View from the Loft

Hell No!

In light of the recent court decision regarding a public school's prayer banner that had been hanging in the gym illegally since the 1960s, my son's experience with the imposition of religion--specifically Christianity--in his school came to mind.

In objecting to the posters put up by an after-school bible club, he did not experience vilification, threats of assault and even death, ostracism, and elected officials spewing vitriol, as did Jessica Ahlquist, who acted as plaintiff in the lawsuit. (See here, here, here, and here, just for starters--there's much more.)

Jessica Ahlquist ran into trouble from day one. And the school administration was dishonest, claiming that the banner (which began with the words "Our heavenly father" and ended with "Amen") was not a prayer, just a "tradition." This fooled no one, certainly not people speaking at a public meeting about the issue last February. Speakers invoked god and insulted atheists openly.

Here's what happened in my son's case: the Hell No! club hung posters in the hallways featuring bible quotes, quotes such as "only a fool does not believe in God," and threats of eternal punishment for nonbelievers. Our son felt that these were inappropriate in a public school and wrote letters to the principal, superintendent, and school board. While I'm sure that some people thought we put him up to this, we did not. Ethan asked me to check the letter for spelling and formatting, which I did. I had no other input.

A few days later he was called to the principal's office. The school's attorney had been informed of the situation, and some of the school board members contacted a local college to see how such matters were handled there. The attorney  considered that featuring a cross on posters advertising a bible club was legal, but that posters suggesting superiority of a particular religion and containing arguably harrassing statements had to come down. About half the posters were removed.

As Ethan reminded me in an e-mail, "A few people were irritated about the signs coming down, but once I exposed myself as the 'squeaky wheel,' no one was really mean about it and some people congratulated me." I recall running into the superintendent and a few of the board members at a restaurant shortly after this happened and being complimented on our son's letter.

But as my husband pointed out, the religionists have gotten much uglier in the past couple of decades, so who knows what might have happened to him if the events that transpired then were to happen today? Whether it's the political clout of the rabid religious right or fears about a secularist minority that's becoming more vocal and less inclined to stay closeted that's causing such vile behaviors as Ms. Ahlquist has had to suffer, the godbotherers have gotten nastier and nastier.

There is a reason not to tolerate such expression of religion in a public school: as the courts have decided again and again, it violates the separation of church and state. Yes, I remember singing a little song in first grade that started with "Oh, the Lord's been good to me," but that doesn't mean it was right, and subsequently such religious artifacts in state-funded schools were ruled illegal. As they should be. The majority of Americans may believe in god, and particularly a Christian god, but the Constitution exists to protect the rights of the minority.

We were very proud of our son for taking this action, as I assume Jessica's parents are of her. It isn't easy to stand for what's right when the majority of your community is against you--even without name-calling and death threats.

To all those religious believers and promoters who tell the rest of us to shut up, I can only say, "Hell, no!"

 

Jesus problem

I know quite a few people who, although not Christians themselves, think highly of Jesus. They believe that he was a great teacher, moral philosopher, and humanitarian--that he was something we should all strive to be.

I used to think that way myself, but in honestly looking at some of his statements--and some of what he neglected to say--I have had to reassess.

Recently I stumbled on a piece that nicely summarizes my own uneasiness about the whole Jesus thing. I don't think Jesus is the greatest thinker or philosopher or even god-botherer who ever lived. I think that he was most likely one of the many itinerant preachers of his time (if he actually existed), mostly ignorant and delusional, who thought that god spoke to them and through them. Today we call this ... well, insanity. Part of me thinks that he must have had something going for him in order to win followers, but part of me also agrees with Tim Minchin that "just because ideas are tenacious doesn't mean that they're worthy." And although I'm not clear on the details, I do know that the doctrines of Christianity were settled by men in seats of power who had a stake in the outcome.

There are a number of sayings of Jesus--and we must always remember that these are attributed to him, but we have no way of knowing whether he actually said them--that militate against seeing him as peace-loving and compassionate, despite "turn the other cheek" and so on. As a pacifist (I'm not saying I'm a very thoroughgoing pacifist, just that my tendencies lie that way), I was always bothered by "I come not to bring peace, but a sword" and by the declaration that he had come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and so on. I have read interpretations that claim to make sense of this in a way that conforms to the idea of Jesus as peace-loving and compassionate, but over time I have become unable to reconcile the words in the NT texts with any such image of Jesus.

