Sometimes in the tangents and fun I have on this blog, I forget why I started it in the first place: to illustrate how atheists are hated in America. Apparently, we’re just as bad as rapists.
Someone in my local atheist group responded, “Just re-affirms my personal belief that I’m included in a group that’s more hated than any other race, religion, gender (or sex) or sexual orientation, Also, the most publicly accepted prejudice.” Another commented, “But if it is true that the hatred is even more than the hatred against rapists, I really want to know exactly who are those people who trust rapists! If such people really exist, that should be more disturbing than anything else, don’t you think?”

There are a lot of issues at play here. Who trusts rapists at all would be a good one. Is the experiment the article is about valid? Would people really be just as (un)comfortable hiring a rapist as an atheist for a high-trust job such as childcare? And if childcare is a high-trust job, why doesn’t it pay better?
Food for thought!

In light of the Occupy Wall Street movement, I got to thinking about the book The Devil Wears Prada and the movie based on it. As is often the case, the book was much better than the movie.
Maybe this is sour grapes, but I say as both a writer and a reader that the book’s ending was weak. (Spoiler alert) The main character, Andy, finally tells her boss, the monstrous and superficial fashion magazine editor, “Fuck you” and that was pretty much it. The movie’s ending was, alas, even weaker, with the editor getting humanized through a divorce, which did nothing to add interest to her character as a villain IMHO, and in the end being a positive force in Andy’s life.
Here is an ending that I think would have been more satisfying.
I would have had Andy tell off her boss *good and proper,* not just a simple “fuck you.” Since everyone in the industry hates Miranda the editor so much, Andy could have gotten any magazine job she wanted, and Miranda’s enemies would bring down Miranda’s editorship. How the mighty have fallen! Now she has to get a low-paying, entry level job and gets a taste of her own medicine. Or perhaps she could do a 180 and join the Peace Corps.

Religion, God and Addiction – The Story Behind Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story

When I think of my Mormon upbringing, one word comes to mind: Addiction.
My mother, an Austrian emigrant who converted to the Mormon religion when she was sixteen, has always been consumed by her Mormon faith —to the point that it almost completely destroyed our family.
Every day of my childhood started with an hour-long home church session and ended with hymns and prayer, on top of what seemed like never-ending official church meetings. Every decision my mom made was guided by our Mormon bishop (the equivalent of a priest), or by the Church doctrine that places Mormon men in an almost God-like position and gives them complete authority over their wives and children.
I started trying to escape the suffocating religious lifestyle at home at the age of six. But I began escaping for real when my parents divorced and my mother married a cruel man who exploited the religious power he had been given to oppress and abuse our family.
When I wrote my memoir, Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story, part of my goal was to shine the spotlight on the serious damage that can occur when a religion gives men complete dominance over their wives and children. But I also wanted to illustrate the consequences of blindly following a religious doctrine.

Sarah: Thanks for the background. So what part of your story is specific to Mormonism? Would your experiences have been similar if your family were a different religion?
IR: Interesting question. While I think a lot of religions put men in the power seat, I think what makes my story specific to Mormonism is the extent to which Mormon men are given complete power over their wives and children. All Mormon men are ordained as members of the “priesthood,” with the absolute authority to preach the gospel, bestow blessings, prophecy, perform healings and baptisms, and generally speak for God. My dad was kicked out of the Mormon religion so didn’t carry this authority over my mom. But when she married her second husband, he was a priesthood holder with absolute authority and abused that power horribly. As a Mormon woman, my mom felt she had no choice but to succumb to the oppression. What also makes my story specific to Mormonism is the fact that Mormons are married for “time and eternity” in the Mormon temple – which further traps women and makes it almost impossible for them to get divorced. Because my dad was excommunicated, my mom’s temple marriage to him was automatically annulled. But it was next to impossible for her to get a temple divorce from her second husband – despite his cruelty.
Because of my mom’s obsession with religion and her desire to turn her life over to God, I think I would have experienced an extreme religious upbringing regardless of the religion I grew up in. But I think my siblings and I would have suffered less if we had been raised in a different Christian religion.

Sarah: When did you become an Atheist?
IR: I consider myself more of an Agnostic than an Atheist – though my idea of a higher force, if there is one, has nothing to do with a single entity. It has to do with karma.
I started to question the idea of God at the age of thirteen, when my mother married a guy who weaseled his way into her life by pretending to be “a man of God”, and then used God as a weapon to keep me from my dad. I began questioning God’s existence in an even bigger way when I reached my early 20s and started writing for a relief organization. I traveled to what was then dubbed the “death triangle” in Southern Sudan to document the plight of hundreds of thousands of children dying from starvation, malaria, AIDS or, in some cases, by machete. Mothers came to me with dead babies in their arms, desperate for help. I saw a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl sitting on her own body bag waiting to die. It’s hard to comprehend how any sort of God would allow such horrid suffering and injustices to occur.

