The fact is, GAs are, and have always been, the game of small lobbying groups, who appear with such depressing regularity that one can almost recognize their members on sight. GAs are the arenas for political punch-ups in the name of whatever happens to be the latest banner cause – the student strike, Israel/Palestine, corporate investment, et cetera. The name of the game is to get as many of your like-minded friends out so you can push your agenda over the unlucky sops that couldn’t gather enough of their like-minded friends, trading barbs all the way, and then go home with a shiny new mandate to hang over the mantelpiece, be it from SSMU, a faculty, or a department. Certainly amendments can be introduced, but if the last SSMU GA was any indication, such actions are little more than political shell games, with opponents trying to “defang” the motion or supporters trying to intensify it.

This is not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue; it stems almost entirely from the fact that nobody goes into a GA without an issue that personally affects them, and usually that issue is raised in the form of a motion that they have an interest in forcing through. Witness the fact that the highest rate of participation for a GA in recent memory – during the AUS strike vote –  happened only when a motion was raised that would affect most students equally, with the more than 1,000 in attendance evaporating as soon as the issue had been decided.

Yet still people defend the myth of the “engaged student,” that fleeting beast that somehow finds time between its fifteen credits of coursework to go out with no preconceptions and spend hours listening to “debate” (which usually consists of propagandistic screeds anyway) so that it can make an “informed decision” and thus be grouped into the appropriate camp for the subsequent mud-slinging (“You damn hipster commie!” “You ****ing fascist!”). This student does not exist. Given the choice, most McGill students would rather stay in the library for a few more precious hours of studying, letting the assorted factions squabble in the GAs over their pet issues. Yet often they find themselves punished for these priorities by the resulting mandates from these political cage fights, forced behind a policy that may even be directly harmful to them. Such is the need for online ratification. Until a way is found to make GAs genuinely open fora rather than “democracy wars” between lobby groups, online ratification is the only way to ensure that SSMU serves the interests of the students, rather than the other way around.

Harmon Moon is a U3 History student. He can be reached at harmon.moon@mail.mcgill.ca.

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I went to a nominally Anglican private high school, although it had long since abandoned all pretext of being religiously oriented. The one holdover from its less pluralistic days was a bi-weekly chapel session, which was conducted by a chaplain well aware of, and open to, the diversity of beliefs and cultures within the school. Rather than a regular religious instruction, chapel was a time to put on our dress uniforms and watch presentations, either by students fired up by some form of injustice, or somebody more prestigious coming in to speak to us about what they did or knew.

The time was mid-September, 2008 – my graduating year. It was our first chapel session of the term, which meant introductions were necessary for new students. We were being graced by a visit from our headmaster, who we usually didn’t see much – he sat beside the chaplain at the front of the building.

The chaplain was the first to speak, and he explained the chapel sessions. He explained that he wanted everybody, regardless of their beliefs, to feel safe in this building, despite its Christian focus, particularly, the large cross on the alter.

The headmaster stood to speak next. He attempted to echo the chaplain’s sentiment of inclusion, but tried to add a joke: “personally, I find atheists to be the mosquitoes in the underbrush of life.”

There was dead silence, and then an awkward laugh. If he’d said that about any religious groups, there would have been uproar.  Yet, he chose atheists, and all he got was an awkward laugh.

Some time later, my friends and I managed to get time in chapel to give a presentation on atheism. I won’t pretend it was good, but it was my first foray into publicly defending the movement. The headmaster was absent. He never apologized for his remarks.

I don’t mean to portray this incident as symptomatic of malicious oppression atheists undergo, especially in an increasingly secularized world. However, it serves as a poignant reminder that the atheist movement is still far from respected. Until atheism is accepted as a legitimate alternative point of view, there must be people that are willing to stand up for themselves and their beliefs and demand respect. To this day, I have tried, through education and interaction, to put a positive face onto a movement often lacking one. Someday I’ll be able to go back to keeping my beliefs a private matter; until then, I’m out to prove that, at the very least, this mosquito bites hard.

