The Atheist's Way

Irish Abuse Report depicts sick groups

2009-05-21T13:01:00.000-07:00

(by Dave Cortesi)

Tales of decades of child abuse in Irish orphanages and schools have some people on an atheist mailing list all atwitter, supposing this an example of the evils created by religion. To me, the story is one of group dynamics gone bad.

The Report was issued by a Child Abuse Commission formed by an act of the Irish Parliament in response to years of lobbying by a few victims. The Commision's web site has an account of the formation including links to the various parliamentary acts. The Report in full is available online but at 2,000 pages or so, most of us will be content to read the Executive Summary (and I recommend that; it is several thousand words long but readable and in parts, gripping).

I want to talk about how such things can come about, not because of religion per se, but because of rotten group dynamics.

Some atheists have commented on the "coverup" of abuse by Catholic clergy. The Irish report is very much the opposite of a coverup. It's a full-blown, "truth and reconciliation" style exposure. I think the Irish parliament deserves props for creating this commission; such openness has to be seen as pretty gutsy, in a country still sufficiently dominated by religion that it recently passed an infamous "blasphemy law."

The Report is hugely damaging to specific Catholic orders. That's clear just skimming the Executive Summary, which sketches a picture of schools that were sheer Dickensian horrors. Here are some representative samples:

... Mr John Brander, who taught children in the primary and secondary school sector in Ireland for 40 years. He was eventually convicted of sexual abuse in the 1980s... He began his career as a Christian Brother and after three separate incidents of sexual abuse of boys, he was granted dispensation from his vows. This chapter goes on to describe this man's progress through six different schools where he physically terrorised and sexually abused children in his classroom. At various times during his career, parents attempted to challenge his behaviour but he was persistently protected by diocesan and school authorities and moved from school to school.... [this] illustrates the ease with which sexual predators could operate within the educational system of the State without fear of disclosure or sanction.

...The physical abuse of boys in Daingean was extreme. Floggings which were ritualised beatings ... were inflicted even for minor transgressions.... Daingean was an anarchic Institution. It was run by gangs of boys who imposed their rules on the others and the supervision by the religious Brothers and Priests was minimal and ineffectual... The gangland culture fostered the development of protective relationships between the boys and these relationships sometimes developed a sexual aspect. The boy seeking the protection had little option but to comply with the demands of the older boy and the authorities were dismissive of any complaints....

The significant element in the account of Lota was the deeply disturbing accounts of sexual abuse of vulnerable children by religious staff. In addition, the indifference of the Congregational Authorities in addressing the issue facilitated the abuse... a Brother who was known by the Congregation to have abused in England... was brought back to Ireland and assigned a teaching position in Lota, where he worked for over 30 years. This Brother admitted to multiple sexual assaults of boys in the school. ... The Brothers have admitted that abuse took place but, as in the case of other Orders, they have not accepted Congregational responsibility for it.

And so on and on. The report casts a harsh light on specific Orders, notably the Christian Brothers, the Brothers of Charity, and the Sisters of Mercy (oh, the irony of those names!). They are indicted as much for the way they continue to minimize and deny responsibility for these problems, as for the problems themselves.

Groups Gone Bad

One person posted the angry question to an atheist list, "One has to ask why? What is it in christianity and its beliefs allows christians to engage in such horrors?"

In my opinion the source lies not in christian doctrine but in group psychology, specifically the group dynamics of these Orders. A closed group like the Christian Brothers, or the smaller group of one school's administration, always tends to protect its existence and to defend its members against "outside" threats. When an accusation is made, the group closes ranks. This happens in all kinds of groups, including government departments, the military, and the police. If some member of the group is accused of wrong-doing, the group takes it as a threat.

In all these cases, when you join the group you give up something in exchange for a share in the group identity. If you join the military, you give up personal autonomy and sometimes personal safety in exchange for the uniform and the pride of service. Join the police, and you give up regular working hours and some personal safety, in exchange for a uniform and the pride of being a special person designated to "serve and protect."

If you join a Catholic order you give up much more of normal life than a military person does. The exchange, again, is for a special uniform and a special status. The Christian Brother or the Sister of Mercy has given up a great deal, and has been set even further apart from normal life.

Such bargains are very serious, almost life-and-death matters for those who make them. If you have made such a choice, and your group's special identity is called into question, it calls into question the value of your entire life! The self-image of the group is your own self-image, and we all will do almost anything to protect our self-image. And that is why, when one member of a group is accused of misbehaving, the whole group is likely to close ranks in defense. Every group member wants to protect the group because the group's identity is their own.

A healthy group has ways of dealing with members gone wrong -- ways that prioritize the group's end-purpose above the group's image. A good police department, for example, holds the public's good at a higher priority than an officer's wrong action.

An unhealthy group, whether it is a local police department, a military command (think: Abu Ghraib), or a bunch of nuns running an orphanage, lets group defense take precedence over the group's real purpose for existence. It holds the group's self-image as more important than the people the group ostensibly serves. Then the police condone and cover up beatings or concealment of evidence; the military condone or cover up war crimes; and the brothers find ways to quietly dispose of sexual abusers.

That's what happened in these Irish abuses, and in the sex abuses that were revealed in the United States a few years ago. Each small division of the Catholic Church, each bishopric or Order, acted like a sick group. It refused to believe evil of itself, and when it couldn't do that, it covered it up, always placing the defense of the group's identity at a far higher priority than the good of the people the group ostensibly served.

This isn't a specifically "christian" nor "catholic" crime; it's an entirely typical and predictable crime of a group gone rotten, a group whose group dynamic has turned sour.

That said, it remains true that the special mantle of spiritual authority given religious people makes it easier for a dysfunctional group to get away with a coverup. And probably makes it easier to rationalize the acts within the minds of the group leaders.

Recovery retreats coming up, end of May and July

2009-05-07T16:33:00.000-07:00

Leaving a Harmful Religion?
It's not the end of the world!  
Come to a supportive weekend with others  who can understand.

"RELEASE AND RECLAIM" Recovery Retreat
May 29-31, 2009; Loveland, CO with an optional third day to relax!

Friday at 7pm until Sunday at 3pm
at a beautiful vacation home by a lake in the mountains

(Also July 31 - Aug. 2, 2009 in Berkeley, CA)

This program is for you if you want to let go of toxic, authoritarian beliefs and reclaim your ability to trust your own feelings and think for yourself.

  Leaving your faith can be a very difficult process, but you don’t have to go it alone. A group process is nurturing and powerful for healing and personal growth.

At a Release and Reclaim Recovery Retreat participants can:

Share personal stories
Examine key issues
Learn coping strategies
Meet others and build a support system
Enjoy meals, relaxation, and fun

These retreats are led by Marlene Winell, Ph.D., psychologist and author of Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion. Dr. Winell has a private practice in Berkeley, CA and also consults by telephone.

COST: Sliding scale: $200 - $320 for workshop, $125 for room and board (all meals included). Other financial help available - PLEASE ASK.  

TO REGISTER: Write to recoveryfromreligion@gmail.com (subject line “retreat registration”) or call Dr. Winell directly at 510.292.0509 to discuss. Retreat space is limited so contact us as soon as possible.   

WANT TO TALK? If you are unsure, you are welcome to chat about your situation and consider all the options available for meeting your needs. Just call Marlene at 510-292-0509

COMMENTS from previous retreat participants:
Speaking as a person who has attended three or so retreats organized by Marlene (intended to support the deconversion process), I would just like to say that attending a retreat, if at all possible, will be one of the smartest things you ever do. I was *very* scared to attend one. And it was really intense being at one of Marlene's retreats and confronting what I had been taught in Sunday school and coming to see it as the poisonous indoctrination it was. However, I am so, so, so glad I went and got help and had Marlene to talk with me and work with me. I know our economy is in a recession but if you have any inclination to attend one of Marlene's retreats, I can't recommend it highly enough. Super helpful! She's knowledgeable, organized, and healthfully irreverent. All the retreats I've been a part of have helped me tremendously.  - M.K.   

I can speak about these retreats first hand. I attended Marlene's retreat last summer. At the time, I had been doing a lot of reading. Intellectually, I was already an atheist. Emotionally, I was a real mess. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't suicidal or anything, I was just feeling a bit like Neo in the Matrix: everything I had been taught to believe was wrong. What the retreat did and what Marlene and the other did, was give me the courage to trust myself and follow through.  It has been six months. I am in a much better place.  - C.R.

For video clips from retreats and more comments from participants, go to: http://marlenewinell.net/event/leaving-your-religion

MORE RETREATS ARE ON THE WAY:
The next one is Berkeley, CA: July 31 – Aug. 2, 2009

 Also, if you would like to organize a retreat in your area, we can work with you to do so.  

The Too-Small God

2009-04-28T16:36:00.000-07:00

(by Dave Cortesi)

Had I been born in another time and place, there are gods I could have believed in. In ancient Greece, I'm sure I would have been a devotee of Great Athena, and gone often to the beautiful temple on the Acropolis to worship.

Had I been born in India before 1800, I probably would have prayed often to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wit and wisdom. Born to a Native American tribe before the coming of the whites, I'd have felt close affiliation with Coyote, the trickster and storyteller.

In fact I had the great good fortune to be born in a Western culture after the Enlightenment, and that placed a lower limit on the size of my God.

Geology

The Enlightenment was a great sea-change in the way people thought about themselves and the world. I hold it really began with the geologists. People have been looking at rocks, and digging mines for gold and coal, forever, but the first people who really studied, and drew, and measured the shape of the land and thought about how it could come to be—the first real geologists—worked around 1800, plus or minus 50 years.

What the geologists did was to show, based on careful measurement of things like the rate at which a stream could erode a slope, that the Earth simply had to be very old, millions of years at least.

Understand that before this time, nobody anywhere had a clue how old the earth was. The only numeric estimate anyone even attempted was when Bishop Ussher around 1650 added up the ages of every person mentioned in the Bible. From that he worked out that the date of creation must have been the 27th of October, 4004 BC. That's when God made the Garden of Eden, and so forth. Based on his careful examination of the Bible, the earth was a little under 6000 years old.

People paid attention to this because they pretty much accepted the Bible as factual history. Some people today still think it is; in fact my parents thought so when I was growing up. I don't remember ever discussing it with them, but they would probably have thought Bishop Ussher's estimate had something going for it, despite their both holding BA degrees.

The geologists of the 1800s destroyed that idea, not by arguing, but by taking measurements of the real world. And their evidence-based picture of millions of years of history for the earth just blew the minds of educated people of the day. Suddenly the earth had a huge past, vastly deeper than anything in recorded human history.

Paleontology

The geologists worked back and forth with the Paleontologists, who also got started in the 1800s. Of course, people had collected fossils for centuries. It was common for rich people to have collections of fossils along with other "curiosities." But it was in the 1800s that people began to study fossils in a professional way: measuring, drawing, and comparing them, and putting them together in sequences; publishing and sharing information from one university and museum to another.

This is tedious, painstaking work, comparing bone shapes and measuring. But the paleontologists soon worked out that fossils had to be the remains of living things that were now extinct, yet related to species alive today. They began to put together a rough tree of life, in which most of the species that ever lived, are long gone.

The paleontologists traded data with the geologists to get the relative ages of different animals. Based on the rock strata that the geologists had dated, they could date fossils found in the strata. Then they could date new strata by the fossils found in them, and back and forth.

The Book of Earth's History

Together, the two sciences produced a picture of a vast ancient history of the earth. Today we know the Earth is 4.5 billion years old -- that's 4, 5 and 8 zeros. Imagine that the history of the Earth is a fat book with 450 pages, with 10 million years on each page. In that book, the entire recorded history of human kind—from the first clay tablets from ancient Sumer, about 4000 BC, to right now—all human history occupies the last word, of the last sentence, on the last page of that book. 449 pages of history with no people. On the last page Homo Sapiens, our species, gets one short paragraph—we've been around a million years, a tenth of a page of this book—and the last word of that last paragraph is "Civilization."

Astronomy

There was one more key piece to the Enlightenment: Astronomy. In the late 1700s people learned how to make decent telescopes and started really looking into the sky, again taking careful measurements and sharing what they saw. It was William Herschel around 1800 who first proved by measurement the distance to a few other stars, and that the solar system of the sun and earth were moving through space among the stars.

Before this, as with the age of the earth, nobody had a clue about the nature of the starry sky. The best guess, based on common sense and some Bible passages, was that the sky was a fixed, hollow shell called the "firmament." The stars were little lights on the inner surface of this solid shell. Or maybe they were pinholes and the light of heaven was shining in through them. Until the 1600s, everybody just assumed that the Earth was the exact center of the universe, and everything rotated around it under the shell of the firmament.

Copernicus in 1540 pointed out that a lot of observations would make more sense if the Sun was at the center and the Earth moved around it, but nobody paid much attention until Galileo pushed the idea in 1650. He got in hot water for that, and the Church made him publicly recant, because to move the earth away from the center of the universe would create a conflict with some bible passages.

Now, a century later, Herschel could prove by measurement that some stars were at distances we could calculate, and those distances were huge, billions of kilometers. And the new telescopes also revealed millions more stars than people had ever been able to see with the naked eye. The universe suddenly went from cozy and comprehensible to inconceivably huge, and not only were we not at the center of it, but our sun was just another star floating through emptiness like one snowflake in a blizzard.

The Book of Universal History

Today we know that the observable universe, the part we can see, is about 14 billion years old. Remember the book of the history of the earth, 450 pages, 10 million years to a page? The book of the history of the universe is 1370 pages long. In the first two-thirds of it, although it tells of millions of galaxies containing billions of stars each, our solar system just doesn't exist: no sun, no planets. Around page 900, a cloud of gas at one corner of one average galaxy condenses under its own gravity to make a star. Around page 925, that star starts to shine and planets have condensed around it—including one that is at the right distance for water to be liquid most of the time.

Now riffle the pages to the end, page 1370: there we are, Homo Sap. is the last paragraph, and all of recorded history, Greeks and Romans and the middle ages and kings and queens and wars and all: the last word on the last page of this fat tome.

Being Enlightened

When thinking people began to grasp this vision of deep time and huge space, full of stars and animals and beauty and complexity but no people—a wonderful universe just perking along fine without us—it kicked off changes of mind and heart that created the civilization we live in.

Even today with all our education it is sometimes easy to forget the almost-inconceivable grandeur of a universe that we know to be 73 billion light years across. If you want a visual aid, take a few minutes to watch this video on the Hubble Space telescope's Deep Field images:

"Over 10,000 galaxies are in this picture... and each one... has millions of stars... each one with the possibility of a civilization..."

The Enlightenment still happens again and again in the minds of individuals, each time one person starts to get it, as I started to get it when I was around eleven or twelve. When it sinks in, two things have to change in your head.

The first is a change in the way you think about people. You realize that people, including yourself, are just not that important in the big picture. You come to feel, first, some humility, and second some perspective, and finally more patience with your fellow man. We're all just beginners. The bees and the ants have had millions of years to work out the right way to live as a community, and we've done better than they in just a few millenia. And, we humans are just babies, we are only starting out. We have done amazing, wonderful things, we've learned so much in just a few centuries, but that's no time at all. We talk as if we are at the end of history, that our society is the climax of wonderfulness. But in fact history has only just started. What we do today is going to seem tiny compared to what our descendants do.

The Too-Small God

One other thing that must change is: your conception of what a God must be. If the universe has a creator, a prime mover as Aristotle said, that thing, whatever it might be, has to be larger and older than the universe. Older than 14 billion years, and in some sense larger than its 78 billion light-year diameter.

I frankly have no idea of what the nature of such a thing, such a being, would be. What could it be like, a thing older than the universe and bigger? I'll tell you this: even as a boy of eleven or twelve, I knew for certain that the God I was being told about in Sunday School, the Bible God, was nowhere near big enough.

Compared to the vastness of space and time, the Bible God is a trivial thing. It is a being that feels jealousy and rage; a being that could without a qualm drown millions of living things that it had made, because they disappointed it; a being who would knock down the tower of Babel and confuse people's minds because it didn't want them to learn anything; a being who took sides between one tribe and another; a being who couldn't figure out how to be merciful until his son committed suicide in front of him to change his mind. (That's what the new testament message comes down to, if you think it through.)

I was not able to put these thoughts in fine words then, but I knew that the God I was being told about could not possibly be the creator of the universe that science showed me. So what do you call a book that tells you a dramatic story that cannot possibly be true? You call it a fantasy. I was familiar with fantasies, I read lots of them. It was obvious that the Bible was just another fantasy novel, and the God of Christianity was a made-up fiction character. Out of respect for my parents I went to church every sunday until I left home, but there was no time that I believed in what I heard.

And since then, I have never heard or read any description of a God that matches up to the size and scale of this magnificent universe. And I've never seen an explanation how a God who did match up to that scale and size, could have the slightest interest in being worshiped, or indeed could have the slightest concern about what I thought about it or anything else.

2009-04-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

by writerdd

Hi All! I've been away doing knitterly things lately. When I started posting on this blog, my goal was to periodically write about "spirituality without religion" and I still want to continue with that topic. I just have a crazy life and sometimes my paying jobs get in the way of my blogging gigs! For now, I would just like to point your attention to an interesting post on this topic by one of my favorite bloggers, Hemant Mehta, on The Friendly Atheist.

The post is about people changing their religious affiliation, but what caught my attention is that a very large number of people leave their church and religion because it is not filling their spiritual needs. This topic, apparently, caught the attention of other readers as well, and is being discussed in the comments. As atheists, I think we need to think and talk about this more than we do, and in a way that does not belittle those among us who are drawn to spirituality.

I notice that on many atheist blogs, readers who mention that they are spiritual or that they are interested in spirituality are criticized or ridiculed by the majority of people in the comments. (That happens less on this blog than on others, from my observations.) We need to stop doing this. It’s true that some, maybe most, atheists do not feel any need for the “spiritual” or hate the use of that word because of its religious baggage. But there are many, probably most, people in general who feel that spirituality is very important.

To use popular authors as examples, Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, and Eric Maisel have written about this and fit into the latter category. Dawkins fits into the first category, and does not seem to understand the need for spirituality at all.

This is a topic I think about, and have written about, a lot. I hope that more people begin to discuss this topic in a way that does not ridicule those who have the desire for spirituality without religion and without gods. I especially look forward to more from Harris on this topic. I found the last chapter of The End of Faith, "Experiments in Consciousness," to be one of the most interesting, but just a teaser.

15 Responses to Believer Complaints

2009-04-24T11:51:00.000-07:00

I was working this morning on adding my responses to “15 typical believer charges against atheists” to my powerpoint presentation in support of my book The Atheist’s Way. I just finished my responses and thought I would share them with you. I’m delivering the presentation to the monthly meeting of San Francisco Atheists tomorrow and East Bay Atheists next month. Cheers!

Here they are:

1. Atheists rob our children of Santa Claus, the Easter bunny, and the Tooth Fairy

I think that the most straightforward and powerful retort to this complaint is, “Exactly.” It is much better that a child get excited about her parent slipping a quarter under her pillow than that she believe, or have to act like she believes, in the existence of a fiction. You do not have to steal away excitement by telling the truth: be excited that you have kind parents who will buy you the bicycle that you want and leave Santa Claus out of it.

2. Atheists claim to have the truth and no one has the truth (except us).

Actually, atheists claim three things in this regard: we claim that you are patently lying when you invent some god or other; we claim that no one has the truth, if by “truth” you mean an understanding of why the universe exists; and we claim that the application of reason gets us to everyday truths better than does wishful thinking. The shorter answer is, “We have a much better grip on the truth than you do.”

3. Atheists are arrogant to assert that there are no gods.

There are two different sorts of responses to this charge. The first is, “Fine, I accept the charge, if you accept that it is incredibly arrogant of you to assert the existence of a god.” The second is, “No, reason is on my side and all you have is wishful thinking.” But it is really the form of this charge that interests us: all sorts of words can be substituted for “arrogant” in an “ad hominem” sentence with this linguistic form: words like “silly,” “short-sighted,” “deluded,” “mean-spirited,” and so on. So a blanket reply might be, “You sure do know how to use language!” and leave it at that. Or maybe just, “Same back at you!”

4. Atheists are merely negative—they provide nothing positive.

We affirm that human life is as meaningful as we make it. We affirm that a ripe peach is sweet, that love exists, and that a good movie is hard to beat. We affirm tons of things, individually and collectively. And, yes, we do take believers to task for making up gods and using god-talk to perpetrate tyrannies, but we have lots of positive things to say. We only wonder if you care to listen.

5. Since billions of people disagree with atheists, atheists can’t be right.

The idea of responding with a “flat earth” argument springs to mind: at one time virtually everybody believed that the earth was flat, except for a few enlightened folks who knew better. So what a majority believes can’t be the measure of truth. But of course comparing believers to flat-earthers drives the wedge between us deeper. Probably the more useful response is, “If billions of people were atheists, would you still believe?” I think this response is nicely provocative and also paints a picture of a world where atheists are the majority, which is not a bad picture to promote!

6. What’s the harm in believing in karma, past lives, or some gentle, loving spirit at play in the universe?

The harm is that maintaining any supernatural enthusiasm weakens your ability to speak out against god-talk. You become a fellow traveler and an implicit supporter of other people’s supernatural enthusiasms. Your “innocent” fantasy ends up supporting much more dangerous fantasies.

7. Religions provide a moral framework—without religion every evil would be permitted.

Probably the simplest response is to point to contemporary research that convincingly demonstrates that the most religious nations are also the most violent, rabid, and dangerous. Another simple response is to note how content and crime-free the least religious nations are, nations described, for instance, in Phil Zuckerman’s Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Teach Us About Contentment.

8. Religions provide comfort—without that comfort life would prove just too hard.

This is a compelling complaint and not unlike the argument one might make for morphine. Doesn’t religious comfort have its place, as morphine has its place? Karl Marx famously said that “religious is the opium of the masses” and don’t people with hard lives deserve opium? The only answer is that a dangerous lie can’t also be supported as a legitimate comfort. If the truth provides less comfort, so be it. The choice is between fighting dangerous god-talk and embracing a comforting lie and we know which choice we hope that people are brave enough to make.

9. The wisdom traditions share so many values that they must arise from a common source.

They do arise from a common source—from the minds of men and women. Each tradition is different from the next because John concocted this one and Harry concocted that one, and each tradition is similar to the next because everyone knows what to value. Naturally the wisdom traditions appear to come from a common source: they do, from one single species.

10. Atheists rely too heavily on the methods and findings of science.

“Too” is the essence of the charge, since the whole world relies heavily on science—do believers not watch television, fly in airplanes, or check their email? So the simple reply is, “Dear believer, please define ‘too.’” Or an atheist can just smile and say, “Yes, I rely heavily on science. Don’t you?” Or we can play their game and respond in all seriousness and in all innocence, “Maybe we do over-rely on science, but surely you believers do not rely on science enough!”

11. On balance, religions do more good than harm.

At root this is an argument that people would not support orphanages, avoid adultery, or cross only on the green light unless they believed in a punishing god. Believers indict themselves and show how weak they fear themselves to be when they say that they would not be good without religion to “guide them.” Their fear is not a reason to countenance religion. Let them be brave and good of their own accord, just as we ask of ourselves and everyone else.

12. Aren’t prophets like Jesus, Mohammed, and the Buddha worth emulating?

All people are just people. They are brave here and fearful there, compassionate here and selfish there. When we say that someone is worth emulating what we actually mean is that we respect certain aspects of the person: her courage, her creative spark, her work ethic, something in particular. The less we engage in the cults of personality and celebrity and the more we announce which personal qualities we revere, the better. There are no prophets—there are just very human human beings.

13. The existence of gods can never be disproved.

Fine. We’d be happy not to bother. You stop creating gods and we’ll stop wasting our precious time helping you see that they are just your inventions.

14. In the absence of certainty, it makes more sense to err on the side of belief than unbelief.

Pascal’s wager boils down to the following: in case there is a god, better stay on his good side! An atheist simply says that he believes the opposite, that in the absence of certainty he will follow reason. The believer can cower, just in case there is a god, and while the believer is cowering the atheist will continue doing his everyday duty, without worrying in the slightest that he has made some miscalculation that will cost him dearly after he is dead.

15. Atheism is just another religion.

Yes, but the right one. And if you can’t that joke, then at least admit that a religion without gods is a pretty mild affair and leaves atheists pretty much to their own devices, having to decide everything for themselves. If you accept that as a reasonable definition of religion—everyone figuring out things for themselves—then we can accept that atheism is a religion. But as linguistic philosophers like to remind us, you can call a horse’s tail a leg but that doesn’t mean that a horse has five legs. You can call atheism a religion, if you like, but you would be doing quite a bit of definitional stretching.

Life and Death on Easter

2009-04-12T21:10:00.000-07:00

It’s Easter; I have memories of getting up early year after year as a child to go to Easter Sunrise Service. We gathered somewhere outdoors, simulating the women and disciples who went to Jesus’ tomb in the early morning on the day of his resurrection. We sang certain hymns that were only for Easter – “Christ the Lord is ris’n today, Ha-a-a-a-He -lelujah,” “He lives! He lives! Christ Jesus lives today. He walks with me and talks with me, along life’s narrow way!” I liked it – the brisk early morning, the feeling of life and hope, the joy of the music. Unlike a lot of other church experiences, it was a day of celebration. And what a profound message – death has been conquered! Just put your faith in Christ.

And now? It’s been many years and I’m no longer a Christian. I do not believe I will continue after I die. In my work as a psychologist, I work with people coming out of religion. There are many issues to deal with, and top of the list for many is this question of death and hellfire. The indoctrination is deep and insidious, a form of child abuse in my opinion. Even without hell, the idea of nonexistence (if that is the direction of change in belief), is sometimes a bitter pill to swallow. Fundamentalist Christianity downgrades a human lifetime compared to eternity and denigrates the whole world as fallen. How many times were we told to focus on where we will be in the hereafter? The result is fear, because no one is certain, and also neglect of the life that we have now.

For those of you who are anxious today and struggle with the idea of death, I can tell you that it is possible to stop fearing damnation. I certainly have and many other former believers have too. It is a phobia indoctrination that serves the religion. If you think you should believe “just in case,” think about what you would be missing. Essentially, your life. The greatest challenge for a human is to know about death, and live fully in the face of it. Other animals can more easily “be here now,” and we can learn from them. However, we have more awareness and it is our existential dilemma to make peace with death.

In a way, we do continue on. Our molecules get rearranged and become other things; nothing is lost, not one atom. All matter and energy in the universe is conserved, according to what we know from physics. I find it beautiful to walk in a forest and see a fallen tree where it is decomposing, nourishing the earth, and causing new life to spring up. And if you worry about your soul, ask yourself, “Where were ‘you’ before you were born?” Is that so frightening?

No, we are better off paying attention to the present. This life is limited but so are a lot of things. The Christian attitude of denigrating life because it is short makes no sense. Is a wonderful meal any less wonderful because it ends? When you are listening to incredible music, are you upset because you know the piece will finish? Hopefully not, and we can extend that lesson to life itself. People who have a brush with death often learn to appreciate life in a special way. Our time on this earth is precious. Perhaps when we cherish our days, honor what is possible, love our fellow humans as best we can, and look at the world with awe and wonder, we can achieve a spirituality of a different kind. Of our own free will, we can commit acts of random kindness and dance for no reason at all. Death be damned.

For the recovering fundamentalist, reclaiming intuition and learning to trust one’s inner wisdom is an exciting process. We are not empty, weak, incapable, or bad. We are all interconnected and a part of our amazing universe. Even Einstein said thinking we are individuals is an illusion.
One day, when I was a little discouraged, I wrote to myself from the wise part of me (yes, we are all multiples), and then wondered about that voice. This is what emerged, and it applies to all of us, so I hope you find a bit of inspiration too. I asked where the encouragement was coming from:

“This is from the force that makes the new shoot grow between concrete slabs. This is from the symmetry of fractals. This is from the incomprehensible distance of space, this is from the sound waves that blend and beat and tell you to dance, this is from the little child that looks at you clearly with no fear and says hi, this is from the unadulterated force of the sea under you and all around you when you swim in the ocean, the sea that takes no prisoners when the tide comes in, the sea that spawned life, and the same sea that sends a wave spreading up the sand to your bare feet, with rhythmic purring caress, bringing you the gems that make you smile - the perfect tiny shell, the fragment of blue glass that you tuck in your pocket.

“This is from the cosmic red afterglow of the big bang. This is from all eleven dimensions, from all the things you don't understand and like that you don't understand. This is from the parallel universes that come with the eleven dimensions, penetrating the membrane. This is from the aquifer beneath all of you, the source feeding flashes of human greatness. This is from the massive network of fungus, hidden from view under seemingly separate plants. This is from the power behind the form, the elusive explanation, the delectable mystery. I only have one thing to say to you right now - and that is REMEMBER ME. You are not alone. You always have a reason to go on. and there is no choice; you will go on anyway. Ineffable and inexorable, both. The tide is coming in again today; the ocean has not been deciding.”

Happy Spring.

Marlene Winell

marlenewinell.net
mwinell@gmail.com
Recovery retreats May 1-3, June 5-7, 13-15
.

Television Interview on The Atheist's Way

2009-03-28T10:13:00.000-07:00

Hello, everybody:

Welcome to the first edition of my Saturday Atheism Newsletter. Over the coming weeks and months I want to chat about atheist topics that interest me and pick your brains about what interests you.

