1. More atheists are sharing their views

Comment #254877 by Alan Canon on September 26, 2008 at 10:56 am

I'm the fellow who submitted the article to RichardDawkins.net, as well as one of the interviewees for the article itself. It was my first time in attendance at the Louisville Atheist and Freethinker's meetup, although I understand it's been going on for some years now.

The reporter who wrote the article was supposed to be the guest speaker at the event, but we wound up in lively discussion instead, so that, after the fact, the reporter didn't even get to deliver his prepared remarks (a fact that several of us felt bad about, though apparently he was okay with it.)

Part of the rest of this comment is a response to a comment made on this thread by Paula Kirby, a person I deeply admire.

I can't speak to what David Cooper meant when he mentioned spirituality. I do know that some people use the word metaphorically, to describe the human condition of relating to one another in community. A hardcore atheist, I myself might use the word "spirit" as a poetic metaphor for the "software" which I believe is human consciousness running on the host "hardware" of the brain. I certainly wouldn't mean to imply that there's anything "ghostbustery" about my consciousness: destroy my brain, and my consciousness goes with it. But I'm a bit more than just the arrangement of my brain cells: I'm also their activity.

Again, I have a completely materialistic understanding of the way consciousness works. There's just a difference between a computer system that's in perfect shape, but hibernating, and the same computer running at full throttle. I might speak of the "ghost in the machine" to describe a fully-running instance of an operating system and applications running on a piece of host hardware, but that does not imply that I think that there's some kind of actual ghost in there.

I was interviewed by telephone for over an hour by the article's writer, and everything I said got distilled to a potted biography and two sentences of quotation in the article: I agree with the two sentences, but don't recollect actually saying those specific words to the journalist. So there's no telling what the fellow who said "spirituality" meant by it. What you read was filtered by the journalist (who I still think, did a pretty good job.)

Paula, I agree with you and others that from a standpoint of caring about what's true, it makes no difference if your delusion is with respect to YHWH or alternative medicine, or indeed what Wiccans may think. I also agree with others here who say that the transition from (say) fundamentalist Christianity to atheism may not be an all-at-once kind of thing.

I'm just glad that here in Louisville, I've found a nexus of fellow atheists (along with some associated not-quite-atheists) who are gathering the courage to speak out. That's the "forest," and the fact that the group (which is just a mailing list and a monthly dinner after all) includes a Wiccan and a Unitarian Universalist is not going to dissuade me from participating, simply because I am and remain a 6.9 atheist on the "Dawkins Scale."

Paula, thank you for your insights and the wonderful work you do.

2. Plan to exhume cardinal is 'homophobic'

Comment #237379 by Alan Canon on August 26, 2008 at 12:05 pm

I didn't know all this about Newman.

I like to make pilgrimages to places like graveyards and other historic sites. Since I am proudly gay-friendly, I think his and his partner's gravesite would make my list if I ever found myself near to it.

After all this plays out, if I ever do find myself standing there, I will either find evidence that this man's last wish was respected by the organization he labored for all his life, or evidence of the Church's disrespect and denial of the man's memory.

With this controversy out in the open, the Catholic Church is damned if they do and damned if they don't. Not bad for some 100 year old bones. As Feynman said of Stevenus, "If you get an inscription like that on your tombstone, you are doing fine!"

3. Scientists Create Blood From Stem Cells

Comment #234483 by Alan Canon on August 21, 2008 at 12:28 pm

>Oops, did I say who made those estimates? Damn that was a typo. Should read:

>Who made up those estimates?

The *survivors*, silly! :)

4. Judge says UC can deny class credit to Christian school students

Comment #229463 by Alan Canon on August 13, 2008 at 4:18 pm

Here's the Wikipedia article, with link to PDF of the ruling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Christian_Schools_International_et_al._v._Roman_Stearns_et_al.#Decision

5. Growing Up in the Universe: Now available on DVD with subtitles in English, Spanish, French and Polish!

Comment #226317 by Alan Canon on August 8, 2008 at 1:14 am

Josh singled me out for praise on the French subtitling, but I would like to turn around and thank RDFRS volunteers Melusine, Zukiwi, Lonely_Atheist, Cedrick, Uberkoala, Kramokian, and Arnaud, and others whose names I don't have before me right now, for their indispensable help on the French translation.

If anyone finds fault with the French subtitles, please let us know, and we will make sure we correct them for the next release.