One Less God is a twice-monthly column on atheist communities and philosophy. Harmon Moon is a U2 History student and VP External of the McGill Freethought Association. He can be reached at onelessgod@mcgilldaily.com

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Yet such categorizations are hardly absolute. For example, many of Ayn Rand’s beliefs can be classified as on the far right of the political spectrum. In this case, her strong atheism was not a major factor in deciding these views.

Conversely, Liberation Theology, a segment of Catholicism, became radically left wing in the late 1960s, as a response to poverty and authoritarian rule in Latin America.  Some have gone so far as to accuse it of being Marxist.

With that in mind, though, I’d be lying if I said that atheists didn’t tend to lean politically leftward, an interesting phenomenon in and of itself. As I said earlier, there’s a certain historical connection stemming roughly back to the Enlightenment, although some will disagree with me on the date. What I would argue, though, is not that the source for this tendency is part of some intrinsic part of atheist thinking, but comes from the age-old marriage between religion and the right wing.

When boiled down to its core texts, religion is essentially a grouping of traditions that are intended to be repeated across the ages. Such an approach tends to be very palatable to social conservatism, with its return to the “good old days.” Even more important were the organized churches of earlier times that tended to amass wealth and influence – with more to lose, and backed up by their orthodoxy, they would tend to turn towards the right.

Atheism as a belief challenges the core precepts of religion, which are often used as justification for reactionary thinking. Since it often takes aim at such roots, atheists can easily find themselves pushing the envelope against a more conservative mode of thought, swinging gently to the left without a serious intent to do so. And, while Rick Perry may lead us to believe otherwise, there is no intrinsic connection between one’s faith and one’s politics.

One Less God is a twice-monthly column on atheist communities and philosophy. Harmon Moon is a U2 History student and VP External of the McGill Freethought Association. He can be reached at onelessgod@mcgilldaily.com

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Obviously, not having died recently, I can’t speak to the deathbed experience, but it’s not difficult to find examples of those secure enough in their beliefs to hold on to them to their last breath. In discussing this, though, I’ve been placed in a position where the perfect example to discuss is that of a public figure that died very recently. While it seems crass to take advantage of such misfortune to make a point, the timing is too perfect to pass up.  Besides, I’m sure the man would approve were he still around.

Christopher Hitchens was, and remains, a controversial figure of our time. English by birth, he made the United States his home for the second half of his life, where he worked as a columnist and literary critic for a variety of magazines, including Salon, The Nation, and Vanity Fair. Although he defined himself as a Trotskyite and a radical, he also took up more unpopular positions such as a fierce advocacy of the Iraq War, as well as vitriolic attacks on “fascism with an Islamic face” and the toleration of religious extremism in the name of multiculturalism.

Publishing books with names like God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Hitchens was well known within atheist circles. His was the face that, more than anything, defined the camp known as “anti-theism:” a deep, principled opposition to the collective delusion that he felt defined God and religion. His aggressive attacks on the institution alienated some and bolstered others, so when he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer in 2010, reactions were mixed.

Where Hitchens was uncompromising while he was living, he was even more so while he was dying. At a debate at the American Jewish University he was asked whether the sickness had caused him to revisit his views on the afterlife. “I would say it fractionally increases my contempt for the false consolation element of religion and my dislike for the dictatorial and totalitarian part of it,” was his reply. “It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know but who are unbelievers and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind?’ That is considered almost a polite question.” There was no desperate appeal for divine clemency at the last minute for Hitchens; he remained an atheist to the end.

I don’t know what Christopher Hitchens’ last words were. His last public appearance was at the Texas Freethought Convention in Houston, where he took audience questions with Richard Dawkins for about an hour. Slightly more than a month from death, he appeared sickly and pale, his head completely bald due to chemotherapy and his eyes sunken into their sockets. Yet he spoke clearly and with good humour and was, as always, unwavering. “I’m not going to quit until absolutely I have to,” he told the audience of over a thousand. And he didn’t.

