Dawkins in Madison

As I mentioned earlier, there was a talk by Richard Dawkins in Madison on Tuesday. I've never seen an auditorium packed like that before--1,300 people, and they had to turn a lot away, 100 I heard. Dawkwins was introduced by UW-Madison professor of evolutionary biology Sean Carroll. My friend Nick, biology major who knows a bit more about Carroll than I do, said he wondered what kind of introduction Carroll would give, as Carroll wasn't known for being a hard-core atheist. Carroll's introduction, thankfully, was truly enthusiastic, with no "I have to give this intro, you have to at least listen to this guy" half-assing.

The talk itself was nothing particularly new to me, mostly drawing material from The God Delusion, though it was very well delivered, Dawkins seemed at home with himself. The one memorable part was when he responded to complaints about the tone of his book by reading quotes from restaurant reviews, to show that he had been relatively subdued in his criticisms by comparison. If I weren't so lazy I'd try to look the quotes up online.

Seeing the audience reaction was the best part. It was almost entirely enthusiastic. They did plenty of laughing, though I didn't feel Dawkins had been going out of his way to get laughs--it was more of a "we're all friends here, we can laugh along with this whole thing" feeling. No hostile questions. I was involved with selling t-shirts, working with CFI, and Debbie Goddard was there representing CFI. She said that Dawkins claimed to only get testimonials and such during questions only once every few talks at the very most. She also said there had been another even where there were Christians protesting outside, and she tried to offer them tickets so they could see the event, but they insisted they would not let themselves be exposed to it. Unfortunate, but not really surprising. Anyway, while I guess that means there was a "preaching to the choir" element to it (though I know there were a number of Muslims and Christians there) it was great to see local atheists out in such force.

Coffee with Vast Left

Yesterday I got a talk to chat for about an hour with the blogger behind Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy. He doesn't live in Madison, but he happened to be in town, so I sat down for coffee with him. At the end I was wondering if he had posts on some of the things we talked about so I could link, and he sent them along via e-mail. Here they are:

*His The Atheist is Always Wrong series, something that even many atheists sorely need to read.

*His coining of a new word, Equivalating, which I need to use some time.

*The Itchy and Scratchy Show, which expands on some of these ideas.

Also, he tells me soon he should have out a post on his Bush/September 11th-era transition from complacent to activist non-belief.

Humanism conference--an ex-hasidic's response

When I went to the Harvard Humanism conference back in April, a briefly met an ex-Hasidic Jew named Leah. "I was Hasidic," she emphasized. "Not just Orthodox." She had a bag with what I thought was a wonderful cartoon: a cow and a caption that said, "I was slaughtered kosher and all I got was this painful hook in my neck."

It happens that she was featured in an SSA eMpirical piece relating to the conference. She had some criticisms of one of the speakers there:

Rabbi Sherwin T. Wine, a speaker at the conference, had made a joking reference to humanists as being "scarred" by religion. But Leah says that in their case, it is neither a joke nor an exaggeration. "Some of us have been literally tortured, and have gone through really painful situations because of our beliefs." She points out that there are a lot of people at the conference with a similar background, and that being called "wounded" by fellow humanists isn't a nice feeling.

I liked Rabbi Wine. He was a funny speaker, and a lot more honest than many proponents of secularized, cultural versions of religious traditions. He is right, in my view, to reach out to those who haven't been hurt by religion but simply don't believe. However, looking back I realize his comments on former fundamentalists had a derogatory edge that went beyond "we're not them," and that's unfortunate.

Campus event: The Question of God

I'm currently the president of UW-Madison's student org for infidels, Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at UW-Madison. I've decided to start writing up reports on events we've done for anyone who's interested: for people who want to know what's going on with atheism among young people, for students looking at doing the same who want to know what a well-run (or at least semi-competently run) student org looks like, or for anyone with a general interest in the kinds of things that get said at the kind of events we do.

