Happy New Year

No, I’m not jumping ahead. I mean right now. Solstice. The long cold night, after which the days begin to lengthen. The annual cycle of light begins again. It feels like a proper place to declare a New Year, not some arbitrary date based on a man-made calendar that has been fiddled with repeatedly over the years until its connection to any natural event has been completely lost.

Solstice this year is rather damp, brown and sad. Where I am, we normally have snow on the ground. The sun rising on Solstice morning sets the world sparkling with icy beauty. But the temps have been averaging well above freezing and all that has been falling, rather steadily, is rain.

Regardless of the weather, the Earth’s axis continues to tilt, and in the Northern Hemisphere, the ratio of daylight hours to night shifts in its predictable way. It’s the reason for the season since long before Christians imposed their holiday on it, to take advantage of the existing reverence folks have for this time of year, not to mention the festive mood.

And no, this isn’t going to turn into a rant against Christians or Christmas. Let them have their holiday and be very merry I hope. Why not? What harm does it do me to smile and return the greeting when they wish me a Merry Christmas? They had the season to themselves for so long, being the powerful majority in this country. And their holiday still dominates, despite all the others that fall during the month of December. It has grown to bloated, obscene proportions. If anyone is conducting a War on Christmas, it’s Big Retail.

But Christians always had the clout to put up their Nativity scenes in the town square without question, and even if they gave a condescending nod to their Jewish neighbors, they were still smugly secure in their primacy. Now they are being forced to acknowledge that not everyone cares about their holiday the way they do. They have been challenged in their primacy. They don’t like it. And believe it or not, I sympathize. Nobody enjoys having their world view challenged.

I don’t either. I am a firm believer in science and have no use for the supernatural. There is plenty of joy, wonder, and awesomeness in the world without having to resort to fairies, gods, angels, or any of the other assorted spiritual flotsam that folks like to believe in. So I get cranky when theists try to impose their world view on me.

So I think it best if we all agree to keep Christmas in our own ways. “But you don’t keep it,” I hear you object. Au contraire. How could I not, with the cultural pressure around me? I don’t get Solstice vacation. I get Christmas vacation. Christmas carols are played (ad nauseam) in every store. Sometimes I feel that Christmas is making war on me. But never mind. There is a secular aspect to the holiday that can be appreciated by anyone. And I don’t mean the materialism or overindulgence.

Look at it as a day to celebrate kindness, generosity, joy and delight. Use it as an excuse to open up your heart and give to others. You don’t have to be Christian to take a wish star and buy a poor child a gift. Compassion is something we all share regardless of religion or lack thereof. Christmas makes people happy, and happiness begets kindness. How can I possibly object to that?

So back to Solstice. My holiday. As the Light returns and a new year begins, let me resolve to be kinder and more tolerant. Let me practice humility, and remind myself that others’ beliefs do me no harm. Sometimes they may act on those beliefs in ways that are harmful, and I can condemn those actions. I am entitled to defend myself and others from what they might do. When they preach hate and advocate intolerance, I can speak against their words. But their beliefs are none of my business. And my beliefs are none of theirs.

I have been guilty in the past of atheistic evangelism. I have come to think this is just as obnoxious as religious evangelism. Yes, I think my beliefs are closer to the truth, or else why would I hold them? Do I think theists are misguided? Yes, I think they probably are. By the same token, they likely feel the same way about me. We aren’t either one of us going to convince the other, and it makes no sense to try. All it does is create animosity and resentment when we attack each others’ beliefs.

Let us go into the new year resolved to figure out a way to live in peace, striving not to belittle each other for our beliefs. Let us judge one another on speech and actions alone, and only object when we see harm being done. Then let us talk about that.

Bring on the Light. Happy New Year. And, what the heck, Merry Christmas.

No Higher Power

I knew I had to do something, I couldn’t go on like that any longer, so I asked my trusty doctor. Christopher Allen. He’s a treasure. Everything a doctor should be: up to date and informed, doesn’t whip out the prescription pad at the drop of a symptom, makes the patient feel cared about, listened to, and respected. He recommended a counseling practice, so I gritted my teeth and looked into it.

