This last weekend was Pastahcon, an event put on by the Pennsylvania Nonbelievers. From what I’ve heard it was a rousing success, so kudos to the PA Nonbelievers for that.

But even more kudos for an event they held smack dab in the middle of the conference: Atheists Fight Hunger:

Pennsylvania Nonbelievers, in cooperation with various other freethought organizations, has been involved in running the PA State Atheist/Humanist conference since 2012. At the 2015 conference, we are organizing a food-packing event to give food to people who are hungry. We will be working with a non-profit program called Outreach to organize a food packing event to be held at the PAStAHCon in Harrisburg, PA on the weekend of September 11th-13th, 2015. This past year, we’ve managed with the cooperation of many to raise $5,704.50. Because of that, on September 13th at the conference we will be able to pack 22,818 meals starting at 3pm. You do not have to have a ticket to the conference to help us feed the hungry right here in Central Pennsylvania. Once the meals are packed, will be donating them to the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank. A bonus: The Central PA Food Bank assures us that the receiving organizations promise that no hungry person will be forced to observe any religious rituals of any kind – This is their standard policy for their participating groups.

So how’d it go this year? I reached out to Brian Fields, President of the Pennsylvania Nonbelivers to get an idea of just hos much food they were able to procure and send out. To say the least it went pretty damn well:

Final numbers for the Atheists Fight Hunger project. Approximately 80 volunteers from the 2015 PAStAH Conference this weekend packed 30,300 meals. Over the last year, we managed to raise $7575. Yesterday, we raised $1870.50 alone, just from our volunteers AT the event.

Welp, I guess if Jesus isn’t going to come down and feed the hungry then it’s up to humanity yet again.

How about that shit? They took time out in the middle of a conference to help the poor – and it was a healthy number of them. Here’s a small photo timeline (pics used with permission from Lindsey Ford Photography, you can also see the rest of the photos here):

Being an atheist is great, it means you’ve arrived at the logically correct position about the existence of god (of course, it doesn’t mean you got there by logical means). But shit like this? Whether you’re atheist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, black, white, short, or tall, stuff like this just means you care. And no matter what you hear from a religion about faith being the basis for being a good person, it ain’t. The basis for being a good person is caring about other people. That’s it. Without that it doesn’t matter how much Jesus you have (see: Kim Davis).

And that’s why we saw an atheist conference go on pause this last weekend to make the world a better place – there was a surplus of good people there.

Oh, and I hear the rest of the conference was pretty good too: