212. cuittle

On Sunday, in the Wall Street Journal online, writer Dave Shiflett penned an opinion piece about the upcoming American Atheists convention in Salt Lake City, Utah — on Thursday, in fact: “Where Atheists Meet to Evangelize: Telling believers they are rubes may not be the best recruitment strategy.”

Frankly, I’m still not sure what to make of it. I don’t know what Mr. Shiflett’s personal religious views are, but his article contains a number of mordant jabs. “… deity-dissing group,” he calls American Atheists at one point.

“… suggesting that the uninitiated are delusional and feeble-minded might not be the wisest way to expand your brand.”

I’m reminded of what Julia Sweeney reports in Letting Go of God, what her mother says in a phone call after Julia is accidentally outed to them: “Everyone knows that there are those few people out there who don’t believe in God, but they keep it quietly to themselves!”

The timing of Shiflett’s article was curious, because on April 11, Kellie Moore wrote a piece in the Washington Post about the growing number of secular communities: “Don’t call it atheist church; secular communities are growing.”

Moore notes that many of the secular groups are geared towards families with young children, and that the children’s activities don’t include “teaching atheism.” In fact, they try to steer clear of any kind of indoctrination.

“Teaching atheism”? What would that even look like??

In my own Evangelical upbringing, a fair amount of time in church was spent teaching us theology and Christian apologetics, the systematic field by which Christians learn how to present a rational basis for the Christian faith and defend it against objections. Everything from having us memorize Bible verses to lessons on Sunday mornings about the Christian life were intended to prepare us to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

Going between these two articles, it’s interesting to see how religious people superimpose their models of church and community onto atheist assemblies. To paraphrase Queen Victoria: “Whatever do atheists do?” They assume that, like them, our goal is to make more atheists; to break down the deeply held beliefs of Christians with cold, hard, scientific logic and rational arguments.

The popular image of an atheist is based on media figures like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, aggressive and vituperative voices bent on destroying any belief that isn’t founded in hard science or reality. We are portrayed as angry, bitter loners without a moral foundation or compass. A recent study covered today in Pacific Standard confirmed that Americans intuitively judge atheists as immoral.

One article on Crosswalk.com claims to expose “Chilling Strategies of Neo-Atheists.” If you’re paying attention, this is how Evangelicals portrayed Communists in the 1950s—godless, immoral atheists mobilized by Stalin to turn the United States just as Communist and atheist as the U.S.S.R.

Nicoll claims that part of the atheista strategy is to target the young and turn them into god-hating, anti-religious clones. (Transference much??) He then quotes philosopher Richard Rorty, who described his dream that students might enter college “as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists” and leave full-fledged atheists.

“… we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable.”

It’s true that some atheists share this view; that religious people are feeble-minded and that religion must be stamped out if humanity is to survive and thrive. Yet what Nicoll accuses us of sounds more like what Evangelicals having done since the inception of Christianity. “Give me the child of seven,” said Francis Xavier, “and I will give you the man.”

This is the distorted view of atheism that we have to contend with, just as many liberal Christians try to distance themselves from their bigoted brethren.

Honestly, how often does the average atheist think about religion? Probably not much. For those of us who follow the news (politics in particular), it’s difficult to ignore the presence of Christofascism, the kind of belief that seems eager to wield a sword to spread and enforce Christianity far and wide.

So were it not for city councils opening meetings with Christian prayers, daring anyone to bring a lawsuit; wedding photographers and bakers making martyrs of themselves in their increasingly bizarre war on marriage equality; and politicians trying to write their religious views about women’s bodies into law… well, most of us wouldn’t think much about religion.

The new Cosmos (with the amazing Neil deGrasse Tyson) is a reminder that there’s more than a lifetime’s worth of amazing things to think about and ponder!

Yesterday, I posted an article with the musing that punishing those who hold (increasingly) unpopular views about marriage equality “seems to run counter to the very message of the LGBT movement, which is that there’s room at the table for all. The real question is whether equality opponents are willing to sit at the same table.”

This is where I’m also at with Evangelical Christians.

The fact is that, until we invent spaceships to whisk us away to other planets, we’re stuck learning to live peaceably together on this one. The atheists I know are willing to reach out, to build a table where there is space enough for everyone, their views and beliefs (however strange). Because right now, outside of academia, we’re rarely invited to join the party. True, we often self-segregate, but mostly, that’s because we’re accustomed to not even being recognized.

We don’t want to necessarily make atheist converts. We don’t want to dash anyone’s hopes and dreams. Rather, we desire a renaissance of critical thinking—and less dogmatism. We want children (and adults) to be free to consider every possible idea and facet of human knowledge, and decide for themselves what they believe instead of being told that they must accept one particular narrative, without question, or burn forever in Hell.

That’s all.

Because it’s about time we started celebrating the wonder of being alive.

103. sucre

Let dreamers dream what worlds they please;
Those Edens can’t be found.
The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good;
We’ll do the best we know;
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.
— Richard Wilbur, Candide (based on Voltaire’s work of the same title)

The past few months I’ve had chats that begin like this, or include questions like these:

• “Can you be good without God?”
• “Without absolute truth, you can’t really believe in good and evil.”
• “Doesn’t that just mean that you define what’s ‘right’?”

The first thing that pops into my head when dealing with questions like these is—did I sound like that when talking to atheists back when I was a Christian? Not that I really ever recall talking to nontheists that much, but I’m sure that discussions like that were had. There were several times when we went out witnessing or having “spiritual conversations” with non-Christians, and I’m sure that something like that came up.

This brings up the issue of what I actually believe now as a non-theist – as a post-theist. In blog post 99, I expressed my frustration with the current flavor of atheism, which can best be described as neo-atheism: the sort of aggressive, in-your-face, denialist movement that has characterized atheism as more of a negative worldview than a positive one. It’s the kind that loudly denies the existence of any supernatural being under any circumstances, and seeks to destroy all belief in god or gods the whole world over. It’s also the kind the kind that has no qualms insulting the religious faithful by calling them weak, small-minded, superstitious, gullible, and… well, you get the picture. [Insert insult here.]

And, of course, the two high priests of atheism – the Anti-Popes, if you will – are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Or rather were, since Hitch is no longer with us. But their voices defined the movement in ways that few others have. Their vehement, shrill and oftentimes rude confrontations with monotheists (and fundamentalists specifically) and their call for all people to throw off the shackles of belief in favor of reason, science and intellect has been persuasive for many, and off-putting for others, including many atheists.

So some of us are left wondering: All right, now what? Rather than stand and define ourselves against a whole belief, what do we stand for?

Well, for starters, the first Humanist Manifesto, followed by the second manifesto (more fleshed out and developed than the first), is a good starting point. As the authors of the second manifesto wrote in their preamble, “Traditional moral codes and newer irrational cults both fail to meet the pressing needs of today and tomorrow. False ‘theologies of hope’ and messianic ideologies, substituting new dogmas for old, cannot cope with existing world realities. They separate rather than unite peoples.”

Religion, as I have come to realize (and let me be clear—I’m talking about the extremist and fundamentalist varieties that I’ve known, that I grew up with, and that most people associate with “religion”), is a distinctly anti-human enterprise. It puts human beings at the bottom of a hierarchy of importance, existing at and for the pleasure of a supernatural deity. It grants other human beings who supposedly hold the “Truth” permission to use and abuse others for their own benefit—or, for the truly devout, for the sake of “God.”

Why would I want an “absolute morality” like that—of a beneficent, celestial dictatorship? Hitch was fond of calling it a celestial North Korea in his talks, where “the real fun begins after you’re dead.” (“But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea,” he says in that video. “Does the bible or the Koran offer you that ability? No!”) Why would I want to pattern my life around such a system in terms of what I do and don’t do?

