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Lately I’ve been listening to the archived episodes of the Skepticality podcast. A few weeks back I heard a good quip, one that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the meantime. Unfortunately I’ve managed to forget not only the exact quote, but also the guest who quoted it as well.

Leaning hard on my poor old memory, I’ve narrowed it down to either Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptic’s Society, or Phil Plait, president of the James Randi Educational Foundation and good astronomer. Maybe.

Still, it went a bit like this… It’s okay to preach to the choir, but every once and a while you’ve got to get out there and SING!

Many of us freethinkers (and I’m not exempting myself from this by any means) spend an awful lot of time getting together in meetups, blogs, or forums and talking about how we feel. We’re fed up. We want change. We’re disappointed, frustrated, and even angry. We have a bit of a reputation, deserved or no, of being grumpy, and of always talking about how damned grumpy we are. Of course, the atheists and freethinkers I know are not particularly grumpy or angry, at least not more or less than anyone else. Some of us are pretty friendly and sometimes even, I hate to admit it…downright perky. But when religion begins to step on civil rights or muck about in politics or insinuate itself into our educational curriculum, well, then we do get angry. And, since these things happen pretty frequently, we get grumpy pretty frequently, and we have a whole lot to say about it.

But at some point we have got to get beyond just talking – or grousing – and get out there and DO something!

Are you worried about creationism sneaking into the school science curriculum? Donate some science materials to your school, volunteer as an aid, offer to come in to show-and-tell with your telescope, give a lecture on the scientific method, or, if you can, run for your local school board.

Are you tired of being misrepresented in the news or in TV programs which are entirely one-sided in favor of a religious point of view? Write letters to the editor or producer, get your local meetup group to send a mass of letters, write opinion pieces for local papers or newsletters, or make story suggestions to local news personalities.

Do you have a skill or talent that might help? Write a blog, a song, a book , or an article; create a podcast, a short movie, or an online video; craft an atheist comedy routine and go to open mic night; become a motivational speaker and quest speak on a podcast or news program, if that’s how you roll!

If you don’t have the time to begin a project on your own, see how you can help someone else; offer your talents or at least your assistance to a local atheist or skeptic organization. And of course, never, ever cease writing to your local government representatives – remind them that you exist and that you vote.

There are unlimited ways that you and I can get involved. Even if you don’t have a lot of time, the occasional letter or donation can go a long way. To find out more, or for many, many other great ideas, visit some of our favorite secular and skeptical sources of information like those listed on the main page of this site; find out where you might best be able to help. And, of course, also take a peek at the inspiration for this piece, Daniel Loxton’s “What Do I Do Next?”.

It’s fine to keep on preaching to the choir – we love to hear from you, and we all need to vent from time to time – but, now what are you going to do about it?

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Early in my Junior year of high school, my mom decided to move back “home” to West Virginia. Well, it was still home for her, at least, but after a decade in Florida it was no longer home for me; I felt terribly out of place. I was a strange and lonely kid who read too much and thought too much, and was stuck in the most awkward time of my life. So, when an older cousin asked me to join her church youth group, I did, hoping to find a place to fit in.

I guess I did fit in, for a while. I developed a crush on one of the boys at church and everyone was just so nice. The other kids had all been saved and baptized and the whole congregation seemed so excited about it when a newly saved soul headed up the aisle to pledge their heart to Jeebus. I wanted everyone to like me, so I decided to do it too. That was a very pleasant time for a shy gal in need of approval. Everyone hugged me, smiled at me, told me what a wonderful child I was. A dream come true for one sorely lacking in self esteem!

A few weeks later I had my baptismal ceremony and it was actually quite an uplifting experience. I had that mystical ‘god’ feeling that you read about; I honestly thought I felt surrounded by god’s presence! (As it turns out, a short time later I found I got that same feeling at large rock concerts where the crowd is intensely emotional and focused on the performer.) Everyone continued to heap attention upon me for about the next week, until the next big thing came along – Revival!

If you’ve never been to a Baptist revival, it is truly something to behold. Guest preachers come from far away, having prepared their best, loudest, most intense fire-and-brimstone sermons. It can go on for several weeks, with different speeches throughout the week. (If you have a morbid curiosity and a high BS tolerance, you should try one sometime, if only for reference.) Our regular pastor was not an intense man, normally. He much preferred the “god is love” kind of sermon, and I suppose, so did his flock. When I attended, the morning service was fairly normal, and I suspected nothing. The evening service though, was horrifying… it was entirely too much for a sixteen year old, and I thought I would be sick before the night was over.

