Religious Symbols and Merry Christmas

Every year religious fundamentalists cry out about the War on Christmas. It's nothing new, and isn't likely going to end any time soon.
One of the claimed attacks is the term "Happy Holidays" being used instead of "Merry Christmas". Or worse yet, "Season's Greetings"! Christian fundamentalists get all bent out of shape when they get reminded they aren't the only group that exists.
On the other side of the battle line are the people saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". Retailers, politicians, and all the non-Christians. They have this crazy idea that not everyone celebrates Christmas, so they try to be as inclusive as possible.

There is a very vocal group of Christians who think all non-Christians pitch a fit when they hear "Merry Christmas" and there is a vocal group of atheists who think all Christians pitch a fit when they hear "Happy Holidays". Both sides are making broad generalizations, though both are somewhat true.

Recently on reddit there has been a number of posts on r/atheism saying "Look at me, I'm an atheist who doesn't care if someone wishes me a Merry Christmas." That's fine, good for them (although a waste of karma (if you can waste that which is limitless)).

However, we shouldn't disregard it as just a harmless greeting. Much like "Bless you" and "I'll keep them in my prayers", there are more than just meaningless sayings. To the religious people who are saying them, they are symbols.
Symbols are very important to conservatives. The folding of hands, the bowing of heads, the kneeling of knees, all symbolic of their supposed humbleness. Their prayers, said at every possible opportunity, serve to remind them to keep their god in every activity. That's why after coming out as an atheist, I no longer participate in prayers with my family. To me, the words are meaningless, I may as well be babbling to a tree for all that it matters. But to my family and other religious people, praying symbolizes that I agree with what they believe. In fact, I was called a hypocrite for singing hymns in church (I could be called a hypocrite for merely going to church). "Don't the words mean anything to you? If not, why do you sing them?" For the record, I still sing hymns because I enjoy singing and the melodies are familiar and musically interesting.

Sure, Christmas is a pagan holiday, Jesus wasn't really born on December 25th, and hearing "Merry Christmas" as an atheist won't cause you to be doused in holy water. But to a Christian, being able to say "Merry Christmas" and hear it back means they are in the company of people who believe as they do. It allows them to forget that people of other beliefs exist, if but for a moment.
I don't recommend flipping a table every time someone says "Merry Christmas" (there simply aren't enough tables). But it is good to remind Christians that not everyone believes that the bastard child of a virgin who was knocked up by a supernatural entity was born on a cow's dinner plate.

In the Minority

Over this Winter Solstice break, I am visiting my sister, who teaches on an Apache reservation in Arizona. The open terrain and relatively dark sky is a welcome respite from the stresses of this past year.

I like mountains.

Since the area is an Apache reservation, it is obviously mostly populated by Apache people. In fact, aside from the pastor and teachers at the Lutheran mission where my sister teaches, I have not seen any non-Apaches.
Being a white, middle-class male, I'm used to being in the majority. The exception is my atheism, however there I accept and even welcome being in the minority. Being a racial minority was a new and uncomfortable experience for me. Not because the natives were insulting or hostile, far from it. The Apaches I interacted with were at worst indifferent or at best friendly and welcoming towards me.

I admit I am at times a bit racist, as I would say everyone is, but actually being a minority for once has opened my eyes a little wider. I'm not naive enough to say I understand what minority groups go through. Instead of being insulted, shunned, discriminated against, or attacked for my skin color, I only feel like I need a darker tan. And I only experience it for a couple hours at a time. I'm not encountering it almost everywhere I go almost all day every day.
Although I cannot claim to now fully understand the discrimination that minorities go through, this experience has made me more aware of the privilege that I take for granted. Hopefully in the future I will be more likely to catch myself when I'm about to take unfair advantage of that privilege.


Damn, I hate ending on a somber note. Happier blogs will be posted when I happen to snatch some wifi. I love the isolation, but the disconnect from teh intarwebs is tough. I'm missing the Steam Winter sale for the second year in a row.

The Two Groups in r/atheism

It's 3am, I'm hyper from caffeine and having just finished watching Return of the Jedi, and reddit is pissing me off.
I've never been the most grammatically excellent of bloggers, but this post is even less eloquent than usual, having been written rapidly and with great emotion.


It would seem that r/atheism is comprised mainly of two vocal majorities. On the one hand we have the people who post memes and facebook screenshots to reap precious, precious karma, and on the other hand we have "r/atheism is just a big circlejerk, it's full of militant atheists who live to offend Christians."

This happens with every subreddit, but recently the divide has been amplified by the inclusion of r/atheism as a default subreddit. So now we have a bunch of new redditors, half of which seem to think that no one has ever heard this Douglas Adams quote before, and the other half who are either theists or moderate atheists.

