WDAD: What Do Atheists Do About Religious Norms? Part 1

http://atheism.about.com/od/aboutreligion/p/StudyReligion.htm

http://atheism.about.com/od/christmasholidayseason/p/AtheistsIgnore.htm

http://irregulartimes.com/further6.html

http://atheism.about.com/od/ideasforatheistactivism/a/AffirmSwear.htm

Being an atheist in America is still difficult even after attempts by many prominent nonbelievers over the decades to normalize it as part of modern culture. Madalyn Murray O’Hair comes to mind, as well as Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett. Christopher Hitchens has American citizenship as well, originally from Great Britain, and Richard Dawkins, a British native, also has made strong strides for nonbelievers. American Atheists is one of the most prominent groups to promote atheism as a culture and community that also shares many values with Christian Americans. But there are many persistent preconceptions people have about atheism that cannot be solved with even the prominent ad campaigns American Atheists has done, as I spoke about in “Atheists Patriot Ad Campaign,”  There are so many, in fact, I have to divide this into two parts. This week will be issues of atheists studying religion and whether that is hypocritical, whether atheists can celebrate holidays of a religious origin and whether atheists must swear on the bible in court.

Something I encounter virtually every time I speak about my undergraduate major, religious studies (sometimes phrased as religion), is that if you are studying religion, you’re presumed to have considered going into ministry. The idea that religion has to be studied from the position of a believer always irks me, since it suggests that one cannot really study religion in an academic context of its effect on culture, on people, as philosophy, as literature, etc, without believing that it reflects reality. The default notion historically for studying religion (understood intrinsically as Christianity and Judaism by association) was to minister to people about theology, to be someone people could consult about these sorts of issues. Pastors can serve that purpose, but only in a limited framework, since their primary goal is counseling more than actually educating people overall. I am in no way doing a disservice to religion or even insulting adherents of any particular religion if I study it and reach a conclusion that I personally don’t believe it, but still find it interesting to read about. A good 20% of my personal library is texts about Christianity, primarily theological or apologetic in nature, if only to see what believers present as enumerations of beliefs and defenses thereof. I can finish any of those texts with an improved understanding of Christianity and yet remain an atheist at the end of it. I would say my study of religion actually helped me a great deal in confronting my own beliefs and comparing them with texts presenting other convictions from their individual perspectives. I gained skills to analyze things that benefit me even today and that is nothing for anyone to denigrate by claiming I’m being disingenuous. If that’s the case, then many Christians who do the same thing in their spare time and ultimately conclude they don’t agree with it are basically as guilty, even if they don’t do it academically. They’ve still looked at something they disagree about with a partly discerning eye and come away a more knowledgeable person (I hope).

Another issue that persists even in spite of pretty clear secular manifestations of such things as Christmas and Easter (the two most prominent religious holidays celebrated even by so called religious people who only come into church two times a year) is a prejudice of atheists being supposedly hypocritical in taking part in religious holidays when they don’t believe in God. While Easter may have more explicit connections to God, Christmas is agreed by even theologians and many more fundamentalist Christians to not be historically justified or have any theological relevance to Jesus. Jesus was more than likely born much later or earlier than the winter, especially with cultural considerations of the shepherds in relation to their sheep. The date decided through church practices in the past coincided with Saturnalia, a pagan practice that Christians sought to co-opt and it has remained that way in spite of historians of varying faiths, Christians included, concluding that it is purely a matter of popularity, not dissimilar from All Hallow’s Eve in the Catholic calendar following Halloween chronologically. A certain group of Christians don’t even celebrate either Christmas or Halloween, for instance, suggesting that they have been so intertwined with non Christian religious practices and are not worthy of devotion. There’s also the observation that Jesus never said to observe anything related to his birth, but only related to his alleged resurrection as he spoke to his disciples. Easter is the more contentious of the holidays, since it is agreed upon by all Christians to focus on God and its involvement with the world through Jesus’ Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection. But, like Christmas and Halloween, there is a way to celebrate Easter without being clothed in reverence to a deity. Merely celebrating spring and new life coming to be through that season seems sufficient to me. I don’t have to get up at the crack of dawn to appreciate spring, since the sunrise will happen every day regardless, as far as I’m concerned. Regardless of the sacred overtones or undertones of any day, it doesn’t exclude atheists from participating in a different, but similar, way. I can get married, but that doesn’t require I pledge my fidelity before God anymore than me getting candy eggs at Easter means I have to believe Jesus came back to life. It is in no way contradictory to celebrate a holiday’s non religious virtues and ideals, since, in all cases, they have already long since been separated by the practice of consumer culture inculcating in us the desire to buy not only candy and presents in convergence with Xmas, Halloween and Easter, but decorations to adorn our house to let others know that we celebrate the holiday. But this in no way establishes (mostly) whether you’re Christian or otherwise. Similarly, I can share time with family and have a good experience, but I don’t need to have extraneous beliefs attached to a special day like Xmas in order to appreciate it. The mere shared experience of happiness and enjoyment is special in itself.

