I spent this evening in the Hammersmith Apollo- the last time I was down here was for R.E.M., who put on an awesome gig. This most recent visit was to see Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, an atheist-centric event which featured Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, Simon Singh, and others providing an evening of entertainment and general Christmas cheer.
Suffice to say, with such a bill the event went off fantastically. The event’s 4000-seater venue is for the third night only, with the first night in the 400-seat Bloombury Theatre selling out in days, along with a second night in the same venue.
Dawkins provided some food for thought with readings from several of his books, and the other comics and great minds were on hand to provide their view of Christmas, alternative medicine (“They have a name for alternative medicine that’s been proven to work. It’s called medicine”), theism, arguments for and against atheism, and Born-Again Christian critics.
Speaking as a solidly happy atheist, it’s nice that people in the atheist and agnostic community are bringing this sort of event into the social calendar. If there’s one strong point to being a theist it’s the community all religions provide (except Scientology, if you want to call that a religion and not a scam). The world could do with more social events for nontheists.
The event was a screaming success by all counts (though if the sound guy ever reads this- master your TV soundtrack sound effects like the Carl Sagan thing to stop it being too toppy/choppy, and learn how to do system EQ because your lovely Meyer subs were resonating at some frequencies). Hopefully 2009, 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of the Species, will be a good year for atheists and agnostics. While I’m confident that the sheer facts revealed by science need no Alpha Course to sweeten them, bringing them to more people and encouraging outward thinking is certainly no bad thing.
Of course, this event was less about encouraging thinking and expanding atheism’s outreach, and more about celebrating the world as it is- without the need to bring God into the equation.