Today I want to start quietly by inviting you to view a short television interview I did last week with an NBC interviewer about my new book The Atheist’s Way. I hope you enjoy it. If you have any thoughts or comments drop me an email at ericmaisel@hotmail.com. Here is the interview:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xiNGZfN5OM

Please feel free to share this video with folks you think it might interest and also alert them to this newsletter. Next week I’ll begin in earnest!

Have an excellent Saturday.

Best,

Eric

MAKING MEANING INVESTMENTS

2009-03-03T15:30:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone:
A few updates and then on to the main affair.
Don’t miss the Your Creative Career Telesummit on March 21st. Attend from the comfort of your home and jumpstart your career in the arts:
http://www.telesummits.com/
Become one of the world’s first meaning coaches (or come aboard to learn how to answer your own meaning questions) by taking the June Meaning Coach Training:
http://www.theatheistsway.com/meaning_coach.html
Now, on to the main affair:
**
There is a world of difference between actively investing meaning in something and believing that something “should” be meaningful, maybe by virtue of the fact that a word like serious or worthy or useful or spiritual attaches to that something. Maybe you believe that service “should” feel meaningful—but in fact you would like to do a lot less volunteering and a lot more creating. Maybe, conversely, you believe that “nothing is more meaningful than individual effort”—and yet where you really want to invest meaning is in community, collaboration, and fellow feeling. The following email that I received recently does a beautiful job of exploring this idea, about investing meaning without “shoulds” attached (which, by the way, is a very different idea from making unprincipled meaning investments).
Barbara (bkairos@yahoo.com) wrote:
“Hi Eric,
The idea that we are responsible for making meaning in our lives speaks deeply to me. I appreciate your amplification of these ideas. I think that the concept that we search for or find meaning has stood in the way of my creative work. The ideas of making meaning, investing meaning, divesting meaning, meaning crisis, meaning drain, etc. make total sense.
As I look back at the periods in my life when I have been assailed by depression, each moment entailed a meaning crisis. I had invested meaning in a given relationship or activity which ceased to have meaning. I had the mistaken notion that the investment of meaning was permanent, so when the meaning drained away, I was left in despair and blamed myself for it. I now realize that just as I choose to invest meaning, I can also choose to divest meaning instead of feeling that somehow I failed. How freeing that is!

I had thought that I was supposed to write a certain nonfiction book because it was “worthy.” I thought that it “should be” meaningful but it actually wasn’t, which drained energy from my ability to write anything. So I have divested meaning from that project (wish I had done that two years ago!) and am continuing with my mystery writing, where the juice actually is. Writing fiction is much more energizing and freeing for me than the nonfiction project. My mind circles around possibilities—settings, characters, plot—and I can feel my energy increasing.
It is only when I encounter serious difficulties with the fiction (mini-meaning crises) that thoughts of the nonfiction project pop into my head: that that is “worthy” and that mystery writing “isn’t important” and “isn’t serious.” At such times I have to get a grip on mind and remember who is in charge of the meaning in my life!
As for the nonfiction, I intend to read authors who have a developed voice in nonfiction, with the thought of writing nonfiction in the future, but in a different way from the past. There may be pieces of my former project that can be plucked out and explored differently, but I believe that the project as it currently stands speaks to a moment in my past and anchors me there, which ultimately proves meaningless. And the seed of an idea for a literary novel is still that—just a seed. It needs time to develop further before I begin that project. So for now, I am investing meaning in my mystery series—and that feels just right. That is where I can best make meaning at this time!
Barbara”
From what would you like to divest some meaning? Where would you like to make a new meaning investment? Let me know and I’ll share some of your stories. And don’t forget about the meaning training:
http://www.theatheistsway.com/meaning_coach.html
Have an excellent Sunday!
Best,
Eric

THE RIVER RELIGIONS

2009-02-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

Hello, everybody:

The Atheist’s Way Virtual Book Review Tour begins this week. Please take a look and see what people are saying, pro or con, about their experience with the book. Here are the two tour stops this week:

2/18
Donna Druchanas on Wednesday at http://sheeptoshawl.com/blog/

2/19
Catherine on Thursday at http://poetrychook.blogspot.com

In The Atheist’s Way I dub certain religions like Buddhism and Taoism “the river religions” and argue that, like the god-based religions, they betray our common humanity by promoting metaphors, fairy tales, and dogma rooted in the same authoritarian energy that drives Islam, Judaism and Christianity. There is no eightfold path, there are no noble truths, and there is no nirvana: there are only personal paths and personal truths and the necessity of personal meaning-making. The river religions, as attractive as they can seem, are detours from the path of personal meaning-making.

I am calling these religions the “river religions” to capture something of their root metaphor, that flavor or “flow” or “way,” and to underscore that they are indeed religions. Many people move from the god religions to the river religions because they want a recognized and non-offensive container to hold their spiritual enthusiasms, not quite realizing that every such container is a human-made device meant to promote fantasy (whether about Heaven or reincarnation) and grab power (whether in the hands of a Pope or a Zen Master).

This week I got a lovely email from a reader of The Atheist’s Way who, perhaps in conjunction with reading the book, had suddenly “seen through” the river religions. Barbara explained:

“I started visiting local Zen centers a few months ago, and have found tremendous improvement in my calmness, rationality and creativity with daily meditation sittings. However, I've been feeling more disappointed as I spend more time with the Zen centers. Yesterday I acknowledged why - it's because I don't believe. Period. I just don't believe in ‘religious stuff,’ not Catholicism like my father's family, not Episcopalianism like my best friend's church, not the radio-show Evangelicism my mother regrettably seems to favor, and thus, not in Buddhism either.

“I don't believe in reincarnation, or karma except as an abstract notion of ‘be a jerk, have a miserable life,’ or the benefits of prostrations, or that lineages of teachers are super special and worthy of prostration, or that the Buddhist ‘miracles’ are any more credible than the Christian ‘miracles.’ I do like the emphasis on mindfulness and compassion, and appreciate the Bodhisattva's Vow where the vow-taker promises to postpone enlightenment until all sentient creatures are free from suffering, but shouldn't mindfulness, compassion and generosity be commonly prized traits that don't need a religion to ground them?

“I think that 1) I'm a little disappointed that I'm an official 100% nonbeliever, since there might be some beautiful practices or comforts out there that I'll miss and 2) I'm disappointed that the tremendous benefits of meditation and the intellectually engaging parts of Zen still come wrapped with miracles, reincarnation and prostrations. But I'm unapologetically a nonbeliever, and that is fine. I'll keep meditating and I think we'll also go back to our local Unitarian church for socializing and networking, where you can be an atheist or deeply agnostic and that is OK. I'm in private law practice, where we are strongly encouraged to get out in the community and know people, and churches and temples are great ways to meet people: if you believe or can pretend to believe. But I see that the bottom line is that I must make my own meaning, with no dogma or snake oil; and that will be fine.”

If you have moved halfway from the god religions to the river religions, come all the way home now. Yes, there will be fewer networking and socializing opportunities—but there will also be fewer scrapes and bows. Leave the river religions behind and, rising from your cushion, stand up for what you believe. Comments welcome!—you can email me your comments at ericmaisel@hotmail.com or post them at the blog where this newsletter also appears: http://theatheistsway.blogspot.com/

Have an excellent Sunday!

Best,

Eric

MEANING CONVERSATION CONTINUED

2009-02-01T10:35:00.000-08:00

Hello, everyone:

This Sunday we continue our examination of the meaning difficulties that many people are currently experiencing. Today I’ll share Carla’s story. But first a few updates.

The next round of creativity coaching trainings begins the week of February 9th. For information on the next Introduction to Creativity Coaching Training and the next Advanced Creativity Coaching Training, and for information on becoming a free client in the next Introduction to Creativity Coaching Training and receiving free email-based creativity coaching, please visit:

http://ericmaisel.com/em_trainings_lg.html

Here is a ringing endorsement from someone who took both the Intro and Advanced trainings last year (they can be taken sequentially or simultaneously):

“Hi Eric,

I'd like to thank you for all the wonderful coursework you provided me this past year. Your meaning and purpose message is important to our times and cultural growth as a universal community. The method you use to teach is an outstanding one and your personal style was a special gift to me. Even from Minneapolis I can feel your touch, sparking my creative life into action. Like so many, my creative life needed resuscitation. Your kindness is woven into all you do. Now I have a renewed purpose to create and potential income that is rewarding and something absolutely worth getting out of bed every day. So, for all you've done for me I say a very heartfelt- thank you!

Sandy”

**

A few spots remain in the March Deep Writing Workshop in London. For more information:

http://designyourcreativelife.wordpress.com/

(If you would like to organize a Deep Writing Workshop in a European locale for 2010, let’s chat. I am particularly interested in presenting in Dublin and Edinburgh but I am open to any European locale. If you want to chat about this, drop me an email at ericmaisel@hotmail.com)

**

If you’re interested in the subject of making meaning, please take a look at The Atheist’s Way, which is now available from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Atheists-Way-Living-Well-Without/dp/1577316428/ref=sr_1_34?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213652533&sr=1-34

**

Last but not least, if you are thinking about taking the Meaning Coach Training that will begin in June (it will be the first of its kind), come on board soon. It is filling up. For more information:

http://www.theatheistsway.com/meaning_coach.html

**

Here, as the main event, is Carla’s “existential blues” piece. As the year progresses we will move toward discussing solutions but for now we are still focused on clearly understanding the problem. Carla explained:

I've had some blend of existential blues since my 20s, but the condition has recently worsened and gotten me closer to genuine introspection and honest investigation of meaning. I recall the blues in my 20s as vague and centered on questions of “what am I going to do with my life now," after leaving a field of study I loved and its career path, for reasons that ultimately turned out to be excellent ones (I don't want that life path back) and then after I started working in business, questions of “why are people in this office so boring? No one wants to study new things or write or draw in their free time; they talk about TV and their lawns a lot - where do these people come from?”

Passion and business are recurring threads for me in the areas of meaning and despair. I always wanted to write and create and do esoteric research (not generally lucrative work) but for better or worse ended up following my parents' desires for me and working in business (comfortable work). The best and worst moments of my college days involve arts and business. The best was sprawling on my dorm bed translating Virgil for Intensive Latin class and getting it! I got it! I got the nuances, meanings, artistry of translation word choices! I was part of creation and art and the heavens parted for a moment - I loved it! The worst was walking across the "Diag" and seeing the business students in their blue overcoats and suits. I saw them and felt like dirt. As much as I loved what I was doing, my family and wider society had already let me know that my interests were useless, frivolous, flaky. The BBA and MBAs in their blue coats, though, they'd go off to something tangible - marketing toilet paper or toothpaste, something that paid. I didn't want their jobs but I did want their probable security and known place to go.

My current existential blues most often arrive in the form of exhaustion, and occasionally as despair. The exhaustion strikes most often when I'm thinking about doing creative work or tired after a day at work (in my business career work) and I can't bear to write, pick up a book or listen to music. It makes me say, “Leave me alone. Why bother?”

I've had long stretches like this. Last year I could not write or even stand to try to read or listen to music for months. I'd visit the book store with my husband and trail after him, picking up and putting back down books, declaring each unreadable on the grounds of type size too small, book too heavy or book looking impossible to think about opening. I slept a lot and looked out of a lot of windows at birds or weather. This would seem like a deep depression, though throughout it, I never missed a day at work, project deadline or bill payment due date and every day was clean, scented and groomed in a suit. It was, perhaps, a deep depression of limited scope that left the rest of my life on course.

The fits of existential despair, a more active visitation of my blues, move beyond the territory of “who cares? what's the point?” to arrive as thunderstruck moments in which I am absolutely convinced that I'll die at my office desk, never accomplish anything I truly care for, and might as well be the walking dead in a business suit. These moments make me less sleepy than inclined to throw all of my professional books out of my office window, on fire, and run down the office park road towards the highway, never to return.

Both forms of existential despair come from the same fear – that I might never achieve anything deeply meaningful to me (while I am doing well in my business career, it is not work that stirs my passion or lets me experience "flow"), and that my deepest loves for arts, creative work and contemplative practices are meaningless and selfish matters of self-entertainment and solitary pleasure. The existential blues can arrive after I've been out of balance - too much creative work and I feel frivolous, too much day-job work and I feel like a worn-out machine cog. A mixture of daily wage-earning work and creative work seems to be mentally healthiest for me, but even then, the blues still come.

Today my blues are focused on how to best survive day-job work and daily inanities while trying to find a way to incorporate my creative passions in a life that is meaningful to me. Do I give up on creating and just consume and enjoy? Isn't that selfish? I want to create - but what if I can't create anything that is good enough to make the mark that Bach, Beethoven, Eliot, Yeats, Milosz, Herbert did? What am I worth if I can see truth and beauty but not create them, or apply them beyond my own consumption? It would be easier to stop thinking trying and passively live a comfortable life away from creation, but I don't want to give up.

As much as I doubt my own ability to create and leave meaning behind, I believe passionately that the "softer," non-law/finance/business things like arts and contemplative practices can have tremendous meaning, value and an impact on the world. When I listen to Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's recording of the Bach cantata "Ich Habe Genug", I feel the presence of something sacred and healing. When I listen to the Borodin Quartet's 1960s-1970s recordings of Shostakovich's string quartets, especially Op. 68 Quartet in A Major with its haunting, lumbering waltz (a staggering Russian bear?) and the last chords that are the sound of light and hope breaking through gloom, I better understand the pain and absurdity Shostakovich wanted to expose.

Yesterday, before I finished the last set of edits to this essay, I was reading Czeslaw Milosz's "A Song on the End of the World" in my car at the oil change shop. I brought it in a stack of things I'd been wanting to read and too busy at work to get to, and was so impressed that I re-read it three times. What an amazing, gorgeous, true poem. What a powerful final image, the old man who could be a prophet but is not, binding his tomatoes and knowing "No other end of the world will there be." I got it, I felt it, and for a moment, I was enlightened. How can I ever rise to create at this level myself?

I believe "soft" creators like the ones I've just praised have made greater marks than most "hard" businesspeople in touching others and changing, even if slightly, the tilt of our world. Were I any one of them I hope I'd feel secure in my achievement. However, as the person I am for most of my waking hours, a suburban professional and "aspiring" everything else, I'm a bundle of doubts. Is my time spent on art worthy? What must it prove to be worthy? Money and fame aren't perfect correlations to value, but what does it say if work earns no money or exposure? And where does a frustrated creator go from there?

I wonder if I'd feel otherwise if it did not seem on many days as though I'm the only one in my world tilting against "normal" life, as defined by my profession's "work, work, work and make more money at work" mentality. I have several frustrated artists in my family, but none ever pushed forward or tried hard enough to finish anything, and all shared the same “sit down, have a drink, have a smoke, work too hard and you'll wear yourself out” mentality. My coworkers think the arts are frivolous, and I never hear the end of “classical music isn't worth anything, it has to keep fundraising to survive – you don't see 50 Cent asking for government handouts.”

I just don't know. I want to create, to touch if only briefly truth and beauty and communicate them, I want to leave something meaningful that lasts longer than a memorandum or settlement agreement at work. But how and when? And is this always worth it? I just don't know. I just don't want to give up yet.
**
If you would like to share your “existential difficulty” story, drop me an email (to ericmaisel@hotmail.com) and I’ll send you along some prompts and guidelines.

**

Have an excellent Sunday!

Best,

Eric

A Comedian Walked into the Atheists United Meeting...

2009-01-27T09:50:00.000-08:00

On February 22, 2009, the Atheists United hosts their monthly get-together at 11am, at the Center for Inquiry. Comedian and author, Cathe B. Jones is the featured entertainer, providing comedy relief, and discussing her books, Godless Grief, and My Doctor Is Killing Me. The event is free, and the day show also serves as a luncheon. Cathe's humor is described as vibrantly witty, thought provoking, and emphatically not politically correct, taking on the topics of atheism, racism, and political satire.

Led by indomitable Bobbie Kirkhart, the Atheists United (a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization) has a three-fold mission:

* To promote atheism through education and outreach;
* To promote the First Amendment and the separation of government and religion;
* To create and support a vibrant atheist community.
AU has a full schedule of events, often inviting vibrant speakers, and highly evolved discussions. The meeting on February 22nd is held at Center for Inquiry-West, 4773 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angles CA. This general meeting is Free and open to the public, and begins at 11am.

Kirkhart is currently the president AU, but also led organizations including Atheist Alliance International, Secular Coalition for America, and serves as board member to Humanist Studies and Darwin Day Celebrations. Her first article published nationally was "I Protest: A Santa Claus God", and was written by a woman who was devoutly protestant. Later, she learned through the efforts of her work as social worker, that her world wasn't created by any religion or gods, and since 1983, she has been a member of AU. As public speaker, author, and leader she continues to inspire atheists here and abroad with her wit, fiery sense of purpose, and ability to reach even the most ardent of the religious right.

Cathe B. Jones has performed stand-up comedy in three countries, since 1981. She has three shows in Las Vegas, performing several times a week. As an Atheist Author, Cathe works to inspire other atheists to proactively promote the idea that kindness and free thought should be practiced in all aspects of life. As a writer, her themes are action-based and humanitarian based, serving advocacy pieces. Godless Grief is the first book written about loss for and from the atheist perspective. My Doctor Is Killing Me is a patient advocacy hand book for those who have not been heard by the medical community. Her husband, Mike Jones, is the music director for Penn & Teller, and they reside in Las Vegas with their pets and pianos.

ONE MEANING CRISIS (AND MEANING TRAINING UPDATE)

2009-01-25T09:49:00.001-08:00

Hello, everyone:

As I mentioned at the beginning of year, among the issues I want to focus on in 2009 is meaning: on making 2009 our “year of meaning.” Toward that end I am commencing a “meaning coach” training in June, inviting readers to share their “existential difficulty” stories, preparing a book on meaning-making, and so on. In today’s newsletter, I’m sharing one reader’s story. Catherine’s story begins after a few announcements. If you would like to share your “existential difficulty” story, drop me an email (to ericmaisel@hotmail.com) and I’ll send you along some prompts and guidelines.

The next round of creativity coaching trainings begins the week of February 9th. For information on the next Introduction to Creativity Coaching Training and the next Advanced Creativity Coaching Training, and for information on becoming a free client in the next Introduction to Creativity Coaching Training and receiving free email-based creativity coaching, please visit:

http://ericmaisel.com/em_trainings_lg.html

A few spots remain in the March Deep Writing Workshop in London. For more information:

http://designyourcreativelife.wordpress.com/

If you’re interested in the subject of making meaning, please take a look at The Atheist’s Way, which is now available from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Atheists-Way-Living-Well-Without/dp/1577316428/ref=sr_1_34?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213652533&sr=1-34

Last but not least, if you are thinking about taking the Meaning Coach Training that will begin in June (it will be the first of its kind), come on board soon. It is filling up. For more information:

http://www.theatheistsway.com/meaning_coach.html

Now, on to the main event. Here is Catherine’s “existential difficulty” story:

“Do you realize how disconcerting it is to feel like a teenager again - in your 60s?? And I’m not talking about the carefree, ‘Gee, it’s fun to be alive!’ kind of feeling that comes with discovering yourself and hanging out with best friends. No, I’m talking about the leaden, ‘Who am I, really?’, unfocused and unbalanced kind of feeling that so many teens experience as they’re discovering their identities, that feeling of just not belonging anywhere, of being unable to ‘land’ on recognizable soil.

“That’s the feeling I’ve been dealing with lately, and it has come to the forefront of my life within this last year. I’ve been retired now since 1999. I went into my retirement from nursing/office work with plans to have my own small practice of healing touch and doula work. I had high hopes for establishing my very own practice. However, in my neck of the woods, the Middle West, alternative and ‘new age’ practices are not much sought-after or trusted. So although I trained and met others in the fields I was interested in, I could not establish a community to work within - no one else wanted to meet with me for support or communication, and I found myself essentially alone.

“Well, that’s not how I operate best - I’m a ‘people person’ and I need the energy of others to keep me on my toes. I knew that from previous experience, so I really worked at contacting folks interested in alternative health. However, I had no success at building a community of alternative practitioners and after a short time, I had no clients of my own either. I lost interest in what was supposed to be my retirement job.

“Fast-forward through a move to a new home 15 minutes out of town, new grandchildren arriving on a regular basis, and some health issues, and here I am, entering 2009 and I still don’t know ‘what I want to be when I grow up.’ Life has become just a series of days to be gotten through, with no real focus and no real energy being directed at anything of importance. I wake up in the morning and often cannot think of why I should even get out of bed. If there’s nothing on my calendar, such as a lunch date or a babysitting stint, I have no reason to even get up.

“Or, if I do manage to get up and going, there’s nothing ‘calling to me’ that I really want to spend my time and limited energy on. One thing I have done is taken up writing … and that has probably saved my sanity. I have managed to join some writing groups that offer me some goals to work toward on a monthly basis. But writing, for me at least, is easy and doesn’t require a lot of effort. And it’s also lonely … I spend lots of time all by myself at the computer preparing for those infrequent times of sharing my writing with others in my groups.

“I have no illusions that what I write will make it into the ‘outside’ world and make me famous or even give me a sense of having contributed to the betterment of my world. It’s just a way for me to pass some time, and maybe something I write will from time to time evoke a positive response from someone in my group. But overall, I sense that there is something missing here … something being wasted, and that time is running out for me to discover and use that talent or gift before I die.

“That sense of limited time, of needing to hurry or else lose what I have been given, is what differentiates me from the teenager - I don’t have the luxury of a lifetime ahead of me to ‘work on myself.’ The feeling of emptiness, of waste, is exacerbated by the sense of fleeting time passing me by at a rate that astonishes me and leaves me frustrated. I have devoted most of my life to being a wife and mother and to the needs and schedules of others. Now that I am here, by myself, everyday, with no one to work ‘for,’ I am lost. And there seems to be little hope of finding myself before time runs out … but I continue to work on it.”

As the year proceeds, we will look not only at these stories of existential difficulty but also at how to effectively meet these challenges. If you would like to read along and to think along as we examine these matters, I recommend two of my books, The Van Gogh Blues and The Atheist’s Way. Let’s make 2009 our “year of meaning”!
Have an excellent Sunday.
Best,
Eric

SEASONED WITH REASON - Gone Bananas

2009-01-20T16:50:00.000-08:00

Click on this to view a video of an Atheist program on public access television in Austin, Texas. The caller is darn near precious. She really has her work cut out for her, trying to convince two well-informed Atheists that her god exists because bananas are shaped to fit into the human hand and point toward the human mouth.

Apparently, this idea that bananas are proof of the existence of god or intelligent design is being commonly referred to as the Atheist’s Nightmare by folks who genuinely think that, even if the banana weren’t cultivated by humans to be more flavorful and convenient for human consumption, as proposed by the hosts of the Austin public access program, one piece of fruit actually proves the existence of their imagined god.

A nightmare? Okay, maybe the stunning ignorance of people who will twist their own mental faculties into pretzel knots to keep perpetuating their favorite myths can be qualified as an unpleasant dream. And who among us doesn’t wish we could wake up from that?

But the nightmare is that this kind of thing is being taken seriously by anybody at all. That anyone with the mental capacity to remember a phone number could actually believe this nonsense about tropical fruit. Or think that their mistaken assumptions about that fruit would constitute any kind of “nightmare” among freethinking people unencumbered by religious programming.

The nightmare might be that there are people I come into contact with on a regular basis who would be quick to accept that the notches on a banana peel, as well as the direction the fruit inside it points, are compelling arguments for the certainty of god’s existence.

People who cling steadfastly to their outdated belief structures are going to greater and greater lengths to defend their positions. I’d find it laughable--bananas prove god, really?--if it weren’t so utterly tragic how the human mind can be manipulated, even in the face of so much readily available information...by a simple banana.

God's Favorite Plane Crashes

2009-01-10T10:33:00.000-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

To believe that gods are monitoring human affairs means the following. You have to believe that a god gathers 165 individuals he wants to have die in a certain plane crash, presumably because they are sinners or something of the sort (including the infants and the children) and matches them with a pilot, copilot, and flight attendants he wants to have die for their sins, and sends them aloft together to burn in a fiery crash, making their death as painful as possible. At the same time he makes sure that the Detroit Lions lose all their games (for some obscure reason) and that dysentery, malaria, and drought bring tens of millions of Africans (who, presumably, deserve the pain) down to their knees. Do you really think that there are gods minding these matters, making decisions about who should live and who should die, and figuring out how to make those deaths as painful as possible?

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God's Favorite Football Teams

2009-01-09T08:31:00.000-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

Doesn’t it make you slightly insane when a football player, interviewed after a win, praises god for the victory? It is impossible to fathom what must be going on in a mind that believes that some god has a rooting interest in one team over another. That believers constantly employ gods in this nonsensical, narcissistic way is further proof of their gods’ non-existence. The secret reason that so many sensible people want to see parochial schools lose at sports is that with each loss those defeated student bodies may be forced to doubt just a little. Yes, it is small of us, but it is hard for an atheist not to experience a tiny tingle of pleasure when Notre Dame, SMU, BYU or TCU loses. Nor do we have to apologize for our unseemly pleasure; after all, their god ratified the loss and presumably celebrated it right along with us.

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The Pain of Glen Gould's Greatness

2009-01-08T08:35:00.001-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

How hard is it to keep meaning afloat? D. N. sent me the following:

“The novel, The Loser, is written by Thomas Bernhard and is one of several novels that I've read of his. He's an existentialist who is always confronting his protagonist with indecision and decisive action by a secondary character. The loser has three characters, Glenn Gould, Wertheimer and the narrator who all studied with Horowitz in Salzburg. His novel is perfect for me to be reading once again as he writes of "comparisons" that we artists often make in lessening our selves and our works.

“In Bernhard's The Loser, the narrator's first encounter with Glenn Gould's piano expertise as a performer is devastating to his career as a concert pianist. Wertheimer is likewise devastated. Both Wertheimer and the narrator abandon their careers eventually because they are not as good as Glenn Gould. Of course, they wanted to be the very best in the world and nothing less. The narrator commits suicide and Wertheimer gives up and goes into science. Thus the title to the novel, The Loser.

“The subject matter interests me as to how an artist deals with comparisons when reaching for being ‘the greatest artist.’ It need not even be ‘the greatest artist’ but perhaps discovering that some other artist arrived at one's imagery before and is recognized as the first one or originator. And then there are all the awards that tell us as artists that we’re great; and for those who haven't received any awards - well they're 'less than'.”

Yes, this is yet another reason why it is so hard to keep meaning afloat!

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The Comforts of God-Talk

2009-01-07T06:27:00.000-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

It is not mysterious why we would want to hold the death of our child or our fatal illness as part of some god’s plan. Why rob us of that comfort? Because god-talk is a scourge and, if we want to extinguish it, we must rail against wherever it is used, including by grieving people facing dreadful circumstances. It will not help civilization survive to strive to eliminate god-talk everywhere but tacitly support it in foxholes, hospital wards, and cemeteries. It is warm comfort to believe in gods and cold comfort to take pride in eliminating god-talk even when you desperately want to believe that some dreadful thing has a silver lining. But the coldness of that comfort notwithstanding, for civilization’s sake we face brutal reality with our eyes wide open.

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Atheism as a Non-Prophet Organization

2009-01-06T08:53:00.000-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

A charmingly apt anonymous saying: “Atheism is a non-prophet organization.” Therefore each atheist must make his or her own way. The very essence of making personal meaning is nominating yourself as the hero of your own story and making your own way in life, listening for echoes in the observations of others but never following in another person’s footsteps. Your circumstances are unique; your causes are yours to choose; one day you can play, one day you can be serious, one day you can rest, one day you can exhaust yourself. Make your own way: even the slightest pull to follow opens the door to mischief.

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Freud and the Future of an Illusion

2009-01-05T07:50:00.000-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

Freud described religion as an illusion and explained in The Future of an Illusion (1927) that “what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes.” Gods are created by human beings, and then accepted by other human beings, because human beings wish them to exist. What can you say to someone about his illusions when they represent something he desperately wishes to be true? You can say exactly what you might say to a writer who would like his novel to be done without him having to write and revise it or to a short, slow, uncoordinated man who would like to play center for his local basketball team: “Wishing won’t make it so.” If we keep saying, “Wishing won’t make it so,” we may at least reach those on the edges of belief who are able to distinguish fantasy from reality.

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God-Talk as Betrayal

2009-01-04T08:17:00.000-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

Douglas Murray wrote, “Anyone can be a bigot. But divine bigots must count as the most intractable; the most infuriatingly impervious to reason.” Indeed, one of the joys of belief and one of the primary reasons for believing is that a bigot’s bigotry is made impervious through god-talk. I argue in The Atheist’s Way that god-talk is a betrayal of our common humanity and that we must not permit it, not by outlawing belief but by repeatedly asserting that god-talk is exactly that sort of betrayal. If enough people point out this betrayal often enough, maybe we can turn the corner on this particularly odious use of language, using made-up gods to justify any piece of bigotry.

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James Baldwin and the Personal Self

2009-01-03T07:00:00.001-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

James Baldwin wrote, “The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.” This is how it ought to be; as it is in reality, psychologists have taken the easier path and dubbed their field “the science of behavior.” For this reason, questions of human meaning have failed to enter their investigations. In psychology as it is practiced and studied, there is no human being who wrestles with meaning; there are only symptom pictures and behavior patterns. The person who resembles you and me vanishes. Isn’t it time that the narrowness of the academic’s interest in some pet peeve, pet love or funding possibility be replaced by genuine curiosity about actual members of our species?

