Whatever you thought about Wesley Crusher, Wil Wheaton has grown up to be pretty awesome. He's been a great advocate for all things nerd/geek, especially for my preferred area of geekdom, table top[1] gaming.
He recently further proved it when a woman asked him to tell her daughter (who based on the context appears to be either quite young or not yet born) why it's awesome to be a nerd, and this happened.
My love for table top gaming has its roots with my father. I don't recall ever engaging in the stereotypical father-son bonding experience, playing catch in the yard. Our version of that was games like Risk & Trivial Pursuit.
It was through this experience where I learned a great number of things. It was there I learned how to lose gracefully. He never let me win these games, and the way I knew he never let me win was because I never won. He had confidence in my ability to know the value of earning your own victories and trusted that I wouldn't like it if I he let me win and that I could learn from defeat.
The reason we[1] couldn't beat him in strategy games was because of his intelligence. He was a computer programmer in the 80s, before GUIs or the Internet. Before being a nerd was popularized and was closer to the characters portrayed in Revenge of the Nerds than Chris Hardwick[2]. Closer to Bill Gates than Mark Cuban.
When I was 4, he left that career to join the Air Force, who eventually sent him to the Naval Post Graduate School to earn a Masters degree in an area where even the title of the degree was confusing to me. I never fully knew what he did in the Air Force because the half of his job that wasn't classified was over my head. I know that he did something with communications and once got a process that took 12 hours down to a few minutes.
I've aced nearly every math class I've ever taken, without even trying. But after my father died, I found some of his math text books and they were ridiculously complex and confusing.
I got a great deal of my ability to think analytically from my father. Some was certainly genetically inherited, but it also came from him teaching us to think critically. We didn't play games labeled as "educational", but we did play games that required thinking strategically. My thought process often thinks several steps ahead of the present. I'm confident that I have my father to thank for that.
He's been gone nearly 4 years and I still find myself wanting his opinion on things. I never got to see his reaction to things like the Tea Party, our first Black President, or the former's insane reaction to the latter.
I've since evolved to slightly more complicated games like Settlers of Catan[3], Puerto Rico[4], Twilight Imperium[5], etc. It makes me sad that I'll never be able to share most of these games with him. Especially Catan, as I think I could actually beat him in it. Probably not Puerto Rico though, as I did get the chance to lose to him in that.
My father was one of the smartest people I've ever known. And he was a Christian.
I frequently see atheists making blanket statements about Christians, saying they're all stupid. And even when challenged on it, they often stick by the generalization. If that is you, then you're my target audience for this letter.
When you do that, you hurt the cause. Calling them all stupid does nothing to convince those on the fence that there's something worthwhile on our side of the fence. All you accomplish with that behavior is the creation & reinforcement of the negative stereotype about us that we're all arrogant dicks.
By treating them all like shit, you alienate potential Christian allies like my father would have been. Not only that, but you offend people like me, who have had Christians in our lives who we loved and respected, who we wish were still here.
You make my job as an activist more difficult. Christians are the majority. We cannot preserve things like the Separation of Church and State without their help.
Please stop calling them all stupid. Go ahead and call individuals stupid when they are, or point out trends if they're valid. Go ahead and criticize the beliefs as irrational, as they typically are. But it's important that we don't alienate ourselves from a large portion of the population when we have giant hurdles to cross to even be accepted as normal or trustworthy. They could just as easily take the side of the Fundamentalists they share a holy book with. Let's show them our side is the right one and not give them any more reason to hate us than the Fundamentalists already do.
Plus, saying they're all stupid is flat out not true[6][7].
The "TL;DR" version of the above is: Please stop calling all Christians stupid. It's not true, and saying it makes us look like assholes.
I've mentioned before that I love Chick Tracts. They're hilarious. In a recent conversation about gaming, someone linked to one. This is a perfect example of why I love these things. It perfectly demonstrates how clueless these people are.
They have the roles reversed here. A DM doesn't tell a player what they player is going to do. The player tells the DM what they want to and the DM tells the player if it was successful.
"I declare her dead"? The DM is a referee in the game, not a god.
Was Elfstar a Cleric or a Witch? Make up your damn mind.
Do these people think magic is real?
Is she playing D&D alone?
If she killed herself over a dead character in a game, she had problems way beyond anything D&D could affect, even if it were like these people seem to think it is.
I thought they had moved her growth out of the game? If they're doing real magic, why are they still worried about their characters? Plus, wasn't Elfstar a level 8 Cleric? She was only 1 level away from being able bring Marcie back.
Wait, did D&D give Debbie/Elfstar a split personality?
Yeah, Debbie that's the best way to get out of a cult. Join a new cult.
What's the lesson we're supposed to get from this comic? What I get from it is that D&D can result in real world magical powers and if you're stupid enough to want to give that up, you can do so by talking to a guy with a creepy porn 'stache.
I never actively sought out an atheist group to join. When I joined the Omaha Atheists Facebook group, it was one of many atheist pages/groups I had liked/joined that day. I didn't put enough thought into it to even realize it was a group who met in person. I just joined the Facebook group & forgot about it.
