Proselytizing Atheism

It has been a while since I've written a blog post. I have been doing a lot of thinking regarding the freethought movement and the direction it has taken. In an effort to maintain the moral high ground, we have mostly avoided proselytizing. We have written books and blogs,  given speeches, engaged in debates, produced documentaries, but you don't often see a secular humanist agenda pushed in songs, movies, or TV shows. We are not out there proselytizing every day of the week on cable TV. You don't see sports, film, and pop stars, politicians and war heroes using their celebrity to spread atheism.  You don't find us going door to door or handing out pamphlets on street corners or trying to get people to come in off the street and listen to an atheist sermon like Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Muslims, or Scientologists. Those religions all grew and spread due to their aggressive recruitment. There are no atheist missionaries risking their lives to bring science and reason to uncivilized savages. I am beginning to think that  this isn't something we should be proud of. Perhaps this moral high ground is actually cowardice on our part.

The idea of travelling to Third World countries where atheism is equated with witchcraft, where homosexuals are stoned, and women and religious minorities are oppressed, and telling them the god, upon which all their cultural beliefs are based, is a fiction, frightens me too. The prospect of going into low income neighborhoods and knocking on doors to introduce people to deductive reasoning and explain logical fallacies as they relate to religion is terrifying to me. But if we ever hope to free this world and ourselves of this ignorance, isn't this exactly the sort of thing we should be doing? We often hear famous atheist thinkers saying they are not trying to convert anyone or spread atheism, but if we are not trying to change minds, then what the fuck are we doing?

How do we expect to change the world if we are not on the front lines? How do we expect to free ourselves from the ignorance, immorality, and oppression of organized religion, if we are not willing to be soldiers of reason just as believers rejoice in martyring themselves as soldiers for their deities? They are out there, every day, knocking on doors, handing out their propaganda on street corners, filling the airwaves everyday with their dogma and rhetoric, spreading their delusion. How the hell do we expect to combat this if we are not at least as aggressive with our counter-message? And if we are not willing to take it to such extremes, why bother writing blogs like this one? Why bother writing our books and creating our little organizations and websites?

So, I have been asking myself this and I would like to hear your thoughts before I make up my mind. Should we as atheists be more willing to proselytize?

Hide and Seek

It has occurred to me that the Christian concept of god and man's relationship to the divine can accurately be described as a sadistic game of "Hide and Seek". Christians believe that God hides himself and all evidence of his existence from man, then man is tasked with discovering this elusive deity's existence and if he fails he is sentenced to eternal torment. Did I leave anything out? Oh, yeah. Man is given a book of implausible and contradictory stories that can be interpreted any of a hundred ways as a guide. Oh, and along man's journey of discovery there will be placed countless liars, conmen, lunatics, and charlatans, all claiming to know God's whereabouts and to even have spoken to him, in order to further confuse him. This, to me, sounds like the perfect condition for the creation of atheists rather than believers. If there were a god, and he wanted no one to ever discover his existence, ever, he could not do better than to follow the Christian god's example.

So, if god has so effectively and thoroughly hidden himself, why has he made it a sin to deny his existence and an unforgivable sin to deny the existence of "The Holy Ghost"? (Whatever the fuck that is) Because he doesn't want people going to heaven? Perhaps because there is no heaven and the only way to keep that a secret is to ensure that no one will ever be worthy of entering it? Maybe it's because he gets a hard-on watching humans burn in the lake of fire? Or how about this, maybe it's because THERE IS NO FUCKING GOD!

Which conclusion conforms most to the principle of Occam's Razor, the principle that the most elegant theory, the simplest one that rests on the fewest assumptions, is generally the correct one? I would say the hypothesis that an omniscient, all-powerful, omnibenevolent creator god who came into existence by itself and loves all of mankind while permitting all manner of atrocities to befall his creations and hiding from them at every turn, while at the same time punishing those who do not find him, is not a very elegant theory. As a theory goes, this one looks like Fido's ass.