Enjoy The Atheist's Way in 2009!.

Anais Nin and the Meaning of Your Life

2009-01-02T07:07:00.000-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

Anais Nin wrote, “There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.” And who writes this book? You do. You are the author and you are the hero of your own story. No, you don’t get to set every plot detail. Many of those are circumstantial. But much of the plot is yours to write. Upon what path do you want to set yourself? What qualities do you want to manifest? You are the author of your own story and you decide.

Read and enjoy The Atheist's Way in 2009!

Viktor Frankl Thought As Our Year of Meaning Begins

2009-01-01T06:31:00.001-08:00

ERIC MAISEL post

I am dedicated to making 2009 our mutual “year of meaning.” But for many people—could it be for most people?—thinking about meaning takes them to a painful place. Why, then, go there? Viktor Frankl put it well: “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load that is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So, if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to increase that load through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.” That is why. We go there to grow stronger, even if the journey increases our difficulties.

SEASONED WITH REASON - Stunning Ignorance

2008-12-19T05:59:00.000-08:00

Last night, I got together with a group of women I see about once a month when we gather to make cards and learn new paper crafting techniques. While they are all Christian, I get along really well with most of these women. A few of them are very vocal about their religious beliefs, while I tend to keep mine to myself.

While we ate supper together at a restaurant last night, that became a little more difficult.

I don't recall how the subject came up, but one of the women--I'll call her Mary--said something about "all the fruits and nuts" in California. Mary is the one who once emailed me religious nonsense criticizing Barack Obama for not wanting to run the country by biblical scripture. I wrote a calm, composed response reminding her that there's supposed to be separation of church and state in our nation, that using any religious literature as a basis for government would compromise religious freedom for everybody.

She didn't respond.

So the disparaging, veiled comment about California's gay population didn't surprise me, nor did Mary's comment about California being poised to fall into the Pacific Ocean, destroyed Sodom-and-Gomorrah-style by god. But then, in what I think was an effort to change the subject, another woman said something about political corruption in Chicago, referring (I assume) to the recent scandal involving Obama's Senate seat.

And Mary said, "Yeah, look what happened to New Orleans."

I was flabbergasted. Of course, I know that there are people who actually think that way. They see natural catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina as god's judgment for sin, and even when I was a Christian, I considered that idea utterly preposterous and appalling. I remember people of faith proclaiming that AIDS was god's judment on homosexuality and shaking my head in disgust.

Rarely do I have to sit next to such stunning ignorance, though. Most of the people I know, even the Christians, don't think that way, and if they do, they keep it to themselves. I sat next to this woman feeling a small war within myself. Should I speak up? Should I point out the obscenity of her assertion that all of the innocent people who died in that disaster deserved it because of some imagined "sinfulness" of New Orleans as a whole? Or should I let it go, not afford her the dignity of any response?

That is what I did. I said nothing. I let it pass, but I don't know if that was the right thing to do. I believe, especially after reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and seeing the movie Religulous by Bill Maher, that atheists need to be more vocal and outspoken, to challenge religious dogma in all its unapologetic ignorance.

I didn't do that last night. I'm not sure why.

THE REASON FOR THE SEASON

2008-12-13T17:27:00.000-08:00

Bah Humbug - Not!
by Denise Beck-Clark

As a Christian acquaintance of mine who persists in sending the sappiest emails, informed us recently, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” I thought, Whew, now I know why everyone is walking around saying things like “Season’s Greetings.” I checked out my Delete key and it worked well... thank the lord.

Another Christian acquaintance of mine gave me a lovely card with a lovely note that she wrote in her English as a second language. She thanked God for knowing me, saying I am a “special person, strong and kind.” Respecting my not being a Christian, she also wrote “Happy Holiday,” thereby avoiding the faux pas she made when we first met and she gave me a very religious card.

The irony is that I am a Jew, as was Jesus, who also, reportedly, was strong and kind. I will show my ignorance here by saying I don’t know what his religious beliefs were, but I have come to understand that I am an atheist. I don’t admit this often, just as I often don’t talk about being a Jew. You’d think that being well into middle age I’d be used to being in the minority, but really I’m not.

Back to Christmas and “the season.” Like many people who don’t believe in Jesus, I still like the season. It’s fun, pretty, and kind. I love Christmas lights, and I love giving and getting presents. There’s really only one thing that bothers me about Christmas, and come to think of it, it’s not really about Christmas at all. It’s about certain people’s interpretation of Christmas. It’s those people in government who forget about separation between church and state. Did you know that in New York State there’s only one day of the year when there are no Lottery drawings? You guessed it. Why is this? I bet if I wanted to undertake the filing of a class action suit we would win.

Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the money to do this, so I will continue each year to be angry that they withhold my addiction from me every December 25th. At the same time, I suppose I can look at the bright side which is the money I’m forced to save. So, thanks, New York State, for imposing your Christian beliefs on me. Oh, and Merry Christmas. And Happy Holiday, to any one of the many non-Christians who love this country for its guarantee of religious freedom.

Happy Christmas!

2008-12-09T07:23:00.000-08:00

by writerdd

Hi everyone. Quiet around here lately. I imagine that everyone is busy with holiday preparations, shopping, and travel plans. I've been noticing the annual "war on Christmas" stories popping around the blogosphere and I'd just like to say that I think the best way to win the imaginary war is to celebrate Christmas with abandon -- especially if you don't believe the baby Jesus is endowed with divinity or supernatural powers.

I love Christmas. I love Christmas trees, carols, sappy holiday movies, and the sound of jingle bells. I love the good cheer and the wishes for "peace on earth, goodwill toward men (and women and children)". I love that people will travel halfway around the world at this time of year to be with friends and family. I love that we indulge in family traditions that we ignore for the rest of the year. I love that for one month you can ignore diets and discipline and just enjoy life in its fullest, without guilt. I simply can't help myself and I don't think I should try. I even celebrated when I lived in California with no snow or cold weather.

I think the biggest humbugs are the Christians who make a stink about the war on Christmas, hence squelching the spirit of joy and cheer that everyone else is feeling. They turn a time of joy and goodwill into a time of anger and bitterness. And I'm not playing their game.

Merry Christmas!

How do you celebrate at this time of year?

moving from anger to hope

2008-11-20T10:19:00.000-08:00

by writerdd

I'm tired of being angry. Have I said that already? I'm sure I have. I am tired of the bitterness, the doom and gloom, the fear mongering, and the angry arguments that have been taking center stage in the national dialog -- and in the dialog between atheists and believers -- for the past 8 years.

I didn't pay attention during this election cycle. I already knew I would vote for the Democratic candidate, and I got so angry during the 2004 election that it almost made me sick. So this year I deleted all the political blogs from my RSS reader, I fast-forwarded through all the political ads on recorded TV, and I skipped the debates. But on November 4, I wanted to watch the election results come in so I turned on CNN and watched all night. All through the evening I could feel an electricity in the air. It was like a fog was burning off or after a long arctic winter the sun was about to rise. The anticipation was palpable. And when the results were announced -- Obama had won! -- and the new President Elect got up to give his speech, I was shivering with excitement. I wanted to shout along with the crowd, "Yes We Can!" I believed that change was coming, and it would be wonderful.

On Wednesday, I heard several Republicans say "Now we're in for it," "the country will be facing a rocky road for a few years," "we're headed for trouble," and "there goes the Constitution." Apparently many of my Christian relatives and friends were afraid and depressed about the election results.

John Marks, author of Reasons to Believe, noticed the same thing:

I wept for joy as I heard [Obama] speak in Chicago. Millions of Americans didn’t. Millions are scared and horrified. This may be sad and even disgraceful, but it’s also true and can’t be wished away. Let’s not get all self-righteous about these nervous Americans. Let’s follow Obama’s lead and see them as our fellow citizens in need of hope and inspiration.

After I recovered from wondering how these people could have missed the rocky road, trouble, and attacks on the Constitution that had occurred during the past 8 years, I found myself wondering how the negative reaction of conservative Christians was different than my reaction after the previous two elections. It also made me think back to my days as a fundamentalist Christian, when there was pressure all around me to be afraid of Democrats, of left-wing heathens trying to destroy morality and bring our culture to collapse. The peer pressure was intense, but having been raised in New York, mother of all blue states, and having been influenced by my teachers and my Jewish-atheist-communist grandfather, probably the most moral and upright person I have ever known, I knew the fear was unfounded. At least in part, the pressures of the fledgling religious right to force all born again Christians to conform to their political agenda pushed me away from the church. And the contemporary fear mongering of the mature religious right, married to the Republican party, gave me a sour taste in my mouth and made me feel that the majority of Christians today are judgmental, bigoted, fools.

Recently I've been in touch with several friends from my born-again days, some of whom are still devout Christians. I don't know what I expected, but they are the same nice, caring, enjoyable people they were when we were friends. They are not clones of James Dobson or Pat Robertson. And I am not a clone of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. I don't want to demonize my friends because of their beliefs and I don't want them to demonize me because of my unbelief. We are not red and blue states, we are the United States, as Obama said; we are not Christians and atheists, we are human beings; we are not believers and unbelievers we are friends and relatives; we are not holy and heathen, we are mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and teachers and firemen and writers and computer programmers.

I still intend to do what I can to combat religious fundamentalism and bigotry in the name of God (and bigotry that has nothing to do with God). And I think that religion, although it is sometimes used for the greater good, has a tendency to decay into legalism and hate of anyone who is "other." Regardless of the good intentions of individuals, the movement of groups is more often inspired by fear than by love. This tendency can make religion dangerous and I hope that individual spirituality will someday replace organized religion. But in the meantime, I also intend to hold out the hand of friendship to people regardless of their beliefs about God, and to find a way that we can all work together to make this country, and the world, a better place for everyone.

I'm tired of being angry. I choose to reject fear. I choose to reject anger. I choose to reject division. I choose to embrace hope.

Cross posted on Sheep to Shawl.

is religious fervency hormonal?

2008-11-18T09:24:00.000-08:00

by writerdd

I don't mean this as a joke, but as a serious question. One of the big turning points for me as I was leaving religion, was realizing that the times I felt moved by the sermons in church were usually when I had PMS. I realized this during a period of time when I was struggling because I couldn't find a church that was meeting my emotional and psychological needs. I was probably outgrowing my need for religion, but I wasn't aware of that yet. Here's a bit I wrote about that memory, and some further thoughts on the topic:

A couple of my friends went to Cleveland Christian Fellowship a few miles south of town. I was, by now, fed up with the internal politics at New Life Bible Church, and had visited Cleveland Christian a few times in the past, so I decided to go there for a while.

It was the most cheerful church I’d ever attended. The worship team led the congregation in upbeat songs with snappy tunes and the band played background music filled with bright major chords. Electric guitars, a synthesizer, and drums made the meeting feel more like pop concert than a church service, and with their big hair and shoulder pads, the worship leader and backup singers looked as if they’d stepped out of an MTV video. Usually the worship leader segued into one or two slow songs, ballads about Jesus or the Holy Spirit, before ending with one last burst of joy and praise. Sometimes there was special music before the sermon, and someone from the congregation sang a popular Christian song accompanied by a karaoke-like recorded arrangement.

When the pastor finally came out onto the stage to speak, everyone was in a great mood, warmed up by the music, ready to be inspired for the week. The sermon was usually upbeat, too. None of fire and brimstone of Calvary Baptist, none of the quiet introspection of Smithtown Gospel Tabernacle, none of the intense self examination of the house churches I’d attended, none of the serious study of New Life. Sometimes it seemed to me like this church was not much more than a social club. But I had nowhere else to go.

A couple of months after I started attending, I surprised myself by starting to cry at the end of the sermon, when the pastor asked us to give more of ourselves to the Lord—to pray more, to read the Bible more, to witness more, to praise God more. Whatever I did, it was never enough. I always failed in my attempts to maintain my devotion. I was slipping away again, letting the cares of the world distract me, falling into sin. A tear dripped down my face, then another, then another. I closed my eyes and turned my face up toward heaven to pray, letting the tears flow freely, even though I knew my mascara and eyeliner would run. I needed to find a way to restore my relationship with the Lord and start over once again.

When the service was over, I stopped in the ladies room before driving home and was glad that I had a tampon in my purse from last month. As I took the tampon out of the wrapper, it hit me. I was crying because I had PMS, not because God was speaking to me. Had this happened before? How many times? Had all of my spiritual awakenings been the result of hormone fluctuations? I didn’t want to think about it, but I couldn’t stop myself.

For the last couple of years, I've been feeling an interest in spirituality again (although not in Christianity or any other religion), as I have begun to go through menopause. It makes me wonder if, at least for many women, these feelings stem from hormonal changes. It's always been comforting to me to realize when my bad moods are tied to physical causes, and it would comfort me now to realize that these feelings I'm having can be dealt with medically. It seems to me that many more women than men are involved in evangelical and fundamentalist Christian churches and other spiritual movements, or at least is is the women who usually start getting involved and the men often seem to go along to keep the peace in the bedroom. I wonder if any studies have ever been done about this.

Cross posted on Skepchick.

Misquoting Jesus

2008-11-18T08:47:00.000-08:00

The other day I found myself getting curious about the curious idea that the Bible is the inerrant word of "God." Not really so that I could debate any fundamentalists; I don't tend to hang out with fundies, and in any case they're impervious to rational debate. Maybe I just wanted to feel smug.

I want to recommend the book I found -- "Misquoting Jesus," by Bart D. Ehrman. It's scholarly but short and readable, and it explores in detail the question of textual alterations in the many copies of the New Testament.

It's no secret that the manuscripts that were eventually stamped with the official seal of approval and became what we know as the New Testament were hand-copied by scribes over the course of hundreds of years, leading inevitably to copying errors. What I didn't quite realize was that here and there, scribes deliberately altered certain passages in order to promote doctrines that they favored and get rid of bits that would appear to support competing doctrines.

Ehrman, by his own account, started out as a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist, but his intellectual curiosity and honesty eventually pulled him away from that position. His own current beliefs are kept scrupulously out of the book, but whatever he may think of Jesus, he makes it clear that the Gospels were written by human beings, who had the usual range of human motivations and failings.

It's a good book. Well worth reading if you're curious about this stuff.

Anxiety

2008-11-14T10:51:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an awful awareness of death. These moments are no fun at all. I envy religious people, who "know" they'll enjoy eternal life. The prospect of eternal nonexistence, however remote it may seem when you're in good health, is difficult to come to grips with. I guess the Catholics have to worry about eternal damnation, but I understand they have some procedures in place for avoiding that outcome.

I don't have a perfect salve to heal this hurt. One thing that helps is if I know I've done things during the day that I truly enjoy. When a day is wasted on stress or mired in mindlessness, the day is gone forever. Looking forward to doing some fun things tomorrow helps too.

I also find that it helps if I spend some time with kids. If you have grandchildren, they may be a good antidote. I'm childless, but I teach private music lessons. Right now two of my favorite people in the world are bright, articulate, inquisitive ten-year-olds.

And as some of my friends in 12-step groups like to say, "H.A.L.T." Don't get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. When I take care of myself physically, the anxiety recedes, if only a little.

On my tombstone I want a quote from Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower": "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke." Sometimes it's easy to laugh, but sometimes it's not easy at all.

Secular Weddings, Secular Rituals

2008-11-09T23:15:00.000-08:00

Like many of you, I was transfixed by the events on November 4th, during the elections across this great country. I was also glad to see that someone who is articulate, and skilled at speaking well was the one elected to be our next President. But, while I cheered the idea that we are now electing a man who would not even be able to vote, due to his race, less than 100 years ago, I mourned the idea that the trade off, for some, was to exclude those who love someone of the same sex, and those who are Atheist, are still pariahs.

National Public Radio posted several conversations regarding the recent Bills that were up on ballot boxes, asking if the public would approve the rights for a same sex couple to:

Adopt a child;

Marry;

Have family rights in case one is placed on life support;

Have the right to have a school dance include same-sex couples;

Have the ability to handle the final arrangements for a domestic partner of the same sex.

The arguments against "Gay Marriage" tend to come from those who believe that religious thought has a place in legal contracts. Aside from having church or chapel weddings, the idea of marriage has been historically of a way to build land, add new family members, and promote a growing community.

Increased land offers increased taxation. Land is built for industry, farming, and services, which is directly used to increase jobs promote increased market and products. The legality of marriage has far more to do with Taxation than religion, and therefore having the argument that "God doesn't recognize marriage between Sam and Dan" doesn't hold water. In fact, many church parishes grew from the addition of families and the land held by these families. Churches exempt from taxation benefit from the land growth, and those who are members, using their property for religious ritual, assist in the avoidance of taxation.

Atheists are often subject to the same arguments of not being able to wed in a church or chapel. Wedding Chapels in Las Vegas do perform rituals for those who are Atheist, and you can request the removal of biblical phrases from the ceremony. Yet, we are told that since we do not hold the tenets of the belief system of this institution, then we are doing nothing more than mocking those who are more pious. This comes from a city that has drive-through chapels, men in capes performing services, and yes, even Elvis as the celebrant.

If we changed the laws to exclude those who do not want to be part of a church, then we exclude homosexual couples who do have a religion belief system in place. If we change the laws to exclude Atheist couples from marrying because their beliefs aren't in tune with those held by the chapels, then we are saying "Take our money, but not our thoughts".

But, both non-wedded domestic partners, who are either gay, or Atheist, or even combination of both, are losing rights by the laws that allow:

Insurance for blood related or marriage related relatives;

Medical proxy during crucial hospital events;

Ownership, property rights, and probate rights- including the dispensing of children after a long term relationship ends, or during a medical crises, or even death;

A partner to incriminate another even though married couples don't have that same caveat.

Probate rights are in play most prominently after a loved one dies. The way most Probate laws are written, only couples sanctioned by a religious ceremony, who have their licenses from states supporting the union, are considered "married". But, there is a strong movement towards Secular Ceremony. Whether gay, or straight, the Secular Celebrations community offers the rite of passage from single-hood to wedded bliss. Another Secular Celebration site, done by Humanist Alita Ledendecker is in Tennessee. And, Mel Lipman, the man who helped power up the Freethought Movement everwhere he has ever lived, is finally moving back to Las Vegas to continue his work in providing both wedding and funeral rituals to those who prefer to halt the religious chatter. His work is primarily through the LVFT and HALVOSON movements.

While many people in our country proudly stand against the status quo, and vote for the idea that a black man can lead us, there is still fear over the idea that family, as defined in a religous book, (Torah, Quaran, Bible, etc), will no longer stand as the "right" way to live. In fact, in the last forty years, more divorced couples have raised children than those who have stayed together. More couples who are domestic, and "common-law", as determined by the laws of the states in which they live, end up lasting in their relationships far longer than those who are considered "regular" wedded couples.

The idea that an Atheist can raise a child as a single parent is scary to many people. Yet, when adoption agencies withhold children from these families, they are also teaching a child that being different and thinking differently will only get you punished by the world around them. If we decide, as a country, to unite people in Secular ceremony, rather than religious rite, we are opening the idea that living without the rules of a storybook god won't change that people will love each other, no matter what the sexual orientation, the color of the skin, the accent of their voice- and dedication to that love is what is important.

The government makes money from Wedding Licensing. It loses money from property taxes on churches. It gains money by not recognizing the rights of those who have no legal binding marriage, absorbing property for sale for profit. It gains money from sales taxes relating to the cost of a wedding, and it gains money from the use of permits, and all other expenses relating to weddings. It even has a cut in the cost of plane tickets for the honeymoon. Rather than telling a group or groups of people "we cannot recognize your love for each other", it would be a smart business move to say, "We must recognize the financial contribution you have made because of this union." By removing a church from this equation, it could also gain property taxes from the ritual sites. It is just good business to allow same-sex couples, and Atheist couples to maintain their right to pursuit of happiness by promoting the options for these rituals.

Obama chorused his speech with "Yes We Can". As he did, the numbers fell for those four states who were struggling with rights for homosexual people. The key point people made was "Gay people choose to be gay". Just like that cow that chooses to be a source of milk, it simply is what it is. There are those genetically, and certainly hormonally, different enough to disprove the "choice" theory. The fact is we CHOOSE to be Atheists, whether we're born straight, or not.

The fight is now on, and the world is now ready to battle the next round of human rights. The rights of gay people to be family, and the rights of Atheists to become family without the sanctioning of a religious organization. Can we win this fight despite all of the walls of hate ahead of us? "Yes We Can"

a peek into my struggles

2008-11-09T07:10:00.000-08:00

by writerdd

For the past year, I have been trying to write a book about my de-conversion from Christian to atheist. Actually, it’s something I’ve been working on for four or five years. Last year (2007), I wrote about 30,000 words, stories about my life. This year, I tried to put them together into a book. So far, it’s not working. It’s hard to take 46 years and condense it into something that can be read aloud in six or seven hours. It’s even harder to focus your memories in a way that makes a story that is true and is still interesting to other people. I don’t know why I can’t write this book, actually. When I have written short bits of it and post them on the Skepchick blog, many readers have found them interesting. But when I try to put it together into a book, to create a longer narrative, it all falls apart and turns into a boring pile of shit. (Maybe, I can’t help thinking that my mother is thinking, maybe God is trying to tell you something. Don’t hold your breath, mom.)

So, what is this book I’m trying to write? It is, at least in part, the story of going against the crowd. While America was experiencing a religious revival, fundamentalists were becoming more vocal and prevalent the news, and conservative Christians were filtering up the ranks of government and into the White House, I was losing my faith, quitting church, and voting for Democrats. I’ve never followed trends or been popular, but in the last two decades of my life, I have found myself consistently moving in the opposite direction of society. Everything I have done has been diametrically opposed to cultural trends. While America was becoming conservative, I was becoming liberal. While mega-churches were growing exponentially, I was sleeping in or going to the movies on Sunday mornings. While Christian books were becoming national best sellers, I was reading and writing about atheism.

It’s not that I’ve been traveling completely on my own. I started writing my book in the wake of 9/11 and under the influence of Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Like some readers here, I have felt afraid of and intimidated by fundamentalists. I felt the need to fight against religion and to stop it from encroaching on secular society, the society that I’ve chosen to live in. I felt threatened by the people I used to love, and disgusted by the same religion I used to embrace.

I haven’t even finished a first draft, and I find myself in a completely different frame of mind. Being pissed off all the time is hard, and when I look back into my own past, I don’t see the strident, belligerent, bigoted Christians that I see on the evening news. What happened to the Christians that I used to know? What happened to the churches that I used to enjoy attending? Was it really me that changed, or was it American Christianity? Maybe we grew apart, like lovers who married too young and found, after just a few years, that they no longer had anything in common. At least we didn’t have any children, I can tell myself. Does this make divorce any less painful?

Now I just find myself feeling confused. I don’t believe in God any more, and I have no desire to go back into a life of faith, but I don’t want to be angry all the time and I don’t want to have my happy memories tainted by more recent stories of religious abuses. I don’t want to demonize good people who are sincerely trying to improve themselves and the world, but I also don’t want to let religious zealots and bigots force me, or anyone else, to follow their antiquated Biblical sense of morality by taking over control of our legislature and courts. I don’t want to ignore the real dangers of religion gone wild, and pretend that the ugliness is not happening because my personal memories are happy.

I constantly have to fight the black-and-white mentality that I adhered to as a fundamentalist. Being an ex-fundamentalist is being like a recovering-alcoholic. You’re never quite free of that past, never able to relax and have just one beer, just one thought. You have to be on guard all the time. In my flight away from fundamentalist Christianity, I found myself with the tendency to fall into a kind of fundamentalist atheism. At first I denied the possibility of the existence of such a thing. Atheists have no holy book, no deity, no sacred creeds, nothing to take literally or to be fundamentalist about. And yet, many atheists and skeptics latch onto the same kind of all-or-nothing thinking that fundamentalists employ. They believe that literalist readings of holy texts and fundamentalist interpretations of religions are more valid than metaphorical readings and liberal interpretations. They see the world as an us-versus-them situation, where you must choose to be on the side of good or the side of evil. The only difference being which side each group considers good.

I don’t want to be a white-and-black atheist fundamentalist any more than I want to be a black-and-white Christian fundamentalist. Like Lokai and Bele, the two-colored men on an old episode of Star Trek who looked identical to the crew of the Enterprise, but who hated each other with a vengeance because one was white on the right side of his body and the other was white on the left, Christian and atheist fundamentalists are nothing more than mirror images of each other, more alike than they are different. Although I still agree that on some level the idea of atheist fundamentalism is an oxymoron, I am beginning to understand how some people can use the term without irony. Can both things simultaneously be true?

To none of my questions can I find satisfactory answers. "I don’t know" goes through my mind more than any other conclusion. It frustrates me, but perhaps ignorance, the admission of ignorance, is the cure to the fundamentalism that has plagued me for so many years.

It’s hard to write a book when you don’t know what you think about a subject. It’s even harder when the book is about your own life and you have no idea where you are going to end up. Sometimes I am afraid my forays into my past will allow the sirens of Christianity to call to me again, that I will once again be sucked into a world of wishful thinking and blind faith. Sometimes I am afraid that I will lose my way and forget who I am and what I’ve been through. I do remember where I came from and a few stops along the way, but the biggest changes in my life happened on days that are forever lost to my memory. So how I can I even begin to tell this story? And why am I obsessed with telling it anyway?

I find myself thinking that maybe it’s too late to write this book. The small wavelet of atheist popularity is over. Once again, I’ve missed my chance to travel with the crowd. Readers are bored with polemics against religion. When George W. Bush leaves the White House, no one will care about religion seeping into politics any more. When the Democrats are back in power, the Religious Right won’t be in the news any more. But I can’t stop thinking about my life and how it has played out against the backdrop of American society. On the other hand, I don’t give a crap about the larger society or any universal messages that might be contained in my story. It is my personal journey and it doesn’t need to be anything need to be anything bigger to be important or meaningful.

Sometimes I think I need to start the book completely from scratch, but how can I possibly throw away all the words I’ve already written? I need to write, perhaps not a memoir about the past, but two intertwined stories: the story of my previous journey into and out of Christianity, and the story of my explorations of atheism and skepticism over the last few years. To me, the worlds of skepticism and atheism seem just as empty and shallow as the world of Christianity. I don’t find solace in groups or comfort in community. I have to make my own meaning, and create my own purpose in life. As much as I would like to fit in, I don’t. So where does that leave me? Where will that lead me? I have no idea. And if I don’t know where I’m going, how can I write about where I’ve been?

2008-11-05T11:57:00.000-08:00

by Dale McGowan
Author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief

There are countless congratulatory messages for President-Elect Obama this morning, all well-deserved. The most remarkably gifted presidential candidate of our time managed somehow to negotiate an unimaginably grueling campaign, and we, despite ourselves, managed to elect him. Shout-outs all around.

But I wanted to take a moment to recognize one of the people who by Barack's own account helped make him what he is -- his nonreligious mother, Ann Dunham.

It should be a matter of no small pride to nonreligious parents that the next President -- a man who has been praised for his ethics, empathy, and broadmindedness -- "was not raised in a religious household."¹ It's the other, undiscussed first in this election -- the first black President is also the first President with a completely nonreligious upbringing.

"For all her professed secularism," he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, "my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened person that I've ever known." And even as she expressed her deeply-felt outrage over those aspects of organized religion that "dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety [and] cruelty and oppression in the garb of righteousness," she urged her children to see the good as well as the bad. "Jesus, she felt, was a wonderful example," said Barack's half-sister Maya. "But she felt that a lot of Christians behaved in un-Christian ways."²

Ann recognized the importance of religious literacy and saw to it that her children were exposed to a broad spectrum of religious ideas. "In her mind," Obama wrote,

a working knowledge of the world's great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. But I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part--no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways -- and not necessarily the best way -- that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.³

Maya remembers Ann's broad approach to religious literacy as well. "She basically gave us all the good books — the Bible, the Hindu Upanishads and the Buddhist scripture, the Tao Te Ching — and wanted us to recognize that everyone has something beautiful to contribute."⁴

In this and several other respects, Ann Dunham was a nonreligious parent raising a child in the 1970s according to the exact philosophy of Parenting Beyond Belief -- educating for tolerance and empathy, lifting up those religious ideas that are life-affirming while challenging and rejecting those that are life-destroying, and seeking the human foundations of joy, knowledge, and wonder of which religion is only a single expression -- "and not necessarily the best."

Barack went on to identify as a Christian. Whether this is a heartfelt position or a political necessity is less relevant than the kind of Christianity he has embraced -- reasonable, tolerant, skeptical, and non-dogmatic. His examined and temperate faith is something he sees as deeply personal, possibly because he had the freedom to choose and shape it himself -- precisely the freedom I want my children to have. It is difficult to picture this man forcing his religious opinions on others or using this or that bible verse to derail science or justify an arrogant foreign policy. It's not going to happen.

It is impossible for me to picture this man claiming God has asked him to invade [insert country here] or that ours is a Judeo-Christian nation. In fact, when he lists various religious perspectives, there is an interesting new entry, every single time:

(Full speech here.)

Is it a coincidence that a child raised with the freedom and encouragement to think for himself chose such a moderate and thoughtful religious identity? Surely not. And if my kids choose a religious identity, I'm all the more confident now that they'll do the same. Just like Ann Dunham, I don't need to raise kids who end up in lockstep with my views. If our kids turn out anything like Barack Obama, Becca and I will consider our contribution to the world pretty damn impressive, regardless of the labels they choose to wear.