Memes and text needlessly displayed over an image I can handle. If it's particularly useless or a flagrant repost, I downvote and move on. No harm done, those that like it can view it but it's out of my sight.
The second group of people however, really get on my nerves.
"r/atheism is just a circlejerk"  "you're all just as close-minded as fundamentalists"  "stop picking on Christianity"  "I'm an atheist but even I think you're being a dick"  "stop shoving your atheism down our throats/stop trying to convert people to atheism"

First of all, FUCK OFF.
r/atheism may be a default subreddit but it takes mere seconds to unsubscribe and get out of there. And what's with all these comments from theists and atheists saying they "unsubscribed for this very reason"? If you've unsubscribed, why the hell are you still hanging around? Oh, you see a post while you're not logged in, and you feel you just must comment on it? Bullshit. I may click on the occasional r/f7u12 link when I'm not logged in, but I don't march in and angrily comment if I don't get the desired amount of lulz from it.
And on that note, why do theists stay subscribed to r/atheism? If they want to see different points of view, expand their mind, or questioning their faith I'm all for it, but don't get all pissy if you see something that upsets you. I don't march into r/Christianity and say "HEY GUYS, tone down on the Jesus ok? Not all of us believe in him you know."

Yes r/atheism is a circlejerk. So is every other damn subreddit on that site. That's the whole frakking point of reddit. If you can't grasp that concept, there are plenty of other similar sites out there. But fair warning, any time a group of like-minded people get together, especially on the internet, it tends to turn into a circlejerk.

And to those that say we're being too mean or picking on Christianity, I've got a video for you.

I can't say for sure, but I would guess that most of the people on r/atheism with the "live and let live" attitude were raised in a moderate household in a moderate part of the country or world, and haven't experienced the harms of religion first hand.
Having been raised in a fundamentalist conservative religious household, I suffer still to this day from low self-esteem (you're a worthless sinner), uncomfortability with sex and my body (lust is a sin), poor education (science and critical thinking are the devil's tools) and a disconnect with my family who just wants me to turn my brain back off and be a good little believer again. And I'm relatively lucky. There are others who are being raised in households that would rather pray than get medical treatment. There are children getting beaten and abused because they have the audacity to question their religion. There are people getting raped and being told they are at fault, even being punished for being the victim. There are people getting bullied and ostracized for being attracted to members of the same sex. And you say we're being too mean? (And don't even think of pulling the "no true Scotsman" crap. That will not fly.)
But why are we only picking on Christians? Well, the population of reddit is majorly from the United States, a country that is NOT a Christian nation but damn does it want to be. When morons like Rick Perry can run for President without getting ridiculed off-stage, that says something about the country that lets him get away with it. If you group together all the flavors of Christianity, they make up a massive majority of the population. If you live in the US and you honestly say you do not encounter religion on a daily basis, you must not travel at all or watch the news.
So like it or not, Christianity is the brand of crazy that most of reddit is familiar with, so it's the brand of crazy that will get the most attention.

I think the caffeine is wearing off so I'll make the final two rebuttals short.

"you're just as close-minded as fundies"
Atheists are a diverse group of people, with a wide range of opinions, intelligence levels, and grammatical abilities. If a particular atheist says something that perhaps is intellectually faulty, that doesn't mean all atheists think that way. We can't all be master debaters (heh) at all times.
Oh, and refusing to hear an argument that we know is going to be inane doesn't make us close-minded. We've all heard Pascal's Wager, hearing it a thousandth time isn't going to make it any stronger of an argument.

"stop converting people to atheism"
Lol. The rebuttal to that is a record so broken it pains us to have to repeat it.
Atheism is not a religion, we're not shoving it down your throats merely by existing, and we're not telling people what to think, just trying to show them how.


An hour later and my ranting is done. I know it's in people's nature to complain, especially on the internet, and I do it all the time too. And if you want to try to improve the quality of r/atheism's posts, by all means, post a helpful comment. But if you don't like it, the unsubscribe button isn't hard to find.

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Update: This link sums up everything pretty well, and does it without hyperactively ranting.

My Deconversion

Recently, a good friend from high school emailed me seemingly out of the blue. He had heard that I came out to my parents as an atheist, and wanted a bit more explanation. I obliged but found that the email was quickly turning into my life story, and rather than bore him with it, I decided to put it on here so that everyone could be bored with it!

A little backstory:
I was raised in a conservative Lutheran household. I went to a Lutheran grade school and high school, and started having doubts in my third year of high school.
Keep in mind that this is written to my friend who was raised in the same religion and went to the same high school, so there may be insider references.

