Ask An Atheist

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.)

If you’re a fan of Ask an Atheist, you’ve probably already heard about the “Adopt an Atheist” campaign of the Catholic League, the stage name of perennial blowhard pundit, Bill Donahue.

In it, he suggests that Catholics adopt one of us to somehow discover closeted Christians in our community.   How they intend to do this, beyond spamming the offices of American Atheists, is not explained.

However, I think it’s a great idea, and I’ve volunteered myself for their adoption program in this open letter I’ve submitted to their web site.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is an open response to an open letter written by Wes.   You can read the full letter here.

Hi, Wes.

I think we’ve spoken or at least communicated before. However, you don’t need to establish credentials with us. If you have a disagreement with anyone on the show, you’re encouraged to write or even better, call us and air your grievances, even if you’ve only just now tuned into the show. That said, we all appreciate the support you’ve given Ask an Atheist, and we hope that it will continue.

There are two points I’d like to discuss. One of them is a personal bugbear of mine that I’ll address later. For now, let’s talk about why you think I suddenly became horribly insensitive.

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Evidently this was made circa 1999 on VHS.  Looks like technology wise, somebody already got left behind…

From io9.

image courtesy of Klaus with K

This past Sunday, I had the chance to explore the experiences of atheists outside the United States.  We heard from David, a professor of American History in Qatar; from Zach, an atheist student who studied abroad in Japan; from Martin in Germany; and from several other Ask an Atheist listeners. One listener’s response to our call for stories and anecdotes was so comprehensive, interesting, and insightful that I didn’t want to dishonor it by briefly touching it on air, so it is my pleasure to share with you the story of our friend João* from Brazil.  Enjoy!

 

Ask an Atheist wants me? I feel this urge to respond, perhaps this feeling is god calling on me to state my views on religion in Brazil and how we heathens are doing down here but most probably it is because I enjoy the show so much.

I’m from Brazil, specifically from [REDACTED LARGE METROPOLITAN AREA]. As for my background, I’m an engineer, my father is an engineering professor born in Spain who migrated to Brazil in the 50′s. My mother on the other hand is Brazilian whose family came to Brazil several generations ago but my grandparents happened to become evangelical Christians and my grandfather was a preacher who worked at the Salvation Army. From what I hear my grandparents were very influential in introducing evangelical Christianity in Brazil. My mother tells me that when she was younger if someone passed by an evangelical church in some shithole town it was very probable that they were singing songs composed by my grandfather (who died in 1975).

You see, until a few years ago (10 or 20) Brazilians used to be proud of the fact that Brazil was the largest Catholic country in the world.

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