The Freedom from Religion Foundation convention

October 10, 2011 • 7:22 am

Last weekend I was in Hartford, Connecticut for the annual convention of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, a really great organization devoted to enforcing the separation of church and state in America. Unlike some atheist organizations, they actually do something beyond holding meetings featuring the same tired group of jet-set atheist speakers and selling each other lapel pins (sorry; I haven’t had my coffee yet). The FFRF mandate is this:

The nonprofit Freedom From Religion Foundation works to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism, and to promote the constitutional principle of separation between church and state. The Foundation is the nation’s largest association of freethinkers (atheists, agnostics and skeptics) with over 17,000 members.

The organization, now headed by the tireless duo of Dan Barker (ex-preacher and author of Godless) and Annie Laurie Gaylor (author of several books, including Betrayal of Trust: Clergy’s Abuse of Children), is perhaps most famous for mounting and supporting court cases that defend the First Amendment.  Their most visible recent victory was obtaining a federal court decision ruling that the National Day of Prayer was unconstitutional.  In one of his more disappointing actions, President Obama is appealing this ruling.  He’s clearly in the wrong.

Anyway, on to the convention. Hartford is the capital of Connecticut, and here’s the state capitol building near the convention center:

The confab began with an optional visit to the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford. Twain (whose real name was Samuel Clemens), was of course an outspoken atheist; here’s one of his many quotes on disbelief:

A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell — mouths mercy, and invented hell — mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!

Here’s Twain’s wonderful house (you can take a virtual tour here), where he wrote, among other things, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He lived there from 1874 to 1891, when he had to sell it because he was bankrupt from bad investments:

The conference formally opened on Saturday morning, with Dan and Annie Laurie reporting on the year’s accomplishments, including a rise in membership to 17,000 from only 5,000 a few years ago. Here is the indefatigable duo:

Dan, an accomplished musician who wrote several well-known Christian songs when he was a preacher, entertained the crowd by playing the piano and singing his newer heathen compositions during breaks:

Among other things it did this year, the FFRF mounted a series of bus and billboard ads that were displayed around the U.S. This “Come out of the closet” campaign features both famous people and “normal” American proudly displaying their godlessness.

Here are a few photos I took from the screen, but you can see the whole series at this page, and you can actually make and submit your own billboard design (with your photo and slogan) here.  (Do it! If your design is really good, it might be chosen for use on an actual billboard.)

Science writer Natalie Angier, author of the wonderful essay “My God problem“:

This is one of my favorites:

And of course we can’t omit Le Randi, who had a great quote:

Friday evening featured two talks.  In the first, Steve Pinker talked about his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. As always, he was eloquent and sported a natty tailored suit, though his hair seems to have become somewhat tamer:

(Before Steve’s talk, Dan played a new song he’d written in honor of the “Power Couple”, for Steve is married to the next speaker, Rebecca Goldstein. Dan’s song was about how their romance was due not to some divine force or miracle, but to a chance combination of genes, environments, and hormones.)

Rebecca gave a lovely talk on her own background (a strict Jewish religious education), which she overcame to become a philosopher and MacArthur prize winner, and also spoke about her latest book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.  She was at the convention to receive the annual “Freethought Heroine Award“. Apparently Steve came along as a freebie.

Rebecca’s talk was followed by cake and coffee in the foyer.

On Saturday, the morning was occupied by awards to students and their own talks, which were very moving. These young people (Dylan Galos and Jessica Alquist) bravely stood up against the incursion of religion in their schools.  The Freethinker of the Year Award was also given to Hawaiian Mitch Kahle (see Kahle here getting roughed up in the Hawaii legislature for objecting to an “official” prayer).

There were a few items on sale, including some “de-baptismal certificates,” signed by Dan (still an ordained minister), officially revoking the baptism of a Christian (name to be filled in).  Bumper stickers were also on offer:

Saturday afternoon featured three talks.  Joseph Taylor, once a famous Christian rock musician (almost an oxymoron, no?) recounted his deconversion, and Steve Trunk received the “Atheist in a Foxhole” award given to veterans who fight First Amendment violations.  Steve is an activist who opposed the existence of the Mount Soledad cross, a large concrete cross (combined with a veteran’s memorial) that sits on state land in San Diego, California.