One Less God is a twice-monthly column on atheist communities and philosophy. Harmon Moon is a U2 History student and VP External of the McGill Freethought Association. He can be reached at onelessgod@mcgilldaily.com. Special thanks to Robert Koeze for fact-checking.

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So when I came to the door, I introduced myself as an atheist that tried to keep an open mind. I then stood back and let my roommate do the talking, which he was quite happy to do. We talked about intelligent design, largely; they’d come prepared with a copy of their magazine Awake! And, of course, a Bible, both of which they read us passages of. I won’t go into the details – that’s yet another topic for yet another column – but we found ourselves discussing evolution versus intelligent design before they decided they needed to move on to somewhere else.

“One last thing I want to say, though,” said one of the missionaries. “The biggest problem I have with evolution is that it doesn’t have purpose. Don’t you feel like science leaves you without any sort of meaning in anything?”

It’s a fair question. When talking to people that hold a belief in a higher power, one of the things I tend to find is that such a belief has an emotional draw to it, a feeling of comfort and security in knowing that there’s some sort of larger force personally invested in your well-being or that there’s some sort of larger justice in the world. I can’t deny the appeal: sometimes it would be nice to think that the universe was working for me, and that what I did in my own life had some sort of cosmic meaning to it. By contrast, atheism is thought of as offering a much less sympathetic view: the universe doesn’t really give a damn what you think, good and bad news comes more or less at random, and there’s no particular significance to anything you do. Not exactly comforting.

Many people claim that such a worldview automatically leads to outright nihilism – the idea that life has no intrinsic value or meaning. I’ve even been told that this is the logical conclusion of atheism (which mystified me somewhat). I don’t want to be unfair to nihilists that identify as atheists by trying to exclude them from the movement, but I will say that it’s entirely possible to be an atheist and still have a purpose; obviously, many atheists do have one. Some find it in dedication to an ideology or social justice; others find it in their personal lives, in their families and friends. To go back to the idea of the atheist worldview I sketched out in the last paragraph: this is despite there being no cosmic significance to any of this. There’s no divine stamp of approval that anybody cares about these things.

Because having some sort of larger endorsement for something that you do is entirely worthless if it’s not something you’re satisfied with yourself. Why would you want somebody else’s purpose? If you have no investment in what you do, then it simply becomes a job, and unfulfilling regardless of the wider connotations; “Doing God’s work” becomes “Doing God’s paperwork.” Atheists simply do away with the need for cosmic validation for the things they enjoy and get on with their lives. So, in a way I do agree with the missionary’s question: science doesn’t provide any purpose. But science doesn’t need to: we, as atheists, provide ourselves with our own meaning, and we don’t need to justify that to anyone but ourselves.

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Before we address this issue, lets examine the notion of ‘good with god’ or what I see as the basis for religious ethics. Most religious ethics are based on the idea of there being some sort of heavenly tribunal watching for infractions of God’s laws, with those who stray being subjected to some sort of fitting punishment. To what degree the punishment takes depends on the interpretation. Some limit themselves to a vague idea of perpetual torture after death, while others have faith in immediate divine intervention.

Obviously, atheists do not subscribe to this belief. And yet, many atheists manage to be good people.

Not only do these ethics depend on the existence of a divine judgment, this notion approaches ethics in a top down manner. This type of religious morality asks that people do good not because it’s kind of a nice thing to do, but because, if you don’t, a gigantic omnipotent hand in the sky is going to lay a divine smackdown on you. The divine power’s opinion seems to matter more than yours.

Yet, despite millennia of religious commandments demanding that we stop it, humanity continues to cheat, steal, murder, covet their neighbours’ spouses, lie, commit adultery et cetera. While it’s certainly a possibility that these people are all being immersed in lakes of boiling oil after their death, there is no immediate, visible reaction to immorality. The cosmic police seem, for all intents and purposes, to be asleep on the job.

