NECSS

So I attended my very first skeptical event over the weekend, the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism in New York City. It was a lot of fun, I got to meet so many great new people. The conference itself had some wonderful speakers and panels.

Definitely the highlight of the day for me was the live Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast and George Hrab's performance during lunch. After the conference was dinner and hanging out at a bar with a bunch of other skeptics.

The lowpoint of the trip was the subway. Saturday night it took about 2 hours longer to get back to the hotel than it should have due to rerouting and delays. My feet were killing me so I was really cranky.

Huge thanks to Mark who set everything up so I could go and for putting up with me when I was feeling so crappy Saturday night.

Atheist Spirituality

I know that title is a bit of a contradiction but bear with me on this. Today on PZ Myer's blog he posted a very snarky response to this article that argues that humans are hard wired for religious belief. I strongly disagree with that article as well but I'm not going to be so snarky.

There are many reasons why humans invented religions but this is about that feeling of spirituality that so many people feel, from evangelical Christians to devout Muslims to Buddhist monks. This brings me back to the contradiction in the titles of this post, we don't really have a good word to stand in for this feeling when it's not religious in nature. Awe and wonder come close but I don't think they quite say it so for lack of a better term I'm going to use spiritual an mean it in a totally non-superstitious sense.

I think that argument of humans beign hardwired for religion confuses that sense of awe before nature and spiritual emotion that humans have. Those feelings I think are hardwired into us, back from the time when nature was an almost total unknown, the source of life and destruction (as it still is but we understand much of it now and what we don't understand we have the tools to learn).

That feeling led our ancestors who hadn't yet developed science to create mythologies that explained and channeled that spiritual emotion. However just because we have this emotional response built into our brains doesn't mean it has to or should be channeled into worship of some higher being. It just as easily can be channeled into a wonder and love of the universe and it's immenseness and beauty. You don't need a god to feel that, there's no emptiness to being an atheist we've just found that we don't need religion to feed that emotional need.

The universe is more than enough for that. I look up and see the stars and realize that the atoms which make up my body were once inside stars like those. As Carl Sagan said "We are all made of star stuff" and that knowledge invokes in me this amazing feeling that is probably the same as the feeling many religious people feel in church.

Trying to Get This Blog Rolling Again

Yeah, I know I haven't posted here in about a year. In the last year things have changed a lot for me so I thought I'd start this blog up again to have a place to write a lot of stuff that just doesn't fit in my other blogs.

Don't expect a lot of posts here, this is more an outlet for the stuff I don't have space enough to say on Twitter. Do expect me to talk more about my skepticism and atheism because I've become a lot more involved and vocal about those topics.