Addressing the subject of the intersection of politics and religion, our distinguished panelists will include Fiona Patten,  leader of the Australian Sex Party;  Marion Maddox, author, academic and political commentator; Dick Gross, journalist, author and atheist blogger for the National Times; and Colleen Hartland, Victorian Greens MLC. Moderated by ABC Radio veteran Derek Guille, it is sure to be a thought-provoking experience, a highlight of the convention programme, and yet another very good reason to be at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in April.

Richard Dawkins is amongst the most provocative thinkers of our times. The Oxford University geneticist has waged a blazing intellectual war on religion, calling for the rule of science and rationality. At the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, Dawkins spoke with Vineet Gill about why he prefers science over faith, whether he is an ‘atheist fundamentalist’, – and issues such as immortality:

What are your views on moderate religion today? You’ve earlier called this ‘a seedbed for extremists’?

I have said that I fear it’s true that if children are taught, however moderately, that faith is a virtue, that you don’t need evidence to believe something, then that paves the way for a minority to be extremists. Everybody has been indoctrinated with this view that if it’s their faith, you can’t argue with them. I think that is pernicious. If children are taught they don’t need to defend their beliefs with evidence, that paves the way for extremism, the biggest damage religion does is indoctrinating and brainwashing children.

You believe passionately instead in science – but what happens when science gets it wrong?

Science doesn’t actually claim to know all the truth. It works hard by getting closer and closer to the truth, but of course science learns by its mistakes and advances by disproving hypotheses and getting things wrong. One of the virtues of science is that it is prepared to change its mind when the evidence warrants it. Public sharing is an important part of science. No scientist will ever say – ‘Oh, it’s true for me, it may not be true for you.’

Science gets space for research and development – why can’t we look at religion too as a living laboratory with people developing their thoughts, rather than just dismissing it?

It would be very nice to study religion in anthropological and psychological ways. By the way, I do think children need to be educated about religion. They just shouldn’t be told you belong only to this or that religion. They should be told, there is this religion and that religion. And when you grow up, you may – or may not – choose to join any of those.

If science were to triumph over time, would you like to become immortal with its help?

No. I think if there’s something frightening about death, it is eternity. And it’s equally frightening whether you’re there or not. Actually, it’s more frightening if you are there. Just imagine billions and billions and billions of years – terribly boring! I prefer to spend eternity under a general anaesthetic – and that is exactly what’s going to happen.

Stepping out of science, how do you explain the powerful effect faith has on people?

It is fascinating. What is it about faith that can make somebody kill? Patriotism is another one – people believe my country is right or wrong. In the World Wars, people were perfectly able to shoot other people just because they belonged to the wrong country, without ever asking what their opinions were. Faith too is like that.

Rejecting belief outright, are you an atheist fundamentalist?

The term ‘fundamentalist’ means you stick to a holy book and never change your mind. I will change my mind whenever the evidence warrants it.

Finally, your thoughts on your friend and legendary fellow atheist, the late Christopher Hitchens?

Christopher Hitchens was a great warrior, a magnificent orator, a pugilist and a gentleman. He was kind, but he took no prisoners when arguing with idiots.

Phillip Adams presents a tribute to Late Night Live’s longest and most outstanding contributor, the late Christopher Hitchens, journalist, author and contrarian.

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An eclectic collection of books sat wrapped under the Christmas tree for me this festive season. Among the crime novels and exotic cookbooks was Christopher Hitchens’s collection of essays, Arguably.

While very happy with all my gifts, Hitchens’s book, coming 10 days after his death from cancer, left me slightly melancholy.

In his recent Vanity Fair columns about the disease I had found a kindred spirit. Enduring a personal catastrophe of the kind Hitchens suffered can be an incredibly lonely journey of unwelcome discoveries, and he captured this.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, eulogised his friend: ”You felt as though he was writing to you and to you alone.” I know what Carter meant.

