Darrin Patrick’s Final Sermon: Life is Precious and Fleeting

A friend of mine, Darrin Patrick, was a pastor of a St. Louis Church called "The Journey." He died suddenly two days ago. The Post-Dispatch reports this: [N]o official cause of death has been released. The gunshot wound appeared to be self-inflicted; foul play is not suspected." I don't know anything further than this cryptic account.

I hadn't seen Darrin for several years, but I could have tried harder to connect with him again. That's one of the crazy things that life does, right? You don't make enough effort and then, suddenly, it's too late. This is not the first time this has happened to me. Perhaps this was Darrin's last sermon: life is truly precious and fleeting and you need to seize the day and make real efforts to maintain your connections to your people. He would likely add that it is critically important to be creative in those connections, because it was a significant part of his mission to support artists and writers.

When we last visited, Darrin spoke highly of his wife Amie and their kids, but I hadn't met them. Yesterday, Amie posted a sad sweet announcement on his FB page, and I just posted a short comment, which I will paste below. Mine was the 918th comment to her announcement. For another glimpse at what an unusual and innovative person Darrin was, check out this post at Dangerous Intersection.  In fact, I'm going to spoil it: I would bet you don't know of any other pastor who invited an atheist to discuss skepticism in front of hundreds of parishioners as part of a church service.

Amie, you and I have never met, but I am one of the many people touched by Darrin. By no means am I the sort of person that would be expected to fit into Darrin's flock, but I suspect that Darrin was surrounded by such people. He challenged me and I challenged him back and that's how he wanted it. That's because he was a real person, filled with intelligence, good-heartedness and energy but also nuance. I'm so sorry for your loss. Please know that I will miss him too. He changed me for the better and that's the bottom line.

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Alabama Atheist billboard controvery

Huntsville Alabama has a new billboard that reads:

You KNOW they're all SCAMS. Southeast Regional Atheist Meet. January 29-30. atheists.org/huntsville.

Here's a photo of the billboard. Here's what you will find if you follow the link to American Atheists:

Is All Religion a SCAM?

SCAM: 1. A ploy by a shyster to raise money. 2., A fraudulent business scheme. To scam means to victimize: deprive of by deceit; "He swindled me out of my inheritance"; "She defrauded the customers who trusted her"; "the cashier gypped me when he gave me too little change" 3. A confidence trick, confidence game, or con for short (also known as a scam) is an attempt to intentionally mislead a person or persons (known as the mark) usually with the goal of financial or other gain. The confidence trickster, con man, scam artist or con artist often works with an accomplice called the shill, who tries to encourage the mark by pretending to believe the trickster. Let's examine some truth: Truth 1) All religions make money and power from their flock. Truth 2) All religions* promise life after death, AND they promise that members of the flock will benefit in that afterlife from their association with the church/synagogue/mosque. Whether it's an amorphous "closeness to God", or eternity in Heaven, or 72 virgins, they make lots of promises about an afterlife that doesn't exist. They appeal to wishful thinking, egos, and love of life to insent the parishioners to follow and give. Let's face it: religion tells a good story. All you need to do is follow the preacher and good things will happen. You will never really die, and due to your involvement in (insert religion here) you will benefit for eternity. Yes, it pleases the invisible man-in-the-sky that you follow your preacher -- just ask your preacher and he will tell you. Sometimes, religions ask for money directly, and sometimes it's more indirect, but there is always money involved, and there is always a promise that will never be kept. Money and power in exchange for something that will never be recieved, and you can't even ask for a refund! This is a SCAM. Billions of adherents, many of whom are preachers themselves, all victims of this Great Scam. Some know it's a scam, yet defend religion because they like the lies. They like the fraud. They like the false sense of security. Unfortunately, no matter how much you like a lie, it doesn't make it truth. It DOES make religion a great scam if victims are willing to defend it, even in the face of truth. SO -- if you know it's a scam: * Why do you give it money? Why to you follow? Do you like being scammed? * Why do you allow your loved ones to follow? Why not raise their awareness so they can keep their money and their dignity?Because they like being scammed? * Why are you silent? Because the scam-artist preachers want you to be? American Atheists doesn't think religion deserves respect for lying or scamming people. Religion is a major conduit of wealth and power in this country, and this all comes at the expense of well-meaning intelligent victims of the greatest con-job ever. We urge you to get off your knees, keep you money, and regain your dignity. If you can read this (if you are human), you are the top of the food-chain. There are no beings on Earth greater than humans. Yes -- eventually, you will die, and wishing it weren't true won't change that, but at least you can live a full and meaningful life here and now, instead of wasting it following a god you know is a myth, and a religion you know is a scam. * Some secular philosophies, including Secular Judaism, Secular Islam, and Secular Buddhism, call themselves religions. We respectfully disagree with their definitions and do not allege they are scams, as they do not promise an afterlife or promote any deity.
Hmmm. I would put this billboard at about a "6" on my tolerance of religion scale. And I would put the website text at about a "5." [More . . . ]

