Friendly Atheist by @hemantsblog » 2008 » June

06.10.08

A Few Conference Highlights

Posted in GLBT, General, Secular Coalition for America at 10:23 pm by Hemant Mehta

While there were many fantastic speakers at the World Humanist Congress, this was the first time that most of my personal highlights took place outside the lecture halls and breakaway sessions.

(Lobbying Congress on behalf of the rights of the non-religious and church/state separation makes for some entertaining stories.)

Some of the more memorable moments from the weekend:

Some guy came up to the Secular Student Alliance booth I was sitting at… I looked up and saw Philip Pullman, the man who wrote His Dark Materials trilogy (which includes The Golden Compass)!
AHH!

I spoke to him about whether the second and third movies are coming out. He said it wasn’t likely, adding that the little girl who played the main character in The Golden Compass was getting older by the day. He disagreed with the notion that the movie “bombed” — it didn’t made a lot in the US (~$70m) but it made a considerable amount overseas (~300m). He seemed angry at the movie studio for not going through with the trilogy. I would be, too, I guess.

I met my Congresswoman, Judy Biggert (and not just her staff members). She’s a Republican. That said, she agreed with the Secular Coalition for America on the two issues I was there to lobby for — stopping proselytizing by military chaplains as well as not re-authorizing the DC voucher program — so all was well:

Barack Obama wasn’t able to meet with us (he’s apparently “busy” or something…). But that didn’t stop me from ogling and petting and bowing down to the plaque just outside his office.

When I looked across the hall from Senator Obama’s office, I saw a sign about gay marriage sitting in the office window of some (presumably Republican) senator:

One job I had was to run a panel discussion on the topic: “What are the best ways to get people to value scientific and critical inquiry, naturalism, democracy, secularism, and human based ethics?”
Rapper Greydon Square couldn’t make it because he was being detained elsewhere… however, (left to right in the pic below) Jeff Nall, Kelly O’Connor, Matt Cherry, and Greg Epstein were fantastic in answering the questions.

As you can see from the pre-panel pictures below (courtesy of Rebecca), I was trying to be very serious while the panelists kept it real.

There were some great presentations made, too, and I’ll write about a couple of these soon enough.

[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]

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Raising Freethinkers

Posted in General at 6:00 pm by Hemant Mehta

Dale McGowan‘s new book, Raising Freethinkers, won’t be released until early next year.

But if you start today, you can conceive and produce a child around the time the book comes out in late February.

If that’s not possible, you can at least see the cover now:

I like it!

My only issue is that the cover isn’t exclusively non-religious like the cover for Parenting Beyond Belief was — on that cover, the parent and child were decidedly not praying to some god.

In other words, I could imagine a Christian child or Muslim child examining a flower. The picture doesn’t scream “atheist.”

I’m sure the activities mentioned inside the book, though, will be unique to non-religious parents.

[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]

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There’s a Revolution brewing in Jesusland

Posted in Mike Clawson at 5:24 pm by Mike Clawson

And Zack Exley wants you to know about it.

Zack is a left-wing activist and organizer who writes for the Huffington Post and at his own blog, Revolution in Jesusland. And what is Jesusland, you ask? Well, perhaps you’ve already seen the internet meme that redraws the map of North America thusly:

As Exley puts it:

The image was a hit because it expressed a sinking feeling in the hearts of many progressives that America had been taken over by an incomprehensible cult of ignorance, intolerance and hate—a cult they knew as “evangelical” or “born again” Christianity.

But what he wants us to know is that there are some radical changes taking place among evangelicals. He writes:

…there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.

…

From mega churches to tiny country churches, evangelical Christians are rediscovering the “gospel of the God of the oppressed.” Perhaps the most surprising among these are the suburban, white evangelicals who are stepping outside of their comfort zones to “get into relationship” with the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, prisoners—the people of whom Jesus said,

Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me….Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. —Matthew 25

They are building houses for and teaching job skills to homeless people, they are creating tutoring programs for kids in failing schools, they’re paying health care bills and sending off rent checks for people living on poverty wages—and there’s even a movement afoot among these people to move their young families out of wealthy suburbs and into forsaken inner city neighborhoods, putting their kids into broken and often violent public schools. And in their Sunday services and Bible studies they are questioning the very foundations of modern American capitalist ideology.

So why should secular progressives care about what is happening among evangelical Christians?

By learning to work together with “progressive” evangelicals, secular progressives will stand a better chance of achieving their goals and also learn an enormous amount from these remarkable people and their organizations that will help secular progressives strengthen their own movement.