From Hitchens’s first cancer column, written after his diagnosis in September 2010, it was evident that many of the unkind surprises his terminal illness threw up had been lobbed at me in the first year following the 2007 plane crash that left me with terrible injuries.

I didn’t have cancer, and I’m still here – very much enjoying the life that I have. But Hitchens, in many important ways, described my ”then”. You don’t forget these things.

When Hitchens wrote about the ”new land” he found himself in, which had its own language – ”a lingua franca that manages to be both dull and difficult and that contains names like ondansetron, for anti-nausea medication” – I knew precisely what he was talking about. Ondansetron became part of my new, unwanted vocabulary too, as did the names of various hideous antibiotics such as vancomycin (a ”drug of last resort”), and psychotropic drugs like lorazepam (to stop the nightmares).

I knew what Hitchens was feeling when in June 2011 he wrote about his despondency at realising cancer was claiming his voice: ”Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality.”

When I lost my legs, I lost an elemental part of who I was. I was a hiker of Wilsons Promontory, a trekker of the Himalayas, a marathon runner. When I catch that pungent eucalyptus scent I associate with running along Anzac Parade, the grand road leading up to the Australian War Memorial – and the start and finish of my Canberra training runs – I sometimes still cry.

In his last column for Vanity Fair, published posthumously in the January 2012 issue, Hitchens wrote about his ”not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write”, as his extremities grew increasingly painful and numb. ”Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my ‘will to live’ would be hugely attenuated”.

I understand this completely.

Even as I continue to grieve the loss of my legs, I am wondrous and grateful that of my four limbs, the only one that wasn’t destroyed or compromised was my right arm, and with it, the hand I use to write and type – the other intrinsic aspect of who I was, and am.

This last column of Hitchens also dealt with the subject of platitudes – those trite one-liners we use to reassure ourselves, which can become meaningless, even insulting, once we’ve known true suffering.

A few years ago I too started compiling a list of the more annoying ones. Two cited by Hitchens were on my list.

The first, attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, was ”Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger”. Hitchens debunked this: ”In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.”

For my part, I don’t think it’s only in the physical world that the lie inherent in this platitude is proven; imagine for a moment the enduring impact left on a mother who has lost her child to leukaemia.

Another favourite cliche Hitchens exploded was the equally ludicrous ”There but for the grace of god go I”.

I should acknowledge that for many people it is difficult to find the right words to convey one’s sorrow in the face of other people’s suffering. But really, no matter how well intentioned, it brings no comfort to someone less fortunate than you to be told ”had not god smiled on me, I might be where you are now”.

Hitchens left out one particularly ridiculous platitude that continues to irk me: ”Any idiot can face a crisis – it’s day-to-day living that wears you out”.

Such words might bring succour to someone whose comfortable existence has never been challenged by true calamity, but frankly, only to them.

Of course, some maxims can have a very positive effect on a person in need of solace. While I was still in the burns unit, struggling to come to terms with what had been dealt me, a very wise man, now a friend, counselled me to ”focus on the things you can do, not the things you can’t”.

I’ve returned to that piece of advice many times since, and its power to lift me has never diminished.

Hitchens once wrote: ”The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed.”

I am one of those readers.

Lawrence M. Krauss is a renowned cosmologist, popularizer of science, and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and 8 books, including the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek. His interests include the early universe, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. He is also a friend and an advisor to my nonprofit foundation, Project Reason. Lawrence generously took time to answer a few questions about his new book, A Universe from Nothing.

One of the most common justifications for religious faith is the idea that the universe must have had a creator. You’ve just written a book alleging that a universe can arise from “nothing.” What do you mean by “nothing” and how fully does your thesis contradict a belief in a Creator God?