The final question asked (for now) is something actually more easily solved by historical progress. Atheists, from what I recall, were historically not trusted to give oaths, though outspoken atheists didn’t exist prominently until probably 50 years ago or so. But now atheists are trusted to give oaths, albeit technically they are called affirmations in legal terminology. The distinction lies between making a claim without religious sentiment that you will tell the truth and nothing but the truth as opposed to swearing to God, which some Christians would argue contradicts what Jesus says in Matthew 5:37 “Simply let your yes be yes and your no be no,” If atheists can assert that they will tell the truth because it makes sense to and that there will be repercussions if they are found to be lying; while Christians seem to think they have some moral high ground when making an oath to God and also doing it partly because they might be charged with perjury; perhaps the former is simpler than the latter. This is one of those questions that has a simple answer and yet is complicated by a basic lack of education. If you are in a court of law, you have no compulsion to take any religious oath, and if you want to put your hand on a bible and swear to both your god and the court that you won’t lie, I can’t help but chuckle, because it’s unnecessary on its face. Why can’t you just not lie because you don’t want to be lied to? Is it that much of an obsession that you need to tell God you won’t lie in a criminal trial?

Atheists have no problem with a religious culture existing and being practiced by people, but they do not need to be practiced by everyone in that sense and there shouldn’t be any pressure to conform by believers. There are secular manifestations and practices of religious holidays and norms, such as the alternative of affirmation versus swearing on the bible for atheists and the like. Not to mention there’s common ground to be found in sharing time with friends and family that transcends those borders between the believing and the unbelieving. Next week, we’ll confront the norms related to patriotism and also that little superstitious phrase uttered when you sneeze with its own history and irony when saying it to atheists. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

Why The Bible Is Still Important Today

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/20/hfr-my-take-read-the-bible-even-if-you-dont-believe-it/

http://www.cnngo.com/explorations/life/whats-it-be-crucified-501065#ixzz1JyCX2oL5


Since Easter weekend just recently passed, and I was at a convention last weekend, I thought it’d be appropriate to do a catch-up commentary on the relevance of the practice of crucifixion for devotional purposes. For most people, this would seem quite bizarre, since it’s not crucifixion in a limited sense. These people actually get nails hammered into their palms and feet, albeit temporarily, and hang on the cross for a predetermined amount of time. Some have been doing this for 30 years or more as an act of devotion on this holiday of importance to Christians around the world. But to many people, even those moderately familiar with the story of Jesus of Nazareth’s life, death and alleged resurrection, this is not only bizarre, but outright unimaginable. To think that people in this modern age would subject themselves to a form of capital punishment that was used thousands of years ago, and for the most part is barely prominent except in archaic jurisprudence in the Middle East, boggles the mind. But the devotional nature of crucifixion to make any sense, it behooves people to read the book from which the significance of that act to Christians today comes from, the Bible.

The practice of devotional crucifixion is done mostly in the Phillipines, though there is a group called the Brothers of Light, or Hermanos de Luz, who have done it since the 19th century. The nature and sequence of the acts are a reference to the Passion of Jesus as he was tortured and beaten before being crucified on Good Friday. The Stations of the Cross, commonly enacted in Catholic and sometimes Anglican and Lutheran churches, are a related ritual, though there isn’t so much of the self flagellation and actual nailing of one’s hands and feet to a cross that is done by the devout in the Phillipines and Mexico. There is much preparation done beforehand and a long process of self mortification, meditation and the like to truly have as much of a connection with the suffering of their Messiah as possible. The wounds they get from the nails, along with the severe damage to their backs from whipping, can take as long as two weeks to heal, but the believers insist it is worth it to gain the closeness they desire to feel with the man that died for their sins. Of course, the duration of the crucifixion is much shorter than Jesus’, but there are many other parts to this process, such as the self whipping mentioned before as well as a part of the ceremony where, similar to the Stations of the Cross, a cross is carried partway to the site of the actual crucifixion. So many people would be unwilling to go this far, primarily for the amount of time put into the whole process, but also the degree of pain one has to go through in mere imitation of Jesus, who didn’t even die from the crucifixion itself necessarily in a Christian understanding. And even if Jesus did die from the crucifixion itself, his death was quicker than most, who usually take at least a few days to slowly waste away from starvation and dehydration. Aside from the literal risks to many people of even being crucified for a short period of time, many people don’t necessarily read the bible, even as believers in Jesus, to the extent that they are focused on Jesus’ crucifixion, but moreso, his resurrection. This kind of focus may not be the case everywhere, but one can argue that even many strong believers in Christianity may not focus so much on Jesus’ passion, his suffering and punishment before and during crucifixion, including the well known wound in his side from the mythical Spear of Longinus. The centrality of Jesus suffering doesn’t seem as pertinent as the dying and coming back from the dead to a common everyday believer, one can claim. And this is where a bigger issue comes up with the topic of religious, and more specifically Biblical, literacy.