Our most recent event--this Tuesday--was based around the PBS documentary The Question of God. The idea came out of the first meeting of the semester when I asked for proposals and a girl who had just joined mentioned she had a couple movies that could make for good fodder for discussion. The thing was four hours, so we picked out six clips totalling a little under an hour, to be followed by small group discussion, a format partially copied from another series of events that had been taking place on campus under the heading "Global Dialogue."

I was a little apprehensive about everything going right--would Central Reservations give us a decent room? Would the right number of people show up, enough to call the event a sucess but not more than we could handle? And related to the second question, would the fliers I handed to the Residence Life Office actually get put up? In the end, it went well: fliers went up, although a little on the late side, the room we got had chairs that were comfortable, though not re-arrangable for discussion, and ~35 people showed up, roughly what I had been counting on.

The six clips were all of conversations of modern people on various sub-topics of religion, numbers 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, and 9 if you go to the transcripts on the website. I'm not sure how they selected the participants. One was Michael Shermer of Skeptic magazine, we does fairly regularly deal with religious matters, though the rest were all over the map: a lawyer, a Jungian analyst, a psychiatrist, and so on.

There were three spots in particular I remember getting a reaction from the audience, namely roaring laughter:

Michael Shermer: One question. What is the origin of the moral sentiments? So, they evolved through natural forces and culture and history, or God implemented — put them in... ?

Margaret Klenck (Jungian, religious beliefs!?!?): Why can't it be both?

Michael Shermer: How can it be both?

Margaret Klenck: How can it not be both?
....

Armand Nicholi: How do you equate an omnipotent, all loving being with what we've come to expect and experience in our lives? How do we cope with the problem of suffering?

Frederick Lee [psychiatrist, Evangelical Christian]: There is no reconciliation. I think the definitive explanation, as far as from the spiritual worldview, is what was said in the book of Job, and this is a book that I cannot understand, and there is no answer to it. There is a wager —

Michael Shermer: But God's a sadist in that —

Frederick Lee: Exactly. There is a wager between God and the devil ...

Margaret Klenck: But we're back into dualism.

Frederick Lee: And the wager is Job only obeys you because you've blessed him, and God says, "Fine, torture him devil, do everything, but you can't kill him." And so he's tortured to the extreme, loses all his children, wealth, gets boils, and at the very end, you know, when his wife is telling him, "Curse God and die," he says, "No, I will remain faithful." Okay, but he still wants an account from God — "Why are you doing this to me? I have not been sinful. I have not committed anything that deserves this."

Jeremy Fraiberg: So why do you believe?

Frederick Lee: Because, as Lewis says, the problem of pain is only a problem because one believes in the spiritual worldview. In other words, faith creates the problem of pain.

Michael Shermer: Right. So just get rid of the faith, and that's it. There is no God.

Frederick Lee: Then there's no problem.

[And then the part the transcript leaves out for some reason] Michael Shermer: You should be an atheist. You'd be good at it.
....

Jeremy Fraiberg: We haven't spoken much about hell here, which I think is actually an obstacle of faith for some people. That is, if God is all good, and all powerful, forget the fact that bad things happen to good people, but what about people like Michael and me who have been struggling with these questions? It would seem kind of unfair if we had to suffer for eternity because we didn't believe after doing the best we could living according to our lights. I find that a very troubling concept.

Frederick Lee: I find it terribly troubling.

Jeremy Fraiberg: But you believe in it.

This is maybe funnier if you see their expressions, see them slowly enunciating their views. There was an apparently enthusiastic arm pump after the "How can it not be both" comment, but I later learned it was a sarcastic-enthusiastic arm pump.

The small group I ended up in consisted of two lapsed Catholics and one guy I'd known since freshmen year who, I found out that evening, still considered himself a serious Catholic. However, his citations of the catchechism (sp?) were, in each case, immediately followed by what was wrong with Catholic doctrine on the point in question.

I don't know everthing that went on in the other discussions, though I know people thought they went well, so I consider the event a sucess.

Oh, but one thing: one of the groups decided there wasn't enough space in the room for all of us, so, without my realizing it, went to another room to discuss. That resulted in one girl frantically looking for her boyfriend at the end. To anyone who's planning on trying to do an event like this, try to avoid having that happen at your event.