Oh! There was one! And I went there!
This year, famous atheist/science/skeptic blogger, PZ Myers came to Toronto to give a lecture hosted by the Centre for Inquiry. It being halloween, it was impossible to find anyone willing to forgo their urge to dress up and go with me, so I went alone (though I did meet up with a new skeptic-friend).
His speech was about what I expected: witty, passionate and dripping with PZ's tendancy to be laid-back, but still managing to be equally venomous and human. Unafraid to say things like "Religion is silly", and "Religion is more like mastrubation", yet still I could sense that he had no disdain for religious people themselves, just their silly beliefs.
The religious hold on education in this country (okay, PZ's country, but it's becoming increasingly applicable to Canada....thanks a lot, Alberta!) has been fighting tooth-and-nail to gain not only a foothold in science education, but a damned fortress on the beach, firing salvos of creationism and Noah's Flood into the halls of the academy, and high schools. PZ really helped to re-impress upon me the truth that religion and science are NOT compatitble, because they are inherently competing ways of understanding...not just different ways of understanding (as say, art and philosophy), but in direct competion. Science and religion can get along, (in that there is no reason a scientist can't go to church with his family, or a rabbi can't read Stephen Hawking), but they cannot be be reconciled. And those of us who accept that very basic fundamental understanding of the two, need to stand up for not just science education, but for science in the culture as well. Aside from fantastic victories in the court-system, we are losing the culture war. And yes, it is a war. We didn't fire the first shot (no matter how much as the religious right claims that Darwin was that first shot), but as my mother would say, by Merciful Minerva, we're going to fire back!
The centrepiece of the talk was the importance of being unafraid to reveal ourselves as atheist/agnostic...unafraid to engage in dialogue that has long been discouraged because religious people get offended; What about us atheists, who have to deal with god-talk on an epic scale, have god in our national anthem, and in the preamble of our constitiution? I don't recognize the supremacy of a mighty creator, and I should feel free to express that without being portrayed as bigoted, small-minded, and that I should just learn to accept that because this is a christian country.
Bullshit. This is a secular country. There may be christian culture, but the state is secular (which should be, as PZ pointed out that his classes reflect as well, that secular different is to be distinguished from atheist...we're not trying to take people's god away from them....we're trying to get their ubiquitous god out of our faces and our government).
Afterwards we went out for drinks and conversation at a bar which was terribly understaffed for halloween. It was terribly refreshing to be around people of like mind: people unafraid to say what they really think about religion, while still not having to explain that it's the beliefs, not the people, we're talking about, and that is perfectly okay in my books. Religous beliefs don't get a get-out-of-ridicule-free card just because many people take it far too seriously.
*sigh* See what just happened there? I felt the need to qualify what I said about religion, because I know how many people will take it in the entirely wrong way. Well, back to the point I was making: the people at the understaffed bar were of like-mind when it comes to skepticism, atheism, and pseudo-science. We all knew our shit, and names like Sylvia Browne, Kent Hovind and Ken Ham were as equally familiar as homeopathy, astrology and i.d.
I felt great being around these people, and as I left the bar I felt energized that this is a community no-longer restricted to, as Ted Stevens would say, "A SERIES OF TUBES!!!". These are real people that exist in real life, and I can drink alcohol with them.
Then, I drove back to Peterborough, and immediatley I felt the life sucked out of me, as I remembered the culture in which my university sits, and strives to expand.: a culture driven by post-modernist relativism that treat atheists like PZ and myself as not people, but loud-mouthed bigoted jerks who should just learn to shut up, take it, and get along.
At least I got a picture with him.
And if it looks like PZ was rudely interrupted mid-conversation by some sychophant wanting to grab a photo....it's just pareidolia.
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