6. Congresswoman Slams Religious Right's Assault on Science's 'Edgier' Side

Comment #225956 by Alan Canon on August 7, 2008 at 2:29 pm

Dear Border Collie,

A little "present company excluded, of course" might make your blanket comment on the incuriosity of Americans go down a bit better with the 86% of the richarddawkins.net traffic which, according to Josh Timonen, originates in the United States. (I know this because this "incurious" American had to ask Josh whether he wanted UK or US English subtitles for the Growing Up in the Universe DVDs.)

signed,
a lifelong lover of science and all questions askable.

7. Charlie Brooker's screen burn

Comment #223714 by Alan Canon on August 3, 2008 at 9:34 am

I'm sure that in the documentary Dawkins will point out Darwin's own revulsion at nature "red in tooth and claw." This aspect of nature is why Dawkins practically exhorts his readers to rebel against our Darwinian origins.

8. Is Killing Liberals a Hate Crime?

Comment #222689 by Alan Canon on July 31, 2008 at 6:00 pm

rod-the-farmer wrote:
"I was under the impression that Hate Crime legislation was passed to allow more senior jurisdictions to lay charges when it became apparent that local officials would not."

I think that's correct (American here.) During the civil rights era (like that era's over, NOT!) there were southern States which would not prosecute whites for killing blacks. There was no Federal murder statute on the books at the time, and apparently no easy way to construct one (given the independently evolved statutes of the 50 states and the dis-expediencies of synchronizing them.)

So what the Federal government did, to bring justice in these cases, was to charge the murderers in Federal court with deprivations of the victim's Federal constitutionally-enshrined civil rights. (The murder of any victim naturally curtailing enjoyment of any rights at all.)

I think rod-the-farmer's on the money here: "hate crime" legislation is a way to keep the backwoodsmen within the confines of civility, when a jury of their fellow backwoodsmen peers would be hesitant to convict them, by dint of sharing the same hatreds.

I'm a privileged white male who grew up (and lives) in the northern boundary of the American south. We still have white racists burning crosses on the lawns of blacks, or burning swastikas into those same lawns and the occasional dragging death of some poor individual just because of the color of his skin. Not all the time, but sometimes. We reel when it happens.

I'll admit I'm more a classic liberal than a libertarian, but I look upon the law as an ideally evolutionary process. If a law exists that, though not perfect, can bring justice to bear against the perpetrators of such horrible acts of victimization, then I'm all for it (until someone shows me a better way, then I'll be all for that.)

If you're not from the southern U.S., you can't know the shame many of us feel at our racist past, and the horror we feel when some new atrocity happens in our back yards. Apart from being "backwoodsly," many southerners pride the part of our culture which is hospitable and welcoming to everyone regardless of their origins, genetic or otherwise. There are both religious and non-religious southerners who value this tradition of civility and hospitality deeply.

So, next time one of you up-Easterners are down here in the big bad South, and one of us pauses on the street, as we've seen you from behind us in the partial reflection from a door we're about to open, don't panic...there's every good chance we're about to open and hold that door for you, (and then make sure you're first in line at the business inside), not to mug or lynch you.

It's so weird how different this is from the (generally) more urbane North. There, it seems, one disses strangers and is most polite to one's friends. Here, one norm (sorry not universal) is to be even excessively polite to strangers. Selfishly, I suppose we want our visitors to give a good report when they return home, and to "hurry back," as we say.

p.s. Y'all fellow atheists are right welcome in this southern would-be gentleman's home anytime. We'll discuss our favorite passages from The God Delusion while riding the oldest steamboat on the inland waterways, my treat, how's about that?

9. Richard Dawkins slaps creationists into the primordial soup

Comment #213867 by Alan Canon on July 19, 2008 at 6:25 am

What does "chav" mean?

Is Big Brother a British original (Eric Blair, coiner of the term was, of course), or an American import? It would shock this Anglophile to learn that there is original BBC "reality" programming. (I suppose Wikipedia could answer that question for me in between telling me the habits of the Echidna and the Capybara.)

Richard should be grateful for the prevalence of trailer parks in America. It's what keeps the tornados from doing real damage to the British Isles!

10. Fury at funeral songs ban

Comment #211956 by Alan Canon on July 16, 2008 at 12:20 pm

I wanted to mention my own wish for my post-death disposition.

In 1991, I discovered (with James Wells) a cave in the Kentucky cave country (most of the cave, though not the entrance, is underneath Mammoth Cave National Park, and it's still a potential Mammoth Cave connection lead.)

The cave entrance is really pretty. Water flows out of a spring just up the hill, and splashes over a six-foot waterfall before disappearing into the cave entrance. (There's then a 1,450 foot water crawl to get into the cave proper, which is probably why the cave went unexplored for so long.)