But that’s getting sidetracked slightly away from the original question: “Can you be good without God?”

The answer is: Yes. Millions of people do it every day. Is the only reason that you don’t rob, cheat, rape, lie and murder because of your fear of divine punishment? And is that the only reason for a theist to do good—because God’s watching? If so, that’s a pretty bankrupt morality, in the opinion of myself and other nontheists.

Morality seems to be a strictly human invention. While there is a rudimentary morality among some of the higher primates, the rest of nature seems to be a completely amoral place. It’s survival of the fittest. “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” as Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote. Our human morality seems derived from our deepest, most tribal, and most primal being that values getting along and cooperating over total anarchy. As tool-wielders, and through trial and error, we’ve worked out a code of immutable “laws” for human survival:

• Don’t kill other humans.
• Don’t steal from other humans.
• Being selfish is bad.

It seems to come from our ability for empathy, which evolved from emotional connections that were necessary to form bonds with other members of our tribe. We learned to see things “from the other chimp’s perspective.” We realized that if we don’t like the other guy beating us up, he probably doesn’t like me beating him up either. And it’s that ability to see through another person’s eyes that gives us our “moral” code.

I see morality as being essentially a complex equation of sorts. Most of the calculating we do automatically, as one segment on “chimp morality” shows on an episode of WNYC’s RadioLab that was about morality. In fact, if you want to really know what I believe about morality, stop reading this and go and listen to that. Then come back and read.

It’s a sort of three-dimensional cost/benefit analysis, where various potential choices are compared side by side, and the possible outcomes are weighed against each other. The solution is usually the one that does the least amount of harm to everyone, and carries the most benefits for everyone involved. It starts with the individual, then moves outward to others in the immediate circle of influence, and then goes further and further out until we can look at the potential benefit/harm done to something as large as the planet.

Doesn’t that sound like a better alternative than blindly following what your 3,000 year-old Bronze Age holy book tells you to do? Such as if it tells you to stone your wife to death for adultery? Or cut the foreskin off a newborn baby boy? Or tells you that homosexuals are disgusting perverts who are going to hell and deserve the abuse they get?

My morality boils down to the line from the closing song of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide (lyrics beautifully penned by Richard Wilbur, which is itself an adaptation of the last chapter of Candide’s novel): We’re neither pure nor wise nor good; we’ll do the best we know. Play nicely with others, treat them how you want to be treated, and leave the planet better than you came into it. What reason do I have for believing this? Absolutely none, aside from my own deeply-held convictions.

Supposing these ancient “moral codes” are merely humanity’s first attempts at describing what it means to be human? Explore and examine how we can live together in community? To try and put these deep and primal desires within us into words? We don’t really need a god to have handed those down to us.

Could I be a selfish bastard and try to get as much as I can from life while I can? Sure. But would it make me happy and contented? Would others benefit from my selfishness? No, they wouldn’t. (“What does that matter,” my theist friends will postulate, “if this is all there is?”) My humanity allows me to look at it through the eyes of my neighbors and decide what the best course of action is.

I don’t know if there is a God or not. I can’t disprove it any more than I can prove it. I take the last verse of “Make Our Garden Grow” to heart: Let dreamers dream what worlds they please; those Edens can’t be found. Ultimately, we don’t know, and speculating only makes things more complicated. It’s fun to think and argue about; but if there is a personal god out there, from the sort of universe it brought into being I think it probably considers belief in it—and all of the myriad of locks and fences we’ve built—pretty pointless.

Even ungrateful.

“Go outside!” it seems to be saying. “Get some sun—but in moderation! Enjoy nature! Enjoy yourself. Enjoy each other. Do good work.”

The sweetest flowers, the fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.

We’re neither pure nor wise nor good;
We’ll do the best we know;
We’ll build our house, and chop our wood,
And make our garden grow.

99. prometheus

I hate getting bad news. I hate it more when it’s about someone I have admired for years.

Yes, Virginia, Christopher Hitchens is dead.

It doesn’t come as a huge shock since we knew it would happen sooner or later, but it did come as an unpleasant surprise this evening to open my Twitter feed to see the bevy of #GodIsNotGreat hashtags and “Christopher Hitchens is dead!” posts. That put a damper on the rest of an otherwise pleasant evening.

Not surprisingly, major news outlets have published obits touting his career and many accomplishments (one of the best, in my opinion, has been The Guardian’s). No doubt they’ve had pieces ready to go since his diagnosis of terminal cancer. Also not surprisingly, many fundamentalist Christians have been expressing their glee at the passing of someone who they considered a mortal enemy. We’ll be hearing sentiments like, “Wherever he’s going, he’s there now!” And, “Boy, doesn’t he feel stupid!”

To be honest, I haven’t read much Hitchens’. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed for his column on Slate.com, and have enjoyed reading his views on everything from religion to politics to the American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, but have always felt a tad… overwhelmed by his intellect. I’ve fallen victim somewhat to the Systematic American Intellectual Laziness (S.A.I.L., for short) that plagues this land and its people, content with a few clever sound bites or quotes, or a summary in layman’s terms of what he’s saying instead of doing it myself.

Sorry, Hitch.

What is probably most unfortunate is that the thing he will probably be most remembered for is his polemics on religion when he had polemics on just about everything else. Right up until the end of his life (the last article of his published on Slate was dated Nov. 28, 2011), Hitchens was still using the scalpel of a mind that he had to go after Republican presidential candidates. It’s inspiring.

As I was driving home from Starbucks tonight, I was musing over this and some of what I’d read tonight, particularly the negative reactions from the religious community. Hitchens was proud of this, taking every opportunity to attack religion in scathingly brilliant diatribes and essays, gathering scores of enemies along the way.

When I first came out as an atheist, the only role models I had were the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, two of the more prominent and vocal members of the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism. Their vehemence at organized religion fueled and sharpened my own hatred of the Church and of God, which I’m not sure was the healthiest thing at that point since there were a lot of issues I was dealing with by not dealing with them and taking up arms instead. To be sure, I’m as staunchly opposed to organized religion—and to Christianity in particular—as ever.

But as I thought about the work that Dawkins and Hitchens have done, the books they’ve written and the rancor they’ve stirred up, I found myself wondering if that’s the kind of world I want to live in—a world of ideological trench warfare, where atheists are constantly on the attack and saying nasty things about theists, and vice versa; and where there is no hope for conversation or dialogue in the midst of the flying vitriolic projectiles and snares.

For the first time in history, atheists and non-theists of all varieties are free to come out and be vocal about their views. Not too long ago it was unpopular, even dangerous, to not believe in God and say so in public. In the 1950s you could be labeled a Communist. In earlier periods it could get you jailed, tortured, interrogated, and even murdered. There are still places where that’s the case, in particular countries where radical and extremist Islam are the dominant religions. But in the Western world, people are largely free to be atheists, agnostics and skeptics. We may still face discrimination, prejudice and abuse from religious bigots (and I’m using the dictionary definition of “bigot” here, not just as a slur), but non-theism seems to be rapidly growing in popularity and acceptance.

What comes to mind is the gay rights movement and the attempts for gays and lesbians, and now bisexuals and transgendered persons, to gain acceptance in society. Homosexuals, like atheists, have always been around but have lived underground for fear of persecution for being who they are. (I’m certainly not equating homosexuality and atheism, though in my own experience you can’t force yourself to believe any more than you can change your sexual orientation.) In order to gain visibility and start the proverbial ball rolling, the founding members of the modern gay rights movement had to be loud, controversial, counter-cultural and polemic. As Harvey Milk said, “You must come out.” After all, people can’t understand what they don’t know about or never come into personal contact with.