Neither do I think it's a coincidence that the man who has inspired such trust, hope, and (yes) faith is the product of a home free of religious dogma. This is what comes of an intelligent and broadminded upbringing. It's one of the key ingredients that have made him what he is.

So thank you, Ann, from all the nonreligious parents following in your footsteps. We now have a resounding answer for those who would question whether we can raise ethical, caring kids without religion:

Yes We Can.
________________________
¹Audacity of Hope, p. 202.
²Ariel Sabar, "Barack Obama: Putting faith out front." Christian Science Monitor, 06/16/07.
³Op cit, 203-4.
⁴Op. cit.

Encouraging active moral reasoning

2008-10-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan
Author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief

The second installment in a nine-part series on best practices for nonreligious parenting. Back to BEST PRACTICES #1.

If the Ten Commandments had been posted at Columbine High School, the April 20 massacre would never have happened.
--former Republican Congressman and current Libertarian Presidential candidate BOB BARR, at a press conference on June 17, 1999

Children's understanding of morality is the same whether they're of one religion, another religion or no religion. But if it's simply indoctrination, it's worse than doing nothing. It interferes with moral development.
--Dr. LARRY NUCCI, director of the Office for Studies in Moral Development, University of Illinois, Chicago

Last May I mentioned a powerful study in which 700 interviews survivors of Nazi-occupied Europe—both “rescuers” (those who actively rescued victims of Nazi persecution) and “non-rescuers” (those who were either passive in the face of the persecution or actively involved in it)—were interviewed about their moral upbringing. Non-rescuers were 21 times more likely than rescuers to have grown up in families that emphasized obedience—being given rules that were to be followed without question—while rescuers were over three times more likely than non-rescuers to identify “reasoning” as an element of their moral education. “Explained,” the authors note, “is the word most rescuers favored” in describing their parents’ way of communicating rules and ethical concepts.¹

This echoed work by Grusec and Goodnow in the 1990s, which showed that "parents who tend to be harshly and arbitrarily authoritarian or power-assertive are less likely to be successful than those who place substantial emphasis on induction or reasoning."²

Both the Oliners’ results and the central role children play in their own moral development are underlined by cross-cultural research from the Office for Studies in Moral Development at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Children in cultures around the world tend to reach certain landmarks in moral development reliably and on time, according to lead researcher Larry Nucci, regardless of what their parents do or don’t do. “Children’s understanding of morality is the same whether they’re of one religion, another religion or no religion,” says Nucci.

The reliability with which kids hit these moral landmarks was underlined by a University of Zurich study published in the August issue of the journal Nature. Kids between 3 and 4 were seen to be almost universally selfish, after which a "strong sense of fairness" develops, usually by age 7 or 8. Fairness was most evident toward those with whom the children identified—in this case, kids from the same school as opposed to a different one.

Ideas of fairness and of in-group preference appear to go hand-in-hand. "The simultaneous development of altruistic behavior and preference of the own group provides interesting new impulses for the conjecture that both of these processes are driven by the same evolutionary process," said Professor Ernst Fehr, one of the principals in the study. This development, which has never been shown to occur in other species, "may be an important reason for the unique cooperative abilities of humans," he said. Unlike animal and insect societies, human societies are based on a detailed division of labor and cooperation in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals who are nonetheless joined by common concerns.

So once again, for the vast, vast majority of kids and situations, morality happens. We are wired up, however imperfectly, for cooperation and fairness. Parents can and should encourage these tendencies, but we mustn't think we are writing on a blank slate, or even worse, rowing against a current of natural depravity. Our job is to draw out and enhance the ethical nature that evolution has already put in place, then expand it beyond the in-group by widening those circles of empathy. Knowing that our children's tendency is toward the ethical can help us relax and row with the current, knowing that kids in a supportive, "pro-social" environment tend to turn out just fine.

Nucci's work does point to one way in which parents can actually impede their children’s moral growth. Any guesses?

“If it’s simply indoctrination,” he says, “it’s worse than doing nothing. It interferes with moral development."³

So the one practice conservative religious thought insists is vitally important in moral education, the one thing we are begged and urged and warned to do—to teach unquestioning obedience to rules—turns out to be the single most counterproductive thing we can do for our children’s moral development.

Instead, the best thing we can do is to encourage our kids to actively engage in the expansion and refinement of their own natural morality—asking questions, challenging the answers they are given, and working to understand the reasons to be good.

Marvin Berkowitz, professor of character education at the University of Missouri, puts it just that clearly: “The most useful form of character education encourages children to think for themselves."⁴
______________________________
¹ Oliner and Oliner, The Altruistic Personality, 181-2.
² Grusec, J.E. and J. J. Goodnow, “Impact of Parental Discipline on the Child’s Internalization of Values: A Reconceptualization of Current Points of View,” Developmental Psychology, 30, 1994.
³ Quoted in Pearson, Beth, “The art of creating ethics man,” The Herald (Scotland), January 23, 2006.
⁴ Ibid.

An Open Letter to Sarah Palin

2008-10-25T09:53:00.000-07:00

Dear Sarah,

As a former fundamentalist, I'd like to call you on what you are doing. The media has called you “opaque” about your religion, but some of us can connect the dots.

This is not about disrespecting your private beliefs. However, your religion matters to us because it matters to you. You have done and said things that indicate you are a born-again, literal Bible-believing, fundamentalist Christian. This is the most important thing about you and you have not been honest about it.

Most people who have never been entrenched in the subculture of fundamentalist Christianity may not understand what this really means, but I do. Like you, I was raised in the Assemblies of God and I was a zealous part of the Jesus Movement. Like you, my life was consumed with seeking God's will for my life and awaiting the imminent return of Jesus.

It's clear to me that you want to do the Lord's will, as a true believer would be in your position. You talk of the “spirit of prophecy.” You are on a mission from God. If that is not true, then I challenge you to deny it.

You probably know that you have a huge conflict of interest here by running for office. Jesus said “love not the world” or you will not have the love of the Father in you (John 2:15). You are ambitious, Sarah, but you can’t have it both ways. And if you are the kind of Christian I think you are, you abhor the thought of denying your allegiance like Peter did.

Former fundamentalists like me know that your worldview is so encompassing, authoritarian, and powerful that it defines who you think you are, the way you view the world, history, other people, the future, and your place in the world. It defines you far more than hockey mom, wife, woman, hunter, governor, or VP candidate. Your indoctrination began as a small child so I know it goes deep.

As a born-again fundamentalist, you would believe that every bit of the Bible is God's perfect word. You would have a supernatural view of reality where Satan is a real entity and where good and evil beings are engaged in "spiritual warfare" (Ephesians 6:12). We know your pastor advised you to read again about Queen Esther, who rose up to save the Jews. Like your Christian supporters, you are likely to believe that God has "called" and "anointed" you to lead America. This is why you have accepted blessing for office through the "laying on of hands" and prayer to protect you from witchcraft.

So what does this mean for governing? What could Americans expect with you at the helm? If you have a fundamentalist worldview:

You cannot affirm basic human decency or capability, because according to your dogma, we are sinful, weak, and dependant on God. And so, your decisions would not be based on expert advice or even your own reasoning, but on your gut-level, intuitive interpretation of God's will. This would allow you to do anything and claim you were led by God.

Your thinking necessarily is black or white. People and policies are either good or bad. After all, Jesus said, "He who is not with me is against me" (Matt. 12:30). Under your leadership, diplomacy and cultural nuance would be less important than not blinking. In a spiritual war, you don't negotiate with the devil.

Social policy? As a believer in individual salvation, you would emphasize individual morality and responsibility, not a community approach with structural solutions. You would be judgmental and controlling of personal choices regarding sex, reproduction, and library books instead of addressing global warming, torture, poverty, and war. Your belief in eternal hell-fire, your deference to a literal Bible despite its cruelties and vengeful god, and your training to disbelieve your own compassionate instincts, are likely to leave you numb at your moral core. You might recall the verse, "If a man will not work he shall not eat" (2 Thess. 3:10). However, faith-based initiatives would be okay because they would use caring to evangelize.

How about science? As it has in your governorship, your interpretation of the Bible would trump scientific scholarship and findings. You would deny the human role in global warming because God is in control. More importantly, you would not make the environment a priority because you do not expect the earth to last.

International affairs? Since your subculture has identified the establishment of Israel in 1948 as the beginning of the end, you would see war, epidemics, climate change, and natural disasters, all as hopeful signs of Jesus' return. You would be a staunch supporter of Israel and deeply suspicious of countries like Russia identified with the antichrist in the end times literature. (You have publicly said that you expect Jesus to return in your lifetime and that it guides you every day.)

This type of Christianity is not about following the teachings of Christ (as in Matthew 25 on caring for the poor). It is about death – his death, our death, the death of the planet. Sarah, if you are a born-again literal Bible-believer, this is how you would view reality. If I am wrong about this, please clarify publicly, and we will all sleep better.

The fundamentalism that has very likely shaped your thinking teaches that working for peace is unbiblical and wrong because peace is not humanly possible without the return of Jesus (1 Thess. 5:2,3). Conflict, even outright war is inevitable, for Jesus came not to bring peace but a sword (Matt: 10:34-37). Like millions of fundamentalist Christians, you may actually find joy in global crises because these things portend His return (Luke 21:28).

But all of this certainty and fantasy in today's complex world is dangerous, Sarah. There was a time when all of humanity thought the world was flat. Today, the stakes for such massive error are much higher.

So I ask you, Sarah, Warrior Princess for God, -- How dare you presume to take responsibility for our country and our planet when you, in your own mind, do not consider this home? I mean home for the long haul, not just until your rescue arrives from space. How dare you look forward to Christ's return, leaving your public office empty like a scene from the movie, Left Behind?

What if you are completely wrong and you wreak havoc instead with your policies? If you deny global warming, brand people and countries "evil," support war, and neglect global issues, you can create the apocalypse you are expecting. And as it gets worse and worse, and you look up for redemption, you just may not see it. What then? In that moment, you and all who have shared your delusion may have the most horrifying realization imaginable. And it will be too late. Too late to avoid destruction and too late to apologize to all the people who tried to turn the tide and needed you on board.

Leave this beautiful, fragile earth to us, the unbelievers in your fantasy. It's the only heaven we have and you have no right to make it a hell.

Sincerely,
Marlene

Marlene Winell, Ph.D.
October 21, 2008

Marlene Winell is a Bay Area psychologist who specializes in recovery from fundamentalist religion. She is author of Leaving the Fold: A guide for former fundamentalists and others leaving their religion. She is the daughter of Assemblies of God missionaries. A longer article about Sarah Palin's religion is on Dr. Winell's website: www.marlenewinell.net

"That doesn't sound very Atheist to me..."

2008-10-21T12:25:00.001-07:00

That doesn’t sound ATHEIST to me....
When we're having our lowest times in life, there's nothing in the world, and in our entire human-being, that states, "Only those who believe in a god or religion needs to have assistance from psychologists, psyciatraists, or social workers." Yet, there are Atheists who prefer to SHAME people who seek out responsible medical help.

Some "bad neighbor Atheists", as James Randi calls them have sent me letters, or emails just refusing to believe that Atheists are supposed to grieve, and certainly shouldn't use, and I'll quote one letter because it is 180 degrees from the truth:

"Jones, we don't need any crutches. No pills, no prayers, no doctors giving a panacea and sending us off in a foggy mist of psycho-babble."

My first response was, "Who was the mental health professional assigned to him to make him so close minded to the idea that MEDICAL professionals are a crutch during times of loss?" But more so, I wondered, how many other people feel this way aren't getting help necessary to get through the really rough patches in life.

Many letters as of late are regarding the great "It's not a depression" scare that we're amidst. Retirees are writing that they are now supporting adult children, and cannot afford their own bills. Employees of long standing are now on the chopping block at places the family has worked in for generations. We're developing a shell-shocked generation of "NO one cares, I'm just a number, so let's have dessert first." Wreckless behavior is on the rise, and with that, tragic deaths. Banks are closing before people tap into their IRAs and force the closures. It's just sad. It's sad that the people who saw it coming were told, "that will never happen." And, these same people, despondent, confused, and bewildered, are being told, "Go to church and pray about it."

We'll stop at that first. No Atheist needs to PRAY to make the world's troubles go away. Talking to yourself is great at calming YOU down but it won't do anything to your neighbor, or your children's future other than keep you out of it for a few moments. STAY in the NOW. Simple neuro-lingistic programming DOES work at keeping us focused, and the mind/body response DOES work at keeping us focused on solutions. Prayer occupies the mind in the same way dreams and fairytales do- the outcomes are out there, unreal, and often just a random tangent of neurons firing based on the part of the brain most stressed at the moment. (ie. You spent the day worry about a car breaking down, and you later dream you own a car that has a flat tire.)

Meeting with groups of people to talk to an invisble entity doesn't help. Meeting with groups of people to form actions and plans will. Get with other people from your company and learn how to cut corners that will make the organization see the PEOPLE as valuable as long as there are ways to cut other things. (Do you really need a soda machine in the hall? Does it matter if the paper you print on is pulp stock or standard?) Start making a solution team, and cut expenses- car pool, offer prizes in gas cards to people who come up with the innovative ways to keep the company affloat.

Meditation and prayer are not the same. Meditation is a state of turning your mind into a calm place from the many thoughts bounced around and argued, events, calandars, bills due, children, illnesses- etc... When we meditate, we are taking moments in the NOW, and saying, "This is my time to NOT think of anything other than what calms me." (puppies, oceans, big sky, anything that puts you in a place of nothing matters for five minutes.) EMBRACE those quiet times. That is what meditation does.

As an animal trainer, I've noticed most of my animals will do just this. If there's a tassle, or one of the cagemates isn't feeling well, or they're waiting for foodtime, many will simply sit in one spot. They aren't causing another animal any stress, and they aren't falling asleep- they just sit, some brush their faces- and just wait. It lasts about a minute or two- then they're back to bouncing and begging for ratty-chow, but they take that time to go from 100% play to 100% calm. It's a forced moment to live in the now- without any interruptions- and can be as short as 30 seconds. Suddenly you'll find your energy easier to tap into for the things that are most pressing, and you'll do better at it.

I'll say this until I have eggplants growing from my ears- but it's more than true. ALL of the human species rely on ritual of some sort. There's no hoodoo juju, and there's not a single church involved. Ritual is merely a structured set of events, shared or not, that helps a person get through the acknowledgement of an event.

I repeat: Ritual is merely a structured set of events, shared or not, that helps a person get through the acknowledgement of an event.

Acknowledgement of something means you are at a point of understanding something better. If we get hired to a new job, a ritual could be decorating a cube so we feel the person who was there before no longer has a presence, and we now belong there. If someone we love is in ICU, we know that by visiting on specific times, and saying specific things, we have acknowledged s/he is in pain, and we have made a commitment to help ease that pain.

If someone we love dies, we may perform an act that would have made that person laugh in our time together. We do this to honor the memory, and to remind ourselves, our moments together did matter- and will always matter long after s/he is gone.

For instance, my foster mom died in 2001- Every Saturday night, I ensure I'm by the PBS station, watching "As Time Goes By", the show we would sit for hours watching in he home. It's a ritual I've maintained for most of the last seven years. During the time, I feel close to those memories, and the years we spent together. I don't hunt for her ghost, or do seances or other self-serving nonsense designed to make someone rich-- I just honor the person I miss by continuing a ritual of something we enjoyed together.

Medications are NOT designed to stop you from grieving loss. They're designed to help you get through anxiety, depression, and chemical imbalances that naturally occur when we are facing loss. Most people given medications for their response to grief have these as short-term solutions. You aren't "mental", nor are you "lazy" for taking them. We're well past the days when we'd jail a woman for having post-partum depression, PMS, or even FREE WILL. Doctors are trained in mental health at every teaching hospital in the world.

There IS a thing called post-traumatic stress disorder. It doesn't mean you were in a war zone. During the earthquakes in 1994 in Southern California, hundreds were suffereing the PTSD symptoms, afraid to leave homes, aftraid to drive highways as they watched the 14/I-5 interchange fall, afraid to leave their jobs because looting was everywhere. These all fall into post traumatic stress, and asking for help is by no means a religious right. It is a human right.

I can't emphasize- the five phases of grief so well touted by the late Elizabeth Kubler-Ross- simply don't exist for all people. Don't expect to have one response flow into another response, as you may only feel angry, then suddenly feel, hapiness. Or you may only feel numb, and then after a few months, go into crying fits. In her model-
Denial: Example - "I feel fine."; "This can't be happening."'Not to me!"

Anger: Example - "Why me? It's not fair!" "NO! NO! How can you accept this!"

Bargaining: Example - "Just let me live to see my children graduate."; "I'll do anything, can't you stretch it out? A few more years."

Depression: Example - "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"; "I'm going to die . . . What's the point?"

Acceptance: "I get it now."

In fact there are at least thirty other responses the "average" person feels- including relief, which doesn't make you a bad person. Guilt- the disccusion I posted earlier- is a huge part of loss for some. And others will feel acceptance, and nothing more. NO one has to go through five stages of anything- it's not human nature, it's an observation made by one person. Human nature shows time and again that we're far more complex and far less likely to live in the NOW, thereby invalidating much of the work Ross did.

I'll close this long note on the letter I got that said, "That doesn't sound Atheist to me..." when I said being around friends and community is a good way to help heal." In fact, ATHEISTS have strong human bonding, and have strong, smart intelligent communities. They won't pray for you, but they'll make sure your bills are paid, or your face is clean. Pragmatic is the plan of the day- and that's a large part of what community does- it puts us in a state of self-acceptance. That's quite humanitarian based, and certainly deity-free.

I'm NOT Joe Plumber

2008-10-16T19:27:00.000-07:00

It's pretty scary. All the people I know who are intelligent aren't registered to vote..well not ALL of them, but a good majority. The excuse of course, "I don't want to vote for the lesser of two evils." That's a self-important crock of bull pucky, folks, seriously. You can't make changes by sitting at home complaining. You have to make effort somehow.

There would be MORE choices if MORE people put effort into saying what they are about, who they want rep'ing them, and if there was- quite frankly- NO party system at all. I think anyone who says, 'I dont' vote because I'm not a Democrat or a Republican' is really saying, "I don't vote because I ONLY want there to be democrats and republicans." You set up a system that perpetuates itself if you do NOTHING to change it.

I've been a registered NON-Partisan for about 20 years. Being from Massachusetts doesn't mean you're a democrat, but it can mean you've had better public schooling than other places. I did. I was "honors" and "gifted", and got through Latin Academy for three years so I could go to a Magnet Arts school, as a journalist/theater person. I elected to make my education important enough to me to graduate high school early, and to go to college. I elected to leave college and go into the service when I saw there wasn't financial options for me. Yes, emancipated children can do that, so I did. I elected to go back to school, and earn a few degrees, predominately in the creative arts. But I elected to do this, as it was the wise course for improving a life that could have been less than worthwhile.

I didn't grow up originally in a neighborhood that was filled with people driving Mercedes, and sending kids to summer camp. I started out several blocks from the projects in a relatively poor neightborhood, that was peppered with people from Lebanon, Italy, Ireland, and Haiti. Many of the people I grew up with settled in on the life of parenting, working at the local shops, and enjoying a high school education. I elected not to be this way.

In my later childhood years, I did end up living in a neighborhood where homes and the car people drove were more expensive than most people's entire lifetime fortune. I had a 27 piece silver service to use on Sundays, and did. I saw the other side of the tracks, and there were no subways, sewers, or five and dime stores- there was tea parties, cocktail parties, and "dinner meetings". The culture was as different from food stamps and government cheese as could be.

But, I don't understand why people ELECT to be ignorant. Ignorance is a choice. I grew up with no opportunities and yet, I found them, was given scholarships, and moved far ahead of what I could have had I elected to be just a kid who went with what people told me I was supposed to do. Free will is a magnificent thing.

People know I was a Richardson fan. A Mexican in the White House has so much comedic potential, but I had first-hand experiences with him, when he was my governor, when I lived in New Mexico. I read Richardson's blogs, and understood WHY he was going to pull out of the race, and WHY he was going to support Obama. I'm also one of the few people making sure C-Span gets SOME ratings. I've sat and watched votes that went on for days. I sat and listened to philibusting bombastic blunderers.

One of my students in New Mexico was pretty disdainful of me as I would rib her constantly for being an ardent Ross Perot supporter. In fact, I admired her greatly for going against the grain, and electing to be aware of whom it was she was supporting. Mostly, I prodded her because it gave her a platform for the speech class. She taught many students to stand up for who and what they believe in, and never be goaded by someone else's ideas. She was fabulous for it.

I watched the debates, along with many of my friends, as I sat at Facebook, typing commentary. Patton Oswalt, Brody Stevens, and Taryn Reid also did this, and many others had great moments of hilarity that Letterman and Leno would envy. But, really, we were trying to get people to LISTEN to what is being said. Don't just assume that someone is in favor of your beliefs because you were the same title, logo, or skin color. LISTEN to what is being said, and watch HOW it's being said to see if there is any genuine passion. Where there is passion, there is truth, where there is truth there is purpose.

I'm not Joe Plumber. I'm the one in my house who votes. If there is Atheist to vote for- that's great. I'm not going to vote for someone JUST because I support Atheists. If there is a pro-choice person to vote for, great. I'm not going to vote for someone JUST because they share my thoughts. If there is somehow someone who actually funded education before war- well- that person just doesn't seem to exist, does it? But, it's up to me to decide if I will follow my free will, elect someone who best represents the majority of my beliefs, and then put that person into office.

I'm not going to be Bushwacked anymore.

why do Christians visit atheist blogs?

2008-10-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

by writerdd

Reading Melissa's post made me think of something I wrote the other day, that may become part of a memoir I am writing about leaving Christianity behind.

I’m not entirely sure why born-again Christians read atheist blogs. I never would have. Perhaps its a morbid sense of curiosity. Perhaps they think they can save us. Maybe they think we are misrepresenting their Savior and they want to set the record straight. (As if God couldn’t take care of his own reputation.) In any case, they claim to want to spread the love of Jesus, but often end up in bitter, heated arguments with unbelievers. From the tone and vocabulary, you can’t actually tell who is the Christian and who is the atheist.

I felt a lot like Melissa does for a long time, and I still do in a way. I refuse to be silenced by Christians -- or people of any faith -- who think "you have to believe in something" is the best response to my atheism. I've been pissed off since somewhere around 9/11. But now I am tired of being mad at Christians. It's really exhausting. While I've been working on my memoir, I've been looking at old photos of friends from church and year books with pictures from the Bible school I attended, and I found myself smiling more than anything else, remembering good times, and good people. I wonder, "What happened to Christianity in the last 20 years to change me from seeing Christians as good people to seeing them as big-mouth bigoted bullies?" I think it's the action of the Christians, always pushing themselves to the forefront, trying to force everyone to follow their rules through legislation, blatantly disregarding the Constitution of the United States. When I was a Christian in the 1970s and early 80s in New York, it was considered uncouth, unspiritual, for born-again Christians to be involved in politics. We were in the world, but not of it. Our mission was spiritual, not political. Looking back, I see that when churches started getting involved in politics, that's when I got a bad taste in my mouth and started to feel like something was amiss.

So, I'm not really sure what to think about all of this. Frankly I'm tired of thinking about it. I wish Christians would just mind their own business and leave the rest of us alone. If they won't do that, then they have to suck it up and take it when we push back. We're not the ones being the bullies.

And Christians visiting atheist blogs and hassling people in the comments are just one example of that bullying. Personally, I think Jesus would be pissed.

SEASONED WITH REASON - When Frustration Reigns

2008-10-15T07:22:00.000-07:00

Lately, in the past month or so, I've been struggling again with anger towards the religious, particularly Christianity because that's the religion with which I'm confronted most often. The subject has come up on this blog before, probably because one of the issues of being Atheist is dealing with religious folks who refuse to respect our philosophies, even while they demand we respect and even adopt their beliefs.

On days when I'm not feeling as enlightened as I like to feel, it infuriates me.

My husband and I have seen Religulous, Bill Maher's documentary about the dangers of religion, twice. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Maher addresses the three most popular organized religions, mostly, and challenges each in turn. He makes really good points. He also challenges those of us who are not religious to be more vocal, more public about it, which give me a lot to think about.

I strongly believe that most religion is dangerous. Why do I say "most"? Because there are a few religions that don't interfere with a person's reasoning capabilities. Wicca and other Nature religions are good examples. I was Wiccan for awhile, and most of the Wiccans and other Pagans I met saw "god" and "goddess" as metaphorical. Their religion is based on a reverence for Nature, and scientific inquiry doesn't threaten their religious beliefs. Wiccans don't have an ancient book that they consult to determine how to live. Their "doctrine" is simple: harm none. They are led by their conscience.

When religion demands that we circumvent our ability to reason and think, then it is dangerous. What remains a continuous dilemma for me is how to cope with how I feel about, say, Christianity when people I love and interact with regularly are devout Christians. I've always considered myself a reasonable person, open to new ideas, respectful of people and their right to believe and think whatever they want.

However, I'm getting weary of Christianity being shoved down my throat everywhere I turn, even here on this blog, where Christians are filling our comment section with anti-Atheist drivel. The difference between me and the average Christian, including the ones that I love and respect, is that whatever I believe, I neither expect, nor demand, that everyone I encounter bow down and worship my lack of belief in god.

I spent a couple of months hanging out online at the Atheism boards on Beliefnet. What was the discussion about most of the time? Christianity. Not Atheism. Rarely did any issues regarding Atheism or Secular Humanism come up. Why? Because there was a constant barrage of Christians with delusions of grandeur preaching their gospel as if we'd never heard it before, as if we'd be inspired by their retelling of stories we've heard and debunked a thousand times, and miraculously turn to Jesus. Even the board moderator supported the idea that there is evidence of god's existence while continuing to assert that he is an Atheist.

And here I am, feeling the need to talk about Christianity. I am weary of defending my lack of belief in what, to my mind, is the same as the Cinderella story. I don't want to discuss the existence of Jesus anymore than I want to delineate the reasons why a pumpkin could theoretically be used as a vehicle. At the same time, I don't want to be the kind of person that steps on the toes of others, and I'm still trying to figure out how to stand for my own beliefs without doing what Christians do to me on a regular basis. I don't want to be, as my five-year-old niece might say, "ugly" to people, especially the people I love who are deeply religious.

But I also don't want to back down and let the Christians win by default. They have a right to believe what they wish; they don't have a right to demand and insist we all believe like they do and run our country, our society, our world into the ground with their religious fervor. I am trying to find a way to be vocal, to be public, to be a voice of reason without letting anger and frustration propel me in a direction I don't want to go.

It's a discussion I'd like to see explored more here so we can learn from each other. We all have to live in this world, and we will always be faced with Christianity and its persistent adherents. Most of us want to be liked; most of us want to be accepted. We want to play nice and get along. But we don't need to back down and play quite so nice with people, whatever religion they are, who are hell bent on stepping on the rights of others.

Religion and Politics: A Match Made in ?

2008-10-13T09:24:00.000-07:00

by Denise Beck-Clark

The great thing about Blog writing and reading is that they stimulate thought. The Blog written by Jim Aiken relates to something I’ve given a lot of thought to over the years: the relationship between religion and politics, and, specifically, how it impacts on personal relationships.

My late mother, who identified herself as “a Democrat,” was married to a man who believed that Ronald Reagan was too liberal. I would always ask her on the phone, for this was when I was an adult, and didn’t see her much in person, how could she even be in the same house with someone with such views, no less be married to him, my belief being that a person’s character and his/her politics are inseparable. Her answer: We don’t talk about politics. Now I realize that there was another reason that explained the feasibility of their relationship: they weren’t religious. I never realized that before, but I do now. If either one of them had been into God, they couldn’t have stayed together. But just their political beliefs were avoidable.

It often happens that people with certain religious beliefs also have certain political beliefs. But this is not always true: there are many Democrats who have a strong belief in God. What separates them is the desire to impose their beliefs on others. That’s also where religion becomes pernicious. What would it matter if most of the world had strong religious beliefs if they didn’t condemn me for not having them. Religion, when it is done sincerely, can have very positive effects, viz., a Mother Teresa. Unfortunately, so many people get more caught up in imposing their religious beliefs on others than in the beliefs themselves, to the fanatical extreme of incarcerating or killing people who don’t agree with them.

But I digress. Recently, something interesting happened with a colleague at my job. Though she is a strong believer in God, she and I were becoming quite friendly, being aware of and tolerating each other’s differences. Until one day recently the talk turned to politics and she started to rant and rave about “those Democrats.” I said to her, “Betty, I am one of those Democrats.” Since that day our friendship has cooled. It was as if we could tolerate the one major difference, but add to that the political thing and it became too much. Oh, we are still friendly, we still talk and like each other superficially, but we know this friendship can only go so far; ultimately, there’s too much about each of us that the other doesn’t like or approve of.

Is there a conclusion here? Yes, and I think it’s the same one that Jim was given as advice by people who responded to his Blog. Above all, most of the time we do what is practical. It’s practical for Jim to smile at his mother’s neighbors so they will look after her. It’s practical for me to be friendly with my colleague at work. It was practical for my mother to be married to her husband. It’s when people’s actions go beyond the practical and focus more on principle that the stakes get higher. So the real problem is when people act on principle; that’s when relationships, be they of a personal or a societal nature, become strained and people get hurt, individually or en masse.

On the other hand, there’s an argument to be made for acting on principle, but that’s another essay.

