Atheism, Architecture and Adoration

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/25/atheists-temple_n_1231848.html?ref=religion

http://www.dezeen.com/2012/01/25/alain-de-botton-plans-temples-for-atheists/

http://artinfo.com/news/story/757687/author-alain-de-botton-plans-to-build-temples-for-godless-londoners

I’ve never spoken much about atheism as anything religious, since it certainly isn’t a religion. But this isn’t to say there isn’t a religious quality to atheism in the same way there is for theism, both being a position on the existence of something supernatural. A London author, Alain de Botton, who wrote “Religion for Atheists” suggests that atheists should be able to utilize things that the religious use for other purposes that are spiritual, but nonetheless secular. This is similar in a sense to a position of Andre Comte Sponville, who wrote “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality,” wherein he claims that atheism can have a spiritual aspect to it in understanding the spiritual to be something we all experience as beings that are able to make judgments and interpretations about the world around us. Botton takes it a step further and affirms that atheism should be able to make a temple in the nominal sense, to represent and give presence to an ideal, such as perspective. Historians of atheism and France might bristle a bit at this idea, since there was something like a religion of reason in France back in the late 18th century. Called the Cult of Reason, it was intended to replace Christianity, but within 2 years of its existence, it was thoroughly repudiated and they were executed, presumably for blasphemy or treason. Botton doesn’t appear to want to create a temple for an atheistic religion, but simply for values that atheists hold dear, almost sacred to the extent that you would want a building to make it very clear. I’m not entirely in support of this, if only for public relations issues, but considering the French context, there is some possible reasoning behind this and something for atheists across the world to consider about what they can utilize from religion in order to make themselves more noticed in the world at large, beyond writings and people.

The main basis of Botton’s plan at the moment is to build a series of so called “temples” in the United Kingdom. Not temples in the sense of worshipping anything, but a place of contemplation. Ironically, this is somewhat the intent of Buddhist temples, contrary to our initial ideas of idolatry or such involving the statues of Buddha that are usually quite prominent. It is not Buddha that Buddhists worship, but Buddha is a prominent figure and an exemplar in the tradition that all adherents aspire to be like. Inside the atheist temple is still a mystery, but the overall design on the outside is supposed to represent the age of the earth, 46 meters tall, each meter symbolizing a million years. The virtue embodied in this structure is that of perspective, something Buddhists have a parallel of sorts with mindfulness. If you do not realize that humans have been on earth for a minute fraction of the time we have evidence of the planet sustaining life for, let alone its physical existence which goes back over a billion years, then perhaps you are focused too much on human achievements without conceding that we are still a young phenomenon in the grand scheme of nature and the universe. This is not to deny the importance of humanity. If humanism is in any sense a result of atheism, then it necessarily follows that we should recognize humanity as something intrinsically valuable, even sacred in a metaphorical sense.

Religious architecture is something many atheists, especially British born ones, such as the late Christopher Hitchens, can appreciate even if they disagree with the sentiments and beliefs that inspired their design. Atheists don’t have to sit by and do nothing; they can build monuments to ideals that all religions and philosophies can find value and agreement on, perspective being one of them. Humanity could be another one in the future. This plan of building atheist “temples” might go differently in America, possibly because of how building permits and taxes are associated with structures designed for worship as opposed to those sponsored for other reasons that don’t fall under the exceptions churches get for tax breaks. Not to mention when you invoke religion without the devotion, people become understandably suspicious. In the U.K. it might be progressing towards a separation from religion and piety, but the two are still connected a great deal in the U.S., so it would be difficult for the American public to conceive of it as anything other than a representation of so called secularist “religion”. There may be a cultural bifurcation between monuments serving a dual religious and secular purpose and houses of worship with a primarily religious purpose, though with Botton’s idea, it is a merging of architecture and art, as done in many churches already, especially with stained glass. It doesn’t need to be called an atheist temple, but perhaps a secular temple, which has a paradoxical ring to it. Secular means of the world in the non sacred sense; profane, which in its oldest sense literally meant outside the temple.