Revival was everything you’ve ever seen on TV, and perhaps more. Lakes of fire, eternal suffering and pain, demons, and so on. I hated every second of it. I had been to church before, and I knew that bad people went to hell, but this…this was way beyond some mild-mannered concept of detention or maybe jail. The fear and hate I felt in the room was so diametrically different from the happy glow I had felt in that very same room just one week before that I couldn’t begin to understand it. How could this be the same god? How could a loving god hold you in his hand and protect you in one moment and then decide to torture you forever in the next moment? And for what? As far as I could tell, nearly everything was sinful, and you had to live in fear all of the time in order to keep right with this monster.

That was the last time I ever went to that church or willingly went to any church. Fortunately my mom didn’t seem to mind. She was mostly a Christmas and Easter kind of Christian anyway. A few months later we wound up back in Florida – which turned out to be more “home” for both of us than mom had realized – so I didn’t have to deal very long with the guilt my cousin or my former friends tried to heap upon me.

It took me a long time to figure out what I was going to do with all of those contradictions about the Baptist god. I continued to read too much and think too much, of course. In time I realized that there was so much more that I couldn’t reconcile, and that it just didn’t seem realistic to believe that Christians had the answers. It took me even longer to figure out that nobody else had the answers either. Today I still can’t be positive of what the answer is, but I finally feel that I have a pretty good idea what it is not.

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Skeptic. Freethinker. Non-believer. Humanist. Agnostic. Secularist. Deist. Nontheist. Bright. Atheist.

Whatever you call us, whatever we call ourselves, two things are certain: there are many who hate and fear these labels…and we nonbelievers are not alone. Despite what you might have heard to the contrary, we never were. From Epicurus in approximately 300 B.C.E. to Richard Dawkins today – many have struggled against the tide of their time to question, wonder, and above all think for themselves.

After thousands of years, it is still a struggle to be a thinker. Our labels are epithets and we are considered immoral, amoral, or outright evil. In some places our children are ostracized and our jobs are threatened, our political motivations suspect and our patriotism questioned. It might be that you, wherever you are, don’t feel safe to “go public” about your lack of belief. You might feel as if you are the only one. But nonbelievers are around, if you know where to look for them.

The first place to start is the internet. Search on the keyword: “atheist group Orlando” – over 18,000 hits. The first listing is the Orlando Atheist and Freethinkers, followed by the Orlando Atheist and Libertarian group. Don’t want to go all-out atheist? Search on “skeptic group Orlando” – over 40,000 hits. The first listing is the Orlando Skeptics with the Tampa Bay Skeptics coming in a close second. The groups mentioned are listed with the popular social site Meetup.com, also not a bad place to start. Simply enter the keyword you like best and your zip code, then see what happens. If you aren’t comfortable attending meetings in person, many of these groups have websites, forums, or email lists you can join to keep in contact without revealing any personal information.

If you’re a student, many colleges and universities have skeptic, secular, or freethought clubs that meet on campus. The Center for Inquiry and the Secular Student Alliance are just a couple of groups that sponsor student organizations. Or check your school’s student activities listings to see if some other secular or skeptical group has formed.

Sometimes it’s practically impossible to go public. Outing yourself could mean becoming cut off not only from your church, but your friends, your family, and everyone you’ve ever known. Whether you face a tight religious community, social group, or racial group, you might feel better with a little extra support from folks who understand the unique challenges and fears that you face.

Generic local groups are pretty easy to find with the proper keywords. It’s harder when you qualify your search with “Black” or “African American”, “Latino”, “Mormon”, “Jehovah’s Witness”, “Jewish” or other specific religious or racial affiliations. Suddenly local groups are not to be found. All the search results show keywords in articles or posts to web-based groups, but no local clubs or organizations, not even a Meetup group. Keep in mind that everything mentioned so far has come from pretty casual internet searches – a deeper search might prove more fruitful.

You also might want to put out feelers of your own. You could start a group with one of the major search engines; Yahoo and Google both do forum or bulletin board-style groups. The major social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, also allow you to create a page which other folks in your area could join. All of these sources would permit you to form these groups with a pseudonym or internet “handle” if you aren’t comfortable becoming public yet.

Another option is to join national organizations. There are a number of well-known groups, including:

• The James Randi Educational Foundation,
• The Skeptics Society
• The Society for Humanistic Judaism
• The Center for Inquiry

Most of these organizations have a major online presence and a forum where you can chat or find people who live near you. The JREF is based in South Florida and the Society for Humanistic Judaism has two congregations in Florida.

