The Amazing Randi devotes half an hour to a muted jeremiad against the obscure "facilitated communication" hoax. Peter says he does not know what "FC" is, but he'll look into it. The comedy isn't much either. Keith Lowell Jensen spends five minutes recounting the history of the restaurant Jack in the Box in order to reveal that he does not like the pope. A writer from The Daily Show jokes about eugenics for Twitter trolls. She takes a selfie and says fire was "invented" 10, years ago.
Another comic says it's sad the aspirin-between-the-knees crowd doesn't know women can still have sex this way. Was this all edgy once? They talk openly about sex as if they are the first bawdy folks to do so. What puritanical America is shocked? Bill Maher cannot be bothered to appear at all. He sends a video, a five-minute riff on the burden of living in a nation of idiots, an old routine from a man whose own movie saw him owned by an amusement park Jesus.
A Beatles cover band plays. They change some of the words in "Revolution" and struggle through "Imagine.
Larry Drecker, when he finally takes the stage, tells the assembled that Reason Rally is "our wake-up call to the religious right," letting them know that if they want to "desecrate the dreams of our Founding Fathers," they'll "have to go through us. I hope this rally will be remembered as a turning point in history," he adds.
He says to "rise up. The rally is livelier on the periphery. A few evangelizers, remnants from a planned and canceled counterprotest, have turned up to debate. Cellphone cameras are rolling on both sides for the benefit of YouTube followers. A man shouts about the true reason we're all here today — the grace of Jesus Christ. Another sits at the back on a bicycle, shirtless, with two megaphones, shouting: Jeeeeesus. He's alive! The argument descends into an extended metaphor about randomized text generators creating comprehensible pamphlets by selecting for readability.
Neil deGrasse Tyson has the wrong model of politics. It's all very , like something out of an old message board. A man tells another that the God of the Bible is a "comic book villain" whose moral code is incoherent. The evangelizer counters: How do atheists know right from wrong at all? She isn't debating anyone, she tells me; she gets enough of that on the internet.
She doesn't want to dignify these people anyway — aren't they satisfied controlling public life? Can't they even let atheists have one day to have a rally for themselves? She says she wishes people understood that science is much cooler than the Bible. There's so much out there, she says; why limit the whole cosmos to a single book? Her first political priority is education, she tells me, although she means "getting these creationists out of the science classroom" and offers little more.
She loves Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist and public face for "science education. Many of the day's speakers are respected scientists, men and women involved in the highest levels of empirical research. But they are not here to discuss their latest findings; they are here to call, again and again, for a general triumph of science, and the man in the full-body devil costume with the cardboard crucifix reading Fairly Tale is drawing more attention.
Some straw man from a Dawkins lecture shouts into a cellphone camera: "You're a religion too! You believe there's no God! It was probably the Amazing Randi who gave New Atheists their favorite bit of cleverness: Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby. Is it? Atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby, but half the philatelists think you'll suffer, think you'll burn, think you'll fuck and figure wrong because of it.
Pew finds that for the first time, merely three-quarters of adults maintain stamp albums; this merits hand-wringing in the New York Times. Why should the secular movement want to be so trivial? They seem to want it both ways, at once a movement and not. There is no hobby with such organized dissent. There are atheists for whom disbelief is not terribly dissimilar to an absent interest, but these atheists are precisely not the ones who find themselves quoting James Randi.
They are not James Randi, who does not speak at public rallies for former stamp collectors. Perhaps atheism is as trivial as not keeping a stamp collection, but the atheists who come to Reason Rally don't believe it. Here is what I believe these days: There is no God, but this is perhaps the least interesting thing to say about the world. I can make you a list of things that aren't and never tell you anything at all — so what?
On some days, disbelief seems to me a defiance, but a passive one, one I take no pride or fight in and one I didn't want. I've long wondered at the notion that by telling somebody I am an atheist, I have told them everything they need to know in order to understand what I believe about the world.
In fact, I have told them nothing. A fact is not an answer. A fact, in this case, is just an absence. What atheism has never seemed to me is a sensible point of political organization. Let me go further: Atheism has never seemed to me to solve any political problems at all. Speakers at Reason Rally advance admirable goals: pluralism, reproductive rights, tolerance. But what about the absence of God tells me that these are civic virtues?
It is not surprising that religion provides rhetorical urgency to reactionary causes, but what causes of any kind has it not at times imbued with moral purpose? Most people are religious. The talk appeals. What would surprise is a world where the absence of faith produced an absence of bad politics or bigotry.