In a similar way, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have been the pioneers of neo-atheism in a world dominated by religion and religious factions. “We’re mad as hell as we won’t take it anymore!” Sundry flavors of Christianity dot the American landscape like radioactive Skittles; and we can’t stop hearing about ethnic violence in the Middle East between sects of Islam, between Sunnis and Shias, but also with the little-talked-about marginalization of the Zoroastrians (which still sounds to me like the name of some alien race on one of the Star Trek series).

Thanks to them and the flak that they’ve taken, countless atheists have had the courage to come out and identify as atheists and skeptics. Dawkins has stated that this was the purpose of his book The God Delusion; that while his wildest hope was that he might de-convert some of the “faithful,” his true intent was to help those who were privately non-believers find the confidence to no longer hide in the closet. His aim succeeded with me, for after hearing him interviewed on MPR I began my own quest for understanding that ultimately led to my letting go of God. But, looking back on my life, I was already there. All Dawkins did was open the door and show me at least one person who’d gone through it.

That said, just as most gays aren’t lisping drag queens or uber-butch lesbians, most of us aren’t as angry or acerbic as many of the prominent atheists. Or, at least I’m coming to realize that we shouldn’t be.

As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog, flamboyant drag queens and butch dykes paved the way for gays like me to live out in the open—often with their own blood. But as important as those early days for the movement were, the gay community is experiencing somewhat of a convergence as we enter the mainstream. We’re doing away with sequins and feather boas (think the denizens of Queer as Folk) and getting down to the business of figuring out how to actually live our lives. (And, so long as a Republican isn’t elected President in 2012, one of these days we’ll be able to legally marry too.)

Neo-atheists like Hitchens and Dawkins paved the way for atheists to be out and proud, but I’m wondering if it’s time we set the vitriol aside and get down to the business of trying to figure out how to live together without killing each other. Sure, theists constitute a majority in the world today, and they tend to flex their ideological (and political) muscles a lot, and we need to fight that; but religion or belief in God isn’t going away for a long time—and neither are atheists. So do I want to alienate all of my friends who still believe in God by constantly attacking and belittling their beliefs (a là Dawkins)? Do I want to be the atheist in the Dane Cook sketch who takes offense when someone says, “God bless you”?

Is that really productive?

This is part one of a two-part entry that conveniently precedes my hundredth entry on this blog, wherein I want to flesh out how exactly I came to atheism and what I believe now. It’s as much an exercise for me as it is for others to read.

Here’s where I’ll leave this today: As much as I admired Christopher Hitchens, his intellect and his uncompromising articulation of his views, I don’t want to pick fights with every ecclesiastical windmill on the road. Nor do I want to waste another year of my life jabbing at the ghosts of my religious past.

It’s time to start moving beyond religion.

It’s time for post-theism.

80. crowns

“Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others. Thousands of people have been tortured for their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots for what is in many cases a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith. Religion devours resources, sometimes on a massive scale. A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred mancenturies in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose. Was it some kind of architectural peacock’s tail? If so, at whom was the advertisement aimed? Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolized medieval and Renaissance talent. Devout people have died for their gods and killed for them; whipped blood from their backs, sworn themselves to a lifetime of celibacy or to lonely silence, all in the service of religion. What is it all for? What is the benefit of religion?”

– Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”

Last night I was at Starbucks, finishing work on a large proofing project for work. Dawkins’ words had a particularly congruous ring to them at that point, as I was spending time outside of work on something that was for work instead of on the rather pressing writing projects I need to be plugging away at. (Hmmm. Maybe that does make me a writer.) Researchers estimate that we spend over a third of our lives at work, and I’ve written in the past about the necessity of being invested in a career or line of work or activity that is driven by deep passion. Life is too short to waste it on so paltry a thing as a job.

Oh god, I sound like a Hippie.

Oh well.

The other day I was asked about the themes that I write about, and my off-the-cuff answer was something about the pursuit of truth in whatever circumstance you find yourself in; but the next morning in the shower I realized that religion is a dominating theme in my writing, and specifically, people living in its awful and haunting shadow. To be clear, religion has done positive things for the world and for society. It provides comfort, direction and meaning to billions of people throughout the world. Some of the greatest relief organizations have been founded and steered by Christians and people of faith. Without Christianity, we might not be as compassionate or charitable a culture as we are now, though other cultures and worldviews have developed both attributes independent of Christianity, which happens to have been the historical vehicle of transmission in the West.

I’ve been devoting a lot of time on this blog to attacking religion, which I guess makes me sound like one of those angry, bitter, cantankerous atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. If that’s so, I’m flattered and consider myself in good company. In the opinion of myself and many others, religion is one of the most serious problems still plaguing the world today, and it would be great to see the end of pernicious blind faith in my lifetime, though I won’t hold my breath. As long as gay teens are brutalized with toxic theologies about their innate and beautiful sexuality; Muslim women swelter in burqas on hot summer days because their patriarchal culture denigrates their bodies; or gullible churchgoers are duped into throwing their hard-earned money away; and as long as the Rick Perrys, Michele Bachmanns and Rick Santorums of the world are taken with any degree of seriousness, I will rail against religion and the evil that it is doing in the world, and the deeply distasteful, unpleasant and vindictive God looming over all of it.

My friend Adam is one of several people I know who are starting a church together. (I’ve mentioned it on here before in the past, SafeHouse Church.) This morning he posted about “Justice and the love of God,” a call-to-arms of sorts of putting your money where your mouth’s been running in terms of putting your resources to use where they’ll do the most good. Adam is passionate about social justice as an essential Christian virtue, something I find admirable and exemplary. He also rejects the absurd and destructive eschatology at the heart of American Evangelical Christianity; that teaches that the “End Times” are at hand and that God has orchestrated a final showdown between Good and Evil, and all that really matters is “saving souls for Jesus.” Were that more Christians shared Adam’s attitude, the church might not have as great a need for missionaries and it might be the compassionate and world-changing faith it was meant to be.

The other night I was over visiting two friends of mine, Joe and Jenny, who are also on the ground level of starting up SafeHouse. (Joe is one of the pastors, along with Adam.) In the discussion that took place that evening, I was trying to understand his theological and philosophical positions. I’m reminded of a line from an episode of the show Mad Men that I watched last night while finishing up the proofing work, where a Beatnik girl whines, “How come every time we have a party the ladies have to listen to the men talk?” (I imagine it’s what Jenny might have been thinking while Joe and I were talking.) Talking philosophy can be very dry going, but it was really a much more interesting discussion than that. Joe’s an intelligent guy and fun to talk to, but the question I kept coming back around to was, “Why bother with Christ at all? Can’t you do the things you do without dragging God into it?” These are the questions I’m pressing Adam with as well.

Joe is a post-modern (whatever that means anymore), doesn’t believe in absolute truth (at least as far as I understood him), and accepts evolution as the most likely explanation for life on earth. As best I could discern from him, Christianity is the narrative that works best for him and for his church, and that they feel the most connection to. Douglas Adams likens religion to feng shui, an ancient architectural philosophy built around making spaces to suit dragons. “It’s worth remembering,” he said in a speech delivered at Cambridge, “that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it’s worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there.”

Or, as William James said, “It doesn’t work because it’s true: it’s true because it works.”

