Dinesh D’Souza and Christopher Hitchins will debate the controversial tenants of Christianity and Atheism on April 6th at 8 pm at the Phillips Center for Performing Arts at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Tickets are free.

More info here: http://www.sg.ufl.edu/accent/

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For Immediate Release
Tuesday, March 9, 2010

ST PETERSBURG, Fla.—Governor Charlie Crist has been accused of assaulting a man for identifying himself as an atheist during a campaign event held in St. Petersburg. On Friday, March 5th, University of South Florida graduate student Michael Middlebrooks approached the Governor downtown and was greeted with a smile and a handshake until he mentioned he does not believe in a god. Crist reportedly became irate, ripping a campaign sticker off the man’s shirt that was placed there by a staffer moments earlier, and then shouting over his shoulder (as he turned his back), “I feel sorry for you!”

Atheists of Florida President John Kieffer sent a letter to Governor Charlie Crist on Monday asking that he issue an apology to the man targeted for this mistreatment.

“Imagine instead if you had ripped a campaign sticker off some other religious minority,” Kieffer wrote, “say a Jew or a Muslim, shouting, as you did here, that you felt sorry for them. The outrage in such a case would create newspaper headlines around the world.” He continued by referring to the event as an attack on a minority worldview which is an affront, an outrage, and possibly even qualifies as a hate crime “because [Governor Crist] committed this battery while denigrating [the victim's] personal religious worldview.”

Kieffer’s letter is available for public view at the Atheists of Florida web site (http://www.AtheistsofFlorida.org), along with a discussion area where others may read or contribute their own comments.

Rob Curry is a native of St. Petersburg and serves as Executive Director for Atheists of Florida. He added, “Crist should be ashamed of such boorish behavior. His actions and words this past Friday deeply dishonor the town we both call home by making it the setting for a grotesque mockery of his constitutional duty to treat all Florida citizens with equal respect under the law.”

Atheists of Florida members have been actively seeking to end official government prayers at Tampa City Council meetings since January, and more recently at Lakeland City Commission meetings. Their stance is that government should be neutral with respect to religion, neither advocating nor discouraging religious beliefs and rituals.

About Atheists of Florida
Atheists of Florida, founded in 1992, is a nonprofit, educational corporation created to heighten public awareness about atheism and to monitor state/church separation issues throughout the state. The organization is a founding member society of the Atheist Alliance International.

Atheists of Florida serves the needs of a growing nonreligious community of reason whose members disagree with supernatural doctrines while valuing personal liberty as a precious heritage for everyone. Recent national surveys show that 16% of the American population is nonreligious, an increase from 14% two years prior.

Objectives include: (a) advocating state/church separation, (b) defending the civil rights of atheists and others with minority views on religion, (c) educating the public to dispel common misconceptions about atheism, (d) offering social support for atheists, (e) encouraging an inclusive sense of community, inspiration, mutual understanding and respect, and (f) promoting freedom, honesty and integrity

Contact:

John Kieffer
President
(813) 919-9161

Rob Curry
Executive Director
(727) 851-6452

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Thursday Sept. 17, 2009, 7 pm, UCF Arena – Atheism vs. Religion: Hitchens and D’Souza Debate.

Does religion hold the keys to creating a better world or would modern society be better off without it? What does religion mean for us today? These are some of the questions Christopher Hitchens, atheist author, and Dinesh D’Souza, renowned apologist, will bring to the table on Sept. 17, 2009.

The event, to be held at 7pm at the University of Central Florida Arena, promises to be both enlightening and entertaining as the speakers debate the value of religion, the existence of God, and the effects of religion on society.

TICKETS ARE GOING FAST, MOSTLY TO BELIEVERS. STAND UP FOR ATHEISM!

Free tickets at http://thegreatdebate.eventbrite.com/. Directions included on the site.

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“It is humanity’s unique blessing and peculiar curse to be the only species on Earth, as far as we know, that worries so obsessively and at such great expense about where we came from and why we’re here.” (Epilogue, pg. 339)

Pulitizer Prize winning journalist Edward Humes is a consummate storyteller. In Monkey Girl, he paints a vivid picture of everyone involved in the 2005 court case, Kitzmiller. vs. Dover Area School District, showing how the U.S. divide between evolution and Intelligent Design dramatically played out in one small Pennsylvania town.  Along the way, he sets the trial’s story in the context of the historical evolution-creationism debate in this country.