Dealing with Believers

2008-10-10T10:35:00.000-07:00

To paraphrase Lady Astor, I don't mind what people believe, as long as they don't shout it in the streets and frighten the horses. Other people's beliefs become my business only when they make them my business.

My mother is 86 years old. Her neighbors are not only friendly and nice, they're helpful. They mow her front lawn. We did a garage sale together this summer, and the guy helped me move a couch. Once when Mom fell down, I ran next door and got the neighbor lady, who helped me get her back on her feet.

This month (October 2008) they have a "Yes on 8" sign on their front lawn. For those outside California, Prop. 8, if passed, will outlaw gay marriage.

They're Mormons.

They haven't tried to convert me, so up to now it has been none of my business. But now ... now I don't dare speak to them.

If I see them in the front yard before the election, I will walk on as though I was preoccupied and didn't notice them. That strategy only needs to work for a few weeks.

After the election, if Prop. 8 fails, I'll be ever so nice to them, and the status quo ante will reassert itself. But if Prop. 8 passes, how will I deal with these nice, helpful, vicious, bigoted savages when I see them?

Confronting them won't do any good. Religious people are mostly impervious to rational argument. Alienating them won't help Mom at all. But if I smile and say hello, I'll leave them with the very mistaken impression that I like them. That I accept their hatred of gay people as a normal and unremarkable part of the social fabric.

I have no answer to this question, and if Prop. 8 passes I'm going to need one.

Help! I Want To Believe!

2008-10-05T19:39:00.000-07:00

by Denise Beck-Clark

It dawns on me that one thing more alienating than being Jewish in this Christian culture is, well, besides being a Muslim, being an Atheist. What poor timing: now, when this country seems to be at an all time high, at least since the 1950's, in its religiosity, what a time to come to the realization that I am, after all is said and done, an Atheist.

Writing these Blogs has caused me to have a revelation: I am, indeed, an Atheist. Prior to now I called myself “Agnostic,” but I understand that this was based on confusion. For, vis a vis the identity of God, I’ve been confused, all my life! I was raised by non-religious Jewish parents, who, when, I asked as a child, “What is God?” answered, “God is all around us. God is in everything.” They didn’t say “there is no God.” Nor did they call themselves Atheists. But I definitely was not raised as a believer in A God.

Because I grew up believing in “God as a Force,” this stopped me from calling myself an Atheist. Now, however, I’ve come to understand that when we talk about “God” we’re talking about the anthropomorphic God. God as the Father of Jesus. God as the Creator, Protector, and All Powerful Being that loves everyone unconditionally. God as the old man with a white beard and long robes, or, in whatever persona people picture this Being.

All my life, until now, I have found it reasonably acceptable to believe in God as a force because to define God as a force allows for stuff like synchronicity, and for believing that there’s energy out there that never dies but instead is re-formatted and re-cycled and provides, at times, a certain unity and logic to things. It’s God as Karma, God as a lesson, God as an explanation. But now I know that this is not the same as the God that people love and pray to.

I have found believing in God as a force to be mildly comforting. But I know that this comfort is nothing compared to the profound solace that is brought by the belief in God as an All Powerful Being who will love me unconditionally and have my best interests at heart at all times. It’s this latter belief that really helps people, and I sorely miss it. Because when the going gets rough, as it so often does, wouldn’t it be wonderful to have this Being to turn to with absolute faith and trust, which would allow me, like a child trusting her all-powerful loving parents, to believe that yes, Denise, everything is going to be just fine. You’re one of God’s children and God is always looking after you. How comforting! No wonder so many people are believers.

The Devil Went Down to Georgia

2008-10-05T17:25:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan
Author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief

I read to Delaney's first grade class yesterday. She had prepped me for my visit like a military operation, reminding me at least five times of the exact time and S.O.P.

"There's a chair you sit in, and I'll sit right by you," she said. "You have to bring three stories, but don't be sad if we don't get to all three."

I promised to hold it together.

She nodded, then ran upstairs to rummage through her books. Five minutes later she was downstairs, beaming.

"First, you'll read this one," she said, handing me Rosie's Fiddle, a great version of a classic folktale. "Then Crictor, the Boa Constrictor, and then"--she held up a finger, eyes closed-- "IF there's time...you'll read Pete's a Pizza."

"Ooh, good ones," I said, only really meaning it about Rosie's Fiddle. The other two are nothing much, but Rosie's Fiddle is the kind of story that can keep a roomful of six-year-olds perched at attention on the edge of their buns.

The operation commenced at 1330 hours.

"If Rosie O'Grady ever smiled," I read dramatically, "no one but her chickens had ever seen it. She was as lean and hard as a November wind..."

The story goes on to describe the solitary Rosie playing the fiddle on her porch at night.

Folks said Rosie could fiddle the flowers out of their buds. They said she could fiddle the stones out of the ground. Folks said Rosie O'Grady could outfiddle the Devil himself. And that was a dangerous thing to say.

Oh...shit.

I flashed forward through the story in my mind, a version of Aarne-Thompson taletype 1155-1169 (Mortal Outwits the Devil). The tale has taken many forms through the years, but once a Russian folktale put a violin in Lucifer's hand, the fiddling faceoff became the preferred choice, from Stravinsky's L'histoire du Soldat to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. And Rosie's Fiddle.

"What's the Devil?" one kid piped up.

Shitshitshit. I looked at Mr. H, Laney's magnificently gifted and cool teacher, whose smile was unperturbed.

"It's a kind of a monster," offered another kid.

"No," said a third, "the Devil is the one who curses you if you do something bad."

Aw shit. Stupidly, this hadn't even crossed my mind when Laney selected the book.

I turned the page to reveal a drawing of the Devil, horns and tail and dapper red suit, standing at Rosie's gate with a golden fiddle. They exchange pleasantries, then he gets down to bidness. "I hear tell you can out-fiddle the Devil himself," I said with a growling Georgia accent, for some reason.

Soon the inevitable challenge is made, and Rosie mulls it over:

Now Rosie wasn't any fool. She knew what the Devil would ask for if she lost: it was her soul she'd be fiddlin' for. But Rosie had a hankering for the Devil's shiny, bright fiddle.

I see all of this as great folklore. But I also knew that if I'd walked into my daughter's classroom and heard another parent reading a parable of the Devil casting about for human souls, I'd have laid a poached egg.

The kids were riveted -- it is quite a compelling story -- and Mr. H didn't seem the least bit troubled. But I was glad to pick up the second book, leaving the world of Faust and Charlie Daniels in favor of a safe, dull story about a pet snake -- pausing for only a moment to remember whether the damn snake offers anybody an apple.

Atheist Alliance Convention 2008- and Guilt Lessons

2008-10-02T15:22:00.000-07:00

This last weekend of September was spent in the harbor on The Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. Aside from a couple who took it upon themselves to try to convert all whom they saw wearing "Atheist" on badges, the event was quite lovely.

From Bobbie Kirkhart, to Ellen Johnson, I was fortunately surrounded by super-star women in the Atheist community, and at the helm was now retired Alliance President, Margaret Downey. At every turn, nothing but positive influence, and positive reinforcement that the freethinking community is alive, well, and filling up convention halls.

On Saturday, the 27th, I was even more honored to meet up with some people who wanted to participate in the Godless Grief workshop. There were some lovely people who had experiences to share, and on couple whose daughter even worked on making a film about their growth as Atheists much later in life.

An interesting comment was brought up during the workshop- it was about loss and guilt. We have to remember that guilt is one of the few emotions we feed to ourselves, and often rather than an emotion of conscience, and consciousness, it's an emotion of self-defeat. It's a natural response when we feel helpless, or at fault for an event, and it can be consuming if we don't realize there are lessons learned by it.

For example, if you have accidentally killed a person in a car wreck, the natural response is remorse, and a sense of guilt. It is also the only emotional response we seem to grab onto as a self-punishment, rather than one that teaches us about our own humanity. After time passes, and after you have confronted the people, or even yourself, about your feelings, you can either realize what lessons you have gained from the experience, seek some forgiveness - again from others, or within, and understand that your guilt is now something that has taught you that you have love for your fellow man, rather than apathy. That makes you a better person, a stronger person, a more HUMAN person.

Some people carry their guilt as a badge- like the great Scarlett Letter for all those around them to see. For years they struggle with the concept that they are to be punished for something they've done, and when others don't continually admonish them, they do it to themselves. In fact, that's a self-perpetuating form of guilt, and doesn't help you grow, or learn, or understand that even if you are at fault for something in someone else's life, you live a life of serendipity, and you aren't going to impress upon the world how much self-torture you are enduring. That's only something you understand. Only you can see your pain in this, and only you can decide if you deserve this.

You have the right to feel sadly, and to feel remorse, and you can know that if you at least acknowledge you were wrong, and can learn, you can help yourself learn forgiveness. It doesn't discount the event, and it doesn't mean you are no longer remorseful, or feel for those who have been directly affected. But it does mean you can give yourself enough kindness, and love, to say you are as human as the rest of us, and at some point EVERYONE hurts some one else. Maybe the events aren't as dramatic as causing someone else to die, but it can be just as painful for someone to lose a friendship, or a marriage, or even contact with family members, and all of these events bring guilt.

Others seem to discover that you can at some point take yourself from the equation, learn to forgive yourself, and start to see the event with objective eyes. For instance, in the car wreck example, if you realize the car had bad brakes, or your loved one didn't wear a seat belt, or there were underlying medical conditions you may not have known about, you can learn to readjust your thoughts to not fully bear the loss as entirely your fault. It isn't saying "it's someone's time" like the religious like to spout on about- it's saying, "I did what I could do at the time, with the amount of knowledge that I had....and did all I knew how to do." That's self-acceptance, and can be a form of forgiveness.

I am going to have a full chapter on this in the upcoming book, but the final guilt lesson- it's okay to feel GOOD after a loss. That seems to be a well of guilt for some. When a spouse dies, for example, and it's been the right amount of time- that only YOU will feel- and you're ready to date, or enjoy yourself with friends, or even laugh again, there's nothing to punish yourself for in doing so. You deserve to be happy. You are living, in the moment, in the now, and in the reality that you have the capacity to love, laugh, and be yourself. You, as a human, and as a living breathing person, have the right to enjoy moments. Maybe they are small at first, but you are entitled to them. And, you don't need to tell yourself that you don't get to have these moments simply because someone in your life is no longer there. They had time to laugh when they wanted to, and now they are gone. It's an honor of the memory of someone we cared about to laugh at what once made us happy.

And, you deserve to be in the now. The now is only guarantee we have. Enjoy the sound of the world behind you, the feel of the chair below you, and the smells, or textures around you. You are alive. Enjoy that. It's you being you, and no one can punish you for that except YOU. And why? Why punish yourself for being alive? It's something we have for such a short time. Guilt won't help you get through your day. It will only feed the idea that you don't deserve to live in the now. In fact, YOU DO. It may be painful some days, but that reminds us we are human.

And humanity is the power of free thinkers everywhere.

What are we?

2008-10-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

by writerdd

I am a spirit, I have a soul, and I live in a body.

That's what I was taught in Sunday school when I was a child. In a way, I no longer believe that today. I've come to see that the body is what I am. ("You are what you eat" has become more than a catch phrase to me.) Without a body, a soul or spirit cannot exist. There is no non-corporeal being that inhabits my body like a house, or a temple, giving it life. I'd figured this out on my own quite some time ago, a short while after I stopped going to church in the 1990s. When I read Francis Crick's book, The Amazing Hypothesis, I dind't find it amazing at all to consider that there is no spirit of life, breathed into my by a god, animating my mortal flesh.

But that's not to say that I'm a soulless being or a spiritual zombie like a vampire. We humans certainly do have souls, something that makes us different than other animals, something unique and amazing and wonderful. This soul may not be a literal force, and it may not be something that can carry on after the death of our bodies, but it is very real. We all feel it. We all experience it. We all know that we are more than just a hunk of meat.

So what is this thing we call a soul, or a spirit? I believe it is consciousness, the very thing that gives us the ability to feel and experience at all. It is nothing supernatural, metaphysical, or paranormal. But it is still quite mysterious. No one can even quite define what consciousness is, just as no one can quite define what a soul is. I don't think that's a coincidence. In the future, I imagine, that scientists will be able to give us much better explanations for how our minds work, but I don't think I'll get to find out in my lifetime. I can live with not knowing. I don't have to make up explanations about ghosts in the machine.

Religious people may use the terms soul and spirit in a way that I don't like. But the word breath was once used in the same way. It was beleived that our breath was, quite literally, our spirit, and that it was the very breath of the gods put into our earthly flesh to give us life. After all, when we stop breathing, we die. Today we know that is, at best, a metaphor. I hope to be able to use the modern words soul and spirt in the same way: as metaphors that capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive and human. At least until someone figures out a better way to explain what we all experience with words that are easy for everyone to understand.

Descartes and my Sunday school teachers may have been wrong, and we may now know that there is no separate, ethereal being dwelling inside our flesh, but in a way I still do believe.

I am a spirit, I do have a soul, and I live in a body.

(Oh, and I changed my hair.)

Spiritual?

2008-09-28T19:37:00.000-07:00

I've been ruminating on a recent post on The Atheist's Way that repeatedly referred, in what seemed to be a generic, non-denominational way, to things "spiritual." I've decided I don't know what that means.

I've always disliked articles that start by referring to a dictionary definition, but in this case such a procedure seemed apropos. Of the seven brief definitions of "spiritual" on merriam-webster.com, six refer to things that are definitely religious or supernatural. Things like "incorporeal" and "of or relating to sacred matters." None of these has any meaning to me.

The seventh meaning relates to things like "team spirit" or "in a spirit of fairness." This is a nicely secular usage of the word, but seems not to relate to what people mean when they talk about spiritual experiences.

People who are "spiritual, but not religious" sometimes talk about the "spiritual" experience of looking at a beautiful sunset, or walking in a forest, or sitting at the edge of the ocean. Searching for a term that I might use to describe these experiences that isn't tainted by reference to the supernatural, I decided they're restorative.

We all need restorative experiences. I should seek them out a lot more often! The nice thing about this term is that it can be explained in physiological terms, though we needn't get reductive about it if we don't want to.

If we meet someone and are tempted to say "she's a very spiritual person," the term "restorative" won't quite substitute. Perhaps "well grounded," "present," "very aware," or "calm and accepting" would serve.

For myself, I can see no reason to use the term "spiritual." It has too many negative connotations, and seems to convey nothing that can't be more accurately described using some other term.

Drugs are bad...m'kay?

2008-09-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

I had an unusual interview two weeks ago.

I sleep through most media interviews now, since the questions tend to be the same, and in about the same order: Tell me a little about your book, Why do nonreligious parents need their own separate resource, How do you deal with moral development, How can you help kids deal with death without an afterlife, Isn't it important to believe in something greater than ourselves, Before I know it, I'm being thanked for a fascinating hour I can't quite remember.

It's a bit like teaching. In my last few years as a college professor, I'd hear my brain stem doing the teaching while my neocortex was planning dinner. I'd come back just in time to dismiss. That's when I knew it was time to do something else.

But the interview two weeks back snapped me out of my usual snooze. I was a little wary anyway, as the station runs syndicated neocon culture-warrior nonsense of the Medved/Prager variety most of the day. Even so, I was not prepared for the very first question to come out of the host's mouth:

"Without a higher power," he asked, "how are you going to keep your kids off crystal meth?"

Wha?

Now I can see this kind of thing coming up at some point...but right out of the starting gate? This, of all questions, was knocking on the back of his teeth? When he heard he would be interviewing a nonreligious parent, the first thing that bubbled up was, "B-b-but how's he gonna keep them off meth?"

I answered that instead of a higher power, I encourage my kids to engage these questions with the power of their own reason, the power of their own minds. There are many compelling reasons to stay away from self-destructive things, after all -- including the fact that they are, uh...self-destructive.

He threw it to the other guest, a minister at a private junior high school, who answered confidently that the higher power was the one and only option. Without Jesus, he'd have no way whatsoever to keep his kids from whirling out of control and into the black abyss. Only by staying tightly focused on biblical principles, he said, can kids avoid utter annihilation.

Mmkay.

Ready for the follow-up? Trust me, you're not:

"Now Dr. McGowan," said the host with a chuckle, "I gotta tell you, when you talk about the Power of the Mind, it sounds an awful lot like Scientology to me. Can you tell me what if anything distinguishes your worldview from Scientology?"

What, if anything.

This is what we've come to as a culture. When you advocate teaching kids to reason things out, it sounds to some like the process of auditing past lives to become an Operating Thetan, casting off the evil influence of Xenu (dictator of the Galactic Confederacy) and battling the alien implants from Helatrobus that seek to control our thoughts and actions.

I apologized for being so very unclear, assured him I had intended to evoke nothing alien, supernatural, or magical by encouraging my children to think. I've also never "informed" them, a la Mr. Mackey in South Park, that "drugs are bad, so don't do drugs, or you're bad." That's commandment-style morality, and it's weak as hell. Instead, we've talked about what they stand to lose, what others have lost, how addiction works, and what a fragile and fantastic thing the mind is.

I remember drawing that last connection vividly as a teenager. I knew that my mind was the key to any eventual success I might have, an asset to protect. I didn't want to risk screwing it up for any kind of pleasure or thrill, and drugs were just too unpredictable in their effects. It was a simple risk analysis, clinched by the death of my dad as an indirect consequence of smoking. I got the message: When you put poisonous stuff in your body, you risk too much for too little. And I never touched so much as a cigarette. My kids have received that same message: Grandpa David never got to meet them because he became addicted to poisonous stuff, couldn't stop, and paid with his life.

I came out of my study after the interview and Connor (13) asked how it had gone. "A little weird," I said, "but fine."

"What was weird?"

I looked him in the eye. "Well, his first question was how I'm going to keep you guys off crystal meth without religion."

"Pfft," Connor said. "As if it's an issue."

It was nice to hear his quick, dismissive snort. I know my kids really well, and though anything's possible, I don't see drugs as a serious threat. In addition to reasoning through it, we've talked about craving and addiction -- that your body can be chemically tricked into thinking it needs the drugs, and that this can be hard to reason your way out of once you're in the middle of it. That, plus a number of personal, family, and community assets, kept me from using. And all without a Savior in sight. I figure it has a good chance of working with my kids as well.

I wasn't surprised to learn that both the host and the minister had gone through the requisite "lost years" of sex and drugs, only to be gloriously saved by coming to Christ. It can and surely does work for some. I'd just love to hear someone on that side acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there are other ways as well -- ways that involve no magic, no demigods, no thetans, no fervent, focused distractions -- just the ability to draw on our own natural resources.

Three women's spiritual journeys

2008-09-21T08:07:00.001-07:00

by writerdd

I change my mind a lot. For most of my life I have been on an involuntary spiritual journey that has led me into and out of Christianity, through explorations of Buddhism, through agnosticism and into atheism. And now I am not sure where I am heading.

This year I've decided that I'm not sure I want to be called an atheist any more, even though I don't believe in god(s). I know according to the dictionary that I am an atheist, but I've become disillusioned with the atheist movement, which largely seems to thrive on making fun of believers and ignoring the desire for spiritual fulfillment that most people feel.

Although I have some Christian friends in America, over the past years, I have found myself viewing all religious people as some sort of monolithic negative stereotype, hell bent on controlling everything and everyone, and teetering on the edge of insanity. I spent the summer in Lithuania where I met people from all over the world, I found that I'd made new friends who were Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, Buddhist, agnostic, and "just spiritual." Although we didn't talk very much about religion, we engaged in meaningful and interesting conversations about many different topics. I found myself rethinking the stereotypes I'd come to accept, and wanting to engage more fully with people of differing backgrounds and philosophies. I want to be open to see where my own spiritual journey will take me next, and I am not willing to be pegged down by labels or stereotypes, even those of my own invention.

I've recently read pieces by two other women authors who are in places that I admire. I'd like to share a few of their words with you, below the fold.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka The Yarn Harlot, is a well known knitting author who has outed herself as an atheist who can appreciate religion and spirituality.

I attended St. Paul's Cathedral for the Sung Eucharist. Many of you will know that I often say that I am a godless heathen, which is to mean that I do not keep with any particular church, and that I am (gasp) an atheist. This doesn't mean, however, that I don't respect or enjoy religion in general, and as a matter of fact, there is a very great deal I find my personal moral code has in common with much of organized faith, particularly when it comes to the basic rules that almost all faiths.... and all good people, have in common. (It is the interpretation of those rules that defeats me. Stuff like "Thou shalt not kill" or "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"being interpreted as "Thou shalt not kill unless you happen to think that the other person isn't really a person because of your own rules" or " do unto others as you would have them do unto you unless you think that simply being a human isn't a good enough reason to receive human rights" is a problem for me. I would have been invited to no parties at all during the Crusades.)

I loved the sermon (topic involved how being a good Christian must include being an environmentalist, should you respect the work of God at all) and was profoundly moved by almost all of the sentiment. When I was offered a sign of peace, and made that same sign to others, and the organ swelled and the choir sang, I was filled with an enormous feeling... A respect for the monumental force that is human faith. Although I don't place my faith in a supreme being whom I believe to be sentient, I am faithful. I have faith in the goodness of people. Faith in the love I have for my friends and family, faith in the love they have for me. I have faith that people will almost always do the right thing, especially if they are not hungry or poor or homeless, or worried about becoming hungry or poor or homeless. I have faith that most poor human behaviour is driven by ignorance, not cruelty. I have a mountain of faith, and that was what I had in common with everyone else in that church. Faith. Different sorts of it, but faith nonetheless, and it was a very human and binding experience.

Sharman Apt Russell, another author I admire, has written the new book Standing in the Light: My Life as Pantheist. This book, which I've only begun to read, is giving me a glimpse into another, less conventional way, to explore spirituality -- without superstition.

I am fifty-one years old, sliding toward death, and I don't much like myself. I have failed at so many things--not the very best writer, not the very best wife or friend, not even the very best parent. I don't much like the world either, which is too full of suffering and disease and war, as the world has always been. I am acutely aware of how my country has betrayed itself, refusing once again to fulfill its potential, to be wise and strong. I am acutely aware of how humanity has betrayed itself, poisoning the earth, heedless of the future we create for our children. As a Quaker, I have lost my sense of the Light. I dislike town. I don't feel special. I am surrounded by miracles--the porch step, the blue sky, black ravens croaking and gurgling--only I don't see the connection. What do they have to do with me?

Still, I feel hopeful. My husband and I have a house in the Gila Villey and a new view of mountains. Living in nature will restore me. This time, I will pay more attention. This time I will take along some friends, books I haven't read for many years, some things I have forgotten. I will take along my science, my neglected pantheism, my neglected Quakerism. If I know anything, I know that I do not want to live in a universe devoid of community, mystery, and awe. I do not want to be alone in my brain, my timid and lazy personality, unconnected to the rest of the world. I cast my lot with Spinoza, Thoreau, and Einstein. I want to live every minute in a holy universe, so pleased and grateful to be part of this existence.

Of pantheism, I will ask the questions we must ask of any religion: How can I lead a better and more joyful life? How can I come to terms with my death and suffering? How should we live as humans on the earth? Ho can we be at home here?

These are the same questions we must ask of ourselves, those of us without religion. Desire, it seems, is the beginning of every journey. Whether we love or hate the current state of the world and of ourselves, if we can find the desire to grow and search, then -- as they say in Lithuania -- viskas bus gerai, everything will be all right. My own journey may be just beginning.

Cross posted on de-Conversion.

Atheist Alliance International Con.: Sept 25-28th

2008-09-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Where do you find Julia Sweeney, formerly of Saturday Night Live, having a chat with Ellen Johnson, Executive Director of Godless Americans Political Action Committee, while enjoying a moment with DC Atheist Advocate, Lori Lipman-Brown? How about sharing a coffee break with August Brunsman from the Secular Students Alliance and Jason Torby from the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers? The time has come for the 14th Annual Atheist Alliance International Convention, held this year at the Queen Mary, in Long Beach, Ca., called "Unsinkable Atheism".
There are dozens of workshops and events planned, including one for Locks of Love, and a blood drive. Student discounts do apply to the convention and dinner fees, and are substantial. The woman who wrote the song that is all over radio and satellite, "I Kissed A Girl", Jill Sobule, appears, along with an entire theater company doing a bit of Religionmania. Aside from entertainment and charitable events, the convention boasts a wide array of workshops and lectures including Jennifer Bardi- Anchoring Your Atheist Story; James Underdown- Navigating the Media; August Berkshire- Starting Your Own Radio Show; and dozens of other events to promote communication in our community. Panels include Women Recovering from the Constraints of Religion and a special recognition festival for Atheists in Foxholes. For those who are trying to get through loss, without the inappropriate prayers offered, there is even a workshop on Godless Grief.

The convention offers an online streaming video for those who cannot make a journey to the various programs in person. The prices are quite reasonable:1. $75 for all three days (Friday night-Sunday morning)
2. $20 Friday night only
3. $40 Saturday (all day and all night)
4. $20 Sunday morning only
To purchase a password, please visit:
http://www.onsitestreaming.com/index.php

And, if you would like to attend in person, visit the website and register:
$150 (AAI Member); $160 (Non-Member)
$80 (Full-Time Student Rate—Student ID required). The cost of the convention includes- a souvenir speakers booklet, Friday-night hors d’oeuvre and entertainment, a Friday night concert, admission to the exhibition hall, Saturday morning workshops, Saturday afternoon plenary, Saturday Happy Hour with hors d’oeuvres and music, Saturday night plenary with a musical presentation, Sunday Continental Breakfast, Sunday plenary, and Closing Ceremony. Additional charges exist for dinner, luncheon, and special "Fun Raising" events. Parking at the event is $12 per day, and the location is wheelchair accessible.

Exhibitors for the convention floor include:

American Atheists
American Humanist Association
Americans United for Separation of Church and State
Aspiring Atheist
Atheist Alliance International
The Atheist Spot
Atheists United
The Bill of Rights Security Edition
The Brights' Net
Center For Inquiry-Los Angeles
Center for Spirituality and the Mind
Charlie's Playhouse
EvolveFish
Final Exit Network
Godless Americans Political Action Committee
Hope Press
Libros Revolución
Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers
Orange County Atheists
Orange County People for Animals
Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
Secular Coalition for America
Secular Nation Podcast Station
Secular Student Alliance
Scouting For All
Stephen Uhl

An Inconvenient Commandment

2008-09-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan
Author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief
_______________________

One of the common worries I hear from religious commentators about nonreligious people is the absence of a solid, reliable, unchanging moral compass. Lacking that...why, folks could make up the rules as they go along.

I've written about this nonsense before ("The red herring of relativism," July 8, 2007), so I won't go too deep into the silly idea that moral relativism follows from the absence of religious guidance. I'm more struck at the moment by just how quickly the "solid, reliable, unchanging moral compass" of religion is cast aside when it's inconvenient.

The Ninth Commandment, for example -- which prohibits lying, or "bearing false witness" -- is taking quite a hit at the moment among the most fervently religious of my fellow Americans as the presidential campaign heads into the final weeks.

Some will note that all politicians lie, as if that makes my outrage moot. Even if that's true, it seems clear to me that they don't do it with equal abandon. Jimmy Carter, who found it difficult to lie, declared the country had fallen into a "malaise" and was booted for his honesty. Ronald Reagan followed up by declaring "Morning in America," then ushered in the most corrupt and scandal-ridden Administration in memory.

Secular, un-compassed me is furious when my own party lies or cynically stretches the truth, which is little different. About a decade ago, the Democrats in my then-home state of Minnesota ran a television ad with a little girl struggling to read a sentence on a blackboard: "Republicans in the state legislature cut 32 million dollars from education funding." A tiny asterisk led to the following at the bottom of the screen:

*(Cuts forced by Governor's memo of 03/08/99.)

It flashed by too fast and small to read, which I'm sure was an oversight.

They were forced to do it by our governor, Jesse Ventura, an Independent. I dashed off an angry note to my state party, which thanked me for (and ignored) my petty plea for integrity.

Barack Obama has offered at least one wincing, bald-faced lie in this campaign when he claimed that his comment

"it’s not surprising then that [some voters] get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations"

was really just an acknowledgment that in tough times, people turn to "the things they can count on," traditional values that "endure." Even without the obvious disproof of this (anti-immigrant sentiment is an enduring value?), it was obvious to all but those blinded by bias on the left that he had meant something much less flattering. The original statement, though impolitic, was true; the cover-up was false, and that diminished him in my eyes.

The half-hearted, embarrassed reaction from much of the left at the time shows that liberals tend to wince when their candidates lie so shamefully. At the very least, we tend not to line up behind him or her and repeat the obvious lie.

See where I'm headed, do ya?

How many supporters of Sarah Palin's candidacy are wincing with embarrassment at the astonishing, breathtaking stream of lies (both half and whole) coming from her and her surrogates in the past ten days? The Bridge to Nowhere ("thanks but no thanks") lie is just one of a dozen or more towering fabrications that have again raised serious questions about not just our collective gullibility but also the willingness of the Right to bear false witness whenever it suits the needs of the moment.

There's a term for this -- situational ethics. It also goes by the name of moral relativism. And the fact that it displays itself so dazzlingly in conservative Christian evangelicals -- those whose God devoted fully ten percent of his ethical instruction manual to forbidding it -- should give any sane person pause before yammering on about the rock solid reliability of that unchanging moral compass.