In America, this sort of project might not be well received even by the atheist community, the main justification being that in America, focusing on education through general means instead of lowering yourself to the level of the religious is the preferred method. If you suggest that you need these sorts of objects and practices to justify your skepticism and value of reason as a virtue, you’ve betrayed the separation you maintain from your native religion. Returning to Sponville, a Frenchman like Botton, there is a possibility that even David Silverman, a fairly outspoken and strict atheist himself, would admit there is a personal spiritual side to atheism, though not in the traditional understanding of the term that involves the supernatural. But even Sponville grants that atheism should not be seen as a religion primarily because it does not have rituals, tenets or anything that someone identifying as an atheist is automatically expected to do or believe by other people sharing that label. It’s so unlike Christianity or even Buddhism when you get down to brass tacks, both of which have at least some expectations that would render me something of an anomaly in Buddhist temples anywhere, since outright atheism is somewhat discouraged against as I understand it. Something more like agnosticism seems to be at least the norm, not to mention the potential misunderstandings that can come to Westerners who investigate and participate in the sheer diversity of Buddhist meditation practices, from India to China and Japan especially.

In the long run, the difficulty of advancing the cause of skepticism, secularism and even the destigmatization of the word atheism and its derivatives, is potentially hurt by this project in London; but if done in a particular way by the American atheist population, it might actually present similar ideals, but in a way accessible to a more religious populace. The term temple creates ambiguities, so another term would need to be developed or utilize a pre existing one that reflects the virtue behind this practice of valuing perspective and other secular values without involving worship. More questions than answers yet again with this topic. Until next time, Namaste and aloha

Keeping Both Wonder and Curiosity

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/07/study-some-atheists-with-children-attend-with-religious-services/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-howard-ecklund-phd/some-atheist-scientists-w_b_1133958.html?ref=religion

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/devon-corneal/keeping-the-faith_b_1137893.html?ref=religion&ir=Religion

I don’t have children, nor do I feel like I understand them as well as I should, but something I think about seriously from time to time is how to raise my future offspring. Many would say there should be a base tradition to raise a child from, but I’d strongly disagree with that. Being raised strictly Christian with little to no exposure to Judaism and Islam, let alone the other religions in the Dharmic traditions of Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism, for instance, stunted my religious education in general. It wasn’t until high school that I had an opportunity to look deeper into various religions and perspectives on faith, including Deism and atheism. If children are allowed to make their own decision about religion without proper education on all religions, then the inevitable choice is biased because of the limitations and social pressures that have been commonly instilled. In my case, my social isolation and help from my parents to be an individual, eventually creating deep friendships, actually strengthened me to eventually sever the bonds from my church pretty conclusively. I don’t think I’ve been there in at least two to three years now. Any time I went before was for Easter, since even Xmas was basically tossed out the window. Though now that I’ve graduated from college, I think my family is even less insistent about me going, since they realize I’m an adult and am making my own decisions. Educating children about religion isn’t all though. There’s a key mistake that many parents probably make and that is not educating their children in skepticism and philosophy as well. If you don’t have that as a contrasting influence, your beliefs aren’t well thought out most of the time even if you know a great deal about various faiths of the world. There has to be a balance between inspiring a child’s wonder at things and maintaining the child’s curiosity that makes them the best kinds of philosophers, according to Gareth Matthews’ text, Philosophy and the Young Child from the early 80s. That message still holds true today in terms of educating children about both sides of the issue of belief and nonbelief.

Education about religion is important since it’s prominent across the entire world and colors a great deal of cultural practices, literary references and philosophical arguments. Even if you yourself don’t believe any of the metaphysical, epistemological or various other unfalsifiable and irrational claims, you can still expose your child to it as a source of knowledge people draw on. Taking children to church could be done for a time. But you shouldn’t just visit churches. Any parent can give the illusion of saying they’re giving their children a varied education about religion by saying they’ve had their children visit a synagogue or a mosque or the multitude of “heretic/false teaching” churches once in their lives. My own home church did something like this, having the young members learn about Mormonism, Judaism and other “Christian” churches. However, this doesn’t constitute sufficient exposure. In the limited scope of maybe 50 miles from where the church is, you could conceivably have had these kids learn about Unitarian Universalism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and other much more foreign religions. But in the limited span of time they had at Vacation Bible School, they probably only wanted to stick with theistic religions. The very idea of multiple gods or no god/gods at all would’ve apparently been too confusing for children ranging from as young as 3 to as old as mid adolescent. We seem to do this not only with philosophy for children, but very much so with religious topics. They’re presented in such a simplistic way that when they find out there’s much more diversity out there, it throws them off and the strategy relies on a likelihood that children will retreat into the only thing they feel remotely secure in. So with a crafty psychological tactic, children could conceivably learn about such things if they go onto college in an introductory religion course, but wouldn’t stray from their native faith. If you’re going to educate children about religion, do it as comprehensively as you can with basic limits on how it progresses. You don’t want to leap into complexities of theology from the start, of course, but that should be something you’re willing to explore eventually if the child is curious or has even had actual experience that they want to tell you about. Being even remotely knowledgeable about these sorts of subjects can also smooth over potentially rough relations between yourself as an atheist parent and a child who converts at some point or another, usually post college graduation. Knowing the arguments and terminology, but also bringing up counter arguments and criticism without appearing to be an outsider can make the situation easier to pacify and adjust to a state of relative coexistence. It therefore benefits both you and your child in different ways throughout your lives to learn about religions even if you both eventually conclude that they’re nonsense.

