Melbourne’s ‘Global Atheist Convention’. Despite the insistence of some of my academic acquaintances that it will be great and that I should attend (which is kind of comic in itself, for some reason), I don’t think I’m going.

It’s not that I’m explicitly against a gathering of ‘like-minded’ people. Neither is it due to my conditioned response to be disgusted at large groups of people and the bureaucracy that surrounds them. It’s just that there’s only so much that they can be like-minded about, and anything past that would be an unbearable dogmatism. And yet here we have an entire convention of people who think that it is worthwhile.

Irreligiousity is the norm in Australia. Very few attend a church regularly, and even less understand the basic tenets of their beliefs.

Perhaps my fears are that this convention is just going to be a rampant Dawkins wank-fest, emboldening further pseudo-philosophy and idiotic rationalistic dogmatism that comes up every century or so. Such phenomena is often said to spark a revival in faith-based systems, given the choice of either/or that make it simple for those who aren’t believers, but who are uneducated about other ways of looking at things. The best read I’ve had all year (so far!) is a confession-style piece by former New-Ager Karla McLaren about converting from the New-Age movement to a sort of sceptical naturalism; she touches on issues of reactionary cultures better than I ever could.

It’s only since reading that best-seller, The God Delusion, that I’ve grown so distant from this supposed ‘movement’; the ill-defined philosophical terms that floated through the book was one thing (where a first year undergrad understanding of epistemology would have been sufficient), but to actually lambast VOLTAIRE for being a deist…? Voltaire, one of the greatest and boldest humanists and satirists of much religious and superstitious stupidity… this dogmatic ignorance about history, philosophy and even rationalism is inexcusable for anyone with an intellectual conscience.

But to the topic at hand, and put simply and miserly: over one hundred dollars is too much for everyday kids like myself. It is too much for anyone with a slight interest in the subject matter. It is okay for those deeply invested in this stuff, but that means that it will only be a bunch of clever people preaching to the choir.

By the time we’ve developed the ability to read, speak and differentiate between ourselves and others, culture has taken hold. That squishy grey mass in our brains drastically reshapes and remoulds its neural pathways quite drastically during our first decade. As machines who have evolved to learn, the environment that we find ourselves in shapes not only the information that we have access to, but the possible means by which we can encounter it. Knowing what we know now about cognitive development, it’s almost unbelievable that Freud could have had such insight with such little evidence (comparatively, of course): Freud’s Oedipus Complex is to cognitive studies what Copernicus’ heliocentrism was to Newton. We know now that the scope and possibilities available to us for the rest lives can be already predetermined to a large extent at a very early age.

The first episode of South Park’s 13th season not only acknowledges the implicit marketing strategies of so-called ‘tween’ culture, but subtly underlines the parasitic tendency of Christian culture to tap in to and appropriate our most general biologically motivated inclinations.

Sex sells. This is a well-worn advertiser’s slogan, the justification of many advertising campaigns across the ages. Only in recent decades, however, has it been increasingly popular to market sex to a presexual audience who are yet to understand such experiences. Sex does sell. But sex sells better when the target audience is already acquainted with the fundamentals of sexual desire by the time when their bodies are equipped to be influenced by such campaigns.

This understanding is taken (amongst many, many others.. *cough* Funtastic *cough) up by those who produce magazines like Australia’s Total Girl (and the American equivalent, Cosmo Girl) – and of course, as emphasised by the recent South Park, the wide-world of child entertainment embodied by Disney, including such teen icons as The Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus and the High School Musical franchise. According to the allusions of the South Park episode, the supposedly explicit message of sexual conservatism (falling alongside the joys of consumerism) is masking the implicit sexual undertones that permeate the plethora of dolls, songs and advertising campaigns marketed at these pre-pubescents. Selling the notion of sexual conservatism so thoroughly is getting these developing teens to think about and desire sexualisation, while avoiding the undertones of molestation that would otherwise be associated with an explicit marketing tactic (think, for example, of the outrage often caused by parents who deliberately dress their 10 year olds to look ‘sexy’).

Considering the ignorance at which many fundamentalist groups approach sexual education, the damage that such ignorance can cause to individuals and families is no surprise. One only has to think of abusive ministers and priests, or barbaric genital mutilations that can occur. But even the less extreme cases like Ted Haggard’s repressed homosexuality lead one to conclude that these sexual policies might be bit irresponsible.