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The whole WELS vs Missouri synod bothered me. Among all the branches of Christianity, the WELS and Missouri Synods are the closest in terms of what they believe and yet there is this stigma that the Missouri synod people are wrong and we shouldn't have fellowship with them. We were excluding members of the Festival Singers from singing in church because some Missouri synod pastors preached a little differently than WELS, and that made no sense to me.
On a larger scale, when pressed our pastor would admit that most if not all of the branches of Christianity would make it into heaven, yet we were raised to have a very xenophobic view towards anyone outside our synod.

So that's what started me questioning. Once I started, I quickly found many things that didn't make sense. The passage "This is my body, this is my blood" we took to be literal. I never got a satisfactory answer as to why we take that passage literally, but the book of Revelations is metaphorical. Considering that the bible has gone through 4 translations and numerous reinterpretations (and that the English word 'is' has many varying definitions and uses), I could not accept that this little phrase was meant to be taken literally when the literal interpretation defied science.

Looking at the bible through metaphorical lenses, almost everything else was up for grabs. At this point it was probably sometime in my senior year, and during Wednesday devotion time I took it upon myself to complete a full read-through of the bible. I don't remember everything exactly, but I do remember two major conclusions I came to.

1. If the bible is an accurate literal record of history, then the god we worshiped is malicious, murderous, cruel, angry, and jealous. Or in other words, sinful.
2. Outside of the bible we have no evidence that anything in our religion is true.

It was at that time that I was an agnostic theist. There was only one keeping me in religion, and that was Pascal's Wager. It worked for a while, but ultimately failed.
If the only reason I was following religion was because of a gamble, I wasn't sincere. If god is all-knowing, my ruse wouldn't work and god would be more angry at my fake sincerity than if I didn't believe but was sincere.
Since then I also realized that I had know way of knowing which god, or which path to follow. A Muslim following Pascal's Wager would follow a different path than a Lutheran, and Pascal's Wager didn't explain how to pick the right god.

Sometime around the middle of the school year, I decided to do one final test. Recalling that passage that said the one unforgivable sin was to denounce the holy spirit, I did so.
I don't remember the exact time or place, but I know I was driving alone in my car. I clearly, yet quietly said "I renounce the holy spirit." When my car didn't immediately explode I said it again, a little louder. And on it went until I was shouting "I DO NOT BELIEVE IN GOD!"
It's a bit of a cliche, but I felt like a great burden had been lifted off my shoulders. It may sound odd, but it was a relief to know that I was the only person who had control of my life. Any successes or failures in my life were because of my actions, and not because a supernatural entity was arbitrarily blessing or "testing" me.

So there I was, the only atheist (that I knew) in a Lutheran high school. I went through the motions, not knowing what else to do. Once I went off to Purdue I was able to drop the pretense. In my third year I discovered the Purdue Society of Non-Theists and I was pleasantly surprised to find a community of like-minded people. With their support I was able to improve my critical thinking and rationally explain how and why I left religion.

Then this year, the weekend before Thanksgiving, we went to Skepticon IV. The speakers and the other attendees there really made me feel comfortable with being an atheist, even more so than I was before. I was motivated to tear down the final barrier and come out as an atheist to my family.
Now I don't have to hide my atheism from anyone, and the last little bit of religiously-instilled guilt is gone.

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Living on Steak

I've got one of those rare days where my calendar is empty, so I figured I'd sit down and tell you all a story about how my blog came to be.

During the summer of 2010 I had a boring job that required me to sit in front of a computer for hours at a time. It was essentially customer support, and since I had to be available for people to ask me questions, I couldn't play games or watch movies or even listen to music. This left me with a lot of time and not much to fill it with.
I had requisitioned my younger brother's desktop since he wasn't using it, and I promptly turned it into a server. So I had a server and time, all I needed was a topic, and a title.

I had a simple little blog for my family to read, but that was intellectually unfulfilling as I had to keep much of my thinkings and doings to myself. So it didn't take me long to decide that my new blog would be about my thoughts and ramblings on things that I couldn't write home about (which was just about everything). "A blog on atheism, anarchy, and awesomeness" would be my tagline. However I still needed a title.

I had a list of quotes that I really liked, and for my other blog I had written a simple javascript file that would grab a quote at random to display on a website.
One of the quotes in there was by Robert Heinlein:

"The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak."

Censorship had always been a topic about which I was very opinionated, and this quote summed up my viewpoint on censorship perfectly. I had my title. A quick domain search indicated that I had my url, too.


Living on Steak is not just a blog title anymore. Living on steak has become a motto by which I attempt to live my life.

• Living on steak is about refusing to be censored for being different or having an unpopular opinion.
• Living on steak is about being honest with yourself and realizing that you don't always have to play the part that others want you to play.
• Living on steak is about always seeking to improve yourself and help others improve themselves.
• Living on steak is about living with as few regrets as possible.
• Living on steak is about being awesome.