The overall importance of the Bible in the United States cannot be overstated. Regardless of whether one agrees with the overall message it communicates, myself included as one of those skeptical of such claims about the prophecies in the holy book, the relevance of its story, particularly that of the Gospels, is important enough to people that you find copies of the book in hotels, and they are handed out by the Gideon group at colleges, high schools, and other public areas across the country. The book has been translated into hundreds of different languages across the world, and has sold billions of copies. Many people would use this to suggest that the Bible must be true, but one could propagate anything across the world with enough money and connections, but it wouldn’t make its claims more or less true because you can find it in virtually every inhabited area of the world. If anything, the popularity and general propagation of the Bible as a literary phenomenon only attests to the accessibility it has to everyone. One can read it as literature, as a cultural text for the Israelites in the case of the Tanakh and Old Testament, as religious wisdom, or other messages of salvation and devotion. The importance of knowing the basics of the Bible in any of the humanities, such as history, English, music, and even philosophy, is unavoidable, particularly in the South (I should know).
Lots of versions of the Bible exist, some of them less reverent than others. I’m partial to satire, so I’d recommend the Brick Testament or if you want a nonbeliever’s take on it, the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible is good. Most people prefer the King James Version, though the popularity of that translation might owe more to tradition that accurate translation, such as the infamous “virgin” translation in the Old Testament prophecy that relates supposedly to Mary. English Standard and New International Versions are also relatively popular, from what I’ve found. I have a physical copy of the Bible in my collection, in the Oxford Annotated style, which is supposedly the most academically rigorous translation, though I’m never certain on these things.

I could probably go on longer, but I’d probably seem disingenuous in praising a book that I’m only familiar with by cultural background and required courses on the Bible in my religious studies’ education, though a great deal more of my studies in Christianity are in theology, with a backdrop to the Bible, instead of direct study of the text itself in context. But I can’t recommend the text enough. The only problem is that, as Isaac Asimov said, “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” Of course, there are always going to be disagreements about proper reading, but that’s neither here nor there. What’s important is that we see the Bible as important in one way or another. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

The Meaning(s) of Easter

http://www.barna.org/barna-update/article/13-culture/356-most-americans-consider-easter-a-religious-holiday-but-fewer-correctly-identify-its-meaning

After going to an Easter sunrise service (staying up the entire night so as not to get 2-3 hours of sleep and be grumpy about it) and hearing the pastor note a study from the Barna Group about how people regard Easter, I thought I’d look into it. After a cursory glance, I took a well deserved nap. And after analyzing it in more detail, I am somewhat disappointed as to how they use their relatively small sampling (a little over 1000 people) to suggest that everyone in the U.S. is ignorant about Easter’s meaning in the Christian context. Some of the answers they gave seem to be there just to make the evangelicals and born again Christians feel superior that they know the “true” meaning of Easter. Some people suggest it is reflective of welcoming the spring or of Passover (which are both true in terms of meaning you can derive from the holiday). Some of the answers are admittedly more concerned with “consumer culture” as it’s termed or the general togetherness the holiday brings. None of these are necessarily the incorrect meaning unless you view the Christian answer as the only true one, which is one of my issues with such groups using studies to justify their status quo or lack thereof.

There’s also their distinction between seeing Easter as a religious holiday and of seeing the “true” meaning of Easter in the alleged resurrection of Jesus. How are these different except in the specificity; that is, assuming there has to be one meaning only? It’s not as if they’re complaining overall; they seem to have a concern about people in my age category and their progressively “secular” thinking making them forget that Easter is even a religious holiday. But the very way they phrase the distinction of the groups that are mistaken about Easter and the minority that affirms the specific things they want to hear troubles me; as if being an evangelical or a born again Christian is not affirming a religious position or should be the majority position. The Barna Group seems more concerned about groups affirming that Easter is both a religious holiday and focused on Jesus’ resurrection. Although even that is observed in the statistics (however suspect they are) to be questionable since less than half of all the age demographics affirm that Jesus’ resurrection is the meaning of Easter, meaning any group affirming exactly what the Barna Group thinks is right are in the minority of what is a miniscule representation of the 300 million+ people in the U.S..

The issue they’re not seeing is that people are not educated enough about Christianity or Easter in the first place to really know what the Christian meaning is in the context of what is commonly their native religion. This issue is not uncommon, especially with a book by Stephen Prothero coming to mind: Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn’t. He notes that America is one of the least religiously literate nations in the world; however advanced we may be in other areas of consideration, such as military. With this in mind, I don’t see the Barna Group’s concern as surprising, but I do see their positive conclusion about people’s willingness to invite people to Easter services as the least of their concerns. The groups willing to follow through with their likelihood to invite friends to Easter services were 31% of their 1000 people, suggesting that even if all 300+ people did what they said they’d do, the increase in congregations would be a paltry sum in the dwindling numbers of active churchgoers. If they really want to improve the status of their religion’s popularity or accessibility to today’s people, then they should adjust the way they communicate to them. However objectionable it may be, I can’t imagine it’s that hard to emphasize the miraculous nature of your founder’s return from the dead even to today’s people, however “secular” they may be. It’s a matter of focusing on the meaningfulness derived from the story itself. The historical or scientific credulity, it would seem to me, is secondary to convincing people that the story of the Jewish rabbi returning to life as a pseudo vampire and saving their souls is something they can derive meaning and purpose from. After all, you’re taking the story on faith primarily, are you not? 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.