Finally, I received the “Emperor Has No Clothes” Award for “plain speaking on the shortcomings of religion.” This was really an honor given that previous recipients included Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Steve Pinker, Janeane Garofalo, Natalie Angier, Penn and Teller, and George Carlin.  Like Groucho Marx, I don’t feel like I belong in that august club, but I did my best with a 45-minute talk called “The Odd Couple: Why Science and Religion Can’t Cohabit.”  It seemed well received, and I signed copies of my book afterwards.  Unfortunately, the talks weren’t filmed (I would love that one to be public) and I have no pictures since I was giving the talk. I’ll post the pictures that the FFRF took later.

The award was accompanied by a nice check and a heavy, gold-plated statue—made by the same people who make the Oscar statuettes—of a naked emperor.  It’s being sent to Chicago since it’s too heavy for me to tote around on my travels. I have to say that this will be my proudest possession:

Saturday evening featured a banquet, with a toothsome dinner followed by an auction of “clean money” by Annie Laurie, Dan, and the FFRF Staff.

“Clean money” is U.S. currency printed before 1957. You may not realize that the motto “In God We Trust,” which appears on all U.S. banknotes—and clearly violates the U.S. Constitution—was added to our currency only in 1957.  Various people had donated “clean” pre-1957 banknotes (from $1 to $100) to the FFRF, and these were raffled off as a way of getting donations for the organization.
Annie Laurie announces a big winner:

The evening’s highlight was a song-and-patter presentation by Charles Strouse, a famous Broadway composer who wrote, among other things, the music for “Annie” and “Bye Bye Birdie.” He also wrote the famous song “Those Were the Days,” sung by Archie and Edith Bunker at the beginning of each episode of “All in the Family.”

Strouse, now 83, is an open atheist who also received an Emperor Has No Clothes Award. Here is he getting it from Dan and then raising it proudly:

Strouse then sat down at the Steinway and played some of his greatest hits, as well as telling anecdotes (some of them off-color) about his days on Broadway.

At one point during a song, he suddenly stopped and began laughing. “My wife has fallen asleep,” he said.  And sure enough, she had nodded off at the table.

Strouse finished with a rousing rendition of one of his best songs, “Tomorrow,” from the musical “Annie.”  (I think, though, that his best song is actually “Once Upon A Time,” from the little-known musical “All American.”  You can hear that lovely song, performed by Tony Bennett, here.)

Strouse’s rendition of “Tomorrow” was so spirited that it made me tear up. It is a wonderful song. I found a YouTube version of Strouse singing it, which gives you an idea of what we heard.

It was a wonderful evening and a wonderful convention. Many thanks to Annie Laurie and Dan for inviting me and conferring upon me such an honor, but especially for running such a fantastic organization.  Join the FFRF now!

2011 Nobel Prize in Economics

October 10, 2011 • 4:42 am

And in other boring news, the 2011 “Nobel Prize” in Economics (it’s not really a Nobel, it’s “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” goes to  Thomas J. Sargent and Christopher A. Sims “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy”.

I’ve always thought this Johnny-come-lately prize was somewhat of a travesty.  Economics is not a hard science, but a social science, and they’ve already run out of famous economists to give it to. It’s not like economics advances so rapidly that they can even give a prize of this type on a yearly basis. (Apologies to Paul Krugman.)

 

The NYT checks in on Hitchens

October 10, 2011 • 3:29 am

Yesterday’s New York Times has a piece on Christopher Hitchens, his receipt of the Dawkins award at the atheist meetings in Houston, Texas, and a report on his work and his health.

It turns out that Hitchens is in Houston anyway, undergoing chemotherapy at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, where “he has turned his 12th-floor room into a temporary library and headquarters.” The Times continues:

Mr. Hitchens is gaunt these days, no longer barrel-chested. His voice is softer than it used to be, and for the second time since he began treatment, he has lost most of his hair. Once such an enthusiastic smoker that he would light up in the shower, he gave up cigarettes a couple of years ago. Even more inconceivable to many of his friends, Mr. Hitchens, who used to thrive on whiskey the way a bee thrives on nectar, hasn’t had a drink since July, when a feeding tube was installed in his stomach. “That’s the most depressing aspect,” he said. “The taste is gone. I don’t even want to. It’s incredible what you can get used to.”