Indeed, the question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” which forms the subtitle of the book, is often used by the faithful as an unassailable argument that requires the existence of God, because of the famous claim, “out of nothing, nothing comes.” While the chief point of my book is to describe for the interested layperson the remarkable revolutions that have taken place in our understanding of the universe over the past 50 years—revolutions that should be celebrated as pinnacles of our intellectual experience—the second goal is to point out that this long-held theological claim is spurious. Modern science has made the something-from-nothing debate irrelevant. It has changed completely our conception of the very words “something” and “nothing”. Empirical discoveries continue to tell us that the Universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not, and ‘something’ and ‘nothing’ are physical concepts and therefore are properly the domain of science, not theology or philosophy. (Indeed, religion and philosophy have added nothing to our understanding of these ideas in millennia.) I spend a great deal of time in the book detailing precisely how physics has changed our notions of “nothing,” for example. The old idea that nothing might involve empty space, devoid of mass or energy, or anything material, for example, has now been replaced by a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles, popping in and out of existence in a time so short that we cannot detect them directly. I then go on to explain how other versions of “nothing”—beyond merely empty space—including the absence of space itself, and even the absence of physical laws, can morph into “something.” Indeed, in modern parlance, “nothing” is most often unstable. Not only can something arise from nothing, but most often the laws of physics require that to occur.

Now, having said this, my point in the book is not to suggest that modern science is incompatible with at least the Deistic notion that perhaps there is some purpose to the Universe (even though no such purpose is manifest on the basis of any of our current knowledge, and moreover there is no logical connection between any possible “creator” and the personal God of the world’s major religions, who cares about humanity’s destiny). Rather, what I find remarkable is the fact that the discoveries of modern particle physics and cosmology over the past half century allow not only a possibility that the Universe arose from nothing, but in fact make this possibility increasingly plausible. Everything we have measured about the universe is not only consistent with a universe that came from nothing (and didn’t have to turn out this way!), but in fact, all the new evidence makes this possibility ever more likely. Darwin demonstrated how the remarkable diversity of life on Earth, and the apparent design of life, which had been claimed as evidence for a caring God, could in fact instead be arrived at by natural causes involving purely physical processes of mutation and natural selection. I want to show something similar about the Universe. We may never prove by science that a Creator is impossible, but, as Steven Weinberg has emphasized, science admits (and for many of us, suggests) a universe in which one is not necessary.

I cannot hide my own intellectual bias here. As I state in the first sentence of the book, I have never been sympathetic to the notion that creation requires a creator. And like our late friend, Christopher Hitchens, I find the possibility of living in a universe that was not created for my existence, in which my actions and thoughts need not bend to the whims of a creator, far more enriching and meaningful than the other alternative. In that sense, I view myself as an anti-theist rather than an atheist.

I’d like to linger on the concept of “nothing” for a moment, because I find it interesting. You have described three gradations of nothing—empty space, the absence of space, and the absence of physical laws. It seems to me that this last condition—the absence of any laws that might have caused or constrained the emergence of matter and space-time—really is a case of “nothing” in the strictest sense. It strikes me as genuinely incomprehensible that anything—laws, energy, etc.—could spring out of it. I don’t mean to suggest that conceivability is a guide to possibility—there may be many things that happen, or might happen, which we are not cognitively equipped to understand. But the emergence of something from nothing (in this final sense) does strike me as a frank violation of the categories of human thought (akin to asserting that the universe is a round square), or the mere declaration of a miracle. Is there any physical reason to believe that such nothing was ever the case? Might it not be easier to think about the laws of physics as having always existed?

That’s a very good question, and it actually strikes to the heart of one of the things I wanted to stress most in the book. Because a frank violation of the categories of human thought is precisely what the Universe does all of the time. Quantum mechanics, which governs the behavior of our Universe on very small scales, is full of such craziness, which defies common sense in the traditional sense. So small squares are sometimes round.. namely systems can be in many different states at the same time, including ones which are mutually exclusive! Crazy, I know, but true… That is the heart of why the quantum universe is so weird. So, yes, it would be easier to think about the laws of physics as always having existed, but “easy” does not always coincide with “true.” Once again, my mantra: The Universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not.

Now to hit the second part of your question… do we have any reason to suppose the laws themselves came into existence along with our universe? Yes… current ideas coming from particle physics allow a number of possibilities for multiple universes, in each of which some of the laws of physics, at least, would be unique to that universe. Now, do we have any models where all the laws (including even, say, quantum mechanics?) came into being along with the universe? No. But we know so little about the possibilities that this certainly remains one of them.

But even more germane to your question perhaps… do we have any physical reason to believe that such nothing was ever the case? Absolutely, because we are talking about our universe, and that doesn’t preclude our universe arising from precisely nothing, embedded in a perhaps infinite space, or infinite collection of spaces, or spaces-to-be, some of which existed before ours came into being, and some of which are only now coming into, or going out of existence. In this sense, the multiverse, as it has become known, could be eternal, which certainly addresses one nagging aspect of the issue of First Cause.

I want to keep following this line, because it seems to me that we rarely do it—and I think many people will be interested to learn how a physicist like yourself views the foundations of science. As you know, in every branch of science apart from physics we stand upon an inherited set of concepts and laws that explain the whole enterprise. In neuroscience, for instance, we inherit the principles of chemistry and physics, and these explain everything from the behavior of neurons to the operation of our imaging tools. As one moves “up” in science, the problems become more complex (and for this reason the science inevitably gets “softer”), and we find very little reason to contemplate the epistemological underpinnings of science itself. So I’d like you to briefly tell us how you and your colleagues view the fact that certain descriptions of reality might be true, and testable, but impossible to understand. I had thought, for instance, that most physicists were unsatisfied with the strangeness of QM and still held out hope that a more fundamental theory would put things right, yielding a picture of reality that we could truly grasp, rather than merely accede to. Is that not true?

Another deep and difficult question Sam! A full answer would probably take more room than we have here, and I have tried to address this issue to some extent both in A Universe from Nothing and my books Fear of Physics and Hiding in the Mirror. First of all, let me address the issue of “understanding.” There are aspects of the universe, such as the fact that three-dimensional space can be curved, which cannot be “understood” in an intuitive sense because we are three-dimensional beings. Just like the two-dimensional beings in the famous book Flatland, who had no idea how to truly picture a sphere, we cannot visualize a three-dimensional closed universe, for example. This does not stop us, however, from developing mathematics that completely describes such a universe. So, our mathematics can model such a universe and allow us to make predictions we can test, and therefore provide an “explanation” of the universe that is comprehensible, even if not intuitively understandable.

But there is something even more profound about the nature of “scientific truth” that has arisen in physics, which I don’t think is generally appreciated. It is the simple fact that we realize that none of our theories are “true” in the sense that they adequately describe nature on all scales. All of our physical theories, as we now understand them, have limited domains of validity, which we can actually quantify in an accurate way. Even Quantum Electrodynamics, which is the best tested theory in nature, allowing us to predict the energy levels of atoms to better than 1 part in a billion, gets subsumed in a more general theory, called the Electroweak theory, when it is applied to trying to understand the interactions of quarks and electrons on scales 100 times smaller than the size of protons. Now, as Richard Feynman emphasized, we have no idea if this process will continue, if we will peel back the layers of reality like an onion, whether the process will never end, or whether we will truly come up with a fundamental theory that allows us to extrapolate our understanding to all scales. As he pointed out, it doesn’t really matter, because what we scientists want to do is learn about how the universe works, and at each stage we learn something new. We may hope the universe has some fundamental explanation, but as I keep emphasizing, the universe is the way it is, whether we like it or not, and our job is to be brave enough to keep trying to understand it better, and to accept the reality that nature imposes upon us.

It is true that some physicists find the strangeness of Quantum Mechanics unsatisfying and suspect that it might be embedded in a more fundamental theory that seems less crazy. But hope and reality are not the same thing. Similarly, it may be intellectually unsatisfying to imagine that time began with our universe, so asking what came before is not a sensible question, or to imagine an eternal multiverse which itself was never created, or to never be able to empirically address the question of whether the laws of nature arose spontaneously along with the universe, but we have to keep plugging away regardless, motivated by the remarkable fact that nature has surprises in store for us that we never would have imagined!

