Athée Canadien
Posts tagged atheism
Vancouver Atheists help the homeless
Feb 3rd
This is really cool.
A group on Facebook called Atheist Republic – which has only been around for a few months but already has nearly 30,000 likes – held its first event last weekend. They went to Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and handed out socks to the homeless.
You can see some photos of the event here (you may need Facebook for this).
Other engagements sadly prevented me from making it out to this event, but I wish them the best in the future.
Atheist Republic has members worldwide and is hoping to launch an international non-profit organization to help organize and rally atheists everywhere. Check them out (their website isn’t exactly ready yet), they’re already off to a great start.
Secular prayers at Vancouver City Council?
Dec 1st
I got a request for an interview over the weekend because an intrepid reporter with News1130 here in Vancouver noticed that Vancouver City Council is opening its weekly sessions with a prayer.
The story highlights that these prayers often don’t involve any references to religion or god. I guess we’re very liberal with our language here on the left West Coast. Google gives the following definition for prayer:
prayer/pre(ə)r/
Noun:
- A solemn request for help or expression of thanks addressed to God or an object of worship.
- A religious service, esp. a regular one, at which people gather in order to pray together.
Neither definition sounds very secular to me.
So I gave my two cents to the story
Atheist Ian Bushfield with the BC Humanist Association disagrees. He would like to see the name prayer changed to something more accessible, like "opening remarks."
"When they bring these church ideas or religion into city hall, they potentially exclude a lot of people of different or even no faith. So I don’t think there’s any need to invoke any higher power. Having some opening words is not against anything I believe in, to mark the ceremony. It’s just important to recognize there are different viewpoints and we should try to include anyone rather than exclude anyone."
This is the second time in a week where I’ve played the token atheist around here. Hopefully by putting that atheist label out in the media more and more we can begin to raise our profile above the rapists.
They also have a poll, so go and crash it. It’s currently pro-prayer by a slim margin.
Explosive skepticism?
Oct 20th
Email listservs can be useful for disseminating information and calling for volunteers, but they can also devolve into banter and many of the same tired arguments.
This clip comes from something that bordered on the latter, while starting from the former. I’ll let you judge whether there’s any merit to this argument or if we should just dismiss it.
Poetic atheism
Oct 19th
Jennifer Michael Hecht, author of Doubt: A History, recently gave a talk at Rutgers University about her new research into “Poetic Atheism.”
The historical research is really interesting to me, and Hecht argues that the New Atheist movement breaks with our history, which was often based more in the humanities than the hard sciences. She argues that many of the great storytellers of history were potentially less religious than assumed, including William Shakespeare.
“If all of the great poets were believers, they would have been religious writers,” she said. “They didn’t believe dominant stories about what meaning is … John Keats, he never mentions Jesus. In Shakespeare, there’s none of this kind of religious thinking.”
She further suggests that many of the great writers wouldn’t have used the word ‘God’ if they had known the intellectual baggage it would carry today.
While some of these ideas sound a bit far-reaching, I’ll hold out judgement until I read the book. It wouldn’t be the first time that a news article glossed over the key details of a complex argument.
It sounds like a fascinating talk. I’ve never had the pleasure of hearing Hecht speak, but she’s definitely on my must-see list.
What are people’s favourite atheist poems (or at least poems that can be interpreted atheistically)?
Quick, someone get us on Halifax Transit
Oct 18th
Back in 2009 when Humanist Canada and the Freethought Association of Canada were both putting out atheist bus ads, a few municipalities that initially rejected the ads eventually came around and allowed them to be run.
Halifax was one of the cities that initially refused but was eventually forced to revise its policy. The city opted to ban all political/religious advertising to avoid controversy.
Now Hemant Mehta has posted a picture from Reddit with a religious ad on Halifax Transit and is asking whether this policy still exists or not.
One issue missed by Hemant is that around the same time, the Supreme Court ruled that Translink (Vancouver’s public transit company) could not ban the Canadian Federation of Students from running ads. This issue is tangential since Translink had initially banned these ads claiming they were political in nature. This opened the doors for atheist bus ads across Canada, regardless of existing policy (since this ruling essentially strikes down any existing policy).
Now, from what I remember of my early time with FAC was that there was some interest from people in Halifax in running a bus ad, but not enough to actually organize it. It wasn’t clear to me that it was banned so much as no one really tried hard enough to run an ad after the ruling. FAC had finished the Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign (There’s Probably No God…) and was trying to find a new direction to head. I’m not sure whether Humanist Canada later tried and failed to run an ad.
So, to answer Hemant’s question, the ads have to be allowed, someone just has to get up the funding and effort to run them.
Just don’t call it church then
Oct 17th
I really don’t see what PZ Myers is so upset about now.
He titles his latest post “Atheist church? NO THANK YOU.” and decries the existence of humanist chaplains. He admits life ceremonies are worthy, but a structured weekly meeting is “a cheat and a waste.”