Also, not long ago the Atheist Nexus (a social networking site) launched. It has groups for Black Freethought and Latina Atheists as well as for ex-Mormon and ex-Jehovah’s Witness members. One member of the Black Freethought group pointed me to a website for the First Annual Conference of Black Nontheists, scheduled for August 7 – 9, 2009, in Atlanta, Georgia.

I know that it can be hard to be vocal or public about being a freethinking individual. It’s intimidating to think about what other people might say or do and frightening to think about losing a friend or a job, or causing a rift in your family. No one can ever tell you that it’s time to go public – for some, that time may never come. But, even if you can’t talk about your thinking to the people you love, it is important that you find a way to communicate and occasionally meet with others who share similar beliefs. It’s wonderfully reassuring to walk into a room of like-minded people and finally feel as if you belong again, to be able to talk freely and intelligently without being careful with your words or dulling your brain.

Come on out and find us! We are around, if you know where to look – and we can’t wait to meet you!

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From the newest scientific discovery to the oldest email investment scam, we are pummeled every day with more information – make it bigger, now it’s better, get it faster, but wait, there’s more! With all of the garbage flying around, how do we figure out what’s real? How do we decide when our kids are really in danger, or if the new diet pill works, or if that talking head is really a doctor – and if she is a doctor, a doctor of what? Every day it becomes more important to be aware of in what and whom we invest our time, trust, and money.

The following is the first in a series of articles to help yourself or the ones you love learn how to think critically about everyday issues from email hoaxes to diet commercials.

Virtual Reality Check

Have you checked your junk mail folder lately? There are pills for what ails you, dating sites, and investment opportunities from dubious “princelings”. A quick search in Google shows a variety of estimates of the waste of fake email, from wasted electricity and bandwidth to actual cash loss of $10 billion or more, and estimates that junk email makes up anywhere from 60 to 95% of all email. Sure, we’ve mostly learned to avoid these internet annoyances and a good spam filter means we rarely have to see another ad for a Viagra knockoff, but what about our nearest and dearest – the best friend or dear sibling who sends those hilarious pictures and heart-warming tales? Are they secretly plotting to spam us too?

Well, probably not. Our loved ones have the best of intentions. They want to warn us of danger, help find a missing child, or let us know about the latest virus, whether electronic or biological. But all too often – and completely unintentionally – they are simply forwarding more junk mail. And for those few alerts that might have ever been real, most are out of date and have been circling around and around the internet for years.

How can you tell if an email is likely to be a hoax or a scam? Here are a few clues to watch out for, thanks to hoax-slayer.com and about.com:

1.    It asks you to forward the email to everyone you know.
2.    It doesn’t provide any sources or places to confirm the content.
3.    It is excessively emotional, littered with all caps, bold print and color; or, alternatively, uses very dense, technical language.
4.    It claims to reveal urgent or important information that you haven’t heard mentioned through any legitimate source of news.

Still, sometimes these messages just seem to ring true and it’s hard to tell if we should buy into the scare. Fortunately, there are a few places to check that specialize in researching internet and email hoaxes. They do the research so we don’t have to. (How do we know if we can trust these sources? Well, more on that a bit later, but the sites listed here are well-known and frequently recommended sources of information – that is, frequently recommended by legitimate news sources.) Here are a couple of my favorite hoax-busting websites:

• Snopes at www.snopes.com
• Hoaxbusters at www.hoaxbusters.org
• About.com at www.urbanlegends.about.com

These sites are easy to use and it only takes a few minutes to check out a suspicious email. Here’s an example of one that I did myself a couple of years ago. I had received an email from a concerned relative about a serial killer who was luring women to open their door late at night by playing the recording of a crying baby. The email urgently warned me to NEVER OPEN MY DOOR if I heard a CRYING BABY – NO MATTER WHAT!! It also encouraged me to send the email to every woman that I know. It had several of the hallmarks listed above such as the dramatic language, the use of all caps, and only vague information about the source. The email didn’t, for instance, even mention the geographical area that this supposed serial killer was operating in, as if the killer could strike one day in Texas and then appear at my own door in Florida on the next.