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of motivation, then, to act like a good person. But we continue to live in a society with a lot of good people in it, regardless of their religious orientation, even though there are not lightning strikes on petty thieves. I would argue  that ‘religious ethics’ is far less important as a system of how to be a good person than it is as a system of why you should be one, and that this system is more based on retribution than it is on inherent goodness. An atheist does away with that idea of retribution. Since there’s no hell to burn in after committing some great sin, it’s a lot more reasonable to just not commit that sin because, well, it’s kinda nice. Atheist moralists concern themselves with their actions; religious moralists concern themselves with God’s reaction. One has an eye on the here and now; one has an eye on the hereafter. After all, why should we be told to do good?

One Less God is a twice-monthly column on atheist communities and philosophy. Harmon Moon is a U2 History student and VP External of the McGill Freethought Association. He can be reached at onelessgod@mcgilldaily.com.

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In a nutshell, no. Atheism, as I’ve argued in other pieces published here (“Beyond a reasonable doubt,” Page 15, December 1, 2010”), is primarily a negative state; without some sort of positive proof suggesting that the case is otherwise, we by default assume that there is no God. Those that cannot consider new evidence to the contrary must be atheists, even if they do not self-identify as such. Animals are a good example here. Since they can’t process an idea as complex as God, they’re atheists. Sorry, Fido.

Such is what is called “implicit atheism.” From there, one makes the leap to rejecting God, and becomes an explicit atheist. But wait, there’s more! It gets complicated from here, though, so you might want a larger coffee.

Picture a graph with two axes: gnosticism vs. agnosticism, and theism vs. atheism. Gnosticism, for our purposes, is the belief that there is an absolute knowledge, so that one can say definitely that something is or is not true. So, in this case, somebody on the far “gnostic” side of our graph would argue that the statement “There is a God” can be proven to be 100 per cent valid or invalid; somebody on the far “agnostic” side, would argue that the same statement can never be proven to any degree of accuracy because it’s impossible to know. Theism vs. atheism is the debate over a god like power: a theist would say “There is a God” and an atheist says otherwise. Somebody between the two would say “maybe there’s a God.”

Is this the definitive way of charting people’s religious positions? Of course not. But it provides a helpful mental image when trying to discuss people’s views. A “strong theist” – let’s say the Pope – will be found at the maximum poles of gnosticism and theism: there is absolutely a God. Whether it exists and can be known is completely beyond doubt. A “strong atheist” hangs around the maximums of gnosticism and atheism, lifting weights and giving nasty looks at those on the theism side: there is absolutely not a God; its non-existence can and will someday be indisputably proven.

Meanwhile, in the quieter parts of the graph, we find at themaximum theism and agnosticism poles the “weak theist,” mowing his lawn. The “weak theist” believes that there is a God, even if it’s impossible to be absolutely certain of this, and acts accordingly. Cleaning his glasses at atheism and agnosticism we have the “weak atheist,” who feels that there’s no way to know for sure, but figures that, well, there’s probably no God. Everybody else falls somewhere between the four poles.

This examination just brushes the surfaces of the different philosophies regarding a god or omnipotent power. Thus, one shouldn’t be quick to assume an exact agreement of beliefs among atheists.

One Less God is a twice-monthly column on atheist communities and philosophy. Harmon Moon is a U2 History student and VP External of the McGill Freethought Association. He can be reached at onelessgod@mcgilldaily.com.

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This is not the kind of list you would want to take to the Laundromat. Basically, atheism is kind of complicated.

Not that you would think that from the common image of atheists in society. Putting aside the vitriolic (and unendingly amusing) visions of a scourging army of militant atheists out to destroy God, Christmas, and all the cat videos on Youtube, there is a common image in the collective consciousness about the average atheist. Not to nail it down to a precise character, but what comes to my mind is the image of a smallish, slightly rotund, pedantic, cranky, balding, bearded scientist with glasses and perhaps a slightly nasal voice, who is likely to fly into a rage at the slightest hint of a religious thought.