A little bit later, I got an invite to the Facebook event for their New Member Meetup. I was free then & curious, so i decided to check it out. My first regular event was the May 21 (End of the World) picnic. I was welcomed as part of the group immediately. And it wasn't in that creepy cultish, "We're going to pretend to be nice until we dull your senses to the brainwashing that's coming" kind of way I get when I visit some churches.
It was a sincere welcoming that has persisted since. It's done so because it's a community. Several of my favorite people in the world are in that group, and I haven't even known them that long. And many of them are people I could have already known but did not. Many are gamers, like me. So, we now have a monthly Game Night, and many of us meet more often to play the games we enjoy together. Some worked at the same company as me, for as long as I have.
They're not just random people who happen to be in the same group as me. They're my closest friends. They're like family. Many of them helped me move, without me even having to ask. I've done the same for many of them. It's a support structure, for both problems relating to religion and otherwise, both online and in person. We've gone on vacations together, including sending more than 20 people to the Reason Rally. We've also gone camping together multiple times, visited Kansas City to party with some KCAC folks, and gone to Skepticon as a group.
We have so much going on, with 3 events that each recur monthly and many more things going on, that we don't often go more than a week seeing each other. And when we do go a week without seeing someone, it is noticed and they're told they've been missed. Even with all the events, we still see each other on a regular basis in between them.
Like I said, we're a community. It's a community I've not even been a part of 2 years yet, but it's certainly one I wouldn't want to go without.
As much as I care for Omaha Atheists, and the people of it, I don't think they're entirely unique. I also think it's a good thing that we're not unique. Hundreds of local atheist groups exist around the country and the world. I've seen similar community from the other local groups I've interacted with so far.
We're at a point where even just simply participating in an atheist group is itself activism. It does a lot to normalize atheism. I don't mean the groups make being atheist normal, as I already think it's normal. But it's, sadly, not viewed that way by many people. These groups provide the perfect evidence to show people they're wrong about us. We're just like them, except for that one thing, and they already like us. One excellent example of what I mean by this was given by JT Eberhard in his submission to the We Are Atheism project.
If you haven't found a group, I hope you will give it a try. They can be found in a variety of ways.
See if your area has a Coalition of Reason, by visiting their website and using the tool they have right on the front page. If your area has one, it will give you a list of the atheist groups in your area.
Meetup.com - Log in and search for groups in your area. Searching for atheist usually does the trick, but some places do use other terms for their names such as "freethinkers", "secularists", "rationalists", "skeptics", "humanists".
Use the same search options I gave for Meetup in a Google search.
If you find your town doesn't have one, please start one. It's incredibly easy to do, and your town (depending on its size) probably has more atheists other than just you. Even though it often feels like you're the only one. The Atheist Community of Austin was started with an ad in the newspaper. But at the time, they didn't have such effective resources available via the Internet. Start Meetup and/or Facebook group, and grow from there.
I am often a moderately cynical person. But I do think it's important to make a point to be thankful for the good bits of life. Thanksgiving Day seems like an appropriate time to do that.
So, here's a short list of things I'm thankful for:
My Parents - They were/are Christian, but they did teach me critical thinking. I've always been atheist, and they knew it before I did. But they never tried to shame me over it, and they never used the despicable indoctrination tactics used by fundamentalists. We only rarely said a prayer before meals, and we certainly didn't today.
Omaha Atheists - I'm not someone who makes friends easily, and for most of my life, I've felt alone in being a nonbeliever. Just by joining an atheist group, both of those problems have simply disappeared. I'm thankful to have met this community of such wonderful, intelligent, caring people. Now I get to focus on other problems (of which the world and I have plenty more).
Table Top Games - Games like Settler of Catan, etc, provide a fun way to exercise the brain, while also socializing with friends. I'm thankful for the people who created these games as well as the people I get to share them with.
Indoor Plumbing - For millions of years, we shit outside. Toilet paper didn't exist. By comparison, the time since we first used the first remedial indoor toilets and toilet paper is relatively short. Even shorter for the time since flush toilets and rolls of toilet paper. Not only does it let us do our business without going outside in Winter, it also makes our society a whole lot more sanitary.
My life has been pretty heavy on the atheism in the last year, especially since the Reason Rally. But it's not my entire life. For instance, last weekend was Nuke-Con, a gaming convention that's been in Omaha for 10 years. but I hadn't heard of it until this year.
I was looking forward to it this weekend both because I love table-top gaming and because it was something secular, nothing to do with religion. It's nice to step back from all the drama of politics and activism every once in a while. That's not to say I have any desire to stop being an activist. I absolutely have no desire to stop my activism. Besides, even if I wanted to, I don't think my conscience would ever allow it.
Then I get there and see this.
I'm torn. On one hand, I am annoyed with the Christian insistence on pushing their religion in every venue they can. But on the other, I'm considering copying the marketing method. Especially since, with the gaming community as an audience, I suspect atheists would get more return on investment than Christians.