Finally, it is the “how” question that is really most important, as I emphasize in the new book. Whenever we ask “why?” we generally mean “How?”, because why implies a sense of purpose that we have no reason to believe actually exists. When we ask “Why are there 8 planets orbiting the Sun?” we really mean “How are there 8 planets?”—namely how did the evolution of the solar system allow the formation and stable evolution of 8 large bodies orbiting the Sun. And thus, as I also emphasize, we may never be able to discern if there is actually some underlying universal purpose to the universe, although there is absolutely no scientific evidence of such purpose at this point, what is really important to understanding ourselves and our place in the universe is not trying to parse vague philosophical questions about something and nothing, but rather to try and operationally understand how our universe evolved, and what the future might bring. Progress in physics in the past century has taken us to the threshold of addressing questions we might never have thought were approachable within the domain of science. We may never fully resolve them, but the very fact that we can plausibly address them is worth celebrating. That is the purpose of my book. And it is this intellectual quest that I find so very exciting, and which I want to share more broadly, because it represents to me the very best about what it means to be human.

The world, which Christopher Hitchens would have happily admitted was already pretty dark, got a little darker yesterday. With his death, it also got a lot emptier.

Christopher was a beacon of knowledge and light in a world that constantly threatens to extinguish both. He had the courage to accept the world for just what it is, and not what we would like it to be. That is the highest praise I believe one can give to any intellect. He understood that the Universe doesn’t care about our existence, or our welfare, and epitomized the realization that our lives have meaning only to the extent we give them meaning.

For Christopher, this came through the credo that guided his life: the courageous defense of the simple proposition that skepticism rather than credulity is the highest principle the human intellect can use to ennoble our existence.

He embodied the delicious possibilities of existence and the profound sense of satisfaction that intellectual exploration, integrity, and bravery can bring, especially when confronting power with knowledge, even as he openly recognized that the possibility of a successful outcome in any such battle is always slim.

In that regard, he was always willing to speak out against injustice and ignorance wherever he saw it, no matter whose sensibilities he might ruffle in the process. He was a true contrarian, and he even wrote a guidebook for the rest of us on how to follow his example.

The moment one entered the Hitchens’ domain, one was overwhelmed by a single obsession: books. Books were everywhere, on every available wall, on the floor, on tables, couches and bathroom counters. But as becomes clear during the course of an evening of conversation, unlike for many of us, the books on Christopher’s wall were far more than window dressing. They were arranged according to subjects and ideas in a way that makes it more than clear that the books were regularly read and consulted, that the knowledge contained within them was used in a sense that few of us really adequately exploit. It was humbling to witness, close up, an intellectual that was so capable of surround a subject, relishing it, exploring it for its own sake, critically soaking up everything that is worth knowing. He was ever ready to incorporate this wisdom to shed light on old ideas or critically examine new ones with the full weight of a lifetime of intellectual exploration combined with the playful and curious excitement of a child in a candy store.

The last time I saw him, our discussions ranged from subjects relating to the nature of nothingness, quantum mechanics and a multiverse (subjects of a new book of mine that Christopher was writing the foreword for before his illness intervened), to the obscenity that is Capital Punishment, the madness that governs the religious fanaticism infecting both sides of the middle east conflict, the embarrassment that is Catholicism, and a related subject: the intellectual laziness and pretentious nonsense that encompasses so much of religious faith and theological noise in our popular culture.

Christopher was not a scientist, but he was fascinated by the power of science—not merely its possible impact on human affairs, but more importantly for him, and for me, the remarkable ideas that it generates. He was wise enough to recognize that the Universe is far more imaginative than we are, and as one who craved experience of all aspects of intellectual life, he was as eager to learn from the Universe as he was from the oeuvre of the worlds’ great writers, philosophers and historians.