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Mending Fences – Part V – the Final Installment

This post contains the final section (Part V) of Mending Fences, my attempt to grapple with how to handle religious differences (here is Part I of this series). Where do we go from here? It doesn’t take a genius to see that religion is deeply important to believers. You can see it in their eyes when a skeptic questions their tenets of “faith.” To me, that “look” is as though the skeptic is trying to tempt them to abandon the safety of a pre-modern community, which would cause them to get eaten by wolves in the forest. That's the look I often get (or perhaps I'm projecting). Even if the crazy things believers say aren’t true, they seem important to believers. When skeptics start to circle believers and display their skeptical questions, it seems to believers that we are tying to destroy something that is vitally important to them. Most good-hearted believers change the topic or run away. Other believers become aggressive or even violent. This puzzle some atheists, but wouldn’t you become violent if someone tried to destroy something you believed to be critically important? How, for example, would you feel if someone defaced your mother’s grave? Would you stay calm? Or would become angry? Maybe we don’t understand why believers believe their far-fetched religious stories, but certainly should be able to understand their emotional reactions when skeptics seem to take delight defacing and destroying aspects of religion that (somehow) have value for a believer. Still, where does this bizarre stand-off leave us? [More . . . ]

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Is the “liberal media” anti-religious?

Is the "liberal media" anti-religious? Bill Maher, who answers the question in the negative, engages in a spirited discussion with newly re-elected Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Daily Beast columnist John Avlon, and author S.E. Cupp. Topics include attempts to discern whether Barack Obama is religious (starting at about 16:00).

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Steven Pinker on the American culture war

Marilyn Westfall of the Humanist Network News recently had an engaging chat with cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. The conversation first focused on why the north and the south differ so strongly on thing such as textbooks:

HNN: You've written a great deal on the impact of the political left and right in the United States. How does the political division figure into the debate over textbooks and especially the teaching of evolution? SP: Partly it really is a culture war. The country does have two cultures: the European Enlightenment and the Culture of Honor. The Scots-Irish settled into a lot of the South and West. What came of this was two different paths to civilization. One path was civilized by the law and government and the king, and the other by self-help justice, avenging wrongs and insults with the help of your own manly honor. They co-exist in one country, but they are different cultures. The civilizing force in the West came first from the church. A lot of the Western cowboy towns were first civilized by the women and the church--in cahoots. Churches have the talismanic role as the source of morals and decency and civilization. But part of the division is just sheer oppositionalism: if the liberals say x, we'll say y. Part of it is also an emotional affiliation with the church, and some of it is a disengagement from the wider world.
The conversation eventually turned to atheism. Why do so many people despise "atheists"?
[Atheism evokes] a very primitive emotional reaction in the minds of many people. Many people simply equate it with immorality, which is why I think they tell pollsters that atheists are people they distrust the most. Often when there is a disliked word--a word with a negative connotation--people find a euphemism, that's why what used to [be called] garbage then became sanitation and now its environmental services. And likewise atheism is constantly reaching for the untainted euphemism. Secularist, freethinker, humanist, bright and so on. I think each one is going to get infected in turn until the societal attitude changes. Atheism is merely absence of belief.

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