By Dick Gross
September 26, 2011
via National Times
The Atheist Foundation of Australia has announced that half of the proceeds from the Global Atheist Convention’s gala charity dinner at the big godless shindig in April 2012 will be donated to the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
One of the challenges of unbelief is to plug those gaps left if it replaces faith in peoples’ hearts and minds. Faiths are famous for philanthropy (try saying that three times aloud! I did and failed). So it is encouraging to see these apostates coalesce with MSF.
There will always be a great debate about the source of goodness and the social loss if faith were to wither. Let me make one anecdotal observation. The two biggest donors the world has seen, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, both claim to be agnostics. That seems like a win for the godless. Hooray for us! And yet both claim to be influenced by their Christian heritage. As Gates opined to David Frost in 2005: ”In terms of doing things I take a fairly scientific approach to why things happen and how they happen. I don’t know if there’s a god or not, but I think religious principles are quite valid.”
This sentiment sounds like a half-hearted win for both sides. These agnostics are generous on an unprecedented scale but acknowledge the well spring drawn from their early brushes with faith. I give this debate to the godless by a short half-head.I must take this further in a future blog but the clear message is that organised atheism has the philanthropic message. We need to and are entrenching altruism in our thinking and in our systems. The Global Atheist Convention is just an example of that.