Through his questions and reflections he extended my understanding of the implications of my own work. After I talked to him about the dismal future of an accelerating universe, he later used this idea to point out something remarkable that about a universe that could come from nothing. For those that think something coming from nothing is terribly improbable or impossible, just wait, nothing arising from something can happen just as easily. In the far future, the universe will be cold, dark, and empty. As he put it, when musing on our universal future: nothingness is heading straight toward us as fast as can be.

That idea didn’t terrify him. He realized that knowledge is not to be gained for comfort our soul but to enhance the awareness of being alive.

Just before leaving his company the last time I saw him, in one of those poetic accidents that makes life so unexpectedly enjoyable, I was reading a newspaper piece at his kitchen table about an emerging effort to ensure that young people at elite institutions preserve their Catholic upbringing during and after College. When describing the temptations to depart from piety, the author wrote: “Exposed to Nietzche, Hitchens, co-ed dorms and beer pong, such students are expected to stray.”

I reflected on what a remarkable tribute to the man this simple sentence represented. To be so overpowering in one’s cultural impact that one can be mentioned without explanation is one thing, but to be sandwiched between Nietzche and beer pong is an honor that very few of us can so hope to deservedly achieve.

Lawrence M. Krauss is Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. His newest book, A Universe from Nothing will appear in January 2012.

Away with the manger—in with the Solstice!

For a fact, the Christians stole Christmas. We don’t mind sharing the season with them, but we don’t like their pretense that it is the birthday of Jesus. It is the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun—Dies Natalis Invicti Solis.

Christmas is a relic of sun worship.

For all of our major festivals, there were corresponding pagan festivals tied to natural events. We’ve been celebrating the Winter Solstice, this natural holiday, long before Christians crashed the party. For millennia, our ancestors in the Northern Hemisphere have greeted this seasonal event with festivals of light, gift exchanges, and seasonal gatherings.

The Winter Solstice is the reason for the season. The Winter Solstice, December 22 this year, heralds the symbolic rebirth of the Sun, the lengthening of days, and the natural New Year.

We nonbelievers are quite willing to celebrate the fun parts of anybody’s holidays. We just want to be spared the schmaltz, the superstition—and the state/church entanglements.

The customs of this time of year endure because they are pleasant customs. It’s fun to hear from distant family and friends, to gather, to feast, to sing. Gifts, as freethinker Robert Ingersoll once remarked, are evidences of friendship, of remembrance, of love.

The evergreens displayed now as in centuries past flourish when all else seems dead, and are symbols, as is the returning sun, of enduring life.

In celebrating the Winter Solstice, we celebrate reality.

Annie Laurie Gaylor is co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the nation’s largest association of freethinkers (atheists and agnostics).

The GAC Committee have selected some of our favourite essays for publication, and we hope you enjoy them.

It would be stellar to gain access to the GAC through a generous grant. As a student in the US, the very idea of attending seemed completely out of reach. Melbourne seems like worlds away! I see the GAC as a way of making my world a little smaller.

I come from a family of compassionate and tolerant Lutherans. I’ve been around religion since birth- I was baptized in the church my parents were married in, and my grandfather remains active in that church to this day. My parents only ever made me attend church on Christmas and Easter, and I have very early memories of stumbling through hymns and refusing communion. I went to a secular private girls’ high school, where I was taught to question absolutely everything. I came out as an atheist when I was 15 to very little fanfare. My parents were understanding, but confused. My mom and I have since had many conversations about why she remains agnostic, and why I stubbornly insist upon refusing the idea of a “higher power”.

I was alone in my lack of faith for a long time. The overwhelming majority of my friends hold on to their spirituality, whether it’s Judaism, Quakerism, or (rarely) Christianity. I discovered the works of Christopher Hitchens, Jennifer Michael Hecht, and Richard Dawkins. I found a niche in these amazing books. I’ve found and latched on to the skeptic community, because it seems to connect all of my favorite things- intellect, doubt, and science fiction. The GAC can be my first adventure in real-life atheism, with a vast community of incredible people who share my non-beliefs.