But this implicit sexual advertising has been promoting the Christian faith from the very outset. In his thoroughly derisive book The Antichrist, Nietzsche pointed out that the very Christian tendency to deride bodily desires and functions as dangerous has been (rather counter-intuitively) one of the reasons that the religion has spread so prominently. The in-your-face anti-sexuality campaigns involved in conservative religious preaching produces even greater sexual desires. Denying our basic functions instead of harnessing them, Christianity has produced beings who build up such a resistance against their bodies that these thoughts are always eating away at their minds – more so than a healthy teenager who isn’t scared to jack it a few times a week – thus reinforcing the belief that such thoughts are dangerous and reinforcing allegiance to the religion.

At one point, the ‘Christian Union’ at my university put up posters with ‘SEX’ written in large bold letters, across half the page. Apparently, they were advertising a campaign to get people to think responsibly about sex. It wasn’t the first thought that came to the minds of people walking past. Not all publicity is good publicity. The so-called ‘new atheist’ movement (Dawkins et al) has also been criticised of throwing believers into a position of either/or: deny any shred of religious experience until it becomes verifiably credible, or recognize the supposed arational nature of their beliefs and move closer to the fundamentalist way of thinking about these things.

Not everyone can be sceptics. Foster doubt where you can. There is no point having expectations that will never be achieved – or worse, lead some to the opposite of what you aim.

It’s hot down here in the lower parts of Australia, with bush fires that have managed to burn up a large portion of the state that I live in. While giant infernos got within a couple of hundred metres to my girlfriend’s farm back home we sit in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, and ash is filling the air from the other large fires that are thankfully much further away.

No one I know has died, but friends of friends have. Death toll is huge. Someone I know had their family home completely destroyed and many others are still threatened. All in all, the atmosphere is uneasy and it’s pretty apparent what a terrible thing has happened over the past week and a bit.

So this is apparently global news (an early Al Jazeera article referred to Gippsland, a large section of the state of Victoria , as a ‘town’ - but it’s the thought that counts). News that’s also spreading around rather quickly is that a previous Family First Candidate (the largest Australian political party that preaches supposed ‘Christian Values’ Danny Nalliah has put the fires down to the work of satanically corrupted individuals that are the result of Victoria’s abortion laws. The media release can be found here.

These types of crazy-ass politically motivated prophesies happen pretty much everywhere there is a natural disaster or a large loss of life. We all hear about them. But it’s not because they’re widespread. There is no rapidly expanding circle of devout fundamentalism devouring the average Australian’s religious inclinations. A huge pool of donations have been collected by charity events, media promotions and corporate donations, not to mention the many religious organisations such as the Salvation Army that do their massive part (almost $50million AUS, last I heard). There’s always only a small batch of these people who prefer to spout a message of anger over the overwhelming majority who preach compassion among people.

So is it that these fundies have louder voices? No doubt that communities who endorse such a message are tightly nit; fundamentalist religious communities, in order to keep their strict readings of texts, are usually pretty self-confined, hostile to outside influences (Yes, Harry Potter will lead your children to pagan religions). A close community speaking with one voice can often evoke a lot of noise.

The other side of the coin is that this sort of message is just disgusting to a majority of people. News like this spreads not because it has a positive message of God that people can hold on to, but the idea that someone can try to sell their religiously motivated political snipes on the suffering of others causes a revolt in the taste of many. Even conservatives like the people at Fox news react this way to such groups. While it’s one thing to ignore/downplay the problem of reconciling the suffering caused by such an event with an all-loving deity, it’s another to think that such carnage can be the result of a completely unrelated political event that the suffering communities were probably not even fully aware of (also, it’s safe to say that most smaller communities scattered across Australia hold associations to some Christian denomination). Even the Old Testament Yahweh would blush at such an accusation.

So as the fundamentalists keep giving themselves a bad name, let’s be thankful that even religious moderates are on the side of us various species of rationalists and naturalists (most of the time). Long live separation between church and state!

And let’s all feel sorry for Danny Nalliah, who probably won’t have many friends left for a while (even former Australian Treasurer Peter Costello has given himself a bit of distance from his old friend).