The thinking (or lack thereof) and incompetent behavior of the creationist members of the Dover School Board borders on ludicrous. It’s apparent they cared less for the public education of their students than for standing up for a “man who died on a cross 2000 years ago.” Humes writes a page-turner as he traces their bungling skullduggery in trying to get Intelligent Design taught in the school’s biology class.

Perhaps the most disturbing facts that emerged from the trial were the chain of events that clearly showed how School Board members who call themselves believers lied to try to impose their religious beliefs on others, then lied under oath to try to cover it up.

It’s also uncomfortable to watch how the School Board pitted Christian against Christian in their zeal to have their way. Board members, parents, and students who favored the separation of Church and State were publicly criticized for not being Christian enough, or for being atheists. At the trial’s end, when the presiding judge, a Conservative Bush appointee, ruled that Intelligent Design is not science, the creationist Board and its supporters accused him of being a liberal judicial activist for defending the Constitution.

The Dover trial is a sad reminder of how many US citizens are unaware of what the US Constitution means. The men who forged that document had a profound understanding of the importance of the separation of church and state, based on experience, not conjecture. Their founding of our new country grew directly out of the anguish and turmoil of centuries of European religious wars in which persecution often meant lengthy incarceration or death.

Unfortunately for the US, it seems the battle to discredit evolution and replace it with creationism is not over. We can only hope that concerned citizens like those in Dover, PA, will continue to speak out and take legal means where necessary and judges like John E. Jones will continue to rule fairly to protect our Constitutional rights.

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As a child, I always had a deep reverence for the Presbyterian Church I attended in the Philadelphia suburbs. It wasn’t so much the religious teachings that inspired me as it was the ambiance – creaky wooden floors, hard brown pews, arched doorways and windows, a pleasant musty smell, rich stained-glass, colorful tapestries, graceful floral arrangements, stirring organ music, and other artifacts found mainly in houses of worship.

I felt peaceful in that space, even if the droning minister in the pulpit was a bore. At age 13, as I was being confirmed on Palm Sunday, the minister collapsed and died of a heart attack in front of us.  Despite this emotional experience, I soon began to question in myself many of the church’s teachings. Why, I wondered, do I always have to go through Jesus to get to God? How is it possible that everything could be done in Jesus’s name? Most preposterous to me as I reached my teen years was the notion that somehow almost 2000 years before I was born, Jesus had died for my sins. I remember thinking, that doesn’t make any sense. If anybody’s going to die for my sins, it’s going to be me.

My creeping doubt came to a head during the early 1960s, when our next minister participated in one of the first civil rights marches, in predominantly Black Chester, Pennsylvania. This outraged the White Republican church members, many of whom were in upper management in large Philadelphia-area corporations. Having somehow received a sensitivity gene in a family with an extremely bigoted father, at age 20 I was proud of what our minister had stood up for. But my support and that of my mother in a subsequent church tribunal was not enough to save the minister from losing his pastorate. Hypocrisy abounded in that church. I was ripe for change.

When I was 23, I converted to Reform Judaism shortly before I married a Jew. This seemed like a natural progression to me, since Jesus played no part in the Jewish religion and I could be directly connected to a God that seemed less vengeful and more whatever I wanted him or her, or it, to be.  I also became painfully aware of anti-Semitism, my first taste as a formerly clueless WASP of the sting of discrimination.

Judaism had it’s own set of mesmerizing artifacts and rituals, but after another 23 years my commitment to theism seemed to have run its course. I yearned for a spirituality that I could practice daily without the pronouncements of some venerated supernatural being on high.

Living at the time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I had my pick of religions to try out. I attended Siddha Yoga services for a time, and then the Korean Zen Buddhist temple. The latter seemed more to my liking. Buddhism has no gods. It’s more a sane psychology for living than a religion in the typical Western sense of the word. Many people who attended services at the Zen temple were also Christians or Jews or other theistic religions. They had no difficulties incorporating the Zen lessons into their theistic dogma.

