The Atheist Blogger

A the title suggests, I would like to know which state (or area) of the USA is considered the most secular / non-believing. Since I live in the UK I am putting this question out to all my American readers in hope that they can throw back some figures for me.

Why do I want to know? Well, I’m currently going into my second year of university studying Computer Science with Information Security (which is way more interesting to me that it sounds to you). It’s a three year course, and at the end I will weigh up my options before deciding whether to do a PhD in it. Whenever I actually leave university, I have always had plans to emigrate to America. Truth be told, there are far more jobs in the computer industry over there, especially in the areas I want to go into (Gaming and/or Web Technology).

I don’t want to end up in a Bible Belt area for obvious reasons, so I’d like a place where I could feel at ease with my beliefs, and find other secular people to hang out with. California’s “Silicon Valley” is a good place to start, since it has the technology and I know of at least one secular/atheist group for workers there. Amiable Atheist recently made me aware of Arizona which has an increasing number of non-believers.

So, which state do you consider the most secular / atheist? Do you have any figures to show this result? What other aspects of this area would make it desirable for a liberal atheist technology geek like myself?

I await your answers!

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Tonight at 11PM (UTC+1) we will be discussing Hemant Mehta’s book “I Sold My Soul on eBay” in the IRC Channel. Find out what time you need to be there using this worldclock. The discussion should last about an hour depending how many people turn up, and as usual a forum discussion thread will follow.

Hemant Mehta is going to try to turn up for the discussion, so you will have your chance to share your views with the author.

A few days ago I mentioned how wrong Ray Comfort was when he remarked:

Light is invisible. We can’t see it.

I’ve checked back to Ray’s blog regularly to see what he does about this basic misunderstanding of physics and how the eye works, and to check up on the comments that his post got (almost all of them were mocking him). He appears to have now edited the article so it reads:

The essence of “white” light is invisible. We can’t see it. Despite this, science has taught us that it’s actually made up of seven beautiful colors that are undetectable to the human eye until they are refracted through a prism. Of course, we know that the seven colors are the amazing colors we see in a rainbow–red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.

Nice bit of rewording he has done. Unfortunately it makes even less sense now than it did before his edits. What exactly is the “essence” of white light? Is he talking about the spectrum? That’s not invisible either. In fact that’s exactly how we see colours.

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The Amiable Atheist commented on an article in the English newspaper The Sunday Times entitled “Alzheimer’s leads atheist Terry Pratchett to appreciate God” where the 60 year old author claims that he may have found god after years of atheism.

He is quoted as saying:

I’m certainly not a man of faith, but as I was rushing down the stairs one day . . . it was very strange. And I say this reluctantly, because I am trying to deal with this situation in as hardheaded a way as I can. I suddenly knew that everything was okay, that what I was doing was right, and I didn’t know why.

…

It was a thought that all the right things are happening in the circumstances; and I thought, ‘Well, that’s all right then.’

Brushing everything aside, what exactly is he saying? That one day he was doing a perfectly ordinary thing, and realised that everything was fine? Is that god? Really? If so, I’ve been a believer pretty much my entire life then. Not a day goes by where I don’t think “Is this really what I want to do with my life?”, and the answer I always come to is “yes”. Whether I am considering my career, education, social life, and even the “atheist community”, I work something out through rational thought.

I fail to see how a sudden feeling that everything was okay defines god? When I donate to charity, I get the feeling I am doing something right, not because I believe I am pleasing a god, but because I am helping my fellow man. It seems Mr. Pratchett has discovered the wonders of humanism, not any form of “god”.

As for the right things happening in the circumstances, is he talking on a personal level here, because I fail to see how this applies to the rest of the world, where decisions are currently electing an evil dictator in Zimbabwe, and many more people are killed on the streets of Iraq. Even if it is on a personal level, how can he reason that out? He is suffering from a mental illness that will slowly destroy his memory. Hardly the “right” thing to happen to an author of all people.

In a slightly more rational moment, Pratchett said:

It is just possible that once you have got past all the gods that we have created with big beards and many human traits, just beyond all that, on the other side of physics, there just may be the ordered structure from which everything flows.

That is both a kind of philosophy and totally useless – it doesn’t take you anywhere. But it fills a hole.

So at least he is admitting that the “god” he might have found is completely ridiculous. It isn’t a theist god but a deist god, something completely outside our universe and undetectable. Yes it fills a hole, but that doesn’t make it any more truthful. For many years people believed the Sun orbits the Earth because that’s the logical explanation from basic observations and it fitted the hole, but it’s completely false.

I’m not saying Pratchett is wrong for thinking there might be a deist god out there, and if he likes the fact that it fills certain gaps in our knowledge then that’s fine as well. I just don’t think there is any reason to believe in something like that without evidence for it. If anything, he’s stuck halfway between atheism and deism, wanting to believe that there is something beyond our universe, but reasoning that such belief is borderline absurd given the circumstances.

It’s a tricky one to call in his situation, but at least he hasn’t started claiming he is the Messiah or anything like a few people would in his situation…

Update: It appears as though the media might be at fault here. According to the Daily Mail (eurgh), Terry Pratchett has denied he has “found God”. Of course the Daily Mail being who they are ignored what he said and the title is “I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist” which bares no resemblence to anything he says in the article…ah well.

As an atheist I get told “You are going to Hell” quite often, whether it be from a person I know or in an anonymous email through this blog. I get quite offended by this which many might consider odd seeing as I believe that “Hell” doesn’t exist. My reasoning for my offense is quite simple though, and I suspect many atheists feel the same way about things like this.

If we go by most religious beliefs, Hell is a place where sinners are sent if they do not repent. A lot of religions believe that a murderer can get into Heaven if they repent their sins before they die, or sacrifice themselves to save another. In short, there are quite a few “get out clauses” that one can consider. My “crime” though, isn’t murder, nor is it rape or thieving. An atheist’s crime is simply thinking, or reasoning. So by this definition, I am offended that someone would believe that a murderer, rapist, or thief who has said they are sorry for their crimes would get into Heaven, whilst a person who has done nothing but think would go to Hell.

Conversely, if we take the religious belief that Hell is a place that all sinners go to regardless of whether they repent or not, I am still offended. It seems that whilst a god may or may not have given us free will (depending on what you believe), we do have it. Therefore it seems ever so slightly unfair that a person should be sent to Hell for using a mental ability that doesn’t cause harm to anyone else. By this definition, I am offended that anyone (gods included) would consider murder an equal crime to using free will.

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