Again, I ask that you consider this bizarre hypothesis from the standpoint of a terrestrial leader, say, the president of the United States. Suppose we had a president who never showed his face, never even spoke in his own voice, but only through proxies who we could never even be certain actually knew him or had ever really spoken to him. These proxies all claimed to have spoken with him, yet they all had slightly different messages. Furthermore, this president sent out a book filled with stories that flew in the face of natural laws and generally accepted science, made a mockery of morality as we know it, had numerous statements in it that contradicted each other, yet he claimed (through his proxies, of course) that this book would explain everything. Now, imagine that civil wars erupted because some people believed the book said one thing, others believed it said something else. Some believed it made women subservient to men. Others believed it made all human beings equal. Some believed that it separated the races and made some races superior to others. Others clearly saw the president's words as proclaiming all races equal. Some quoted chapters and statements in the book, which explicitly outlawed homosexuality and condoned the enslaving of other human beings. Other looked at this book and could clearly point to statements saying no man was to judge another and everyone was to treat each other well. And so, wars broke out over these contradictions and millions of people were murdered, raped, enslaved, and tortured. Neighbor hated neighbor, yet they all believed the book was good and the president was good for having wrote it.

The president's proxies could not agree on who was right. They splintered off into little groups based on different interpretations of the president's book and the fighting continued as people further divided themselves , yet still, the president refused to address his loyal citizens in person and clear it all up, but was content to watch the entire country descend into chaos and madness. Now imagine that he declared, through his book and his proxies, that if anyone failed to obey any of the laws he put forth, they would be put in jail for the rest of their lives, where they would be tortured every day. Imagine that, upon hearing this, and knowing all the different interpretations of the book, everyone continued to believe in the president's benevolence. Imagine that no one ever once considered the possibility that the president was long dead or had never existed and his proxies were just making it all up. Imagine that no one ever thought it odd that he never answered any questions personally and that not one verifiable sighting of him had ever been recorded. Imagine that, as you looked around at all the fighting and arguing and hatred, you were the only one who could see the absurdity of it all. You now know what it feels like to be an atheist.

Where Are All The Black Female Atheists?

I asked this several years ago and since then I have had the pleasure of meeting many Black atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers of the opposite sex. Women like Sikivu Hutchison who wrote the recent book, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars or Ayanna Watson, head of Black Atheists of America or journalist, Jamila Bey, and many others have shown that not all black women remain willing captives to religious dogma. Not all black women can so easily cherry-pick through this abominable book of atrocities and ignore its condoning of slavery and misogyny. So, if some, why not all?

The women in my family are strong, proud. They refuse to be dominated by men, choosing to be single rather than accept the tyranny of unworthy males. Yet they bow without question before the most chauvinistic character in all of literature, the god of Abraham. How can this be?

I struggle with not looking down upon Christians, particularly Christians who are Black, Latino, homosexual, or female, the ones who have suffered the most at the hands of Christianity. It is hard not to think of them as grossly ill-informed, self-hating, sell-outs, or just plain stupid. I said recently of gay republicans, that if this were 1968 and there was a candidate promising to lower the deficit, balance the budget, and find jobs for everyone, but he was against interracial marriage and wanted to bring back Jim Crow laws, there is no way in hell I would vote for him. That's why I could not understand gay "fiscal conservatives" voting for republican candidates. I feel the same way about women and minorities praying to the god of Abraham. Don't you know that son of a bitch hates you?

As a result, I often find myself wincing when my mother or my aunts talk about going to church or praying or when they send me emails or finish a conversation with "God Bless You" or "Have a blessed day" or that annoyingly innocuous tagline "Blessings". I want to tell them how idiotic I find their faith and how I not only find it embarrassing as a Black person, but that they should be embarrassed as women. I feel toward them the way you would feel about a woman who speaks glowingly of her abusive husband, a little sad and embarrassed and just a tad bit disgusted.

I want to remind them of all the horrible things the bible says about women, how it condoned slavery and how the atrocities of the bible led to thousands of years of persecution by males and how it was used to justify the Trans Atlantic slave trade. Yet, even when I have told Black women this, it has never changed a thing, therefore, I am unwilling to risk my relationship with my loved ones to try to convince them of something they are unwilling to be convinced of. Yes, they all know my feelings about religion. It's plastered all over the internet and my Facebook page, so how could they not. I just don't talk about it directly with them, except for my mom, who happens to be a preacher of all things.

