1. Are there right and wrong answers to moral questions?

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world — and there clearly are — then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

2. Are you saying that science can answer such questions?

Yes, in principle. Human well-being is not a random phenomenon. It depends on many factors — ranging from genetics and neurobiology to sociology and economics. But, clearly, there are scientific truths to be known about how we can flourish in this world. Wherever we can have an impact on the well-being of others, questions of morality apply.

3. But can’t moral claims be in conflict? Aren’t there many situations in which one person’s happiness means another’s suffering?

There are some circumstances like this, and we call these contests “zero-sum.” Generally speaking, however, the most important moral occasions are not like this. If we could eliminate war, nuclear proliferation, malaria, chronic hunger, child abuse, etc. — these changes would be good, on balance, for everyone. There are surely neurobiological, psychological, and sociological reasons why this is so — which is to say that science could potentially tell us exactly why a phenomenon like child abuse diminishes human well-being.

But we don’t have to wait for science to do this. We already have very good reasons to believe that mistreating children is bad for everyone. I think it is important for us to admit that this is not a claim about our personal preferences, or merely something our culture has conditioned us to believe. It is a claim about the architecture of our minds and the social architecture of our world. Moral truths of this kind must find their place in any scientific understanding of human experience.

4. What if some people simply have different notions about what is truly important in life? How could science tell us that the actions of the Taliban are in fact immoral, when the Taliban think they are behaving morally?

As I discuss in my book, there may be different ways for people to thrive, but there are clearly many more ways for them not to thrive. The Taliban are a perfect example of a group of people who are struggling to build a society that is obviously less good than many of the other societies on offer. Afghan women have a 12% literacy rate and a life expectancy of 44 years. Afghanistan has nearly the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. It also has one of the highest birthrates. Consequently, it is one of the best places on earth to watch women and infants die. And Afghanistan’s GDP is currently lower than the world’s average was in the year 1820. It is safe to say that the optimal response to this dire situation — that is to say, the most moral response — is not to throw battery acid in the faces of little girls for the crime of learning to read. This may seem like common sense to us — and it is — but I am saying that it is also, at bottom, a claim about biology, psychology, sociology, and economics. It is not, therefore, unscientific to say that the Taliban are wrong about morality. In fact, we must say this, the moment we admit that we know anything at all about human well-being.

5. But what if the Taliban simply have different goals in life?

Well, the short answer is — they don’t. They are clearly seeking happiness in this life, and, more importantly, they imagine that they are securing it in a life to come. They believe that they will enjoy an eternity of happiness after death by following the strictest interpretation of Islamic law here on earth. This is also a claim about which science should have an opinion — as it is almost certainly untrue. There is no question, however, that the Taliban are seeking well-being, in some sense — they just have some very strange beliefs about how to attain it.

In my book, I try to spell out why moral disagreements do not put the concept of moral truth in jeopardy. In the moral sphere, as in all others, some people don’t know what they are missing. In fact, I suspect that most of us don’t know what we are missing: It must be possible to change human experience in ways that would uncover levels of human flourishing that most of us cannot imagine. In every area of genuine discovery, there are horizons past which we cannot see.

6. What do you mean when you talk about a “moral landscape”?

This is the phrase I use to describe the space of all possible experience — where the peaks correspond to the heights of well-being and valleys represent the worst possible suffering. We are all someplace on this landscape, faced with the prospect of moving up or down. Given that our experience is fully constrained by the laws of the universe, there must be scientific answers to the question of how best to move upwards, toward greater happiness.

This is not to say that there is only one right way for human beings to live. There might be many peaks on this landscape — but there are clearly many ways not to be on a peak.

7. How could science guide us on the moral landscape?

In so far as we can understand human well-being, we will understand the conditions that best secure it. Some are obvious, of course. Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I’m not sure we do. Are there genes that make certain people more compassionate than others? What social systems and institutions could maximize our sense of connectedness to the rest of humanity? These questions have answers, and only a science of morality could deliver them.

8. Why is it taboo for a scientist to attempt to answer moral questions?

I think there are two primary reasons why scientists hesitate to do this. The first, and most defensible, is borne of their appreciation for how difficult it is to understand complex systems. Our investigation of the human mind is in its infancy, even after nearly two centuries of studying the brain. So scientists fear that answers to specific questions about human well-being may be very difficult to come by, and confidence on many points is surely premature. This is true. But, as I argue in my book, mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a huge mistake.

