SHOULD I BE A DICK?

I will not lie to you, as I write this; the news from the trenches is not encouraging. The enemies of reason are on the march. We are being attacked from all fronts.  Because the struggle is so long and so exhausting some of you might begin to blame your fellow soldier for the slow progress of the entire movement. We must not give in to this, seductive temptation. For, although it seems like our foes have us greatly outnumbered, We have right on our side!..AND WE HAVE A SECRET WEAPON.
If you don’t know, there is war going on in the Freethought community. Skeptics think that Atheists are pushing their message too hard. Atheists are accusing Skeptics of being accommodationist. And everyone just ignores the Humanists because, let’s face it, they don’t know how to get any press anyway. The following is a letter that I have sent to some Freethought and Skeptic magazines:

The debate over whether to be nice or not while practicing Skepticism seems to be missing an important component …numbers. Every facet of the Freethought movement (Skepticism, Atheism and Humanism) seems to have blossomed in the last few years, but honestly none of us can really say that what we are personally doing contributed to this. A survey every ten years reporting how many Americans “believe in evolution” doesn’t cut it.

I put forth a challenge to all sides – STATISTICS AT TWENTY PACES. Let us remember who we are. We are, each of us, scientists at heart. We do not accept a hypothesis merely because it sounds good. We demand proof. I call for a new emphasis on statistics. I call everyone, be you Skeptic, Atheist or Humanist, to go forth and seek out new ways to measure whether what you are doing is having any effect. I for one do not want to waste my time preaching to the choir. I want to accomplish something.

Go ahead and try new things; put up billboards in Georgia, give out vaccinations at comic book conventions, even roll up pages of the Koran and smoke them if you want, but come up with some type of metric beforehand that shows that what you are doing is having an effect. That’s how a scientist would do it. Not by giving a lecture but by timing weighted balls dropped from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. We Freethinkers have a secret weapon in this war against reason. We know numbers don’t lie. In this debate, one side might be right or all sides might be right but we will never know without a way to measure it. Like all of you, I demand proof. I say RELEASE THE ACTUARIES!

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