I generally am bored by essays about the secularization of America, particularly when they argue that secularization will lead to a dystopian future in which the United States resembles Sweden. I’ve never been to Sweden, but if it is the third happiest country in the world, how bad can it be?
I’ve never found a word that I feel comfortable applying to my religious beliefs. Culturally and temperamentally, I am a Protestant, but almost no one seems to share my definition of that term. It would be impossible to be less of a theist than I am, but the word “atheist” has lost it’s original meaning of “not a theist” to connote something affirmative, almost like a set of beliefs. I like the word “agnostic” which technically means “someone without special wisdom or knowledge of religious matters.” Correctly understood, an agnostic is someone who doesn’t know whether there is or isn’t a God. But that doesn’t reflect my confidence in rejecting theism. On the other hand, anyone who thinks utterly rejecting theism means you are completely confident that you understand the universe is a moron. In my case, it’s more a matter of moving so far beyond a question that it no longer exists. No, there is no Sky God, but that is a debate for people who lived in the 16th Century, not for people who fly spacecrafts out of the Solar System.
So, whatever, I am not going to call myself any of those things because the second I do you will start making false assumptions about me. What bothers me is that most of the the presidents we had in this country from its founding until World War One were not what you would call “theists.” But today, you have to profess theism to even be considered for high office. We’re undergoing a massive shift in pubic attitudes about homosexuality and electing more and more gay and lesbian politicians, which is great. But anyone who doesn’t sign up for theism can forget about high office, especially on the statewide or national level. That’s a shame for people like George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams, who could never be president in modern America because they weren’t theists.
I accept my oppressed status without much complaint, but I have to welcome any news that people like me are becoming more socially acceptable. In that regard, I’d very much like to see this country become more like Sweden. But, really, you’ve been reading this blog for a long time. Can you remember me talking about my religious beliefs or complaining about how my beliefs are treated? I have no religious agenda that I want to impose on anyone. I just want to be able to run for office without pretending that I think there is some bearded man in space who is pretending to be Zeus.
I do call myself an atheist, but was recently told by someone that that offended him. “That means you think I and other people of faith are crazy?” So I am thinking about asking people what do they mean by “God”, and then say why I don’t believe that.
That touches on my point about atheism being perceived as something you are rather than something you are not.
When you attach an ‘a’ to the front of a Greek word, it means “not a.”
The ancient Greek word for actor is hypokrites (ὑποκριτής). If I add an ‘a’ prefix, it means that you are not an actor. Okay, so you are not an actor. Does that mean you are a dancer?
I don’t believe in a Sky God. What can you assume about my religious beliefs once you know that?
Can you assume I disagree with your religious beliefs any more than the typical Buddhist or Hindu?
That’s why these terms are unsatisfactory. They are taken as an insult because that’s all the meaning they have. They mean, “I don’t believe what you believe” and nothing else.
Had an interesting Facebook exchange yesterday that was catalyzed by a poster of Steven Hawking saying he did not see any need for a God to explain the universe. One guy was quite huffy and insulted by Hawking, going so far as to say that Hawking “styled himself as an intellectual.”
Really, he said that. He was deeply offended that Hawking would dismiss his beliefs because Hawking had not devoted his life to studying religion. I commented that both of their beliefs had equal weight as far as I was concerned, because they were both personal beliefs that are untestable by any objective measure.
And it went on from there.
Yeah, well I don’t see any need for a god to explain the huffy dude’s stupidity.
Which is almost as large and profound as the universe, and both seem to consist of large amounts of hot gas.
Hawking’s statement, as quoted, was not a statement of belief, but of fact. Cosmologists have a pretty firm idea of what is or is not needed to “explain the universe”.
“Cosmologists have a pretty firm idea of what is or is not needed to ‘explain the universe’.”
That’s a theism if ever there was one. There’s so much we don’t know and even more that we don’t even know we don’t know. One could define religion as a willingness to stand in the enormity of the open questions. Unfortunately the word religion has been so skewed, it might be better to call it mysticism.
Yeah, well I’m offended when a theist decides I must have no moral principles because I don’t believe in a Sky God who will spank me if I do something bad. I think that assumption about atheists is much more common than the one that theists are crazy.
Buddhist parable: a particle of yeast in liquid has no knowledge it is making beer. The mind cannot understand what is not capable of grasping.
that’s exactly right. However, the particle of yeast can be fairly confident that it is not copulating with a unicorn.
Yeast cells have two mating types, but you can be either one you want to be!! Hooray for “schmoos”! Unicorns, on the other hand, probably not.
Sorry, but isn’t that just copping out?
