It’s my birthday!  I turn 26 today, a fun if utterly insignificant anniversary.  It snuck up on me this year – the past month passed in the blink of an eye as I spent all my time acting as Publicity Director for the Reason Rally.  I’m still coming to grips with what we pulled off.  Suddenly, after all the Facebook ads, the media interviews, the emails, the press releases, the organized chaos, and the excitement… it’s over.  And I realize that it’s my birthday.

But that’s the thing – our rally, our movement, our cause – means far more to me than my path around the Sun.  Promoting reason over faith, fighting for the political and social equality of atheists… that’s what I care about.

So if you’re moved to celebrate my birthday with me, please consider supporting the future (and present!) of our movement.  The organization I work for, the Secular Student Alliance, does fantastic work making a difference on campus and in communities across the country, and I can’t think of anything that would mean more to me than supporting their activism.

If you’re a Friendly Atheist reader, you see the constant stream of stories about the great work secular students are doing.  If you went to the Reason Rally, you saw how important students are to the movement.

I’m going to steal an idea from Hemant and ask you to celebrate with me by donating $26 to the SSA today.  We even have a matching offer from members Jeff Hawkins and Janet Strauss, so any donations will be doubled!

I’m so proud to be a part of this community.  Here’s hoping I get to spend another year doing what I love with all of you!

I’m not usually one to feel that sense of awe about the universe. But… wow. This new image NASA released yesterday as part of their “Blue Marble” project is incredible:

(I also found the absolutely enormous, 8000×8000 px version. It blew my mind.)

Really gives a sense of perspective, doesn’t it? … And then you realize that the planet is a tiny speck in the solar system, which is an even smaller speck in the galaxy, which is just one of billions of galaxies…

I think I’m going to mark the “love” tag for this post. It seems oddly appropriate.

Perhaps I’d gotten too cynical, but I didn’t see this good turn of events coming. As announced yesterday, religious leaders in Cranston, Rhode Island stepped up to defend Jessica and speak out against the hateful comments, the bullying, and the threats.

Here were the rapid reactions I jotted down as I watched:

• Yes, like you, I cringed every time the news anchors opened their mouths to talk about the case. I would have loved it if they actually stated facts as facts: The banner was unconstitutional. We can cite the judge’s authority. Some threats were death threats. They were made publicly. There’s no reason to make them sound like allegations, they’re facts viewers should know.
• I’m a bit confused about what the clergy was trying to say by comparing Jessica as a prophet.
• I’m ever so glad that someone is condemning the death threats because they still hope Jessica will come to faith. (Yes, that was my sarcastic face.)
• When Jessica used the phrase “I already won the lawsuit — and fairly so,” I couldn’t help but start grinning. I’m not sure why, but the way she slipped it in was perfect. For some reason, that was left out of the WPRI transcript online.
• I also loved the way Rev. Gene Dyszlewski called out the “radio demagoguery.” Damn straight. It WAS toxic and harmful.
• It would have been nice to hear a defense of the separation of church and state, though the press release mentions that they “speak in support of Jessica Ahlquist’s right to challenge the banner at Cranston High School West.” Perhaps that didn’t make it into the two minutes of air time.

Overall, I’m really glad to see this press conference happen. True, the bar wasn’t set very high. It would be a sad day indeed if religious moderates wouldn’t come out in favor of the Constitution and against death threats to 16-year-old girls.

Jessica’s case has been deeply polarizing in her community — but at least we’re finding out which “pole” the religious moderates are closer to. It brought together 18 leaders: Baptists and UU’s, Jews and Muslims, all coming together to defend an atheist from violence. We atheists often say that we need the religious moderates to be on our side, condemning the extremists. This is a start.

That’s right: religion is ruining the true spirit of Christmas. That’s my argument in today’s US News & World Report Debate topic “Has Christmas Become Too Secular?”  Believe me, I had a lot of fun answering. The secular submissions are dominating the religious ones – go upvote the ones you like!

