The Atheist Blogger

The British broadsheet newspaper The Telegraph has been caught in a despicable attempt to blacken the name of a new atheist student organisation of which I am a proud member. The article in question, titled “Atheists target UK schools” is only made more misleading by its subheading, which reads “Atheists are targeting schools in a campaign designed to challenge Christian societies, collective worship and religious education.” Of course, neither of these is an accurate description of what the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) is campaigning for. The AHS is a student organisation aimed at universities and colleges, not schools, and nothing the AHS is campaigning for includes challenging religious education or collective worship.

The Telegraph articles states:

The federation aims to encourage students to lobby their schools and local authorities over what is taught in RE lessons and to call for daily acts of collective worship to be scrapped. It wants the societies to hold talks and educational events to persuade students not to believe in God.

What the AHS actually wants to do is encourage interfaith discussion through a variety of events, focusing on both scientific and religious education, as well as supporting charity work. The aims of the current initiative are outlined in brief here:

• To teach students how to debate and create dialogue between school faith groups.
• Provide the school with fun and educational events and activities, including two student-led courses: ‘Perspectives’ in which a speaker from a faith group gives a talk followed by Q&A, and our ‘One Life’ course, which considers moral and ethical issues without god. Many events will also support the scientific curriculum.
• Encourage charity volunteering.
• Give students the experience of running a group and managing events.
• Show students that it’s ok not to believe in god and encourage critical thinking.
• Bring out issues concerning religious privilege in schools such as collective worship and incomplete or biased religious education.

The Telegraph article, perhaps one of the most blatant examples in recent years of “lying for Jesus” goes on to quote Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute on the matter of this supposed atheistic child indoctrination.

Atheists are becoming increasingly militant in their desperate attempts to stamp out faith. It is deeply worrying that they now want to use children to attack the Christian ethos of their schools. Many parents will also be anxious at the thought of militant atheists targeting their children. – Simon Calvert, Christian Institute

Of course the AHS is using children to counter Christianity, but the children in question are well into their late teens and early twenties, old enough to think for themselves one might have concluded. The implication present in both the Telegraph article and in Simon Calvert’s quotation is that the AHS are targeting children of primary and secondary school age, and this is a completely fallacious assertion. Recently, the AHS has been approached by several 6th form students who wish to form atheist groups at their respective colleges, and as a result 16-18 year olds from across the UK have been invited to a conference at Warwick University on 21st June. The aim of this is to help students set up societies at their colleges, and to support them.

As far as I am aware, the only organisation who are involving the younger generations of children is Camp Quest, which is a summer camp for the children of nonbelievers. This can hardly be called atheistic indoctrination though, since the children who go there all choose to participate, and the parents of those children are well aware of the activities that the camp includes.

In response to the article, AHS Press Officer Chloë Clifford-Frith had this to say:

The AHS is disappointed that the paper chose to twist information as far as possible to create a negative, sensationalist message out of a positive development for educational provision in schools.

The AHS does not and would never seek to challenge religious education in the manner that article goes on to suggest. The AHS strongly believes in the importance of a balanced, impartial and full religious education and would support the introduction of a national RE curriculum to ensure standards are met.

To find out more about the Warwick University conference on 21st June, please contact press@ahsstudents.org.uk or visit ahsstudents.org.uk.

Yesterday, I attended the launch of a new UK charity, the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS). They are similar to the international charity Secular Student Alliance, an organisation of which my student group is affiliated.

The plan was to travel up to London by catching the 8:23am train, a feat that was made immediately impossible for me, as I slept through three alarms and woke up at 8:40. Literally running the 2 miles from my house to the train station, I arrived only to find that all the self-service ticket machines had gone faulty (even the cash ones). Finally on the train, I mused over the frequent saying that when something goes wrong, everything else seems to go wrong as well, but eventually resorted to shoving this highly irrational thought to the back of my mind to get beaten into a pulp by psychological projections of Daniel Dennett. Instead, I concentrated on trying not to throw up as the train hurtled along to London (being England, there were of course no seats available).