Sarah: How is it that your father and mother married and then your father seemed to lose interest in religion, while your mother maintained Mormonism?
IR: I think there are two general types of personalities – those who are drawn to rules, structure and groups; and those who can’t stand rules or conformity of any kind. My mom is an extreme example of the first type of personality. My dad is an extreme example of the second type of personality (I clearly took after him).
My dad grew up in the Mormon religion in Northern Utah, where Mormonism is ingrained in every facet of life (school, politics, social activities). It was all my dad ever knew, but he never paid much attention to it. After high school, he left Utah and headed to Hollywood to make a name for himself. When that didn’t pan out, he decided to buy himself a little time to figure out what he wanted to do with his life by doing what all nineteen-year-old Mormon boys are expected to do: head out on a two-year Mormon mission. My dad was sent to Austria, where he met my mom, who was then eighteen. They fell in love – or at least they thought they did. But once his mission ended and my mom immigrated to Utah so they could marry, they both quickly realized they were at odds when it came to religion. The more my mom pushed her religious views on my dad, the more he rejected it. Soon, he began leaving on sales trips for months at a time to escape my mother’s religious extremism. As soon as I could, I escaped too by joining him on the road as a tool-selling vagabond.

About the Author:
Ingrid Ricks is a Seattle-based writer and speaker who focuses on overcoming adversity and embracing the moment. She is the author of Hippie Boy: A Girl’s Story, a compelling true story about a feisty teenage girl who escapes her abusive Mormon stepfather and suffocating religious home-life by joining her dad on the road as a tool-selling vagabond – until his arrest forces her to take charge of her life. The book as is available as eBook or paperback on Amazon or BN.com . For more information, visit www.hippieboybook.com

I don’t typically hear about atheists who are as virulently homophobic as a fellow I met on Facebook. This discussion started when I posted on my wall about an anti-gay bill in Nigeria.
Royalist Humanist, an FB user, went on homophobic rants too numerous to repeat here but here are a few examples.
“I am an atheist, I have always stood for the equal basic right rights for all irrespective of any other qualifications. As a Humanist, I do not discriminate against anybody else on the basis of sexual orientation alone …! However, I have the liberty to socialize with a person of specific inclination or not, that is not discrimination…. that is my basic human right ….”
“Gay marriage is something new to Nigeria, therefore they are sticking to the already established moral code about sexual unions between adult and consenting male and female for sex through the vaginal route-called the natural or normal sex. Thoses who come with a new invention of homosexuality: Anal sex between men or anal-sex between a man and a woman on the name of gay-marriage has the burdern to prove their case….”
“Moreover, human anaal canal has not any defence mechanism against entery of sexual diseases through the male sex organ and the human male sex organ has not evolved any protection against the foul feces in the anal canal and therefore diseases like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases like Gonorrea and Syphilis are 20-40 times commoner in the anal-sex practitioners like homosexuals and gays as well as in Bisexual men and women. The problems of Bisexuals: A Bisexual man is the one who pracrices vaginal as well as anal sex and thereby easily spreads diseases acquired through the anal route into women through vaginal route as he is a bisexual. A Bisexual woman is the one who allows men to have sex with her through vagina as well as through anal canal; she often gets sexual diseases from Biseual men and then other men get AIDS and other sex diseases through her….”

See if you know where to begin correcting Mr. Humanist. And ask: we might expect this sort of ignorant ranting from religiosi, but don’t we expect better of atheists?

Including some unexpected atheists.
Right now I’m reading Ingrid Ricks’s Hippie Boy, her memoirs of growing up in a religious Mormon family. More on that later.

1. Paul Giamatti – Giamatti is known for his outstanding roles as a supporting actor. In a 2006 interview, Giamatti stated that he is an atheist. Although his wife is Jewish and his son is being raised Jewish, he noted in the interview that he might influence his son’s beliefs: “I’m waiting for my time to step in and tell him how things really are but I’ll do that when he’s a teenager. I figure he’ll be ripe for atheism when he’s a teenager.”

2. Sir Ian McKellen – Known for his outstanding work on the stage and in film for diverse roles such as King Lear, Gandalf, and Magneto, McKellen is noted for saying, “I’m an atheist. So God, if She exists, isn’t really a part of my life.” He came out in 1988 and has been a prominent LGBT rights activist.