No, it’s recognizing reality. To date we have a pretty good basis (scientific method) for answering the question How does that work? We have no understanding of why things exist at all. Most religions offer a set of beliefs/assumptions as an answer to the Big Why. You either accept those beliefs/assumptions on faith, or you do not.
There are some very important logical truths out there that go a long way in explaining life and the nature of reality without having to throw in the towel and say “therefore some god must exist” just because there are gaps in knowledge. The “theory” of evolution is that a set of natural laws explain natural phenomena. The Law of Natural Selection is a mathematical truth, it does not require even scientific proof. It is pretty simple–traits that are adaptable to a species pass on to the next generation, making them more likely to survive. Darwin predicted that there must be a mechanism for living things to do this. DNA was not discovered for another 100 years. But that discovery pretty much was all that is needed to say that the Theory of Evolution is scientifically proven. The Law of Natural Selection is logically true. Any attempt to dispute this is illogical.
I don’t think we disagree.
It seems to me that natural selection and most of science explains how things in nature work. Religion is about ultimate sources. For example, why could a theist not believe that natural selection and evolution are laws about how nature works that the Living God created?
There are a number of dedicated theists that don’t see any conflict between science and faith. There are also a number of scientists that think the same. The popular conflict between faith and science comes into play when people confuse the roles of the two spheres of thought.
But a criticism of theists: The so called Christians of this country are so often superficial and misdirected in their so called faith, that they are approaching spiritual death. They grab onto any external icon that means something religious to them and make a idol of it. They lose any sense of mysticism because it’s easier to prop up some shortcut.
They grab onto any external icon that means something religious to them and make a idol of it.
Now, now. Stop picking on poor Tim Tebow.
🙂
Excellent points. It’s worth noting that both Einstein and Newton were deists.
Maybe you are an apatheist who just doesn’t care about pondering the existence of a higher power and resents both theists and atheists who think that you should care.
That’s almost correct, but it’s still wrong.
I don’t deny the existence of a higher power. If you’ve read Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, you know that our consciousness could be considered a subsidiary power to our DNA, and our DNA a subsidiary power to our individual genes.
You can drill down or expand out, and it’s pretty clear that we humans are relatively powerless forces in the Cosmos.
I am not uninterested in these matters at all.
But if your higher power is a man who resides in the sky and who lays his judgment on us and casts us into Hell (usually) or occasionally has mercy on us (rarely) and invites us to play harps for eternity, I am going to ignore you.
For me, you can go on debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin for as long as you like, but I am not going to worry about that because it think it’s settled that that debate is anachronistic.
The question isn’t God or not God. That idea of God is obsolete. But that settles nothing about higher powers, purpose, meaning, or any of the eternal questions.
There never was any debate on now many Angels could dance on the head of a pin. At best it was a rhetorical question to test students on how the understood their philosophy, relating to Plato’s theory of Forms and other concepts. If you had asked that question in the 16th century they would have laughed at you. That fact that people today use that stupid line to laugh at what they think people were debating about in the “ignorant” 16th century pretty much shows the contempt they feel for other people
If you want an answer, it would be that Angels have no physical bodies so they take up no physical space. Plato had the idea that the “true form” of something existed in a higher dimension separated from the physical universe, and that physical bodies “Reflected” or took on part of this ideal. That’s the realm Angels were said to inhabit. Very high concept stuff for the ignorant 1000 BC.
And they knew the world was round around 300 AD. Columbus only set out on his voyage because he got his maths wrong, thought the earth was far smaller than it is, and thought the rest of the world had made a mistake. Everyone waved him off thinking they would never see him again, and they wouldn’t if America hadn’t been in the way. And today people think he was a genius.
Popular history isn’t fair, I suppose.
You know, since I’m on a roll here I might as well talk about the popular image of Gallileo vs the reality.
People think of Galileo as this supreme evidence based scientist against the ignorant church. But that’s not true at all. Galileo was a decent scientist, but a great deal of his work turned out to be flawed. His insistance on circular orbits, for example, meant that his heliocentric theory was not actually very good at predicting where the planets would actually be. He started a scientific brawl with the Jesuit scientist Orazio Grassi by arguing that comets were atmospheric phenomena. Grassi had calculated, based on observation, measurement, and analysis, that comets are more distant than the moon, but Galileo’s commitment to the benefits of experimentation tended to be strong only when the experiments were Galileo’s.
As for the Inquisition, people don’t realize that some of the people on the inquisition were some of the greatest mathematicians of their age. There are some good arguments for the case that the episode can be viewed at least partly as a no-holds-barred brawl within the scientific community of the time – Galileo had pissed off a fairly substantial portion of the Italian scientific community by that point. He was sometimes right, often wrong, and always vocal and agressive.
