The Spirit of Atheist Christmas Giving
In the spirit of atheist Christmas giving I’d like to make a shameless plug for donations to this blog, Debunking Christianity, the brainchild of John W. Loftus, noted atheist author and speaker. As John pointed out last March, the blog itself is ad-free (although John was not able to remove ads entirely from the Disqus discussions below the line). As John says, “I have no institutional support nor am I a paid employee of any atheist organization.” Which means the burden of keeping the site afloat financially falls on all of us. I found by direct empirical testing that it’s super easy to locate and click the yellow “Donate” button at the bottom of the right-side navigation links in the large-screen format of this site. So I call upon all my out-or-closeted atheist / agnostic / freethinker / Nones / fact-based / reality-curious sisters, brothers, and gender-fluids to donate early and often, as your circumstances allow, and as the “spirit” moves you.
John has been one of my favorite authors and editors for a while. If you’re like me, a complete nobody, it’s not every day that one of your favorite authors asks you to guest-blog. So I’m incredibly flattered and will always try my hardest to overlink. (I’ll also try hard to tell jokes, and likely fall short. But seriously, whenever I use a word that has a technical meaning which might not be obvious to every human alive, I like to put a link on it. “Overlinking” refers to documents containing “too many” links, which to me sounds rather alien, like being “too beautiful” or “too rich”, neither of which I can imagine nor have approximated.)
“The spirit of atheist Christmas giving” is a phrase rich in multiple meanings and irony, which I trust are obvious enough. As atheists we generally don’t believe in anything supernatural (although not all atheists are strictly metaphysical naturalists). But atheists can reappropriate “spirit” as a metaphor, and this is what many non-atheists also do when they use the word “spirit” in a vernacular sense (as in “school spirit”, the “spirit and letter of the law”, a “spirited reply”, etc.). We’re generally not referring to literally imagined metaphysical beings. This watering-down of religious concepts formerly taken seriously appears in many words, such as “museum”, “musing”, and “amusement” (originally having something to do with the muses, spirit beings thought to inspire people to think and create). Perhaps someday all religions will exist only as such etymological residues. Some formerly cherished and vigorously defended religious beliefs have already become myths.
As atheists we don’t see any supernatural underpinning to Christmas - and as there is no evidence for any, we’re on pretty solid ground. Therefore, unlike fundamentalist Christians, we aren’t amygdala-triggered by Fox News scaremongering about a War on Christmas. We are no more concerned about keeping Christ in Christmas than we are about keeping Zeus in the Olympics. (As if the supposed Creator of the Universe could need any help from feeble humans for that!) And we are unconcerned for keeping the various gods in their various calendar events for the same reason, namely that all deities are purely imaginary and thus cannot be harmed by being reduced to metaphors. The War on Paganism is almost complete now, having been started almost 2000 years ago by Christians. The stories of Paganism live on in Classics departments at universities, so it’s not so much about eradicating religion as de-fanging it.
And while not all atheists are liberals (and not all Christians are conservatives), enough are to make the trends evident. Since our brains generate all our leanings and beliefs, scientists can sometimes identify brain differences that correlate with belief differences. See for example the YouTube video Liberal vs. Conservative: A Neuroscientific Analysis with Gail Saltz | Big Think.
The amygdala is the brain organ responsible for generating the emotions of fear, anxiety, and aggression. It happens to be larger and more active, on average, in the brains of conservatives, compared to liberals, according to brain-scanning technology. What’s more, the more fearful a child is at age 4, the more likely they are to be conservative 20 years later. See chapter 3, “Why Not Everyone Is a Liberal”, in the book Beyond Contempt: How Liberals Can Communicate Across the Great Divide. This doesn’t mean conservatives are more fearful across the board though, and especially about things they should rationally fear, such as rejecting vaccines, not wearing masks in a pandemic, and burning fossil fuels. By an odd quirk of ideological evolution, modern American conservatism combines heavy elements of fear-mongering and risk-ignoring.
In the spirit of secularizing religious ideas, and in keeping with the season, there’s the 2009 anthology edited by Ariane Sherine, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas. It features pieces from exactly 42 authors including Richard Dawkins, in honor of Dawkins’ friend Douglas Adams. Here’s some more information including a short book-signing video featuring three of the contributors.
And after Christmas comes the equally mindless celebration of the New Year, a holiday which is at least unencumbered with any pretense to holiness i.e. religious irrationality. However, it is encumbered with its own destructive irrationality, as many people ring in the New Year heavily intoxicated. According to the CDC, the legal drug known as alcohol is responsible for about 178,000 deaths in the United States each year. After people sober up, perhaps with some permanent incremental loss of brain and liver function, many will make New year’s resolutions. Quite a few of these resolutions involve a this-time-for-sure vow to stick to an exercise program. This leads to a phenomenon well-known to serious gym-goers, that of the “resolutioners” who surge into gyms every January, only to falter after a few months (or weeks, or even days). Mass participation in a shared ritual-gimmick doesn’t change the fact that exercise is hard! For this and other reasons I tend to be skeptical about New Year’s resolutions. The time to decide to do something is whenever you are going to do it, a battle to be fought daily. For most people it doesn’t work to decide one time for the whole year. That doesn’t magically create discipline and willpower for the remaining 364 days. Each one of those days will involve the same amount of struggle to do the right thing vs. temptation to slack off.
But the siren song of gimmicks is hard to resist, so I’ll suggest one. If you’re not already on Goodreads, consider signing up there and tracking your book reading. You can sign up for the Goodreads Reading Challenge. According to DuckAssist, the AI of DuckDuckGo:
The Goodreads Reading Challenge allows users to set a personal goal for the number of books they want to read in a year and track their progress. It’s a fun way to encourage reading and connect with other book lovers.
Thus in fine resolutioner fashion one can declare to the world how many books one is going to read in the upcoming year. Then one can spend the rest of the year falling ever farther behind, only to realize that Goodreads doesn’t care how long a book is. Which means one can catch up to any reading goal, no matter how unrealistic, simply by finding sufficiently short books to read. Even more convenient is that there is no limit to the number of times you can read the same book. So if necessary you can read The Cat in the Hat 25 times on December 31 to bring the year’s reading challenge home.
But seriously, there are a lot of serious books to read. This blog’s own Dr. David Madison lists 500+ titles in his Cure-for-Christianity Library. One might ask, why so many? If you’ve already deconverted from Christianity, why keep pounding more nails of facts and logic into the coffin? Well, there’s the advice of Miguel de Unamuno who famously said, in paraphrase, “The more books you read, the less harm they do.” And part of doing less harm is stuffing your head with more ideas and arguments. This might make you less susceptible to being caught by surprise when having a chat with someone (such as a religious apologist), leading to those troubling episodes of staircase wit, l’esprit de l’escalier - or even worse, not thinking of the perfect reply even when you reach the staircase after flubbing a discussion (i.e., staircase witlessness). There are lots of books to read, in part, because the religious apologist’s Gish Gallop contains a lot of talking points.
I suspect that someday, perhaps Real Soon Now, AI-powered personal assistants will virtually eliminate staircase wit, by giving everyone helpful real-time suggestions on all the perfect replies. But that’s a subject for another blog post, my speculations on potential upsides from AI as it floods the world with deepfakes and threatens to cause mass unemployment (maybe, or maybe not).
