The 2012 Global Atheist Convention, A Celebration of Reason, brought together a line-up of atheism’s brightest stars. Inspired by the success of the Atheist Foundation of Australia’s first convention in 2010, and attracting twice the numbers, the 2012 convention was a joyous and momentous event, and a feast of what some of the world’s finest thinkers have to offer. A triumph of humanism, reason and secular values, the 2012 Global Atheist Convention will be remembered as a landmark moment in the history of atheism in Australia and beyond. If you were unlucky enough to miss it, or just want to revisit the moment, this DVD contains presentations from the 2012 Global Atheist Convention.

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It is full of insights from various perspectives accompanied by magnificent photos of the event.

If ever there was a way to relive this exciting and one-off experience, this is it.

If you would like to purchase a copy of the magazine it is available for $20.00 (inc p&h.)

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About the causes:

High Court Challenge to the constitutional legitimacy of the NSCP

To date, nearly half a billion taxpayers’ dollars have been committed to fund the National School Chaplaincy Program (NSCP). This program puts largely unqualified, religious practitioners into our secular public schools at a time when the ratio of students to qualified counsellors is pitifully low. The Australian Psychology Society says there is ‘clear evidence that school chaplains are engaging in duties for which they are not qualified’ and that this amounts to ‘dangerous professional behaviour’. In 2009, frustrated parent Mr Ron Williams sought advice regarding a possible High Court challenge to the constitutional legality of the Commonwealth providing treasury funds to the National School Chaplaincy Programme. In February 2010, Horowitz & Bilinsky accepted the case. A trust account has been established to assist with the costs and disbursements associated with the High Court proceedings.

Kasese Humanist Primary School

Kasese Humanist Primary School is a secular school offering Nursery and Primary education to young people aged between 4 and 13 in the communities around Kasese Municipality in Uganda. The school is the first of its kind in the district and in Uganda for its set up on humanist values and ethics offering basic subjects as stipulated by the Uganda Primary school Curriculum and in addition subjects like Humanist studies. In all subjects taught at school, much emphasis is put on application of scientific & humanist principles in an effort to realise a potential all round pupil ready to be innovative, creative & skilled to do certain things at an early age.

Atheist Foundation of Australia

The Atheist Foundation of Australia is the largest, most active secular organisation in Australia, and is run entirely by unpaid volunteers. It has organised 2 highly successful Global Atheist Conventions in 2010 and 2012, and ran the ‘Mark No Religion’ campaign during the 2011 Australian Census.

WESTERN liberals, crippled by political correctness, guilt and a romanticised view of Islam, are leaving atheists and Christians bereft in the ”Arab winter”, human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali says.

Ms Hirsi Ali, no stranger to controversy, told an audience of several thousand at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, that it was Christians and conservatives who led the way in defending free speech and rights. ”Why is it that secular liberals in the West fail to help? Are they so insecure about the morals they live by and by which they raise their children?”

She said elections following the overthrow of dictators had produced Islamist governments in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, with Islamists also gaining power in Libya and Yemen. ”The plight of Christians is going to be dire. They are killed, their churches destroyed, the women are raped. This is also the plight of Muslim minority sects.”

She blamed political correctness, white guilt over former colonialism that was actually racist because it did not hold non-whites to the same standards, and a view of Islam as romantically primitive (the noble savage).

Ms Hirsi Ali, who has for a decade been accompanied everywhere by bodyguards, provocatively suggested it was too much to expect a billion Muslims to become atheists, so they should convert to the much more benign Christianity ”as a halfway house on the path to enlightenment”.

Outside the Melbourne Convention Centre, two dozen Muslims from Dandenong Mosque chanted ”burn in hell” and waved inflammatory placards.

”We just want to have a conversation, and tell them it is illogical to say there is no God,” said one of the protesters, Shafeeq.

Security guards locked the doors, but many atheists used a nearby alternative to engage the Muslims in furious debate.

Sam Harris, one of the ”four horsemen of the anti-apocalypse”, said his foundation had helped fund Ms Hirsi Ali’s protection when the Dutch government stopped paying. ”I went out to the moderate Muslim community to get help, and the push back was vile. The real problem is that religious moderates provide a space in which religious extremism is flourishing,” he said.