Teaching children to be skeptical of religion, pseudoscience and the like is equally, if not slightly more, substantial because of how it enables the child to grow up and not simply believe in things by authority or faulty reasoning. Even if the child converts and believes things vastly opposed to your own, you can fall back on what you taught them, if only to moderate those beliefs by the very education you instilled in them. The child may not be able to get over the mental block that was initiated by some near death experience or other mystical encounter with the “sacred,” You may be able to make them reexamine their beliefs more critically and possibly reject them in favor of less ridiculous ones. Or if nothing else, you’ll make them realize the need to maintain  equanimity with you in terms of discussing a subject you’re not only familiar with in terms of the basic tenets of that faith, even if it’s an eclectic one pieced together, but also able to objectively examine and see whether it holds up to reason and evidence. They won’t be able to convert you so easily, if at all, since you educated them and hopefully haven’t softened in terms of practice. But you can also be much more civil than a parent who would otherwise be too harsh in criticizing the child for believing in something for reasons that you thought you communicated were illogical without showing them this directly from those faiths in question. If you realize that the child was bound to consider religion at least partially, it’s better than being excessively secularist to the sound of antitheism, opposing the very existence of religious belief even at the cost of human liberty which you also value. To teach children about science, philosophy, and other subjects of worth can be done by the educational system, but encouraging them to think critically about those subjects and engage with religious people and a religious culture such as America is something a parent is responsible for much more than any school is. It can be difficult to strike a balance here as well. Being staunchly anti religious would be counter-productive, but simply encouraging philosophy can be too weak, since a certain segment of religious believers have significant philosophical training and can twist the principles around with theological sophistry to make a person reject their disbelief rather quickly, not only because of their authority as an instructor, but because they genuinely know philosophy better than the student. A person who has cultivated understanding of both belief and nonbelief in the supernatural is better prepared for not only the world of philosophy in general, but also interpersonal relationships with people you may fundamentally disagree with in many ways, but can be friends with regardless. Most of my own friends, for instance, online or otherwise, are supernaturalists of one form or another. But our shared interests have trumped what could otherwise be a contentious subject that we rarely, if ever, bring up. A disciplined secularism is far better than one run amok with emotional baggage.

Simply educating children about religion without the counterbalance of secularism and philosophy is just as potentially bad as just teaching secularism and philosophy itself. The child could become an arrogant intellectual who regards religious people as beyond and below them, not even being polite or courteous to them in any sense because of their unjustified sense of entitlement as one who doesn’t believe whatever believers affirm as true. It would also reinforce the negative stereotype of atheists all the more if you bring up an adolescent being as fundamentalist and rigid in their beliefs as the religious people they criticize. The irony would be palpable, yet painful. You also don’t want a child to simply speak about religion as if they know about it without also being able to criticize religion for the nonsense it more often than not claims as truth. Belief in the resurrection of the dead, miraculous healings, attributing ethics and metaphysics to the divine instead of to humanity where they originated, and so many other inanities that would make most people grind their teeth in frustration. But if you comprehend where the believer comes from in their perspective about the world and how they think it came to be and its inner workings, then you’re better equipped to show them how it’s not only unnecessary to believe many of these things, but unreasonable on its face. Better conversation from both sides of this battle of worldviews starts with good education. Neither lackadaisical teaching about world religions nor rigid adherence to logical positivism will make for a well adjusted individual. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

WDAD: What Do Atheists Do About Ethics?

