A Photo Tour of the October 3, 2009, Atheist Alliance International Annual Convention in Burbank, California!

The Atheist Alliance International Annual Convention, held this year in Burbank, California (at the Marriot Hotel Convention Center next to Bob Hope Airport), happened to be not too far from where I live, and so I went. Ironically, the Marriot Convention Center was, just two weeks prior, the host to a UFO convention. (I went to that convention also. See here.)

In any case, I’ll take you on a little photo tour of the event. Here’s the Convention Center from the outside:

 

As you can see, it’s not a terribly large complex. The room that the conference was held in has a maximum capacity of 800 people, and the event attracted perhaps 700 people. Not bad, but no speaker (except Richard Dawkins in the evening) managed to fill the room to the gills. By comparison, the UFO conference that I attended in the same building a few weeks previous drew somewhat fewer people (perhaps 300-400). So it might be inferred that, in Los Angeles, atheist culture is a bit more popular of a draw than UFO culture (though not by much). No doubt some megachurch within a couple of miles of the Marriot Hotel pulled in more people on Sunday morning (and by orders of magnitude) than Atheist Alliance International managed to draw over a whole weekend (and that even with top-rate scientists and intellectuals speaking, and Richard Dawkins heading the bill). Of course, donut shops also vastly outnumber bookstores in Los Angeles. Nobody ever said the world was particularly just. 

I like bumper stickers, and I noticed that the parking lot was giving off a nice Southern California liberal sympatico  vibe:

 

And here was a car parked at the conference that had Arizona license plates (which I do not show in the photograph):

 

 

And inside were atheist vendors selling their atheist wares. The vendor below was selling a combination of atheist titles and libertarian/Ayn Rand titles. Free market libertarians make a respectable showing among atheists. You might be looked upon askance if you go to a homeopath, but not if you’re into Ludwig Von Mises. Skeptic  magazine publisher, Michael Shermer (for example), seems to also be a Reason  magazine kind of atheist guy:

 

No, the dude with the beret isn’t Michael Shermer. Here’s Michael Shermer (giving an interview, perhaps to a podcaster, just outside of the conference building):

 

The Libertarian book stall had political competition, but it was weak. The Marxist left had a little table with “Power to the people!” and “Communism is wonderful!” book titles, but it was a small set up, and off in a low trafficked back corner, and looked lonely. Ironically, it was nearly the only place where you might find nonwhites at this “international” atheist conference. By the average age, affluence, ethnic, and gender makeup of the conference (more men than women), you might well have imagined that you had stumbled upon a conference of Republican activists. I thought it was ironic that the nearly all white and affluent crowd mouthing off about the evils of religion were being catered to all weekend by a coterie of working class Hispanics who, on Sunday, would no doubt be at Catholic Mass or in attendance at one of the local Protestant megachurches. As the workers moved about the conference hall serving up salmon, beef, or vegan dishes to the comfy attendees, the workers didn’t seem to be listening (or caring to listen) all that closely to what was being said from the stage. Oh, and there were lots of “Darwin fish” around:

 

And here was the Skeptic  magazine vendor area. I bought several DVDs, one of which was of a debate on the Anthropic Principle that I attended a dozen or so years ago at Cal Tech (where a lot of Skeptic  events have occurred in the past):

 

This woman’s name is Priscilla Herochik. She’s an attorney, and she wrote a humanist positive novel, and was selling it. I bought her book:

 

There were also young bohemian atheists, mostly Gothic in their dress style, selling t-shirts, necklaces and bumper stickers. They were wise in where they set up their tables and racks (next to the bathrooms). Older men. Enlarged prostates. Lots of toilet runs. Ka-ching! Here were some of the bumper stickers that they sold:

 

And here’s the necklaces that some of them had made by hand. They were $18 dollars. You gotta make a living, right?:

 

Okay, so that was outside the conference hall proper. What happened when you entered the inner sanctum? Here’s what that looked like:

 