NYT photo by Michael Stravato

We all know that Hitch is on the downslide, but he’s facing it with courage:

His main regret at the moment, Mr. Hitchens said, was that while he was keeping up with his many deadlines — for Slate, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair — he didn’t have the energy to also work on a book. He had recently come up with some new ideas about his hero, George Orwell, for example — among them that Orwell might have had Asperger’s — and he said he ought to include them in a revised edition of his 2002 book, “Why Orwell Matters.” He had also thought of writing a book about dying. “It could be called ‘What to Expect When You’re Expecting,’ ” he said, laughing.

Turning serious, he said, “I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.” He added: “I don’t know why I got so sick. Maybe it was the smokes, or maybe it’s genes. My father died of the same thing. It’s pointless getting into remorse.”

And he’s characteristically sardonic:

On balance, he reflected, the past year has been a pretty good one. He won a National Magazine Award, published “Arguably,” debated Tony Blair in front of a huge audience and added two states to the list of those he has visited. “I lack only the Dakotas and Nebraska,” he said, “though I may not get there unless someone comes up with some ethanol-based cancer treatment in Omaha.”

Well, at least I’ve beat the man at one thing: I’ve been to every state save North Dakota.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

—Dylan Thomas

h/t: John Danley

Singer lauds Pinker’s new book

October 9, 2011 • 11:58 am

At the Freedom From Religion Foundation convention in Hartford, Steve Pinker gave a very good 45-minute talk about his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. (I’ll have a fuller report on the FFRF meeting, with pictures, when I’m able to stay in one place for a bit.) As you probably know by now, the book’s thesis is that violence in our species has declined drastically since the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Steve documents that decline and then tries to explain it.

In today’s New York Times, philosopher Peter Singer gives the book a three-thumbs-up review (on the cover too!)  Snippets:

In 800 information-packed pages, Pinker also discusses a host of more specific issues. Here is a sample: What do we owe to the Enlightenment? Is there a link between the human rights movement and the campaign for animal rights? Why are homicide rates higher in the southerly states of this country than in northern ones? Are aggressive tendencies heritable? Could declines in violence in particular societies be attributed to genetic change among its members? How does a president’s I.Q. correlate with the number of battle deaths in wars in which the United States is involved? Are we getting smarter? Is a smarter world a better world?. . .

Against the background of Europe’s relatively peaceful period after 1815, the first half of the 20th century seems like a sharp drop into an unprecedented moral abyss. But in the 13th century, the brutal Mongol conquests caused the deaths of an estimated 40 million people — not so far from the 55 million who died in the Second World War — in a world with only one-seventh the population of the mid-20th century. The Mongols rounded up and massacred their victims in cold blood, just as the Nazis did, though they had only battle-axes instead of guns and gas chambers. A longer perspective enables us to see that the crimes of Hitler and Stalin were, sadly, less novel than we thought. . . .

Pinker argues that enhanced powers of reasoning give us the ability to detach ourselves from our immediate experience and from our personal or parochial perspective, and frame our ideas in more abstract, universal terms. This in turn leads to better moral commitments, including avoiding violence. It is just this kind of reasoning ability that has improved during the 20th century. He therefore suggests that the 20th century has seen a “moral Flynn effect, in which an accelerating escalator of reason carried us away from impulses that lead to violence” and that this lies behind the long peace, the new peace, and the rights revolution. . . .

“The Better Angels of Our Nature” is a supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.

You can’t get a much better review than that, and I’m happy for Steve.

Hitchens makes rare appearance in Texas

October 9, 2011 • 5:55 am

According to Chron.com, Christopher Hitchens showed up at the Texas Freethought Convention, where he appeared in a discussion with Richard Dawkins and received the Richard Dawkins Freethinker of the Year Award:

In introducing Hitchens and presenting him with the award that bears his name, Dawkins said that the old religious line that there are “no atheists in foxholes” is disproven daily by Christopher Hitchens.  Hitchens is dying and he knows it, but stares reality in the eye without blinking, Dawkins said.

Hitchens’ speech did not disappoint. He talked about his illness and noted that over the last year, he’d been coming to Houston regularly for treatment, presumably at MD Anderson Cancer Center. He was emphatic that though his “time” is rapidly approaching, he wouldn’t stop doing his best to shed light on the fraudulent claims made by religion, a line that brought the crowd to its feet.

