less of an atheist because of this. If anything, I feel like this should be encouraged,. Learning about the whole concept of being a secular Jew made me feel much more comfortable about becoming an atheist, because it gave me a way to abandon the religion while keeping my Jewish identity, which is important to me. I’m sure other potential secular Jews can be more easily brought away from the religion if they know they can still keep their Jewish identity.
An interesting note is that I’ve actually met a significantly high number of open secular Jews. However, I’m 22, so I’m sure that to some extent this is correlated with my generation being less religious as a whole compared to yours. Anecdotally, I joined a Jewish fraternity, and although we don’t define it as a religious organization, at least half of us were atheists with Jewish heritage. Even a lot of the reform Jews I know who are my age either have doubts about God or don’t pay any attention to the actual contents of the Torah.
Lastly, I think it’s a bit silly to have a definition of “Jew” that excludes Rabbis.
Im still giddy about getting to see Jeff and Inna speak. Glad you enjoyed your visit to our part of the world.