I’ve never participated in a blog carnival before, mostly due to laziness, but this one may just be too interesting to pass up.

If you’re not familiar with the term, a blog carnival is when a blogger invites other bloggers to write about a particular subject, and then links to (and usually writes a synopsis of) the submitted posts. In effect, it becomes like a single issue of a magazine, with several contributors. Carnivals also tend to be have new “editions” periodically, which makes the “magazine” metaphor even more appropriate.

A popular atheism-related one is the Carnival of the Godless. However, Ebonmuse, author of the wonderful Daylight Atheism blog and the Ebon Musings collection of essays, has noticed a trend in most atheism posts and blogs: we spend too much time writing negatively about religion (what’s wrong with it, debunking myths, spotting contradictions and atrocities in the Bible, denouncing the actions of some of the worst theists, and so on), and too little writing positively about being free from religion. So he’s created a new one: The Humanist Symposium.

Now, atheism itself is not a religion, a philosophy, a code of conduct, or a way of life; it is simply the lack of belief in gods. But it is usually closely related to humanism, especially secular humanism, which, as opposed to atheism, is a philosophy. And writing about humanism is what this new carnival is about. Quoting Ebonmuse:

Submissions should touch on one or more of the following categories, or on topics similar to them:

• The happiness and freedom of life as an atheist, or other positive aspects to living a life without religious belief
• Efforts to evangelize for atheism, and stories of people who have recently deconverted from religion
• How to find meaning and purpose in a godless life
• How non-religious people deal with weddings, child-raising, deaths, and other significant life events
• Posts that stir up the human sense of awe and wonder
• The ethics and moral philosophy of the non-religious

In short, the purpose of the Humanist Symposium is not primarily to criticize religious beliefs or debunk the latest superstition, but to offer and discuss a positive alternative to belief systems based on the supernatural.

As I said in the beginning, I’ll try to participate in this one. No promises, though.

I have to say, however, that this is a problem I’ve been noticing more and more in atheist blogs (which I read a lot more of, nowadays, thanks to Planet Atheism) — including, I have to admit, my own. We spend too much time criticizing religion, instead of speaking positively about atheism, humanism, and the sense of wonder and freedom that comes from living a life without seeing your mind as inherently “flawed”, without belief in the supernatural, and without fear of hell or dependence on an imaginary friend.

Why do we do that? (Again, I’m including myself, not simply criticizing fellow bloggers.) Could it be that criticizing religion is… easy? That spotting contradictions in the bible or in the beliefs of theists is so risibly easy to do that we can do it and then “go home” with the feeling of a job well done, without any real effort?

Because you don’t need to be a genius to realize that the Bible is ridiculously self-contradictory, and has a lot of dubious — when not actually evil — “morality”. All you need to do is read it critically, for once.

Maybe that’s a part of it. Of course, another part is probably this: that we’re annoyed, and possibly even angry, at the war on reason and science, at the demonizing of atheists, at the atrocities committed in the name of religion, at the crippling of millions of young minds. Unlike what George Lucas might tell you, not all anger is negative or “leads to the dark side”: in fact, if some terrible deeds don’t anger you, there’s probably something wrong with you.

Still, it’s a fact that writing endlessly about what’s wrong with religion may simply be “preaching to the choir”, and also be something that we do, in many cases, mostly to feel better about ourselves, because we “see what they don’t see”, while they’re “so stupid” that they can read the Bible and not notice the contradictions, “so dumb” that they can disbelieve other religions as “absurd superstitions” but don’t see that their own is no different, and so on.

Nobody is going to leave religion, or even feel slightly more inclined to do so, because they’re told, or shown, how wrong — or how foolish — they are. If anything, it may actually activate the common theists’ “persecution complex”, and cause them to become even more set in their ways.

Note that I’m not saying that criticizing religion is wrong, that it shouldn’t be done, or that I’ll stop doing it. And anyone is, of course, free to write about whatever he or she wants. But criticism of religion should not be all that atheist bloggers write about. After all, we have something better than blind faith, than believing in fairy tales, than using the writings and legends of primitive desert nomads as a source of morality… so why not write about it, for a change?

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Tags: atheism, humanism

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 17:32 and is filed under atheism, humanism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.