The Global Atheist Convention has been run and won and the results were reasonably splendid. Considered to be one of the largest congregations of atheists in the world, it was in a sense a seminal moment.

The place was packed to the gunwales, with 4000 paying $400 to attend. The overwhelming impression was the youth of the audience. Battalions of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed twentysomethings crowded the place, queueing breathlessly for the signatures of the new deities.

While 4000 people are dwarfed by Hillsong Church’s claimed audience in Sydney of 20,000 every weekend, it is still an achievement, given the cost and the time demanded. This vibrant crowd, like that of the Hillsong devotees, showed that the young are still excited by existential ideas and discussions.

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This flies in the face of the stereotypical image of an atheist – a retired, elderly man with a bushy beard, appalling clothes sense and dubious personal hygiene. This audience was young and vibrant. The ambience was, accordingly, devoid of the usual ennui, pessimism and time-worn impatience. Who’d have thought it? And the pejorative image of atheism as dusty and dull was utterly repudiated. It was a weekend of laughs. For the atheist community, it was an important morale booster, demonstrating that we can have jamborees that are stimulating – even if we don’t sing and dance like some faiths.

What gave the frisson to the conference was the presence of the heroes of atheism. Richard Dawkins, Geoffrey Robertson, Daniel Dennett, AC Grayling, PZ Myers, Ben Elton and the simply amazing Ayaan Hirsi Ali are huge international attractions and there was a palpable air of enchantment buzzing through the place. Dickie Dawkins gave a clever but unremarkable address, and yet spontaneous outbursts of adulation pulsated from the crowd. There wasn’t a dry seat in the house. My more sober assessment is that his extraordinary intelligence is tempered by a seeming absence of a sense of humour.

Here are my edited highlights.

In the absence of liturgy and ritual, what do atheists have other than interminable speeches? Well, at this global confab we had stand-up comedians. A third of the contributors were stand-ups. It was as if the Melbourne Comedy Festival, which is on now, had coughed up some underutilised performers to double-gig at the Atheists’ Love-In. They were often hilarious and only occasionally misogynist. I am always in awe at the courage and narrative skills of stand up comedians. The one difficulty is that the overwhelming comic device was to bash those of faith as universally stupid, paedophile dress-wearers … and did I mention, stupid. The stand-up comedians were tremendous but lent, at times, a one-dimensional ambience.

The star in my view was Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A former Muslim who has been genitally mutilated, she has been the subject of numerous threats and fatwas for opposition to Islam and now lives in the United States under permanent guard. She analysed the Arab Spring of 2011 and found that despite the failure of North Africa to embrace democracy universally and the pre-eminence of the Muslim Brotherhood in those few elections that have been held, there is hope in a growing secular movement and the influence of diaspora communities. She was scathing of Iran and warned that the nuclear issue is real and dangerous. This warning was reiterated by Geoffrey Robertson, who documented the enormous and under-reported killing of atheists and religious minorities in Iran. Both challenged the atheists to do more on Islamic abuses when we are often the victims and when the heavy lifting is being done by those of Christian and Jewish faith.

Daniel Dennett is almost as popular with the intellectual twentysomethings as the boy band One Direction is with prepubescent girls. Before you ask “Daniel who?”, let me assure you he is an international star of atheism. It was a joy to see lines of young people queue for an autograph or photo. It was less of a joy to observe that no one queued for my autograph on my book, but I’ll put that debilitating humiliation to one side. It is a phenomenon I am sadly growing used to. Daniel is an analytic philosopher with a Father Christmas look and beard. He is one of the famous “Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse of Atheism”, with Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens. He analysed the level of unbelief in the clergy, arguing that belief in the old faiths is so sclerotic that unbelief reaches into the high echelons of faith, but that ministers are too comfortable to confess this.

The scientists, Dawkins and the breathtaking physicist Lawrence M Krauss did not pussyfoot around when it came to the meaning and purpose of life. There is none in the scientific and atheistic world view. While the godly have the purpose of serving God, and extract meaning from being part of God’s plan, this ontological consolation is not available to those of no belief.

