What would be a good holiday for atheists?
Joker
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Joined: 19 Mar 2011
Age: 36
Gender: Male
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Location: North Carolina The Tar Heel State :)
Maybe a 7-day Kwanzaa-like holiday that runs from 12:00:00am December 25th until New Year's Day?
One day for Tesla, when kids get electronic toys.
One day to honor cats for being perfect companions & buy toys to entertain them with. Laser pointers & remote-controlled mice for all!
One day to honor the freemasons who gave formal Christianity the finger. OK, they weren't atheists per se, but they had the right general idea. If they gave thought to a deity at all, he was kind of an aspie watchmaker who'd long since moved on to new hobbies and had more interesting things to care about than the neighbors' sex lives. The kids get Legos, Erector sets, and AutoCAD.
ok, 4 more days to fill...
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You mean like Festivus?
For the rest of us Classic
I'm picturing the complete opposite though, actually... A fun, over-the-top, science-themed holiday. Something children would enjoy and that's also educational.
Kind of like Christmas meets Bill Nye the Science Guy
Most xmas celebrations here in the US are so devoid of religious content that I am sure many atheist families partake. They just leave out the religious parts. How many people know that "Santa Claus" was originally a skinny guy named "Saint Nicholas?" There are lots of secular xmas carols, for example. Some might object, but turnabout is fair play. "Christmas" absorbed pagan traditions like the Borg absorbed planets,
The secular version could be called xmas instead of Christmas. Hmmm, they are both pronounced the same, so maybe we need a new name for it. "The winter solstice holiday" is a little wordy. Any ideas?
Last edited by Rocky on 10 Apr 2012, 2:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
You mean like Festivus?
For the rest of us Classic
I'm picturing the complete opposite though, actually... A fun, over-the-top, science-themed holiday. Something children would enjoy and that's also educational.
Kind of like Christmas meets Bill Nye the Science Guy
I'm sure Bill Nye would approve, since he is an atheist. Your post made me think of science discovery museums for kids like the "Exploratorium" (I think) in San Francisco. I'm sure there are other musuems that are similar elsewhere. Families could make a tradition of going at least once a year.
Hmm... I was thinking Napoleon would be a good birthday or passing to remember. He was an atheist emperor. I think that's pretty cool. He was often the type of person to use religion to promote an atheist agenda too. Personally I'm not sure if I like darwin, he's too much of an elitist, he's not for everyone.
In addition to an annual holiday for atheists, how about adding birthdays to the list of things to celebrate in an atheist way? Use them to remind people that each person is an individual, has thought as good as anyone else's, and should exercise it freely, though in privacy and with caution, especially around the religious. We should also celebrate Christmas, Easter, and saints days, and each year remind our children that god is fake and teach them outright what religion is and why it benefits some, but can be very dangerous for a person's existence. Conventional holidays are the time to let our children know what all the religious news and secrecy is really about and why they do it. It's the time to teach our children how a person's religion can be used to identify that person as a person, or what religious ignorance has turned that person into through years of abuse and how to protect themselves from ever becoming that person or their 'lunch.' It is also a time to teach our children compassion for the poor souls who inherit religious ignorance. To always seek to set them free lest they live another second in a man made hell, a world where they are constantly lied to and oppressed where no one cares about their existence and is willing to allow them to live ignorant lives. This is what a holiday is for an Atheist. We celebrate life and compromised existence, we fight for the freedom of the mind, we fight the conspiracy of religion peacefully, but very loudly. We teach our children what really happened to Jesus from the very beginning, how he was tricked into believing he was the son of god and that he was going around healing people by a huge social conspiracy. We teach our children why Hitler really genocided the religious (to control social pretense), and how it is used as a tool for war and oppression and is too dangerous for society to possess. Never should an existence be that corrupted by a massive social lie. Never should anyone be oppressed or considered a lesser person, or be denied an equal existence with access to all knowledge, history, and be without secrets or live as an outsider to the masses. Never should social/existential genocide be allowed to exist. We do what we do for the people and families that have ceased to exist because of religion's history of genocide which continues in cunning fashion to this day. We live the lives we do for the people in our families and others who have committed suicide or who have been killed by abstract means and methods because they were not in religious know. We live the way we live as Atheists because people are worth more than that to us simply because they exist and share genetics with us. We live the way we live because the bible tells us that there were no wars before man separated from nature and created god. That the first wars written in the extant book of Jasher and in Genesis happened under the guise of religion with some people not knowing why they died, just as people who commit suicide don't know why they are dieing and even through they face death, their families abandon them to ignorance and accept that they may just have to die for the existence of religion rather than ever be told the truth. That a man might not be given the dignity to die at least knowing the reality that they are leaving. In this way, religion kills everyday, silent and like an assassin in the dead of night. We live the way we live because war is just a way for society to purge itself of people it doesn't want or doesn't think are necessary.
