Obama Mentions Non-Believers!!!!!

Ok, so I was at the inauguration yesterday, in an enormous crowd of wonderful people, listening to Obama's inaugural address. Inbetwixt all of the cheering and emotion, Obama said something that I would have, sadly, never expected.

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers.

I jumped up and the air and yelled "Woohoo!" at this mention, this recognition, the first I have ever run across and definitely the highest official acknowledgment of non religious people I have ever heard from an American politician. In the crowd, I was alone in my cheer, and promptly looked around but found no one to share it with. I know, though, that thousands of others cheered with me across the globe. If you missed it, check it out at 14:25 in the video below, and feel free to jump up and yell with me:



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My Belief System: Radicalism

One thing that really annoys many of my friends is that I am what you might call "radically anti-radical." I understand the value of radicalism, of course, in pushing the envelope and being the cutting edge of what it means to be an environmentalist. Its just not for me.

In College, I watched as what had been a "radical" environmental club, the Student Environmental Action Coalition or SEAC, transform itself into a pragmatic, solution-focused group. Not only did the group grow from 5 to 10 people to more than 100, but we have instated a Green Fee, planted a campus organic garden, and given every incoming freshman a Compact Flourescent Light (CFL) bulb. The individual campaign meetings in this group are now larger than the original group was!

The difference between pragmatism and radicalism, as I see it, is a focus on what can be done now rather than what should be done. A good and relevant (to me) example comes from sustainable forest use. While a radical environmental group might call for an end to all forest use, pragmatic groups are trying to reshape forest industries so that less damage is done to the regenerative capacity of the forest.

A couple of summers ago, I was zip-lining in the Costa Rican rainforest. In order to create the zip-line course, the adventure group we were with had cut swaths wide enough that one could swing around on the line and not hit any trees. While we were there, a friend remarked on how much disturbance and fragmentation this caused to the forest. There was no question that the forest was severely damaged by the zip-line course. However, one look at the pineapple plantations one plot of land over revealed that the choice was not between a pristine forest and a disturbed forest, it was between a disturbed forest and a pineapple plantation. When radicals criticize eco-tourism as "Greenwash," they need to understand that tourism is often the only thing keeping local people from simply converting pristine systems to agriculture.

Another example that will get some folks talking is the difference between becoming vegan and searching for sustainably (and ethically) raised animal products. Which will change the conditions in which animals are raised? Is it better to eat a veggie burger or grass-finished beef? I tend to believe that in terms of actually changing the meat industry, searching for "good" meat creates a demand for better practices. As long as the only two alternatives people see are vegetarianism or factory-farmed meat, meat producers will simply write off vegetarians as lost customers but never actually change their practices. If the subset of people who would normally become vegetarians instead began demanding ethically produced meat (and this is starting to happen), these products would become more available and demand would spread to people who would never consider vegetarianism but who otherwise care for the Earth and its animals. This is pragmatism in action, increasing the base of support for a cause by making it more accessible to "normal" people.

Before the past election, I was involved in a massive voter registration drive by MoveOn.org. As I went around trying to register people to vote, I repeatedly and inevitably ran into people who were "too radical" to vote. Disgusted and appalled, I tried to understand these people who decided that voting, the end product of not just one, but several, radical movements, would make them "complicit with the system." How could one be an activist and not vote?

It seems that the issue of purity is central to the distinction between pragmatism and radicalism. The idea of personally not participating in the system that one disagrees with permeates radical thought. The problem is one of scale. I believe that except in extreme circumstances (dictatorships, fascism, etc.), participation in the system is essential to changing it. So is the idea that some change is always better than no change. Many radicals see what I think is a false choice between a perfect change and an imperfect change. More often, the real choice is between imperfect change and no change at all.


Controversially,

Christmas Prayer

Great post Erica! It was getting lonely around here.

So in another passive aggressive move (see this for background if you care) my mom got me to say grace at the dinner table tonight. I was put on the spot, especially since my grandmother was there. I thought about it for half a minute and then said something like this:

We pray and we hope to the consciousness inside our heads that we have a better year coming up. We've started to see a bit of change this year, and we hope that things get better and that we see some real improvements in the world. Amen.

