The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (20 page)

On reflection, everything connected to the campaign artwork went according to plan, and I think I got away with it. As far as I know, nobody laughed and said that the design was the work of an incompetent buffoon who should never be allowed near a computer again. That’s good enough for me. I’m well aware that any number of people could have done the same job to an equal or higher standard, but no one was unkind enough to point that out. No one said much at all really, although a work colleague of mine recently told me how one of the official car stickers I gave him had scared away some Jehova
h’s Witnesses from his front door. If that’s not a positive result, what is?

Chapter 37
The
Little Atoms
Radio Show

N
EIL
D
ENNY

It is an oppressively hot summer evening, but we are immune from the heat outside, sequestered in a cool, air-conditioned basement below the School of Life in Bloomsbury, the philosophical heart of London.
Little Atoms
, the radio show I produce and co-present with Padraig Reidy, has been running for nearly four years now, and we have decided to embark upon a bold and possibly foolhardy experiment. The show is normally broadcast live from the Resonance FM studios, with just a guest, an engineer, and ourselves in the room—but for the purposes of recording tonight’s show, we have hired
a venue and made tickets available, and the writer Jon Ronson has kindly accepted the invitation to be our guest and guinea pig for the evening. We are about to share with an audience the arcane magic that goes into making our radio show. That magic basically consists of two people with hastily scribbled notes talking to a third person, and me periodically pressing stop and start on my MP3 recorder. Still, in the comfort of the studio it is easy to pretend that nobody is actually listening—but there is no such escape today. They are here to listen to us discussing Jon’s latest film,
How to Find God
, which charts the journey of a number of agnostics toward “spiritual salvation” through the medium of the Alpha Course. The tickets for the interview were snapped up within twenty-four hours of being made available, and we have a waiting list for cancellations. An air of expectancy fills the room.

The seeds of the idea that became the
Little Atoms
radio show were sown in a pub garden by London Bridge on the afternoon of July 7, 2005, while I and a skeptic named Richard Sanderson waited for the trains to start running again. Richard and I had been introduced by a mutual friend, and we had been going along to Skeptics in the Pub together on a regular basis. Both lifelong atheists, we had often discussed working together on a radio show about science and rationalism. That afternoon we discussed how, while London came to terms with the fact that it was once again the target of terrorist
bombs, nominally progressive commentators had already begun to pontificate online that the blame for these lay with the government. The idea that
this might have been the personal responsibility of individual religious extremists was anathema to them.

This response served as the final catalyst. We decided that very afternoon to create a show that would actively promote the intellectual legacy of the Enlightenment and would defend freedom of expression, free enquiry, empirical rationalism, skepticism, the scientific method, secular humanism, and liberal democracy. At the same time the show would cast a critical eye over the
bien-pensants
who automatically attribute all the world’s ills to the actions of “the West,” over the purveyors of religious dogma, superstition, and magic potions, over those nostalgic for totalitarianism
, and over the adherents of deranged conspiracy theories.

We pitched the idea to Resonance FM, suggesting ourselves as balance to
The Headroom
, a syndicated show presented by a UFOlogist, which was at the time their most popular show—and so, in September 2005,
Little Atoms
was born. In August 2006 Padraig joined the show as a presenter, having previously been a guest. Over the past four years we have been joined by an array of interviewees, including Christopher Hitchens, Jonathan Meades, Noam Chomsky, Ann Druyan, Alain de Botton, Adam Curtis, Julie Burchill, Marcus du Sautoy, Francis Wheen, and Richard Holloway, as well as quite a few of the
contributors to this book.

So far, the night has been a great success. Much wine has been consumed, Jon is in great form as usual, our questions have been reasonably erudite, and the audience is laughing along with the interview. We take a brief pause so that I can think of how to phrase a link to the next part of the interview. Jon surveys the room, thanks everyone for coming, and then declares, “I’m really excited to see this cornucopia of skeptic celebrities in the room . . . it’s like a kind of skeptical heaven!”