Arriving in London, I met up with the only other member of our group who had bothered to turn up (or perhaps he was the only one who woke up on time), Jack. We were already running late, but I was assured by a quick phone call to the President of the AHS, Norman Ralph, that everyone was just mingling for the first hour. We arrived at Conway Hall, the “headquarters” of the South Place Ethical Society, the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, and were met by the Norman Ralph and introduced to a few members of the organisation.

The hall was filled with students, and organisations like the National Secular Society (NSS) and the British Humanist Association (BHA) had set up tables packed with information. I took the opportunity to join the BHA for half-price (we’re in a recession y’know), and to talk to members of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, who are planning to protest Sharia Law courts in the UK on March 7th.

At that moment, Richard Dawkins walked into the room. While officials went to greet him, Jack and I were reduced to giggling schoolgirls, whispering “That’s Richard Dawkins…3 feet away from me” to each other. We eventually regained our manly composure, and I decided I’d go talk to the professor, something which Jack decided was “too much”. Richard Dawkins was standing on his own, a banana in his hand, when I snuck up on him and introduced myself, saying how I was a fan of his work, and how it was just amazing to meet him. He said he liked my t-shirt (“There’s probably no god…”) and that he’d been seeing the colour scheme being used in various places. I finally told him that my friends would kill me if I didn’t get a picture taken with him, and he happily obliged.

Richard Dawkins shows he is not afraid of the atheist's nightmare.

In his speech, which was preceded with talks by Polly Toynbee and Professor A C Grayling, Dawkins pledged to support any student group that wanted to start up, and to write to his charity (The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science) if we ever needed money to organise events. The audience rightly applauded the pledge, and Dawkins ended his speech with a few highly amusing anecdotes.

So the Royal Holloway Secular Students will be joining the ranks of the AHS, and hopefully be running numerous events throughout the next year, especially with the support the AHS, SSA, and RDF!

A few photos I took of the event are available in my photos section.

There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

The campaign to put the words “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” on bendy buses in London has been a tremendous success. The campaign started this morning and within a few hours had succeeded and passed it’s target by over £15,000.

The original target was £5,500, with Richard Dawkins matching the donations up to that value. This alone would have put the slogan on 2 sets of 30 buses for 4 weeks. Now, with the campaign getting more donations by the minute, the organisers, British Humanist Association, can either get more buses or more weeks (or both).

I’m gonna have to go into London and take some photos when they come out. Meanwhile, some quotes:

Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride – automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children. – Richard Dawkins

We see so many posters advertising salvation through Jesus or threatening us with eternal damnation, that I feel sure that a bus advert like this will be welcomed as a breath of fresh air.- Hanne Stinson, chief executive of the BHA

I certainly hope the campaign will get people talking, and I will be donating to it later today (every little helps). Fundamentalists however, were not pleased:

Bendy-buses, like atheism, are a danger to the public at large.

I should be surprised if a quasi-religious advertising campaign like this did not attract graffiti.

People don’t like being preached at. Sometimes it does them good, but they still don’t like it. – Steven Green, Christian Voice

Mr Green evidently doesn’t understand the difference between his kind of preaching (hateful and vindictive) and the slogan on the bus, which tells people there is probably no god, and also to stop worrying and enjoy life. I wonder which people would prefer?

Having an atheist group on campus is great fun, as long as you can remember what your group is called. Last September I created the first such group Royal Holloway had seen, the “Atheist Union”. Later that year we changed the name to “Atheist & Agnostic Alliance” because some people refused to join otherwise, and it looked more open that way.

Then, this summer a guy created the “Royal Holloway Humanist Alliance” which I quickly got in contact and met up with. At the meeting we decided that two secular groups on campus was plain silly, and so we created the “Royal Holloway Secular Students” group, which is an umbrella group for both the Atheist & Agnostic Alliance and the Humanist Alliance.

Enough is enough, we have a group name now…hopefully one that will stick. We are planning fortnightly debates on secular issues, such as Abortion (next week), Faith Schools, Evolution vs Creationism, and Shia Law.

Should be fun…

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.