PZ Myers at Pharyngula linked to an article by Ricky Gervais about his Deconversion Story. It’s a fantastic read and highly recommended but it reminded me that for all the Atheism talk on the blog, I’ve never gotten around to telling my own Deconverson Story.
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Razib at Gene Expression has a great post on Christmas and what it means, if anything:
Ed, Greg & PZ have commented on the strange reaction of the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary toward Richard Dawkins’ enthusiasm for Christmas traditions. So “why would an atheist want to sing Christmas carols?”
The same reason that the study and reading of literature has not been reduced to physics. We humans appreciate great stories, and we can conceive in our mind’s eye ideas which may not be true, but we enjoy the play of those ideas nonetheless. One does not have to be a Greek pagan to appreciate the beauty and power of the Iliad, and in fact for centuries pious Christians have been moved by the poems of Homer without acceding to the reality of its relgious vision. For them Homer was not about the Truth of the gods, but the Truth of human experience. We don’t need to appeal to a classical education though, anyone who reads a piece of moving fiction can be emotionally impacted, without entertaining that the narrative is real in a positivistic sense.
Today many Christians complain about a “War against Christmas,” but they might be surprised to know that until recently the soldiers in that war were avowed Christians! During the 1650s the ascendant Puritans in England waged a war against Christmas because of its associations with “Popery” and paganism. The reasoned argument was that Christmas had no Biblical foundation, that was not grounded in Truth, and that a host of practices were obviously extra-Biblical interpolations from the pagan milieu of their ancestors, residue from the age of darkness before the Savior. Politically, the practice of Christmas traditions was a sign that perhaps one was for the Cavalier cause or a recusant Catholic. In the the name of utilitarian economic efficiency these early fundamentalists also abolished most holidays and religious festivals because they had no Biblical grounding, and so were not rooted in Truth, and were a waste of time and without any utility. In may ways I think these early Protestant fundamentalists had much in common with latter day social engineers, such as the Khmer Rouge, who seemed driven by an unnatural and distorted Benthanmite conception of what drives human nature and what gives joy and fullness to our lives.
I believe in human nature. We are not a blank slate into which one can pour in prior values and assume that our lives will be shaped by these exogenous inputs through a chain of necessary propositions. We enjoy good food, music, the company of family, gossip, socialization and the broader succor of our community. These are not social constructions, they are are the core of our humanity, and any belief system or model of human action which neglects these natural impulses will lead us astray. I am not denying flexibility of the parameters, but that flexibility exhibits constraints and stress when deviated from the central tendency.
The whole post is great and hits on several ideas that have been whirring about in my brain for some time. One idea in particular that jumped out at me was his statement that, “anyone who reads a piece of moving fiction can be emotionally impacted, without entertaining that the narrative is real in a positivistic sense.“ This cuts to the heart of the Fundamentalist problem with other narratives, not just the Christmas Story.
So, today the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring Christmas and Christians important. Now, one would think, in a nation that is 70% Christian, where there’s a church on every other fucking street corner, this would be superfluous. Guess not. If the 12% of us Agnostics and Atheists scare American Christians that much, simply by our desire to sleep in on Sunday mornings, than your religion isn’t worth shit. Apparently, the very knowledge that some people, maybe living next door or down the street (or in your own house, even!) don’t believe in the same imaginary friend really spooks True Believers. But it’s not persecution. I live in a state that still has Blue Laws. I can’t buy a bottle of wine on Sundays to go with my dinner, like any civilized European or Northerner, yet you’re the one whose oppressed?
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So, Mitt Romney gave a speech, did you hear? In it, he blathered on, as politicos are want to do, about the importance of religion, and our shared spiritual values and how, so long as we all believe in Jesus, at least a little, than Freedom! Cake! Puppies and kitties! Vote for Romney!
Did you know that Atheists are driving people away from science and into the loving arms of religion because we’re such meanies? Yeah, neither did I. But according to Mary Midgley, moral philosopher, that’s exactly what we are doing:
People are not going to accept scientific fact if they think it is morally pernicious. When people are asked why they are persuaded by intelligent design, they often say that it’s the only alternative to scientific atheism and Darwinism which are pernicious moral doctrines; they see it as the only refuge from this anti-human bloody-mindedness. It’s at the level of attitudes to life that these choices are made. And people will think scientists as a whole believe this.
Not that I think this is true but let us suppose, just for a moment that some people are put off of Science by us morally pernicious Atheists and our ungodly talkativeness. Why would this be?
Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta’s slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa.
“Where is my faith?” she wrote. “Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness… If there be God — please forgive me.”
Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith.
“Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal,” she said.
As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask.
“What do I labor for?” she asked in one letter. “If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true.”
“These are letters that were kept in the archbishop’s house,” the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk told Phillips.
The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who’s making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa’s proposed sainthood. He said her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her case.
“Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic,” said Rev. Kolodiejchuk. [emphasis added]
Sure, she didn’t really believe in God but she’s really popular so we’re going to make her a saint anyway. Whatever it takes to fill those empty pews. How many other saints didn’t really believe but were appropriated after their death for reasons of marketing and cajoling? Probably about as many as were just invented altogether.