Not exactly eloquent, but I did manage to do a prayer without invoking anything explicitly supernatural, so I was proud of myself. I'm pretty sure I meant to say "conscience" rather than "consciousness" though, and it would have sounded a lot less new-agey if I had.

Merry Christmas Everyone! (I'm not being sarcastic, I actually do love Christmas)

Generic Season's Greetings

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

A Colbert Christmas: Toby Keith Sings

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O'Reilly Interview

I figured the Atheist's Log would be the best place to vent about the Christmas season. While I do like that Christmas seems to be getting more and more secular, it's also getting more and more materialist and consumerist, which isn't a good thing. Additionally, the Christian right always seems to go bonkers all over Christmas, as if they don't even realize that Christmas is a syncretic holiday, just like many aspects of Christianity exhibit syncretism. It really bothers me that the Christian right isn't interested in scholarship, science, or facts; it is more interested in maintaining power, placing guilt trips, and manipulating its way in the government. I feel that a true Christian scholar would study the origin of the religious texts and traditions and recognize that paganism has had vast influences on the religion. Yet modern-day fundamentalists want to ignore this simple fact, as well as the separation of church and state. The way I see it, there is no way to represent every single religion equally and fairly, so the government should represent none. There should be no presidential recognition of the national Christmas tree in Washington DC. It is merely a disgusting display of discrimination. And the fact that the biggest religious diversity we've had in a president was Catholicism instead of Protestantism is just a gross demonstration of the US of A's intolerance. People seem to think that they can remain politically correct by representing a variety of religions, but the fact remains that there are so many religions and so many interpretations of those religions (and then there are the atheists with no religion! what do we get??) that it is better to refrain from political public displays of this sort. Even at the College of William and Mary where there is a traditional Yule Log Ceremony (an obvious shout out to the pagans, right?) the students tried to represent every religion. The Christians spoke first, of course, quoting the Jesus birth story from the Bible (but wait, wasn't Jesus born in the spring?), then students representing the faiths of Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and the holiday of Kwanzaa spoke. But I, as an atheist, felt left out. And what about an acknowledgment to the pagan tradition of Yule Log? Oh, that tradition was read later, but only as a reminder of the rules of the event, like where to rub the sprig of holly. Is no one willing to recognize the lies and hate mongering that is Christianity? Before realizing other religions were represented at this Yule Log Ceremony, I yelled something like "Fuck this Christian shit! This is a pagan holiday!" causing the woman in front of me to turn around and give me a look.

I am willing to exchange gifts around Christmas; it is a nice gesture and, to be honest, with so many people celebrating the Christmas holiday, there is no escaping it. But I am not willing to believe "little baby Jesus" was born in a manger on December 25 to a virginal Mary. Because it isn't true. And any quick look on the Internet would show that Christianity borrowed greatly from existing traditions.

My Belief System: Waste

I hate waste. That sentence basically sums up this part of my philosophy, but I'll go on so I can explain some of the repercussions and practical principles that come from it.

When I talk about waste, I'm not just talking about the obvious physical waste that everyone can see. Of course we should recycle, reuse, compost, and reduce the stuff we use. At the same time, there are many kinds of waste besides the physical: wasted time, wasted potential, wasted mind power, wasted space.

I see all sorts of waste all around me all the time. For example, there's school. At every level, assignments are used mostly to further the students themselves. Many of these assignments, with a few modifications, could be exported to the "real world" and actually affect it. For example, rather than make students write a report on, say, National Parks in the US, you could get them to make a Wikipedia article on protected areas in Western Australia, most of which don't have articles yet. This way, rather than the report rotting on a desk, it can become part of the growing body of knowledge being built in this amazing resource.

One principle that I try to live by based on this whole hating waste thing is "Use what others might not." For example, if I see napkins that someone left on a table at a restaurant, I'll use those rather than get new ones from the dispenser, because those napkins will probably be thrown out. I don't know for sure that other people won't use them, but they might not, so I might as well use them.

Another principle is to use what you've got until its unusable (in terms of stuff, not nature of course). This is the reason I still carry the wallet I got when I was 14, even though the zippers are broken and the window for my ID is gone. As long as I can stuff a bill into it, I'm gonna keep on using it.

Its extremely easy to get carried away if you take any principle to far, and I'll talk about how I keep myself from doing that in my next post.

