Jim’s topic is “Hope for Humanists.”

Pirate recruitment to follow. (Yay!! Stop global warming!)

Rummy, how have you screwed us? Let me count the ways: Newly released top-secret documents from the Rumsfeld White House that slathered religion all over the war.

Followed up by:

Soldiers in a prayer group exhorted to “hunt people for Jesus.” (Proselytizing is an expressly prohibited practice in the U.S. military, but they seem to be thinking up ways to weasel out of that.)

“Do we know what it means to proselytise?” Captain Emmit Furner, a military chaplain, says to the gathering.

“It is General Order Number One,” an unidentified soldier replies.

But Watt says “you can’t proselytise but you can give gifts.”

And this, Harper’s cover story for May, about a group of soldiers who painted “Jesus Kill Mohammed [sic]” on their Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and drove around with an interpreter blaring out the phrase over the loudspeaker.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” chanted the interpreter. “Jesus kill Mohammed!”

A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody fired on the roof, and the Special Forces man directed a response from an MK-19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” remembers Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared.

“Jesus kill Mohammed!” Another head, another shot. Boom. “Jesus kill Mohammed!” Boom. In the distance, Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of RPGs. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” DeGiulio would later say.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation works to expose and litigate these kinds of fundamentalist violations in the U.S. military. If you care about this issue, now is the time to give. They have a matching program going on how until the end of May.

We had some interesting people stop by, including a clearly Christian woman who kind of demanded to know if we were trying to convert people (“Do I *look* like I’m trying to convert anyone?” Like YOU people are doing? … as I sit behind the “Ask an Atheist ¢25″ sign). I mean really! You don’t convert people to atheism. It’s not a religion! We have our hands full just taking in the people churches are leaving angry, disillusioned and broken by the side of the road.

This one guy came up and let loose this spiel to end all spiels (it was grand, really it was!) about his “heterosexual pride” movement, and ultimately Asimovian plan to have robot servants for everyone, which would (somehow) bring wealth and properity to the planet. Oh, and he said that all men should give all women their money. I’m waiting!

Fer reals, everyone, though, if one more person walked by and derisively sneered “Are they for REAL?” I was seriously going to launch something at them. We’re not trying to part you with your money (well, except for that ¢25), your self-respect, or your reason and common sense.

Things to do next year:

• Flags (for some reason, people loved the “peace flags” and didn’t even look to see what was on them)
• Face painting
• Kittens. Especially the kittens.

And please no more pink poodles in pajamas… or I will cry.

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington.  She is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org, and the host of Christianity in the Public Square, Moral Politics Television, Seattle.

For years, atheists, agnostics, and other freethinkers have been saying that you don’t need a god to be good. Recently, they even tried to say it on the side of an Indiana bus. More and more, they are finding ways to show it.

Kiva.org is a matchmaking service. It pairs up desperately poor people who need loans with folks who are willing to take a chance on them. With as little as $25 in your hand, you can go to Kiva and help a farmer in Pakistan who wants a pair of goats, or a single mom in Peru who wants to invest in a new sewing machine for her home embroidery business, or a vendor in Sudan who sells corn flour and wants to increase her inventory. The borrowers request a specific amount through a local microcredit agency, often with a small group of community members who guarantee each others’ loans. When enough lenders choose them, meaning the full amount is available, they get the loan, invest it in their venture, and begin making payments on an eight month schedule.

On Monday, my 13-year-old daughter Marley bounced in the door from school and said, “Are you ready to go to Kiva?”  She and her older sister Brynn had emptied their banks — literally — and bought me a Kiva gift certificate for Mother’s Day. Marley inserted herself between me and my computer. She pulled up the site and began explaining her investment criteria: female (because females more often reinvest earnings in the family) no more than two kids (because they have a better chance to get ahead), and no beauty parlors (because that’s just dumb). She showed me a cooperative in Tajikistan and a grandmother in Mexico. But when I kept returning to Pakistan she assured me that I really could make my own choice. Except — was I going to put the whole $50 into one person?! She’d forgotten her final criterion: spread the wealth.

Last, but not least, Marley proudly showed me how to credit my gift to a Kiva lending team:  Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious. Does my daughter know me or what?

