Cold comfort

There was no “Welcome Michigan Atheists” sign outside the Ann Arbor Best Western Plaza.
Not that it would have been visible.

It was tempting to infer divine displeasure from a lot of things that happened at the 2008 Michigan Atheists convention on Saturday, Dec. 6, beginning with the weather. All morning, furious sheets of snow whipped the bumper stickers in the parking lot: “Darwin Loves You.” “Hell Don’t Scare Me, Pat Robertson Do.” “When Religion Ruled, We Called It The Dark Ages.”

At least I knew I was in the right place.

If you wanted to gum a warm gingersnap, shop a decked-out mall or sway in a pew with the faithful, you were out of luck here.

Inside the hotel, about 70 non-believers, mostly from central or lower Michigan, gathered in a suite of drab, drafty rooms, sipping bitter coffee. It was a rare dose of December reality, and that’s the way the Michigan Atheists like it.

Atheists and adversity seem to go together, like St. Lawrence the martyr and a hot grill.
In the early afternoon, during the screening of a film, a ceiling light socket burst open and water poured into the auditorium. Later, during an awards ceremony, the American Atheists logo (an atom cut off at the bottom to make a big “A”) fell off the wall.

The hardy freethinkers took perverse delight in each new omen.

“It’s a sign,” snickered several members as somebody scrambled to put the logo back up.
To kick off the convention, Ed Brayton, president of Michigan Citizens for Science, treated the unfaithful to a prickly defense of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Brayton mocked the panicky posture of self-appointed defenders of faith — the folks who see no harm in putting a manger in front of a courthouse.

“The war on Christmas seems to start earlier every year,” Brayton quipped.

He told the group that longstanding legislative efforts to put creationism into the state’s science curriculum were quiet for now, owing to a 2006 change in committee chairmanships and an enlightened school board.

Only a few of those present were ACLU members, but Brayton’s talk dovetailed with the Michigan Atheists’ statement of purpose, summarized as “defending atheists’ civil rights” and “the complete and absolute separation of state and church,” according to a newsletter distributed to members.
Michigan Atheists Director Arlene-Marie (she doesn’t use a last name) estimated that there are about 2,000 members in the Michigan group, which held its first state convention in 1984. She said the day’s attendance of 71 was “about average for this event.”

Arlene-Marie said the group has come a long way from being “hated, feared and mocked” to unprecedented media attention and public curiosity, fueled in part by “bulging shelves” of popular books validating atheism.

The jolliest man in the room was the convention’s only huckster: Steve Jaqua of Ann Arbor, standing proudly behind his brainchild, a new board game he calls “Blasphemy.”

“It’s a race to the cross,” he explained.

One large die (the “holy roller”) sends two to four rival saviors on a treacherous, winding path laden with elaborate and sarcastic references to the Old Testament.

The goal is to collect flocks, throngs and multitudes, make it into Jerusalem and ascend the cross.
“It’s a faith-based game,” Jaqua said. “Anytime he’s out of faith, he’s out of the game.”

Engineers seemed to make up a large proportion of the group. Douglas Campbell of Ferndale, a recently laid-off electrical engineer at General Motors, said he doesn’t come to all the annual meetings, and found some of the day’s speeches “redundant,” but still likes to check in every so often.

“I’m not an evangelical atheist,” Campbell said. Not that he’s bashful. He proudly took part in the 2002 Godless Americans’ March on Washington, D.C.

“People ask me how far out of the closet I am,” he said. “I tell them, ‘C-Span.’”

Throughout the day, assistant state director George Shiffer, an octogenarian from Allen Park, made the rounds of the room. With a silver mop of hair and red suspenders, he looked like Clarence Darrow rehearsing for the Scopes monkey trial.

Shiffer has been in the Michigan group 10 years. He shares his colleagues’ concern over church-state miscegenation, but there’s something else that really sacrifices his goat.

“They scare the hell out of small children, that they’re going to burn in hell forever,” he said. “I think it’s a crime. Only in religion can they abuse children and get away with it.”

One guest speaker, avowed ex-Jew and anti-circumcision crusader Norm Cohen, showed the group a slide of himself, as a boy, standing next to his father, a rabbi.

“I’m speaking today as a former slave,” Cohen said.

Cohen gave the group a break from fuming over mangers on courthouse squares, excoriating Judaism as a “destructive group fantasy.”

“I am defined by my actions, not my parentage or heritage,” Cohen said.

When it came to apostasy, he scorned half-measures.

“You don’t have to say, ‘I’m a secular Jew’ or ‘I’m a humanist Jew,’” he said. “You can just stop being a Jew.”

Despite the day’s odd glitches and the edgy rhetoric, the only really uncomfortable moment in the day came just after Cohen’s speech, courtesy of a Lansing visitor to the convention.

Spike Tyson, a familiar figure at state Capitol protests against the Iraq war, sparred with Cohen over the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. Tyson said the number was closer to two and a half million, not six.

Cohen and the following speaker, American Atheists legal director Edward Kagin, hastened to condemn “Holocaust denial.”

Tyson was unmoved. “Nonsense is nonsense,” he muttered as he left the microphone.
It wasn’t the warmest group, to be sure. I only saw one hug all day, when Arlene-Marie embraced her friend Kagin, the lawyer, before his talk, the day’s last.

Kagin probably needed a hug. He has the unenviable job of keeping the atheist flag flying in his hometown of Union, Ky.

Swaddled in lawyerly tweeds, Kagin admitted he felt overdressed. He could have given the group a constitutional lecture worthy of Laurence Tribe, but as the day’s final speaker, he resolved to send the members out with a smile.

“Get it out of your head that a small group of atheists can fight all the Six-Flags-Over-Jesus types in this country,” Kagin said. “But we can laugh at them.”

He invited Michiganders to visit his home and check out the Creation Museum, only 15 minutes away.

“It’s worse than you think,” he said.  “They’ve got a barefoot, pregnant Eve.”

Kagin’s slide show was a combination of travel night at the community center and “Religulous.”
His wife, Helen, kept popping up in odd places.

“Here’s Helen in the Judaean desert,” Kagin said. “Here’s Helen in her office.”

A slide of a Nazi belt buckle reading “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) was a big hit. Kagin drew a gasp or two, even in this crowd, by flashing a slide of a crude stick figure cartoon labeled “Mohammed.”

At that point, a pair of small batteries in my pocket — meant to used as a spare for my camera — completed a circuit with my car keys. Hot stigmata stung my right thigh. Recalling St. Lawrence and the grill, I fled the room and turned my pockets out into the hallway.

When the spirit moves, you move with it.