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.)

Where do candidates stand on the separation of church and state? What is a church allowed — and not allowed — to do in an election season if it wants to keep its tax exemption? At what point is a candidate making promises that violate the First Amendment’s establishment clause? Why does it feel like candidates are getting more and more deranged by public displays of religiosity?

To help us sort it all out, we’ll joined this week by two special guests:

Rob Boston, the Senior Policy Analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and board member of the American Humanist Association.

Sean Faircloth, the Director of Strategy and Policy for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and the author of “Attack of the Theocrats! How the Religious Right Harms Us All- —and What We Can Do About It”

Join us for what should be a great hour of discussion!

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.

(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.

In fact, there were hundreds of such posts, threatening death, beatings and bad grammar on the people responsible for the trend. It never ceases to amaze me how the people most likely to say that Christians have a monopoly on moral behavior are often the quickest to threaten violence when someone disagrees with them.

Ironically, all of their bitching and violent only helped it trend even more. I think Hitch would have appreciated that.

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