I really liked John Dominic Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, and it influenced my thinking for a long time. But now I have read enough to wonder if Jesus actually even existed. We don't really have outside proof of it. And I also doubt Crossan's theses about Jesus. I used to agree with Jackson Browne's song "The Rebel Jesus," but now I think Jesus was actually pretty conservative, in that he exhorted his followers to hew to Jewish law in all its intrricate prohibitions and  demands. Nor did he urge his followers to rebel against the Romans; remember "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's"?

I know that Jesus proclaimed the existence of flame and fire for those who did not believe. Well, so much for a compassionate god, right? And what about the arrogance? "If you don't believe what I'm saying, you're going to an eternal fiery pit!" Pretty hard to reconcile with an idea of a loving Jesus, although the Christians always take issue with this, because it's the unbelievers' hardened hearts that bring hell upon them ... But anyway.

I have come to agree that Jesus was, as many have maintained, a failed apocalyptic prophet, of which there were many in his time (if he existed). I'm sure that for the vast majority of people at the time who lived a hand-to-mouth existence, a man promising their eventual triumph over their oppressors and over death was pretty appealing. Followers who came after him had to account for the fact that his prophecies did not come to pass in the time frame he'd promised, but that's not historically unusual.

I haven't really enjoyed giving up the idea of Jesus as a compassionate, philosophically defensible, exemplary teacher. But I've had to own up to my doubts and to wonder how this most likely unschooled man of a couple of millenia ago came to be the keystone of such a powerful religion. I tend to think that the answers to that are pretty unsavory and have a lot to do with earthly power, corruption, and co-optation. And yeah, the whole eternal life thing.

But hey, I can live without Jesus, and contrary to what the goddy types think of nontheists, my life isn't empty or meaningless. I'd rather look the facts in the eye, thank you very much, than try to hang on to a "comforting" myth. I'm a thinking person, and I can't--and don't want to--undo that.

Christmas cards

Surfing among the skeptical/humanist/nontheist blogs recently, I came across a post asking what fellow atheists like or dislike in holiday cards.

In this question lie buried myriad other questions, such as,

• Why do atheists send holiday cards? If they don't believe in Jesus/God, then why celebrate the holiday at all?
• Do atheists even have a right (in ethical terms) to object to certain kinds of cards? It's not their holiday, after all. Who are they to object to a manger scene?
• Since atheists are in the minority, shouldn't they just shut up and go with the flow?

And so on.

I've addressed the topic of Christmas before. Yes, I'm a nonbeliever, and yes, I still love Christmas. I've never felt that I had to abandon the traditions I love, especially as so many of those traditions have their roots in pagan celebrations of the winter solstice. I'm not pagan, either--I don't have religious beliefs of any kind--but I can appreciate all of the symbols and archetypes that abound. Myth and story will never lose their enchantment for me.

I like sending and receiving Christmas cards. I choose secular cards, and particularly favor cards that feature the word "peace." UNICEF offers some good choices, and the money goes to children in need, so I often buy holiday cards from that organization.

I don't like getting religious cards, but for the most part, I also don't attribute our getting Jesus-y cards to specific intent on the part of the sender. It does, however, irk me to some extent that most Christians seem to feel that all share their beliefs. That's not exactly astonishing, given the cultural mainstream, but sometimes it rankles nonetheless. I'm sure, too, that Christians feel that if there's any time where religious figures and symbols are called for, it's at Christmas. I understand that. I don't take offense at people's Christmas cards, even when my gut reaction is "yuck." I'm pretty much just gratified that they thought of James and me, and signaled that with a card.

My spouse used to get birthday cards from his mom once in a while in which she would write something about how she hoped he'd find Jesus. Those used to bother me and, I think (he's not much to comment on such things), James. Do believers really think that we nonbelievers haven't thought these things through? That we're just uninformed? Or steeped in "sin"?

Anyway, holiday cards just aren't something to get your shorts in a knot about. I think we all just want to reach out at this time of year and let people know they're still important to us, that we think of them even when we don't stay in touch as we should, that they are not absent from our thoughts, hearts, and lives. 