The second reason is that many scientists have been misled by a combination of bad philosophy and political correctness. This leads them to feel that the only intellectually defensible position to take when in the presence of moral disagreement is to consider all opinions equally valid or equally nonsensical. On one level, this is an understandable and even noble over-correction for our history of racism, ethnocentrism, and imperialism. But it is an over-correction nonetheless. As I try to show in my book, it is not a sign of intolerance for us to notice that some cultures and sub-cultures do a terrible job of producing human lives worth living.

9. What is the difference between there being no answers in practice and no answers in principle, and why is this distinction important in understanding the relationship between human knowledge and human values?

There are an infinite number of questions that we will never answer, but which clearly have answers. How many fish are there in the world’s oceans at this moment? We will never know. And yet, we know that this question, along with an infinite number of questions like it, have correct answers. We simply can’t get access to the data in any practical way.

There are many questions about human subjectivity — and about the experience of conscious creatures generally — that have this same structure. Which causes more human suffering, stealing or lying? Questions like this are not at all meaningless, in that they must have answers, but it could be hopeless to try to answer them with any precision. Still, once we admit that any discussion of human values must relate to a larger reality in which actual answers exist, we can then reject many answers as obviously wrong. If, in response to the question about the world’s fish, someone were to say, “There are exactly a thousand fish in the sea.” We know that this person is not worth listening to. And many people who have strong opinions on moral questions have no more credibility than this. Anyone who thinks that gay marriage is the greatest problem of the 21st century, or that women should be forced to live in burqas, is not worth listening to on the subject of morality.

10. What do you think the role of religion is in determining human morality?

I think it is generally an unhelpful one. Religious ideas about good and evil tend to focus on how to achieve well-being in the next life, and this makes them terrible guides to securing it in this one. Of course, there are a few gems to be found in every religious tradition, but insofar as these precepts are wise and useful they are not, in principle, religious. You do not need to believe that the Bible was dictated by the Creator of the Universe, or that Jesus Christ was his son, to see the wisdom and utility of following the Golden Rule.

The problem with religious morality is that it often causes people to care about the wrong things, leading them to make choices that needlessly perpetuate human suffering. Consider the Catholic Church: This is an institution that excommunicates women who want to become priests, but it does not excommunicate male priests who rape children. The Church is more concerned about stopping contraception than stopping genocide. It is more worried about gay marriage than about nuclear proliferation. When we realize that morality relates to questions of human and animal well-being, we can see that the Catholic Church is as confused about morality as it is about cosmology. It is not offering an alternative moral framework; it is offering a false one.

11. So people don’t need religion to live an ethical life?

No. And a glance at the lives of most atheists, and at the most atheistic societies on earth — Denmark, Sweden, etc. — proves that this is so. Even the faithful can’t really get their deepest moral principles from religion — because books like the Bible and the Qur’an are full of barbaric injunctions that all decent and sane people must now reinterpret or ignore. How is it that most Jews, Christians, and Muslims are opposed to slavery? You don’t get this moral insight from scripture, because the God of Abraham expects us to keep slaves. Consequently, even religious fundamentalists draw many of their moral positions from a wider conversation about human values that is not, in principle, religious. We are the guarantors of the wisdom we find in scripture, such as it is. And we are the ones who must ignore God when he tells us to kill people for working on the Sabbath.

12. How will admitting that there are right and wrong answers to issues of human and animal flourishing transform the way we think and talk about morality?

What I’ve tried to do in my book is give a framework in which we can think about human values in universal terms. Currently, the most important questions in human life — questions about what constitutes a good life, which wars we should fight or not fight, which diseases should be cured first, etc. — are thought to lie outside the purview of science, in principle. Therefore, we have divorced the most important questions in human life from the context in which our most rigorous and intellectually honest thinking gets done.

Moral truth entirely depends on actual and potential changes in the well-being of conscious creatures. As such, there are things to be discovered about it through careful observation and honest reasoning. It seems to me that the only way we are going to build a global civilization based on shared values — allowing us to converge on the same political, economic, and environmental goals — is to admit that questions about right and wrong and good and evil have answers, in the same way the questions about human health do.