What is so odd for me, and so difficult to understand, is that I come from strong women. The women in my family have raised kids by themselves, overcome all manner of hardships from poverty to spousal abuse to cancer to lupus. These are not weak women. And when I see women like Ayanna Watson, who has shrugged off the fetters of religious dogma, I wonder why my own family members, no less strong or intelligent, cannot. I wonder why the millions of Black women crowding the churches throughout America and the world, cannot. I wonder if the centuries of slavery and oppression has somehow conditioned us to obey even imaginary, despicable masters.  The thought saddens and appalls me. I wonder if the feebleness of the American educational system, particularly in Black urban areas, has somehow contributed to this absurdity, made us less rational and more vulnerable to charlatans. Perhaps, as I have said before, the legacy of the Black church's involvement in the Civil Rights movement makes us feel obligated to the church and Black women, traditionally placed in the role of the preservers and purveyors of cultural identity, and the ones charged with the role of keeping the family together, feel a unique obligation to maintain the faith. Faith is, after all, part of the Black cultural identity in America. The only way that will change is by changing what mothers teach their children and right now teaching a young black kid how to be a good person is seen by most women, most people, in America as synonymous with teaching them how to be good Christians. Charged with the responsibility to raise good Christian children, I believe many Black women feel obligated to remain good Christians themselves. They may feel that failing to keep the faith would somehow be the same as failing their children and by extension their family and ultimately the entire Black culture.

Whoa. That is one hell of a burden to carry. No wonder there are so few Black female atheists. Until we relieve this burden from them, until we show the women in our culture that being Black does not have to mean being Christian, that being a good person does not necessitate being a Christian, that doing right by your children and raising them well does not have to mean bringing them up in the church despite all the cultural pressure to do so, until we can instill in them that raising rational, free-thinking individuals will not doom them to hell or make them bad parents or bad women, we will never be free as a people. It starts right here, with mom and dad. And I know I have placed a lot of the responsibility on the moms here, but that's only because, in our culture, that's where most of the pressure to conform originates. Women place pressure on their peers to toe the line and show up to church every Sunday with their kids in tow. They shame other women and judge them when they don't show up in a way that they don't when it comes to Black men. It is more acceptable for a Black man to avoid church then for a Black woman. She is still viewed as the nurturer. It is her responsibility to preserve the faith and the culture. Women are the majority of the church population in our culture, so that's where the indoctrination has to stop. Free the moms and the kids will follow.

But is it that simple? Is it simply extreme peer pressure, a sense of cultural and familial responsibility, coupled with the extreme religious indoctrination as children that most of us undergo that continues throughout our lives that has led to the obvious imbalance in freethinking Black females versus freethinking Black males? Is that the reason so many Black women, including my aunts, cousins, sister, niece, mother, and grandmother continue to embrace the god of their oppressor? Would a concentrated campaign to change the cultural paradigm of Black female religious enslavement fundamentally change our culture? I say, it is worth a shot.

Atheism in Black America (Lecture)

The following is a link to a lecture I did recently for The Austin Community of Atheist's weekly lecture series. There are a few corrections/retractions I need to make first. I mentioned that "My best friend is a minister...". Maurice is one of my closest friends and he is a church organizer not an ordained minister. I also said, when speaking about my aunt and my cousin, "... neither of them have spoken to me since." Actually, my aunt is still quite cordial to me. My cousin, however, chose Jesus Christ over me.

Something for Nothing

If there's something there I cannot see
And this something claims to care for me
but would let me die without a thought
let children be raped and sold and bought
let masses die of vile disease
and disasters bring nations to their knees

If it exists to love and to protect
and demands our trust and our respect
our worship and our adoration
obedience and admiration
yet lets millions perish of starvation


If it demands our deference and praise
under threat of endless pain
and promises paradise for faith
yet ever fails to keep us safe

I'd offer up my soul for sale
and calmly take my place in hell

Top Fifteen Logical Fallacies of Religious Apologists

I have been debating with religious apologists for as long as I have been an atheist, some 23 to 24 years. Over that time, I have come to recognize certain common fallacies in their arguments. What follows is a list of the most common logical fallacies committed by religious apologists:

1. Psychogenetic Fallacy. This logical fallacy states that if someone has psychological motivations for putting forth an argument, then he's biased, so his argument must be wrong. For instance: "He was molested by a priest. That's why he thinks there's no God." Psychological motivations give you information about the proponent of the argument, but they tell you nothing about the truth of his proposition. I can hate Christianity because it condoned slavery and because most racist organizations in America are Christian organizations. That does not subtract at all from my legitimate, logical arguments against the plausibility of an all-knowing, all-powerful, omni-benevolent creator.

