The weekend of the non-believers

Everyone had a story to tell.

Dawkins wasn’t one of them. He was conspicuous by his absence for the most of the weekend, through no fault of his own. He was out here under the auspices of his publisher and was run off his feet for two weeks with appearances all over Australia and even New Zealand. Just about everywhere he went, writers’ festivals, Melbourne Town Hall, media interviews, ABC TV’s Q & A, he was dogged by the word “strident”. “Wouldn’t you get your message across more effectively if you weren’t so strident? interrogator after interrogator would ask. And Dawkins, in his quiet, well modulated, gentle tone, which immediately gave the lie to the questioner’s premise, would patiently explain that he was respectful of other peoples’ views and always listened to them carefully and tried to confront them at the level of evidence and argument without rancour or voice-raising. “Strident” and “atheist”, he remarked seem to have become inextricably linked in the public vocabulary, so that you don’t seem to be able to use one without the other.

This was demonstrated during the questions after Dawkins’ talk, when one of the questioners identified herself as a Christian. Some people in the audience were tempted to shout her down but Dawkins silenced them and insisted she be heard, listened respectfully, and gave a detailed answer to her question.

In contemporary social commentary “strident atheist” has become a meme, that is an idea that replicates itself like a virus through a culture, irrespective of its truth or falsity. Ironically, it was a term originally coined by Dawkins himself to explain the prevalence of religion.

Dawkins’ presentation on Sunday afternoon was the culmination of the Convention, what everyone had been waiting for, and people were hanging on his every word, but although the adulation was there, in some senses it was not the emotional climax, not the rousing exhortation, the impassioned call to arms, that some had expected. Dawkins spoke of the gratitude we should feel for our good fortune in being the products of an evolutionary process that could have so easily not resulted in us, then posed the question, “gratitude to whom?” He then discussed how at first human gratitude was directed towards imagined gods, but as human’s evolved they came to realise that this was not justified and their gratitude is more and more turning towards the universe itself, and our duty to nurture and care for those parts of it within our power.

Perhaps the emotional high point of the Convention was the presentation by former Bangladeshi Muslim Talima Nasrim who impressed the audience with her courage and conviction in the face of persecution and threats to her life.

One of the miracles of the Convention was that it was organised on the smell of an oily rag. Unlike International Youth Day in Sydney and the World Parliament of Religion in Melbourne last year, both of which received many millions in government funding, the convention organisers received absolutely nothing. All the organisers worked for nothing and the speakers and presenters gave their services gratis. Despite this it was a magnificent and resounding success.

The other miracle was that if the violent and damaging hail storm that wreaked havoc in Melbourne last weekend had come a week later, people would have seen it as god’s vengeance on the atheists. The weather this weekend was stunning. Had the deity got his dates wrong?