But still I’m wondering, “Why bother with Jesus or God at all?” If you don’t really believe it’s fundamentally true (and I do think it matters a great deal whether it’s true or not), why not take the positive tenets of religion – altruism, kindness, generosity, love – and jettison the rest? Instead of superimposing a theistic narrative onto everything, throwing your money away on a church building and its ecclesiastical-ish trappings, wasting hours on Sunday morning singing communal songs to God (which is really more of a themed rock show anyway), and fretting about filling seats every week; why not go out and campaign for free speech (or marriage equality and gay rights – take your pick), raise money to go dig wells or medical relief in third world countries, or feed the poor and sick and take care of widows? Those are the things that the Jesus of the bible seemed concerned about.

Just as it’s a waste to spend life working a job, religion ultimately robs humanity of valuable time and energy that could otherwise be devoted to other more worthy pursuits. When I think of the priests who have spent their lives in devoted, celibate service to God; of the men and women who have beat themselves up trying to conform to the bizarre Evangelical Judeo-Christian sexual mores; and of all the people who have gone willingly to a gruesome martyr’s death (to cite just a few examples), it makes me sick with sorrow for humanity. Let’s say what we really mean, not what sounds nice, comforting or convenient. We don’t need to be good for God. I doubt God would be concerned with that anyway.

As the popular Christmas song goes, “be good for goodness sake.”

78. nevermore

This weekend I came to the realization that I can probably only date other free thinkers or skeptics—guys who grew up in the Church and, after much thought and weighing of evidence, decided that it was no longer tenable to stay there.

Frankly, it’s not an easy thing to turn away from the place that has been your home for all of your life. From my earliest remembrance, the church was the primary social and sociological organizing feature of my life. I can still vividly remember sitting in the hard pews of the Evangelical Mennonite church that my family attended, feet dangling off the side, not yet long enough to reach the floor.

… I remember singing hymns together, and the older Mennonite woman who taught my 1st grade Sunday school class, and the felt board and pieces she used to tell Bible stories.

… I remember lunches, dinners and missionary gatherings in the community hall, and playing games in there during AWANA and vacation Bible school.

… I remember Christmas, Advent services with the candles (and mine catching fire several years in a row), Easter, and all the services in between.

It’s not that I don’t care about the Church, or about religion, or even God. I take it very seriously, which is why I can’t believe anymore—because I take it too seriously to believe on such a profound lack of evidence as there is. As Richard Dawkins writes in his endnote to Chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene:

“I don’t want to argue that the things in which a particular individual has faith are necessarily daft. They may or may not be. The point is that there is no way of deciding whether they are, and no way or preferring one article of faith over another, because evidence is explicitly eschewed. Indeed the fact that true faith doesn’t need evidence is held up as its greatest virtue; this was the point of my quoting the story of Doubting Thomas, the only really admirable member of the twelve apostles.”

He continues in the same endnote: “Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr’s death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb.”

I’ve dated a number of guys who have held various religious beliefs. My first boyfriend had a horrific experience coming out as a teenager in his Christian community, where he was literally thrown out of his house by his conservative fundamentalist parents, as well as shunned by everyone he knew.

It’s been a mixture, with some guys still believing that Christianity is the way and trying to reconcile homosexuality with the Bible; but mostly the guys I meet are apathetic at best about Christianity. Like most American men, church doesn’t have a strong draw for them. Most grew up around Christianity but once they were old enough drifted away; and for many gay men, we get the message early on that the church has no place for homosexuals. Some might even go so far as to say that gays make Jesus throw up.

I’m at a place right now where there’s a lot of internal anger towards the church and its teachings. Having grown up within the system, while I’ve known many decent and kind religious people, I frankly believe that religion itself is too often used as a tool of psychological abuse and terrorism, subjugating individuals through fear of damnation and glorified ignorance in a sort of holy Stockhausen Syndrome.

It’s ironic. When I first came out, I was committed to only dating Christian gays, even going so far as to joining Christian gay dating sites and online forums (such as the GCN Network, which is where I met my first boyfriend). Now the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, where I should probably only date date agnostics or atheists, guys who have come out of the church and are committed to free thought and eradicating ignorance and religious abuse and inculcation from the world.

This experience is so defining and pervasive that it honestly makes it difficult to connect to others. That was what made it easy to connect to Seth—our common religious backgrounds and the experience of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian environment. But that chapter of my life is over, and a new and brighter one has begun—and now I want to share it with someone who understands that; who takes faith and religion seriously but also realizes through having lived it how toxic and deadly an ideology it is.

What it comes down to is that I can’t date guys who are willing to suspend their critical thinking skills in light of everything that we now know. Looking at the long term (which is where I’m at in seeking a relationship), our beliefs about the world are fundamentally different. He’ll believe that everything happens for a reason, and that there is a God benevolently looking out for us in Heaven, whereas I do not. My deepest sense is that there is a God (though that being is probably more akin to the God of the Deists than the personal God of the Evangelicals), but see no evidence to believe that life has any intrinsic purpose beyond that which we ascribe to it. The universe doesn’t care about anyone. It is amoral, non-sentient. Therefore, we must care about each other.

Similarly, I couldn’t date a guy who is apathetic about religion, because what we think and believe does deeply define us. It’s somewhat like having lived through combat—difficult for anyone who hasn’t experienced it to relate or fully appreciate the gravity of the emotional, psychological and social ramifications. Turning your back on your religion is a huge decision—one not to be taken lightly.

75. votive

On the way home this afternoon, I was listening to this passage from The Selfish Gene:

“Consider the idea of God. We do not know how it arose in the meme pool. Probably it originated many times by independent ‘mutation’. In any case, it is very old indeed. How does it replicate itself? By the spoken and written word, aided by great music and great art. Why does it have such a high survival value? Remember that ‘survival value’ here does not mean value for a gene in a gene pool, but value for a meme in a meme pool. The question really means: What is it about the idea of a god that gives it its stability and penetrance in the cultural environment? The survival value of the god meme in the meme pool results from its great psychological appeal. It provides a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence. It suggests that injustices in this world may be rectified in the next. The ‘everlasting arms’ hold out a cushion against our own inadequacies which, like a doctor’s placebo, is none the less effective for being imaginary. These are some of the reasons why the idea of God is copied so readily by successive generations of individual brains. God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.”

—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p.192-193

In my last post and in posts previous (in particular, one from a few weeks ago), I’ve been discussing and considering the idea of the existence of, and belief or non-belief in, God. I’ve pondered various theories, from theism being an evolutionary advantage for our early ancestors that we just never got rid of, to it being a “mind virus” that infects a person until a good dose of rational thinking cures him or her of it. But this idea of God being a meme (that is, “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture” (source: Merriam-Webster)) finally put into words what I’d been trying to articulate. Considering how fast Internet videos and catch phrases spread now, and that some are more or less enduring than others, puts the whole thing in better perspective. God is an idea—and ideas, as Alan Moore once wrote, are bulletproof.

Or is God an idea?

Along with this I’ve considered the possibility that I’ve made God what I want God to be—or not to be—to suit my notions of the world and how I think it works. It certainly is more convenient for there to be no God, since it eliminates the “problem of pain.” This world is all there is, and there is no benevolent God in the afterlife waiting to wipe away all our tears and put all things to right. We don’t have to work out how or why God might allow terrible things to happen because there is no God to allow it. Things just happen. Children die. Planes fly into buildings. We’re just another animal on the Serengeti plains, eating or trying to avoid being eaten.

But I keep wondering if we’re simply asking the wrong questions. Supposing that there is a God (and my sense is that there is). Why would such an all-powerful being expect us to erect this monolithic ideology around the idea that people are intrinsically evil (tainted through no fault of their own, simply by virtue of the fact that they’re born and without any choice given to them, by this supposed Sin Nature that was imputed to them when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden however long ago it was) and that Jesus had to be born as a human in order to be tortured to death for our sins (which we seemingly have no choice about committing since it’s inevitable that we’re going to do something “sinful”)?

