The 51st edition of the Humanist Symposium has been posted at wongaBlog.

The Humanist Symposium is a blog carnival created to celebrate and showcase the internet's best writing on atheism, on positive humanism, on morality from a rational perspective, and on the bright side of a life free from religion. We're always looking for new entrants, so if this is the kind of thing you write, send in your posts today! If you see a fitting post written by another author, you're welcome to submit that as well. E-mail entries to me at ebonmusings@gmail.com, or use the form on the carnival home page.

The next edition of the Humanist Symposium will be on March 14 at WongaBlog. If you'd like to volunteer to host an upcoming edition, you're welcome to do that as well. We can always use new hosts! Contact me via e-mail if you're interested.

For this week's Photo Sunday, a seasonally appropriate picture. There's complexity in the world all around us, and the patterns of cracks and pits on the frozen surface of this lake, almost like the surface of an alien planet, caught my eye as a beautiful example:

Frozen lake surface, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, January 2010. Photo by the author. Camera details: Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Click for larger version.

This week's guest contributor says:

"Day three of a canoe exploration of Lows Lake and the Bog River Flow, Adirondacks. This dreamlike scene marked the end of an idyllic day of slow paddling and fishing for dinner. The world takes a breath and pauses...."

Sunset, Lows Lake, Adirondack State Park. Photo credit: Jim Sabiston, Essential Light Photography. (Visit his site!)

This week's guest contributor says:

"This is why it pays to rise with the sun. Very few people are blessed with the experience of a wilderness sunrise such as this gem. After a morning like this, the world cannot help but seem a miraculous place."

Sunrise, Pharaoh Lake, Adirondack State Park. Photo credit: Jim Sabiston, Essential Light Photography. (Visit his site!)

Via Ophelia Benson, this unwelcome news: the Center for Inquiry's podcast Point of Inquiry, which I listened to regularly until now, is seeing a change in hosts. D.J. Grothe, who formerly conducted the interviews, is leaving to serve as the president of the James Randi Educational Foundation. He'll be replaced by a rotating series of hosts, and the most important of which, who's expected to conduct approximately half of Point of Inquiry's new interviews, is Chris Mooney.

On its face, this is a bizarre choice. No one has expressed more consistently than Chris Mooney the view that atheists should sit down, shut up, and not speak our minds if doing so might upset or offend anyone. Yet he's now the head interviewer for a podcast whose stated purpose is to interview the leading minds of today, including a majority of guests who are well-known atheists and religious skeptics. What is he going to ask them? Will the interview be thirty minutes of silence, since he's against giving such people additional opportunity to air their views? More plausibly, will he steer clear of any interview topic that might give his guests the opportunity to express opinions he dislikes, or select only guests who agree with his accommodationist viewpoint of silence and surrender?

Although I have nothing against the other named interviewers, Robert Price and Karen Stollznow, I've come to the conclusion that I can no longer in good conscience listen to or promote Point of Inquiry. D.J. Grothe conducted interviews with skill and professionalism, regardless of his guest's viewpoint, and I'm sorry to see him go (though I am glad to see the atheist movement developing the kind of infrastructure that leads to competition for outreach jobs like these). But I'm not optimistic about his replacement.

So, it seems I need to find some new atheist/skeptic-themed podcasts. Anyone have any suggestions? Feel free to recommend your favorite in the comments.

As much effort as we freethinkers put into making atheism a viable and socially accepted option, it's important to remember that it's still a difficult feat to extricate oneself from religion when one's family and social life are bound up with church attendance. Consider this e-mail I received a few days ago, whose author's personal information I've omitted:

I just wanted to say thanks for your sites, which I've been reading for about a year now. I'm a 49 year old former Salvation Army minister from the UK, who was a devout Christian for most of my life. Not a fundamentalist, happy with evolution, a 15 billion year old universe and a bible that was not inerrant, but still a Christian.

I had a bout of mental illness a couple of years ago, and after coming through it started to question some of the religious feelings I'd had and the 'inner certainty' that God was speaking to me. The religious awe that had convinced me of the existence of God just seemed to be the other side of the depressive state I had been in, and the voice of God nothing different to the delusions that had told me to commit suicide.

Once I started to question things, the compartmentalisation that had enabled me to retain my faith began to collapse. The questioning led me to your Ebon Musings, and both the essays you have written yourself and the links and references to other authors have helped immensely in developing my new view of the world.

I guess I'm not what you'd call a fully fledged atheist in that although I no longer believe in a God, Christ or any other religious doctrine I still go to church most Sundays, mainly for the social interaction. It's hard to give everything up when all your friends are there, your social life is there, your kids are involved etc. Maybe one day I'll feel able to give it all up, but not just yet.