Only a narrow imagination supposes that the depravity of men will not find other cudgels; that an empty sky will make good policy visible to all. Set aside that such clear skies are improbable, that religion is a stubborn thing and one that persists too well in climates far more hostile than the present.
The promotion of an improbable goal is not Reason Rally's sin. What is troubling in Reason Rally, in Movement Atheism, among Dawkins and Nye, in the throngs of free thinkers turned out on a dry Saturday to hear the talk of turning points and revolutions, what is troubling in all of this is the optimism of these free thinkers.
The extraordinary credulity of skeptics. David Silverman, the president of American atheists and a "self-described firebrand," demands we all chant atheist! This activity consumes roughly half his speech. And then? Banish superstition, and the major political struggles of the American state will solve themselves by measurement.
Accept the facts, the prime fact, the fact of an imaginary God, and we will realize the dream of the Founding Fathers. But a fact is not an answer. We are only interested in logic , but what are your premises? Empiricism is the only way to know the truth about the world. Well, what do you want to know about it? The trouble with Reason Rally is how little it cares for what comes after; its hubris is the faith of so many attendees that pure reason will reward their politics.
It's only us; we've only got each other. It's true, but it's not good news at all. One does not need to believe in any particular metaphysics of sin to believe in the depravity of mankind. The problem with science is that so much of it simply isn't , William A. Wilson writes in First Things :. At its best, science is a human enterprise with a superhuman aim: the discovery of regularities in the order of nature, and the discerning of the consequences of those regularities.
We've seen example after example of how the human element of this enterprise harms and damages its progress, through incompetence, fraud, selfishness, prejudice, or the simple combination of an honest oversight or slip with plain bad luck. This is not a condemnation of science, but it is true, and if the crowd at Reason Rally knows it, they are not letting on.
When Lawrence Krauss tells us that children should be taught to question everything, the audience on the National Mall is all serene. Yes, one man says while he applauds, quiet and forceful and without any irony at all. Yes, his wife is nodding. These are the vanguard of a permanently uncertain revolution, but you wouldn't know it to hear them speak so surely.
You wouldn't even think they understood the virtue of empiricism at all. Good science often troubles the world. It rarely solves it. Krauss says he wants to ask some questions about reason, but he means he wants to ask after the reasons of the hateful. What reason justifies suppressing education? Hating women, hating homosexuals, making bigotry in law?
The answer is implied. Chapel Hill shooting forces uncomfortable conversations among Reddit's atheists. A question Krauss does not ask is if reasons may be found elsewhere, if hatred may find its rationalizations outside the language of God. Signs and slogans bearing atheist slogans -- "I think therefore I'm Atheist" -- proliferated on the National Mall as musical guests and promotional videos played on stage.
A small group of protesters stood nearby, holding signs that said "God Doesn't Believe in Atheists.
The coalition of secular organizations hoped for a turnout of 30, people, though the attendance seemed somewhat more sparse. Read More. Other participants called for a non-religious approach to politics amid a hotly contested presidential campaign. They also hoped to flex the political muscles of the religious unaffiliated, turning one of the fastest-growing groups in the country into a powerful voting bloc.
In an informal survey of the crowd, Bernie Sanders, who has called himself a "non-religious" Jew , was the standout favorite. While the rally featured musical entertainment, flashy speakers and late-night cocktail hours at neighboring hotels, the thousands of "nones" -- people who don't identify with any religion -- coming to the nation's capital also have a more serious agenda. The Reason Rally is "absolutely" a political event, said executive director Lyz Liddell. We want to see reason taking precedence over religious-driven ideology.
Congresswoman criticizes religious bigotry. The rally's major political issues are climate change, reproductive rights and LGBT equality, all hotly contested political topics whose opposing voices often come from the religious right. Larry Decker, executive director of the Secular Coalition for America, said his group scheduled meetings with more than two thirds of the members of Congress, whom they hope to lobby on behalf of secular values.
They also hope to soften some of the social stigma still attached to the "atheist" label. Gallup: Record number of Americans would vote for an atheist president. What happened to God in America? There is a "small vocal group of people in this country who have really demonized what atheist means," Decker said. But while organizers hope to distance religion from the conversation, the rally's attendees and speakers include people of faith, notably such legislators as Rep.
Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Virginia. We want to be heard by them," said Liddell. Gabbard said that, as a U. Bigotry based on faith also occurs closer to home, the congresswoman continued, citing conservative who insist that President Obama is Muslim, despite his frequent invocations of his Christian faith.
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