If we look not to the Bible but to the world around us, we see a common theme: it’s broken and a mess, but we do the best we can and life goes on. Why instead do we spend all this time flagellating ourselves (literally or metaphorically) about what awful sinners we are in God’s eyes? What a colossal waste of time and energy considering how brief and wonderful life is! It would be like going to the Louvre and instead of marveling at the incredible works of art, we’re outraged about how other people aren’t appropriately appreciating the artwork, or aren’t looking at it in the right way, or littering, or talking too loudly—and completely missing the point.

This afternoon one of my good friends at work and I were discussing her son and his three neighborhood friends, and how she wonders which one of them might turn out to be gay. She and her husband are trying to raise him in as affirmative a way as possible so that he feels free to be who and whatever he is. Her neighbors are of the same mind.

Then she talked about a friend of hers from college whose friends finally made him come out for his own good, because they didn’t care if he was gay—they just wanted him to be authentically himself and to be happy with that. Hearing stories like this—about parents who love and encourage their children, and friends who do the same—both inspires and kills me. One of our art directors at the agency has a gay son who is currently studying to be a dancer at Julliard. They knew he was gay early on, and when he finally realized it they basically told him what any parent tells their straight son or daughter—we love you, and be safe. No complications. No hand wringing. No soul searching. As if it was normal.

Because (pardon my Finnish) it fucking is normal—se on vitun normaali.

What if I’d grown up in a family where my parents didn’t care whether I was gay or not? How much unnecessary mental anguish could I have escaped? And, thinking beyond just myself, I wonder what kind of a world we might have if all parents did that. If kids didn’t worry about being bullied at school because they were or are perceived to be gay.

It comes back to this cultural god meme.

I’m going to backtrack for just a bit and lay some groundwork—and I’m going to focus for now on homophobia, which happens to be on my brain and is currently (and no doubt will be) a major moral and political issue in the upcoming presidential campaign. Now it’s telling to me that the only places where homophobia still has a strong foothold is in the Americas, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Let me focus briefly on the latter two:

• Asian culture (and forgive me for generalizing here) is one steeped heavily in tradition and honor to family, though the up and coming generation is becoming increasingly Westernized and progressive, and less tradition-bound. To an outsider, it appears almost militaristic in its demand of unquestioning obedience and conformity to social mores.
• Africa—and here I’m trying hard not to be conscious of making generalizations or value judgements—is a continent that seems largely dominated by violence, ignorance, poverty and fear. That’s also true of many societies, but I look with sadness at the genocides and ethnic cleansings of even the recent past in Rwanda and the Darfur, and the apparent utter disregard for human life in the ongoing slave trade. That AIDS continues to ravage the continent because men largely refuse to practice safe sex, or believe that the rape of a virgin will cure them, is another symptom of a continent in desperate need of enlightenment.

Africa and Asia are two continents where any of the monotheistic religions haven’t had much historical presence, which is why I singled them out, and why I’m not surprised that the cultures would be strongly homophobic. For hundreds of years, the Americas have had a strong Christian dominance, and the Middle East is home to the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Islam. Both began as largely tribal societies and religions, their religions reflecting the dominantly patriarchal hegemony of the culture.

Okay—brief excursus on sexual politics in the ancient world (which is very relevant to the discussion here) and we’ll get back on topic. Gender roles were rigidly enforced in the ancient world as social stability required that everyone know their place—and free males (those who held military or monetary power and property) were masters of that world, all others (women, children, slaves, foreigners) subservient to their wills. Consequently, because males were at the top of the social ladder, it was logical that their God was male too since he must be a bigger, stronger and invisible version of human males. And so God, like a freeman, becomes a homophobe.

Sex was often the politics of the ancient world, and a freeman’s social dominance often expressed itself through sexual dominance as well. A freeman could have sex with anyone—so long as he wasn’t violating the property of another freeman. Penetration is the key word here. A freeman could penetrate (i.e., dominate) anyone of a lower social rank—women and girls (all females were considered property of males), boys and male slaves. It was shameful for one freeman to penetrate (i.e., dominate) another since that other male was either taking on the role of a non-dominant (i.e., a woman or slave) or proving himself unworthy as a freeman by being soft or weak. Inevitably theology was woven into all of that, and it became a sin for two men to have sex since God, the überman, like any freeman, doesn’t like the idea of one man penetrating another.

Sorry, this is a huge idea to tackle in one blog post, and I must sound absolutely batshit insane and sex-obsessed, but bear with me. Fast forward a couple thousand years. At the core of every Christian pastor and politician’s polemic against gays and calling for the protection of “family values” is that same ancient meme, passed down like a collective virus that shapes and defines the culture around it.

And now I’m getting to Europe, which we purposefully haven’t talked about yet.

For over a thousand years the Roman Catholic Church was the dominant reigning power in known Western world. It dictated the thoughts and beliefs of everyone with an iron fist, from kings to serfs, holding the threat of damnation and often torture and death for heresy and unbelief—but it too was infected with that same cultural god meme that had come up through the same tribal Hebrew culture from which Christianity sprang.

Douglas Adams wrote, “There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.”

It was around the middle of the 18th century that people started having brilliant new thoughts, and the new meme of rationality began to take hold like a anti-virus in what came to be known as the Enlightenment. Suddenly it wasn’t okay to just blindly accept whatever you’d been taught or held to be true. We could understand the world and life through logic and rational thinking. And it took several hundred years, but eventually someone questioned whether our belief that it was unnatural for “man to lie with man” or “woman with woman” was right.

And that happened in Europe—just as the Enlightenment happened in Europe.

So if you’re still tracking, I don’t think it’s by accident that Europe is less homophobic, or that it thrives in places where rationality doesn’t. It is by employing reason that we move forward (in what I believe Dawkins considers a next stage in human evolution), for it was by employing reason that we abolished slavery in the Western world, developed science and medicine, recognized basic human rights and that women were the equals of men, and first got a glimpse of our place in this vast and incredible universe.

And now back to the idea of God.

… remember God?

Supposing there is a God, but we’ve created an idea of him in our image—male to boot, in all his jealous, raging, egotistical glory (and I don’t think it’s coincidence either that most theologians were males)—and built an entire civilization around that ancient meme. What must that God think of the amazingly ape-like creatures who go around stuffing each other or themselves into artificial moralistic boxes, or even going around killing each other, based on how they think he wants them to live.

What if God is like the curator of the Louvre, seeing all the silly Puritanical visitors obsessing about how furniture is arranged instead of enjoying the artwork?

72. blessing

This morning I was listening to This American Life from 29 July, a show in two acts about thugs and various kinds of thuggery. In the first act, a man in Egypt is subjected to the nightmare of beatings, torture, false imprisonment and then charged with being a thug, all because he wasn’t going along with the military coup before and during the ousting of Hosni Mubarak.

In the second act, a social worker fights to redeem a young man who enters the criminal justice system who she is determined to save and believes in against all evidence to the contrary. As the story goes, he is eventually connected to a horrific murder, goes to prison, escapes, and kills two more people before he is finally caught and sentence to death row. Through it all, the woman maintains his innocence—until he finally confesses to the murder he was originally accused of, as well as another murder that he was never suspected of, because “he found God . . . and needed to atone for what he’d done.”

Later on, she goes to visit him in the maximum security prison where he will eventually face execution. He began to change, the story went, one day while flipping through the trial documents.