In an article I wrote a couple of months ago, Atheist Arrogance, I encouraged non-believers to counter stereotypes simply by being who they are. “Be out, be yourself.” In example, I mentioned a Seattle Atheists blood drive. So imagine my delight to find that the AASFSHN team — yes, the acronym is pathetic — topped Kiva’s list, with over 16,000 loans made. Not to be outdone, a group called Kiva Christians is hot on their heels. Is it a competition? Sure looks like it. But can you imagine something better to compete over?

Religious communities perform a valuable organizing function.  True, it can be used for harm — to organize a “Bibles for Afghanistan” crusade, or worse, a literal crusade. But religious communities also activate people to feed the hungry or protest against nuclear weapons. As no-nbelievers are becoming more open, they too are beginning to coalesce into moral communities that talk openly about deep values. My hope is that, freed from the constraints of dogma or the need to proselytize, these communities will be able to invest themselves in the simple process of doing good for goodness sake.

What does that mean? Primum non nocere (First, do no harm). The simple principle of harm avoidance is at the heart of humanity’s shared moral core. But so is proactively nurturing well-being. Healing harm. Creating delight and beauty and wonder. Loving. Truth-seeking. Practicing random acts of kindness. Our ancient traditions, both religious and secular, converge on a shared set of virtues and moral principles that are probably built into our bodies by our ancestral history. There is a lot we can learn from those traditions about how to be good with or without gods.  But, as Marley just reminded me, there is also a lot we can learn from our children. We offer them the insights of our ancestors, and our own, but they are the ones who, as Khalil Gibran put it, dwell in the house of tomorrow.

Paid “friendship missionaries” on the University of Arizona campus scan for lonely foreign students, who get invitations to dinner with a side dish of salvation. Are the missionaries and their sponsors generous, predatory, or both?

Several studies (e.g. here and here) show that religious people give more dollars and volunteer hours to charity than do nonbelievers. Evangelical Christians have been trumpeting these findings: No matter what you may think about our exclusive offer of salvation, our religion is a social good.

As a former Evangelical I tend toward skepticism, especially when it comes to data that have been assembled and promoted by ideologues. And yet I’m inclined to suspect that these results tap something real. Sociologists have found that tribal identity increases altruism toward other members of the tribe (though at the expense of outsiders). In many ways, a religion functions as a tribe. Besides ordinary in-group/out-group effects, religions explicitly teach that we are made to serve something larger than ourselves. They encourage members to give of themselves to gods, co-religionists and others — in part by promising deferred compensation. But perhaps even more importantly, they provide a community and structure for doing so.

Let’s assume that religious people are more generous or altruistic. An interesting follow-up question is this:

Where is this generosity directed? Does it serve the cause of goodness? By a scientific definition of altruism, suicide bombing is an altruistic act supported by religious attendance. It is the individual sacrificing his life (and reproductive potential) in the service of another individual or the greater collective — in this case Allah, Islam, the Muslim brotherhood. But is it as a social good?

Within conservative Christianity, a tremendous amount of donated time and money is solicited for conversion activities: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Is religious recruiting a social good? On this, most evangelists and I would have opposite opinions, at least about Christian recruiting. (We might be more in agreement about the proselytizing done by Hare Krishnas or Scientologists.)  It is only fair to give evangelical missionaries credit for their intentions. If you truly believe the unsaved are going to be tortured eternally, then there is no greater good than to spend your life saving their souls. By comparison, nothing else matters. A missionary, operating on this premise, may experience herself as highly generous, because she is.

She also might protest that independent of afterlife benefits, accepting Jesus makes people happy in this life, here and now. This is true.  Sometimes. Jesus worship can fill people with deep joy. It can get alcoholics to stop drinking and abusers to stop abusing. It can save marriages.  But sometimes the opposite happens. (See thousands of testimonials at exChristian.net). Pentecostals point to happy African church-going children singing and dancing. A former Pentecostal might point to the African children who have been kicked out of their communities or killed because new converts to Pentecostalism saw them as witches and took their took their Bibles literally. The net here and now benefits of proselytizing are arguable.