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The funny thing is, I’m not really a people person. Like a lot of atheists (supposedly), I’m quite an outsider, as much of a hermit as I can get away with, in fact. I have never liked going out in crowds or socializing with large groups of people.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I have realized something that I want to share with you. Even though I’m a curmudgeonly hermit-y atheist, I love going to the 3 atheist/freethinker meetings we have every month. That’s 3 Sundays a month where I happily leave the house and go socialize with a small group of people. And I look forward to it. The one or 2 Sundays where we don’t meet I miss it.

Even people like me benefit from social community and contact. The beauty of the atheist/freethinker community is that we are relatively like-minded. We have a foundation of common ground. But we are also quite different, of course, which is good because that makes things interesting. The added bonus of freethinkers, skeptics and atheists is that we seem relatively level-headed (overall – there are exceptions,  of course) and we argue and discuss matters with interest and fairness. No drama llama is invited! So it’s actually fun and mentally stimulating.

I think we all need some type of community, which is one thing that religion has in its favor that being a lone atheist does not.

But this is easily remedied. I thought I’d share some thoughts on how to get involved with a secular group of like-minded people. If none exist in your area, you can start one up.

Tips For Finding A Local Atheist/Humanist/Freethinker/Skeptical Community

1. Do a local Google search on the type of group you’re interested in. They may have a Yahoo, Google or Facebook group, or other page set up, or a website devoted to their activities.

2. Go to your favorite organizations and see if they have local chapters, or a list of local groups associated with them. Examples would be CFI, American Atheists, AHA, UnitedCoR, SCA, etc.

3. Look in your local paper, either online or in print. We have our meetings listed in the Today section of the paper, as well as a general entry in the church section (which is really more for a laugh than anyone looking there for an atheist group, I think)

4. Visit the library or local coffee shops for possible fliers on the bulletin boards.

Once you’ve seen that no local groups exist, or you find that you aren’t interested in what’s available, it’s time to start your own.

Tips For Starting A Local Atheist/Humanist/Freethinker/Skeptical Community

1. Start a local yahoo group, Google group, and/0r Facebook group. If you are sure of the name you want your group to have, you can get a domain name and set up a blog or website for the group you are forming.

I recommend a WordPress blog that pings to many different listing sites. This gets you into Google and other search engines much faster than a plain old website, in the easiest way.

2. Go to your favorite organizations and see if they offer any tips on starting a local chapter. Examples would be CFI, American Atheists, AHA, UnitedCoR, SCA, Atheist Nexus, etc.

3. Set a date, time and place for the first meeting. Also have a topic or agenda to talk about. For the first meeting, your location can be the library or a comfortable coffee shop. Provide directions to the meeting clearly in whatever web presence you’ve chosen.

4. Set up a Gmail email so people can contact you with questions.

5. Contact your local paper. Look for a contact for the Today section, or something similar. Be friendly and polite and see if they will list your local meeting.

6. Create fliers (they don’t have to be big or fancy) and put them in the local coffee shops, the library, and any other places you can think of. If you created a group somewhere online, make sure to share that on the flier so people can read more, as well as your new email address so they can ask questions.

Also post to any groups you’ve created on Facebook, Yahoo or Google groups. Spread the word!

7. Show up to the meeting about 10 or 15 minutes early. I carry a tote bag that identifies me as an atheist (one of my Sir Lee Tees designs, a positive atheism message) to help people I haven’t met yet find me in the location. I also have my picture up on Facebook and the websites so people can see my face. Then they have no problem recognizing me when they first come to a meeting. You can do something else to identify yourself to make it easier and more comfortable to people who will need to approach you. Or if you meet at the library, put up a sign in the room you are in, etc.

Expect the first meetings to be small. Maybe get a friend to sit with you for a half hour to see if anyone shows up. For Morgantown Atheists, there were quite a few meetings that were just the original founders and no one else. But with lots of messages on Atheist Nexus and other areas, it has grown to quite a dynamic little group that meets 3 times a month and now will have a secular service project ongoing.