3. Eva Green – She is best known as the smoldering Bond girl of Casino Royale. Eva is actually a French actress who speaks English fluently. She was raised as an atheist and starred in the film, The Golden Compass, which is based on a young adult novel by atheist author Philip Pullman.

4. Mark Zuckerberg – The co-founder and CEO of Facebook has “atheist” listed for his religious views on Facebook, although he was raised Jewish. He was named Time magazine’s person of the year in 2010 and is the world’s youngest billionaire.

5. Hugh Laurie – Like his cynical TV character, Dr. Gregory House, Laurie is a self-proclaimed atheist. In a 2007 interview, he said, “I don’t believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he’d take it away. So he’ll be like: ‘You think this is going pretty well?’ Then he’ll go and send down some big disaster.”

6. Woody Allen – The neurotic director is of Jewish ethnic descent but declares himself as an atheist. He has made numerous witticisms on the subject, such as, “Not only is there no God, but try finding a plumber on Sunday.”

7. Julianne Moore – When asked what God would say to her when she appeared before him in heaven during a 2002 interview on Inside the Actor’s Studio, she said, “Well, I guess you were wrong, because I do exist.” She is also a pro-choice and LGBT activist.

8. Roger Ebert – Perhaps the most famous of film critics, Ebert is slowly dying of thyroid cancer, but has stated the he does not fear death. In an article about his beliefs in 2009, he wrote, “I have never said, although readers have freely informed me I am an atheist, an agnostic, or at the very least a secular humanist–which I am. If I were to say I don’t believe God exists, that wouldn’t mean I believe God doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean I don’t know, which implies that I could know.”

9. Stephen Hawking – Hawking has been a longtime proponent of the extraneousness of a belief in God. He first raised the prospect of a self-creating universe in his best-selling book, A Brief History of Time, which was published in 1988. In his 2010 book, The Grand Design, he wrote, “The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can’t understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second.”

10. Angelina Jolie – Jolie has stated that she does not identify with any religion because she doesn’t feel the need for a God and dislikes authority-based religion. Her equally good-looking partner, Brad Pitt, has been noting as saying he is 20% atheist and 80% agnostic. In another interview, Angelina mentioned that she and Brad are raising their six children to respect all religions and they have a bookshelf in their house with a Bible, a Torah, a Koran, and other religious books.

Patricia Duggan has a Masters in Psychology and has been in practice for 12 years. She runs the site Psychology Degree Finder. She writes about various subjects within psychology.

Can you believe the above pic is a cake?!
Sex and the City brought it out of the (erm) closet, but I’m sick to death of hearing the stereotype that women love shoes, specifically expensive ones. OK, I get it: we’re the fair sex, and looking good is important to us, and we appreciate beauty in objects, but I think this shoe stereotype is particularly offensive. It perpetuates the idea that females are shallow and materialistic, and furthers the idea that we are gold-diggers so that we can use men’s money for material pursuits such as shopping. People seem to have the idea that women and girls are silly and do silly, useless things. The amassing of designer shoes seems to epitomize this.

I was more than once criticized as a writer trying to get more money: “You just want it to buy shoes.” I’ve heard the same thing about abortion: women just want to abort their pregnancies so that they can afford to buy shoes. I’m sure.

Girls are encouraged at a very early age to be into this stuff. I have seen at least one children’s book teaching girls how to love shopping for shoes. Just what we need, right?

Not all women are shoe-obsessed, or even shopping-obsessed. True, many are, and many of you might say, “Well, if the shoe fits…” True enough, maybe this is one of those times when the stereotype is accurate, but I’m still sick of seeing it everywhere. I’ve seen the shoe fetish (fetish in every sense of the word) in the form of cookies, umbrellas, Christmas tree ornaments, and tzotzkes. All hail the high heel!

Tangentially, I’ve heard of rich women getting surgery on their feet so that they can wear designer shoes better. Hello, Darwin Award in the making!

I just discovered this FB page, Working Class Atheists. I’m interested in you all since many people accuse atheism of being an elitist, ivory tower egghead enterprise (almost an alliteration there…), so a working class presence would set people straight. A while back, I wrote that I was interested in hearing from conservative atheists, who I know are out there, but didn’t hear from many. (No, I wasn’t planning on attacking them for being conservative. Honest.) Working Class Atheists, the page, writes:
“We are teachers and policemen and firemen and factory workers. We are nurses and caregivers. We are custodians and cashiers. We are salesmen and women. We are waiters and waitresses. We are laborers and contractors. We are small business owners. We are out there in everyday life working hard and being good without god. We are family members, fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers. We are working class atheists.”
Sadly, I couldn’t find anything when I perused the page that was specific to the working class! So tell me what you’re up to, guys, and submit your story if you want.