The Jesuits initially supported Galileo against theological charges brought by the Dominicans. Galileo repaid that with some spectacularly harsh – even by the standards of the time – criticisms of their scientific work. In the case of his dispute with Scheiner, Galileo was right that sunspots were a feature on the surface of the sun; Scheiner’s attempt to interpret the same evidence as indicating that they were planets was incorrect (and fairly easy to demonstrate as incorrect with the evidence at hand). However, the accusations of plagiarism that he leveled at Scheiner, in a document that Scheiner could easily argue was plagiarizing some of his work, went a bit far. The dispute with Grassi saw Galileo deploy even more offensive polemics, and in this case Galileo didn’t have the good grace to at least be correct – he was the one who was obviously wrong, Grassi was the one with solid observations and mathematics, and Galileo called him an idiot and worse in print, and in the vernacular. When the next opportunity for Galileo to get in trouble with the inquisition rolled around, he had managed to turn the Jesuits from supporters to instigators.
And one thing holds true then as now. You DO NOT piss off the Society of Jesus anymore than you start a land war in Asia.
Anyway, a bit of a pointless history lesson I suppose but I had nothing much else to do on a Tuesday morning. Just wanted to clarify that the “ignorant 16th and 17th century people” were not actually that ignorant.
This is an interesting account. Have any sources where I can do further reading?
“The Sleepwalkers” by Arthur Koestler is a good read that covers some of this.
You could start with this for a pro-catholic view.
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0043.htm
And this for a more pro-Galileo view
http://es.rice.edu/newgalileo/sci/scheiner.html
And for a more general overview on Galileo’s influence on general philosophy you could try this
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/galileo/
The last tries to pin the blame for the Trial on Cardinal Bellarmine, which I think is very unfair.
Anyway, I’m glad you enjoyed my little essay. Happy reading.
The closest term I can think of for my beliefs in naturalistic humanist. There are a lot of us and many of us are members of Unitarian Universalist Congregations.
My Dad (a retired UU Minister) recently wrote a book called Journey Beyond God: Religious Philosophy for our time. You may find some things of interest there.
“But if your higher power is a man who resides in the sky and who lays his judgment on us and casts us into Hell (usually) or occasionally has mercy on us (rarely) and invites us to play harps for eternity, I am going to ignore you.”
You’re describing a Christian fundamentalist view of God. It’s not a view that reflects any sort of deep thought on religious matters, now or in the past. It doesn’t reflect the teachings of Jesus. In the Koran, the words most often strung together are “In the Name of the One, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” It also says we are not to create separation based of faith or ethnicity because God chose to make the world a place of many tribes. Jews endlessly debate the morality of everything and anything (from when it’s alright to kill and when it’s not to how much you should charge for a chicken) across centuries.
The deep teachings of people of faith are a sea of thought. Fundamentalists (whether Jewish, Christian, Islamic or otherwise) flatten everything into simple, idiotic issues — religion for five year olds. People then oppose them, thinking they oppose religion, when in fact they’re only opposing a narrow, ignorant view of the universe masquerading as religion.
One thing I will always be grateful to my parents for, is that they didn’t drag me to a church or synagogue. Instead, on Sunday mornings I worshipped at the church of the holy trinity — Larry Curly and Moe — 10 AM on Channel 5. Thanks Mom, thanks Dad, you kept me from catching the god infection.
Ironically because my parents did the opposite the only thing that prevents me from being agnostic is my own arrogance.
It’s like pouring water into a cup. You pour in too much too fast and the cup tips over spilling all the water.
I don’t even agree with his premise. It’s something I celebrate — people becoming less Christian — but it doesn’t mean they’re becoming non-believers. Non-believers is a fast growing demographic, but “no religion” is the one that is really taking off. And I am not convinced it’s because people suddenly realize that Christian or Islamic or Jewish God(s) are foolish to believe in. It’s because they’re sick and tired of Evangelical Fundies, or the Catholic Church’s cover-up of for child rapists. So they’re more in a temporary limbo: they want to be part of a religion or church, but feel so disgusted that they simply take no labels. Hopefully this leads to atheism, but I’m not convinced that’s what is happening (yet).
And yet, the sad thing is, as I’ve said before, the online atheist community has a lot of overlap with libertarians and men’s rights activists who hate women. So much so that some of my female atheist friends have told me that when they encounter an atheist man, they are guarded (and they’re atheists themselves!)