Even Exley himself has been caught up by this movement. In a recent post at Sojourner’s God’s Politics blog he wrote:

Over the last few years, I’ve gotten acquainted with a movement of Christians that is vibrant, enormous, and yet refuses to let itself be named or to take credit for any of its accomplishments. Some have named subsets or aspects of the movement — for example, “The New Monastics,” “The Emergent Church,” “Ordinary Radicals,” and even “Revolutionaries.” But there are millions of people swept up into this movement who have never even heard those phrases.

I grew up an atheist and a left-wing activist/organizer. I got a view into this movement only when I married a Christian and started going to church (the only way it was ever going to happen) a few years ago. When I first saw thousands of upper-middle-class, white, Southern suburbanites respond passionately to a sermon titled “Two Fists in the Face of Empire,” I knew that something incredible must be going on. Afterward, a minute of Googling revealed that the U.S. was already full of churches preaching that same “anti-empire” gospel — both mega- and mini-churches, suburban, rural, and urban.

…

I started weeping in worship services myself when I started to see what this movement was actually doing in people’s lives. It was taking very isolated, individualistic middle-class suburban people like me and breaking them open in all kinds of ways. Even though I had spent a lot of time working as a community and union organizer, I had always been careful to keep my life totally unentangled by the immediate needs and troubles of the people I was organizing — that’s what I was most comfortable with, and it’s also what I was taught to do by all my mentors.

I was organizing for “big” solutions and staying away from all the “little” stuff that to me just seemed too messy and complicated to ever solve anyway. But these young Christians I was meeting were “falling in love with each other across class and racial lines,” and wrestling with demons of poverty, addiction, community violence, family violence, sexual abuse, depression, hopeless schools, and all the other troubles that plague American life. They were “making redemptive history” by healing wounds and repairing families and communities one at a time. It’s really the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve had the opportunity to witness it up close in a dozen states and scores of giant mega-churches and tiny house groups.

At any rate, Zack’s blog is, in his words, “A guided tour for secular progressives” into this new Great Awakening among evangelicals. His goal is to help other people like him see that there is more going on among heartland Christians than what the media stereotypes and shocking stories of the extremes would seem to indicate. I’d definitely recommend giving him a read.

Besides the articles I’ve already linked above, I’d also recommend a two part series he recently did for the Huffington Post about Shane Claiborne and his new book (together with Chris Haw) Jesus for President. They are:

Jesus for President, a Book Review for Atheists; Part 1, What is Shane Claiborne?
Jesus for President, a Review for Atheists — Part 2: God’s Story

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Barack: Stop Playing with the Monkey God

Posted in General at 3:00 pm by Hemant Mehta

Why is Barack Obama carrying all sorts of $&%# in his pocket for good luck?

It makes him look like Dennis Kucinich…

Caption from Time: Amongst the things that Barack Obama carries for good luck are a bracelet belonging to a soldier deployed in Iraq, a gambler’s lucky chit, a tiny monkey god and a tiny Madonna and child.

“Tiny monkey god”? That’s Hanuman, who, in the Hindu scripture the Ramayana, led “a monkey army to fight the demon King Ravana and rescue a kidnapped princess.”

Which, by my count, makes Obama Christian, Muslim, and Hindu…

Got it.

Hanuman’s making news for other reasons, too.

He was just “named official chairman of the recently opened Sardar Bhagat Singh College of Technology and Management in northern India.”

Yep. You read that correctly.

The position comes with an incense-filled office, a desk and a laptop computer. Four chairs will be placed facing the empty seat reserved for the chairman and all visitors must enter the office barefoot, said Vivek Kangdi, the school’s vice chairman.

…

“When we were looking for a chairman for our institution, we scanned many big names in the field of technology and management. Ultimately, we settled for Lord Hanuman, as none was bigger than him,” Kangdi said.

This means the invisible, non-existent monkey God gets more perks in his profession than you do in yours.

Probably gets paid more, too.

Maria shares my own feelings on the matter:

You might think that I, being Indian, would be embarrassed for my home country. Nope. Not me. Why should I care that an institute of higher learning in India is sabotaging its duty and keeping flocks of young Indians mired in ignora–…. AAAAAAAAAAAAARGH! YOU STUPID BASTARDS! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Sorry.

Why is this bothering me so much? It’s just a monkey, after all.

Of course!

Monkeys like bananas. And bananas are an atheist’s worst nightmare!

My world has come full circle.

Everything makes sense now…

[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]

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