In 1998 I moved from Michigan to Florida. While there are ethnic Buddhist temples in the state, none are easily accessible for me so I practice on my own. Living in the so-called Bible Belt, I again feel the discrimination of being in the minority.  Only recently have I begun to identify myself publicly as an atheist.

Years ago, when I was living in the Northeast US, religion didn’t have a prominent place in the national discourse.  We all coexisted amicably without the need to force our religious views on each other. There was no public outcry that spoke of the Christian foundations of our nation.  It was clear to all of us, without having to talk about it, that religion was something separate from the public sphere.

These days a very vocal minority of fundamentalist Christians has been trying to change that. Their inaccurate interpretations of our founding documents threatens to turn us against each other in a way our founding fathers never intended.

We are not a Christian nation, though many Christians worship freely here.  I, like everyone else, have had the luxury of worshipping however I want. Or of not worshipping at all.  No one should be discriminated against for what they do, or do not, believe.  Religion and spirituality are private matters and should stay that way.  That practice has served us very well for over 200 years.  Why mess with it now?

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America’s secular heritage begins with the founding of the country in the late 1700′s. While 200 years may seem like a long time ago, it’s a blink compared to the history of secularism that has threaded through most civilizations over the past 3,000 years.

Freethought is by no means an American invention.  It appeared in various guises as far back as ancient Middle East, Greece, India, and China. Gautama Buddha in India in the 6th century BCE spoke of the respect for uncertainty and doubt, warning his followers not to accept anything based merely on tradition or authority.

Thucydides, Anaxagoras, and Theodorus of Cyrene were famous ancient Greek secularists. There is also speculation that Digenes and Socrates were nonbelievers. Secularist Romans included Cicero, Horace, Lucretius, Seneca, and the skeptical philosopher Sextus Empiricus. It’s interesting to note that Romans called everyone who weren’t their religion “atheists,” including Jews and the early Christians.

Persian (Iranian) Omar Khayyam (1048-1123 AD), a first-generation Muslim and well-known mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and poet, was not devout and expressed his doubts publicly about divine intervention.

During the Renaissance Leonardo da Vinci was one of the biggest opponents of acceptance of the authority of the Church. It’s generally agreed that the modern period of Freethought began with the death in 1600 of Italian theologian and writer Giordano Bruno, who traveled throughout Europe writing and lecturing on secular topics. He was finally arrested by the Inquisition and spent seven years in prison in Rome before being burned at the stake for his atheist beliefs.

Atheism and skepticism emerged during the Middle Ages in Europe as universities began to grow independent from the control of the Catholic Church. Chaucer, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, and William of Occam helped reawaken the belief in reason and an interest in science, although none were atheists.

In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, Freethought became popular in England, France, Germany, and other European countries.  During that time, America was well on its way to being settled by Europeans fleeing religious persecution or looking for a better life and African slaves, indentured servants, and prisoners sent to this new land against their will.

By the late 1700′s, the 13 English colonies were ready to split from British tyranny and strike out as a new country founded on human reason and secular humanist, not religious, principles. The founding fathers made their intentions clear on the importance of keeping church and state separate.

In the mid 1800′s, a large number of well-educated, German freethinkers and anti-clericalists emigrated to the US, Canada, and Australia following the 1848 European revolutions for democratic reform and human rights. Known as Forty-Eighters, these people, many of whom were Jewish, hoped to be able to follow their beliefs without governmental or church interference.  Many settled in immigrant communities in St. Louis, Indianapolis, Wisconsin, and the Texas hill country.

Freethought had it’s heyday in American society after the Civil War, from about 1875 to 1914, The most notable freethinker of the time was Robert Green Ingersoll, who gave well-attended, popular speeches around the country.  A number of Freethought periodicals were also published.

But as the country experienced growing pains, schisms between the secular and religious opened up.  Many looked for connections to God to be more visible in society. They wanted a tidy world of moral absolutes and a comfortable sense that a thread of religious belief bound everyone together with the same sense of virtue.  And so secularist influence receded as atheists and freethinkers were censored by regulations and laws meant to silence them.

In the 20th century, skirmishes continued on may fronts between those who wanted to place the Christian God front and center in the workings of everyday public life and those who understood the continuing relevance of freedom in the US Constitution and Bill of Rights.  That divide continues.

For a richly detailed, clearly written accounting of freethought in America, read Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

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