FBB needs your clicks!
This is so big — and so, so easy.
Foundation Beyond Belief is one of several thousand charities nominated for a Chase Community Giving grant. Two hundred charities will win grants of $10,000 to $250,000 based entirely on public votes. Voting has begun, and we are currently #67. If we stay there, we’ll earn $25,000, an amount that would completely transform our ability to put humanist compassion to work next year. Just 150 votes would launch us to #45, which is $50,000.
This is HUGE.
Please take a moment to click the link, approve the annoying app, and cast your vote for Foundation Beyond Belief. If you can share with your friends, that’s gravy. Voting ends September 19, so I’m afraid I’ll be a pest for nine more days.
UPDATE 9:00pm: When I posted this we were at 442 votes and #67. We’re now at 607 and #57. If you’ve voted, please click the link to return to your vote page and share the link from there!
Q: Where is the story of disbelief most interesting?
In the middle of Chapter 14 now and having a ball. It’s a kind of snapshot chapter — lots of stats and facts about religious disbelief today, including the way it presents differently around the world. Like:
• China and India, where the environment for atheism has been relatively relaxed for thousands of years
• Norway (et al.), where most people are non-believing Lutherans and the state church just (mostly) disestablished itself voluntarily
• Québec, which in 40 years went from the most religious province in Canada (and 83 percent Catholic) to the least religious province in Canada…and still 83 percent Catholic
• California, which in 30 years went from part of the “Unchurched Belt” to the middle of the pack in religious identity, largely because of the influx of Catholic Hispanics
• The UK, of course, which underwent such a rapid secularization after WWII that they had to create a National Health Service to deal with all the whiplash
• The fact that urban-rural is overtaking all other variables in the secular-religious split
You get the picture. I’m trying to draw out these interesting narratives in short spurts. So
Q: Do you know of any interesting stories of the rise, fall, or other change in nonreligious identity at the national or local level, anywhere in the world?
Vermont, you went from 13% nonreligious to 34% in 20 years. Got to be a story there. Also wondering about Uganda for a half dozen reasons. I’m especially interested in the global South, but anything interesting will do. Just a few sentences and a link if appropriate. Thanks!
The two day neural dump
I’ve always found the physicality of thought really interesting — that my ideas and memories take a physical, electrical form in my head. When I’m mentally exhausted, my head actually hurts, like an overused muscle. And when I’ve done too much complex thinking in a short time, it feels like my head is physically constipated.
That was Monday for me. I was going balls out* for the last week of this 50% benchmark, and when I got to the last chapter for that deadline — Chapter 17, “Being an Atheist in a Religious World” — I was just completely spent. Constipated. I got the chapter written, but it didn’t pop, at all. I could see that through the fog, but couldn’t see how to fix it. At all.
I turned it in, knowing there’s another round for author revisions later, then took two days off. And here’s the thing: no matter how fried and exhausted I am, that’s what it takes to fix me. Not a month, not a week — two days. I’ve seen this over and over. Whenever I hit a wall after a huge project and think I’ll need two weeks to recover, I’m back in two days.
Yesterday I looked at Chapter 17 again and my brain instantly saw what it needed. I rewrote it in an afternoon. And it pops.
Maybe it’s the standard time required for a neural dump. Anybody else have that two-day thing going?
*Origin of the phrase “going balls out.” You thought it meant what?!
Honey, there are no coincidences! Oh wait…I just thought of several
I experienced a cosmic circle of coincidence today. Working on a section about meaning in Atheism for Dummies, I suddenly remembered a Jehovah’s Witness at my door in Minnesota in 2006. “You’re an atheist?” she gasped. “So then…you think your children are just…a bunch ofprocesses?”
This brought to mind a great passage from an essay by Adam Lee, including this:
Theists…deride the atheist viewpoint as entailing that human beings are “just matter” or “just chemicals”. However, the fact is that we are not “just” any of those things, any more than a house is “just bricks” or a book is “just words”. Houses are made of bricks and books are made up of words, but not every arrangement of bricks constitutes a house, nor is every arrangement of words a book.
Just as this arrangement of words was leaping into my book, a knock at the door.
Witnesses!
Halfway there
Submitted the 50% benchmark an hour ago — 178 pages down and 178 to go. Wake me Wednesday afternoon.
Watching Canada
I’m beginning to think that when it comes to the border between religion and religion’t, Canada, of all places, is the one to watch:
• Yesterday I wrote the section on Humanistic Judaism, which started in 1963 when Rabbi Sherwin Wine announced to his congregation that he didn’t believe in God and hadn’t for some time. “It is beneath my dignity to say things that I do not believe,” he said, and invited those who wished to do so to follow him in creating a nontheistic Jewish congregation. This was in Windsor, Ontario.
• Five years ago I blogged about Québec, which has historically been the most religious province — over 83 percent Catholic. But now Québec is considered the least religious province by a big margin — and without losing a single Catholic. It’s cultural Catholicism in situ.
• In an Ipsos Reid survey last year, 33 percent of Canadian Catholics and 28 percent of Canadian Protestants said they don’t believe in God.
And ding.