I don’t know why we dwell on bad things, but we do. We just do. Maybe because they’re interesting. Maybe because we want to make sure they never happen again. As much as I’ve read on the tragedy (I haven’t written much about it), one thing I always think is: we were stupid.
According to an airport employee who checked in a couple of the terrorists, he said that they looked “like terrorists.” In the interest of not alienating passengers, he didn’t do anything about it.
The pilots in flight school didn’t seem interested in learning how to land, and we didn’t catch on.
All the terrorists, based on what I read, paid for their tickets in cash, and bought one-way tickets. These were warning signs and we still didn’t catch on.
It shouldn’t have helped that these men were clearly Muslim. Percentage-wise, many terrorists are/were Muslim (not all. I’m alert enough to know that). I’m just saying that put all those things together and alarm bells should have gone off.
Sure, hindsight is 20/20, but we were stupid.
Every year on my blog, I reference All European Life Died in Auschwitz, from a Spanish journalist, which was one of the factors that pushed me into thinking that, yes, Islam itself is a problem. (Not to say all Muslims are “bad,” but it’s the whole gestalt.) Every year, the article moves me, even though I know not all my friends agree with the sentiment, and I keep repeating the last line to myself: “What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.”
Peace, Sarah

Let’s not forget that the point of Not My God is that in the US, atheists are hated and persecuted. As Stephen Colbert said about distrusted people according to polls, “I wouldn’t trust a Muslim any more than I could throw him at an atheist.”
Do a search on Google or YouTube for “hate atheists” or some such and you’ll come up with a lot of hatred for (not so much of) atheists. People don’t like us, or at least not yet. If and when we become a larger group to contend with, perhaps the hatred will abate into reluctant tolerance. If we become a majority, Darwin willing, we can’t bloody well hate ourselves, can we?
Let’s not forget.

He’s walking in the middle of the sidewalk, completely clogging it so that you can’t get around him. No, he’s not five feet wide. He’s just a dad.
The double-wide stroller, the scaled-down SUV of parents who have a case of conspicuous consumption, didn’t exist when I was a kid. Is it because people spaced their pregnancies more, or did they have fewer twins due to today’s fertility treatments, or did they make kids who knew how to walk do so? Those were the days.
Parents with double-wide strollers tend to not obey pedestrian traffic rules. Clogging the middle of the sidewalk, rather than on the right– or worse yet, on the left, strolling against you– they are oblivious of the annoyance they cause the rest of us. Sometimes they are trailing small children, exacerbating the problem. And guess what: they assume that you will get out of their way to accommodate their parenthood. That’s just rude on their behalf.
There have been a couple of times when I’ve politely reminded such folks (as well as old people, but that’s a different story) to walk on the right. I shouldn’t have to remind them.
And it doesn’t stop on the sidewalk. It occurred to me once while in a small sushi bar that if a parent were to bring in a double-wide stroller (as opposed to a standard one), it would completely block traffic in the restaurant, forcing diners and staff to do some heavy side-stepping in the obstacle course. Now, a restaurant need not be tiny for this to be a problem. but wait staff really do need to walk around quite a bit, with loaded trays, and a big obstacle and tripping hazard, they don’t need.
I can make a concession. I realize that there are harried parents doing eight things at once and maybe they are oblivious to pedestrian traffic. It would help, though, if they needed a stroller to carry two kids, to simply use the in-line model. They don’t have to impose on us if they don’t want to.
Tangentially, I find the trend of parents putting children in strollers who are much too big to be in a stroller a little disturbing. I’ve seen such kids who are so big that their feet scraped the ground in the stroller. Parents, these kids are old enough to walk. Don’t treat them like cripples.
Try mentioning the double-wide annoyance to an enthusiast and you will probably get the business. They may refuse to address the fact that they walk in the wrong part of the sidewalk, but will probably act like their owning the monstrosity of a vehicle is in the Bill of Rights. “If I want to bring a stroller into a restaurant, that’s my right as a parent!” They will likely say that society should bend the rules to accommodate parents– which it often does– at the expense of other people. Entitled, entitled, entitled.
Double-wide stroller parents usually take such criticism as an attack on parents and on children. Yep, I sure hate children, all right. That’s not true. I love children. I’m just annoyed (or in more serious cases, fucking scared) at the way parents choose their parenting decisions.
“How dare you question my double-wide stroller! You’re not a parent! You can’t understand! You hate children!”
Take a bite out of a reality sandwich, parents.
If you have two babies or young toddlers, you can put them in an in-line stroller. If you must have a double-wide, obey the rules of traffic. Not that hard, right? You don’t have to annoy. You choose to.