Fellow Atheists/Agnostic Atheists - Let's Chat: Do you feel it is risky being "out" these days?

Here's one that I sent.

IMAGE(http://www.soane.org/shop/images/T/La%20Mariee%20%28Small%29.jpg)

I wrote 'Worst Xmas tree ever?' inside.

http://www.soane.org/shop/Mascarade-...

Ideally Xmas cards should be interesting and/or beautiful.

This is always a favorite of mine by Evil Ink Designs.

On the inside it says "Santa doesn't need you. (Santa doesn't need anyone)"

IMAGE(http://i66.photobucket.com/albums/h260/macquigg/631664340_m.jpg)

McIrishJihad wrote:

My wife and I (she's pagan) spent 30 minutes trying to find the most non-denominational pack of holiday cards that we could this season. Either the front looked awesome, but had a bible quote inside, or there was the Capital G word right on the front.

Couldn't you just felt-tip marker the letter "s" in after all the instances of the Capital G word? May God(s) always look upon you with joy!

NSMike wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:

I think expecting any devout Catholic or Christian to send anything but an overtly religious Christmas card is odd. I always view those cards as representing the people sending them, not me.

I didn't express it well, but that's part of my conflict, yeah. I'm also conflicted by the fact that they should know their audience.

Jayhawker wrote:

And if someone prays for me, I try to take it as a compliment rather than an affront.

It depends on the spirit in which the sentiment is offered. I've encountered people offering to "pray for me," when it was clearly meant as, "You are wrong, I know you are, and I am going to tell you that by appealing to my imaginary skyfriend to change you."

Mike, I think this is exactly what they mean, even when it is a compliment. I also don't think it is something worth spending time thinking about. I got this from my former mother-in-law all the time, because I didn't marry her daughter in a church (they sort of frown on that for someone who doesn't believe in God). I know she likes me, even now, and she is worried that when I die, I will be condemned to a fiery hell and my kids will have to spend their afterlife eternity without their father. So she prays that I will see that I am wrong wrong wrong and find Jesus. It's a nice thought, but it has less influence on my life than the flavor of my coffee. I suggest you accept that your parents want the best for you, and they believe that that means coming back to the church. They are wrong (according to you - which is all that matters), but their heart is in the right place, even if it feels a little pushy and invasive.

I haven't sent cards for a couple years now, but the last ones I sent was a print-your-own card from Nodwick that depicted a snowman coming to life after an old silk hat they found in a raid turned out to have some magic in it. (which I can't find on his new website now - BOO) How does that fit on the scale?

I do have some generic ones with really pretty snowflakes on them and no message inside so I can write a note on them myself that I mostly use as industrial-grade tags for those presents that need seriously fancy wrapping. That's what I will send out if I ever get my ducks arranged in a shape that can even be expressed as a fractal this year.

momgamer wrote:

I haven't sent cards for a couple years now, but the last ones I sent was a print-your-own card from Nodwick that depicted a snowman coming to life after an old silk hat they found in a raid turned out to have some magic in it. (which I can't find on his new website now - BOO) How does that fit on the scale? ;)

Oh man, I'd completely forgotten that Nodwick existed, I have an archive binge ahead of me! Yay!

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema Sworn Into Congress without a Bible.

She's the first one apparently, a shame she still can't do so as an open atheist and must do so as 'unaffiliated' but it's a start at least.

She swore on a copy of US Constitution. Even the most die-hard Tea Party wahkabbis should be happy with that!

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

She swore on a copy of US Constitution. Even the most die-hard Tea Party wahkabbis should be happy with that!

I wouldn't be so sure of that considering the massive overlap between Tea Partiers and the religious right.

OG_slinger wrote:
Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

She swore on a copy of US Constitution. Even the most die-hard Tea Party wahkabbis should be happy with that!

I wouldn't be so sure of that considering the massive overlap between Tea Partiers and the religious right.

And yet, given her position, having her look at a copy of the Constitution while sworn in might be more experience with it than most of the Tea Party elects.

krev82 wrote:

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema Sworn Into Congress without a Bible.

She's the first one apparently, a shame she still can't do so as an open atheist and must do so as 'unaffiliated' but it's a start at least.

With Pete Stark out of Congress, at least we have some kind of non-theist representation. Whether or not she's an atheist is irrelevant; she won't be (implicitly) swearing to uphold the laws of a mythological tale filled with genocide, infanticide, slavery, misogyny, incest, and celestial rape presided over by a cruel, immoral, petty, infantile god.

Good on her.

Nicholaas wrote:
krev82 wrote:

Rep. Kyrsten Sinema Sworn Into Congress without a Bible.

She's the first one apparently, a shame she still can't do so as an open atheist and must do so as 'unaffiliated' but it's a start at least.

With Pete Stark out of Congress, at least we have some kind of non-theist representation. Whether or not she's an atheist is irrelevant; she won't be (implicitly) swearing to uphold the laws of a mythological tale filled with genocide, infanticide, slavery, misogyny, incest, and celestial rape presided over by a cruel, immoral, petty, infantile god.

Good on her.