He looked at the photo of his victim, the girl he killed, alive and beautiful. Then he held it side-by-side with her autopsy photo and thought, I did that. He pauses and puts a hand over his face, as if he’s collecting himself enough to continue. But watching Kenneth relive this is like watching a bad play. The words are disconnected from his gestures. He makes a show of weeping, lowering his eyes, shaking his head, and covering his face with his arms. When he looks up again, I don’t see any tears.

The crime for which he went to prison involved robbing two female university students, then later kidnapping them, taking them out into the middle of nowhere and shooting both of them. One girl died; another survived and managed to get to help. “He went back, he said, let them beg for their lives, and shot them, over and over.”

Then the victims of his prison break. A farmer, the one with the truck, was trying to run away when Kenneth gunned him down. And finally, this. After the car chase in Missouri, state troopers made Kenneth walk over and look at the lifeless body of the delivery driver, thinking Kenneth would be remorseful. Instead, Kenneth says all he saw was the man who got in the way of his escape, and he spit on the body.

In one of the earlier episodes of the fourth season of Torchwood: Miracle Day, a child molester and murderer (Bill Pullman in a fantastic change of role for him) is executed by lethal injection, but due to The Blessing (the event by which everyone in the world stops dying) occurring just before his execution is carried out, he survives and is released since he cannot be tried or executed for the same crime twice. In the second episode, he is confronted during a TV interview à la 60 Minutes with the image of the girl he brutally killed. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, weeping, tears welling up in his eyes.

“What good is ‘sorry,’ Mr Danes?” the interviewer scoffs. “Is it going to do anything for Mrs Cabina every morning when she wakes up?”

What is it about “finding God” that is supposed to engender sympathy or forgiveness for even the most savage of criminals? As if praying a prayer erases a multitude of wrongs – if not on earth then in heaven. This is one of my primary objections to Christianity: that you could savagely murder a room full of people and then have a pang of conscience, ask for God’s forgiveness, be rightly executed for your crime, and go straight to heaven to be with Jesus for all eternity without a blemish on your soul. Because Jesus paid it all.

Quick primer in atonement theology. There are two main schools of thought here:

• The Christus Victor, or ransom, theory: Humanity is enslaved to Satan on account of the Fall, wherein Adam and Eve imputed Original Sin to all their descendants. The best analogy here is in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where Edmund betrays his brother and sisters to the White Witch (the Satan figure in Narnia) and becomes her slave since every traitor is her lawful prey. To save him from death, Aslan (the Christ figure) dies in his place, but because of the Deep Magic from the Dawn of Time, “when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table [i.e., the Cross] would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”
• The Penal substitution, or satisfaction, theory: Same premise as Christus victor; but here, God is the Righteous Judge and humanity is the Wretched Criminal. “Sin” is the inexorable debt to be repaid to God for Man’s rebellion against him, and Man is automatically found guilty by God, the only perfect being in existence; and so he is condemned to be separated from God for all eternity in Hell (e.g., life in prison). But Jesus, the perfect sinless Son of God (don’t get me started on trinitarian theology), is sent to serve that sentence and is born the God-man and executed, thus fulfilling the conditions of the sentence. And God declares the debt as having been paid in full.

Richard Dawkins responded to the theology of atonement, how Abraham and Isaac prefigures the Crucifixion, and Original Sin in an interview with Howard Conder this past March. Dawkins said: “The idea that God could only forgive our sins by having his Son tortured to death as a scapegoat is, surely from an objective point of view, a deeply unpleasant idea. If God wanted to forgive us our sins, why didn’t he just forgive them?

“If there’s something I can’t stand about Christianity, it’s this obnoxious doctrine of Original Sin, which I think is actually a hideous, and demeaning and a vengeful doctrine. It’s the idea that one can be absolved; that a sin by somebody else has to be paid for by a different person, which is a horrible idea.

“It would be persuasive if the judge said, you’re forgiven. That would be great. That would the kind of thing one could empathize with. But that’s not what he said. He said, ‘Okay, we’re going to hang somebody else for your crime’.

“I think it’s a horrible idea that – given that the judge is all-powerful; given that the judge has the power to forgive if he wants to – the only way he can do it is to sacrifice his son. I mean, what an incredibly unpleasant way to do it, given that you have the power to forgive, that you are all-powerful!”

So what’s so wrong with a murderer (or anyone else for that matter—liar, adulterer, thief, homosexual, or whatever else you call a “sin”) being forgiven and getting off scot-free? Or with Jesus paying your sin-debt for you? It’s precisely that—you get off scot-free. And let’s say that the people you killed weren’t Christians. Let’s say you tortured them—horribly—before you then murdered them, had that pang of conscience later after you realized what you did, prayed “the prayer” and were “saved.” The problem is that you sent however many into an eternity in hell (because they weren’t “saved”) while you yourself skip out of jail into a blissful eternity in heaven and Jesus pays the $200.

What kind of a theology is this? To borrow from Julia Sweeney Letting Go of God, it would be as though Hitler had a “come to Jesus” moment right before he died. According to atonement theology, if he was truly sincere, no one would sit him down and say, “You fucked up, buddy! Now you’re going to spend an eternity in hell!” Quite the opposite. His sin of having murdered millions of people (among other things) would be expunged, paid for on the Cross by Jesus.

Supposing an inmate who suffocated in the gas chambers of Auschwitz ran into the man responsible for their death in heaven? Or Susie Cabina running into Oswald Danes who raped and murdered her as a 12-year-old? Or Cecil Boren or Dominique Hurd meeting Kenneth Williams (the kid from the This American Life story earlier)? Or conversely, any of them going to hell and learning that their murderer had been pardoned by God?

Now, it may be fair to say that I just don’t like this arrangement because I don’t think it’s just. God sees all sins as equal, and if a sinner truly repents, who are we to begrudge God for granting pardon since we are just as guilty as the murderer? Does that make me the Unmerciful Servant whose debt the king forgave? Or a grumbling vineyard worker who resented the owner for paying those who showed up at the last shift the same as those who had worked all day? Possibly—to both.

However, as to the question of whether a murderer who “found God” should be worthy of our forgiveness, I say the only person who can truly forgive the wrong is the victim him or herself.

In Tony Kushner’s play Perestroika, Ethel Rosenberg returns to haunt Roy Cohn, who effectively killed her by pulling strings with the presiding judge to get a death sentence. As Roy lies dying of AIDS, Ethel stands at his bedside.

I decided to come here so I could see could I forgive you. You who I have hated so terribly I have born my hatred for you up into the heavens and made a needle-sharp little star in the sky out of it. It’s the star of Ethel Rosenberg’s Hatred, and it burns every year for one night only, June Nineteen. It burns acid green.

I came to forgive but all I can do is take pleasure in your misery. Hoping I’d get to see you die more terrible than I did. And you are, ’cause you’re dying in shit, Roy, defeated. And you could kill me, but you couldn’t ever defeat me. You never won. And when you die all anyone will say is: Better he had never lived at all.

In the scene that follows, Roy feigns reverting to a childlike state, calling for his mother, begging her to sing to him. At first, Ethel is bitter, angry, and refuses, but finally relents when he persists. She sings him an old Yiddish song, “Shteit a bocher.” Then, once she thinks he’s dead and turns to go, he suddenly sits up and exclaims, “I can’t believe you fell for that ma stuff, I just wanted to see if I could finally, finally make Ethel Rosenberg sing! I WIN!” After which he actually dies.

Towards the end of the play, Ethel returns in a final gesture of forgiveness to help Louis say Kaddish over Roy. They end with the blessing, “Oseh sholom bimromov, hu ya-aseh sholom olenu v’al col Yisroel v’imru omain. You sonofabitch.” The Hebrew translates to, “He who makes peace in His heights, may He make peace upon us and upon all Israel; and say, ‘Amen’.”