Obviously, this is not true. Last I checked, I have a full head of hair.

The fact is, atheists come from pretty much everywhere. With something as large as a god – who theoretically represents, well, everything – there are going to be a wide array of responses to the subject. Some come to atheism rationally. Some come by a gut feeling. There are at least as many ways to leave religion as there are to come to it, and the products of those experiences are wildly different.

So why, then, am I starting a column here at The Daily, purporting to provide an atheist voice after having just proven that it’s impossible to reduce irreligious thought to one person? Would this be a sign of some sort of the intellectual incoherency inherent to the movement, or am I just really bloody stupid?

Well, of course, everybody has their own opinion on a world without God. That said, those that subscribe to that particular creed often find themselves facing many common issues. Although starting any concerted action is like herding cats, there has been an atheist community forming in today’s world that often disappears under the radar of people that have other priorities, such as the inexorable glaciers of homework that are constantly threatening to cave in our tiny student skulls. As somebody that has been active in the atheist community for the past two years, I feel as though I can provide a window of insight onto general trends of the community, including a rough basis of the philosophy and some issues meeting it today.

I cannot pretend to be a representative of the entire atheist-agnostic-rationalist-humanist-secularist-free thought movement, but, in my column, I will try my best to be an ambassador of it.

One Less God is a twice-monthly column on atheist communities and philosophy. Harmon Moon is a U2 History student and VP External of the McGill Freethought Association. He can be reached at onelessgod@mcgilldaily.com.

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Here, then, is a presentation of the view from the other side: a brief explanation of the principles behind rationalist, atheistic thought.

In a debate, you usually have two sides – the proposition and the opposition. One person proposes something and the other person opposes. If the proposer wants their argument to hold water, they have to back up their statements. Let’s say I turn to you and announce that you are standing in the way of an invisible pink unicorn that would like to get by. It would be perfectly reasonable in this situation for you to ask me how I know there’s a unicorn there. Until I provide a satisfactory answer, you’re in no way obligated, to accept the existence of my invisible pink unicorn as a fact, and if I were to start demanding, “Why don’t you think there’s an invisible pink unicorn here?!” it would also be perfectly reasonable for you to simply walk away. Since I am the one proposing, the burden of proof is on me to show that there is an invisible pink unicorn in the room.

There’s a bit more to this, though. Continuing with the unicorn, let’s say that I announce: “I know the invisible pink unicorn is there because she told me so.”

“I didn’t hear anything,” you reply. “Maybe she could repeat that?”

“You didn’t hear her because she was whispering,” I reply in turn. “She doesn’t want to talk to anyone else, though, so you’re going to have to take my word for it. There’s your proof.”

Unfortunately for me, evidence needs to be verifiable in some way in order to be reasonably accepted. Since there is no way to confirm whether the unicorn actually spoke or not, having me tell you that the unicorn spoke is not acceptable proof of the unicorn’s existence.

“Okay then,” I assert, “She’s standing right there. You can see her hoofprints in the carpet.”

“Those look like they could be marks from the vacuum cleaner,” you counter. “Can we take her outside and see if she makes the same marks in the dirt?”

“Getting her hooves dirty?!” I cry incredulously. “What’s wrong with you? Don’t you have all the evidence you need?”

Further, the evidence needs to be able to be presented independently of the circumstances. If you claim that your TV can turn itself on, but only when there’s a remote control in the room, you have not presented compelling evidence. Move the TV to a new room, or move the remote, and the phenomenon is no longer replicable. The TV doesn’t turn itself on, and the unicorn probably doesn’t exist either.

This is the same issue with god. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it’s hard to find a claim more extraordinary than that there exists an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent being that cannot be perceived but which has a profound effect on everything that happens in the world. Until the proposition has working proof for its claims, the opposition is under no duty to disprove it, and the invisible pink unicorn will never make her way across the room.

—
Harmon Moon, U1 History, is a member of the McGill Freethought Association. Write him at harmon.moon@mail.mcgill.ca.

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