US News gathered four secular representatives:

• Me, with the Secular Student Alliance
• Roy Speckhardt of the American Humanist Association,
• Annie Laurie Gaylor with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and
• Herb Silverman for the Secular Coalition for America

They also got five people to take the other side, representing:

• Concerned Women for America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute
• Traditional Values Coalition
• Family Research Council
• American Family Association
• Catholic League

Yup, that’s some of our favorite groups, including our old friend Bill Donohue. Here’s a taste from his answer:

Having gotten about as far as they can by swinging their legal club, the secular dogmatists switched gears by seeking to blunt Christmas celebrations with contrived competition. So now we are told that December is “Diversity Month,” a time when we must recognize the multiplicity of races, ethnic groups, religions, and cultures around the world. It’s as political as it is pathetic.

(~Bill Donohue)

I went for the moral high ground, claiming that Christmas is about secular values:

Take a look at the most important parts of Christmas: togetherness, compassion, and peace. Those are secular values. A secular Christmas is an inclusive Christmas true to the spirit of the holiday.

Some might claim that the “most important” part of Christmas is a particular religious belief. But do we really want to put faith before family? Doctrine over charity? No. If anything, religion is distracting us from the real meaning of Christmas.

(~Jesse Galef)

I celebrate a secular holiday about family and the spirit of giving. I call it Christmas – the federally-recognized holiday occurring on December 25th. It confuses some people because a Christian holiday has the same name. But as you know, winter celebrations have changed over time (evolved, if you will). From Saturnalia to Solstice, Christ’s Mass to today’s secular Christmas, we’ve seen it happen. And we can take it further.

If you don’t want to celebrate Christmas because you think it’s too closely associated with religion, I understand. Give it time. Before you know it, Christmas will be focused on the things that matter: family and charity. And atheists celebrating it our way helps claim that focus. I like this framing because it make it clear: WE have the moral high ground. We’re focused on the real aspects of morality.

By the way, it probably isn’t in the “true holiday spirit”, but I do enjoy seeing the point spread between my answer and Bill Donohue’s:

For the record, there are only 9 spots.  He’s in last place with negative 500 votes.  It’s as if we atheists have a strong online presence or something!

Check out the other submissions and vote!

“How Should Rationalists Approach Death?” That’s the title of the panel I’m moderating this weekend at Skepticon, and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s a big topic – we won’t figure it all out in an hour, but I know we’ll get people to think. Do common beliefs about death make sense? How can we find comfort about our mortality? Should we try to find comfort about death? What should society be doing about death?

I managed to get 4 fantastic panelists, all of whom I respect and admire:

• Greta Christina is author, blogger, speaker extraordinaire. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer. I’ve been thrilled to see her becoming a well-known and respected voice in the secular community. She delivered the keynote address at the Secular Student Alliance’s 2010 Conference, and has been on speaking tours around the country.
• James Croft is a candidate for an Ed.D at Harvard and works with the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. I had the pleasure of meeting James two years ago at American Humanist Association conference, where we talked and argued for hours. Eloquent, gracious, and sharp, he’s a great model of intellectual engagement. He’s able to disagree agreeably, but also change his mind when the occasion calls for it.
• Eliezer Yudkowsky co-founded the nonprofit Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), where he works as a full-time Research Fellow. He’s written must-read essays on Bayes’ Theorem and human rationality as well as great works of fiction. Have you heard me rave about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality? That’s him. His writings, especially on the community blog LessWrong, have influenced my thinking quite a bit.
• Julia Galef is a science writer with a background in statistics. She’s on the board of the New York City Skeptics, co-hosts the Rationally Speaking podcast, and gives lectures and moderates panels about rationality and critical thinking. She blogs at 3 Quarks Daily, Rationally Speaking, and apparently writes a pretty cool blog with her brother, Jesse, called Measure of Doubt.

To give you a taste of what to expect, I chose two passages about finding hope in death – one from Greta, the other from Eliezer.

Greta:

But we can find ways to frame reality — including the reality of death — that make it easier to deal with. We can find ways to frame reality that do not ignore or deny it and that still give us comfort and solace, meaning and hope. And we can offer these ways of framing reality to people who are considering atheism but have been taught to see it as inevitably frightening, empty, and hopeless.

