For anyone who thinks there are no atheist charities…

From Jim Underdown, Executive Director of the Center for Inquiry — Los Angeles:

We are deeply concerned about the hardship and suffering caused by the wildfires here in Southern California. We want to help, so the Center for Inquiry—Los Angeles is launching an effort through SHARE (the Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Effort) to raise charitable funds to assist low income and displaced families who have been affected by this disaster.

Those of us who have seen some of the devastation first hand understand the magnitude of the situation. Since last Saturday, at least 15 fires have destroyed over 1,500 homes in Southern California. The fires have razed nearly 460,000 acres—about 719 square miles. Over a half million people were evacuated from areas that stretch from Ventura County northwest of Los Angeles east to the San Bernardino National Forest and south to the U.S.-Mexico border. A smoky haze continues to drift over our Hollywood offices.

Losses total at least $1 billion in San Diego County alone, and include much of the state’s southern farmland. A full third of the state’s avocado crop has been destroyed. The loss of these agricultural products will no doubt put some of our neighbors and their children at risk from a severe loss of income. This is something that many families can ill afford and may affect their foreseeable future.

The current financial loss estimates are sure to rise. The needs of those who’ve lost their homes and their livelihoods will be very great. Your assistance is very important. Please join with us and other humanists and skeptics to help out in this crisis. Your support is greatly appreciated!

The address for SHARE is PO Box 664, Amherst, NY 14226, or you may make your contribution to SHARE directly by clicking here. All funds sent to SHARE are tax exempt in the United States.

Thank you.

If you haven’t heard of SHARE:

The Center for Inquiry and its affiliated organizations have launched this initiative to raise charitable funds to aid children and families affected by the Southern California wildfires. Secularists, humanists, and skeptics may make their contribution directly through SHARE, the Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Effort, sponsored by the Council for Secular Humanism. This charity, maintained by the Council for Secular Humanism for over two decades to channel aid to victims of natural disasters, forwards funds received to organizations providing direct relief to the victims.

I donated.

Will you do the same?

Update: To answer some of the questions posed below, Debbie Goddard, a CFI staff member, made this comment:

Hi there,

I’m one of the field organizers at the Center for Inquiry. I asked why the SHARE link hadn’t been put on CFI West’s website yet–it’s because the person who updates the website was out for a couple of days, and the SHARE message originally went out on Friday. (The site was also still advertising an event on October 24th…) It should be up some time this afternoon.

Secondly, the Secular Humanist Aid and Relief Effort is indeed a part of the Council for Secular Humanism, which is listed on the Charity Navigator site. So, go ahead and give!

Debbie Goddard
Center for Inquiry

[tags]atheist, atheism, California, fire, relief, charity[/tags]

Last week, Elevation Church in North Carolina did something quite commendable.

They take in an average of $40,000 weekly even though they don’t have a building of their own. They’re trying to raise capital to get one. What are they doing for their capital campaign?

Giving away money.

Taking a page out of Oprah’s playbook (I assume), they decided to take a week’s worth of money and Pay It Forward — it was called the Bless Back Project.

When pastor Steven Furtick instructed members to pluck from the collection bowls, filled with envelopes containing $5, $10, $20, $50 or $100, some people didn’t believe it. One person at each of the five services even got an envelope with $1,000.

Members looked at Furtick like “What’s the punchline?” he recalled. “Then the creative wheels started turning.”

The money isn’t to keep, Furtick told them. Instead, members were to go out and do something random for someone else.

Get inventive, he said, and tell us about it.

…

Of the $40,000 giveaway to the congregation, Furtick said, “I thought it would be a cool moment in the church’s history. … Not as a gimmick, not as a publicity stunt, but to get it in the DNA of our church to be a blessing to others.

They couldn’t give the money back to their church. They just had to use it to help others.

Read the stories of what people did. They’re incredible.

(Atheists who get queasy at the mention of the word “blessing” and prefer to keep their distance from people who “talk to God” may want to stay away… though I hope you don’t. See past the Christian-speak and get inspired by their actions.)

…we went to dinner, still wondering what to do with the $100. We had a really sweet waitress. Johnny asked her how her day was and she said she had been at work since 10am, and would probably be there till 1am. But she still had a great attitude! So, we decided to brighten her day, and on top of the normal tip, gave her $100!

…

With the $10 I got from church on Sunday at school I was able to bless a 8 year old classmate with lunch money. He did not have any lunch money.

…

My envelope contained $100. So I bought a GOAT! Yes, I said goat. Through a wonderful organization, Heiffer International, one struggling family will receive one goat — providing up to a gallon of milk every single day. That’s more than enough milk not only to drink, but to use to make cheese, butter or yogurt, PLUS to sell whatever’s left and buy much-needed clothes, school supplies and medicine.

Heiffer International helps children and families around the world receive training and animal gifts that help them become self-reliant.