http://civic.bev.net/atheistsnrv/articles/definition.html

http://carm.org/can-atheists-be-ethical

http://www.ethicsmorals.com/ethicsatheist.html

http://www.atheism-analyzed.net/Ethics.htm

http://www.atheists.org/Ethics_Without_Gods

If atheists aren’t accused of trying to take over America (along with Jews?), they are most likely being told they are immoral, amoral or otherwise without any moral basis for their actions. While there may be atheists that behave and believe this way, I’m willing to wager most atheists are more than capable of discerning between right and wrong and good and evil in a variety of situations. Hesitating because of particularly ambivalent issues or general moral gray areas does not make you amoral, it makes you that much more moral for actually considering whether the action is justified. And just because you lack a belief in a creator, the so called arbiter of morality, hardly suggests that you think all morality is completely arbitrary. There’s diversity amongst theists about morality and ethics on issues like abortion or capital punishment, so that already gives me an indication that morality is flexible but not haphazard. Atheists might not have stringent and unbending orthodoxy on what’s right and wrong, but I guarantee we have less likelihood of leaping to unsound ethical judgments based on tradition or authority.

The biggest stumbling block I’ve found for theists even acknowledging the possibility of atheists being moral in any sense is the idea that they have no accountability to God. But as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m fairly accountable already to my fellow humans, especially because they can directly confront me and punish me if necessary for correction. Not having my actions monitored by some entity that doesn’t appear to intervene except when it chooses to (so called miracles or other “acts of God”) doesn’t mean that I think I can get away with anything. Justice system aside, we have a conscience built into us that has nothing to do with a soul or the afterlife, but simply a recognition that we have done wrong in the immediate sense.  The notion that humanist ethics are completely relativist is mistaken on its face, since there is, if nothing else, a persistent factor that remains for consideration at all times: humanity and its capacity for suffering. When I deliberate an action, part of my motivation should be to harm the least amount of people possible and to help the most people possible. I’m not a strict utilitarian, but the notion that I should strive to help people instead of harm them does cross my mind. There are times, however, when making people suffer in some sense can be a benefit to them in the future. All in all, though, to say my ethics are in any way claiming that I can do anything I want without consequences ignores the crucial parallel aspect of many atheists to theists: we both take the suffering of a fellow human seriously. I do good things to advance human flourishing, I avoid bad things to lower human suffering; simple and yet complex in the flexibility of situations that come about.

The insistence that atheists might have morals compelling them to behave in a certain way is countered by saying they have no absolute to base those morals around. They are, even if not relative normatively, they are relative descriptively. Morals to an atheist, theists claim commonly, are not consistent across generations or in general because of the multitude of perspectives and lack of an ultimate source. There is also the claim that atheists follow experimental ethics; what works is good. As if this is a completely bad thing: if I find something is beneficial in a particular situation, but not in others, it behooves me to be particular and not general. Focusing on practicality in ethics should not be the absolute focus, but it shouldn’t be thrown out either. Ethics don’t require absolutes, but consistent principles that govern behavior. It shouldn’t focus on conformity with the letter of the law, but the intent behind it (or the spirit if you’re of a Christian or Jewish flavor). Lack of a God as foundational to one’s ethics does not automatically render one a relativist.

Christians usually admit atheists can be ethical, even if they can’t be righteous before God. Even if I am not following your God’s law completely, many would argue I might actually be following the law better than Christians, albeit they would also insist I’m a legalist because I’m following the law for fear of punishment instead of doing it out of genuine goodness in my heart.  That notion has always disgusted me since I heard of it. Atheists can be virtuous people for the sake of virtue just as much as Christians. In fact, I’d argue all the more for atheists, since they don’t pretend to have some reward for them or any sort of holiness surrounding their actions.

And in terms of considering the pain non humans suffer, atheists are not by any means so anthropocentric (centered on only humans) that they cannot concede that animals deserve to be treated humanely, even if they don’t deserve treatment as human equals, since they couldn’t understand that concept. I treat my cats with respect, occasionally play-fighting with them, and do not consider it permissible to let animals become feral just because you don’t want to take care of them. Treating animals humanely also involves the decision of euthanasia that is equally controversial for humans. But in both cases, there are factors outside the individual that apply. With humans, there is the relation of that human to other people and so they must consider that in their decisions. With animals, the humans that own them have to make the decision for them in a reversal of the choice a human makes for assisted suicide. To think atheists don’t contemplate these sorts of things is to give us too little credit merely because we don’t believe in something that is either unverifiable or generally useless.