And I’m genuinely puzzled by atheists who are trying to undercut that.

Eliezer:

I wonder at the strength of non-transhumanist atheists, to accept so terrible a darkness without any hope of changing it. But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day. One point eight lives per second, fifty-five million lives per year. Convert the units, time to life, life to time. The World Trade Center killed half an hour. As of today, all cryonics organizations together have suspended one minute. This essay took twenty thousand lives to write. I wonder if there was ever an atheist who accepted the full horror, making no excuses, offering no consolations, who did not also hope for some future dawn. What must it be like to live in this world, seeing it just the way it is, and think that it will never change, never get any better?

If you’re coming to Skepticon – and you should, it’s free! – you need to be there for this panel.

I know, I know, the Ten Commandments aren’t a good moral code. We reject the very notion of following rules passed down from an authority figure. But what if we didn’t take them as absolute rules? What if they were decent, secular guidelines? And what if the authority figure *cough* was Penn Jillette?

It’s a fun idea. Apparently, Glenn Beck challenged Penn to come up with the atheist’s version of the 10 Commandments and Penn did a decent job rewriting them to tease out what was worthwhile. Kimberly Winston shares them with the public in a Religion News Service article – here’s a sampling:

(You can read the others in the article.)

Not bad. It’s a decent starting point in describing what it means to be good without god. I think he was handcuffed by his decision to follow the original format, something the late great George Carlin rejected: (NSFW – come on, it’s Carlin)

He got it down to two commandments, though he tacked on one of his own at the end.

Of course, the ultimate distillation comes from the preeminent secular scholar of our time: E.T.

Be good.

Sure, not much nuance or real guidance… but punchy, I’ll give him (it?) that.

It’s not every day you see USA Today call out a sitting Supreme Court Justice.  Apparently Justice Antonin Scalia isn’t quite as accomplished a theologian as he is a judge. Speaking at Duquesne University about the death penalty, he said some pretty revealing things.  In a great article by Lisa Miller, he’s quoted as saying:

“If I thought that Catholic doctrine held the death penalty to be immoral, I would resign. I could not be part of a system that imposes it.”

Miller tears him apart. Calling it “nothing short of astonishing,” she lays out evidence that the Catholic doctrine probably does condemn the death penalty.

To recap: The U.S. bishops oppose capital punishment. So do this pope, the last pope and documents from the Vatican press office. Catholic doctrine isn’t crystal clear, but Scalia himself believes “Evangelium Vitae” fails to support capital punishment. And so, in the tradition of millions of Catholics for thousands of years, he has rejected official teaching in favor of his own view, which he believes (to be presumptuous for a minute) to be more traditional and more moral than the established one.

She goes on to close with some pointed remarks:

That’s fine with me. I don’t want a justice sitting on the Supreme Court who submits blindly to religious authority or who holds his religion above the laws of the land. So keep your job, Justice Scalia. Just don’t pretend your church approves of the death penalty. Or that you aren’t like most people of faith, cherry-picking the teachings of your church that suit you best.

Zing!

After a few minutes mulling it over, I went from angry to happy.  I realized that Scalia’s actually following my vision of separation of church and state.  Justices are tasked with interpreting the Constitution of our secular government according to secular reasoning. Justices can absolutely be religious — there shall be no religious test for office, after all — but they need to be able to put those convictions aside to serve their secular purpose. If they’re not able to do so, they’re not fit for office.

Apparently Justice Scalia agrees! That’s pretty much what he said: if he thought interpreting the Constitution was strongly at odds with his religious morals, he would step down.

Wait, Scalia says that he’ll leave the court if he believes the legal system supports something the Catholic Church considers immoral?

Quick, tell him about the Catholic Church’s position on divorce!

***

(And no, this entire post wasn’t just an excuse to post this picture:

If you ever see me at the bar, ask me to tell you the funny story.)