What do we make of a life devoid of purpose? Those at the conference were not apparently discomfited and welcomed a view where the meaning of life was simply life itself, which expired upon death. How you react to this depends on each individual’s response. Some see this as forbidding prospect but those at the conference did not. What is your view on meaning?

One cannot leave this conference without alluding to the response of the extremes of faith. Before the conference I was informed that I would be sent a newspaper, which I duly received. Prayers were said to save the souls of the speakers. At the conference, both Christian and Muslim groups demonstrated, expressing their shared conviction that we were all going to spend an eternity rotting in hell.

This common bonding seemed to be our contribution to world peace. It made our day to deserve such attention and to be such a threat to God that he was going to torture us until the end of time.

You can’t beat the theatre of a threat of eternal damnation. It was the final inspiring touch to one of the world’s biggest godless conferences.

Many of the world’s best-known atheists have met in Melbourne to discuss faith, or the lack thereof.

Thousands of people came to hear the likes of Richard Dawkins speak out against religions of all kinds.

As Clare Atkinson reports, speakers used both science and comedy to argue the case for non-belief.

Click to listen.

It is a mark of our civility that we are free to believe in God – or not.

IT IS not the place of this newspaper to adjudicate on the existence of God. That is a question beyond the remit of even the most ambitious investigative reporting. We can, however, endorse with a clear conscience the presence in Melbourne of the 2012 Global Atheist Convention, which opened on Friday night.

This is not, as some might have it, because it furthers a perceived secular agenda of this organisation. Nor is it that the convention will tip some tourist dollars into the state’s coffers (although we note approvingly that it comes at considerably less cost to the taxpayer than the formula one grand prix). No, the major benefit of this ”Celebration of Reason” is the injection of intellectual capital it has provided.

The past week, since the much touted, albeit slightly underwhelming, encounter between Cardinal George Pell and leading atheist Richard Dawkins on the ABC’s Q&A program, has been alive with debate as both sides put their case. And while not all of it has been as polite as one could hope, with one commentator describing Mr Dawkins as a C-list celebrity boxing above his weight, it all has value.

Said value is not that we might, by process of argument, prove or disprove one case or another, but that it focuses attention on the question. Australians as a whole are casual about the matter of faith: in the 2006 census, 18.7 per cent of us said they had no religion, but only 0.16 per cent labelled themselves atheists.
Similarly, a 2009 Australian National University survey found that 47 per cent of Australians believed in God, but only 16 per cent believed there was no God. That suggests that a lot of people are slouching on the fence, uninterested in being identified as part of a church but at the same time unwilling to take the next step and say definitively that nobody’s home upstairs.

It’s the sort of relaxed and comfortable approach you might expect in a country where there have long been few, if any, consequences for choosing a given faith, or even for rejecting them all. Those who grew up from the 1970s to the early 2000s had lives free of religious discrimination and intolerance in a way inconceivable in many parts of the world, or even in the Australia of 60 years ago. Even now, when the rise of radical Islam, the resurgence of fundamentalist Christianity and even the arrival of the so-called New Atheism have sharpened awareness of religious difference, there is an admirable willingness to live and let live.

Not caring about the answer to the question of faith and not asking it are two different things, however. Belief or non-belief are fundamental to an individual’s world view. On one side, there is the offer of an answer to the age-old question of ”why are we here?”. On the other, as articulated by Mr Dawkins, there is the view that ”the question why is not necessarily a question that deserves to be answered. ‘What is the purpose of the universe?’ is a silly question.” A robust public debate on such intangibles is good for the mental health, and hopefully inspires people to think more deeply about their own personal beliefs and why they hold them.

Knowing where one stands on these issues, and why, is important, and becoming more so. Religion is anything but a spent force in the world: whether in the Middle East, the Deep South of the US or the mountains of Kashmir, it is a potent driver of both personal actions and international politics.
Locally, churches still occupy a favoured and powerful place in public life, while issues such as gay marriage and the teaching of religion in schools show that for all this county’s relaxed secularism, faith matters.