Atheist ethics only differ significantly and originally from theist ethics in how they relate to the supernatural. Atheists don’t derive any ethical obligations from the supernatural, so there are no moral duties to respect the gods or rest on a Sabbath or any such thing. The focus is instead on humanity and duties to it as a community and on interpersonal levels as well. In that sense, even if atheists don’t have absolute ethics, I’d say they have far better ethical priorities. If your focus is only on pleasing God and following all of its commandments and looking for its approval, humans are at best a secondary concern, since you don’t have to please humans to be good in God’s eyes. With that thought, I honestly tend to think that theist ethics are not only indefensible from a humanist perspective, but anti humanist in nature, since the goal is not flourishing for humanity, but flourishing for individual humans or particular groups of humans in heaven, whatever that specifically entails. The question remains; which would you rather trust: an atheist who has well thought out but not absolute ethics or a theist who has absolute adherence to ethics they haven’t thought out? Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

No Southern Hospitality For Atheists

http://www.bastropenterprise.com/features/x2132687894/Student-challenges-prayer-at-Bastrop-graduation
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/hed7y/threatened_to_contact_aclu_for_prayer_at/
http://www.blaghag.com/2011/05/atheist-high-schooler-receives-death.html
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/standard_small_town_saga.php
http://friendlyatheist.com/2011/05/21/what-happened-at-damon-fowlers-graduation/

This topic jumped out at me due to my near addictive interest in issues of church and state. Just recently in Louisiana the graduation at the local high school in Bastrop, Louisiana proceeded with a student directly violating the First Amendment’s establishment clause; in a pretty duplicitous manner, might I add. This was a willful and unjustified protest against the changes the school put in place, responding to Damon Fowler, a fellow secularist, and his allegation that they were not only violating the Constitution, but Louisiana state law, which has a similar provision against laws that discriminated against or favored any religion. Technically atheism is not a religion, but one can instead claim that it was favoring Christianity, and since this is a state sponsored institution, a public high school, doing an invocation that favors a particular religion is unconstitutional. Here’s the first of two different videos involving willful defiance against the change in the program from a prayer to a moment of silence. The student in question, Laci Mattice, stated at the beginning of the ceremonies that she was originally going to lead an invocation, but that she was instead told to lead a moment of silence. I don’t see why leading a moment of silence is less important than leading a prayer. The worst part of this was her trying to weasel out of her official duties by disclaiming that before she “fulfilled [her] obligation” she wanted to thank God for helping her graduate; because she really needed to pray to be the salutatorian instead of actually studying. Afterwards, she tried to sound amicable to nonbelievers by asking that those who believed as she did bow their heads to pray. But she never temporarily suspended her duties with those disclaimers; it doesn’t work that way. As personal and individual as she tried to make it, she was sponsored by the school in that position and she had no right to do that prayer regardless of her personal beliefs or being offended by the replacing of the “traditional” invocation with a moment of silence. Pure and simple, she was not only in dereliction of her official duties, but she was spitting in the face of religious freedom. And don’t tell me that her letting all the Christians bow their heads was being charitable to non Christians. She wanted to shove this prayer down everyone’s throats in direct opposition to the school itself telling her that she could not do a prayer. And what does the school do? They sit by as the status quo is maintained even in spite of an affirmation to the contrary by the school authorities. There’s a time and place for being religious and thanking your creator for academic success, and it’s called the baccalaureate. Quite possibly, the first video might have been a baccalaureate, but the sources suggest this was related to, but not the same as, the graduation ceremony itself.

This video, however, seems to be the graduation ceremony, where the same student proceeds to go with a nearly identical process. She says she respects other people’s beliefs, but then proceeds to disrespect them by saying that her desire to thank Jesus trumps the rights of everyone to not hear it in a public context sponsored by the state. She asks her fellow students to join in, again trying to slip around the school sponsored prayer bit, but you can clearly hear the audience joining in, so she might as well have just announced to everyone, “Hey, we’re having a prayer, even though they told us we can’t legally do it. They can’t touch us, we’re the majority!” It’s a contemptible display of majority tyranny. Tennessee can be pretty bad about it in certain regions, but I can’t recall getting even a minute vibe similar to this travesty. And in both instances, they give a pittance of time for the moment of silence, maybe 15 seconds, while they get at least twice that length for their own public soapbox to condescendingly preach.