Want a heartwarming story of progress? Patrick Henry High School in San Diego just made history by crowning the nation’s first lesbian homecoming couple. The students voted Rebeca Arellano (left, below) Homecoming King last Friday, and this week they named her girlfriend Haileigh Adams Homecoming Queen.

What a sign of the times. We already know that younger generations are more supportive of GLBT rights, but this goes above and beyond.

The two girls told ABC News that they’re thankful for the abundance of support they’ve received from family, friends, and students and staff at the school.

Arellano said one of her teachers told her, “Today school is a bit better because of you girls.”

Arellano’s Facebook wall is covered with congratulatory notes from her friends.

Check out the video as Haileigh was named Homecoming Queen to join her girlfriend — the crowd is chanting her name and cheering.  Be forewarned, it gets loud:

I admit, I choked up a bit reading about this story.

Sure, there were a few naysayers. But nothing the students couldn’t handle. Arellano, responding to some negative criticism, delivered some Truth (with a capital T) on her Facebook wall:

For all the girls who think tradition should be continued, go back to the kitchen, stop having sex before you’re married, get out of school and job system, don’t have an opinion, don’t own any property, give up the right to marry who you love, don’t vote, and allow your husband to do whatever he pleases to you. Think about the meaning of tradition when you use it in your argument against us.

Want hope for the country? This is what the younger generations are like.

(Image from the LA Times Courtesy of Rebeca Arellano)

[cross-posted on Measure of Doubt]

Somehow, it went viral. In just 24 hours, the Secular Student Alliance’s Facebook page exploded from 6,500 supporters’ “likes” to 18,000. I found myself thinking, “How the hell did that happen?”  And then thinking, “Hmm… how can we do it again?”

The whole thing started with Kenny Flagg, one of our group leaders with the Freethinkers of UND. After noticing that the SSA’s Facebook presence was much smaller than Campus Crusade for Christ’s, he wanted to make a difference. He “grabbed both profile pictures for the groups, added the stats from each page, and threw in a quick meme for good measure.” Then he posted it on Reddit. That was it. Many of you saw it posted here earlier. Everyone else, take a look and see whether you would expect it to inspire a frenzy of activity:

Yes, this is the image that launched a thousand clicks.  Well, several thousand, actually.

I had to figure out why a simple picture like this inspired such a big reaction. The more I thought about it, the more psychology and rhetorical communication techniques I saw present. Kenny:

1. Demonstrated insider status
2. Invoked tribal/patriotic feelings, and
3. Gave people direction.

Well look at that. In classic style, he hit the three branches of rhetoric: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.

Kenny’s Insider Status (Ethos)

Kenny was a perfect person for the task. If my coworkers or I had been the ones to post, we would seem self-serving. Kenny, not being an SSA employee, comes across as a more objective voice. Do you trust the used car salesman or the blue book to tell you a car’s value? We tend to trust people more if they share our interest – and we trust them less if we suspect they’re looking out for themselves.

A great way to gain people’s trust is by proving that you’re a member of their community. Sharing group identity acts as a proxy for sharing values. The “Challenge accepted” meme accomplished that beautifully. It’s like using slang – it reinforces your status as an insider. Redditors heard the message: “I’m one of you.” He put that to good use.

Our Tribal Emotions (Pathos)

After establishing his credibility as an insider, Kenny appealed to an incredibly powerful emotion to get them to act: group loyalty. When groups of people get compared to their rivals, it creates an us-versus-them mentality. The competition angle rallied atheists on Reddit into a stronger, more unified group.

And the more atheist redditors rallied together, the stronger the social proof dynamic became. When we’re in a group, we tend to watch other people for cues about how to behave. As redditors saw other people commenting, upvoting the post, and liking the SSA’s page, it influenced their behavior. People got the impression: “This is what it atheists on Reddit are doing.” As part of that group, they felt moved to behave the same way.

Kenny’s post inspired group pride, anger at cultural opponents, and the desire to fit in – emotions that motivate us to act. But that motivation needed direction.