When Charles Gibson asked Sarah Palin about the Bush Doctrine last week, any thinking observer could see that she had no idea what he meant. She paused awkwardly, then asked if he meant "[Bush's] general worldview." To cover themselves and perpetuate the larger lie that Palin is prepared for the national stage, the McCain campaign engineered a whopper: Palin knew the Bush Doctrine so well that she wasn't sure which of its many facets Gibson wanted her to address.

And a shriek of needles on paper was heard across the land, and countless polygraphs now sit sweating in straitjackets, their needles quivering fearfully, humming "Give Me Some Truth" loudly to themselves for fear they will hear the Republicans say...it...again.

When (Roman Catholic) Sean Hannity interviews (Assemblies of God) Sarah Palin this week, there can be little doubt what they will do to their beloved Commandment. He will ask her (no doubt with "respect and deference") about the Bush Doctrine, and she will faithfully parrot the lines she has learned since Thursday about its many, many facets, pretending to have known this all along, locking the inconvenient truth away with a click as decisive as the syllables of "Ahmadinejad" she had so faithfully learned the week before.

And afterward, all talk will be about whether she hit a triple, a home run, or a ground rule double, measured not against a standard of truth, nor what it takes to be Vice-President of the U.S., but against "expectations" and the dial-in-your-vote-for-the-next-American-Idol perceptions of three hundred million marionettes.

Maybe we can't ask for an administration that doesn't lie. I don't know. But is it too much to hope for one that feels some semblance of shame when they do it?

Introducing Myself

2008-09-06T16:13:00.000-07:00

by writerdd

Hi everyone! This is my first post on The Atheist's Way blog and I'm so excited to be here. Some of you might know me as writerdd from Skepchick, and others may know me as Donna Druchunas, the author of Arctic Lace and Kitty Knits, and to many of you, I may be a stranger. I hope we won't stay strangers for long. This message is a short introduction. If you have any questions about who I am or my background or what I think about atheism, feel free to ask in the comments.

I've been an atheist for about 14 or 15 years. I was raised as a Christian, was born again at age 9, baptized in the Holy Spirit at 14, and dropped out of high school to attend Bible School instead of college. I slowly lost my faith after I stopped attending church in the early 1990s, and I've never looked back. Obviously there's a longer version of that story, and I will probably share bits and pieces of it with you from time to time.

For the first few years of my faithless life, I didn't think about God or church or religion very much at all. Then George W. Bush got elected, planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City, and Sam Harris wrote The End of Faith. I found myself getting sucked into religion again, this time as an critic, rather than as a follower. I've been blogging about atheism and skepticism, following politics closely, and reading a lot of blogs by the prominent atheist figures for several years.

To be frank, I'm getting tired of it all once again. It hasn't been any more fulfilling than going to church was. I don't care who believes in god(s) and who doesn't. I am not interested in making fun of believers, laughing at pictures of Jesus on toast, or deciding what form of religion -- fundamentalism or liberalism -- is more authentic.

What I am interested in is something that I call spirituality without superstition, and that's the topic I intend to discuss here. I want to explore how we unbelievers, those of us who don't believe in gods or spirits or maybe even souls, can experience the same wonder, awe, and exhilaration that believers find in the sanctuary on Sunday morning. I want to talk about how we can make meaning in our lives without having to depend on a holy book or a sage to show us the way. I want to explore ways to talk about spirituality without using the words that have been co-opted by religions and superstitions.

I was thrilled when Eric Maisel sent me an early copy of The Atheist's Way to read, because this book touched on the very topics that I find most important in my own life. I hope you will join me on my continuing journey to discover the joys of living without gods.

PANDER BEAR (atheist teaching tales)

2008-09-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Hello, all:

You know that I do not believe in gods and that I believe that god-talk is a betrayal of our common humanity. In this political season, I wanted to share with you the following teaching tale (that is, it is fiction) from the collection of atheist teaching tales that I’m developing. If you would like to share it with others, by all means do so.

PANDER BEAR

So as to get elected and stay elected, a certain politician, who believed in nothing but pleasure, announced his belief in God at every opportunity and religiously attended a neighborhood church each Sunday.

As much as it pained him to do so, he would leave the bed of his mistress by Sunday noon and trudge home to his wife and family, who by the time he arrived would be dressed for church. Changing to a somber suit, he would set his face into its grave Sunday afternoon expression, an expression so pious and serious that undecided voters had been known to throw him their vote just because of it.

One day he came home to find his wife wearing the oddest expression, an expression at once grave and serene.

“What is it?” the politician said worriedly.

“Emily hasn’t been feeling well. I took her to the doctor last week and they ran some tests. The tests just came back. She has a rare cancer—I can’t remember its name.”

The politician slumped into a chair. “No,” he whispered. After a moment he said, “Can they treat it?”

His wife shrugged. “That’s neither here nor there. I went to church today and prayed with the minister. God spoke directly to me. He said that Emily must not be treated—that she was in His hands.”

The politician leaped to feet. “That’s crazy!” he cried. “Of course she must be treated. We’ll get her the best--”

“No,” his wife said, staring serenely at her husband. “God will take care of her.”

The politician thought quickly. “But didn’t God make the treatments and the medicines that the doctors use? Who else could have made them? So of course we should use them!”

“Of course He made them,” his wife said mildly. “But He sent me a clear message that Emily doesn’t need them. Not just that—He was very clear. He does not want Emily to see any doctors. He only wants her to pray. If she prays, He will take care of her.”

The politician took a menacing step toward his wife. “That’s lunacy! You and that minister! All those crazy churchwomen! We will not go down this road.”

His wife cocked her head thoughtfully. “You don’t trust God?” she said. “Or—maybe you don’t even believe in God?”

“I don’t believe in you, you crazy woman!” the politician shouted. “God isn’t talking to you! You are the last person He would talk to!”

“Of course He talks to me. He talks to all sorts of ordinary people. What sort of God do you take Him to be?”

The politician fought not to strangle her. “I won’t play along on this one,” he said after a long moment. “I won’t!”

“No?” the politician’s wife said, her smile still serene but her voice ominous. “Well, if you won’t abide by God’s wishes, then I will have to make it clear that you do not believe in God and that you are nothing but a lying hypocrite.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“If you don’t think that God comes before my husband, you are the crazy one!”

Later that day the politician called a meeting of his advisors. He explained that Emily had cancer, that his wife, trusting in God to cure Emily, would not let Emily be treated, and that if he lifted a finger to get Emily medical treatment his wife would go to the media and let it be known that he did not believe in God.

Hearing this last bit of news his first lieutenant jumped up and exclaimed, “Christ! She gives a terrific interview! She’s been great in every campaign. We can’t have her on television proclaiming that you don’t believe in God!”

“We could spin it that you believe in God but that you also believe in medical treatment, just as most religious people do,” his second lieutenant offered. “You could say, ‘God makes the medicine that can cure Emily.” You could, you know, say that you just disagree with your wife. You could say, ‘Believing in medical treatment doesn’t make me an atheist.’”

“God, no!” the first lieutenant cried. “Don’t use the ‘a’ word! We could say, ‘Millions of religious people seek out medical treatment every day and medical treatment is what Emily needs.’ That should work!”

“Maybe you could say, ‘It’s not a God question, it’s a health question,’” the second lieutenant added.

After a long silence, the politician said, “She’s not a stupid woman. She’s dug her heels in. If I fight her, she’ll bring out the heavy artillery. I think she’ll name all the Commandments that I’ve broken as proof that I don’t believe in God.”

“But everybody breaks those Commandments!” his first lieutenant cried. “Breaking them has nothing to do with believing or not believing in God. It just has to do with not listening to God!”

“I’m not sure about that,” his second lieutenant said thoughtfully. “An argument could be made that if you actually believed in the wrath of God you wouldn’t sleep with your neighbor’s wife or whatever.”

“People believe in the power of the IRS and still cheat on their taxes!” the first lieutenant countered.

“There’s that,” the other agreed.

“All right!” the politician exclaimed irritably. “What’s the bottom line here?”

They debated the matter for some time. Finally they agreed, unanimously and without reservation, that a television blitz by the politician’s wife would do too much damage. That couldn’t be allowed to happen. They would capitulate, give in to the politician’s wife’s agenda, and pray for the best.

“What if the public hears that Emily isn’t getting treatment?” the first lieutenant wondered suddenly. “Isn’t that going to look—I don’t know—cruel? Maybe even abusive?”

The politician nodded. “Good point. We’ll have to keep Emily’s condition a secret. That at least we are good at, keeping secrets!”

The meeting finally ended. The politician found that he couldn’t stomach going home. Instead, he went to the apartment of his mistress. She took one look at him and poured him a tall Scotch.

“What is it?” she said.

He explained Emily’s situation and his wife’s position.

On the verge of tears, his mistress said, “And what did you decide?”

“To trust in God. God will protect her.”

His mistress stated at him. “You can’t mean that!” she exclaimed. “That’s … that’s terrible! That’s awful. It’s … you can’t mean that.”

“What I can’t do is let my wife get on television,” the politician said coldly. “Pour me another Scotch.”

Emily lasted a year. Much of that time she spent in great pain, as her mother would not countenance painkillers. In deep seclusion, cut off from her friends and family, guarded by hired help masquerading as caregivers, and visited only by her mother and occasionally her father, Emily grew gaunt and pious, sometimes screaming and sometimes singing God’s praises.

Naturally the politician could not miss his daughter’s funeral. But as it took place during the campaign season, he could spare only a few hours, flying in, giving a lovely eulogy (which the cynical among the mourners thought sounded awfully like his regular stump speech), and flying right out again. All the pundits agreed that Emily’s death would produce a bump of at least ten percentage points—points that the politician did not actually need, so popular was he with his God-fearing constituency.

**

Have an excellent Sunday!

Best,

Eric

P.S. “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” – Albert Camus

Religion is the Prozac of the People

2008-08-31T18:43:00.000-07:00

The God Antidepressant

God, how I envy people who have a strong belief in God. As someone who has been prone to depression for almost my entire life, I see how the belief in God alleviates depression for others. I wish I could take this antidepressant, too. I've tried, but I've never been able to stick with it.

Twelve-step programs, which address addictions that generally arise out of depression or other emotional disturbances, understand this with their belief in a "higher power" (though they throw in there, to paraphrase, 'in whatever form you may understand it') but ultimately they're talking about "God." What they're acknowledging, in not so many words, is a rehashing of what was said by Karl Marx, that "Religion is the opiate of the people." So, if you have to have an addiction, something to which you turn to make you feel better, it might as well be God, and not Vicodins, marijuana or beer.

I take Marx's statement in a slightly different direction: while he equated religion with an "opiate" which I take to mean something which gets you high thereby giving you a temporary escape, I suggest that these days, religiosity actually acts more like an antidepressant and cures the depression, giving the believer a permanent tool with which to feel reasonably content.

What blows me away is that for so many people it works. I see examples of it all the time: people who would be seriously depressed, even to the point of not functioning, if they did not have God to turn to. Life is seriously difficult for many people, and even more so for those for whom the "ordinary" problems we all have such as illness, divorce, bills to be paid, etc., are compounded by poverty, single parenthood, being a grandparent caring for young children, disabilities, incarceration, drug addiction: the list goes on from the most horrific on down to the petty frustrations of every day, such as the mail delivering something urgent a day late, job related stresses, etc.

If people couldn't rationalize their pain and console themselves with the belief that whatever is happening is part of God's plan for them, many would be hard pressed to face another day. At least two people I spend a lot of time with turn to God for help many times in a day. They easily explain away painful events by saying that if God wants them to endure this then they will, because their faith is such that they put their full belief in Him. Even if they can't explain the reason for something now, they are sure God will make the reason known to them eventually.

God, how I've envied this. How much easier and more comforting it must be to believe that no matter how horrific something is, it's happening for a reason. It seems virtually impossible (proven by how relatively few atheists there are!) to accept that all the suffering I endure is purely arbitrary, unexplainable, and, ultimately, in the service of nothing.

A specific example of this is the very human need for justice. How many times I've heard my religious friends express the belief that people get what they deserve, e.g., "Don't worry. God will take care of so and so [who did something evil], if not in this life then in the next." They are alleviated of having to cope with people doing evil to them or their loved ones and nothing will happen to them. And, in the reverse, people (like them?) who are especially good, will get theirs too. While they may not win the lottery, they'll be rewarded in some way for their goodness, again, if not in this life, then in the next.

The next installment of this blog will address how things might be if as many people as do take the God antidepressant didn't.

SEASONED WITH REASON - Speaking Up

2008-08-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I received an email from an acquaintance of mine. The forwarded message contained a link to a YouTube video which pieced together clips of a speech given in 2006 by a politician in which he argued that it was not a good idea to use the Bible as a basis for public policy in the United States. The reasons he offered were responses to specific, problematic verses in the Bible, and the producer of the video accused the politician of "making fun" of the books in which those verses were contained.

He clearly thinks using the Bible as a source for public policy is a swell idea and scolded the politician for not agreeing with him.

The video irritated me.

Normally, I don't respond to emails like this one. A few months ago, the same woman emailed me an image of Jesus Christ, stripped down, beaten and bloody, kneeling on a cross with a crown of thorns on his head, a woeful expression on his face. I found it disturbing, much more than I did when I was a Christian. I guess my former desensitization to depictions of mythological torture has worn off because I actually became a bit queasy in my stomach looking at that image she sent.

I didn't write her back. I knew there was little point. I typically refrain from discussing religion with people I don't know well, especially when I know them to be fundamental Christians with little respect for anyone else's point of view.

This time, though, I felt the need to respond. Carefully, I explained my point of view, that regardless of what the Bible says, it's a religious book, and therefore, according to our Constitution's First Amendment, it's illegal to use Biblical text for public policy.

I quoted to her, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Maybe I have a simple mind, uncluttered by linguistic subtleties others see, but I can't fathom how that sentence could be misconstrued. It could not be much clearer.

And I also suggested that the passages the politician discussed in his speech certainly were problematic--one was about how to keep slaves, another was about the way to stone a child that strays from the religion--and pointing out the inherent problems of those passages can't really be considered ridicule.

After I sent the message, I started to think of possible ramifications. This woman and I share friends, and we're part of a group that gets together once a month. All of the members have been outspoken about their faith. I am the only one who isn't Christian, and I have kept it to myself. I wonder, will she pass along my comments to the others? Will I be exposed to a whole room of cold shoulders next time we assemble? Will they decide to exclude me altogether?

Whether all of those minor worries come to fruition, or she dismisses my email with a shrug and moves on with her day, I'm glad I wrote it. When religious folks start spewing what can only be called nonsense, I struggle with frustration, sometimes outrage, and I don't always know how much to object. There are many occasions when I hear or read someone say, "This country was founded by Christians!" or "This country was founded on Christian principles!" Those are at the top of my list of peeves, lately, mostly because they are so blatantly, obviously false.

Yet I usually keep silent.

This time, I simply couldn't, and I hope that my email inspires my acquaintance to see a different side of things. Separation of church and state is a crucial issue, and there will be far-reaching consequences if we lose it. In this case, whatever it may cost me, I had to attempt to be the voice of reason.

First Annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition

2008-08-28T10:44:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan, author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief
--------------------------------

In addition to my other writing, I edit the Humanist Parenting site for the Institute for Humanist Studies. One of my IHS duties is to solicit and/or write a monthly parenting column for Humanist Network News, which also then appears on The Meming of Life.

We've featured the writing of such freethinkers as Ed Buckner, Noell Hyman, Marilyn McCourt, Stu Tanquist, and Roberta Nelson, as well as columns of my own.

Now it's your turn to become the quiet kind of famous. We are now accepting submissions for the First Annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition. Your entry should tackle a subtopic within nonreligious parenting (as opposed to the topic on the whole) or a personal story from your own experience.

The top entries will:

-- appear in Humanist Network News (subscription over 5,000);
-- be posted on the Humanist Parenting website; and
-- appear in the Meming of Life (which currently averages 2500-3000 visitors per day).

Submissions should be attached in a Word document 600-800 words in length PLUS a bio of no more than 75 words, and emailed to column [at] parentingbeyondbelief dot com with the word COLUMN in the subject line.

[No Microsoft Word? Paste into email.]

Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2008.

Sobriety Without "God"

2008-08-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

Alcoholism is a terrible scourge. Alcoholics Anonymous, which was founded in 1935, has been of tremendous benefit in helping people recover from alcoholism.

Unfortunately, AA does a lousy job of meeting the needs of atheists. It provides a very God-centered program of recovery.

If you go to enough meetings, you'll spot a few people who never talk about God, and even a very few who identify openly as atheists. Atheism is certainly tolerated, but it's not encouraged.

The real problem is not the social and philosophical discomfort of being an atheist in AA, which turns out to be relatively minor. The real problem is that when drunks come through the door of an AA meeting and hear all the "God talk," a certain number of them bolt out the door again, never to return.

Some of those people grit their teeth and get sober without AA. But some of them don't. It's a statistical certainty that some of them get drunk again, get behind the wheel of a car, and kill people. It would be naïve to say that AA has no complicity in those needless deaths.

Nothing whatever can be done to change this. AA was founded by a conservative Evangelical Christian who firmly believed not only that God had gotten him sober, but also that the only way to recover from alcoholism was by "finding God." To a large majority of AA members, the idea of recovery without God is simply inconceivable. AA is completely non-denominational, but theism is the lifeblood of the program.

Atheists who want to get sober do have options, including Rational Recovery (RR) and the Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS). They're smaller and harder to find than AA, but they do provide invaluable alternatives for atheists.

Unfortunately, the legal system in the U.S. typically sends drunk drivers to AA. The courts are actively supporting an avowedly theistic organization, and in effect steering people toward church attendance.

My own belief is that one of the essentials of recovery is a strong support group of sober people. AA has a solid presence in almost every town in the U.S., which makes it a great place to go when you're seeking support. But you do have to be thick-skinned enough to put up with a certain amount of "God talk."

LIVING IN THE VOID: No Atheists in Foxholes

2008-08-25T20:54:00.000-07:00

We've all heard it many times--"There are no atheists in foxholes." Not surprising, this remark is attributed to a WWII Chaplin. I would be praying too in a foxhole. "God help me!" comes to mind. However, this doesn't mean that I believe in God, even at the time of supplication. It's more the child crying out to the parent to save them. And this is the essence of the individual/God relationship. Why do humans believe in God? Oxford researchers have received a 1.9 million pound grant for the development of the study of the cognitive science of religion. This grant will promote scientific ideas about the meaning of religion and its origin in the human mind.

Other research studies have already located a part of the brain that is the "religious-seeking part," which suggests that natural selection may have hardwired us for faith. And how natural then, for humans to create God in their image, not vice versa. But not every one can take that leap of faith and blindly believe in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence that says otherwise. Religion is like a theatrical play on a stage--the believer doesn't pull back the curtain to reveal the props backstage. Instead, they prefer, or need, to keep the curtain, their belief drawn.

Finks ahoy!

2008-08-25T07:49:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan, author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief
--------------------------------
There's plenty of nonsensical meme creation on the Internet (just so you know). One of my least favorites is what I'll call the Fictional Narrative Cartoon (FNC, or 'Fink'). Follow these steps to write a Fink of your own:

1. Select a life stance you have never held or attempted to understand.

2. Achieve a Vulcan mind-meld with people of that perspective. When that fails, simply pick a set of unflattering assumptions off the top of your head about what the world "must" look like from that perspective.

3. Weave a fictional monologue or dialogue to describe the world through the eyes of this worldview. Include acts of puppy smooshing for maximum effect.

4. Post!

I've seen atheists do this to religious folks and vice versa. It tends not to be a true Fink if the person once shared the worldview -- the atheist who was once a genuine theist, or the theist who was once a genuine atheist. In those cases, the risk of nonfiction sneaking in is too great. The true Fictional Narrative Cartoon must spring entirely from willful ignorance.

My Google alert for "atheist parents" brings Christian FNCs about nonreligious parenting into my inbox once in a while. The gods of cyber-serendipity smiled on me yesterday, delivering a Fink about an atheist dad talking to his child about death just days after I had posted a nonfiction narrative of the same thing.

The blogger, a Christian father of seven, begins by describing his approach as a Christian parent talking to his children about death:

Have you ever had a surprise party thrown in your honor? You walk through the door and the lights come on and the horns blow, close friends cheer as ribbons and balloons are thrown into the air? Have you ever watched as an athlete’s name is announced and he runs from the dressing room tunnel and onto the field as 60 or 70 thousand people cheer his arrival?...When my kids ask about death, these are some of the analogies that I use...

What a difference it must be for atheist parents, especially for those who want to be honest with their child.

He's right -- it is certainly different. And yes, it's a much greater challenge than contemplating death as a stadium full of angels doing the Wave. Unfortunately he doesn't stop with what he knows, but begins to construct a Fink:

“Dad [says the child of the atheist], what happens when we die?”

“Well, nothing really. We come from nothing and we go to nothing. Either your mom and I or someone else will put you into the ground and cover you with dirt and the person that we knew as YOU will just totally and completely cease to exist.”

“But how can I just come to an end? What if I only live until I’m five years old? I won’t get to do anything important.”

“My dear boy. Five years or five hundred years, it doesn’t really matter because none of it counts, not ultimately anyhow. Humans are part of a dying species in a dying universe. You’re an accident little buddy. An absolute accident to which we gave a name. Don’t get me wrong. We love you, and perhaps some day you can even manipulate some other people to love you too. But apart from that you’re pretty much on your own.”

“But what are we here for? Is there any meaning or purpose to all this?”

“Use your brain son. How can there be meaning and purpose to something that’s an accident?...Reality is, you come from nothing and you’re headed to nothing, just emptiness, a void. That’s all there is son. That’s not a bad thing son. It just is. The fact is, our life has no meaning, no context and absolutely no purpose save the purpose that you pretend to give it. Pretty cool huh?”

“But daddy, shouldn’t I at least try to be a good person?”

“Oh my precious little munchkin. Good and bad are just subjective words that some people use to describe things that they like or don’t like...All I know is, live good, live bad, live for yourself, live for others, none of it matters because the end of the good and the end of the bad, the end of people, pigs and insects is exactly the same, we rot away and become a different form of matter. Now, why don’t you run along. I’ve got some useless and pointless things to do.”

“But dad, that’s absurd! How do you expect me to be happy if life has no meaning, context or purpose” If that’s the way things are, why did you make me in the fist place?”

“Well, sweetpea, now you’re starting to ask what's beginning to feel like a lot of questions. First of all, I couldn’t not make you. My genes compel me to reproduce. I squirt my semen here and there and everywhere..."

You get the idea.

I was once at a family gathering where the subject turned to gays and lesbians. I chimed in that homosexual sex is disgusting. They all nodded, mildly surprised.

"You know something else that's disgusting?" I added. "Heterosexual sex." Reduce the sexual act to the physical slapping of flesh and it doesn't matter who is involved -- it's disgusting. Gay rights opponents recoil at the idea of gay sex because they strip it of the emotional component that transforms their own rutting into something entirely else.

Reducing a nonreligious parent's description of death to the slapping of dirt on a coffin achieves the same brand of reductionist nonsense. The Fink starts and stays with sterile facts, never granting the atheist parent the human faculties of compassion or love except as a laugh line. I do think we die, for real, and that love and understanding can help us live with this difficult fact quite beautifully and well -- even without invoking balloons and confetti.

The best thing about the growing nonreligious parenting movement is that we no longer need be content with Finks about nonreligious parenting. We're living the nonfiction versions. Which points to the most important difference between this blogger's take on the atheist parent-child conversation and mine.

Mine actually happened.

[Link to the fictional conversation]
[Link to the nonfictional conversation]

Where all roads lead (2)

2008-08-20T08:47:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan, author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief

[Back to Part 1]

We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.

“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.

She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:

“I don’t want to die.”

Now let’s freeze this tableau for a moment and make a few things clear. The first is that I love this child so much I would throw myself under Pat Robertson for her. She's one of just four people whose health and happiness are vital to my own. When she is sad, I want to make her happy. It’s one of the simplest equations in my life.

I say such obvious things because it is often assumed that nonreligious parents respond to their children’s fears of death by saying, in essence, Suck it up, worm food. When one early reviewer of Parenting Beyond Belief implied that that was the book’s approach, I tore him a new one. I am convinced that there are real comforts to be found in a naturalistic view of death, that our mortality lends a new preciousness to life, and that it is not just more truthful but more humane and more loving to introduce the concept of a life that truly ends than it is to proffer an immortality their inquiring minds will have to painfully discard later.

But all my smiling confidence threatens to dissolve under the tears of my children.

“I know, punkin,” I said, cradling her head as she convulsed with sobs. “Nobody wants to die. I sure don't. But you know what? First you get to live for a hundred years. Think about that. You’ll be older than Great-Grandma Huey!”

It's a cheap opening gambit. It worked the last time we had this conversation, when Laney was four.

Not this time.

“But it will come,” she said, hiffing. “Even if it’s a long way away, it will come, and I don’t want it to! I want to stay alive!”

I took a deep breath. “I know,” I said. “It’s such a strange thing to think about. Sometimes it scares me. But you know what? Whenever I’m scared of dying, I remember that being scared means I’m not understanding it right.”

She stopped hiffing and looked at me. “I don’t get it.”

“Well what do you think being dead is like?”

She thought for a minute. “It’s like you’re all still and it’s dark forever.”

A chill went down my spine. She had described my childhood image of death precisely. When I pictured myself dead, it was me-floating-in-darkness-forever. It’s the most awful thing I can imagine. Hell would be better than an eternal, mute, insensate limbo.

“That’s how I think of it sometimes too. And that frrrrreaks me out! But that’s not how it is.”

“But how do you know?” she asked pleadingly. "How do you know what it's like?"

“Because I’ve already been there.”

“What! Haha! No you haven’t!”

“Yes I have, and so have you.”

“What? No I haven’t.”

“After I die, I will be nowhere. I won’t be floating in darkness. There will be no Dale McGowan, right?”

“And millions of worms will eat your body!!” chirped Erin, unhelpfully.

“…”

“Well they will.”

“Uh…yeah. But I won’t care because I won’t be there.”

“Still.”

I turned back to her sister. “So a hundred years from now, I won’t be anywhere, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Okay. Now where was I a hundred years ago? Before I was born?”

“Where were you? You weren’t anywhere.”

“And was I afraid?”

“No, becau…OMIGOSH, IT’S THE SAME!!”

It hit both girls at the same instant. They bolted upright with looks of astonishment.

“Yep, it’s exactly the same. There’s no difference at all between not existing before you were born and not existing after you die. None. So if you weren’t scared then, you shouldn’t be scared about going back to it. I still get scared sometimes because I forget that. But then I try to really understand it again and I feel much better.”

The crisis was over, but they clearly wanted to keep going.

"You know something else I like to think about?" I asked. "I think about the egg that came down into my mommy's tummy right before me. And the one before that, and before that. All of those people never even got a chance to exist, and they never will. There are billions and trillions of people who never even got a chance to be here. But I made it! I get a chance to be alive and playing and laughing and dancing and burping and farting..."

(Brief intermission for laughter and sound effects.)

"I could have just not existed forever -- but instead, I get to be alive for a hundred years! And you too! Woohoo! We made it!"

"Omigosh," Laney said, staring into space. "I'm like...the luckiest thing ever."

"Exactly. So sometimes when I start to complain because it doesn't last forever, I picture all those people who never existed telling me, 'Hey, wait a minute. At least you got a chance. Don't be piggy.'"

More sound effects, more laughter.

Coming to grips with mortality is a lifelong process, one that ebbs and flows for me, as I know it will for them. Delaney was perfectly fine going to sleep that night, and fine the next morning, and the morning after that. It will catch up to her again, but every time it comes it will be more familiar and potentially less frightening. We'll talk about the other consolations -- that every bit of you came from the stars and will return to the stars, the peaceful symphony of endorphins that usually accompanies dying, and so on. If all goes well, her head start may help her come up with new consolations to share with the rest of us.

In his brilliant classic The Tangled Wing, Emory psychologist Melvin Konner notes that “from age three to five [children] consider [death] reversible, resembling a journey or sleep. After six they view it as a fact of life but a very remote one” (p. 369). Though rates of development vary, Konner places the first true grasp of the finality and universality of death around age ten—a realization that includes the first dawning deep awareness that it applies to them as well. So grappling with the concept early, before we are paralyzed by the fear of it, can go a long way toward fending off that fear in the long run.

Laney, for better and worse, is ahead of the curve. All I can do is keep reminding her, and myself, that knowing and understanding something helps tame our fears. It may not completely feed the bulldog -- the fear is too deeply ingrained to ever go completely -- but it’s a bigger, better Milk-Bone than anything else we have.
____________________

Visit The Meming of Life.

My Daily Encounters With "God"

2008-08-19T18:29:00.000-07:00

There is a ubiquitous presence in daily life of something for which we have no proof of its existence. I'm sure there must be some classical philosophical term to describe this phenomenon, but I don't know what it is. Does anyone out there?

Every day we encounter "God" in dozens of ways; and yet, objectively, "God" is a subjective idea. Amazing! We encounter something so often that is really an abstraction, an idea or belief. Is there anything else like this which has a pervasive presence in our lives, yet may or may not exist?

Someone might make an a priori argument that since "God" is everywhere, he/she/it must exist. But all the manifestations of "God" are man-made. Viz.:

* Places/things that mention God, such as money, banks, jewelry, songs, places of worship, etc. are omnipresent.

* Every day I say "Thank God" or "Oh God" at least two or three dozen times. Usually, afterwards, I feel silly. Often, I'll exclaim "Jesus Christ!" or "Holy Christ!" then I think, how can I say these things when I don't believe in them?

