Just wondering if any of you went to the Reason Rally on Capitol Hill last Saturday. I didn't go. But I went to an atheist meet up last night where a lot of people went. Naturally, they complained about it lol: -10,000 people were there, compared to 20,000 people four years ago -many VIP seats empty, embarrassing -venue poor: at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by the long reflecting pool where MLK delivered his I Have a Dream Speech, which cut the audience in half and made it look like there were even less people. Venue better last time, by Washington Monument and Smithsonian -not enough famous people. Richard Dawkins had a stroke and had to cancel at the last minute, so he just sent a video. Johnny Depp didn't show up due to some abuse scandal. Bill Nye was there though, as was Penn Jillette. -didn't attract to atheist base: many speakers religious people! including representative from Hawaii who's Hindu. It was to gather "reasonable people" i.e. who support separation of church and state whereas last time it was about atheists. -David Silberman was excellent apparently. For example, he had the audience shout out their label i.e. atheist, agnostic, secular humanist. Then he had them all shout out "atheist." "See how much better that sounds?" he said. He got the audience pumped. He was what the whole rally could have been
well this is the furst i hear about it. my biggest what the fuck, is people who swear up and down they're not 'religous', whatever that's supposed to mean, and then turn around and insist no other kind of religious belief is even possible unless it somehow relates to christerism. i'm also annoyed when people don't seem to get, that their responsibilities toward their world, themselves, and each other, are exactly the same, whatever god or gods may or may not happen to exist. i remember panthiea conventions. do they still happen i wonder? i don't think athiest sounds better, because claiming to know something doesn't or can't exist, is no less of a blind and baseless assumption then claiming to know that it does. the honest thing, it seems to me, would be to accept, that no one knows what no one knows. i have my beliefs because they're based on what i experience, but they're not based on names or books or what other people claim their beliefs to be.