Melissa McEwan has written about it:
This Female Atheist, And Where She Is
Not every woman raised in a religious tradition had the same experience I had. There are many different religious traditions. And not every woman who has explored movement atheism has had the same experiences I have had. There are many different ways to participate. And even the women who have had experiences similar to mine do not necessarily share my reaction to either or both.
But a lot do. Enough do.
That should be a concern to the men in movement atheism who fancy themselves a superior alternative to retrograde patriarchal religious traditions.
I would say I felt exactly as welcome in movement atheism as I did at my Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, but that would be a lie. No one at St. Peter’s ever called me a stupid cunt because I disagreed with them.
Having read the essay (in-full), I see that’s kind of where Gerson went.
I saw an account of this extreme misogyny among organized atheists at Pharyngula a couple years back, and concluded these guys are just another batch of self-absorbed contrarian jerks, not people I’d like to associate myself with by identifying as an “atheist.” Great way to win friends and influence people, guys!
As an aside, it’s distressing to see how comfortable so many men now seem to be with expressing violent misogyny, especially online. When I was young (a long time ago) men were condescending and dismissive but rarely openly threatening toward women. Now the latter is commonplace. Why are we going backwards?
Two reasons. First, the nature of on-line communications encourages increased hostility in some people. This was noticed in the early usenet days. Possibly in part due to the inherent limitations of expressions of tone in written communications, but most likely the dominant reason is the anonymity – even if you know the name being a faceless person thousands of miles from the other person “feels” more anonymous. It’s similar to how some normally well-behaved people become tailgating, swerving jerks in traffic.
Second, the emergence of right wing hate media has created a subculture where such behavior is normal. Limbaugh’s feminazi rants, as bad as they are, are mild compared to what the Limbaugh wannabees say.
I wish Dem politicians would get in the habit of always answering questions about their religious beliefs with something like “That’s private” or “I share that with family and friends.”
Face it, you’re an atheist.
Western atheists disbelieve, with whatever degree of confidence, in the creator God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
They also generally disbelieve in any other gods or supernatural beings, though some who accept the name understand it to be relative to some set of gods.
On this usage Christians are atheists with respect to the gods of ancient Greece and Rome, for example, though not with respect to the God of their own religions.
But most people (me included) take “atheist” to entail not only disbelief in the God of Theism but more broadly in any or all all gods and/or supernatural beings.
Commonly but I not universally, Western atheists also disbelieve in any afterlife or that humans exist or existed before the present one and only life.
I once knew an atheist philosopher, a Husserl scholar, who said the Transcendental Ego can never die.
The variety of human belief is sometimes startling.
Anyway, a minority of Western atheists also disbelieve in the objectivity of morals (non-cognitivists, anti-realists).
This includes a fair number of European and Anglo-American philosophers of varying degrees of fame and varying political or moral outlooks, if any.
And some reject morality altogether (an immoralist subset of the former including myself), though I don’t know of anybody especially famous who does that.
George Bush the Elder pretended to be a dolt while campaigning.
It won him the White House, once.
thanks for telling me what I believe.
You’re very welcome.
Morality and religion are entirely independent and unrelated.
I used to go with agnostic on the premise that while there is zero evidence for an activist God – that is the idea that there was some force guiding things and/or responding to prayers – that there isn’t enough evidence to deal with topics like the origin of the Universe. To me atheist said I was saying “there is no God, period” and that my belief was that I couldn’t say that for all topics.
It was Dawkin’s God Delusion that convinced me otherwise. Forget the exact words now, but he addressed exactly the viewpoint described above and argued that this is in fact atheism. There are things that are entirely unknowable to humans today but that doesn’t open up the possibility that there is some God being. We do know today, based on massive evidence, that humans have invented huge religious frameworks based on zero evidence and that billions believe in these things. Just because we don’t know about, say, the origin of the Universe doesn’t open up a possibility that a God in the style of a human religion might have created it – it just means that this is something we don’t know.
I’m not saying it nearly as well as he did, but it makes sense.
Now, I understand Boo’s point about some atheists treat their non-belief as an activist cause, and certainly you could put Dawkins in that group. I also get the point made in a reference link above that some male atheists are also tied into the anti-women movements. But my own experience is that these are a small minority. The atheists I know don’t trumpet our non-belief, don’t form friendships or social groups based on it, and don’t even talk about it that much (this is probably my first post on the topic in many, many years). It’s a non-belief. We socialize all the time with believers of varying degrees and basically stay off the topic.