So for this atheist (or am I an agnostic?), Christmas cards will remain a feature of the holidays. Is it too early to say Merry Christmas? 

 

Dirge Without Music

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Oh my dog, I love Tim Minchin!

Do watch his animated film.

 

Old mortality

A friend who has also recently suffered the loss of a loved one remarked that she believed there is something of us that lives on after death, and she was honest enough to add, "I believe it because I want to believe it." Other friends present at the time concurred with her, at least about the existence of the soul (I infer), if not the "wanting to believe" part. None believed in the Christian afterlife of heaven and hell, but felt that in some way, we do go on, in whatever form, after our deaths.

Probably most human beings want to believe that death is not finality, not the last word. I think this is the lure of religion: the promise that there's an everlasting life for the soul, or that the soul is reborn, or for my friend, something unknown, yet there. It's very hard to accept the notion that this is all there is: this life, with all its joy and pain, exultation and tragedy, mundanity and transcendence. That this is it, this is all we get. That someone we loved is now gone, gone for good, all that brilliant light extinguished. And I'm not saying that that acceptance is right, or reasonable, or the only thing that makes sense. I'm saying only that this is something I'm trying to accept, because I don't think there's anything for us beyond this life.

Sometimes I myself have said that I wish I could believe--in God, in an afterlife, in something that gives the lie to e. e. cummings's line "and death I think is no parenthesis." But I have yet to understand how one can force oneself to believe. For me, it hasn't been possible to believe out of a desire to believe. That would require, for me, a shutting down of parts of myself that I can't, or don't want to, shut down. (For the record, I think "can't" is the more likely.)

My sister Linn bitterly accused me of being too rational, which strikes me as funny, since anyone who knows me knows that for me--to quote cummings again--"feeling is first." I react to things first with emotion, and often have to go back and analyze why I responded the way I did. I'm volatile, dangerously so--dangerous, that is, to my relationships with people and thus to my own well-being. I think most people who know me would attest to my passion and emotionality, and aren't those the opposite of rationality?

Linn's objection was that I needed some evidence for the idea of god in whatever way one imagined god, and that I hadn't found any. For her, god was far from the god of Judaism or Christianity. God was more in the way of a consciousness universal in scope and, in fact, inherent in the universe. She felt that I must feel very diminished by my acceptance of this life as "all there is." She pitied me for it. She raged against it. But one who lacks belief, like me, can't just talk herself out of unbelief and into belief. I don't know how untrue to myself I'd have to be to even attempt that.

It's not that I love the idea that this life is it, that we do, in fact, only go around once. Who does? And so ministers at countless funeral ceremonies intone about how we--well, actually, only those of us who are "saved"--will meet our loved ones in the hereafter. That sets apart "us"--the saved--from the miserable sinners among whose punishments is the eternal loss of our loved ones. I've never been to a Protestant funeral where this promise of a heavenly family reunion hasn't been trotted out as a recruiting device. Frankly, I find it sickeningly offensive and manipulative to exploit people's grief and fear at such a time.

I understand the need for comfort when we're grieving. I understand why preachers stand up and talk about how the departed is "in a better place now" (by the way, there's no Biblical support for the idea that the soul of the deceased immediately ascends to heaven). I've heard people at many a funeral talking about their loved one looking down from heaven and so on. I'm not a cold-hearted, cruel person. I understand why people believe what they do.

But I don't buy it. To me, it's wishful thinking. I don't have the comfort of having that comfort. I think we're like all other animals: we have a life, and when it's over, it's over. Death is the final act. I'm not happy about it, but there it is in all its starkness. And there's nothing to focus your attention on it like the sudden death of someone close to you.

Our own mortality is one of the hardest facts to grasp. Now that I'm heading for the age of sixty, I'm quite aware that my time on earth is dwindling. I would like to come to terms with the reality of my own death, but it isn't easy. And it isn't possible for me to find refuge in the belief of an afterlife. One cannot force oneself into a belief: it's either a belief, or it isn't. I understand wanting to believe, but I can't get from the desire to the actualization. I wish for many things that do not exist and will not exist, and I can't make them happen.

So this is it, all I have left of my life and myself, this time left on this earth. The question, then, is how to make the most of it.