I love the idea of forming relationships with outspoken, intelligent, educated, interesting, and all-round fantastic atheists from around the world. I’ve learned so much from the godless heathens in my life, and I can’t wait to spend a weekend bonding with more.

Jennifer – Philadelphia

Having come from a relatively conservative town in the southernmost part of New Zealand, I’ve seen my fair share of illegitimate, religion based logic. Out-dated traditions have kept many high schools in Dunedin in the Stone Age in terms of accepting people for whom they are and allowing, tolerating and encouraging diversity. I consider myself lucky in that I managed to go to the most open-minded high schools in Dunedin. Here at Logan Park high school we’re the only school in Dunedin that has allowed same-sex couples to attend end of school formals/balls together. The fact that every other school in Dunedin disallows this is outrageous. Some schools allegedly will allow a same-sex couple to attend the end of year formal if they acknowledge their sexuality in a school assembly. To me this is clearly a human rights violation, which brings me to my next point about why I consider myself an Atheist and why I would love to attend the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne.

Why:

Why is something that I believe we need to ask at every stage of our lives and every decision that we make. While I consider asking why to be a core pillar of what makes our society work, various religions would rather that we didn’t question why and that we left certain or most topics out of the spotlight of conscious debate. As an atheist I feel that we should constantly question and challenge traditions and beliefs. This is in no way limited to a belief in gods or tradition created solely by religion. I believe that we should be in constant re-evaluation of our moral and ethical code. If we question the beliefs of the past we can improve our quality of life and create a better world for everybody to live in. If we take some entities view on what they consider ‘wrong’ to heart then we’re limiting ourselves in a very serious way. We have only a short time on this earth and it’s important that we make the most of it and enjoy every part of it that we can. Thinking in this way allows us to discontinue archaic traditions like the one I highlighted above.

I pity the huge numbers of people that waste their lives away in the hope of something better, in some mythical afterlife, when really, the only thing that can make them happy or create change in their lives, is themselves. I would like to attend the global atheist convention because I want to ask why. I want my mind to be changed and I want to re-evaluate more of the decisions that I’ve already made. I want to hear alternative reasoning regarding everything in life. The Global Atheist Convention is the best place to do this because of the free and open thinking that atheism creates. By doing this I believe I will be able to enjoy a fuller and more interesting life.

Louis – New Zealand

My name is Mysti, I’m a year 11 student and an atheist. I was not raised an atheist though, my heritage is a little bizarre. The reason I wish to attend the Global Atheist Convention may require a little history of my atheism.

The half of my family I don’t live with are of a secluded fundamentalist religion, the other half indifferent. I was not raised religious, but I was given Bibles as presents, sung grace when visiting my family and took part in religious education during primary school. I can’t say it ever resonated with me, I understood it the way I understood a fairy tale. My first step towards acknowledging my lack of belief was when I said God was just Santa Claus for adults, however this revelation wasn’t met with as much praise as was usual.

Complete understanding of what constitutes an atheist and what I was wasn’t achieved until a few years ago. My brother would show me videos about the universe, and they really interested me. They appealed to my sense of logic; it is exciting when things make sense. When he bought up a religion is when I actually thought about what I had been taught in R.E and what my family practiced. None of it made sense; it really is just an adult’s Santa.

When I visited my religious family from then on I would stay quiet during grace or their “meetings.” I asked my father why he left the religion, and I was remarkably surprised how similar our logic was. The real revelation came when I finally spoke to my cousins, the same cousins whom only know the religious life. Nothing made sense to them either.

Now I will proudly announce my atheism and why I am an atheist, I will also add that it isn’t I who should be validating my views. My first and current boyfriend was a Christian, only to be seduced by science the way I was. I believe he is also applying for this and I can also safely say his family dislike me because, and I quote, I have too many opinions. So I’m opinionated, I would call that a positive trait.