Giving a Direction (Logos)

Have you ever felt that you wanted to make a difference, but just didn’t know how to do it? Without direction, all that energy just sputters out. Telling people to “eat healthier” is overwhelming and vague, but saying “switch to 1% milk” is specific and helpful.

Kenny gave everyone a simple, concrete task: go click “like” on the Secular Student Alliance’s page. He had everyone share his big vision: to get the Secular Student Alliance as many “likes” as the Campus Crusade for Christ page. He even provided a link to the SSA’s Facebook page. The direction was clear.

It all fit together.

Can we do this again?

We never know for sure whether a meme will explode.

But we’ll be more likely to go viral if we pay attention to what works. If you’re interested, I recommend Chip and Dan Heath‘s books Made to Stick and Switch. Kenny managed to use psychology techniques without meaning to, but you can be more deliberate with our efforts. (Be careful fostering us-versus-them feelings. Competition is all well and good, but actual hostility is dangerous.)

There might seem like a lot of it boils down to luck. But as Richard Wiseman found, capitalizing on “luck” is really a skill. The Secular Student Alliance prepared by generating student leaders who were enthusiastic to help us out. When we spotted the opportunity we posted like madmen and even hosted an “Ask Us Anything” to interact with the community. And yes, Kenny did a fantastic job.

For such a quick image, it had a lot going for it. It’s not exactly Cicero orating in the Roman Senate, but it was damn good rhetoric in its own way. Forget a thousand words, that picture was worth 12,000 Facebook fans.

“Should we be offensive?” is a common question in the secular movement. It’s also the wrong question.

The title of this post comes from Phil Plait’s “Don’t be a Dick” talk at TAM 8, which sparked conversation about the wisdom of offending people in the cause of critical thinking. Though it generated the most attention, it’s not the first time we’ve asked these questions: Should we condemn people for opposing LGBT rights? Mock people for believing in creationism? Call religion a delusion? Sometimes it seems like everything we do offends people – even the simple act of advertising our existence offended Iowa Governor Chet Culver.

In the face of that, it’s almost liberating, isn’t it? If everything we do is offensive, it doesn’t matter anymore – we can stop worrying about it. In fact, I used to argue that myself! When confronted with accusations that Everybody Draw Muhammad Day was offensive, I’d point to the bus ads and billboards and say, “People get offended at the most mundane things. We can’t let that hold us back.”

But offensiveness not a simple yes-or-no issue. Like my sister, Julia, wrote a few months ago, it’s tempting to treat belief as a black and white matter. It’s not – we can hold beliefs with differing degrees of confidence, and if we treat it otherwise we lose a lot of power to make distinctions, see nuance, and chart the best course of action. It’s the same with asking whether or not to be offensive. We need to add nuance.

At the first level, it’s probably more helpful to phrase the question “How many people are my actions likely to offend?” Not all offensive statements are equal. Sure, saying “People can be good without god” offends people, but not as many people as “Religion is a myth.”

We can go further. Asking how many people we expect to offend still treats the issue as a binary: they’re either offended or they’re not. A better phrasing would be “How offended will people be?” Billboards reading “Religion is a myth” and “Jesus was a bastard” would both upset a lot of people – but not to the same extent.

But even this isn’t what we want to be asking. To take the final step, we need to dissolve the question away into what we actually want to know. Each time we ask “Should we be a dick in this situation?” we’re really wondering a lot of things, like:

• Do we like the short-term and long-term reactions this will elicit?
• Would it attract attention for our message?
• Would it reduce the chance of persuading the target?
• Would it help push the boundaries of the national conversation?
• Would it damage a helpful relationship?

There isn’t an inherent property “being offensive” or “being a dick” – that’s just a heuristic, and it’s not very precise. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say just a heuristic – labeling a message as ‘offensive’ is a helpful way to talk about expected reactions. But we need to be able to step back and refocus our attention when the heuristic causes confusion.

And the heuristic IS causing confusion. Treating it as a single, inherent property leads people to miss the strategic benefits – and drawbacks – of getting people upset in different ways and contexts. Treating it as a binary question leads people to wield anger indiscriminately rather than tactically.