* On most days, at least one or two people tell me "God bless you and your family," and this has nothing to do with sneezing. Not sure what to say, I reply, "Thanks, same to you."

* Often, in response to my saying "see you tomorrow" someone will say, "God willing." Sometimes, now, I say it as an anti-jinx measure, which can't hurt.

* Often, I receive emails which tell me how blessed I am, how I should love God, and pass the email on to the people I love, as did the person who sent it to me. Usually, I delete them.

* Religious holidays.

And finally,

* I have daily interactions with people whose lives are dedicated to "the Lord." Most of them are Christians; a few are Jews.

All of the above is very confusing because I waver between being Atheist and Agnostic. Here is a constant presence in my life, and I'm not sure if it exists. So what do I do? What I've been doing since I was born into a secular Jewish family in a Christian society: I pretend a lot and participate a little.

What an odd thing, though, to be pretending about something all the time. But, if I'm saying I'm Agnostic, am I really pretending? Or, do I not know if I'm pretending? What kind of way is this to live?

To be continued...

My Daily Encounters With God

2008-08-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

There is a ubiquitous presence in daily life of something for which we have no proof of its existence. I'm sure there must be some classical philosophical term to describe this phenomenon, but I don't know what it is. Does anyone out there?

Every day we encounter "God" in dozens of ways; and yet, objectively, "God" is a subjective idea. Amazing! We encounter something so often that is really an abstraction, an idea or belief. Is there anything else like this which has a pervasive presence in our lives, yet may or may not exist?

Someone might make an a priori argument that since "God" is everywhere, he/she/it must exist. But all the manifestations of "God" are man-made. Viz.:

* Places/things that mention God, such as money, banks, jewelry, songs, places of worship, etc. are omnipresent.

* Every day I say, "Thank God" or "Oh God" at least two or three dozen times. Usually afterwards, I feel silly. Often, I'll exclaim, "Jesus Christ!" or "Holy Christ!" then I think, how can I say these things when I don't believe in them?

* On most days, at least one or two people tell me, "God bless you and your family," and this has nthing to do with sneezing. Not sure what to say, I reply, "Thanks, same to you."

* Often, in response to my saying "see you tomorrow" someone will say, "God willing." Sometimes now I say it too, just as an anti-jinx measure (which can't hurt).

* Often, I receive e-mails which tell me how blessed I am, how I should love God, and pass the email on to the people I love, as did the person who sent it to me. Usually, I delete them.

* Religious holidays.

And finally,

* I have daily interactions with people whose lives are dedicated to "the Lord." Most of them are Christians; a few are Jews.

All of the above is very confusing because I waver between being Atheist and Agnostic. Here is a constant presence in my life, and I'm not sure if it exists. So what do I do? What I've been doing since I was born into a secular Jewish family in a Christian society: I pretend a lot and participate a little.

What an odd thing, though, to be pretending about something all the time. But, if I'm saying I'm Agnostic, am I really pretending? Or, do I not know if I'm pretending? What kind of way is this to live?

To be continued...

Why Are They "Praying For You"?

2008-08-18T13:02:00.001-07:00

In much of my work, emails come asking about the correct way to respond when someone says something directly attacking, or passively disparaging to Atheists. A majority of this is regarding the phrase, "I'm praying for you". The comment, often supposed to imply that you are in someone's thoughts, is remarkably thoughtless. It's as if someone said to a woman without arms, "Why can't you hug me?" It just doesn't make sense to Atheists, and it certainly doesn't mean anything to us. Yet, we don't always have any visual clues during everyday interaction with most people as to beliefs, or lack of beliefs.

Those who wear religious garb, or specific tattoos, or even jewelry give us some indications of their thought process. As a species, we're trained to judge others by appearance, to determine ally from foe, family from stranger, business from casual. But, we're not trained nor do we seem to understand that our own methods of communicating our needs aren't clear. For example, teens who want to be different, wear the same black garb today that they did when I was in high school over 20 years ago. Parents often seem the same age as their children, and grandparents, which once used to illicit images of grey hair, and warm smiles, are now indistinguishable by age range. The forty-four year old next to you may be a first time parent, or a third time grandparent.

As we continue in our lives, we notice that stereotypes once held are now completely blurred. Where once it was taboo to marry between races, now it is difficult to know how many cultures exist within one household. So it is true with our view of those who are religious. Just looking at someone won't tell you Atheist from Catholic from Wiccan from Buddhist. In as much, our language has also blurred. The phrase after someone sneezes, "bless you", which came about during the days when plague was prominent, was also a pagan hex to ward off evil spirits. Atheists are just as guilty of using this phrase as anyone, simply because it has become a colloquial statement of "wish you aren't sick" ingrained in our culture from our earliest social interaction. It really doesn't mean anything, and really doesn't need to be said.

However, when someone says "I'm Praying for You", it doesn't feel quite the same way. It may indicates the speaker could be ashamed of your beliefs, and therefore wants you to change them- with his or her power of prayer. It could be a statement of "I have nothing to offer you that will help you, but this one thing I know I do for myself." It could be a statement of simple, genuine concern. The manner it is stated, and the circumstances which brings that comment out has as much to do with the words as the intent.

James Randi stated that he believes in the Good Neighbor Policy of Atheism. He assumes everyone is Atheist and doesn't preach the lack of belief to anyone unless challenged to do so. "Screaming at someone and telling him that you don't have beliefs and why is just as bad as screaming at someone and telling him what religion you have and why they should be 'saved'." He also gets very insulted when someone "blesses him or offers prayer" because it is "very assumptive to assume that you have enough power to bless me or change my life through your words."

Yet, when the phrase, "I'm praying for you" is uttered to us we aren't always clear on the response. It is dependent upon the circumstance, the speaker, the intent, and the manner in which it was spoken. Degrading another person isn't the Good Neighbor Policy, of which Randi spoke. But, there are times when hearing these words repetitively can be curtailed forever, simply with the response, "I can't accept your prayers, but I can accept your thoughts." Without insulting someone, or preaching the logic of Atheism, you succinctly state your needs. You relate to him on a peer level, and you don't disparage his way of life.

But what do you say when the comment is made as an insult or "lesson" to you as an Atheist? How do you politely tell someone that you are sick of hearing his wishes to convert you, or turn you away from what he may think is heathen path to hell? What if he is an employer, or family member? What can you say that will stop the prayers, and continue the relationship? You state the truth.

The truth is the easiest solution, and will keep that phrase out of conversations. You state, "I appreciate that you live your life as you wish, as free will is something I also hold dear. It's wonderful we can be adult enough to accept our differences." Then change the topic. Completely stop talking about the idea that prayer is part of his life and not yours. Don't bring up a church, or a time when you left a church. Don't carry the conversation farther than the fact of, accepting the person for who he is, and gratefully accepting yourself for who you are. You may need to say this several times, in several instances, but the message will eventually get through.
----------

Cathe Jones is the author of the book, Godless Grief, and the moderator of the writing group, Las Vegas Quill Keepers. In September, she hosts a workshop on Godless Grief at the Atheist Alliance International conference at The Queen Mary, in Long Beach, California. She is represented by Janet Rosen of Sheree Bykofsky and Associates.

Where all roads lead (1)

2008-08-18T12:14:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan, author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief
---------------------------
I have 22 posts jostling for attention at the moment, but a Saturday night conversation with my girls has sent all other topics back to the green room for a smoke.

The three of us were lying on my bed, looking at the ceiling and talking about the day. "Dad, I have to tell you a thing. Promise you won’t get mad," said Delaney (6), giving me the blinky doe eyes. "Promise?"

"Oh jeez, Laney, so dramatic," said Erin, pot-to-kettlishly.

"I plan to be furious," I said. "Out with it."

“Okay, fine. I…I kind of got into a God fight in the cafeteria yesterday.”

I pictured children barricaded behind overturned cafeteria tables, lobbing Buddha-shaped meatballs, Flying Spaghetti Monsters, and Jesus tortillas at each other. A high-pitched voice off-camera shouts Allahu akbar!

"What’s a ‘God fight’?"

“Well I asked Courtney if she could come over on Sunday, and she said, ‘No, my family will be in church of course.’ And I said oh, what church do you go to? And she said she didn’t know, and she asked what church we go to. And I said we don’t go to church, and she said ‘Don’t you believe in God?’, and I said no, but I’m still thinking about it, and she said ‘But you HAVE to go to church and you HAVE to believe in God,” and I said no you don’t, different people can believe different things.”

Regular readers will recognize this as an almost letter-perfect transcript of a conversation Laney had with another friend last October.

I asked if the two of them were yelling or getting upset with each other. “No,” she said, “we were just talking.”

"Then I wouldn’t call it a fight. You were having a conversation about cool and interesting things."

Delaney: Then Courtney said, ‘But if there isn’t a God, then how did the whole world and trees and people get made so perfect?’

Dad: Ooo, good question. What’d you say?

Delaney: I said, ‘But why did he make the murderers? And the bees with stingers? And the scorpions?’

Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt my first grade table banter rose to quite this level. Courtney had opened with the argument from design. Delaney countered with the argument from evil.

Delaney: But then I started wondering about how the world did get made. Do the scientists know?

I described Big Bang theory to her, something we had somehow never covered. Erin filled in the gaps with what she remembered from our own talk, that “gravity made the stars start burning,” and “the earth used to be all lava, and it cooled down.”

Laney was nodding, but her eyes were distant. “That’s cool,” she said at last. “But what made the bang happen in the first place?”

Connor had asked that exact question when he was five. I told Laney the same thing I told him—that we don’t know what caused the whole thing to start. “But some people think God did it,” I added.

She nodded.

“The only problem with that,” I said, “is that if God made everything, then who…”

“Oh my gosh!” Erin interrupted. “WHO MADE GOD?! I never thought of that!”

"Maybe another God made that God," Laney offered.

“Maybe so, b...”

"OH WAIT!" she said. "Wait! But then who made THAT God? OMIGOSH!"

They giggled with excitement at their abilities. I can’t begin to describe how these moments move me. At ages six and ten, my girls had heard and rejected the cosmological (“First Cause”) argument within 30 seconds, using the same reasoning Bertrand Russell described in Why I Am Not a Christian:

I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made god?’” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.

…and Russell in turn was describing Mill, as a child, discovering the same thing. I doubt that Mill’s father was less moved than I am by the realization that confident claims of “obviousness,” even when swathed in polysyllables and Latin, often have foundations so rotten that they can be neutered by thoughtful children.

There was more to come. Both girls sat up and barked excited questions and answers. We somehow ended up on Buddha, then reincarnation, then evolution, and the fact that we are literally related to trees, grass, squirrels, mosses, butterflies and blue whales.

It was an incredible freewheeling conversation I will never, ever forget. It led, as all honest roads eventually do, to the fact that everything that lives also dies. We’d had the conversation before, but this time a new dawning crossed Laney’s face.

“Sweetie, what is it?” I asked.

She began the deep, aching cry that accompanies her saddest realizations, and sobbed:

"I don’t want to die."

(To be continued.)
____________________

Visit The Meming of Life.

The Second Problem of Evil (Under Tasso's Oak)

2008-08-17T13:38:00.000-07:00

The Atheist Way is about living a robust, normal life uncluttered by religion. And for most people, musing on issues of philosophy isn't a big feature of normal life. So it's appropriate that most of the posts here are about life, not philosophy.

Yet for a few, musing on the big, abstract ideas is part of normal life, and bumping into a new idea is one of the most exciting things that can happen. Recently that happened to me while reading a book of essays on philosophy (Philosophers Without Gods, Louise M. Antony, Ed.) and I want to share those ideas here. Maybe a few others will share my excitement.

Two ideas in these essays were new to me. One is positive, a simple, secular basis for a moral system. I will cover that another day (I need some more time to digest it).

The other is a new perspective on the old Problem of Evil which makes it an even stronger argument against a god's existence.

The Old Problem of Evil

The Problem of Evil is an old argument against the existence of god. It can be summarized this way: if the world is created and maintained by an omnipotent and morally-perfect god, how come it contains pointless suffering? Because there is so much suffering of animals as well as people, and so many human miseries that cannot possibly be linked to human will, it becomes easy to conclude either that god is not omnipotent; or that god is not morally perfect (at best morally indifferent, if not outright malevolent); or more simply that there is no god.

The Problem of Evil has been explored in exhaustive detail by many philosophers. (For an overview of its many facets see the Wikipedia article . For a more technical review see the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.)

An argument that aims to reconcile the existence of suffering with a benevolent god is called a theodicy (from the greek words for justify and god). There are several approaches to theodicy, and people who are emotionally committed to the idea of a benevolent God can usually find one that satisfies them. Those of us without such a priori commitments usually find theodicies contorted and unconvincing.

A Different Face of Evil

My understanding of this old chestnut was broken open by the essay "Divine Evil" by the late David Lewis.

Forget the natural suffering caused by cancers, or by tsunamis, says Lewis. Forget the millions of years of painful deaths of innocent animals. All of that suffering was merely permitted by god, but it is only a drop of blood in an endless ocean of pain that is not merely permitted, but intentionally commanded by god. And this second ocean of suffering cannot be justified by any traditional theodicy.

What is Lewis talking about? He is pointing to the promises of eternal damnation that are an undeniable part of orthodox Christian (and, I understand, Islamic) belief. The key elements of damnation are that it is (a) a form of suffering, and (b) eternal, which is to say, infinite in extent.

The suffering of all sentient beings that have lived since the beginning of the Earth -- all the animals that have died in pain in a predator's jaws or a forest fire, all the people who have suffered disease or flood or landslide -- no matter what kind of arithmetic you use to calculate suffering, it sums to a finite value.

If even a single sentient being is made to suffer for an infinite time, the total suffering is infinite and has to be greater than any finite value. In fact, Christianity and Islam both insist that not one, but vast numbers of people will be condemned in this way. This is not the suffering that is merely permitted as an incidental part of creation — the suffering that conventional theodicies try to justify. It is suffering that is explicitly commanded, created, supervised by what is claimed to be a benevolent god.

Some modern Christians attempt to soft-pedal damnation, but it is not easy to find a kinder, gentler reading for texts like Matthew 25:41ff: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire... and these shall go away into everlasting punishment... and that is only one of several grim promises of damnation in the New Testament.

Lewis argues at length that an infinite ("everlasting") punishment can never be a just penalty for a finite sin. But the justice of damnation is not the central issue. The issue is that (religious dogma insists that) god is determined to intentionally create an infinite quantity of suffering in the future that will utterly eclipse the finite sum of all previous suffering. None of the arguments that try to justify finite suffering can apply. Either this god is not benevolent, or it does not exist.

Supporting Critical Thinking In Our Schools

2008-08-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

A free society should want its schools to prepare its young people to think critically, make meaning, demand freedom, and bravely face the facts of existence. If a society does not want this, it means that its citizenry is ambivalent about freedom and its leaders are corrupt. If its citizenry were not ambivalent about freedom or outright antagonistic to it, it would make clear demands on its leaders. If its leaders were not corrupt, they would lead. What we see is exactly this combination of ambivalence and corruption that has produced an educational system where critical thinking is not valued, meaning is misconstrued, freedom is minimized, and the facts of existence are rarely allowed in the classroom. We see a system in crisis—one put there intentionally

It may seem paradoxical and absurd that a society should intentionally choose to educate its children poorly. Yet there is a strong pull in our culture to do just that. The reason is a straightforward one. Most people do not want their children to think. They want their children to get good grades, obey, fit in, find a job, play sports, salute the flag, kneel in prayer—but not think. Thinking is culturally portrayed as effete and funny but it is actually held as dangerous. Those who want to preserve their privileges, whether it’s their drinking habits, their bank accounts, or their fairy tales, do not want youth to ask difficult questions, dispute their authority, or threaten them with exposure. Their sense of self-interest makes them secretly wish that all schools would crumble and vanish.

This is why so little critical thinking is taught in schools. Educators agree, at least at the level of lip service, that teaching critical thinking skills is education’s number one priority. Yet classroom observers report that in 95% of the classrooms they visit no critical thinking skills are being taught. This is understandable, as an unspoken agreement has been reached by all involved—parent, politician, school board member, school superintendent, principal, teacher and, with that army aligned against them, students—that thinking is dangerous and should not be countenanced.

Therefore “learning” and not “thinking” is supported. Learning is safe. Nobody’s feathers are ruffled if you provide your students with another plane geometry theorem or twenty new French vocabulary words. The system is set up to support exactly this sort of transaction. There is a school subject called plane geometry, there is plane geometry subject matter, there is a teacher who teaches plane geometry, there is a student who learns plane geometry and is tested in plane geometry, there are uses for plane geometry, as a pillar in a liberal education and a steeping stone to solid geometry, and it all makes perfect, seamless sense. Doesn’t it?

No, it doesn’t. The tyranny of subject matter, with one subject following another from the cradle through and including graduate school, leaves little or no time for thinking. The “big” solution to this grave problem is to reduce to a minimum the teaching of traditional subjects and to completely revamp how we think of educating our children, focusing on a “thinking” model rather than a “learning” model. As this big solution is certainly out of reach, a smaller, perhaps obtainable solution is the following one: that a portion of each school day, perhaps an hour or two each day, from elementary school through graduate school, be turned over and devoted to thinking. Somebody with a new name might lead this portion of the day: not a “teacher” but a “critical thinking coach” or a “critical thinking facilitator.” This person could of course be a traditional teacher, but for this hour or two she would coach and coax, rather than teach and test.

What would occur during this two-hour block? Students would actually learn critical thinking skills. The device employed to help them learn these critical thinking skills would be “the big problem.” Students would be presented with a “big problem” and asked to think about it. They would be assured right off the bat that not only were there probably no easy answers to the problem, the problem might not actually be solvable. When a student did try to solve the problem with a slogan-sized, too-easy answer, it would be the thinking coach’s job to say, “But what if?”, helping the student, and the whole class, realize what a poor job slogan-sized answers did in addressing human-sized problems.

Here are some of the sorts of problems that might be brought forward:

• How do you decide if you should or shouldn’t support a war that your country is engaged in?

• How do you know when you’re addicted to something?

• In what circumstances would you turn a friend into the police?

• How do you know if someone is crazy and should be put in an institution?

• What should you do if your parents criticize you?

• Which should a just society more strive to uphold, the freedom to accumulate wealth or the fair distribution of wealth?

• How do you decide if space exploration is or isn’t an important societal goal?

• What is “personality”?

• If species “naturally” go extinct, what is the rationale for preserving bio-diversity?

• Under what circumstances is it ethical to lie?

It should be clear that these are questions that not even “the experts” can answer and also that these are infinitely more provocative and mind-expanding questions than questions like “What was the date of the Battle of Gettysburg?” or “Into what genre does Wuthering Heights fall?” It should also be clear that the “thinking coach” would have to remain on her toes as she facilitates the class discussion. She would need to anticipate the kinds of slogan-sized answers that students would be likely to give and be ready to help them see the paucity of slogan-sized answers.

For instance, if in the “In what circumstances would you turn a friend into the police?” discussion, a student was to say “As a matter of principle, I never turn a friend in!”, the “critical thinking coach” might reply ever so mildly, “What if your friend were engaged in a plot to kill your children?” If during the “How do you know if someone is crazy and should be put in an institution?” a student offered up, “They’re crazy if they look crazy!”, the “critical thinking coach” might respond, “So if an actor on stage were looking crazy, you would lock him up?”

These new “critical thinking coaches” would help students:

• Think for themselves
• Name problems worth solving
• Embrace complexity
• Expect to feel nervous
• Lead with skepticism
• Demand context
• Learn about the subjectivity of evaluation
• Form and test hypotheses
• Change their mind based on new evidence
• Grow comfortable with not knowing
• Think existentially
• Think big

Such sessions would dramatically smarten up students and would also partially inoculate them against supernatural enthusiasms. It is clear from countless studies that the more secular education a person receives, the less likely he or she is to believe in gods. These studies are doubtless full of confounds and artifacts but it is probably safe to say that secular education really helps in reducing religion’s grip. How much more would these “critical thinking” sessions help? Not only would we produce better thinkers and freer and more compassionate citizens, we would surely produce individuals far less likely to fall for the slogan-sized blandishments of religion.

Especially if we believe that reason is the primary sword that we employ to combat belief in gods, it would be wise if we added “more reason” to our current secular education system by lobbying for the introduction of these “critical thinking sessions” at every educational level, from elementary school to and through graduate school. Since every educator pays at least lip service to the idea that critical thinking is an admirable educational goal, it should be possible to nudge at least some schools and some school districts in the direction of revising the school day to include, in addition to subject matter classes, “critical thinking modules.” And you might think about becoming a “critical thinking coach” yourself and volunteering your services at a local school. What could be a more enjoyable pastime for you and of more value to society?

Creating in the Shadow of Cancer

2008-08-14T19:45:00.000-07:00

A New Normal

The raw face of the unknown I stare in, sends shivers through my soul. My artistic activity has come to another level. It's been a year since cancer up-ended my life and, the precarious role of primary caretaker/second cancer patient, presented itself like a spoiled child. A new normal has set upon my creative life. Calendars are just fantasy now and scheduling long term dates are irritating. I look at photos of artwork for inspiration but the joy of planning months ahead brings on anxiety. The free flow of my creativity has been thwarted by an unseen silence.

It's hard to articulate the thing that dams up my creative flow, but the blockage is palpable. My Aha! – the enjoyment of a new idea flashing through me becomes daunted in the next moment of actuality. My artistic reality reflects this new normal creative life.

Every bump and twinge my partner has darts my spirit and panic awakens. It’s a spiritual dilemma. Making art anyway is now more than making meaning – it’s a way to survive. I can't do anything about this situation, but here I am. All I can do now is figure out how I create from this place. However, it's a huge energetic dare to stay in this new flow and extract my creativity.

My challenges are many. I’m adapting to remaining flexible and embracing uninvited change. It takes more than energy to face this challenge and I find part of my spirit stimulated by this new normal. Days when cancer seems the fantasy are both welcome and despised, because they expose my growth along with what has been abandoned. My painting is rusty and I can’t help overworking parts muddying their pigment. On reflection, sometimes I feel as if I’m stuck in mud. I decided it was time for a simple structure. A fifteen minute sketch everyday will help me awaken my skill and relieve stress. My internal critic can’t get too chatty over a brief and unintended masterpiece. The rhythm of work feels good. My mind can travel far away with my muse.

I need different creative space now. Little snippets of time to do small parts of my projects, work well with my new routine. I’m setting up small workstations around my studio to take advantage of time and keep my projects moving. Playing with my work more and not expecting anything good will result, removes pressure. I need no extra pressures now. I’m building both a reserve of energy and creativity to have ready for change. My senses are on high alert all the time and a new function of my muse seems apparent. Dabbling in new activities and taking advantage of every opportunity to walkabout and observe fills me full of something new. I’m not sure what will come into my art from all of this but I’m on for the ride.

It’s symbolic that this blog has started during the astrological sign of Cancer. My partner asked me what I thought about how cancer got its name. According to Encarta Encyclopedia, it’s Latin for crab and the crustacean is the symbol of the sign. It’s based on a Greek myth about Hercules. A crab fought him as he was attacking the Hydra, a many-headed monster. People born under this sign have an unusual sense of other people’s emotions and the knack to intuitively address their needs. Loving Comfort might as well be their name. I’m blessed to call one my close friend and she’s the antidote for a many headed monster like the disease. Writing this blog addresses my new normal creativity.

I learned along time ago that when life gets crappy it’s time to create a new one. The great thing about creativity is that it is constantly changing. There is a mysterious paradox between liking change in creativity, and hating it in something like cancer. On rough days my emotions run raw, which then feed a new creativity. We’re all familiar with the attitude S#*t happens! Or it’s always something! These days my creative zest fuels me with the response question- then what shall I create now?

How do you cope with the ugly dumps in your life? Do you feel your creativity is changed? When crummy things to you, what happens to your relationship with your creative muse?

Sandy Nelson makes art in Minneapolis. As a painter she loves to tell stories with her canvas and when writing she enjoys painting pictures with her words. She’s a Creativity Coach and consultant, running a consulting firm with her partner.

http://www.art-of-creations.com/

the mix

2008-08-14T06:45:00.000-07:00

by Dale McGowan, author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief

You've got to be taught, before it's too late
Before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives hate
You've got to be carefully taught
____________________
From the musical South Pacific

Our three summer family reunions were terrific, especially for the kids, who have discovered or re-discovered no fewer than 50 cousins of various degrees of remove. Better yet, these cousins are good kids, enjoyable kids, funny and friendly and loving kids.

And ohhh so very religious. Which is fine, of course.

My wife and I are the dolphins in the tuna nets of our respective families. Most all of the relations on all three sides are not only churchgoing but fish-wearingly, abstinence-swearingly, cross-bearingly so. The fact that most of them are also genuinely delightful to be around -- funny and friendly and loving -- serves as a nice slap on my wrist any time I find myself lumping together all things and people religious.

How can I not love it when my twelve-year-old second cousin, working on a leather bracelet, asks, "Mister Dale, how do you spell 'Colossians'?" (I nailed it.) Or when Becca, watching another young cousin making a wooden picture frame with the letters JIMS across the top, innocently asked, "Is that for sombody named Jim?" only to be told patiently that "it stands for 'Jesus Is My Savior'." It's sweet. It's lovely. Creepy-lovely, perhaps...but that's a kind of lovely, isn't it?

When it comes to assessing the many conservative religious folks in my life, though, there's a complication, one that still makes me dizzy after all these years. It was captured by (of all people) Larry Flynt, who wrote in the LA Times about his unlikely friendship with Jerry Falwell after the televangelist's death last year:

My mother always told me that no matter how repugnant you find a person, when you meet them face to face you will always find something about them to like. The more I got to know Falwell, the more I began to see that his public portrayals were caricatures of himself. There was a dichotomy between the real Falwell and the one he showed the public.

The same weird dichotomy is present in many of the deeply religious folks I know. Many are just plain good in word and deed, and I love having their influence in my kids' lives. But many others, including some I like so much I could burst, will be in the midst of a perfectly normal conversation, then suddenly spew bile or rank ignorance -- often without changing expression -- before turning back to the weather or the casserole.

It's not a case of some believers being lovely and others being nasty. That I could sort out. It's much more confusing. Like Larry said of Jerry, they're often the same people. But in the case of folks I know, it reveals itself in the opposite order of Flynt's description. I liked them from the beginning, then was blindsided by the nastiness.

The conversation at one reunion found its way to gays and lesbians, and a cousin -- one of my favorites, a deeply religious college graduate and the pick of the litter -- suddenly said, "What kills me is when they say [homosexuality] shouldn't be treated. Well if that's the case, why treat schizophrenia? Why treat cancer?"

All heads nodded but mine. I was searching for the perfect line. Finally it came. "And what about the lefthanders?" I said. "And those got-dam redheads, roaming the streets untreated!"

They laughed, not quite getting it, and the topic quickly moved on to (if I remember correctly) boat motors.

I find myself related by blood or marriage to several ministers, including a couple who are among my favorite people on Earth, open and honest and deeply humane, without a shred of pretense. There's another of whom I'm very fond as well, but in him we encounter The Mix. A quickish wit, he spends most of his time trying to make other people laugh. But when the conversation turned to the war and someone had the gall to mention the deaths of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, he erupted:

"Oh innocent civilians, innocent bystanders, boo hoo! First of all, they're not so innocent. Second of all, this is war! If you are my enemy, I'm not gonna shoot you in the leg, I'm not gonna shoot you in the arm...I'm going to put one right between your eyes. I'm going to annihilate you. And the sooner I do it, the sooner the world will be safe for God's people."

Several kids were sitting in earshot, getting themselves carefully taught. I was livid. "Now there's a man of God!' I said. "Hallelujah!"

Beloved Relation looked me in the eye, momentarily wordless, then decided to play it for comedy. "Just like the old days!" he bellowed. "Kill a Gook for Jesus! Kill a Commie for Christ!"

Nice.

Anybody wish to guess the denomination that would have a minister playing so fast and loose with the Sixth Commandment, not to mention the Beatitudes? Yes, you in the back, Reverend Falwell -- what's your guess?

I listened to two high school teachers bemoaning their "lazy Mexican" students. "It's like an entire culture of unaccountability," one said. "And if I say a word about it, I'm a racist!" The other couldn't agree more. "Joo can't say dat to me, joo ees raceest," she mocked, and they laughed. I also heard them both bemoaning the posture, attitude, and irresponsibility of their non-Mexican students, but in those cases, it's because they're teenagers. For the Mexican kids, the same behaviors are attributed to Mexicanness. One group of sinners, in other words, is unforgiven.

On the ride home from one of the reunions, Erin told of a cousin she idolizes saying "I hate Democrats!" then informing the rest of the group in a whisper that Obama is "a Muslim."

My kids are plenty old enough to pick up on these things. Connor was nine when he asked, "Why does [Beloved Relation X] hate A-rabs so much?" with the requisite long 'A'. In answering such questions, I find myself struggling more than anything with The Mix, trying hard to emphasize the positive qualities of religion, to keep them away from the broad brush, to remember that we are all a Mix, to not to create my own category of unforgiven sinners. Again -- many of the religious folks in their lives are wonderful, kind, and ethical. But I can also say, with honest regret, that the greatest poison my kids hear comes from fervently religious people they know and love.

Why is that? (he asked rhetorically). And why am I so damned hesitant to point it out?