In the meantime I'll content myself with authors like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Victor Stengler etc, and of course your own Daylight Atheism. That, and knowing that after nearly 50 years I've finally worked things out.

I wrote back to this person to find out whether the other members of his church knew his beliefs had changed, and this was his reply:

I've been (and still am in many cases) a fairly active member; I used to take meetings and open air services (although I've now stopped doing those, ostensibly due to the effects of my breakdown a couple of years ago), but I still wear the uniform, play in the band and take part in other church events and appear to be a 'good soldier'. No-one knows of my change in beliefs except my wife; to come out and say publicly that I no longer believe in god would mean that I'd have to put off the uniform, stop playing (which I love) and wouldn't be able to take part in some events. I'd still be able to go to the meetings with my friends, but it wouldn't be the same.

The core of my difficulties is probably simply that extracting myself from a belief system that I've held for over 40 years was never going to be easy, given the family and social implications that would involve. I'm moved a fair distance in the last couple of years, and maybe I need a few more before I can finally move away completely.

Of all the strings that religion places upon its adherents, social connections can be the most difficult to break. Of course, a church has every incentive to make their followers' entire lives revolve around its events - it increases their obligation and raises the costs of backing out. I think this person is probably wise to bide his time and keep his deconversion a secret until he's ready to announce it on his own terms.

But we out-of-the-closet atheists should keep stories like this one in mind. How many secret atheists are there among the church ranks - or even among the clergy - people who would be open about their atheism if they could, but feel constrained by circumstance to stay silent and go along with the crowd? It seems entirely plausible to me that there are as many closeted atheists as there are open ones, and possibly even more.

The more we do to establish atheism as a positive and accepted alternative to religion, though public advocacy and political activism, the easier we make it for people such as these to come out. We stand to benefit from a positive feedback spiral, a snowballing effect, if we can be successful in our activism. Keep that in mind the next time some pious accommodationist demands we stop voicing our opinions, and think of what that would mean for the people who still don't feel able to fully express themselves.

I'm happy to report that there's quite a lot of good news this week:

• The U.K. government recommends that primary school religious education classes should teach about "secular beliefs such as humanism and atheism", in addition to learning about major world religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. This is just one more symptom of how far ahead of us our European friends are in some respects - can you imagine the religious right frenzy that would ensue if a U.S. politician recommended teaching about atheism in public high schools?

• In a story that made me especially happy, Andrew Wakefield, the pseudoscientific doctor who's almost single-handedly responsible for the anti-vaccination movement, was found to have seriously abused his trust as a medical practitioner by a U.K. ethics panel. According to the ruling, Wakefield ordered unnecessary and invasive tests on autistic children (including spinal taps and colonoscopies), without securing proper ethical approval, in the paper that claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He also failed to disclose major conflicts of interest (he was being paid by trial lawyers looking to file claims against vaccine manufacturers). The General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield was "dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain" of the children, and is still evaluating a charge of professional misconduct that could lead to Wakefield's losing his license to practice medicine.

• And lastly, I'm glad to report that Scott Roeder, the Christian terrorist who shot and killed Dr. George Tiller, was convicted of first-degree murder by a Kansas jury this week. The judge rejected the defense's ludicrous request that the jury be allowed to consider voluntary manslaughter, and they returned the verdict after just 37 minutes of deliberation. Roeder faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison, the most fitting punishment for a cold-blooded and vicious killer like himself.

Although the cause of justice was served, this verdict can't undo the damage; Dr. Tiller's clinic will be closing for good, which means in a way that Roeder got exactly what he wanted. Still, the verdict sends a message that anti-choice zealots cannot commit these crimes with impunity. It may not be enough to discourage future acts of terrorism against abortion providers, but at least we have assurance that the rule of law is still operative in America.

This photo is from my trip to St. Louis last weekend, taken from the base of the famous Gateway Arch. Besides the sheer scale of the structure, I was attracted to its stark, geometrical shape - almost like a mathematical equation in the form of a building. In the enlarged version, you can see the windows of the observation deck at the apex.

Gateway Arch, St. Louis, January 2010. Photo by the author. Camera details: Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Click for larger version.

Next week there will be photos from my trip to St. Louis, once I've had time to do the normal cropping and processing. Until then, there's this: I'm fascinated by the way the camera reveals unfamiliar-seeming details of familiar surfaces.

Fallen timber, Hudson Highlands Nature Center, November 2009. Photo by the author. Camera details: Canon PowerShot SD1200 IS. Click for larger version.