Anyway, we cave explorers sometimes dump a non-toxic dye into cave streams so that we can trace where the water emerges in the surface stream that drains the cave system, in this case the Green River.

My wish is to be cremated (after all useful organs are harvested), and to have a small amount of my ashes mixed with flourescein dye and flushed down the entrance to Sides'/Athena's Cave.

It's kind of moot: we are 100% sure we already know where the water drains to (Pike Spring), based on previous hydrological mapping efforts. But I want to be the first human dye-trace! How's that for dedication to science?

Then there's my musician friend Dan, who wants to be cremated on a proper outdoor pyre, with a horn (saxophone, trumpet, coronet, etc.) stuck into every bodily oriface...so that the expanding gases blowing through the horns will produce one last musical performance. Kinda poetic and beautiful in a really gross way, n'est pas? If he goes before me, I'm supposed to help, and I can't really say I'm looking forward to it :)

So, where I'm going for one last outrageous stunt in the name of science, Dan wants to do the same for music. For both of us, these thoughts sort of turn our own deaths into a project to pull off, not just an event to fear.

11. Fury at funeral songs ban

Comment #211249 by Alan Canon on July 15, 2008 at 4:47 pm

Here's a link to the Free Inquiry Magazine article, "Dealing with Dying". October/November 2007. Vol 27 No. 6., referenced above by Laurie B.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=fi&page=dealwithdying

12. Fury at funeral songs ban

Comment #211201 by Alan Canon on July 15, 2008 at 3:03 pm

My "in group" are largely secularists (many of them, though not overtly atheists, would describe themselves as "spiritual, but not religious.") Now that we're approaching middle age, we've had, in recent years, to absorb the sadness of having dear friends die, some "before their time."

I have been so touched by the secular memorial services that have been organized for several of our deceased friends. What has been interesting to me is that certain members of our community have come to the fore as the equivalent of "spiritual" leaders in these sad events. A sort of non-clergy clergy, in a way.

The memorial events themselves are very like the secular funerals that Richard Dawkins has often described. Many of us are musicians, and we now have a tradition of playing, continuously and improvisationally, for many hours while a memorial picnic takes place. During one such service for a fallen musician, we had piles and piles of musical instruments laid on blankets under a tree, so that anyone who liked could pick one up and join in. This in addition to eulogies and readings by friends and family members.

The families of the deceased, even if they are religious, have been very touched by our younger-person efforts to memorialize and grieve, and to celebrate the life that is now over, in our own way. Often, especially when the family is from another city, this is their first opportunity to know the community of friends who loved the deceased family member.

In contrast, we've also had to endure purely religious funerals, organized by families, for friends of ours who we knew did not share their family's religious beliefs. After one such dreadful service, in which the Bible got a lot of exposure, and the life of our deceased friend got none, I overheard someone saying, "Jesus already had his funeral. This should have been Kym's, not his." Another friend who attended the same funeral said that she was on the verge of laughing out loud during the service, recalling Dawkins' comment about his wife Lalla's reaction to the prayers during religious services. For my part, I was very angry during the same funeral. I wanted to jump up and shout "She didn't believe in that bullshit! This is not her! How dare you besmirch her memory by bringing your Baptist crap into her funeral!"

Since becoming an atheist, I've adjusted my ideas to exclude the persistence of the human mind after death. But as a materialist, someone who believes that the mind is not other than the activity of the human brain, I have a sort of neo-spiritual view of life after death: the minds of the dead do live on in the virtual-reality simulation inside the minds of those who remember them. When I dream about my deceased grandmother, or remember something a dear friend said to me long ago, I can, metaphorically speaking of course, imagine that a part of that person's "soul" is alive in a sort of distributed way, both in the memories of those who loved the deceased, and in our very makeup, inasmuch as we are changed forever by knowing such good people.

What about your experiences? Do you find that there are members of your secular community who are prized for their secular spirituality, the ability to provide comfort without resort to religious platitudes?

p.s. I've used the word "spiritual" in this posting, and I hope the word doesn't give offense. I hope it's obvious what I meant from the context.

13. Tablet Ignites Debate on Messiah and Resurrection

Comment #204892 by Alan Canon on July 6, 2008 at 5:18 am

Laurie Fraser wrote: 'John Shelby Spong has written extensively on the subject of the "prophesies", especially in "Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism". A very fine and informative read, if anyone's interested, and backs up the thrust of this article.'