It is admirable, though, that our society can host an event as potentially provocative as a conference on atheism. It speaks well of our civility and tolerance, as well as our right to freedom of religion. For that reason alone, we are glad to have the godless among us.

JERRY deWitt ”came out” a few months ago. It cost him his job, and nearly his house, but he could not be happier because he feels he has regained his integrity.

DeWitt was a Christian minister who stopped believing, and could not abide the hypocrisy in the pulpit. His story emerged at the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne yesterday through his friend and fellow former pastor, Dan Barker, founder of an online support group for clergy who have lost their faith.

The international group, including at least one Australian and a former imam, has grown to more than 200 members in its first year. Most have left their jobs, but more than 50 are still active clergy, Mr Barker says. The group, clergyproject.org, is getting up to 40 applications a month, each of which is carefully vetted by volunteer screeners to make sure it is genuine.

”It’s a sanctuary, where they feel they can hold on to their sanity,” says Mr Barker. Funded by the Richard Dawkins Foundation, the support group has several forums, all of which are confined to members.
”We have forums for liberals, Pentecostals and conservatives, on humour, philosophy and theology,” he says. ”But the most used are practical: how did you get another job, how did you get retrained?” One member is a former monk, tested by his order for mental problems. ”He was highly sane. He was kicked out of the monastery and lives in a homeless shelter – ‘bugs and thugs’, he calls it,” Mr Barker says.

Mr Barker, founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, left the ministry in 1984 after 19 years as a preacher. ”There were two things. One was intellectual. I had no choice but to follow the facts where they led. But the other was emotional-social side, which was going in a different direction.” Losing the title ”reverend” and the social esteem was like being stripped of a knighthood and no longer called ”sir”. But it was not nearly as painful as being a hypocrite, he said.

The leading philosopher Daniel Dennett – one of the ”four horsemen of the anti-apocalypse” with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris (who are also speaking at the convention) and the late Christopher Hitchens – said the mismatch between what the clergy believed and what their parishioners expected them to believe was a source of real anguish.

”One told me, if you offered retraining you’d have 10,000 members tomorrow,” said Professor Dennett, who has led a study involving several of the clergy. ”Christian leaders know it is true. Hardly anyone denies it is a phenomenon, but no one knows how big it is. They are like gays in the 1950s, but without gaydar.”
He said these ministers were caught in ”an insidious trap baited with goodness”, but it caused most of them real suffering.

Melbourne ethicist Leslie Cannold said Prime Minister Julia Gillard, an atheist, had done enormous damage to the atheist cause, failing to advance separation of church and state.

This weekend’s Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, one of the largest such gatherings in the world, has raised more than a few eyebrows. The first question that arises is this: how can one seriously bring people together simply to celebrate not believing in something? The answer is equally simple. The convention will instead celebrate something positive: reason.

Too often, especially in my own country, the United States, public policy is based on ideology, preconception or money – anything but what it should be based on, namely empirical evidence. Promoting such evidence-based decision-making is vital to the health of democracies, which can function effectively only with an informed electorate and legislators.

Individuals may differ in their opinion on issues such as addressing climate change, for example, but without an honest assessment of existing knowledge, and an awareness of the fact that the climate is changing now, that sea levels are rising, that the world is getting warmer, that oceans are acidifying, and that all these changes are consistent with predictions based on known human production of greenhouse gases, how can we hope to explore sound policy options for how to meet this challenge?

In the US in 2008, when presented with the option of a presidential debate on science and technology policy questions, the two presidential candidates opted instead for a debate on faith, in spite of the fact that faith is irrelevant for all of the major challenges facing the next president, from the environment to energy production, national security and health.

As I put it at a recent debate in Canberra, when the issue of religion as the basis of rational policy was concerned, if you are choking next to me and either I could perform the Heimlich manoeuvre or I could pray for you, which would you choose? Needless to say, in that instance, even the most devoted recognised the difference between religion and science in a time of real crisis is that science works.