8. Have some flexible goals in mind for the direction you want your group to go in. My experience is that these small communities sort of take on a life of their own, but having some ideas to start off with can at least give you confidence, as well as help others to decide if they want to come to a meeting.

~ So that should get you started. If you are interested in finding our starting a group, or if you do start one and want some more ideas, let me know! We can brainstorm, as I’m always looking for new ideas for my groups.

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I thought I’d share some pictures from our Nature Walk.

In our conversations we talked about how people struggle when they are questioning their faith. It’s different for everyone, but some of the big things you have to give up are:

• Your consciousness living forever in heaven. Life after death.
• Someone thinking for you, telling you what your morals are, and spoon-feeding you the big answers to questions about why we’re here, etc.
• Community from your church. Sometimes this is everyone you know. Family and friends.

One thing the budding atheist community needs to do is to help people with things they miss out on from their church. This makes the transition away from religion easier and less painful.

The first one is the toughest. A person deconverting just has to come to terms with the cold hard fact that consciousness dies. But one way I’ve dealt with that is to find relief in the fact that I won’t burn in hell, since it doesn’t exist any more than heaven (which sounds extremely dull and boring).  Another way I’ve dealt with it is to really embrace science and learn about how amazing nature is.

That brings me to the second thing. What is my personal ethical/moral code? And the big questions. How did life begin? Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What I’ve realized is that I had to reevaluate all these things. And it took time.

I’ve gone through the morals that I was indoctrinated with and carefully came up with my own reason-based code of ethics. It boils down to being good for goodness’ sake. You can see my 10 Principles here.

And I’ve realized that I have to come up with my own reason for the meaning of life. It’s individual. We all decide what that is for ourselves. A lot of this work was realizing I could throw away the garbage from religion I had accumulated. Filling in the answers for myself was much easier once I got rid of the nonsense.

When it comes to questions about how life began, I turn to science. That’s easy. The church could never answer those questions honestly, but science investigates these things every day, all around the world. It’s awesome. It certainly answers great questions a zillion times better than religion ever could.

Freethinking groups are the solution to community. We have a wonderful group here in Morgantown. Just do it. Find a group or start your own. If you want ideas for how to start your own group, let me know. I am not a group kind of person (being a bit of a hermit by nature) but I find that hanging out with my fellow atheist friends is wonderful. Give it a try. You might really like it.

And here is the sunset from our awesome day. I just caught the last bit of it.

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Thank you for answering my email. I am only 21 and it seams that I am searching for myself and what it is that I can believe. I see how people lie on a daily basis to make the even more entertaining than the event really was so I find it hard to believe anything that is told to me. Giving this way of living I find it tremendously hard to base my life and way of living around things that have been written in a book (the bible) that has been translated umpteen different times before coming to english. The thought that people let their lives revolve around something that was written 2000 years ago just amazes me. As humans are we so daft to do such a thing? The more I look into religion the more I am amazed at the living situations of some people in this world.

My dad did not express any beliefs of god when I was young because he is like me a firm non-believer until there is hard core facts to show him. He wanted me to believe what I wanted and didn’t want his opinions to influence me so he felt it best not to tell me anything. My mother… well she didn’t teach me anything about god or religion until I was 12 we went to church for the first time. She stuck me in Sunday school before a service. Now my father’s mother was catholic. She went twice on Sunday and Wednesday night. I stayed the night with her several times and went to church with her I believe when I was 7. That was enough religion for me. I still remember sitting in the pew looking around saying to myself “are these people really this crazy?!?”

I went to public schools in Indiana. I went to ten different schools before 9th grade so needless to say I was not well adjusted. I never really had any foundation so to say.

I have two children and I want to be able to educate them on religion and allow them to choose their own way. I don’t see the point in trying to force them to do things my way because they need to find out who they are maybe then they won’t have the same struggles that I do.

To answer your question no I was never taught the prevailing theories of how the earth was formed through natural cosmic events. As I said we moved a lot and the curriculum was different at each school there were several things I missed out on. That is why I am so ignorant on religion because I was never taught the scientific end of the world.

I don’t feel that I “NEED” a religion. I would just like to know a little more about why I am here on this earth. I feel there is a purpose for everything because it just doesn’t seam like we exist just to exist. There is some sort of purpose behind our being. So now my job is to find the why.