So in the end, I’m conflicted. On the one hand, a God who pardons the unpardonable and allows his son to be tortured to death for our sins is utterly offensive. On the other hand, what are the limits of forgiveness in light of eternity? What is the extent of forgiveness? And what is the extent of retribution?

Many friends of mine say that the criminal justice system should be restorative instead of merely punitive—that the purpose should be to eventually restore an individual to right standing in society (provided that there is no danger posed to society). But to what extent can a debt be considered “paid”? Does such a person deserve to walk free, or receive our collective forgiveness?

69. immortality

*I posted this comment to an article on my friend pantaloondescendo’s blog this afternoon, and (narcissism aside) thought it was beautifully phrased and wanted to share it with anyone reading this*

To quote Douglas Adams (via Richard Dawkins): “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

At the same time, I’m rather intrigued by the Jewish idea that God will hold each of us accountable for every legitimate pleasure that we denied ourselves in life (this coming from Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks). We are sentient beings capable of thought, feeling and understanding, so for one of those beings to live a life wasted and full of regret is probably the most supreme tragedy there is in the universe.

I heard Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speak about this idea of a sort of “spiritualized hedonism” (to paraphrase slightly from John Piper and his “Christian Hedonism“) on American Public Media’s On Being (formerly Speaking of Faith) on the show “Pursuing Happiness” which was a conversation with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Jonathan Sacks, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, and Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr at the 2010 Interfaith Summit on Happiness held at Emory University.

Sacks was responding to Schori, who in turn was responding to a question about “our physical selves in this condition of happiness.” She outlined the two traditions of ascetic approach and an incarnational approach (which I won’t post here but is in the show transcript, in the second section of dialogue). Then Sacks had this to say:

Judaism has a certain approach to the physical dimension of the spiritual life. It’s called food. In fact, somebody once said, if you want a crash course in understanding all the Jewish festivals, they can all be summed up in three sentences: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat. But I think that part of our faith is that God is to be found down here in this world that God created and seven times pronounced good. And I find one of the most striking sentences in Judaism — it is in the Jerusalem Talmud — is the statement of Rav that in the world to come, a person will have to give an account of every legitimate pleasure he or she deprived themselves of in this life. Because God gave us this world to enjoy.

I must say that quite apart — and I mean, absolutely, Judaism has taken — I think we share this, but Judaism has said there are three approaches to physical pleasure. Number one is hedonism, the worship of pleasure. The number two is asceticism, the denial of pleasure. And number three is the biblical way for sanctification of pleasure. And that, I think, is important and very profound. And I must say that sometimes the best kind of interfaith gatherance — I mean, theology is extremely wonderful. It’s very cognitive. That is a very polite English way of saying boring. And sometimes the best form of interfaith is you just sit together, you eat together, you drink together, you share one another’s songs. You listen to one another’s stories and just enjoy the pleasures of this world with people of another faith. That is beautiful.

I would add just one other thing. If there is one thing I find beautiful beyond measures — there in my own tradition in what we call hakhnasat orhim, hospitality, very real element of Christianity and Islam and Buddhism — it’s a super element in Sikhism, what’s called langar. You know, it’s not just my physical pleasures. It’s giving physical pleasure to those who have all too little. One very great Hasidic teacher once said, “Somebody else’s material needs are my spiritual duties.” And that, I think, is where we join in sharing our pleasures with others.

This is very different from the normal conservative Christian views that say you can’t (or shouldn’t) drink, smoke, swear, have sex outside of marriage, be gay, etc., ad nauseum. After all, if God created it (and he did… didn’t he??), why is it wrong to do? The smoking thing I can understand since it’s harmful to your physical body and to others; but the rest seem based on cultural norms and even personal preferences as supposed to a divine ban on said activity. Alcohol is fine and even healthy in moderation. Swearing’s probably not good, but it’s damn good fun. Premarital sex is in the Bible, so this whole “saving myself for marriage” doctrine is complete nonsense. And don’t even get me started on homosexuality.

In short, any religion or system of belief that starts becoming more prohibitive to experiencing life in its fullest on the basis of “God said so” is one that should probably be re-evaluated.

68. blinding

I’m living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head

I’m living in an age
Whose name I don’t know
Though the fear keeps me moving
Still my heart beats so slow
– Arcade Fire, “My body is a cage” (from Neon Bible)

---

Yesterday afternoon I came across an article on the Huffington Post by David Lose entitled “Adam, Eve & the Bible.” He starts out by comparing the Biblical story to the legend of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree or Paul Revere warning the colonists (or the British, depending on whose history you listen to), then launching into discussion on Scriptural authority, problems with the Bible read as a historical or scientific text, and fundamentalist insecurity about the veracity of the Bible and of truth in religious belief.

NPR even aired a story on August 9th about evangelicals questioning the existence of the Biblical famous first couple (leave it to NPR to find evangelicals willing to admit to that on record). According to Scripture, all of humanity descended from one literal man and one literal woman in the Garden of Eden. However, as Dennis Venema, a professor at Trinity University, is quoted in the article, “that would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years.” There is too much genetic variation in the human genome today for that to be true. It’s even more ludicrous if you ascribe, as evangelicals do, to a “young earth” theory (i.e., that the earth is 6 to 10,000 thousand years old).

I was taught Young Earth Creationism growing up and believed it for a long time—until I heard and was convinced by Richard Dawkins. Evolution was touted as thought rebellion against God, a rejection of Biblical teaching on the origins of the universe, the earth and man. In 5th grade, my Sunday school teacher at the time was a colleague of Australian creationist Ken Ham (whose famous one-liner response to evolution is “How do you know? Were you there? Do you know someone who was?”) and had arranged for him to come to my church to do a seminar on Creationism. I had flashbacks recently after seeing a video of school children at his Creation Museum, who were about my age when I saw Ken Ham. When asked how they knew Creationism was true, most of the kids stumbled back with canned-like responses such as, “Because it’s in the Bible” or “My parents told me,” reflecting a lack of intellectual and critical foundation in Christian fundamentalist thought.

One curious aspect of the article was when Venema was later quoted as saying, “There is nothing to be alarmed about. It’s actually an opportunity to have an increasingly accurate understanding of the world — and from a Christian perspective, that’s an increasingly accurate understanding of how God brought us into existence.”

This seems like an odd thing to say, partly because of the weight Evangelicals place on the reliability of the Bible, but also since the Genesis story was a point of departure for me from Christianity. For me, the similarities between the Biblical creation story and early Mesopotamian accounts such as the Epic of Gilgamesh were too close for comfort, so it’s likely that in forming his creation story, the author of Genesis drew from that or even earlier legends to write his own, with Yahweh at its center.

The Bible hangs upon the premise that humanity fell from grace as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, leading to Christ being enfleshed in order to take our place to suffer God’s wrath. The theology of the Apostle Paul, which forms the bedrock of theology in both the Roman Catholic and Protestant faiths, is built on this premise. (That alone could take up a whole post, but I’m trying to keep this as close to 1,000 words as possible.)

I can see how there might not be much to worry about if the first few chapters of Genesis are a metaphor for the creation of the world—or, as David Lose put it, “The story of Eden is the history of humanity writ small.” The Bible was written by a Bronze-age people that didn’t have or expect solid scientific evidence. Lose writes that the Bible “is a collection of testimony, confessions of faith made by persons so gripped by their experiences of God they had to share them using whatever literary and cultural devices were at hand.” Why should we saddle an ancient text with modern expectations?