Some other things to remind our children on days of Atheism:
1. The argument between religion and Atheism is better described as one of acceptable losses. Religions are willing to risk losing people to death and existential death where Enlightened Atheism must not allow a single person to suffer or die in ignorance. There are no acceptable losses. Casualties are a fact of war, and war a side effect of the social pretense created by religion. Raise not your arms but for self defense. Enlighten your enemies and show them the lifelong damage done by social pretense.
2. Where religious kids are persecuted for Jesus/Mohammed/Jewry/other deity/etc, Atheist kids should be raised to understand that they could have been proverbially stoned into losing a life of enlightenment for one of ignorance and be made to suffer through conspiracy for their entire life unto death on the whim of "god." We must always remind our kids of this so that they never become the evil that lies in the silence of religion.
3. We remind our kids that religion teaches that being in a majority equals being a god and being able to make decisions for others. We teach them to resist this mindset on Atheist Holidays. We teach them that each person can make their own decisions and should never be denied the truth as an excuse to remove their thoughts from debate or lessen their feelings. No person should be made to feel that their emotions are inferior, no person should live in pretext to dissolve their argument before they can even make it because they are not part of the majority. No person should be destroyed or provoked in their ignorance to be taught a lesson or have someone else's view forced upon them.
4. Never should social pretense be allowed to cause or contribute to disease. This is no different than germ/biological warfare Even if the result is mental illness, it is still disease warfare and must end. As Atheists, we much mobilize and petition the United Nations to end the spread of social pretense related diseases around the world and keep the future of man safe from them. Again, there are no acceptable losses. We are not acceptable losses. Birth into ignorance is birth into death. For those who have gone before us in ignorance, we are committed not to interfere with life!
5. Atheism will form a community free of any social pretense whatsoever and it will grow that community until no one is negatively affected by social pretense and people are born and live all the days of their life without ever having to live in religion. We advocate for freedom from religion and we teach our kids exactly what we are arguing for when we advocate for freedom from religion as opposed to freedom of religion. No one should have to have one or be compelled by the force of social pretense into having one or otherwise being tricked into believing in some god or another because they don't believe in any of them.
6. We teach our children that when we choose not to believe in religion or god, it means that we don't believe in the system of religion or social pretense and because we do what we do for the martyrs of religions we aren't in anyway indebted to systems of religion and can't be expected to speak in a way that supports them. Instead we teach our kids how to speak religion for their own benefit and identify those who are ignorant of it and bring them to the light of our family's Atheism.
3.
But no part of atheism requires someone believing in this or that scientific theory, or even the method as a whole.
That's kind of the problem, isn't it? What do a group of people whose only commonality is lacking a pervasive, stupid belief celebrate, exactly?
See my post above, we celebrate revolution and freedom from religion! Can you drink to that?
I object
How about we make up an identity or a bunch of identities, place their birthdays on popular religious holidays and celebrate them that way. We write things in support of our cause and attribute it to these made up historical figures just as the religious say Jesus said said stuff. Jesus and the apostles were written about by other people and in their voices, their names may even have been changed. We can even celebrate with the religious, but for different purposes. They celebrate acceptable losses, we celebrate the cause for Atheism and our peaceful stand against social pretense, we know the language of religion and we await the day when Atheists will outnumber the religious, even if we have to change them one at a time. If they leave a person in religion, we will know them, and we will bring them to the light of Atheism.
We just need to ensure total lack of belief in our children. This will save them from Jesus, and this is what our movement should be about.
not a bad idea. Start with bacterial mat dipping sauce with early arthropod-analogue orderves (we'll use shrimp) and... jeez, the meals probably won't be all that gastronomically appealing for like 96% of the courses!! ! Assuming each course represents a geologic epoch that is
If we are trying to enlighten people against the will of a fairy tale figure, we should have our own fake people. The difference between them and us however are that our books that are attributed to these imaginary individuals all need to contain an enlightenment statement about who "Adam Atheist" really is, that he is a character to whom people attribute a body of work for the benefit of an Atheist culture to keep each Atheist's privacy and promote Atheists holidays for families to observe together. Adam Atheist lives forever of course, because we don't have to believe in death and we aren't born dead the way baptized/religious babies are.
We also don't advocate for Darwinian selection among humans, we support our species and try tirelessly to bring them into our Atheist Family that is 100% free of social pretense. This is Atheism for the win!
That sounds like fun. Kind of a holiday from reason. We could have an Unreasonable Rally!
We could burn effigies of all religions pretending to be different religions! For instance, we could burn Jesus while pretending to be Satanists, Next we could all parade around a giant stuffed effigy of a certain prophet and walk around in circles around it while chanting its name. We could call it day of sillyness!
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