I am glad there are people like Dawkins out there fighting the fight because at some point society does have to come to grip with reality. To borrow heavily from one of the greatest diatribes in history from George Carlin, there is no invisible guy watching everything you do who is going to judge you and if you don’t follow his rules will send you to a place where you will suffer unimaginable torture for all eternity – and he loves you. It’s time we stopped using labels like “person of faith” or “faith-based initiatives” as a positive quality and stopped scaring children with the if-you-don’t-believe horror stories. We’d benefit greatly if we could celebrate rational thinkers who don’t have to pretend they believe in the “power of prayer” and the like.
And regarding the tiny number of right wing libertarian atheists I’ve begun noticing a funny trend recently – not only do these self-described rational thinkers reject en masse the global warming – greenhouse gas tend, a large number of them are beginning to embrace the notion of modified intelligent design. I hear stuff like “I believe in microevolution but not macroevolution”. How they resolve this with their alleged atheism must be interesting, but I’ve never stuck around long enough to find out. I suspect all of these terms are used by that group of people more as tribal labels than as actual beliefs.
In my view, Dawkins sets up straw men and spends his time refuting them. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he refutes the straw men that are fundamentalism. But that’s not theism or deism or religion — it’s just fundamentalism, which did not exist in any meaningful way until the 20th Century.
Yes, there’s not a sky god. But this is not a new discovery. People have known this for a very long time. It’s at the core of religious teachings such as the Jewish refusal to write or speak a name for God because, the moment you do, you’ve defined something beyond definition and thus created an idol. This same idea expresses itself in many religions, including Buddhism which refuses to go anywhere near the concept of God. And yet God in the sense that the mystics knew it is very much a part of Buddhism.
Dawkins is ignorant of religion, as are the fundamentalists. Neither are in any position to say anything of value.
In my view, Dawkins sets up straw men and spends his time refuting them. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say he refutes the straw men that are fundamentalism. But that’s not theism or deism or religion — it’s just fundamentalism, which did not exist in any meaningful way until the 20th Century.
It’s hardly a straw man when you are arguing against the dominant religious philosophy of the political party that owned all three branches of the US government when the book was written. Not to mention being the religious philosophy of many dictatorships around the globe.
Yes, you can argue that fundamentalists are ignorant of religion – or rather, religion as you prefer it to be understood. You can argue that Dawkins is ignorant of such religion. I would say instead he focuses most of his attention on the worst elements of religion, the ones which cause the most harm. But he also talks of other harmful aspects of religion. The blocking of scientific progress (with examples both from centuries past and recent issues with stem cells); the scaring of children with horror stories of hell (no, not limited to just fundamentalists and certainly not limited to this century) and of course the use of religion as a key tool in whipping up a population to commit atrocities on people who are different.
No, there are a lot of legitimate criticisms of Dawkins but saying he’s fighting a straw man is not one of them – at least in the God Delusion book.
I would never argue against the point of view that people who consider themselves religious have been responsible for countless horrible crimes. Religion has often been its own worst enemy. Whatever the impulse is that calls men’s hearts to a sort of universal something can be easily manipulated by those seeking to misuse that impulse to gain power and control over others.
One of the questions I would like to ask you Booman is whether you think human beings, in any case, are wired to believe or put faith in something. It seems to me likely that we all tell ourselves something in the way of “eternal principles” (for want of a better term) to give our lives direction.
If not Jesus, Durga, Krishna, or any personal god being or concept, then how about ultimate truth, beauty or that “the moral arc of history is long, but bends toward justice”?
Not sure I’m using the right language here…
If you haven’t read Dawkins God Delusion you might consider it. He spends a lot of space talking about this exact question – all the remote tribes who on their on invented a myth that matched exactly in form the general Jesus-Savior myth – and discussion (mostly speculation) of what evolutionary influences might have caused that.
Sorry I couldn’t get to your comment earlier. In case you catch this response though…
I HAVE considered Dawkin’s book. But unfortunately most of the time when I’ve read shorter accounts of his thought, I come away thinking that his views against religions are based on easy targets. There’s a lot of superficial BS among many so called people of faith and I wouldn’t need Dawkins to point that out.
What you say sounds interesting though. From what I can see just listening to present day people, it seems to me that there are dynamics inherent in our nature. I’m also a fan of Joseph Campbell because I think there are archetypes embedded in the common human experience. And these archetypal thoughts, motives, etc all come swimming to the surface in all kinds of different cultural flavors.
I stumbled across the word “ignostic” that seems to fit my position. Wiki goes into detail. Basically, if the religious could define god in a way that’s falsfiable, then we could have an adult conversation. As long as god is just warm fuzzy in the sky, not so much. Which is to say, I’d probably be an atheist if I cared.
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-107