Thank you so much for this information!! You are right I will have many more questions for you. I want to look over the information you have given me and I want to do some additional research. (Internet based because I now live in the middle of BFE so no museums in my area and the library has a limited amount of books. Besides the fact, I am in the middle of the Bible belt so there will be virtually no literature supporting the thought that there could be an existence not provided by god.)

And here is my new reply:

Thanks for answering my questions. Yes, please research for yourself. The internet opens the whole wide world of information up to you, even in the middle of BFE. I live in a small town that is quite heavily populated with churches and one sad library. There is one small set of shelves for the science section in there. It’s pathetic. I do almost all of my research online, too.

I was thinking about you today and found something that you might enjoy: a set of 5 videos for young and old alike by professor Richard Dawkins. He is an evolutionary biologist. It’s 5 lectures he is giving to children in England but I just watched the first two and really enjoyed them and learned little bits and pieces of information I didn’t know before. He talks and then demonstrates what he says in ways that are easy to understand. But trust me, he doesn’t talk down to anyone. He is quite interesting and has a great passion for life and how we got here and what our place in the world is.

Here is a link to his website with all 5 videos. They are an hour each, I think.

Finding meaning and purpose in your life is not the same as looking for something to believe in. Perhaps you’re using the term differently than I am. Perhaps what you mean is that the two things are the same. Let’s look at the definitions to clarify.

belief: 1. something believed; an opinion or conviction; 2. confidence in the truth or existence of something not immediately susceptible to rigorous proof; 3. confidence; faith; trust; 4. a religious tenet or tenets

purpose: 1. the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.; 2. an intended or desired result; end; aim; goal.

meaning: 2. the end, purpose, or significance of something

So a belief is a conviction that doesn’t have proof to back it up, which means it’s similar to faith.

faith: 2. belief that is not based on proof

You said you want to know why you are here on earth and that you feel there is a purpose for everything. Why do you feel this way? Is it because it gives you comfort? Just because you want to believe there is a deeper meaning to the universe doesn’t make it so. There is no evidence that there is any validity to that kind of thinking.

Let me put it this way. You say you feel there is a reason you are here on this earth. This leads to fallacious thinking where every little thing that goes right in your life affirms this false belief. Of course this is cherry-picking because you ignore all the things that happen in your life that are completely meaningless or downright negative. This leads you to think you (and the human race) are special, that we have some magical purpose because you have ignored the whole of reality to focus only on what you feel and what confirms what you want to believe to begin with.

The human mind is amazing and awesome, but it does take shortcuts and can easily be misled and make wrong conclusions. It’s very easy to cherry-pick and remember only what feels right or what seems special. This is dangerous and will lead you down a path of lies and myths in trying to believe in and confirm something that has no basis in reality.

It’s normal to ponder why were are here and what it all means. We have consciousness and an amazingly complex brain that can handle complicated concepts like the number 0 and the number 1 for example.

I also think this is one of the toughest issues an atheist deals with. If there is no god then what is the reason for existing? What is our purpose in life?

Well, it’s pretty simple. There is no purpose for everyone. You make your own purpose. You have to find your own meaning. I think some universal ideas would be to always keep learning, and do your best and be a good person. What is the meaning of life? There isn’t any one meaning. It’s what you find important. Try to find your own happiness and do as little damage to others as possible along the way.

Since you have children, nothing is more important in this part of your life than raising them to the best of your ability. Raising them free of dogma, with honesty, with a the ability to ask questions and think for themselves is the best thing you can do for them.

I know that thinking there is some cosmic force for good out there is really appealing, but there’s no evidence for such a thing. While it’s nice to chalk up good things to such a force, there are an awful lot of bad things – no natural justice, natural disasters, birth defects, etc – that make that seem pretty silly.

Basically you are here on this earth because life moves inexorably on. Within life, the need to procreate is part of evolution and natural selection. Again I recommend the videos by Dawkins that I linked to above. They will really give you an idea of evolution which will help you to see that we evolved naturally, and will continue to evolve unless we destroy ourselves and the planet by being careless, short-sighted and selfish.