What we should be asking ourselves, when choosing a message, is this: “How offended do we want people to be, and offended how?”

For example, I still stand behind my support of Everybody Draw Muhammad Day – it did cause a lot of offense, but it offended people in the right way: by intentionally disregarding the Islamic demand that we respect their prophet. That was the goal – shocking people into paying more attention to a dogma which wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t support using mockery in a one-on-one conversation with a creationist. When we’re trying to educate someone, a small amount of offense is useful to catch their attention – say, by openly disagreeing. But mockery is a different kind of offense, one that reduces our chances of convincing them.

Sometimes it’s easier to talk about whether or not to offend people.  But we can be so much more precise thinking about it in terms of anger, surprise, disrespect, disagreement.

They say the devil’s in the details – so we should feel right at home.

I have an announcement about Hemant. Heads up: I’m going to gush a bit.

Today marks the start of the Secular Student Alliance’s Annual Conference, which promises to be an exciting weekend full of inspiration, camaraderie, and – let’s face it – a whole lot of fun. We (full disclosure: yes, we – I work for the SSA) have a great line-up speakers including Dan Barker, PZ Myers, Greta Christina, Dave Silverman, Jamila Bey, and on and on… and Hemant!

But Hemant will be doing more than giving a talk on “The Need for Critical Thinking in Public Schools”. This year we’re also presenting Hemant with the 2011 Freethought Backbone Award.

Every year our national conference, the Secular Student Alliance presents the Freethought Backbone Award to an individual within the freethought movement who is a guide and inspiration for secular students and student groups – someone who has demonstrated a commitment to the secular values of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human-based ethics.

In the past this award has been presented to such notable figures as Ellery Schempp, plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Abington vs. Schempp; Herb Silverman, president and founder of the Secular Coalition for America; Dan Barker, Co-President of the Freedom from Religion Foundation; and Lori Lipman Brown, former Director of the Secular Coalition for America.

It’s rare for the honor to go to someone so young – Hemant is only 28 – but his impact on the secular student movement has been incredible. From an organizational standpoint, he’s been involved for years. In college, Hemant helped establish UIC’s first secular student group, he served as CFI’s student president, and was on the Secular Student Alliance’s Board of Directors (acting as Chair of the Board for 5 years) for so long he got term-limited off.

But it’s what he’s has done outside the organizations that really sets him apart. Hemant has been an excellent role model for the kind of positive engagement I wish we saw more often. His book, “I Sold My Soul on Ebay” is a story of his experience visiting churches to share his outsider perspective with them. He’s continued engaging with “the other side”, speaking at churches and religious events to present the friendly face of a nontheist. I remember his talk for the 2010 SSA Conference, where he told the room full of student leaders how productive it had been to reach out to Laurie Higgins of the anti-gay Illinois Family Institute to get coffee with her. I can’t think of a better “guide and inspiration” for secular student leaders to follow.

It’s because Hemant lives humanist values of critical thinking, respect and compassion. Though he’s no longer on the SSA Board of Directors, he’s now Board President of the Foundation Beyond Belief – an excellent nonprofit devoted to creating a culture of nontheistic involvement in charitable efforts. Besides that, he uses his online reach to help others. When Damon Fowler was being thrown out of his home for being a nontheist, Hemant rallied the secular community to raise over $30,000 toward Damon’s college fund. Since we atheists don’t have as many in-person gatherings, it’s remarkable to see the internet being used so effectively to provide that support.

Not only is the Friendly Atheist blog bringing the secular community together around humanist ideals, it’s bringing more people into that community. There’s no telling how much of an impact this blog has had on people questioning their faith, curious about atheists, or long-time doubters looking for others who think like them. For years, the Friendly Atheist community has been a place for all of them.

Sorry to gush, but I really am proud. I’m proud to be a part of Hemant’s Friendly Atheist blog, proud to consider Hemant a friend, and proud to see him honored with this award. Congratulations Hemant Mehta on being presented the Secular Student Alliance’s Freethought Backbone Award of 2011.