They didn’t make it easy, of course. I had to call and I got an answering service, who connected me with an automated system where I was to leave a message. They called back, and I missed the call, so I had to call them again, and got the answering service which sent me to the place to leave a message. Complicating this procedure was a glitch in their message recorder, which cut me off after about seven seconds, leaving me with a bewildering choice of numbers to press, none of which included “Talk to a Human.” I hate phones anyway. I nearly gave up.

Finally we connected, and I was asked a bunch of questions, which I answered badly because I was nervous and I hate phones. Plus they were awkward questions about why I was seeking help, the answers to which were complicated and difficult. And did I mention I hate talking on the phone?

At last I was able to set up an appointment with an actual counselor. I warned her I was a hard case, had had bad experiences with counselors in the past, and had serious trust issues. She took it in stride, briskly confident, and got down to business. I knew there was hope when she countered my ramblings about mindfulness and CBT with responses that assured me she knew her stuff. She was focused, listened, took copious notes, and actually offered some insights, instead of just letting me prattle on aimlessly while the clock ticked down.

I’ve been three times, and I’m cautiously optimistic. At the last session, she suggested I join AA. She was concerned that I didn’t seem to have a good support system. She had that right. I’ve got an unhealthy tendency to shut down when I’m under stress. I isolate myself, and don’t even recognize that I’m doing it. It’s like leaving a party to run up to your room, slamming the door behind you, and then weeping miserably because you’re all alone.

So, yeah, I need to deal with certain problems regarding alcohol, but the problem isn’t really my own drinking. That’s a symptom. Still, AA might be a good choice except for all that Higher Power stuff. I mean, the whole Twelve Step thing is all about turning our lives over to God because we admit we’re powerless to help ourselves. That just isn’t going to work for me.

“You don’t need to call it ‘God’,” my counselor said. “I don’t believe in any bearded guy in the sky, myself.”

“I could call it ‘Fred’,” I replied, “It still wouldn’t help. I just don’t believe there’s anything out there to surrender to. God, as I understand Him, doesn’t exist. It’s all up to me. I’m the only one who can save myself.”

“And how has that worked for you so far?” she said.

Good point.

And yet, what is my alternative? I just don’t have a sense of any sort of “higher power”. I can admit that I have a problem and that I can’t seem to find a solution, but if I just throw up my hands and admit defeat, there’s nobody else to take control and “remove all these defects of character”, “remove my shortcomings”, and “restore myself to sanity”, all stuff the 12 Step Al-Anon program says I got to pray to God to do. Just isn’t going to happen.

If I turned my will and my life over to some unseen, ineffable, Something, all I’d do is fall. I’d be battered by my inner turmoil, terrorized by fear and crippled by unceasing rumination. I’d be back to hiding under the covers whimpering and, yes, self-medicating. I just don’t have that God-shaped place in my soul that theists talk about. I can imagine what it might be like to believe in the supernatural; in fact, when I was younger, I did believe in all sorts of magical thinking. Then I began to realize it wasn’t getting me anywhere, magical thinking didn’t work, and I was far better off using common sense, compassion and science as my guides.

Let me add that I don’t deny it works for some folks and that’s fine. It’s a little like an opera enthusiast dragging me to a performance and then gushing, “Wasn’t that amazing? How can you not be moved by that?” All I can do is shrug apologetically. He can keep his opera and more power to him. It just doesn’t do anything for me.

So, it’s back to I am the only one who can save me. But I know I can’t do it alone.

Surprise! I don’t have to. And it doesn’t have to be an invisible Power getting my back. My counselor was right about one thing: I need a support system. But why go looking for one? Why reinvent the wheel? As I realized in my previous blog, I’ve got friends.

That’s my Greater Power — visible and tangible.