The student in question, Damon Fowler, was reported by his brother to have gotten death threats from some people. Couple this with the social ostracism from a class that’s practically the same size as mine in a relatively small area and it’s amazing he hasn’t been outright attacked. This whole incident was an unnecessary and unfounded vindication of a majority’s wants over a minority’s needs. Atheists don’t want to be treated like everyone else; they deserve and need to be treated like everyone else. For someone to ask their classmates, even nicely, to pray is to isolate non Christian students. But with the community at large cheering this girl on, it just reinforces this negative tradition that anyone not in the majority religion should sit by and let their supposed guarantee of freedom from state sponsored religion get trampled on.

Any Christian reader should not get the idea that I have a problem with students praying privately and reading their bible in non class contexts at school. My problem is with people being so proud of their own faith that once they’ve realized they are in a majority, they think they deserve special treatment. Even if they preface it by saying other people have their right to believe or not, when you use a position of authority like this to pray your specific prayer, you instate the exact opposite feeling which you were trying to inspire before. It only makes religious diversity seem all the less likely when you think being a majority religion or a religion of many founding fathers gives you carte blanche to speak openly about it with no fear of persecution. Not to mention it clashes with an admonition from Jesus himself in Matthew 6:5 that you should pray privately to God, so as not to seem like a hypocrite who wants to be seen by everyone as religious. Your outward behavior is not what God cares about, from what I understand; it’s your internal convictions. And aren’t we supposed to be in the last days where Christians are persecuted? Clearly these kids aren’t worried that Christians will be persecuted since they feel they can just pray a Christian prayer and no government will get on them. I only hope the ACLU and FFRF get on the school about this, though I’m not sure of the exact intervention they could do at this point. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Religion and Secularism's Questions and Answers

http://www.bigquestionsonline.com/features/against-the-%E2%80%9Canswer-bank%E2%80%9D-theory-of-religion
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/09/college-becomes-nations-first-to-offer-major-in-secularism/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/us/08secular.html?_r=1

This time we have an interesting pairing of topics. The first is from an article I found over a month ago and recently decided to comment on, since the bin Laden story and everything preceding it caught my interest and demanded my thoughts more compellingly than this, which is more of a speculative topic. As much as I like reading Stephen Prothero’s blog posts, I still have yet to read his popular book concerning religious literacy in America, let alone his work from 2010 called God Is Not One, which is sitting somewhere in my ever growing library. But this essay he linked to from one of his posts on Belief Blog intrigued me enough to add it to a growing backlog of topics I want to talk about, including one I tend to avoid: evolution/creation/intelligent design and the debate that goes along with it (humanities major before science enthusiast, see.). But onto the actual topic.

When we think of religion, we usually associate it with those who believe they have answers, usually about questions of existential significance: when the world will end, why bad things happen to good people and so on. The group that believes the world is ending May 21, 2011, comes to mind for eschatology. Or Westboro Baptist Church, who asserts that America is being judged daily by a God who likes to play Risk with real human lives just to punish us for accepting homosexuality, as to why soldiers get blown up on a near daily basis. The list could go on forever with any person who flaunts their religiosity as the basis of their worldview. Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and other 2012 Republican nominee hopefuls would also be part of this group. Prothero calls this an “answer bank” theory of religion. It’s most popular with religions focused on orthodoxy, or correct teaching. Christianity is notorious for this in the form of accusations of heresy by the Catholic Church towards many thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas in at least one isolated incident, I believe. Origen and Eckhart, on the other hand, are better known by heresiologists (yes, that’s a word), those who study heretics. In Christianity, if you don’t believe the right things about God, Jesus, salvation, etc, more often than not, you’re regarded as heretical, teaching false doctrine or other expressions depending on denomination and level of education. On the other end of the spectrum are people who are more flexible in the long run than their counterparts. The ones I speak of focus on orthopraxy, or correct practice. The common example is Judaism, though from my experience Buddhism can work just as well. But Judaism serves as a more accessible faith for a counterexample to the faith it un/intentionally spawned. The distinction of cultural and religious Jews attests to this, not to mention the “relative” coexistence as I see it from my limited understanding of the Jewish community, excluding Zionists, I suppose. Jews care less about the precise teachings and more on practicing what you preach, though that tendency does exist in Christianity as well. This is where the divisive and confusing nature of studying people’s beliefs comes up.