I'll second that. Spong even gets kudos (and a bibliographical citation) from Dawkins in The God Delusion. It goes both ways: Spong speaks glowingly of the God Delusion and its contemporary volumes.

I've met Spong, and heard him speak, and have read many of his excellent books. He is about as much of an atheist as you could be and still be nominally Christian. Far more an "Einsteinian" sort of religious person.

Spong helped to create a theological discussion framework that is good at deprogramming fundamentalism in true believers. He very much is an advocate of critical thinking and rationally based beliefs. It would be easy to see how a recovering fundamentalist, set upon the path by Spong's writings, would then just go "all the way" to full blown atheism, once the lid of critical thinking is cracked.

14. Does the Pope wear Prada?

Comment #204532 by Alan Canon on July 5, 2008 at 5:52 am

I know what my beloved Episcopal priest, Lucinda, would say: "Thank God he revived SOMETHING of John XXIII's!"

The Catholic Church (I almost said "Catholics," which would be ad hominem and also not what I mean) had a shot at getting on the road to something like sense with Vatican II. It has pained me to see them career back towards medieval thinking since then. Sad.

15. Evangelical Christians sign up to a 'Church within a Church'

Comment #203238 by Alan Canon on July 2, 2008 at 1:47 pm

A few years ago I actually joined the Episcopal Church, which is the American branch of the Church of England, as a proud full-blown Atheist, precisely because I wanted to make a statement in support of the brave members who are advancing the issue of full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons within their church. (I was raised in a very conservative evangelical tradition, and it was against this conservative tradition that I was making a symbolic stand.) I am on the hetero- end of the scale, but witnessing discrimination against homosexuals in my youth turned me into an activist of at least the "consciousness raising" variety.

These days, I'm reading more Richard Dawkins than John Shelby Spong, and I'm not a practicing Episcopalian (well, okay, I don't go to church, so I suppose I am a practicing Anglican in principle :) But, like Richard, I hold a residual fondness for the gentle norms of the Anglican Church, and like Richard, I regard it as an innoculatory strain of the virus.

I'm an American with a special affection for the people of England, whatever their theology or lack of it. One may only stand in awe of the British empire of mind, with Darwin, Maxwell, Lovelace, Hawking, Woolf, Turing, and Dawkins a mere sprinkling of the peers of the realm.

A nation which can produce such depth of intellect should doubtless be able to get its national church through the "changing moral zeitgeist" to which we all, believers and nonbelievers alike, contribute.

16. Richard Dawkins on Doctor Who

Comment #201643 by Alan Canon on June 30, 2008 at 1:23 am

I'm an American, but please let me butt in on behalf of the British, their sci-fi, and their Richard Dawkins. I'd wager that those who are critiquing Dawk's cameo are people who don't primarily realize what televised science fiction in Britain is all about. And from this atheist Kentucky boy's perspective, you might ought to, and I'm gonna tell ye.

Before there was Dr. Who (and you have to go back more than a few decades into the mid-1950s to get there in your TARDIS) there was Nigel Kneale, of Prof. Quatermass fame. Wikipedia him and remember everything you read. Ealing studios (noticed how they are referenced in the present Dr. Who episode with Dr. Dawkins, and marvel) participated with the BBC in making the three six-part canonical series of Quatermass.

This American knows that it was said in the papers of London the next day, that on the night of the last airing, "the pubs were empty."

Then (amid other productions, amongst those lamentedly missed for lack of preservation include Dawkins' semi-hero Hoyle's own story, "A For Andromeda," with a young Julie Christie, produced ca. 1963 by the BBC but sadly not archived) we have Dr. Who.

Dawkins' spouse Lalla is one degree of separation from Dr. D. and Dr. Who, but so was Douglas Adams, who introduced the two and who was a script editor on Dr. Who.

All I mean to really say, is that

a) Dawkins must surely be more of an expert on Dr. Who, and the wonderful, semi-camp acting styles that make it uniquely what it is for British television viewers than virtually anyone commenting to the contrary in this forum; and

b) Dr. Who is not about convincing performances, fancy special effects, or anything else expected by "Star Trek" reared science fiction fans across the pond. Dr. Who is its own thing, and if you don't agree, try to find another science fiction series with more hours of teleplay, and you will fail.

It is all about the ideas and the writing, then the BBC puts this wonderful teleplay before a bunch of underpaid actors and production staff, and the British Commonwealth of Nations who are taxed for this production gather around the tele to see what they've paid for, and they are entranced. And so am I. Because what Dr. Who does, is, it rips your head off, every time.