We should probably take a few moments at this point to discuss the tenets of skepticism. What do people who self-identify as skeptics actually believe? Aren’t they just, well, skeptical?

It clearly isn’t practical for us to live our lives questioning everything. As somebody wise once said, “If you’re too open-minded, your brain will fall out.” There are distinct parameters and techniques that can be learned to help us lead a more skeptical life. Let’s look at a few examples of things that a skeptic should (and shouldn’t) be skeptical about.

A skeptic is skeptical about paranormal phenomena: the existence of a God or gods and the afterlife; creation and reincarnation; ghosts and spooky visitations; psychic phenomena such as extrasensory perception,
remote viewing, and fortune-telling; the supposed ability of a medium to communicate with your dead grandmother or hamster; or the ability of a “psychic soldier” to stare a goat to death.

A skeptic is open-minded about the possibility of life on other planets but is also quite confident that midwesterners and their cattle are safe from the invasive medical practices of Venusians. Likewise, a skeptic is not convinced by shaky camera footage of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster.

A skeptic worries about the rise of alternative medicine and its use within the National Health Service, the efficacy of magnet therapy, reflexology or crystal healing above and beyond the placebo effect, homeopathic malaria pills, chiropractic cures for childhood ailments, or the use of vitamin C as the sole treatment for AIDS.

Nonetheless, a skeptic should also be skeptical about the sharp practices employed by big business, the drug, tobacco, and oil industries; about the fake “controversies” invented by advertising, PR, and government spin; and about the mass media and its selection bias and love of fake “experts” and food gurus.

But a true skeptic should also have a keen nose for bogus skepticism, which often manifests itself in the form of conspiracy theories.

Why oppose conspiracy theories? Isn’t it the province of the skeptic to be skeptical about man landing on the moon? Or of HIV being the cause of AIDS? Or of MMR being a safe vaccine? What about the crackpot idea that “nineteen men living in a cave in Afghanistan” could have had the nous to bring down the World Trade Center? Or that life on earth could have evolved through natural selection?

The key variable to note here is evidence. True skeptics have at their disposal an amazing array of tools that have been honed by great thinkers across many civilizations down through the ages—tools like the scientific method, controlled experiments, and double-blind testing. The skeptic learns, in the words of Carl Sagan, “to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument . . . [and to] recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric.”

(Much more of this can be seen in the chapter “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection,” from Sagan’s magisterial book
The Demon-Haunted World
—if you don’t happen to own it, you should put down this book right now and go and buy it!)

The other key point to note is that, unlike with the dogmatic belief system of the religious zealot or the conspiracy theorist, if at some point in the future compelling scientific evidence comes along, say, for the existence of God or chakras or Nessie, then skeptics will be obliged to change their mind.

After the interview there is a lively question-and-answer session with the audience, and then a group of us retire to a local pub. I ponder what Jon had said earlier about the skeptical luminaries in the room. It occurs to me that while the observation he made was correct, a large number of these people are also my close friends. We regularly socialize together and attend each other’s events and meetings. Is this really suggestive of a growing interest in skeptical thinking among the wider public? The inner skeptic in me wonders if we could be just a small group of self-aggra
ndizing obsessives who constantly reinforce our own belief system to each other. Is there actually any evidence that this stuff matters to people?

To answer that question: the past couple of years have seen a number of significant initiatives, events, and happenings in the skeptical world.

Most people reading this book will be aware of the spate of best-selling books on atheism that have hit the shelves in recent years. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in particular, both well-respected writers in their own fields, have written hard-hitting books on God and religion that have massively outsold most of their previous work.

