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Sunday School for Atheists

TIME — ‘When you have kids,’ says Julie Willey, a design engineer, ‘you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.’ So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.

An estimated 14% of Americans profess to have no religion, and among 18-to-25-year-olds, the proportion rises to 20%, according to the Institute for Humanist Studies. The lives of these young people would be much easier, adult nonbelievers say, if they learned at an early age how to respond to the God-fearing majority in the U.S. ‘It’s important for kids not to look weird,’ says Peter Bishop, who leads the preteen class at the Humanist center in Palo Alto. Others say the weekly instruction supports their position that it’s O.K. to not believe in God and gives them a place to reinforce the morals and values they want their children to have.

Read the article here.

Dealing with Dying: secular views on death

October 7, 2007 / Klint Finley

Free Inquiry’s latest issue has a special section on death and dying from the secular humanist perspective:

You’d think dying would be harder for the nonreligious. For us, death is the end, as final as turning off the television-and throwing it in the lake. However falsely, believers can look forward to eternal bliss or, if not bliss, at least justice; resolution, all the same. Picturing a deity’s hand upon the cosmic helm, believers can hope for all accounts to be settled and each injustice compensated, with every life set firmly into meaning’s great template.

How strange, then, that, despite the comfort and support their beliefs are said to bring, most religious people appear to fear dying and dread death no less fiercely than any secular humanist. Maybe it’s the animal in each of us, snarling at the dying of the light, no matter what mind and heart believe about eternity. Or maybe, when it comes to the capital E End, some believers feel less certain of what lies beyond the grave than they had hoped they would.

For those who view life as a prelude and those who view it as all there is, dying and death constitute the ultimate crucible. In so many ways, we reshape ourselves in our responses to the dyings and the deaths of those we love. Soon enough, each of us will face a dying, a death all our own. For some, the dying process will be transformative, the summation of a life well authored. Others will be denied that opportunity but spared also the suffering that may come with it.

Full Story: Free Inquiry.

The atheists’ revolt

October 6, 2007 / Klint Finley

Nigel Willmott at the Guardian asks if Richard Dawkins is the new Martin Luthor:

But one man does not make a revolution – political or intellectual; Luther tapped into all the sources of dissatisfaction in his world and very quickly found enthusiastic adherents. And what is interesting about Dawkins is that there seems to be a growing following for his uncompromising views. Over the past two or three years, for instance, Dawkins’ assaults on religion have generated more letters to the Guardian by far than any other single topic. As the religious communities have united to counterattack, secularists and members of the scientific community have become increasingly strident about “superstitious belief in unverifiable beings in the sky”. From being passive a-theists, they are becoming active anti-theists; no longer just critics of the existing religious superstructure of our world, but iconoclasts seeking to radically change or abolish it.

Full Story: The Guardian.

Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns

August 24, 2007 / Klint Finley

The survey concluded that “high levels of organic atheism are strongly correlated with high levels of societal health, such as low homicide rates, low poverty rates, low infant mortality rates, and low illiteracy rates, as well as high levels of educational attainment, per capita income, and gender equality. Most nations characterized by high degrees of individual and societal security have the highest rates of organic atheism, and conversely, nations characterized by low degrees of individual and societal security have the lowest rates of organic atheism. In some societies, particularly Europe , atheism is growing. However, throughout much of the world – particularly nations with high birth rates – atheism is barely discernible.”

It found the US to be one of the most religious nations.

Full Story.

(Via Sorceress Jade).

How do you prove photography to a blind man?

March 27, 2007 / Klint Finley

That was the question I was asked: how would you prove to a blind man, that photography exists?

I knew what he was getting at. We had been discussing psychics. He was a firm believer in psychic powers, had had psychic experiences, and regularly visited a psychic. His point was, since I had not experienced psychic powers, I would never be able to believe in what he ‘knew’ to be true. You could never prove to a blind man that photography exists, and likewise no one would ever be able to demonstrate to me that psychic powers were real.

It took me about ten seconds to think of a way to show he was wrong.

Full Story: Skeptico.

(Thanks Trevor!)

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Sunday School for Atheists

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