What set him off this time was a Boston Globe article that hints at Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein’s latest Humanist Community Project, where he aims to duplicate the success of his chaplaincy across the world.
From my reading of the article, I see no mention of Epstein saying atheists need church, ritual, or rigid structure. Further, I don’t see him demanding that we all go and absolve ourselves of critical thinking.
In fact, the brief description provided gives quite the opposite view. At a recent meeting they had Jason Torpy, president of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers give a presentation (not a sermon).
If this had been a church, Torpy might have raised his voice in righteous indignation, pounding the pulpit. Instead, he asked for questions. Hands shot up.
This is how we’ve run our weekly BC Humanists meetings for years. Every Sunday we either have a speaker or watch a short video (15-40 minutes) and then we discuss and debate the merits of it.
There’s no preaching, no forced ritual, and lots of dissent.
Edmonton Atheists care for Alberta’s highways
Oct 1st
I totally missed featuring this, but a few weeks ago the good folks at the Society for Edmonton Atheists participated in their annual highway clean-up.
By picking up garbage on the side of the road, the group gets a sign recognizing their efforts.
You can read about their adventures and see more pictures on their blog.
Congratulations to the Edmonton Atheists! Keep up the good work!
Genocide equivalent to tearing a piece of paper
Sep 20th
It’s 2011 and we still have to deal with garbage like this, from Brad Hirschfield:
Fanatical atheism is no worse and no better than fanatical religion, though it may be more bitterly ironic. There is something pretty odd, dare I say hypocritical, about a bunch of people who call themselves “freethinkers” and “humanists” not only verbally abusing people of faith, but actually tearing up verses from the Bible as an act of protest, as they did on a pier in Huntington Beach, California Saturday morning. It doesn’t sound terribly humane to me, and I am quite sure that destroying texts, however much one may object to them, is the opposite of free thought.
Murder, genocide, female genital mutilation, and indoctrination don’t “sound terribly humane to me.” Ripping out parts of the Bible that no one even follows is proving a point – one which apparently flew right over Brad’s head.
Nearly half of Canadians don’t believe in God
Sep 19th
In addition to the swath of new reality, cop, and comedy shows, there’s a new “news” show coming to Global this fall called Context.
Context promises to discuss “life beyond the headlines” (the quotes are on their Who We Are page), meaning news from a Christian world view. The show is hosted by Evangelical Christian journalist Lorna Dueck, who previously hosted Listen Up.
I was going to go through the Answers provided by Context, or how she responds to her “atheist friends” that science has disproved god but it’s fairly standard Christian mumbo-jumbo. I don’t have the will power to go through it right now, maybe I’ll pick on it later, or you can demolish it in the comments (or if anyone wants to actually read through it all, send it to me and I’ll post it here).
What’s more interesting than picking on another evangelical TV show (which shows at roughly 11:00 AM local across the country), besides the opportunity to crash her set if you’re in Toronto, is the results of the poll that they commissioned to launch their show.
They hired reputable firm Ipsos Reid, who polled 1129 Canadians earlier this month. Among their findings:
- Only 53% of Canadians believe in God. This puts a combined atheist/agnostic/unsure response rate at 47%, the highest ever reported. Worth noting is the 1 in 3 Catholics and nearly 1 in 4 who attend Church service weekly do not believe in God.
- The same number of believers also think religion is a net positive, while the remaining 47% agree that religion does more harm than good.
- Only 29% of Canadians believe in heaven, and only 19% believe in hell. So sticks and carrots aren’t dictating our morality.
- 71% don’t think that religious people are necessarily better citizens – which means sadly that 29% still think atheists are lesser than the rest.
- 64% think religion raises more questions than answers.
- Finally, a slim majority – 51% – do not think “religious practice is an important factor in the moral lives of Canadians.”
I think the TV show is trying to play these results off as demonstrating the need to evangelize more, given their tweets:
Regardless of their thoughts, these numbers show the success of the secular and atheist movements.
Keep it up!
God’s existence does depend on us
Sep 17th
Daniel Racicot writes for the Sudbury Star.
In the 2010 remake of Clash of the Titans, Hades says to Zeus, "The prayers of the mortals sustain our immortality."
I wonder how many people understood what he meant? Greek mythology is commonly regarded as a great source of ideas and imagery for fantasy movies, but to the ancient Greeks it was their religion. So, what does it mean, in religious terms, that the gods need our prayers for their sustenance? What does it mean that the existence of God depends on us?
Unfortunately, he goes off on some babbling about a two-way relationship with the Almighty when the answer is so much clearer and simpler.
God’s existence depends on us because he only exists in the minds of people. No appeals to philosophy, cosmology, or scripture are necessary.
No consciousness, no God.
Theology makes things complicated, atheism makes them simple.
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