Peace and Plants

My Belief System: Life

Lets see if I can get this into one post. I've spent a large part of my short life trying to figure out what I believe in, and it looks like I have finally been able to collect enough thoughts to put together a relatively coherent version of that.

Most of my core beliefs are based on five principles: a love for Life, a abhorrence for waste, an obsession with questions, a distaste for radicalism, and an extremely long timescale. Lets go through these one by one. And no, there's no way this is going to fit in one post.

The love of Life is a love of all life - plants, animals, fungi, microbes, and people. As the product of 4 billion years of biological evolution, its only fitting that Life itself is at the core of my belief system. I believe there is a fundamental choice behind almost every decision we make: we can either respect, love, and further the systems that produced us, or we can destroy them. The most obvious product of a life - centered philosophy is of course, environmentalism.

I've basically always been an environmentalist. I've seen everything from enormous roadside dumps in Mexico to rivers of sewage in India to enormous rivers of concrete in California, and all of these things disturbed me greatly as I was growing up. There's plenty of writing about the environment out there, so I won't get into it too much, but I will say this: environmentalists have been pessimistic to the point of hopelessness. As a movement, we need to start focusing on solutions rather than problems, to start playing offense rather than defense.* No, we can't get that old-growth forest back in our lifetimes, but we can plant something that will someday resemble it.

If environmentalism is obvious, there are other results of this focus on life that might not be. The first of these is my very non-supernatural version of an afterlife. We live on through our children and through the ideas we pass on to others. In the ancient past, of course, it was only through our children that we could live on by passing our genes to the next generation. For a long time, however, probably since right before the first mammals, we've been passing on memes; ideas and behaviours that complement our genes and allow us to essentially skip thousands of generations with a single step. In fact, if you're reading this right now, I believe that a part of me is now in you! Scary thought huh?

The second, non-obvious result of basing a whole set of life principles on life itself is the desire to replicate it. I'm not just talking about having kids, or even restoring life on disturbed ecosystems... I'm talking about replicating the entire biosphere on other planets. You may be thinking this is a ways off, but the fact is that we are the only species on this planet capable of bringing life to lifeless worlds. We're less than half a century away from putting people on Mars, and I hope that we can bring more than people with us to that new world. This is where life-centered environmentalism parts with landscape or wilderness-centered environmentalism. Whereas many traditional environmentalists might say that we should leave other planets in their natural state, life-centered environmentalism essentially requires that we adapt life to live on these worlds and adapt these worlds to life. If you want a three-novel exploration of these ideas, check out The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anyway, thats about as much as I can get out right now. Look forward (or beware) of at least four more posts on this as I try and get my belief system down on paper. And down on paper I mean out on the internets...



*For more information about ecological restoration and my personal journey through it, see my other blog at http://restoringtheamericas.blogspot.com/

We are not alone!

Hey 'yall,

Our little blog has just joined the wider Atheist community by being added to the Atheist Blogroll! Its a growing collection of like-minded blogs from around the world. Check it out on the sidebar towards the bottom. Also, if you have another blog you would like added to the blogroll, let Mojoey of Deep Thoughts know and he'll hook you up!

While we're on the subject, lets talk about some of the other features of the blog. For starters, there's the Atheist Google search. Its like a normal search, but biased toward our beliefs (or lack thereof). I just typed in Spore and got this hilarious video from the creature creator. I also typed in Jesus (after seeing the video) and found atheists for jesus as the first result. The second result is an interesting article by Richard Dawkins.

Below the archive and subscription links, which are pretty self explanatory, is the slideshow. It basically displays anything on flickr tagged with the word "Atheism." So, if you want to throw something in the mix, just go on flickr and tag it. Because its unfiltered, some of the pictures are bound to be from religious folks trying to piss us off, but thats all part of the fun!

You may have noticed the ads on the blog. As full disclosure, I do earn revenue from those ads. I've made $1.30 so far!!!! The ads are based on the content of the site, which is rather Atheism heavy, so just like the pictures, many of the ads are meant to try and convert us... because I know so many folks that have "found Jesus" on the internet. He's probably lurking around here somewhere.

Anyway, this post has gone on longer than I wanted, so play around with the blog and I'll put up a real post later.

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