—– Catholic Church Closing 33 Worship Sites In Central New York State (Marc Parry/The Albany Times Union; Jan 18)

ALBANY: Cities across the greater Capital Region will bear the brunt of a massive plan to close 33 worship sites throughout the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, Bishop Howard Hubbard announced Saturday.

Troy will be ground zero in an unprecedented consolidation the 14-county diocese is undertaking to cope with shifting demographics and a shortage of priests.

Hubbard, despite lobbying to change the outcome, decided to close six of the Collar City’s dozen Catholic churches. That is more than any other city. And the list of soon-to-be-shuttered Troy churches includes St. Peter’s, the state’s third-oldest Catholic parish.

Elsewhere, St. Teresa of Avila and Holy Cross will close in Albany. In Cohoes, St. Bernard’s, St. Joseph’s and St. Rita/Sacred Heart will all shut down. And in Schenectady, St. Mary’s, St. John the Baptist and Immaculate Conception also will close.

Altogether, the diocese is closing just under 20 percent of its 190 worship sites, a historic downsizing that is comparable to other consolidations in the dioceses of Buffalo, Syracuse, and Rochester.

The decisions announced Saturday culminated a 2 1/2-year planning process, known as Called to BE Church, that involved thousands of Catholics and 38 local planning groups making suggestions to the bishop….

Other cities beyond the Capital Region’s four-county core will also lose churches, including Glens Falls in Warren County, where St. Alphonsus will close.

In Montgomery County, three Amsterdam worship sites will close: St. Casimir’s, St. John the Baptist, and St. Michael’s….

The closure of so many neighborhood landmarks isn’t just a Catholic issue. Empty churches create “a hole in our community,” said Lynn Kopka, a non-Catholic who heads the Troy’s Washington Park Association.

The longer they sit vacant, the more deterioration makes it hard to find other uses for buildings that make economic sense, Kopka said.

The former St. Jean’s, closed under a previous bishop some 35 years ago, sits vacant in the block south of Washington Park, Kopka said. Now the diocese plans to close St. Mary’s as well.

“It’s one more wallop in the head for urban areas that are trying to move forward,” Kopka said.

[Diocese spokesman Ken] Goldfarb responded to that concern by saying nearly all vacated church buildings have found other community uses and are no longer vacant. He sent the Times Union a church-by-church list of those uses, from a shelter for homeless women to a community arts center….

—– Humanist Billboard Goes Up In South Carolina (Josh Cascio/WCIV.com; Jan 30)

CHARLESTON: It’s hard to miss an unholy sign looming over the holy city.

“It makes me mad. I think it’s wrong and I believe in God,” said Mike Anderson, a firm believer in God.

“I think everybody has the right to believe in what they believe in whether you don’t believe in God or not,” said Cheryl Cabiad.

The billboard along I-26 asks “Do You Believe in God? If Not You’re Not Alone.” The organization behind it is the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry.

“The purpose is not to try to convert it’s to say we exist and we know there are a lot of others in Charleston who are also non-believers,” said Vice President of the organization Herb Silverman.

Silverman has considered himself an atheist since his early teens. He said non-believers deserve just as much respect as those who follow organized religion.

“We believe we can be good for goodness sake we don’t feel we need to go to an authority of a book written a couple thousand years ago,” said Silverman.

Here in the buckle of the Bible belt, church leaders are keeping their faith squarely in God.

“It says don’t believe in God then you’re not alone…that’s ironic for us because if you don’t believe in God then you truly are alone,” said Father Gregory Wilson.

Father Wilson doesn’t believe the sign will seriously hurt the church. He also said he’d be happy to help non-believers find the Almighty.

“I think when people say God isn’t real, obviously they have something deep within them that they’re still searching for,” he told ABC News 4’s Josh Cascio. “I think God is reaching out even to those who put up things like they don’t believe in God because God believes in them,” he added.

Whether you like this sign or not you can expect to see it on I-26 through February.

—– Atheist Bus Ads Spreading To Brazil (PZ Myers/Pharyngula; Jan 30)

Buses must be militant atheists, because pretty soon they’re all going to be sporting declarations of godlessness. The latest nation to jump on the bandwagon is Brazil. If you can read Portuguese, you can go direct to the source and read all about it. Otherwise, I’ve put a translation below the fold.

In the first week of this year was launched the first advertising campaign in the UK about atheism, promoted by the British Humanist Association. The campaign has its own website (where shirts can be purchased) and is attracting great attention from the media since its launch in October – including in Brazil. The so-called “bus campaign” spread to several countries, and now also came to Brazil. The Brazilian Association of Atheists and Agnostics launched the first phase of the campaign in the country, with eight slogans that we want to display on buses in the city of So Paulo. The phrases explain what atheists think, and seek to launch a first step towards the recognition of skeptical people as full and worthy citizen, with its deserved place in society. One of the highlights is the phrase that calls for an effective secular state, which ATEA believes should be a priority for citizens of all beliefs and disbelief.

The slogans chosen by the association are:

2. I’m happy without believing in any god. Subtitle: Be proud to be who you are. Do not hide.

3. I do not need a god to be good. And you?

4. Image or text showing famous atheists. Text: You know which one is an atheist? ALL. Subtitle: We are millions in Brazil, hundreds of millions worldwide. Suggestions for names: Camila Pitanga, Angelina Jolie, Paulo Autran, Dercy Gonçalves, Charlie Chaplin, Daniel Radcliffe, José Saramago, Glória Maria, Drauzio Varella, Cassia Eller, Jodie Foster, Jorge Amado, Walmor Chagas.