Instead of searching for why you are here, make the most of your one precious life. Raise your children to the very best of your ability, be good to yourself and others, learn as much as you can. Make your own meaning and purpose with what you have.

Sometimes thinking for yourself, being free of religious dogma, reminds us of our grown-up responsibilities that religion masks. Thinking about such topics are part of being truly grown-up in this life. It might not be fun when you first encounter the new ideas, but reality is always preferable to fairy tales and lies. Give it a few days. Learn as much as you can about evolution and you’ll see. Truth and reality are magnificent and beautiful.

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“The Symphony of Science is a musical project by John Boswell designed to deliver scientific knowledge and philosophy in musical form. Here you can watch music videos, download songs, read lyrics and find links relating to the messages conveyed by the music.”

The first time I heard A Glorious Dawn was on the Reasonable Doubts podcast. I didn’t care for it for the first few seconds but it grew on me very quickly. When I watched the videos I was inspired. Basically Carl Sagan and other awesome scientists are singing in a synthesized way. There’s a special program that does this, but I can’t think of what it’s called at the moment. Ozzie and Cher have both put out albums using this same technique to save their sagging voices. But here John Boswell turns speech into music.

All three are awesome. I hope you try them out. Go to the website to download the music. A Glorious Dawn is also available on iTunes!

A Glorious Dawn

Symphony of Science – Carl Sagan – “A Glorious Dawn”, featuring Stephen Hawking

[Sagan]
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch
You must first invent the universe

Space is filled with a network of wormholes
You might emerge somewhere else in space
Some when-else in time

The sky calls to us
If we do not destroy ourselves
We will one day venture to the stars

A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way

The Cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths
Of exquisite interrelationships
Of the awesome machinery of nature

I believe our future depends powerfully
On how well we understand this cosmos
In which we float like a mote of dust
In the morning sky

But the brain does much more than just recollect
It inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes
it generates abstractions

The simplest thought like the concept of the number one
Has an elaborate logical underpinning
The brain has its own language
For testing the structure and consistency of the world

[Hawking]
For thousands of years
People have wondered about the universe
Did it stretch out forever
Or was there a limit

From the big bang to black holes
From dark matter to a possible big crunch
Our image of the universe today
Is full of strange sounding ideas

[Sagan]
How lucky we are to live in this time
The first moment in human history
When we are in fact visiting other worlds

The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean
Recently we’ve waded a little way out
And the water seems inviting

~

We Are All Connected

Symphony of Science – We Are All Connected
featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye

[deGrasse Tyson]
We are all connected;
To each other, biologically
To the earth, chemically
To the rest of the universe atomically

[Feynman]
I think nature’s imagination
Is so much greater than man’s
She’s never going to let us relax

[Sagan]
We live in an in-between universe
Where things change all right
But according to patterns, rules,
Or as we call them, laws of nature

[Nye]
I’m this guy standing on a planet
Really I’m just a speck
Compared with a star, the planet is just another speck
To think about all of this
To think about the vast emptiness of space
There’s billions and billions of stars
Billions and billions of specks

[Sagan]
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it
But the way those atoms are put together
The cosmos is also within us
We’re made of star stuff
We are a way for the cosmos to know itself

Across the sea of space
The stars are other suns
We have traveled this way before
And there is much to be learned

I find it elevating and exhilarating
To discover that we live in a universe
Which permits the evolution of molecular machines
As intricate and subtle as we

[deGrasse Tyson]
I know that the molecules in my body are traceable
To phenomena in the cosmos
That makes me want to grab people in the street
And say, have you heard this??

(Richard Feynman on hand drums and chanting)

[Feynman]
There’s this tremendous mess
Of waves all over in space
Which is the light bouncing around the room
And going from one thing to the other

And it’s all really there
But you gotta stop and think about it
About the complexity to really get the pleasure
And it’s all really there
The inconceivable nature of nature

~

Our Place in the Cosmos

Symphony of Science – Our Place in the Cosmos
featuring Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Michio Kaku and Robert Jastrow
[Narrator]
With every century
Our eyes on the universe have been opened anew
We are witness
To the very brink of time and space

[Robert Jastrow]
We must ask ourselves
We who are so proud of our accomplishments
What is our place in the cosmic perspective of life?

