Ask An Atheist

This week, Mike, Sam, after a long hiatus Jeremy answer emails and take a call or two.

Today, a lot of snow fell on us here in Tacoma, and for the first time in a long while, the phrase ‘snow day’ has meaning for me thanks to Becky’s teaching career. Even so, we were doing more than staying indoors, watching RiffTrax and playing Minecraft.

Well, okay, it was mostly that. But if you happened to check our website yesterday, you would have been greeted with this message:

SOPA an PIPA threaten free speech,
even for Ask an Atheist.
It may seem odd that a show like ours would participate in
this movement. However, we believe that the freedom of the
Internet, however defined, is a large part of what makes
our modern atheism visibility movement strong.

This generation of copyright protectionism threatens that freedom.
It also places the United States on equal censorship footing
with dogmatic and theocratic nations we have repeatedly denounced on
the show.

We are also sufficiently familiar with religious privilege in this
nation to know that the fledgling atheist media will get it in the neck
long before the titanic Christian dogma factory has to concern itself.
Specifically, the vigilante protection clauses of these
bills gives religiously motivated institutions carte blanche to attack
the message of Ask an Atheist, regardless of our 1st Amendment protections.

Therefore, we stand with thousands of other Internet resources
including Google, Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Reddit by voluntarily removing
our presence from the Internet today, January 18th. Normal services
will return shortly.

For more information, please see
this website.

If you want to see it in all of it’s glory, check it out here.

While we normally shy away from political topics such as this one, this is a topic which I believe transcends most political ideologies, and clearly intersects with the message of Ask an Atheist, as we say above.   Participating in activities such as these should be a rare thing for us, and I welcome any feedback you have about our participation, positive or negative.

The good news is that the stunt seems to have done the job.  Becky pointed me to this Ars Technica article pointing out that as of today, PIPA has 18 new opponents, 7 of whom are former co-sponsors.  I won’t pretend that we had a hand in this, but I like to think that we helped.   I’d also hope that we’ve helped to raise awareness about aspects of these bills that potentially hurt our ability to be godless citizens of the United States.

For those of you who are fans of irony, as I am, it has recently come to light that Representative Lamar Smith, author of SOPA, is violating copyright law on his own campaign site.

I want to thank Mike and Becky for giving me the go ahead to do this terrible thing to our website for a day.   Not only would these bills hurt Ask an Atheist, the freedom of the Internet and free exchange of information in an open cultural context is personally very important to me.

(for the record, fellow geeks, I don’t think Becky’s a regular reader of Ars Technica.   or at least she never lets on if she is.)

This week’s look at the funny, the scary and just plain weird passages in humanity’s holy texts comes from listener Mark from Kent, WA. This week, we’re steering away from the usual sources like the Bible or the Qur’an and we’re talking about the Raelians.

Wait. Who?

The Raelians are an atheistic, creationist UFO cult. Yeah. The short of it is that they’re essentially intelligent design proponentists, who have substituted a race of aliens that they call the Elohim in place of the standard Abrahamic deity.  So, basically science fiction instead of fantasy.

This is from “The Message Given to Me by Extraterrestrials” (later republished at “Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers”) by Claude Vorilhon, the founder of the Raelians.

Page 105, Chapter 7, Paragraph 2:

My face seems to be in the open air, but really it is protected by an invisible shield composed of repellant rays inside which I breathe different air from you.

So basically, according to the Raelians, we’re all living in a rip off of a Keanu Reeves movie.

Is there anyone out there who still doubts that atheists, secularists and non-believers are targets of hate and discrimination?

(Take a breath, that’s rhetorical.)

One of the interesting side effects of Christopher Hitchens’ death has been the complete validation of his activism by the response to said death.  On one hand, you have the preachers and fundamentalist bloggers and media figures lining up with their condescending “I-told-you-so” statements. They simultaneously pretend to care about his fate, while barely being able to conceal their glee about the belief that he’s being tortured forever for disagreeing with them. Then, in the same breath, they turn their self-satisfaction on their audience and threaten them with the same hellfire ultimatum, proclaiming it to be an act of love.

While Sam, Libbie and I eulogized Hitch on our last episode, and joined the crew in raising a glass of Johnnie Walker Black to his memory at the post-show dinner, many others have been honoring his legacy on Twitter.

Until a couple of days ago, #GodIsNotGreat was trending on Twitter, as a tribute to Christopher Hitchens’ 2007 bestselling book. Not everyone was happy about this.

Read the rest of this entry »

It just came to my attention that a great mind, pen and mouth died today. After a long battle with oesophageal cancer, and even longer battles with the forces of fundamentalist stupidity, our atheist visibility movement has lost one of its brightest lights.

Christopher Hitchens was one of my primary inspirations for becoming an atheist activist, and one of the most stalwart, brutally honest and brilliant champions that rationalists could ever hope to have in their corner.

While I can’t say that I’ve always agreed with every word that came out of Mr. Hitchens’ mouth. I will say that even in times of disagreement, he never failed to be incredibly informed, concise and deliciously scathing at the same time.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have had Christopher Hitchens alive in an era where his speeches and debates can be recorded for all time and that his cutting wit and devastating eloquence will not be lost to future generations of freethinkers and opponents alike.

While I’m certain that thousands of smug and proudly ignorant blogs, articles and church newsletters are currently being typed right now about how Hitch has just gotten what he had coming to him, but I warn these pious sadists to be careful what they wish for.

We atheists can play Pascal’s Wager too. And I would put down good money that if we godless skeptics are wrong about this whole gods and afterlives nonsense, that Hitch has already made Saint Peter cry by now.

We’ll miss you, Hitch. Read the rest of this entry »