Visit Dale's secular parenting blog The Meming of Life.

Miracles R Us...

2008-08-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

I try not to be dogmatic about atheism. I try to remain open to the possibility that the universe is more magical than it seems.

Poking around on the Web the other day, I stumbled on a blog written by a devotee of "A Course in Miracles." Twenty years or so ago, I looked at ACIM briefly, but the Jesus talk kind of put me off. This week I thought, "What the heck -- let's see what's on their website. I could sure use a miracle!"

Their methods read like a kinder, gentler form of Scientology. The system is right out in the open, not shrouded in secrecy. That's the good news. The bad news....

The "lessons" involve daily meditation on specific phrases. (I'm not sure I want to dignify them by calling them "ideas.") The first few phrases seem designed to break down the seeker's intellectual preconceptions. ("Nothing I see in this room means anything." "These thoughts do not mean anything. They are like the things I see in this room." "My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.") Breaking down preconceptions is not a bad thing to do. If you have real spiritual insights to impart, it may even be necessary.

The breakdown continues:

"I am never upset for the reason I think." "I am upset because I see a meaningless world." "God did not create a meaningless world." "I have invented the world I see."

But as new ideas are introduced to replace those you showed up with, a curious cloud of illogic settles over the scene:

"I am under no laws but God's." Isn't that what fanatics always say when they set out to butcher their enemies? Well, yes, it is.

"Sickness is a defense against the truth." Without denying that some illnesses are caused or influenced by mental and emotional events, I think we need to consider that this blanket assertion quickly leads to a "blame the victim" stance -- that if someone is ill, it's because they haven't embraced The Truth.

"Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin." By the time the acolyte has been led this far down the garden path, the reality of evil and suffering is being flatly denied. Holocaust? If "A Course in Miracles" is to be taken at face value, it never happened. That's the plain meaning of those sentences.

"Whatever suffers is not part of me. What grieves is not myself. What is in pain is but illusion in my mind. What dies was never living in reality...." At this point, it seems, compassion for our fellow humans has been replaced by the numbness of the True Believer. When bad things happen, I do not grieve. When I feel pain, I cut off all feeling in myself so as to maintain steadfastly my faith.

That anyone gets sucked into believing this stuff -- that's the miracle. Or, unfortunately, it's not. There is clearly a human propensity to get sucked into it. How sad.

So Do You Believe in God?

2008-08-08T11:24:00.000-07:00

by Marlene Winell, Ph.D.

I get this question so frequently, I’ve decided to make a better effort to reply. To be honest, I don’t like the question because it presumes we know what those words mean. Here are some responses, touching on more or less serious aspects of the topic.

1. Which god? Do you mean Zeus, Baal, Athena, Shiva, Allah, Jehovah, or some other? If you mean one of those, then no. I am not a theist. I don’t believe in an individual being that created and now controls the world.

2. What is belief? Is it a cognitive conclusion that I have reached based on logical consideration of evidence?

That would assume I have access to all the information, and I do not. Is it an emotional feeling for something beyond myself? Well, my emotions vary, and some days are hopeful, other days are dark. Emotions are a rocky basis for “belief.” Do I make a leap of faith, not knowing anything really, but simply wanting to “believe,” and putting stock in a “scripture” to give it support? This is also difficult because knowing about the origins of “scripture,” I know the complexity; they were not simply dictated. Also, the strength of my blind faith can also vary and I’m not sure how completely I am supposed to convince myself in order to say I “believe.”

3. The concept of “God” usually meant by this question is some sort of being that exists “out there.” The god of the Bible is very separate, superior to humans, but anthropomorphic in many ways. Other gods are also considered “out there” and have controlling powers we do not have. A more New Age notion of god includes “the divine” in all of us, and still involves the notion of “spirit” infusing people. There is an assumption in most approaches to spirituality of a kind of “force,” which can be called by different names, but which is a thing in a universe of other things. As such, I do not resonate with this idea of “god” as an entity.

4. If I must use the concept at all, I would equate it with the “nature of being.” This is close to “ground of being,” a phrase used by Tillich and then by John Robinson years ago in the book, 'Honest to God." For me it involves a perception of existence grounded in the profound science of modern physics. Most ordinary people do not know much about this. Yet, we now know from findings in both relativity theory and quantum physics, that the universe is much more strange and incredible than we ever realized. It calls for massive humility because there are things no one understands, yet we now have good reason to question all of our basic assumptions about “reality.” The difference is bigger than finding out the world is not flat. We have evidence for questioning our ideas about matter, linear time, cause and effect, and more. String theorists agree there are eleven dimensions. Yet the general population operates all day every day assuming things that are completely out of date. The knowledge has not reached the masses. This is akin to having everyone act as if the earth is still flat. The issues are intensely profound, with implications for everything we do. The big words for me are “mystery” and “possibility.” Feelings are humility, awe, and excitement. There is no religious description of “god” that matches the grandeur of the universe as it is – elusive, ever-changing, impossibly mind-boggling. And this includes us. We are part of the fabric; there is no separation. If this is believing in god, then by all means, a hundred times YES! But I’m still not drawn to the language.

A couple of quotes that I find consistent with this:

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant’? Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”`
-Carl Sagan

“I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”
-Albert Einstein

5. Dispensing with the “god” word, it makes a little more sense for me to address “spirituality,” although this word has often meant a focus on other-worldly things. I prefer to describe spirituality as a way of living which is here-and-now. These are attributes rather than a definition. They involve feelings and perceptions and experiences which depend on openness. This openness can be chosen and developed. Rather than escaping into a different realm, I think of spirituality in terms of how we live our lives – the choices, the consciousness, the texture of daily life. There are several aspects of this:

Accord. This is the experience of feeling attuned with the rest of existence - a feeling of belonging on earth, being a part of the rest of nature, and in harmony with everything around. When you are in accord, you move along with the vast river of evolutionary change, feeling connected in a fundamental way with the harmony and power of the whole. You feel as though you are tapping into a rich resource that is beyond you, much larger than yourself. Your inner spring of god-within connects with the vastness of god-beyond, a "deeper power" rather than "higher power," a subterranean aquifer connecting all of life. This produces a sense of trust and safety, a knowledge that you fit, that you have a place.

Awareness. With awareness you are alive and awake, fully experiencing life. This means being totally grounded in the here and now. Your sensory experiences are vivid, and you notice what is happening when it is happening, both around and inside you. You do not reject uncomfortable experiences or deny pain; you are open and embracing of all that life has to offer. This makes it possible for you to enjoy things more intensely and to learn from difficulties. You are not trying to be on some other plane of existence, but are willing and happy to be here now, like a curious child.

Growth. Growth is a natural process. You are not static or inert; you are a changing, growing being. And your experiences can propel you to develop further. As a plant needs the attention of water and food to grow, you need to attend to your needs and consciously make opportunities to learn and change. This aspect of spirituality is active, complementing the more receptive elements of accord and awareness. As humans we are granted the exciting option of making conscious loyal commitments to move in positive directions. Learning will often occur anyway, as a neglected plant will often survive, but informed with a sense of accord and awareness, you can take action on your own spiritual behalf.

Transcendence. There are moments of awe for us in life, those times of being overwhelmed with wonder at beauty, or love, or natural power. At these moments you get clues about the immensity of the cosmos, like pinpricks in the veil around your limited consciousness. You are humbled and thrilled as you gaze at a sunset or a torrential waterfall. A moment of pure love can be ecstatic. Let your vision extend into the night sky, and you may experience a blissful dissolving of your individual ego. Not needing to understand or control, you can experience a sense of total Mystery. These moments are gifts that reflect your spiritual capacity, gifts that become more available as you open to your sense of the ultimate. This is not ultimate in the sense of above or better, but simply beyond your usual mode of consciousness. These are moments of realization knowing that the sense you have of “god” within is not only in contact with but one and the same as the transcendent “god”-beyond. You are a wave in the ocean, individual in a sense but also part of something much bigger – the immensely huge and powerful ocean of existence. You don’t understand and you don’t need to understand. All of this is multiverses away from “believing in God.”

So even though I would have to say I don’t believe in God and I am an atheist in the true definition of the word, ie, not a theist, I obviously feel compelled to question and reclaim the language being used and make this rather inadequate stab at describing my lived experience. It’s a bit defensive and that’s because the stereotype of the cold, shallow, hedonistic, selfish atheist needs to be challenged. In my opinion, it’s all about how we live, and not what we “believe.”

What do you think?

Kind regards,
Marlene Winell, Ph.D., psychologist and author of "Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion" and facilitator for retreats for religious recovery called "Release and Reclaim" The next one is Aug. 15-17 in Berkeley, CA

SEASONED WITH REASON

2008-08-04T17:22:00.000-07:00

Melissa LaFavers

Sacred

Lately, I've been taking strolls around my neighborhood. I walk on sidewalks mostly shaded by tall, old trees. Their branches sway in soft Summer breezes, their leaves shine bright, healthy green in the sun. I turn my face to the sky and smile in the sunshine, soaking up the air, the warmth, the beauty all around me. I feel gratitude for my feet, my legs, my heartbeat, the sweetness of a warm July day.

This, to me, is sacred.

Often I find religious folks perplexed when confronted with the idea of not believing in god. Their belief in their god is so woven into every facet of their lives that they can't fathom how life could have meaning of any kind without the imagined presence of their heavenly father hovering over everything they do, say, think.

Many atheists have been accosted by a variation of the question, "If you don't have god, how do you have any morals or meaning in your life?"

Religion, as we all know, doesn't corner the market on morals or meaning. We humans have the ability to attach meaning to anything we do. Atheists and secular humanists may need to be more creative to define our lives without the ready-made boxes and labels that belief in god and religion provides, and we have much more freedom without the confines of established dogma.

I have a young friend who is a new mother. She is faced with the dilemma of bringing her daughter up without belief in god, while still wanting to create meaning for her, specifically in connection with seasonal celebrations, and wanting to allow her daughter to make her own choice of religion when she is mature enough to think for herself.

Celebrations require neither belief in god, nor religion. While we are both essentially atheist, my husband and I find a great deal to celebrate in what Wiccans call the Wheel of the Year. Most religious holidays have a basis in ancient Pagan festivals which were anchored in the cycles of Nature. We live in the natural world. We experience the delights of nature on a daily basis and don't need to believe in any deity to celebrate. We do join in celebrating the Winter holiday most people refer to as Christmas, though I find it more and more difficult each year to use that word. I prefer Yule or Winter Solstice. One of the things I love the most about the holiday season is the carols, and I've started to substitute "Solstice" for "Christmas" because it makes it more meaningful to me as I feel no connection to the story of Christ and his birth.

But I do feel connected to the magic of millions of intricate snowflakes falling from the sky on a blustery Winter day, to hot chocolate after shoveling my long driveway. I also feel connected to the first green shoot of a crocus as the cold begins its slow retreat and the wheel turns from Winter to Spring and all its new life, Nature awakening in a thousand different glorious and colorful ways all around me. I feel connected to the lush life of camping on a Summer weekend, the dance of a million distant stars in the night sky, the jubilance of an evening storm pelting our tent with a few raindrops, the song of Lake Huron lapping at the shore nearby. I connect joyfully to the parade of windblown Autumn leaves through a chilly afternoon, the scent of wood smoke from someone's first fire of the season, the zest of a ripe apple picked fresh from a tree by my own hand, the pleasing glow of a jack-o-lantern on a dark evening, the dazzling array of pumpkins at the local market.

Creating celebrations can be as elaborate as hosting a Halloween costume party, or as simple as sipping cider by a bonfire with friends. We can celebrate moments privately by reciting a poem or lyric on the anniversary of someone's death, or we can celebrate publicly by singing the national anthem with a crowd of people before a 4th of July fireworks show. The options are endless, and none require that we hide our reason in a box.

Godless Grief- It's Okay to Feel

2008-08-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

When we're sitting at home and realizing that we have to face people for the first time in a group situation after the news hits us-- perhaps it's just after learning that we have a friend in a hospital, or perhaps it's when we are summoned by a university to attend a massive convocation and vigil-- but we have to somehow find it in ourselves to face other people, despite our own shock, and our own pain.

The way we personalize our pain is unique. No one has a correct way to grieve. If someone is telling you "Oh, yes, well you're in X phase", chances are, you are not. You are in whatever phase you are in for that moment, in that time, in that day. One minute you may be laughing at a joke you had never even thought about since you were ten years old. The next you may find yourself huddled in bed and absolutely resolved never to leave. Either is perfectly okay, and both are absolutely the right way to feel.

But we aren't always given the luxury of our own time, and our own space. We aren't always allowed to be by ourselves, and that can man our grief is now a public affair. How are we supposed to keep it together when we are put in a situation such as a public funeral? Or what about being in a hospital, when a friend or a child is possibly never coming home alive? What is expected of us, and how are we supposed to behave when we have no idea what our emotions will lead us to think or react towards at any given moment?

First, you are around other people who are likely just as confused and as lost as you are. There are likely people who are naturally drawn to certain roles in these situations. Some are going to be the ones who play strong, silent leaders. Others will be quietly taking in the events around them, generally shocked or just holding off any response until they feel safe. Still others will be the basket cases, tossing out a variety of reactionary responses based on a number of catalysts including everything from the lighting to their own family history. Some of us are good at living in the moment, or are seeking out others to care for so we don't have to deal with our own pain until it is a time when we are feeling stronger. All of these roles is correct, and all of these roles should be expected. This is why you often find one family member taking up the cause of handling the details of funerals and feasts, and perhaps one stirring drama and another even missing altogether. These roles naturally occur during tragedy as they do weddings, or any emotionally charged event.

It is okay to be the one who doesn't attend the funerals. The person who doesn't attend is often the one who is given the cold shoulder by other family members, and I find that reaction appalling. To me this is the brave act of a person who understands his own ability of grieving. If he has no reason to seek closure through a funeral then I see no reason why he should be expected to attend one. Those who seek him are doing so for their own reasons, which can be tended to at any other time. Guilt has no place in grief. It's a very cruel tool that is used to manipulate others and certainly should not be used during times of sorrow.

And, it's okay to be the one who is emotional during time of sorrow and confusion. Men who have emailed me are never the ones who are embarrassed over tears. The people who complain more about tears tend to be those who have never shed them. I find those who are most likely to be afraid to cry are older women, those who have held families together as single parents, or those who have lived and fought as female soldiers. There's almost a wall built that won't allow them to be weak for enough time to acknowledge that their fear or sorrow. For what it's worth, I am now giving these women, and anyone permission to feel whatever pain and sorrow they need to feel. And, I give you all permission to cry if that is what you need.

Crying is not a physical action. The act of crying is a physiological reaction that has a chemical reaction not unlike that of some antidepressants. It helps to release some of the triggers in our minds that allows us to feel the painful sadness. Animals cry. We are animals. We forget this sometimes. But we have a biological need to do what animals do to function as a healthy being. This includes crying. If you do not think you have the right to cry, I am giving you the permission slip, and you have that right. You are as human as I am, and in your humanity, you own that right.

It's okay to scream, and yell. Anger is a part of grief. Anger directed at something positive, like something that helps you grow stronger, such as physical fitness or even singing to a recording, or screaming into a pillow, is perfectly normal, and even expected. Anger often causes people to move forward to actions. Actions that have come from anger include the creation of the United States, the recording of multiple albums, the Live Aid events, and millions of other positive changes of random order which popped into my head at the thought of it.

None of these emotions comes in any particular order. Some may even hit you when you are at these functions which you are expected to attend. It's up to you to determine how you should respond to the events at hand. Do you need to restrain the emotions you have just to get through, for the sake of children, or those around you? Is the event being televised? Do you have to wear specific clothing? Do you want to wear something that reflects your emotions if you are unable to express them verbally?

Remember, no one has been through the exact moment you are going through and you are the only one who can judge your own reactions. But whatever you feel, and whatever you understand, it's okay to feel. As long as you are not harming another person, or yourself, you are absolutely feeling the right things. And if you feel that someone should be harmed, then you may need to talk to someone who is better equipped to help you deal with your reactions. In that case, you can turn to any of the counselors advised by your friends, or family, or even those found on this forum.
--

Cathe Jones is the author of the book, Godless Grief, and the moderator of the writing group, Las Vegas Quill Keepers. She resides in Las Vegas with her husband, jazz pianist Mike Jones, and is represented by Janet Rosen of Sheree Bykofsky and Associates.

Low cost spots at recovery retreat

2008-08-03T16:49:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,
I posted a notice a while ago about the workshop we are doing Aug. 15-17. I'm pleased to say we have some space for "pay what you can" participants. The room and board is still $125 but beyond that is negotiable. So get in touch soon if you are interested!
Kind regards,
Marlene Winell

Here's the notice again.

LEAVING YOUR RELIGION?

It's not the end of the world! Join us at a recovery retreat.

"RELEASE AND RECLAIM"

August 15-17, 2008, with Dr. Marlene Winell

Do you feel alone in your struggle for healing? Come to a supportive and powerful weekend with others who can understand you -- an oasis from dogmatic teachings and judgmental groups. We'll rant and rave, tell our stories, discuss the issues, visualize, role-play, dance and draw – whatever it takes to think for ourselves and reclaim our lives. A joyful, empowered life is your birthright and you can start now.

WHEN: FRIDAY, Aug. 15, 7PM - SUNDAY, Aug. 17, 3PM.

WHERE: A beautiful house in Berkeley, California,
with hot tub and other amenities.

COST: $320 for the workshop, $125 for room and board. Financial need considered & options available.

TO REGISTER: Call 510-292-0509 or send an email to recoveryfromreligion@gmail.com. Register soon as group size is limited.

Dr. Marlene Winell is a psychologist & author of "Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists & Others Leaving their Religion." She has a practice in Berkeley & also counsels individuals by phone. For more info, mailing list, comments about retreats, & Youtube link, visit: www.marlenewinell.net. Or call Dr. Winell for a complimentary discussion about your interest.

THE MISSING LINK (Atheist Tales)

2008-08-03T08:40:00.000-07:00

The Missing Link

A young archaeologist, who happened also to be an atheist, had many and sundry religious friends. Knowing that he was both an archaeologist and an atheist, they took great and constant glee in pointing out how the gaps in the fossil record disproved Darwin’s theory of evolution. “Without the missing link,” they chortled, “you have nothing!” Although he had a sensible response to their gleeful accusations, the response was complicated to deliver, not wholly convincing, and typically met with gales of knowing laughter. So usually he made no reply—hardly a satisfying outcome!

Sometimes he dreamt that the perfect fossils had suddenly appeared all at once and answered every question. It was a lovely dream, usually set in a cream-colored desert that was also, as was possible in dreams, a lush savannah full of lions and gazelles. The dig and find were scrupulously recorded in every conceivable way so that no one could doubt that the fossils had been extracted from virgin earth. It was the perfect setting, the perfect dig, and the perfect result. The young archaeologist would smile in his sleep and not feel the slightest twinge of envy that he hadn’t been the lucky—and soon-to-be world famous—archaeologist of record.

One evening he found himself hanging out in a seedy archaeologist bar not far from the university. Lost in thought, he sipped his wine and dreamed of fossils that no one had ever seen and the creatures those fossils recorded. A tap on his shoulder startled him. A man he didn’t know, who looked like one of those all-but-dissertation thirty-five-year-old faded graduate students, was breathing in his face.

“May I join you for a second?” he said.

“Certainly.” The young archaeologist waved him to a chair.

“You come highly recommended,” the man said, sitting down and pulling his chair close. “I’m in sociology. I’ve been studying the worldwide harm done by religions. I’ve spent fifteen years at it. I keep thinking: can’t they be stopped? One day last week a light bulb went on. I had a brainstorm. But I need an archaeologist to pull it off. I asked around—and people recommended you.”

The archaeologist felt a tingle run down his spine. Flattered, intrigued, and excited, he learned forward.

“What’s your idea?” the archaeologist said, his voice lowered.

“You know the missing link thing?” the man said.

“Do I ever!” the archaeologist exclaimed. “I get smacked around with that all the time!”

“Let’s make believe we found it!” the man whispered. “You will ‘find’ it and I’ll enlist other archaeologists to corroborate the find. Maybe we’ll ‘find’ several missing links at once, like an underground meteor shower! Maybe we can get hundreds of archaeologists in on the gag and have missing links found in every country on every continent! Aren’t you tired of being bludgeoned by the gap argument? Let’s ‘find’ a ton of missing links, all the missing links anybody could want, and then we’ll lock them away like some religious relic and not let anyone else see them. We could pull this off!”

The archaeologist, disappointed at being presented such a ludicrous and unsavory scheme, nevertheless pondered the man’s idea. “Of course, we’d be lying--” he began.

“They lie with their every breath, going on about gods!” the man interrupted. “It’s just tit for tat!”

“More importantly, that’s not the way science operates.”

“Science has to get down off its high horse and fight in the trenches. There’s a war going on!”

The archaeologist bit his lip. “I appreciate your argument and almost don’t disagree,” he said. “Almost.” His head swam. “But I couldn’t do it.” Suddenly his mind cleared. “And you shouldn’t pursue this,” he said. “It’s a bad idea. It’s beneath us.”

“Should I run through a litany of the horrors of religion?”

“Save your breath,” the archaeologist said, turning away. “I’m not interested.”

The man shrugged. “Some archaeologist will join me,” he said, getting up. “Of all the archaeologists in all the archaeologist bars in all the university towns the world over, some archaeologist will join me.”

“I wonder,” the archaeologist replied, turning away from the stranger.

The man’s plan disturbed him. He understood the argument that sometimes you had to fight fire with fire. Sometimes you had to pull off dirty tricks to achieve a righteous outcome. But that truth, while undeniable, was still a souring one. It meant that the battles and wars would never end. It let in everything you wished would one day vanish from the face of the earth. He finished his drink and left the bar in a bad mood.

That night he had bad dreams. Devilish fiends were making false finds in a coal-black landscape, cackling at their tricks, pulling out bones that never were and never could be and parading with them in monstrous dances around bonfires from hell. The archaeologist sat up in bed and shook himself; but as soon as he fell asleep the nightmare returned. It seemed that the man had ruined his beautiful dream of a righteous find.

About two weeks later the young archaeologist was having a drink with a colleague at the seedy archaeologist’s bar.

“Did you fall for that sting?” his colleague asked.

“What sting?”

“That thing that was going on here? That guy from the Freedom from Evolution Foundation, posing as a sociologist? They were trying to see how many archaeologists would be willing to falsify the fossil record!”

“No!” the young archaeologist exclaimed.

“He couldn’t find a single one. Not here, not in any archaeologist bar anywhere. There were some close calls—a fellow in Ann Arbor almost bit, and one in New Haven came this close. But ultimately no one agreed!”

The young archaeologist nodded. After a while, he found himself smiling. Yes, they would always use such tactics; they would fabricate, trick, lie, and scheme. On his side, the side of science, many unsavory activities would also occur: falsified research, unholy marriages with business, and more. But at least this time, in archaeologist bars in university towns everywhere, no archaeologist could be found to falsify the fossil record and provide the world with an unearned missing link.

That night his sweet dream returned. He dreamt that the perfect fossil had appeared and answered every question. It was the same lovely dream, set in a cream-colored desert that was also a lush savannah. The dig and find were scrupulously recorded, so that no one could doubt that the fossil had been extracted from virgin earth. It was the perfect setting, the perfect dig, and the perfect result. He smiled in his sleep; and in the morning he returned to work, a proud and happy archaeologist.

Recover from religion! Weekend workshop offered

2008-07-31T21:03:00.000-07:00

LEAVING YOUR RELIGION?

It's not the end of the world! Join us at a recovery retreat.

"RELEASE AND RECLAIM"

August 15-17, 2008, with Dr. Marlene Winell

Do you feel alone in your struggle for healing? Come to a supportive and powerful weekend with others who can understand you -- an oasis from dogmatic teachings and judgmental groups. We’ll rant and rave, tell our stories, discuss the issues, visualize, role-play, dance and draw – whatever it takes to think for ourselves and reclaim our lives. A joyful, empowered life is your birthright and you can start now.

WHEN: FRIDAY, Aug. 15, 7PM - SUNDAY, Aug. 17, 3PM.

WHERE: A beautiful house in Berkeley, California,
with hot tub and other amenities.

COST: $320 for the workshop, $125 for room and board. Financial need considered & options available.

TO REGISTER: Call 510-292-0509 or send an email to recoveryfromreligion@gmail.com. Register soon as group size is limited.

Dr. Marlene Winell is a psychologist & author of "Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists & Others Leaving their Religion." She has a practice in Berkeley & also counsels individuals by phone. For more info, mailing list, comments about retreats, & Youtube link, visit: www.marlenewinell.net. Or call Dr. Winell for a complimentary discussion about your interest.

Nice People

2008-07-29T09:38:00.000-07:00

One way or another, I often have encounters of the ordinary kind with religious people. Some are the parents of my private cello students, for instance. Almost without exception, they strike me as very nice people.

My next-door neighbor is a Mormon. He sometimes mows our front lawn, unprompted, simply because it's a nice thing to do.

Maybe it's the nice people who are attracted to religion in the first place, or find it easy to stay in a religious community if they were born to one. They're not rebellious by nature; they're comfortable going along with the crowd. Or maybe it's that when you're part of a religious community, the rough edges of your personality get sanded down.

I'd love to be part of an atheist community, but I'm not sure how one could ever take root and grow. The Unitarian/Universalists are as close to an atheist church as you can get. I've tried Unitarianism a couple of times, but it didn't stick. Maybe it was just me. But in recent years, even the Unitarians seem to talk about God a lot. They're just more vague about it.

Here's the scary thing, though: The fellow down in Tennessee who shot up a Unitarian church this week was described by his neighbors as "a really nice person." That may have just been happy talk, but he may really have seemed nice to them. He reserved his hatred for the liberals.

If we did have an atheist community center here in town, who would protect us from the nice people?

The Seeker After Wisdom (ATHEIST TALES)

2008-07-27T19:22:00.000-07:00

A young man was puzzled and disturbed by the world he lived in. So much sorrow, so much confusion! One day he heard about a wise man who lived in a house at the foot of a mountain. The wise man, it was said, could explain the meaning of life and reveal the path to ultimate bliss.

The young man eagerly sought out the sage and begged him to explain the meaning of life and reveal the path to ultimate bliss. "These secrets are revealed only to those who are worthy of them," the wise man explained.

"I feel worthy," the young man said. "As worthy as anyone, I guess."

"That is but illusion. You must prove your worthiness."

"How may I do that?"

"By becoming my servant," the wise man explained. "Whatever I desire that you should do, you must carry out my orders promptly and unquestioningly. If you can do this without fail for seven years, at the end of seven years I will explain to you the meaning of life and reveal the path to ultimate bliss."

Seven years are a long time in the life of a young man, but on balance the bargain seemed a good one. "What must I do?" the young man asked.

"Here is an ax," the sage said, smiling. "The wood pile is depleted. Go into the forest and chop some wood. When you are finished with that, I will require you to sweep the floors of my house."

And so it went. For more than three years the young man carried out the sage's orders. Occasionally he would approach the sage and timidly inquire whether the sage might be willing to share a crumb of wisdom, but always the sage brushed off the request. "You are not ready," he would reply. "You have not yet shown enough loyalty or perseverance. Here is a bucket. Go down to the well, fill the bucket, and pour the water in the cistern in the kitchen. See that you fill it up, for it's a hot day, and I'm thirsty."

The fame of the sage was widespread, and travelers sometimes arrived, seeking him out. They would usually encounter the young man first, since the young man would be outdoors working in the garden. "Are you the wise man?" they would ask.

"Oh, no," he would reply. "I only chop wood and carry water. Someday I hope to become wise."

So might matters have continued for four more years, if not longer, but as time went on the people of the nearby village became unhappy with the sage. At a banquet he was observed to become quite drunk and surreptitiously urinate in the rice bowl of the mayor. The tithe he demanded of the commerce in the market was never enough to suit him; his house was filled with fabulous statues and tapestries, and still he craved more. Eventually it was discovered that he had been pleasuring himself with several of the young women of the village, who were now pregnant.

The villagers descended on the wise man's house, seized all the fine works of art, and then burned the house to the ground. The sage himself they stripped naked and whipped until he ran away.

The young man observed all of this from a hiding place at the bottom of the garden. When the villagers had gone home, he shook his head sadly and went back to tending the garden. When he needed water, he drew it from the well. When the wood pile was depleted, he chopped wood with the ax.

Travelers still arrived, as before, from distant lands. They had heard tales of the sage who lived in the district, but had not heard of what happened to him. They would see the young man humbly tending the garden before the burnt-out ruin of the house and ask, "Are you the wise man who can explain the meaning of life and reveal the path to ultimate bliss?"

"Oh, no," the young man would reply. "I only chop wood and carry water. Someday I hope to become wise."

LIVING IN THE VOID

2008-07-27T17:05:00.000-07:00

I now know why I call myself an atheist, and not an agnostic. The reason being that the agnostic point of view is that "I don't know if there is a God or not." Since the attributes ascribed to "God" are consciousness--not just ordinary consciousness, but all-knowing, powerful, and ever-lasting, I can with confidence say that I'm an atheist because in my belief a necessary requirement of consciousness is life, and when people say, Oh, yes, what we mean by God is the origin of the universe, well, bottom line, the Higgs boson particle, "the God particle," does not have consciousness.

It's a fascinating question, and the many interpretations, in my view, come out of the mystery of life and not a "deus ex machinus" solution.