2. Ad Ignorantiam is an argument from ignorance. The fallacy that a proposition is true simply because it has not been proven false. I'm sure you've all heard theists try to counter the argument that they have no proof in God's existence with "Well, you can't prove he doesn't exist!" This is silly of course because it is nearly impossible to prove a negative. I can't prove that fairies, elves, Leprechauns, vampires, and werewolves don't exist either, but I think we'd all agree that you'd have to be an idiot to believe in any of them because of the improbability of such beliefs.


3. The Teological Argument or Argument from Final Consequences is based on a reversal of cause and effect, because they argue that something is caused by the effect it has, or purpose that is serves. For example: "God must exist, because otherwise life would have no meaning." or "God must exist or else there could be no absolute moral laws." This only demonstrates that the conclusions are distasteful to you, not that they are false. Life may not have an objective absolute meaning or morality outside of that which we ascribe to it. This is not only possible, but plausible. Life's only meaning may be to exist and then cease to exist so that something else may exist. This may be a depressing, unpalatable answer, but it might also be true.

4. Least Plausible Hypothesis. This is a fallacy in which the most reasonable explanations are ignored in favor of a less plausible one. "I was praying for God to help me get this job and that night, the phone rang with a job offer." Obviously, this ignores the more plausible possibility that the prayee was the most qualified applicant.

There is an old rule for deciding which explanation is the most plausible by favoring the one that relies on the least number of unfounded assumptions; the simplest explanation. In essence, it is the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. It is most often called "Occam's Razor". To put it another way, just because you smell smoke doesn't mean there are dragons about. This is one of the reasons that I reject the absurd "Liar, Lunatic or Lord" argument. Obviously, liar or lunatic conform much better to the principle of Occam's Razor than "son of an omnipotent, omniscient, creator god, sent to earth to suffer and die for man's sins."

5. Argument from Incredulity or Argument from Astonishment. This is another form of The Argument From Ignorance. It is an intellectually pessimistic argument that says that if I don't know something, then no one else knows, and no one ever will. It confuses "currently unexplained" with "unexplainable". Because we do not currently have an adequate explanation for a phenomenon does not mean that it is forever unexplainable, or that it therefore defies the laws of nature or requires a paranormal explanation. An example of this is the "God of the Gaps" argument of creationists which seeks to label anything we cannot currently explain as "unexplainable" and therefore an act of god. William Lane Craig commits this particular fallacy when he argues for Intelligent Design by stating that the hyper-dense singularity that exploded to create all matter in the universe (The Big Bang) must have exploded for a reason and, since science has yet to come up with a definitive explanation for what caused The Big Bang, it must have been God. Obviously, by that reasoning, we could say: "Since we don't know what caused The Big Bang, it must have been giant cosmic chipmunks or gremlins or leprechauns." Again, this is just idiotic reasoning.

The other issue with the "God of The Gaps" is that as the gaps in our understanding slowly close, God must necessarily become smaller and ultimately disappear. One example of this is the attempt to refute the Theory of Evolution by pointing out the gaps in the fossil record. As those gaps are filled, (and they are being filled consistently year after year) an already weak argument weakens further.


6. False Dichotomy. Arbitrarily reducing a set of many possibilities to only two in order to make the conclusion appear obvious when it is actually far more complex. For example: "Jesus was not a liar, therefore he must have been God." assumes these are the only two possibilities when obviously there are many other possibilities like Jesus being confused, mistaken, or even deliberately manipulated by those around him. The famous "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" argument is a false trichotomy for the same reasons.

7. Non-Sequitur. In Latin this term translates to "doesn't follow". This refers to an argument in which the conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premises. In other words, a logical connection is implied where none exists i.e. "There is so much beauty in nature. There must be a God."

8. Reductio ad absurdum. In formal logic, the reductio ad absurdum can actually lead to factual conclusions. It follows the form that if the premises are assumed to be true it necessarily leads to a ridiculous conclusion therefore one or more premises must be false. The fallacious form of this argument refers to the abuse of it by stretching the logic in order to force an absurd conclusion. Christian Apologists often commit this fallacy by arguing that if I don't believe in anything I haven't seen then I must not believe in Antarctica or The North Pole because I haven't seen either place with my own eyes. This is a false reductio ad absurdum because it ignores other ways that humans acquire knowledge besides personal experience, i.e. the documented and confirmed experiences of others, photographic evidence, and other forms of empirical evidence. I haven't seen Antarctica, but I have seen polar bears and penguins. In short, doubting the existence of God does not lead to the conclusion that one must also reject the existence of The North Pole or Antarctica.