The importance of religious studies shouldn’t be overstated, but it shouldn’t be underestimated either. When people hear I’m a religion major; or even if they hear my major expressed as religious studies; I guarantee 50% will ask this question first, “Are you going into the ministry/Are you going to be a minister?” It’s ironic that saying you’re a religion major is such a conversation starter, when talking about religion outside of an academic framework, on the other hand, is more often than not a conversation stopper. But religious studies’ value lies with the questions it inspires rather than the answers various writers and traditions pose to those questions, such as you’d find in theology. Many of the faithful would no doubt object to this, on the grounds that they feel more comfortable with having these big questions settled to a certain extent, even if they also admit they have faith in these things. But as I said in an older post of mine entitled “Comfortable Certainty or Chaotic Contentment,” religion is a starting point, not the end of human endeavors. But many religious people, such as Augustine of Hippo (Christian) and Averroes (Muslim), said that religion and philosophy can have a mutual relationship, though I wouldn’t reach the same conclusions they do. Faith seeking understanding is one thing, but balancing it with understanding seeking faith can work in a paradoxical sense in the discipline of religious studies.

Interestingly enough, a college in South California has brought up what may be called the flipside of the coin that religious studies offers in terms of the big questions about life. When you bring up a “secularism” major in a conversation, I imagine people would react with confusion or hostility, depending on their understanding of the term “secularism”. If they view it as the enemy of everything good in the world or a progenitor of the New World Order, either way, they’ve already missed the point. Secularism isn’t perfect; I don’t think anyone would claim that. But it does try to solve questions in terms of substantive issues; whether something is true or not; as opposed to the problem of interpretation in religious studies; let alone its distant parent theology, who sired the notorious bastard child I’ve studied under for years alongside its ancestor.

The growth of secularism intrigued Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist of religion who’s written books and articles on the spread of nonbelief and cultural distance from religion. This was a large part of his desire to start this major as the first of its kind, along with its relevance in a growing secular culture even in America. One can only hope that this spreads across the country, if only to inform people more of atheism, agnosticism, freethought and such. As people begin to understand that irreligious/nonreligious people are not necessarily hostile to religion when they have ceased to believe in God/etc, the relationship between believers and nonbelievers can improve by leaps and bounds. Once you understand why skeptics are slow to believe in such things as the resurrection and auras, you may also begin to see why people choose different belief systems in general, supernatural or natural. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

On Secularism and Censorship

Less than a week after I blogged on the billboard in North Carolina, that same sign has been vandalized. The perpetrators, still at large (not that their punishment would stop future attempts to interfere in this protest against atheist discrimination), spray painted an arrow with the words “Under God” being guided to the point in the sign between “One Nation” and “Indivisible”. The sign will be repaired, if only to persist in countering what this incident demonstrates about the pledge in its current state. Contrary to the popular insistence that the pledge unites the country, it actually has divided it with the insertion of “Under God” in the pledge in the 50s, the so called McCarthy era, where Communism was the enemy of freedom and we were afraid the Soviet Union was trying to infiltrate the country from within, among other things that fostered a sense of paranoia and nationalism. And this American exclusivism has reared its vicious fangs again in this vandalism of a sign that had no intent of insulting believers in God by displaying the pledge as it has existed for over half a century. In fact, it would be the reverse, since the original pledge formed in 1892 had existed unaltered for over 60 years before the insistence that America had to be understood as a Christian nation, which thankfully our present president has countered since his election in 2008.

The secularist group that funded the sign seems to be the more patriotic of the two groups in this underrepresented conflict in present issues. We can try to classify the two groups as traditionalists and revisionists; the traditionalists representing the secularists and other citizens (believers in God or otherwise) that don’t agree with the addition of “Under God” in the pledge, preferring it to be in its original form and the revisionists representing the theocratic and “Christian nation” fanatics that insist that if you don’t believe in God, you’re not a real American, though the latter is dangerously close to the vein that would suggest that only Caucasian Europeans who are explicitly Protestant Christian and Republican are the purest form of American citizens. I’m not insisting that every believer in God is the second group, since there are those that believe that religion and politics have distinct spheres and are only overlapping within very particular parameters (like Jon Meacham for example). A church doesn’t need the government’s approval to exist for example, nor does the government need the church to persist in its management. If people in the government start believing less and less in God, it does not necessarily have a negative effect on how the government is run as long as they still persist in following principles that are agreed upon on a more fundamental level, such as the importance of a governing document like the constitution and protecting the rights of citizens as elaborated in that document. Whether one is atheist, theist or anywhere in between, it’s not as if you can’t be a patriotic American and have pride in what the nation’s ideals are, such as inclusivism without hard relativism, tolerance without blind acceptance and freedom of expression to the extent that you don’t push that freedom into “might makes right”. If we began to think that perhaps not all the traditions we were raised in are always the right one or the end standard for how we should behave in every situation, then we might begin to work towards returning the pledge back to its original form. The problem here is our attachment to familiarity.