To top off a year that saw the Atheist Bus Campaign, many successful Skeptics in the Pub meetings, and the Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People concerts, now to become an annual Christmas fixture, October 2009 saw the first London iteration of the Amazing Meeting, the yearly conference of skeptical thinking run under the umbrella of the James Randi Educational Foundation. This two-day conference, featuring talks given by some of the world’s leading rationalists, was attended by around 500 people, and had sold out within twenty-four hours of tickets going on sale.

One setback for skeptics this year has been the ruling by Lord Justice Eady in the libel case pitting the British Chiropractic Association against Simon Singh. Eady held that by using the word
bogus
in a
Guardian
comment article to describe the
BC
A’s promotion of chiropractic for the treatment of a number of childhood ailments, Singh was stating as a matter of fact that the
BC
A were being consciously dishonest. As this was not what Simon had been arguing, it made his position difficult to defend. At the time of this writing, Simon had made the decision to appeal.

However, even this disappointing ruling has seen a positive and optimistic outcome: the science advocacy group Sense About Science launching a campaign called “Keep Libel Laws Out of Science.” An online petition received 15,000 signatures within a few days, including a large number of prominent people from the arts and media as well as scientists and skeptics. At the same time, a loose coalition of science bloggers began to closely investigate the claims of their loc
al chiropractors, which saw a large number reported to local trading standards departments, an action that caused a rival chiropractic association to claim without irony that they were victims of a “witch-hunt.”

The examples above seem to me to be ample evidence of two things: first, that there is a huge appetite for atheism, skepticism, and rational thinking out there, and second, that we organizers of skeptical events need to start booking bigger venues! Indeed, the very fact that you have bought this book and are reading these words suggests as much. Of course, as a skeptic, I’m willing to accept that I could be wrong, and that perhaps the only people who are reading my words are the same people who sat in that basement back in the summer. If this is indeed the case, then happy Christmas, friends! I’
ll see you all in the New Year for a pint.

Chapter 38
James Randi: The Real Santa Claus

S
ID
R
ODRIGUES

I have very, very religious parents. Our family originates from the west coast of India, where the surname Rodrigues gives you a clue as to the Portuguese colonization that took place in the sixteenth century. All my ancestors were Hindus, and the Hindu caste system in India is very rigid—you’re born into it and can never ascend or descend within the system or marry outside of it.

At the time, there were only two ways to get out of the caste system: either you could pretend that you weren’t from that caste, or you could convert to Christianity. The first option didn’t work particularly well, because you’d have to try to hide away from your past, and it could always come back to haunt you—particularly if you wanted to get married and had to prove you weren’t illegitimate.

So in the sixteenth century a lot of Hindus on the west coast, including my family, converted to Catholicism (hence my real name being Simon-Peter, not Sid). I went to a very Catholic school where we were called by our surname, but at the age of five, most couldn’t pronounce “Rodrigues,” and unfortunately there were a few others in the class called Simon or Peter! (Not to be confused with Peter Simon, the eighties kids’ television presenter of such compelling Saturday morning shows as
Double Dare
.) So in the end, my first name was shortened to Sid, and I’ve been called that ever since.

My Catholic primary school was full of teachers who were great fun, and the good thing about going to a Catholic school was that we always got lots of time off for a quick pray in the mornings, and went to mass on what seemed like random occasions, which were actually feast days. As I hadn’t thought about it much at the time, I went along with all the religious procedures and prayed a lot.

Then, when I was about twelve, I developed a keen interest in magic and conjuring, and was also a bit of a science nerd. Predictably, I was transfixed by a program on television called
Psychic Investigator
, which featured a magician called James Randi. I never missed an episode, and loved to watch the Amazing Randi apply science to all these “psychics,” like Uri Geller, who purported to have magical powers. I hadn’
t thought you could test psychics, but James showed you exactly how the scientific testing worked, and so my interest in skepticism began.