As a friend of mine said, the intelligent are never moderates. They may change their view if presented with sufficient evidence, but they are never moderates.

To attend a convention that celebrates reason and takes pride in the inherit intelligence of logic is an amazing opportunity. The speeches from previous conventions appeal to that excitable common sense of mine, as do the speakers’ books. I’ve a good number of atheistic books, and a few religious books from my boyfriend. The truth is obvious.

If I were to name role models, I wouldn’t name athletes or celebrities but every name I do say would appear on the conventions’ list of speakers.

With that, I ask that you consider me for this grant. It would be by far the most exciting thing in my life.

Growing up in a Catholic family, I was surrounded by religious influence in my most formative years of my short life. For a period of time, I simply took the indoctrination at face value, and never questioned what decisions were being made for me. Thankfully, upon being exposed to concepts such as rational thought and secularism, I soon began to question the lessons I was being taught. Fortunately, I was in an environment where religious belief was enforced very little, and I did not have any great ‘coming out’ moment. At 17 years of age, I reflect on how my views of people have changed for the better, and how rational thought has become so core to my being.

I have great aspirations for my future careers. Convinced to take Philosophy and Reason in senior schooling, I soon learnt the vast array of knowledge that existed, and it has inspired me towards a political future. When I view the current state of events through my admittedly naïve eyes, I am astounded by the amount of political currency we still place in Bronze Age fairy tales. We continue to unequivocally support a ‘secular’ nation that has continued to base its Middle Eastern diplomatic policy off the basis that the bible is a factual recording of events. That same nation spends millions upon millions of dollars in weaponry in arming a nation that lays its claim to land in the Torah, to continue a perverse cycle of senseless violence, while claiming to have ‘tolerance’ and ‘understanding’ in its ethos.

Furthermore, our own supposedly secular system is corrupt to the core in promoting various faiths through tax breaks. The $30 billion that religions fail to pay each year is a staggering amount. It is incredible to imagine what could be achieved in providing $30 billion for scientific research or education. While I express disgust at these current practices, I am not prepared to stand idly by and watch the theocrats drag the world
down. I understand that proactive measures must be taken, and political action can cause real change. As I look towards tertiary study next year, I look forward into engaging in student politics, to gain experience in these areas, and to hone my ability to understand logic and reason when making decisions.

Thus, I feel my attendance will be the first small step in a series of great ones. Starting in the small role as a mere observer will allow me to learn from the great figures of the atheistic movement. Being surrounded by other like minded people will provoke me into stimulating conversation and debate. The lessons I will learn from this experience will galvanise my efforts to promote reason and secularism, and allow me to engage and relate to others who share the same ideals.

Matt

Despite attending Christian schools for most of my schooling, I have been an atheist for many years. I wish to attend the 2012 Global Atheist Convention for many reasons.

Books such as The God Delusion and Letter to a Christian Nation were, and still are enormously influential to me as an atheist teenager, and Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris have always been authors who inspired me to learn more about atheism. The opportunity to see some of these leaders in the atheist community present a talk is truly amazing. Catherine Deveny has been a role model of mine for a long time, for various reasons – although I haven’t always agreed with her opinions, her work with Dying with Dignity, support of people with disabilities and her initiative of “No chicks no excuses” is nothing short of inspirational.

I have spent many hours in compulsory religious education classes, but the only religious education provided was that of Christianity. Although I now currently attend a public school, there is a Christian group – and I intend to create a secular student society. The internet is, of course, an invaluable resource, but the prospect of meeting with like-minded people at a three-day conference is an experience that would provide me with enormous amounts of information, confidence, and guidance in the right direction to promoting atheism and freethought as a viable alternative to religion.

The 2012 Global Atheist Convention is an exciting event which I hope to attend, which is why I hope to receive a ticket to next year’s convention.

Miranda

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