Skepticism, anyone?

A friend and I have been having a most interesting conversation based on my post about the scarlet A over there in the right column. He's a reasonable person and I hope I've been reasonable too. And he's not, to my knowledge, a religious person. at least in the sense of organized religion. But in the course of our conversation I ran across this video by Tim Minchin, who is known for his skepticism and nonbelief in god, and couldn't resist putting it up here.

 

About that scarlet letter

You might have noticed the red A over there in the right-hand column.

The A stands for atheist. Clicking on it will take you to The Out Campaign, an effort to get nonbelievers to come out of the closet. Atheists in the US are often fearful of admitting to their lack of belief, particularly in certain parts of the country. It can also be difficult to come out to one's family and friends, particularly if one has been part of a religious family or belonged to a church community. The Out Campaign is about giving other nonbelievers a bit of courage by showing them that they're not alone.

I would just like to clarify here what I mean when I call myself an atheist. Really, I think I'd prefer "freethinker" or maybe even "skeptic." But I feel I have to stand in opposition to all the theists out there. I don't believe in a god or gods--but I don't and can't know. (My sister Linn may be surprised to read that, given some of the lively discussions we've had on the topic.) I can't know, but I do not believe that there's a god. It would take a lot to convince me that there is. I can imagine that there could conceivably be some sort of evidence that might convince me, but I can't imagine just what that would be. The "burning in the bosom" of the Mormons or the visions/inner voices of various branches of Christianity (and other religions) wouldn't do the job. I'd figure I was hallucinating or over-reacting emotionally or suffering a brain tumor.

The thing about belief is that it can't be compelled. Despite Pascal's Wager, some of us simply cannot believe in god's existence, and even though Pascal thought that those of us who can't believe should act as though we did in the hope that faith would come, that is not a tenable position for most of us nonbelievers. It feels too much like fakery--and if there were a personal god as Pascal saw it, wouldn't that god know we were faking it? Should we pretend a belief we don't really hold just to hedge our bets?

None of the arguments I've heard for god's existence has convinced me. Christianity is the religion I know best, and I find it nothing short of absurd in its inconsistencies, ahistoricism, antagonism toward science, illogic, inability to deal with the problem of evil, and so on through too many reasons to mention here.  

The lack of a belief in god does not color the world gray and bereft of joy, wonder, love, awe, or gratitude--if gratitude can be felt without anyone or anything to be grateful to--or something akin to it. And contrary to what many believers think and say, lack of belief in god does not render one immoral. Morality does not depend on the existence of god. It depends on our behaving in a way that respects our fellow inhabitants of the planet and the planet itself. I've read so many times, "If you don't believe in God, then why not behave in whatever way you want? What's to stop you?"

All I can say is that it's a good thing those people believe in god, because otherwise, apparently, they would feel no moral compunction at all to behave decently and honorably. More accurately, such people usually fear hellfire and that's what keeps them on the straight and narrow. It's scary that they can't imagine any other reason to behave morally and ethically.

So that's the word on the scarlet letter over there.  I've been accused of "flaunting" my atheism--seems like anyone who's honest about their unbelief has that charge made against them--but if atheists aren't somewhat vocal and up front about it, others may stay in hiding out of fear. In a country where an atheist doesn't have a hope of winning a political office, where stereotypes about atheists abound, and where the assumption is that of course we're Christians, I think it's important to know that there's quite an atheist presence beginning to be seen here in the US and elsewhere. We can't be a presence unless people know we're here, and The Out Campaign is just one of the ways to help establish that presence.

Cheryl Wheeler: "Your God"

I love Cheryl Wheeler. Check this out:

 

 

Deconversion

Via Pharyngula, I came upon several videos that record one person's experience of leaving Christianity and becoming an atheist. It's a remarkable series in that it's thoughtful, calm, rational, and quite detailed. In the videos, the speaker outlines the various pillars of his religious belief and shows how, under the weight of evidence, those pillars crumbled.

The young man's desire to follow the evidence wherever it led him was a courageous act, given how immersed he was in Christianity and the belief that he'd had a personal relationship with God.

I found these videos to be quite powerful and the narration very articulate. Kudos to this secular humanist.