At the end of the series, because I’d enjoyed the show so much, I took the initiative. The show’s producers had brought out a book, and I rushed out and bought it with my pocket money. In the back of the book there was information on a challenge offering a $10,000 prize for anyone who could demonstrate paranormal powers under scientific conditions, so I wrote to the address printed there on the off chance that James Randi might write back. That letter started off a correspondence across the Atlantic that has lasted for nineteen years.

A few years after we started writing, we got onto the subject of God. James knew about my Christian upbringing straightaway, because my name lent a clue that I was from a Christian family, and asked, “Are you Catholic?” Even though he’d clearly worked it out from my name, at the time I thought he’d managed to read my mind. I explained that yes, I was a Catholic, because I’d been brought up that way. He never questioned this, but occasionally he would point to different bits of the Bible and say, “Does that make sense to you?” I know now that he was teaching me to think for myself.

Once James had got the ball rolling, I started to do my own research, and slowly stopped believing. However, because of my family, I can still fully understand that religious belief is extremely comforting. It also involves a significant emotional and financial investment over the years. The older you are, the more of your life you’ve invested as a believer, and if you decide to give it all up a long way into your life, it probably makes you feel a bit daft. Because I was so young, I had none of this baggage to hinder me.

A lot of people I know who are atheists have parents who weren’t really that bothered about religion, but if your parents are devout, it’s much harder to make that leap. I don’t know what mine made of these letters from James Randi—they either thought it was a bit odd or decided it was quite nice that I had a new friend. I really looked forward to his letters, which would always turn up on different types of novelty paper. One would look to be printed on a crumpled sheet of paper; another would be printed on the back of the final draft version of his latest book’s glossy dust jacket.
Every time I received a letter, it would be like Christmas all over again.

I was pen pals with James throughout my teens, but I’d entered university before I met him for the first time. I received an e-mail from him saying: “What are you doing at the weekend? I’m in Bristol, and am heading up to Oxford to meet a friend and do a talk there. I know it’s quite close to London, so is there any chance you could meet me in Oxford? We’ll sort you out a hotel there, or you could stay at Richard’s place—I’ll give you his number.” I was incredibly excited
. I had no idea who the “Richard” he was referring to was, but duly booked my ticket and arrived in Oxford. I needed to get directions, so I called the number he’d given me and talked to the man on the other end. It was only once I had hung up that I realized I had been speaking with none other than Richard Dawkins!

I went to a pub to have some lunch and a beer before setting off on the second leg of my journey. As I was sitting at the table, it dawned on me that today I was going to meet two of my heroes. As I left and started the walk to Richard’s house, I started getting really nervous. I knocked on the door, my stomach churning, and his personal assistant answered and asked, “Can I help you?” I was a gibbering wreck and couldn’t even speak. “You must be Sid, then,” she said. “Come on in—they’re both here!”

It was both bizarre and wonderful, as James Randi and Richard were both very welcoming. James was nearly seventy by then, and his honesty and open-mindedness made a great impression on me, since he always said exactly what he thought. I sat and listened to him, Richard, and Richard’s wife, Lalla, talk about science and skepticism, but I was so in awe I barely said a word all weekend.

Their talk was the most memorable skeptical event I’d ever been to, and it was one of the best weekends of my life, spent over pasta and science. I remember getting progressively drunk on wine, but, thankfully, I don’t remember saying anything silly. I arrived home startled by how scientists and skeptics could encapsulate everything I’d been thinking in such a clear and succinct manner. I had been completely won over.

A short while later, while I was still at university in London, I stumbled across an event called Skeptics in the Pub—which just happened to take place just over the bridge from where I was studying. If I wasn’t such a skeptic, I’d say it was serendipitous. Skeptics in the Pub was run by an Australian named Scott Campbell, who had come up with the idea of organizing monthly meetings for people interested in skepticism, and it soon became one of my unmissable events. A few years after I began attending, Scott handed the night over to a guy called Nick Puller, who ran it for five years
before moving to Hungary, at which point the reins were handed over to me. I’ve now been organizing and running it for the past two years, in which time it’s grown from a forty-to-sixty-person meet-up to what
Time Out
has certified as “probably the world’s biggest pub meeting.”