There seems to be no more pretense about whether Hitchens will survive his cancer, a situation that’s ineffably sad.  And he’s looking a bit gaunt.  Still, he did something really nice:

Though he was asked a variety of questions from the audience, none appeared to elicit more interest than the one asked by eight-year-old Mason Crumpacker, who wanted to know what books she should read. In response, Hitchens first asked where her mother was and the girl indicated that she was siting beside her. He then asked to see them once the presentation was over so that he could give her a list.

As the event drew to a close, Mason and her mom, Anne Crumpacker of Dallas, followed him out. Surrounded by attendees wanting a glance of the famed author, Hitchens sat on a table just outside of the ballroom and spent about 15 minutes recommending books to Mason.

Mason should treasure that list, and I’d love to see it!

h/t: Grania Spingies

Nobel Laureate wins prize parking space

October 9, 2011 • 5:41 am

From  the University of California at Berkeley News Center, via Starts with a Bang, we learn that the one of the latest physics laureates, Saul Perlmutter (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Woody Allen), got an encomium far more valuable than the prize itself:

Inevitably, a reporter wondered when Perlmutter would get his Nobelist’s parking permit, one of the international prize’s notable campus perks.  “I was assuming today,” Perlmutter replied, adding that “the only reason to win a Nobel Prize is so that you can park on campus.”

In answer to the reporter’s question, the Chancellor leaped up and presented Perlmutter with an NL (Nobel Laureate) parking permit.

It’s not a joke, folks!:

And from Time Magazine, an article about how some Nobel Laureates spent their prize money. Not included in the list is Richard Feynman, who used his dosh to buy a beach house in Baja California.

h/t: Michael

Inter-Amish religious war!

October 9, 2011 • 5:11 am

OMG, even the Amish, peaceful as they seem, aren’t immune to religious warfare.  But instead of defenestration, they engage in depilation.

Alert reader Hempenstein noticed a report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette  that one sect of the Amish in Ohio has broken away from the others.  Members of the renegade sect are engaged in Bartkrieg, invading the homes of other Amish and hacking off their beards. The motivation? Faith, of course:

There have been only minor injuries. Each time, beards have been targeted.

“What they’ve been doing to everybody else is shaving the entire head and beard,” Mrs. Miller said. “We believe their intent was to do the same things here.

“They say this is to uncover sins, and it’s to straighten us out.”

Then, she continued, “They’ve been making threats they’re going to do worse things.”

One Amish man from Mechanicstown, who was working in Bergholz on Friday, said that about a year ago the members of the group shaved their own beards and hair.

“They were under the impression that would cleanse them before God,” said the young man, who asked that his name not be used.

BBC’s The Museum of Curiosity deals with religion (and zero and other topics)

October 9, 2011 • 4:38 am

by Matthew Cobb

I normally keep my guest posts here firmly limited to science – this is Jerry’s blog (sorry, website) and even if I generally agree with him on matters atheistic, the way he approaches them is very much his own. Today is a bit different – I thought WEIT readers round the world might appreciate this link to BBC Radio 4’s ‘The Museum of Curiosity’. This is a 30-minute comedy programme which invites guests to put various items into a non-existent Museum of Curiosity. In other words it’s an excuse for a bit of a chat, some odd facts and a few jokes.

Today’s episode (first broadcast last Monday) dealt – unusually – with the topic of religion. One of the guests, Dr Francesca Stavrakopoulou, is a Senior Lecturer in Theology from the University of Exeter in the UK. Unlike  most people interested in theology, Dr Stavrakopoulou is an atheist, and approaches the history of religion from a materialist basis, with an interest in the archaeology surrounding the bible (she had a three-part series on BBC2 earlier this year called The Bible’s Buried Secrets, which I’m afraid I didn’t see – she had a miniblog about this here).

Anyway, her views about religion are quite refreshing (Christianity monotheistic? Think again. Yaweh used to have a wife, that talking snake was a good guy etc etc). I won’t spoil things, I don’t think, by saying that her contribution to the Museum is God.

Also on the programme is comic Jimmy Carr, who I don’t find very funny most of the time, but appeared in a new light when he described his abandonment of Catholicism (despite his accent, he’s Irish) and his realisation that there is no god. And writer Alex Bellos talks about numbers and zero and all that.

You can listen to the programme here, but you’ll have to be quick – the BBC will block access tomorrow evening UK time! The first 15 minutes are probably the most informative.