[Carl Sagan]
The exploration of the cosmos
Is a voyage of self discovery
As long as there have been humans
We have searched for our place in the cosmos

[Richard Dawkins]
Are there things about the universe
That will be forever beyond our grasp?
Are there things about the universe that are
Ungraspable?

[Sagan]
One of the great revelations of space exploration
Is the image of the earth, finite and lonely
Bearing the entire human species
Through the oceans of space and time

[Dawkins]
Matter flows from place to place
And momentarily comes together to be you
Some people find that thought disturbing
I find the reality thrilling

[Sagan]
As the ancient mythmakers knew
We’re children equally of the earth and the sky
In our tenure on this planet, we’ve accumulated
Dangerous evolutionary baggage

We’ve also acquired compassion for others,
Love for our children,
And a great soaring passionate intelligence
The clear tools for our continued survival

[Michio Kaku]
We could be in the middle
Of an inter-galactic conversation
And we wouldn’t even know

[Sagan]
We’ve begun at last
To wonder about our origins
Star stuff contemplating the stars
Tracing that long path

Our obligation to survive and flourish
Is owed not just to ourselves
But also to that cosmos
Ancient and vast, from which we spring

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Anyway, the other thing that has kept me busy is thinking of the holidays that are fast approaching. While I like getting together with friends and family and celebrating, I don’t like the religious nature of it all (of course). One thing that really frustrates me is the card selection.

So I decided to try my hand at designing some irreverent cards! I dug through my favorite winter pictures that I’ve taken over the years, then came up with some messages for nontheists (with the help of my most awesome husband Butch, of course), and uploaded them to Zazzle.

I would like to do a few more, but these are a good start, I think. If you have ideas you’d like to see created, feel free to comment or Email Me.

~ Begin Shameless Promotion Here~

Just Be Good For Goodness Sake! Three cards with original photography by © ZeNeece and 3 slightly different messages.

The Cardinals Agree Card

Retain Your Reason This Season! Card

Snow Angel Jesus Card

See inside messages and matching stamps as well as postcards:

Message in card and on back of postcard: These Cardinals Agree! Just Be Good For Goodness Sake! Enjoy The Season No Matter What You Celebrate	Message in card and on back of postcard: Tis The Season To Retain Your Reason! Just Be Good For Goodness Sake! Enjoy The Season No Matter What You Celebrate	Message in card and on back of postcard: Lighten Up! Just Be Good For Goodness Sake! Enjoy The Season No Matter What You Celebrate
The Cardinals Agree Stamp	Retain Your Reason This Season! Stamp	Snow Angel Jesus Stamp
The Cardinals Agree Postcard	Retain Your Reason This Season! Postcard	Snow Angel Jesus Postcard

~
Sir Lee Tees will customize designs for you, or create something entirely new. Just email them at sirleetees@gmail.com. See more irreverent designs at SirLeeTees.com or their Zazzle Store.

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Then I met Tim. He’s a friend of mine who is also an atheist and he encouraged Butch and I to come to a Morgantown Atheist meeting. Earlier this year we did and it was awesome! Here were people who were like us, who had similar views of the world in matters of religion as us. The next month we joined the Freethinkers Morgantown Book Club too.

One thing we wanted to do at Morgantown Atheists was to get a billboard like other cities across the country and around the world. We started getting a bit more organized, then found the United Coalition of Reason. They believe that local organizations who don’t even know about each other should work together, pool our resources, and reach out together to people who don’t even know the little groups exist.

Before you know it, we formed the Morgantown Coalition of Reason! That’s the Morgantown Atheists, the Morgantown Brights, the Freethinkers Morgantown Book Club* and the Morgantown Thomas Paine Society*. Now together we can do projects together and all kinds of good stuff. Since we got together, I’ve met a lot of other people from the other groups and they’re great!

So the UnitedCoR helped us get our billboard! For a month we’re going to be calling out to the godless of our area, letting them know where to find us, and that they are not alone. People of Reason, unite!

If you’re in West Virginia, you can contact the MorgantownCoR to see about joining. In fact, you can contact me, because I’m the Coordinator.

If you’re in another part of the country, think about contacting UnitedCoR to help you get organized too. United we stand. And together we can make a positive difference in our communities and around the country.

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