9. Slippery slope fallacy. This logical fallacy is the argument that a position is not consistent or tenable because accepting the position means that the extreme of the position (however ridiculous) must also be accepted, which would inevitably lead to harmful consequences. "If we let two men marry what's to stop a guy from marrying a horse if he wanted to?" Any reasonable adult, outside of the Christian Right, can see the obvious absurdity in this reasoning.

10. Straw Man. Arguing against a position, which you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view. My aunt once forwarded an email about an atheist arguing with a Christian that he didn't believe in Jesus because why would Jesus lower himself by consorting with humans and becoming human. It employed some clever metaphor. I believe it was a man trying to get chickens to follow him into a chicken coop by acting like a chicken. All the Christian who read it applauded the witty way in which the protagonist of the tale countered the atheists argument, but it was a ridiculous argument to begin with and no atheist I know would make an argument like that. There are dozens of strong reasons for not believing in the Christian deity and I have never heard an atheist say he didn't believe because God lowered himself to man's level when he became human. It was one of the sillier Straw Man arguments I'd heard.


11. Tautology. A tautology is an argument that utilizes circular reasoning. The conclusion is evidence of its self. As one blogger put it:
"God is Good because the bible says that God is good and the bible was written by God who would not lie because he is good."

12. Argumentum ad populum. This is a fallacy that assumes that if a majority of people hold a certain belief, that belief must be true. It attempts to turn truth into a popularity contest where the conclusion with the most people believing it to be true is therefore true. Obviously, truth is not decided by majority vote. "People all over the world, in many different cultures believe in the existence of God. They can't all be wrong!" Well, of course they can all be wrong. There was a time not long ago when the majority of people believed that demons caused illnesses and the world was flat.

13. Unfalsifiable Hypothesis/ Special Pleading. An unfalsifiable hypothesis is exactly what it sounds like, a theory that cannot be disproven. Ask a theist how they would know if God did not love them, what evidence they would need to prove that God in fact hated them and they could give you no answer because their belief that God loves them is not based on evidence therefore no amount of evidence can refute it. By this reasoning, if they were to become poor, crippled by illness, victimized by criminals, and see their loved ones tortured and murdered before their own eyes, they would still believe that God loved them because their belief in God's love is not based on empirical facts.

14. Argument By Selective Observation. The Argument By Selective Observation "cherry picking" as it is more popularly known, is the enumeration of favorable circumstances while ignoring the unfavorable. "Jesus was the God of Peace! He told Everyone to love thy neighbor as thy self." He also condoned slavery and condemned anyone who did not believe in him to death. But let's ignore that.

15. Ad hominem. An ad hominem attack is an attempt to refute an argument by attacking the argument's proponents, rather than addressing the argument itself. Theists often commit this fallacy, avoiding the arguments of freethinker by accusing them of being "Angry at God" or of "Just wanting to live immoral lives and sin without consequences". Atheists, on the other hand, have also been known to commit this particular fallacy, for example, by calling people who believe in Christ crazy or stupid. I know, I've been known to call believers idiots as well, but I counter their arguments first and don't use "Theists are idiots" as the counter argument.

So there they are, my top fifteen. The next time you argue with a theist, see how many of these fallacies you catch them using. If they're an apologist worth their salt they'll hit every one.

The National Atheist Party African American Committee

The National Atheist Party is recruiting African Americans to join their Diversity Council.

The African American Committee is the main resource of the Diversity Council for African American information, interpretation, and opinion needed to define Party policy. The African American Diversity Council Committee is a resource of Party membership, providing reports current African American knowledge, ensuring worldviews are respected.

Position Duties
The African American Committee strives to keep the National Atheist Party informed and educated on issues of concern to the African American community both domestic and abroad in both current and past times. Provides the Diversity Committee with information, interpretation, and opinion needed to define Party policy. Reviews language of policies to insure accuracy of terms and respect specifically to the African American Community. Provides information to the membership pertinent to African American issues.

Position Requirements
Each member will be required to -
• Identify with the worldview of the group you are applying to.
• Have experience and knowledge of issues within diversity council group.
• Be passionate and ready to work hard!

Required Proficiencies
No required proficiencies.

If you have the qualifications and the desire to serve in these positions, please express your interest, and we will contact you with more specific details about the responsibilities of the position. You may contact Anthony.Graham@usanap.org, Chair of the Diversity Council, for further information. http://www.usanap.org/available-positions/african-american-committee-member.html/