…

After the service I waited till I was in the car to open my envelope. In my envelope was a 20 dollar bill, immediately the ideas came to my head. Earlier in the service when you were giving the money out and before I even knew I had to give it away, I leaned over and told my mom i was going to give it to the first homeless person that i saw, and that exactly what I did with it. My mom and i were in the car going up to Lake Norman, we pulled off onto exit 33, and there he was. The same homeless person that we’ve seen for the past 2 years. After we gave him the money and drove away there was no doubt in my mind that that wasnt’ the right thing to do, I knew it was the right thing to do because when we handed him the money he said, “OOH GOD BLESS you kind people, thank you so much you don’t know how much this helps.” And I just wanted to say thank you so much for giving out that money becuase of that i was able to help someone’s life.

…

Well my friends and I all pooled our money together after the service and gave it to a guy in our senior class that was having trouble paying for his senior trip. We put the money (145 dollars) in an Elevation envelope and a note telling why we gave the money to him (we didnt tell him who it was from) and put it on his seat in his car. I was talking to him yesterday and the money came up in the conversation, he didnt know who gave him the money but he said it brightened up his whole week.

A good amount of the money was donated to other Christian groups or ministries, or trying to get other people to go to church. But most of the acts were secular in nature.

That said, the point of the project was to get people in the habit of giving to others and that’s a noble thing to do no matter the circumstances.

I hope that once they get the building, they’ll use a sizable chunk of their weekly income to continue helping the community. And by helping, I don’t mean converting them.

Atheists don’t have weekly meetings and the idea of taking in $40,000 in a week is so foreign to any atheist group, even the national ones. But I wish our groups did more for the communities we live in than we currently do.

(By the way, I’m learning that some Christians speak in ALL CAPS even on their own websites. What up with that?)

(via ChurchRater)


[tags]atheist, atheism, charity, donation, Elevation Church[/tags]

Being dealt the first hand of 13 cards or the second?

As onegoodmove writes:

There are 635,013,559,600 possible hands and the chances of being dealt the first hand is just as likely as the second though a common intuition is that the second is far more likely. This I believe is because the second has a more likely distribution of the cards, but we are talking about individual hands not distributions. I think it is the same wrong intuition that people use when presented with the fine-tuning argument for the existence of a designer god, the argument is that the laws and constants of physics are fine tuned and if they were different we wouldn’t exist. To which I answer okay, and what’s your point. Well there must be a designer to have just this set of laws and constants they respond, but like the two bridge hands above it is more likely that it is random.

The faulty analysis comes from the arrogant idea that we are somehow special and that leads us to believe that we can’t be here just by chance, or that it is somehow more likely that there is a designer.

[tags]atheist, atheism, probability, statistics[/tags]

Me neither.

But if you are, Professor Eric Schwitzgebel at the University of California at Riverside has compiled his seven postings on applying to Ph. D. programs in philosophy.

The seven parts:

Part I: Should You Apply, and Where?

Part II: Grades and Classes

Part III: Letters of Recommendation

Part IV: Writing Samples

Part V: Statement of Purpose

Part VI: GRE Scores and Other Things

Part VII: After You Hear Back

(via The Uncredible Hallq)


[tags]atheist, atheism, philosophy degree[/tags]

True story.

Wiccans move into small-town Bible-Belt-ish Christian community in Illinois.

They set up their own school.

Chaos ensues.

The Christians meet in the local high school’s gym to discuss what to do:

As more than 150 people filed into the shuttered high school Wednesday night for the meeting, Andy Thomas, youth minister at the Rossville Church of Christ, said residents had a spiritual responsibility to drive the witches out. If they didn’t, he said, young people were in danger of being pulled off the Christian path.

“Rossville has fallen on hard times,” Thomas said. “The school closed. This is a popular place for meth. We’re like, ‘Great, now a witch school.’ It feels like we’re being attacked.”

It gets better.

The high school brimmed with excitement as night fell and old and young filed into the gym.

But when Robert Kurka, the featured speaker, stepped to the lectern, an unexpected thing happened. Instead of leading a pep rally against the witches, the professor at Lincoln Christian College and Seminary delivered an academic lecture comparing Wicca and Christianity.

The Wiccans were not dangerous, Kurka said. They simply adhere to a flawed religion.

“I know you’re thinking, ‘This is amazingly dry,’” he said. “But when you sit down and take the spin off, you start to see that this is not that interesting.”

Kurka encouraged the crowd to try to convert the Wiccans rather than drive them away.

Yep. This should end well.

Neither side gets points for intelligent soundbytes:

“We don’t want [the Wiccans] to go in there and get potions to put hexes on their friends,” said Deb Robling, co-owner of a beauty salon on Chicago Street. Robling, also one of Rossville Church of Christ’s 230 members, helped organize Wednesday night’s meeting.

…

[CEO of Witch School International Donald] Lewis said he believes a mother goddess gave birth to the world and can take a variety of forms—”like Jesus or nature or even Mickey Mouse.” He said he believes in reincarnation and communicating with the dead. He said he also believes in magic, and openly calls himself a witch.

Which side do you take? (And you have to take one.)

Do you support the paranoid Christians trying to drive away a non-existent threat? (I promise the Wiccans’ hexes won’t do anything…)

Or do you support the Wiccans who believe in pseudoscience like talking to the dead and reincarnation and offer a course in their school on “zombies”?