But tell us how you really feel

When I was working, I was open with my co-workers that I was atheist. No one had any trouble with it, at least openly. And all of these people were pretty religious bible belt good ol' boys with some very old fashioned ideals.

Morning Edition this week is doing a series on the rapidly growing group of people who do not identify themselves as belonging to a religion. I've linked to the first story above, and here's the meta-page for the series (where future stories will appear).

From the first piece:

Perhaps most striking is that one-third of Americans under 30 have no religious affiliation. When comparing this with previous generations under 30, there's a new wrinkle, says Greg Smith, a senior research at Pew.

"Young people today are not only more religiously unaffiliated than their elders; they are also more religiously unaffiliated than previous generations of young people ever have been as far back as we can tell," Smith tells NPR Morning Edition co-host David Greene. "This really is something new."

And:

"It begins to jump at around 1990," he says. "These were the kids who were coming of age in the America of the culture wars, in the America in which religion publicly became associated with a particular brand of politics, and so I think the single most important reason for the rise of the unknowns is that combination of the younger people moving to the left on social issues and the most visible religious leaders moving to the right on that same issue."

I interpret that as: the crazier and more xenophobic the religious right gets, the more young people are driven away from all religion completely. Even the less crazy religions start looking loony simply by association.

gore wrote:

I interpret that as: the crazier and more xenophobic the religious right gets, the more young people are driven away from all religion completely. Even the less crazy religions start looking loony simply by association.

And not necessarily wrongly so. I think reasonable religious people exist, but a lot more needs to be done by them to call out the loonies and fanatics and extremists. Some already do this (see: Phoenix Rev and others), but sadly most religious people keep silent on the issue. This creates a climate that tacitly condones the hi-jinks that the crazy side gets up to.

In such an environment it's not strange to paint all religions with the same brush, rightly or wrongly.

Interesting article in io9 about Zach Kopplin, a 19-year old history student at Rice, taking on the Louisiana Science Education Act.

For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for teachers to introduce creationist textbooks into the classroom. Outraged, he wrote a research paper about it for a high school English class. Nearly five years later, the 19-year-old Kopplin has become one of the fiercest — and most feared — advocates for education reform in Louisiana.

(We don't have a Creationism vs. Science thread -- and probably don't need one -- this seemed the best spot to find people interested in the article.)

I think we've tried a couple times on Creationism v. Science, and I think it hasn't gone well either time. We always seem to derail ourselves into threadlock.

We actually have creationists in p&c? O.O

Yeah.

I know the difference, I guess I just don't label the latter category to be "creationists," since there isn't much "creating" going on so much as a "setting the ball rolling" in those views.
Maybe we can label them "rollingists."

I grew up with young-earthers, maybe I'm still a little territorial.

It's important to distinguish between types of creationists. There's the young earth creationists, literalists who believe God created the earth only a few thousand years ago; and then there are the people who believe God created the world, but in ways that don't conflict with the evidence we now have.

The thing about the former category? They're so totally off the rails, it's pointless to discuss anything at all with them, since they basically don't believe in logic. And those are the people writing education policy in poor, rural areas in this country. I suspect there aren't too many of them around these parts...

"Creationism" in the US usually refers to Young Earth Creationism, or more generally to a disbelief that evolution caused the diversity of species in the world (as opposed to Creation of "types" which were then preserved after the Great Flood.) Tied with this is a denial of modern geology, because that gives us a good idea of the age of very old things; a distrust of cosmology, for the same reason, including theories of the origin of the universe; and a general distrust of science as an authority on the world, because the aforementioned fields and their relations (physics, especially) are supposedly contradicting God's word.

Old Earth creationism is simply the idea that "God created the Earth/universe long ago, as science tells us" and the believer then picks which specifics they want to layer on that. "God created evolution", or "The Earth is old but God created all the species as they are today, however, over 99% of them have died out" and so forth into many variants.

Saw a good quote on Metafilter:

Pope Guilty wrote:

To be a militant Christian, you have to shoot abortion providers. To be a militant Muslim, you have to blow up buses. To be a militant atheist, you have to not be quietly ashamed of being an atheist.

Cue Stalin/Pol Pot/Mao cite in 3...2...1...

Robear wrote:

Cue Stalin/Pol Pot/Mao cite in 3...2...1...

How about an Ayn Rand cite ; D

CheezePavilion wrote:

How about an Ayn Rand cite ; D

Fiction authors don't really apply here.

Robear wrote:
CheezePavilion wrote:

How about an Ayn Rand cite ; D

Fiction authors don't really apply here. :-)

I think that one needs a little more time in the oven--doesn't make sense, so I can't give it a smiley.

We just had a lot of weak people (i.e. intellectuals) that couldn't re-educate themselves or survive without food for more than a few months. And according to Wikipedia, China's population actually doubled under my stewardship, so I'd say my policies were on the whole pro-life, really.

Robear wrote:
CheezePavilion wrote:

How about an Ayn Rand cite ; D

Fiction authors don't really apply here. :-)

So we can stop quoting the bible then?

Spoiler:

ZING!