taking christ out of christmas

Taking the Christ out of Christmas

Philadelphia Weekly has an article about the local atheist movement

here in Philly.

Philadelphia's atheist story has a cast of characters that wouldn't

look out of place in a Robert Rodriguez movie scripted by a

resurrected Tennessee Williams. We will meet a large-breasted

exotic dancer and atheist intellectual who loves watching the

Christians she debates try to maintain eye contact (check out

Kelly's blog here -- JP). And a little girl who, while the adults

upstairs are holding a seance, bangs on the basement ceiling with a

broom and flashes the lights on and off by removing and replacing

the fuses (check out Margaret's homepage here -- JP). We'll meet

right-wing libertarians and left-wing liberals, woolly agnostics

and hardcore "nontheists," students, professors of philosophy, moms

and dads and YouTubing, blasphemous T-shirt-wearing punk rock

troublemakers. The only things they've all got in common are: a)

they don't believe in God (or Santa or the Flying Spaghetti

Monster) and b) they're your neighbors.

The article talks mostly about Margaret, the Tree of Knowledge, and

the RRS, but mentions other Philly atheist groups.

In Philadelphia alone there's the Freethought Society, the Humanist

Association of Greater Philadelphia, the Ethical Society, the

Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, the 100-member

First Church of Atheism and a bunch of internationally known

troublemakers who call themselves the Rational Response Squad

(RRS).

Just don't assume they all get along. Hang out with atheists long

enough, and you'll hear agnostics referred to as "idiot atheists"

and "chickenshit fence-sitters."

The author, Steven Wells, even mentions my local meet-up group.

The atheists of the Philadelphia Atheists Meetup Group, meeting in

the Cos� on 12th and Walnut in late November, might be mistaken at

first glance for anarchists or some other species of modern urban

troublemaker. They have a look of healthily dissatisfied,

computer-savvy malevolence about them. They look like they probably

don't spend too long coordinating their wardrobes.

I'm sure that last dig was aimed at me since he was giving me dirty

looks when he interviewed me (just kidding, he was very professional).

The article is well worth reading, but I need to post two more quotes

from it because they show why it's important for these (our) groups to

be around and what we're still up against. One quote is about sabotage

done to the Tree of Knowledge and the other is about the absence of a

certain founding father here in the cradle of American liberty.

In the coming weeks the tree of knowledge will be repeatedly

vandalized. One creative soul will remove all the restraining ropes

on one side, presumably so the tree will topple into the nativity

scene in the first high wind.

Philadelphia's Thomas Paine--the revolution's great

propagandist--wrote Common Sense, a blistering attack on the

absurdity of regarding the Bible as anything other than bad history

on great drugs. For this sin of intellectual honesty he was

physically and verbally assaulted, libeled, slandered and, but for

the efforts of America's atheists and freethinkers, would've been

written out of American history entirely. To this day, thanks to

Christian opposition, there's no statue of Paine in Philadelphia.