And as you approached the screen, it was like entering the theater of Dionysus, with all the chief priests of atheism gathered at the front and center tables closest to the stage, and sitting together in a clubby way. The best tables were reserved for VIPs. Some people had VIP on their name cards. Perhaps they made big contributions to the event. The rest of us were losers. We were not very important people. This two-tier system was at work throughout the day (or you might think of it as a three tier system if you count the virtually all Hispanic conference staff). Whatever else atheism is, it’s not a critique of hierarchy. Hierarchical religion may be bad, but hierarchical irreligion is, well, natural. Every train needs a caboose. And you gotta network, right? Here’s biologist Jerry Coyne and philosopher Russell Blackford at the center front table closest to the screen:

 

Sure they’re happy! They’re right up front with all the cool people. Indeed, they are the cool people. Atheism is great! Just like high school. At supper time, when all the nonwhite hotel workers were moving around vigorously, I noticed that Michael Shermer and PZ Myers were sitting together also, chuckling it up. Seeing all this front and center social bonding, I couldn’t help but think of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. (Oh, so this is what the victorious revolution will look like!) And when you turn around at the charmed alpha-male center stage area, you might find yourself bumping into uber-atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, physicist Lawrence Krauss (who gave, by far, the most interesting talk of the weekend), and philosopher Daniel Dennett (I’ll avoid making any jokes about these three being one):

 

Krauss’s talk, by the way, was so intellectually stimulating (he talked about the multiverse hypothesis and the expansion of the universe, among other things) that, after he spoke in the morning, the rest of the talks on Saturday felt like let downs. Biologist Jerry Coyne, for example, said little that was fresh about evolution. (He rehearsed for a crowd that already believes in evolution the basic converging lines of evidence for evolution. Ho hum. It was like having a historian lay out the converging lines of evidence for the Holocaust to a gathering of Jews. We’re with you, rabbi. We get it.) Likewise, Daniel Dennett was not especially enlightening in his talk about the religious uses of language, and Richard Dawkins was, uncharacteristically, flat as a pancake, reading from his book, rehearsing his slides, and posting on the screen (too long) quotes from Darwin. By this point in the evening, some in the crowd seemed visibly distracted and bored. (In his defense, Dawkins had been introducing people on the stage all day, and he was probably tired).

In the late afternoon, there was an effort to break up all the inner sanctum intellectuality with some music. The organizers (or rather the Hispanic hotel workers) put out a wooden dance floor, and the guitarist below played some songs with atheist lyrics in them. Some people watched, but nobody danced. Too many ironists in the crowd to let go, I suppose:

 

After Dawkins’s talk ended around 9:30, I was pretty much done. I left a bit disappointed, and not really stimulated intellectually (as I had hoped for the day). Maybe Krauss’s unusually stimulating morning talk set too much expectation in me for how the rest of the day would play out. As I left, the dance floor was still not being danced upon. Perhaps people started dancing later in the evening, but I doubt it.

As an agnostic hanging out with committed atheists for the day, how did I feel? A bit like I needed a shower. I didn’t want to leave this way. From the start, I tried to stay Buddha-open to new ideas, compassion, and surprise. But (at least for me) there’s something dead about atheism that I can’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps it is its vampire like reductionisms (“we murder to dissect”), or its generally dismissive shrugs toward paradoxical and poetic language (Dennett called religious languages “deepities”. They appear deep, but don’t really say anything.) It feels like atheists (to echo the poet AR Ammons) walk the floor of existence even as they display little genuine astonishment that there is a floor to experience in the first place. Existence just is. It’s a quantum fluctuation. An inevitability. No big whoop. Now embrace the blind machine. I asked Dennett, over the lunch break, what he thought of qualia, and the best that I could get from him was: “Define qualia?” He knows what qualia are, and what I meant by the question, but he obviously didn’t care to deal with it. Qualia, he said, is “like God.” In other words, it’s another deepity for Dennett, something to shrug at, to pass over in silence. The ontological mystery, if spoken of at all, becomes just another function to deconstruct.

I drove home listening to my audio collection of poets reading poems. It was my way to detox. I might have danced.