Even my parents are in a generation that didn’t really know a pledge without under God even existed. Their parents would’ve been raised in a time when the pledge was probably just said “One Nation Indivisible”, but with their age affecting their survival into the next generation as well as the more general attitude of raw progress that affects even my own generation to the exclusion of archaic or outdated modes of thought from the early 20th century, it’s a wonder any of them have tried to protest and revise the pledge from how it was when they were in school. I’m thinking the next time I have a chance to talk with my grandparents and even the surviving great grandparent I have, I would ask them about this event and what they think of it, what they remember and what should be done about this. I’ve never really gotten the feeling that my elders have been especially intolerant of people that differ from them in such ways as not believing in God at all (as opposed to just being Jewish, Muslim or Catholic for example) or not being white or particularly democratic (such as in the Middle East or China with recent events), but if it does happen to be the case, I would want to at least try to understand why they would believe that way in a time when, however sheltered they may have been from many cultures outside of North America, there were ideals that at least took the phrase “live and let live” seriously. America seemed to follow the original motto more to the letter, e pluribus unum, from many, one. People were different, but they were all American. There are always clarifications, since racism was almost a tradition back then as well, but evidently the relationship is mutual: the old can learn from the young, but the youths can learn from the elders as well. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.

American Atheists Convention On Easter

http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/04/03/easter.atheists/index.html?hpt=T2

While Easter Sunday is nearly to be celebrated (early in the day, no doubt) by Christians across the world, on this same weekend, the American Atheists are meeting in their 36th convention. This year’s goal in particular is to note that while there are still widespread stereotypes about atheism (one of them especially mistaken, since worshipping Satan as a god would decidedly negate the idea of atheism, lack of god belief) atheists are becoming more accepted, albeit in limited ways. The main way David Silverman, best known as an animator for The Simpsons, observes the change is in the publishing of books such as The God Delusion and The End of Faith by authors Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. While this is a step forward, the dominant stereotype does seem to be ironically reflected in a sense with the group itself. The stereotype that atheism is somehow a religious or ideological movement seeking to destroy Christianity would potentially be seen as validated with the existence of groups such as American Atheists and the Rational Response Squad (popular for the Blasphemy Challenge online). But this line of thinking is mistaken on a few levels.

Groupings of a group that share certain beliefs or lack thereof in the case of atheists does not suggest they are actively seeking to eliminate groups that differ from them. Otherwise the suspicion of Christian bible study groups or the like trying to erase Jews, Catholics and Muslims from the map would probably have some credulity. Yet it is a minority of those groups that seek to eliminate some group, such as Army of God advocating the justified use of violence against abortionists. I have yet to see a group of atheists that is well known in public having any agenda to eliminate religion as a phenomenon from the world (except perhaps the Brights, but I’m not sure of that). If anything, the advocacy is more along the lines of fair treatment of atheism as a minority position in America, alongside such like minded beliefs as Buddhism, Jainism or Laveyan Satanists, all decidedly minorities in this country and all lacking a belief in any deities. The American Atheists want to be recognized equally as Americans alongside Protestants, Jews, Catholics and Muslims, though modern thought doesn’t exactly grant them a lot of trust as I’ve observed. But when Mormons and homosexuals (supposedly viewed by Christians as blasphemers or abominations respectively) are trusted more than atheists (many of whom were more than likely raised Christian), the issue lies with education. If people are told such deceptions as atheists being without an objective source for morality or being against capitalism or other American pastimes (even though there is such a thing as Christian communism), then it’s no wonder atheists are treated like black sheep in America.

Not to mention people have the wrong idea about why the convention for American Atheists is held on Easter. It’s demonstrably paranoid to suggest that they’re using the weekend as a venue to attack Easter. Makes sense for them to choose that weekend, since as Silverman puts it. “The hotels are cheap, and everybody has time off." The choice is little more than an economic expediency, like someone hoarding their sick days and then using them all up for a holiday, not something uncommon to Christians and atheists alike within the right job, I imagine. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.