And so does Prof. Dawkins. He rips my head off, every time. It's his Donald Swann moment - Swann's way.

And that should send you all packing to Wikipedia.

17. Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Comment #189504 by Alan Canon on June 6, 2008 at 11:23 am

As far as other universes springing into being, I do know that virtual pairs of oppositely charged particles can come into being briefly, even in a vacuum, and then mutually annihilate in the blink of an eye. Though it appears to violate conservation of mass/energy, it's allowed by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. The traditional statement of HUP is "uncertainty in momentum times uncertainty in position is greater than or equal to Planck's constant." To get the version helpful to this phenomenon, you rework the units until you have "uncertainty in energy times uncertainty in reaction time is greater than or equal to Planck's constant." So the worse the violation of the conservation law, the less time it's allowed to happen in. This so-called "zero-point" energy is the reason you can't have a perfect vacuum, and is also the reason black holes are predicted to radiate (one of the particles falls into the event horizon, and the other one escapes, before they have time to mutually annihilate.) Googling "zero-point radiation" would probably be helpful. As far as I know, zero-point radiation is an accepted part of the standard model, not controversial in any way.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

18. The Faith of Flanders

Comment #184459 by Alan Canon on May 25, 2008 at 10:34 am

SurfDude, I deleted my own post by accident. I'd saved it and edited it a number of times. The last time I saved it, it appeared twice. I figured that I must have duplicated it by accident, and deleted one of the copies of the post: both disappeared.

Since my comment struck home while it was up, I'll try and reconstruct it, in brief.

I was saying that my own mother is an example of someone I deeply respect and love, though I do not respect her religious ideas. I also confessed to a period in which I was very angry with my family for remaining religious (as well as the alienation that came from leaving the religion of my parents.) I identified that period of my life as unhelpful and damaging, which it was.

Now I remember the analogy I made. A group of my friends purchased a live goat at auction. Our initial plan was to eat it, as one of us is a very good cook. But we quickly fell in love with the animal: its ultimate destination was being put out to pasture at a farm where children would visit him. It fell to me to pull the printed barcode label off of the animal's side, its lot number at the stockyard. Underneath was a lot of sticky adhesive, a huge mess on the goat's fur. I spent most of an afternoon with the goat in the shade of a tree (this in a crowded residential neighborhood in the middle of the city!) picking adhesive off of it.

I think of my parents' religion as a sticky label, difficult to remove, attached with lots of horrid adhesive by their own parents, who'd had it applied to them by their own, and so on. Raised in a community in the heart of the Bible belt of the southern United States, which in terms of the analogy is like trying to extricate oneself from a pot of glue. Mom and Dad never had a chance.

But I did, raised in an urban environment (thanks to my parents' decades of labor) and in a more modern time. My own father bought me every science or logic book I ever asked for, the same books that helped me escape the Black Hole that was his own religion. Who am I to gloat that I am their intellectual superior? Rather, I just feel sadness, tenderness, and pity.

The atheist brain that sparks inside my skull is just as noble and wonderful as the believing brain that sparks within my mother's skull. We know this because we know we share a common ancestor, and that our brains are therefore very similar. The addled nonsense that my mother believes came not from within her brain, but from her environment.

I'm reminded of the phrase of Aldous Huxley when he is describing the artificial wombs of the Brave New World, in which are bred underclasses by the expedient of depriving the embryos of oxygen in order to retard their intelligence: "Didn't need it and didn't get it."

My mother developed in an environment similarly starved, remote, rural, river towns dotted with Baptist Churches, Churches of Christ, Assemblies of God, Nazarenes, Seventh-Day Adventists. To blame her for not escaping religion would be like blaming an innocent prisoner for not escaping a maximum security prison.

Some Christians (I think ignominiously) say, "Hate the sin, but love the sinner." (As John Shelby Spong once said in a lecture I attended, it's hard to imagine a "sinner" feeling loved, in that moment.) But I'd like to adapt that phrase, sincerely this time. Hate the delusion, but love the deluded. We are all on a forward march toward goodness knows what. If you will, a pilgrimage (reversing the sense of Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale, as he reversed that of Chaucer's pilgrims.) Sometimes we need to talk face to face, but that march must take place hand in hand. Not just between deluded and non-deluded, but between all human beings, and the fantastic nature that is now, unbelievably, ours to study, guide, and care for.

This impulse to goodness that I feel came from my environment. That environment was provided for me by my mother and father. They think they get their goodness from scripture. They are wrong, but thank goodness, they got it!

Happy Towel Day from Louisville, Kentucky, home of more rational-thinking people than you think!