5. Images of crucifixes in public places, “God be praised” in the money, “Sorocaba is of the Lord Jesus” and saying “Atheists are also citizen.” Subtitle: We want equality. We deserve respect.

6. Faith does not give answers. It only prevents questioning.

7. Smile! Hell doesn’t exist.

8.You are as atheist as we. When you understand why you don’t believe in all the other gods, you will know why we do not believe in yours.

9. Two hands working do more than a thousand praying.

Atheist or not, any person can help finance the campaign, regardless of relationship to the Association. Donations can be given separately for each of the phrases, using for it a value with the last digit equal to the numbers in the above list…. Values ending in 1 are intended to any of the slogans, values ending in 0 are reserved for donations to the association.

This campaign does not plan to deconvert in mass. The objective is to achieve a place in society in proportion to our numbers, reduce the enormous prejudice that exists against atheists in the world, and move towards equality, that doesn’t exist outside a truly secular state….

—– Sir David Attenborough Defends Darwin, Blames Bible For Devastating Planet (Steve Connor, Science Editor/The Independent; Jan 31)

He has romped with gorillas, turned his back on grizzly bears and found himself knee-deep in suffocating bat dung. After decades of getting to know the furthest-flung corners of the world – and its inhabitants – Sir David Attenborough has vented his ire on the Bible for promoting the belief that man has complete dominion over the Earth.

Sir David, probably the best-loved broadcaster and certainly the most distinguished television naturalist, has blamed the Book of Genesis for many environmental problems, from the burning down of tropical rainforests to the extinction of species.

On the eve of a BBC1 documentary on the life of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution, Sir David has criticised the centuries-old idea running through the Judaeo-Christian tradition which assumes God gave the Earth to man to exploit and use in whatever way he saw fit in order to populate the world.

Sir David, 82, said the devastation of the environment has its roots in the first words that God supposedly uttered to humankind, as detailed in Genesis 1:28: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

An atheist raised in an academic, non-religious family, Sir David said Genesis peddled untruths about how animals and plants appeared on earth and was also at the root of why there was now serious environmental degradation due to the greedy overexploitation of the earth’s natural resources.

“The influence of the Book of Genesis, which says the Lord God said ‘go forth and multiply’ to Adam and Eve and ‘the natural world is there for you to dominate’, (is that) you have dominion over the animals and plants of the world,” Sir David said.

“That basic notion, that the world is there for us and if it doesn’t actually serve our purposes, it’s dispensable, that has produced the devastation of vast areas of the land’s surface.

“Of course it’s a gross oversimplification, but that’s why Darwinism, and the fact of evolution, is of great importance because it is that attitude which has led to the devastation of so much, and we are in the situation that we are in,” he told the science journal Nature.

In tomorrow’s documentary, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, Sir David does not mention the Bible directly but there is an oblique reference to its influence in his concluding statements about the important principles of evolution encapsulated by Darwin in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species.

“Darwin’s great insight revolutionised the way in which we see the world … But above all Darwin has shown us that we are not apart from the natural world – we do not have dominion over it. We are subject to its laws and processes, as are all the other animals on earth to which indeed we are related.”

Sir David has received hate mail from viewers upset that he does not give God credit in his nature programmes and some correspondence from creationists makes him angry.

“Evolution is not just a theory, as many a correspondent writes to me and says. It is a historical fact like any other historical fact and as certain as William the Conqueror landing in 1066, except it’s more certain because the evidence for it comes from a much wider range of fact,” Sir David said.

“All we have to tell us about William are a few bits of paper here or there – not very much at all. For evolution, we have much more evidence,” he said.

—– Atheist Diana Athill Wins Major Book Award (Brandon Robshaw/The Independent; Feb 1)

Somewhere Towards the End is the winner in the biography category of the 2008 Costa Book Awards. It’s not a biography, but that must have been the closest-fitting category for this extraordinary memoir, in which Athill reflects on a long and remarkable life (she was 89 when she wrote it and is 91 now). She writes of her friendships, love affairs, career, dogs, gardens, and what it is like to grow old and face death, all with a deft, feather-light touch.

One review of this book, quoted on the jacket, used the howlingly inappropriate word “feisty”. That patronising image of a battling old granny is a world away from Athill’s persona of a wise, serene, almost unnaturally detached woman. There is none of the tiresome score-settling that spoils so much autobiographical writing. Athill likes and understands the people she’s met, as, you feel, she likes and understands herself. (It’s true that Elias Canetti comes in for a slight roughing-up, but it’s done candidly and without malice.) There is no sound of grinding axes. Athill has few regrets, but the tone is far from the bombastic boasting of “My Way”. Instead, there’s an almost objective interest in the strange yet normal experience of living a life.

She writes frankly about the fading of sexual desire that comes with age, and about the death of her mother (when Athill was in her seventies). What’s most refreshing and unusual is her unafraid, undramatised expectation of her own death; her thoughts on this and on atheism alone (“vastly more exciting and beautiful than any amount of ingenuity in making up fairy stories”) would make the book worth reading, as would the limpid, economical prose….

To learn more about Athill, see the story entitled Not Bad For 91 that was published in The Guardian on Jan 5.