There is another reason, however, to bring such a large group of individuals together who share an unwillingness to accept on faith various outrageous claims of divinity associated with books compiled by long-dead and sometimes illiterate peasants thousands of years ago. Religious fundamentalists of all persuasions are quite vocal – and politicians do not turn a deaf ear. It is about time we demonstrated that a significant fraction of the voting public, about 15 per cent in the US, for example, claim no religious affiliation, and that we vote, too. Two weeks ago, 30,000 people came together in Washington DC for a Rally for Reason. On the other side of the globe, in Melbourne, 4000 people will gather for a similar purpose.

But perhaps the most significant impact for the individuals who will come together at the Global Atheist Convention will be a personal one, and one that is not that different from the reasons that people attend churches, synagogues and mosques.

Based on my own experience, many will come to share a sense of community with those who share a common world view. They may come from communities where they are afraid to speak out openly about their views on religion. Surrounded by the relative safety of numbers, many will come away from the weekend with courage bolstered and frankly feeling better about themselves.

One of the criticisms launched against a scientific world view is that it can never fulfil the deep human needs that have made religion so prevalent throughout human history – the needs to be a member of a group, to sense something grander in the world outside oneself than one can immediately perceive.

I for one cannot accept this claim. Surely by celebrating together a remarkable universe, indeed a universe far more remarkable than anything envisaged either by science fiction writers or by the authors of scripture, we might hope to encourage a shared sense of awe and wonder and partnership that is based not on an imaginary world we have created to console ourselves, but on the real world.

Lawrence Krauss is foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the author of A Universe from Nothing. He will appear with Richard Dawkins at the Sydney Opera House on Monday.

Danny and Shelley Segal, father and daughter, still share their music if not their religious beliefs. Photo: Angela Wylie

By Barney Zwartz
14th April, 2012
via The Age

TONIGHT, Danny Segal is going to want to pinch himself to be sure it’s real. There he will be – a traditionalist, believing Jew – on stage at the Global Atheist Convention with his singer daughter Shelley, a new pin-up girl for the international atheist movement.

Danny, president of the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation, plays the violin and has his own klezmer (Jewish music) and dance band. Shelley, 25, has just returned from singing to 25,000 people at the Reason Rally in Washington, and will visit the US at least twice more this year for big atheism conventions.
On Monday, the day after the Melbourne convention ends, the singer-songwriter is launching what she believes is the world’s first specifically atheist CD, titled An Atheist Album. All her own songs, they depict her journey to non-belief.

”I’m not confrontational, I care about how other people feel, but I won’t compromise on being honest,” she says.

It’s a message that will resonate with the more than 2000 people gathering at the Melbourne Convention Centre this weekend to hear such prominent atheists as Richard Dawkins, Geoffrey Robertson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, philosophers Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, A. C. Grayling and Peter Singer, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss and an array of entertainers. Shelley and Danny will perform at the gala dinner.

Sitting in their Caulfield home arguing passionately but lovingly, with lots of laughter, they provide a perfect model for how the wider debate could be conducted.

Raised a traditional Jew, Shelley first had doubts when taught evolution in biology. ”I probably called myself an atheist at 18, but I still thought religion was positive, if not for me. It was the beginning of learning to think critically.

”When I got some distance and perspective I saw things I might take issue with – women being separated [in synagogue] and not being allowed to take part in the service or lead the service and, looking back, it’s abhorrent to me that I didn’t see a problem …”

There were frictions at first. Shelley was angry and Danny was shocked. He says: ”It took a little while to get used to the fact that Shelley didn’t think as I did. But I believe people have the right to determine their own beliefs and I support her 100 per cent.”

Music muted the tensions. Shelley has been singing with Danny’s band since she was 11 and Danny plays with Shelley at her gigs. ”Dad has taught me the joy people can get through music,” Shelley says.

”The support is amazing. When as a teenager I came home and said I didn’t believe in God it must have felt like a complete rejection. The more I meet people in the movement and hear how hard it’s been for them, the more impressed I am by my family.”

Entertainingly, they disagree about whether they disagree on where values come from, but Shelley tells Danny: ”I still have your morality and your values, and the fundamentals of how we feel about life and people are very much the same.”