So, what do you do with an email like this? You want to be safe, but something just sounds fishy, or you want more information. Pick your favorite hoax checking website – at the time I went to Snopes.com. You’ll generally find a list of popular or recent hoaxes and urban legends on one side and a series of categories you can search in the middle of the page. There is also a large search box at the very top of the page. Take a key word or name from the email – in my case I entered “crying baby” and “murder” – then click the search button. A list of hits will come up on the next page. Mine was the first one on the list, an urban legend about a Baton Rogue serial killer who lured women into opening their doors by use of a baby’s cry on tape. It turns out that the tale was a couple of years old, from around 2003, had supposedly been related to the case of a real serial killer, but that no information about a crying baby had ever been brought up by the police or the media. Snopes listed the story as “false” and provided some background information on how they figured out that it wasn’t true, plus some information on old urban legends that were similar to this one.

So, before you hit that button to forward another Important Warning to your friends list, take a minute for a reality check and make sure that the information is real. Stop the spread of useless spam and save an electronic tree!

For more information on how to spot email fakes and other internet hoaxes, also check out www.hoax-slayer.com.

Article for next time: As Seen on TV!

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“English doesn’t just borrow words from other languages, it chases them down back alleys and then goes through their pockets for spare metaphors.” – George Bernard Shaw

English is the language in which you can tie a bow, choose a beau, or climb to the highest bough, but typically only pull a plow – or a plough, if you’re from the United Kingdom. You park in driveways and drive on parkways. In baseball a strike is a miss; in all other cases it’s a hit. Perhaps only in the English language can the same word have two perfectly useful yet opposite meanings at the same time. They are called autoantonyms (or contranyms), and are more common than you might think. This bizarre split can happen for a number of reasons, including early Americans’ attempts to distance American English from its parent by changing everything from spellings to meanings. Beyond that, of course, a word can suddenly begin to be used in a different way, like slang; both meanings are accepted for a while, until the older form is forgotten by most people.

Sometimes, though, a word retains its old meaning for a much longer time because it is used by a particular group of people for a particular purpose. For example, most people know that the word “sanction” means approval of an action or behavior, as in, “the charity ball was sanctioned by the board of directors.” But there are cases, generally in law or business, where “sanction” still means disapproval or punishment – being sanctioned could mean a fine or a jail term.

Another good example is the word “theory.” In everyday use theory does mean a best guess. However, just as sanction has a completely different meaning in the world of law, theory has a completely different meaning in the world of science. According to the United States National Academy of Sciences, a scientific theory is “a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time.” In other words, a scientific theory is a solid explanation of a group of well-known facts; an everyday theory is a haphazard guess based on limited information. Not every theory is “just a theory.”

It can be a bit confusing when science calls some things laws and some things theories. This isn’t because laws are facts and theories are guesses; theories do not eventually “grow up” to become laws. In fact, it is very nearly the other way around – laws (along with other observed facts and hypotheses) are usually a small part of a larger and more important theory! A few examples might surprise you:

• Modern Atomic Theory – Atoms are a theory, but splitting them has explosive consequences
• Germ Theory of Disease – Yep, Germ Theory, but hand-washing is still a pretty good idea
• Theory of Relativity – Einstein’s famous theory, which modern scientists count on for good data
• Theory of Gravity – Still a theory after all these centuries!

Wait…I thought gravity was a law! Well, it is, at least sometimes; the Law of Gravity is true under very particular circumstances that happen to occur here on this planet and under other normal conditions. But the Law of Gravity is not always true. There are places, and abnormal conditions, where gravity as Newton understood it doesn’t work. Scientists needed to keep searching to figure out how to explain those other rules of gravity. The explanation that emerged is the Theory of Gravitation, which itself is a part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Theories are kind of like the parents of ideas. Theories bring together laws, facts, models, and hypotheses and house them all together under one big roof. As time goes on, some ideas grow up to be very different from what they were when they were younger (like poor little ex-planet Pluto!) while some others become old and pass away – does anyone remember when the Earth was the center of the universe? But the larger theory still holds everything together, adapting and changing as its family grows.

A scientific theory may not be perfect or complete, but science counts on the fact that the theory is functional and correct. Science works because it isn’t based on hunches, beliefs, guesses, or everyday theories; science works because hypotheses are tested, facts are determined, and scientific theories are developed by hundreds of scientists over many years. Atoms really do exist, germ theory really saves lives, and gravity really works. After all, rockets launch and satellites remain in orbit, stars shine and – theoretically speaking – black holes really suck.

For more information, check out the following sources:

(1)    Fun With Words website at www.fun-with-words.com/nym_autoantonyms.html
(2)    Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way, published by William Morrow: NY, 1990.
(3)    The National Academies of Science website at www.nasonline.org
(4)    The NAS Press brochure on Science, Evolution, and Creationism at www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11876#toc
(5)    Wikipedia’s article on theory at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory

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