Mother Theresa of course deserves some of the blame. She continued to force feed the poor and sick nonsense that she didn’t even believe, just so she could watch them suffer, to try and jump start her flagging faith.
The only thing worse than sadism wrapped in piety is sadism for it’s own sake.
William Lobdell, staff reporter for the LA Times, writes about how covering the religion beat for the newspaper cost him his faith. He lobbied hard for the job and then was confronted by an endless parade of child molesting priests, outcast Mormons whose only sin was not being Mormon enough and worst of all, Benny Hinn. It’s a sad story because you see in William Lobdell what you see in a lot of people these days. They desperately want to believe in God as away to give structure and meaning to their lives, to do good deeds and use their faith a s a motivation for creating positive change. But then reality set sin. They see how people let themselves be used by church leaders for the usual pathetic power games, or worse, to cover up and excuse their own twisted, all too human hearts:
On a Sunday morning at a parish in Rancho Santa Margarita, I watched congregants lobby to name their new parish hall after their longtime pastor, who had admitted to molesting a boy and who had been barred that day from the ministry. I felt sick to my stomach that the people of God wanted to honor an admitted child molester. Only one person in the crowd, an Orange County sheriff’s deputy, spoke out for the victim.
On Good Friday 2002, I decided I couldn’t belong to the Catholic Church. Though I had spent a year preparing for it, I didn’t go through with the rite of conversion.
I understood that I was witnessing the failure of humans, not God. But in a way, that was the point. I didn’t see these institutions drenched in God’s spirit. Shouldn’t religious organizations, if they were God-inspired and -driven, reflect higher standards than government, corporations and other groups in society?
I found an excuse to skip services that Easter. For the next few months, I attended church only sporadically. Then I stopped going altogether.
Luckily, Mr. Lobdell realized that faith was a crutch propping up institutions that have neither God nor people’s needs in mind, but are just corrupt organizations designed to make money and control the week and desperate. And he walked away. he decided that he didn’t have to be part of that system. It may make it harder to be a force for positive change in the world without an established apparatus with all its infrastructure and support to fall back on but it is still possible. Hopefully, Mr. Lobdell will see that and maybe help us Atheists make some noise and spread some of his hard-won reason and knowledge.
Link via Amanda at Pandagon.
Mathew Nisbit at Framing Science asks a pertinent question of us Atheists, and then proceeds to piss all over everyone who has an answer. But you can’t be an apologist for theists and not get something wrong. First, the pertinent question: “How do we make sense of human values and how do we move forward in a post-religious age?”
He’s actually quoting someone else (Philip Kitcher, who has a new book Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith), but it is a common question I’ve heard asked by a variety of people. Now, the something wrong:
As I’ve argued, one of the reasons I find the New Atheist PR campaign so troubling is that it is has radicalized a movement that feeds on anger and fear and that offers little more than complaints and attacks.New Atheism turns on a binary discourse of us vs. them. In the rhetoric of the New Atheist movement, you’re either with us or your against us.
There are a number of problems with this short paragraph but the main one is pretty glaring: Pissing off religious people is easy. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. As if we weren’t so strident and there, Theists would respect our freedoms and wishes to exist, eventually. In time. Once they get used to us being, you know, around. So yes, pissing off religious people– how easy is it? You don’t even have to call them out on their fairy tale nonsense, their history of repression and violence, or their adherence to outdated and reactionary ideas. Hell, where I live, you can do it just by buying beer on Sunday. If we New Atheists (who are a lot like the Old Atheists, only more vocal, which is Mathew’s real gripe) come off as tad angry, it’s because we’ve gotten tired of being told we’re bad people and treated like second class citizens because we don’t believe in the popular fairy tales of the day. There’s only so many times you can be called Evil and treated by older relatives like puppies who have just messed on the rug because you don’t want to get up early on Sunday and go play Eat the Magic Carpenter with them, before you just decide to be the asshole they already think you are by having the lack of decorum not to drink wine while pretending it’s the blood of their imaginary friend.
Atheists and rationalists often lament about the increased influence that the dogmatic and religious have in this country and by extension, on the world’s political and social scene. We hear so much about religiosity and it’s discontents with modern civilization, that we think of it as a creeping force to be reckoned with, something to remain ever vigilant against, lest we be dragged kicking and screaming back to the Dark Ages. But a recent report by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman says otherwise.
Their study looked at a number of factors and found that far from the popular claims of a Western World in the grips of a religious rebirth, we are in fact becoming far more secular, faster. And by we, I mean the entire human species, not just the US. The only disappointing news in the whole piece is that the US is moving slower in this regards than everyone else, including China and even Turkey (where one third of the population say that religion is not all that important in their daily life, compared with just over one half here in the US). But just because we’re a little behind in the race to a rational, secular world, it doesn’t mean we aren’t getting there, and faster than the Dominionists would have you believe [emphasis mine]:
Tony Millionaire has also reviewed Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not great. I like his review better.