A darker way to look at Christian “outreach” is as an example of how viral beliefs, sometimes called meme complexes, can exploit the human tendency toward altruism. What I mean is that a belief set can redirect altruistic do-gooder impulses away from activities that actually serve human well-being and onto activities that serve to replicate the belief set itself. When the Asian tsunami hit, a highly successful Seattle mega-church directed members to do three things: pray for people who were affected, give to Mars Hill Church, and give to the Mars Hill church-building work in India. Why not reverse this — pray for Mars Hill church, pray for our missionary work, and give money to the people who were affected? Churches that make suggestions like these are, on average shrinking. Churches that follow the Mars Hill model are growing.

Daniel Dennett in the first three pages of his book, Breaking the Spell, beautifully narrates how a similar redirection occurs in nature. An ant climbs to the top of a stem of grass and lingers there. Why? Not because it is adaptive for the ant. Rather, another organism has take charge of the ant’s brain and to reproduce it needs the ant to be eaten by a cow. When a person’s altruistic impulses are directed toward winning converts, it is valid to ask whether they are actually serving human well-being or simply serving a mind virus.

If we don’t count their recruiting activities, do Evangelical Christians actually give more than non-religious? Do they give more to things that we humans pretty much agree are social goods? Sorry, all you fellow secularists, thought the gap narrows the answer still appears to be yes. Think first about money given to churches. Besides outreach, church moneys fund what economists call “club goods“. Churches often do a wonderful job of providing and organizing members services: warm meals for kids with a sick parent, adventures for teenagers, housing for young adults, support during bereavement, even free counseling or legal services. And with regard to outsiders, even if food, medical care, or friendship is offered primarily as bait to set a fish hook, the food and medical care are real.

But even beyond the money given to churches, religious people appear to give more to ordinary charities than secular folks do. At least based on self report data, religious participation and religious giving are positively correlated with giving to nonreligious charities like educational institutions, social services, even blood banks. Although the gap gets smaller the harder you look at it, this appears to hold true for the 40ish percent of Americans who self-describe as Evangelical or born again as well as their more theologically open counterparts.

If this makes those of us who are freethinkers squirm a bit, perhaps it should.

You might protest that that charity should be only a way station on the road to justice, and that your energies are better spent working for structural change. Many secular folks and liberal people of faith believe this is true. I know I do. As a non-theist, I once sat on the nonprofit board of an organization called the Washington Association of Churches because their mission was my mission: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Like me, they sought solutions that went beyond charity.

But even if justice is the destination, those way stations are still needed. Most of us agree that both generosity and justice are virtues. We prefer to live in a world where both are in rich supply. Maybe, now that freethinkers are coming out of the closet it is time for us to begin thinking about how to create our own communities and structures that empower personal generosity. Since we don’t have to be a sales force with a promise of treasure laid up in Heaven, we are free to give without expecting something back except maybe a bit of good will.

Recently Seattle Atheists organized a blood drive for members. Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

[Ed. note: Not only do both Seattle Atheists and Tacoma Atheists have an ongoing food-drive in place, but Seattle Atheists has a bi-monthly blood drive, Christmas wrapping (of which 100% of the proceeds go directly to the Seattle Childrens Hospital), and a Day of Reason blood drive.]

There were some fabulous talks by Jim Corbett, Roy Speckhardt, David Domke and others. We Twittered much of the conference here (of course, you have to start at the bottom and read up). #freethought, for those of you who do that.

While we were there, of course, the article in the Seattle Times ran, and there was a DoS attack on the Seattle Atheists servers, so it was fun-filled and exciting, and most of all, great to see that atheists and humanists were coming out of the woodwork. It’s a wise, compassionate, and energetic group of people, and I’m honored to have been a part of it. Jerry, Sylvia (of the Humanists of Greater Portland), and I did a panel on using Meetup to build membership, which I think people enjoyed. I particularly enjoyed Jim Corbett’s talk on debating Darwin deniers, and the CFI presentation.

The food was great, the speakers were great, the coffee was great, and it was fun doing the set-up and introductions, and running around helping. I also learned, interestingly, that some Catholics have likened Humanists to cannibals. Hey, we don’t go for that transubstantiation thing, man. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

A big, huge thank you to the HGP and all the other groups for making this event possible. Look for a bigger, better conference next year in Seattle!