The first thing I did when I took over was to move it to the biggest function room I could find: the Penderel’s Oak in Holborn. It holds up to 300 people and is often packed. I run the night once a month, but sometimes we’ll put on a special extra night at short n
otice if a notable skeptic is in town and likes the idea, as we can spread the word quickly through Facebook and Twitter.

It doesn’t always go smoothly, and there’s even rumored to be a “curse of Skeptics in the Pub”! At one of the first events I went to in Waterloo, ten minutes into the speaker’s talk, there was an electrical short because of a road digger outside, and the whole pub was plunged into darkness. Someone smelled burning, and we realized that a small flame was slowly illuminating the back of the bar where a fridge had caught alight, so the whole pub had to be evacuated. A couple of people arrived late and tried to get into the pub, and the landlord said, “I’m sorry, but the pub’s burning down—you’
ll have to come back next week!”

Then, when we moved to Holborn, a speaker was halfway through a talk when a waitress ran downstairs and said, “I’ve got an announcement to make—does anyone own a car with the following registration number?” Nobody did, so she scuttled away, only to come back five minutes later and say, “Sorry, we’ve got to evacuate the whole building, because there’s a bomb alert and the police are cordoning off the whole road!” So, ironically, they led us outside, straight past the dodgy suspected bomb car—if they’d left us in the basement, we’d have been a lot safer!

Until around two years ago, London was one of the only venues for Skeptics in the Pub, but then I gently persuaded my long-distance partner, Rebecca, to open one up in Boston, Massachusetts—and now they’re all over the place. There are nearly thirty regular events in the UK, the United States, and Australia, furthering rational thinking across the world.

Meeting Rebecca was one of the best things about becoming a skeptic. James Randi has a conference in the United States called The Amaz!ng Meeting (T
AM
), and I was lucky enough to be invited to the first one, where a lot of brilliant skeptics from around the world shared stories and had a laugh together. A few years later, T
AM
4 took place in Las Vegas, and on the first day I met my future wife. We went out in the sun and made all the delegates’ name tags and had a chat, and because the weather was so hot she jumped fully clothed into the swimming pool—I immediately fell in love. Bec
ause we met at T
AM
4 in Vegas, we decided it would be fitting to get married at T
AM
7, which also took place in Vegas, and so in July 2009 we tied the knot in front of all of our fellow skeptics, like one big skeptical family. Our wedding video is on the intertubes, and Jon Ronson comically called us the John and Yoko of skepticism. (He’d originally called us the Brangelina of skepticism, so it was a vast improvement.)

Letters have given way to e-mail and Skype, but I will always be grateful to my bearded skeptical Santa Claus, the Amazing Randi—because without him, none of this would ever have happened.

SID’S TOP TIPS FOR GETTING INVOLVED IN SKEPTICISM

It’s predictable, but I’d say that if you can, try to get to Skeptics in the Pub. In the UK, there are monthly events in London, Oxford, Leicester, Leeds, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Edinburgh, so you’ll never have to feel alone in your skepticism again.

If you can’t get to those, there’s always the James Randi Educational Foundation message boards and the UK Skeptics message boards, and there’s also a great forum at richarddawkins.net. Richard Dawkins even joins in the discussions on his forums sometimes.

Read books on skepticism, such as Ben Goldacre’s
Bad Science
, Richard Wiseman’s
Quirkology,
Phil Plait’s
Death from the Skies—
and, of course, anything by James Randi, who now contributes to an online blog called Swift, which is published at www.randi.org.

Join the British Humanist Association or the National Secular Society, as they have lots of local area groups you can join. Humanism and secularism are different from skepticism, but both types of group will be made up of rational people who believe in the natural world rather than the supernatural. You can also look on meetup.com for nearby groups in your location.