The Uncertainty Convention

A Facebook update alerted me to a local billboard for an Atheist Convention. With no ax to grind, my buddy Kurt wrote that this convention seemed...odd.

I imagine him asking in his whiny, Bowery Boys wise-guy voice, "What do they talk about at an Atheist Convention? Disgust with mono-theism?.

From his Facebook update:

If you went to a convention for people who didn't like Star Trek, what would you talk about? How much you hate Star Trek?

I suspect well-adjusted people would not bother convening to discuss something they hate. People convene for many reasons. People have to convene. It's animal nature to get together to shoot the shit. A geneticist could probably isolate a gene for packs, tribes, and cabals in animal DNA.

Like-minded people convene to connect, share stories, imbibe, and to feel the love of tribalism.

Atheists tend to be attuned to, and appreciative of, the physical world. As it happens, being attuned to the physical world gives atheists plenty to talk about. Ahem...starting with the known universe.

I dismiss certainty in most realms. I respect conviction, but only if it is conviction associated with ideas that make common sense, or support the common good.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
 ― Albert Einstein

I am uncomfortable with dogmatic anything. I am uncomfortable with dogmatic atheists. And I am very uncomfortable with dogmatic theists. The people closest to me are not theists, but if a theist strikes me as otherwise simpatico, I cultivate common ground before I wave buh-bye at the edge of the superstition abyss. 

I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.
― Woody Allen

Human-conjured deities that take on the metaphoric image of man repulse me.

The whole of nature, the living world, is much more sublime than the human species. We are familiar with the shortcomings of man. It takes a lifetime to know the profound beauty, and ruthless efficiency, of the living world.

When atheists respect my uncertainty, they are, generally speaking, easier to converse with than theists. Like atheists, I too am attuned to, and appreciative of, the physical world.

My convention is The Uncertainty Convention. Would you attend The Uncertainty Convention?

I wouldn't want to go to the expense of a billboard if you weren't going to show up.