*sigh*

(Thanks to Ben for the link!)


[tags]atheist, atheism, Wicca, Rossville[/tags]

Humanist Network News’ latest podcast has a series of one-on-one interviews with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett. I listened to it yesterday and I think it’s one of the best episodes they’ve done to date. (And congratulations to hosts Duncan Crary and Jes Constantine on their two year podcasting anniversary!)

You can download the episode here.

It also includes discussion with all those authors (including Sam Harris) on Harris’ speech where he suggested doing away with the atheist label.

I was disturbed during one of the other interviews, though. The Rational Response Squad jabbed those atheists who shy away from the term. They said (jokingly?) they would start a website for “chicken shit atheists” (42:15) — that is, people who don’t use the word “atheist”… like Humanists, for example

I’ve never heard any Humanist, Bright, etc. back away from the word “atheist.” They just felt it didn’t describe who they were or what they believed as fully as the other terms did. Atheism only means you don’t believe in a god. It doesn’t describe what you do believe.

Personally, “atheist” was the first word I used to describe myself when I stopped believing in a god — I hadn’t heard of any of the other terms — and it has stuck. I’m proud to call myself an atheist, even though Humanist might be a more accurate, total description.

Either way, I don’t think Brian and Kelly of RRS made anyone want to call themselves an atheist, even if they share they same non-belief mindset as the rest of us.

…

On a slightly related note, I’ve been getting a number of emails from people who request I don’t use their names or out them as an atheist when they send me links. I’ll honor their wishes but it’s a constant reminder that there is a whole other group of people who want to call themselves atheists but can’t bring themselves to use the word.

The reason they don’t want to use it is simply this: it would ruin their lives. Their families might disown them. They could lose their jobs. They would be alone.

It’s just not worth coming out when you don’t have support behind you.

I’m all for people going public with their atheism, no matter which “form” it takes. My former campus group started a simple yet fantastic website that encourages people to go public with their non-belief using their real names.

But I also know that for some people, their inability to do so is not because of lack of courage. Or balls. It’s because too much is at stake. Why make a stand when the rest of your life will come crumbling down?

I do think that a lot of times, this way of thinking is overstated. The sky won’t fall if you come out. You just think it will. But it’s a very real fear.

We as atheists need to help foster an environment where that wouldn’t be the case. We need to offer as much support to those in the closet as possible. The more atheism becomes an acceptable way of thinking, the easier it will be for closeted atheists to come out.


[tags]atheist, atheism, humanism[/tags]

Dilbert creator Scott Adams is answering questions for the Freakonomics blog.

He’s said some increasingly crazy things about atheists and evolution.

On atheists:

This brings me to atheists. In order to be certain that God doesn’t exist, you have to possess a godlike mental capacity – the ability to be 100% certain. A human can’t be 100% certain about anything. Our brains aren’t that reliable. Therefore, to be a true atheist, you have to believe you are the very thing that you argue doesn’t exist: God.

On evolution:

I’ve been trying for years to reconcile my usually-excellent bullshit filter with the idea that evolution is considered a scientific fact. Why does a well-established scientific fact set off my usually-excellent bullshit filter like a five-alarm fire? It’s the fossil record that has been bugging me the most. It looks like bullshit. Smells like bullshit. Tastes like bullshit. Why isn’t it bullshit? All those scientists can’t be wrong.

If you are new to the Dilbert Blog, I remind you that I don’t believe in Intelligent Design or Creationism or invisible friends of any sort. I just think that evolution looks like a blend of science and bullshit, and have predicted for years that it would be revised in scientific terms in my lifetime. It’s a hunch – nothing more.

In another post:

My track record of predictions has been fairly good this week:

1. DNA evidence shows that ape-human fossil records have been badly misinterpreted. (Nailed it.)

Wrong on every count.

PZ Myers has argued against Adams’ points a number of times.

If you’d like to make Adams answer questions on these subjects, feel free to call him out on it.


[tags]atheist, atheist, evolution, creationism, Christianity, fundamentalist[/tags]

If you tried checking the site out last night…. or this morning… or two seconds ago, you probably got a page that said this account was suspended. That’s because 302423 people were coming to the page at once. Because my posting on the new atheist symbol was Farked.

(See the bottom of the picture)

I’ll change servers soon. This is getting frustrating.


[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]

Manya Brachear writes as The Seeker for the Chicago Tribune.

She recently posted about Frank Warren and his popular blog PostSecret.

These were some of the confessions people had about their spirituality:

“I became Muslim because I liked the way I looked in a headscarf.”

“I stole Christian music.”

“I’m an editor for a large online atheist newsletter — and I believe in God.”

“I hate when people tell me that Jesus answers prayers because he didn’t answer mine when I was praying for the life of my child.”

“My dad is a Catholic priest. I have been his secret for 21 years.”

“When I was a child, I thought that Phil Donahue was actually God. They both were old white men with white hair. They both seemed to live somewhere up in the sky.”

“I like to go to church to see what other women are wearing.”

[tags]atheist, atheism, religion, faith, Christian, confession[/tags]