It would be one thing if this were just personal belief. However, from this story of Adam and Eve sprang an institution that is responsible for the torture, oppression, abuse and slaughter of millions based on an imperialist theology and eschatology (the same could be said too for Islam, or any other belief system). It had better be more than a story since billions of people have based and are basing their lives on it, and millions have led lives of misery for the sake of “Christ and his kingdom.” And, as my last article discusses, a radical, conservative interpretation of God and the Bible is currently being used to shape political policy, with tangible effects. So if it’s just myth, somebody has a lot of explaining to do.

At this point I’m asking myself, “Self, why are you making a big deal of this? So what if it’s true or not? Even if it’s not true in the literal sense, it’s still true psychologically, in the way that other stories are ‘true’.” After all, what’s wrong with a God creating the universe (or setting evolution in motion and letting it play out), or even Jesus dying for our sins?

Because as nice as those stories are, inherent to belief in religion is a certain amount of willful blindfolding that must be done in order to maintain that belief. You must be willing to accept certain precepts on faith alone, such as the claim that Jesus was the Son of God—or that God even exists—in the face of a lack of evidence or even to the contrary. It’s likely that there was a man in Judea in the 1st century C.E. named Yeshua; that he taught some really radical things; and that the Jewish religious leaders had him executed, but no genuine proof he truly performed miracles or physically rose from the dead. His followers certainly believed he was who he claimed to be—though as Robert Parsig writes (as quoted by Dawkins), “when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”

I consider myself a naturalist and a secular humanist. While I acknowledge the possibility and likelihood of a “god,” that which is “true” must be quantifiable by what we see and observe in the known world and universe. Science tells us that humanity could not have sprung from two original humans on the basis of the genome, so if the story of Adam and Eve is a myth, the rest of the Bible probably is too. What science is showing us through its evidential work is that humanity probably evolved over millions of years, gradually developing the tools and skills for survival, including language and consciousness.

So I would put it to you, dear reader: Where do we draw the line between artifice and delusion? Is a belief in a transcendent reality (and a transcendent deity) incompatible with the pursuit of reason and rationality? And if not, does it matter which system of belief you follow so long as it brings you closer to that “inner spark of divine light”?

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References

Arcade Fire (2007). My body is a cage. On Neon Bible [CD] Durham: Merge.
Hagerty, B. (9 August 2011) Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve.
Lose, D. (17 August 2011) Adam, Eve & the Bible.

67. intrinsical

*This article was written for the Minnesota Skeptics blog, but pending its review I thought I’d post it here for a sneak peek*

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I’m embarrassed it took this long, really.

New Christian converts have barely finished asking God to “kindly please not smite them” before a copy of the Gospel of John is practically shoved into their hands, and yet it took me nearly six months to crack open Richard Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene.” (Yes, there are plenty of mixed feelings and eye rolling about Dawkins to go around, but this should be required reading for any burgeoning skeptic or nonbeliever.) This past February I finally came out as an agnostic naturalist, but it wasn’t until a month ago that I even owned a copy of that book, or until two weeks ago that I finally cracked it open and decided to find out for myself what all the fuss is about.

Growing up as a fundamentalist Christian, the name “Dawkins” was almost synonymous with “Satan.” He was an evil (albeit misguided) scientist trying to lure the Faithful away from the fold and into his godless atheism. Yet (and I’m still devouring it) once I started reading and considering what he was saying, I found myself almost giddy, reveling in his language about survival machines, natural selection and replication. The thought of how life on this planet came about through processes that happened over a time frame larger than the mind can’t even comprehend, and the sheer beauty and awfulness of it, was almost a religious experience in itself. I’m this close to running out and getting one of those Darwin fish decals to slap on my car.

The other night I was visiting a friend of mine who is a more “non-traditional” Christian. She’s pro-gay rights, pro-choice, a Democrat, and many other things most fundies would consider blasphemous. We got onto the topic of evolution—something she accepts as fact without issue—and, naturally, “The Selfish Gene” came up. During the course of the discussion, she posed a query: What advantage might there be for an “inherited” belief in god? This came up after I suggested that the idea of “god” was probably a cultural construct, and she countered by saying she’d grown up in a non-religious home but had always had a sense of “god.” So, if there is no God and the universe and all life within it happened spontaneously, why do some believe in a deity while others do not? Is it a trait handed down through generations, like left-handedness or eye color?

It makes sense, actually. Having a religion would have carried some evolutionary advantage for our early ancestors. With their limited scientific knowledge, holding religious beliefs may have helped them cope with stressful situations such as disease, accident, natural disasters, animal attacks, and attacks from other hostile tribes. It would have facilitated social bonding and the fostering of community. Religious rituals also carry powerful symbolism, and the sense of belonging derived from going through such rituals would’ve been vital to our tribal ancestors.

It also seems a by-product of our consciousness and awareness of our mortality. You don’t want to think about your friend having just died because that means that someday you too will die and cease to exist. So it seems most likely that we created an afterlife and a God (or gods) to look after us both there and in this world too. An all-powerful God also appears to fill the parental void left once we grow out of childhood and into a cold, inhospitable world without a parent (i.e., ‘god’ to children, giver of life and gifts).

So here’s where this is going: If indeed “God” is merely a delusion, should we as a nation be basing deeply held political beliefs on such a foundation? As a skeptic invested in civic life, this worries me probably more than anything, especially when I hear politicians invoking religious, even eschatological language and rhetoric. Would it have been less American on 9/11 for George W. Bush to quote Psalm 23 or end his national address with “God bless America”? Or would Barack Obama have been any less patriotic had he not ended with “May God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America” on the night he announced that Osama Bin Laden had been killed? Furthermore:

• This past April a 1996 ban on the federal funding of stem cell research in the United States was finally lifted—a ban that George W. Bush affirmed in 2001 when he said that “human life is a sacred gift from our creator.”
• Israeli-U.S. relations have been historically shaped around the biblical belief that Israel is God’s “chosen nation,” and that any government that aligns itself against Israel aligns itself against God. That’s foreign policy based loosely on a religious notion.
• “Blue laws” remain in effect in state ordinances around the country, including in Minnesota, that prohibit the sale of alcohol on Sundays, originally under the idea that people should be in church, and many states also require car dealerships to be closed. Originally these laws were in accordance with the “day of rest” commanded in Exodus 20.

More recently has been the battle over same-sex marriage, vociferously led by GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. At the root of this conservative opposition to GLBT rights is the deeply held belief that, according to the Bible, God ordained marriage as between one man and one woman. They also point to several key scripture passages that they consistently use to label the GLBT community as “unnatural” and to deny them equal rights under the law. Law currently shaped by religious ideology, mind you, not law informed by unprejudiced, scientific and logical fact and evidence.

So what happens when you view the Creation story not as a factual account of the origin of the human species but as a variant of common creation myths in the Ancient Near East—including the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish? And what further happens when you view this story not as literal, God-given fact but as an attempt to explain where we came from? From there the narrative of scripture as Truth Handed Down From On High begins to unravel because so much depends on the veracity of this first story, at least in the view of fundamentalist Christians, which (looking at this as a former fundamentalist myself) is partly why this is such a critical issue.

And yet, religion is shaping and forming domestic policy, defying the Jeffersonian concept of a “wall of separation between church and state.” Skeptics are famous for debunking the paranormal, homeopathy and cultic belief systems, turning the same piercing scientific objectivity on them as we do for any academic subject. What would happen if we were to apply that to American civic life, calling out political leaders when they fail to uphold the Constitution they swore to protect and instead uphold religious ideology?

Because when last I checked, America still wasn’t a theocracy.