Coexist

“You don’t refuse service to gay people because you are a Christian, you do it because you’re a bigot.” (click for full story)

I often hear Facebook criticized as being a mindless wasteland where digital “friends” that one barely knows prattled endlessly about what they are wearing or where they are going or what they had for lunch. Perhaps I just am lucky enough to have a particularly interesting circle of friends (many of whom actually are friends that I see outside of the Internet) but my Facebook conversations often go much deeper.

All right, I’ll confess, I have blocked some people because they have spammed my feed with way too much share bait, Hallmark inspirationals, or nAWWWWseating cutesieness. And occasionally the never-ending “Look what the RWNJs have done now!” memes get on my nerves. But on the whole, I find many interesting links, nuggets of information, and genuine chuckles in my daily feed. And often a post will spin off into a stimulating debate. Sometimes they deteriorate into link wars (“No way — check this out! [link]” “Oh yeah? Well, what about this! [link]”). Sometimes, they evolve into thought-provoking exchanges of ideas.

There were three or four of these going yesterday, Easter Sunday. One of them, posted in the Atheist Librarians group I belong to, started with a link to a RawStory piece with the title: “How are atheists spending their Easter morning? By mocking Christians on Twitter, of course”.  One comment read, “I think the above is just comedy, its not bigotry in any way, shape or form. We aren’t discriminating against christians or refusing to serve them (sound familiar!) just mocking religion, which is an idea, not a person itself, and ridiculous ideas are okay to mock.” That is, I think, a legitimate take, although arguably the atheists in question are mocking a person (Jesus) and people (those who believe in Jesus’ resurrection). One commenter groused, “because the twits on twitter represent 100% of atheists”. Good point. Not only am I not on Twitter, but I was spending much of my Easter in a dialog with some theist FB friends about how to come together in harmony and celebrate the values we agree on, like compassion, generosity, forgiveness and selflessness.

“Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival.” HH14DL

I posted: “To those who follow the teachings of Jesus: May I humbly suggest that it is time you all took your religion back from those who are giving it a horribly bad name. It makes it very confusing to the rest of us when you all call yourselves by the same name (Christians) when you manifestly don’t all believe and act the same way. In fact, it might not be a bad idea for all of us to clean house a bit, and distance ourselves from hatemongering of all stripes. I welcome suggestions on how to go about this.”

Since it was Easter, and since many if not most of my FB friends self-identify as Christian, I addressed it to them. But it could have applied equally to any theist. I have heard Muslims express the same misgivings about how extremists have horribly perverted their faith.

Vikki responded: “Honestly, all faiths must be examined, evaluated, tidied, rearranged, and updated from time to time. I think people tend to forget that faith must be dynamic, not static.”

To which I replied, “Problem is, many faiths think the Truth IS static, eternal, never to be questioned, which is why it is the Truth. This is difficult to get past.”

Matthew said, “Justine hit it on the head. For it to be “The Truth”, it must always be true. In order to change, people must take the teachings metaphorically. But a metaphor would be a spiritual truth. Even the tolerant ones only accept their beliefs as metaphor when it contradicts their current moral code or scientific knowledge. Christians of a logical bent will accept that young earth creationism is a metaphor in the light of science, but try telling them the virgin birth is a metaphor and you get the cold stare.”

Meanwhile, on Twitter…..

Meanwhile, a similar discussion was taking place on my husband’s Twitter feed, which he shared with me (another example of an atheist constructively engaging with theists and not mocking them). Ted Cruz’s candidacy for president may become a catalyst for Christians who don’t support the extremist fundamentalist agenda to speak out and defend their faith.

Laura said, “Those of us who do choose to worship within an organized setting and call ourselves Christian cringe at what some of the associations are.”

Gail agreed. “Just trying to figure out alternative ways to express it since now haters have also made a mockery of the phrase ‘sincerely held beliefs'”

Beth said, “These people who profess one thing, and do the exact opposite (treat people mean) shall be called ‘hypo-Christians’.”

Angi suggested, “Maybe instead of trying to apply a label to the crazy cakes from the outside (provoking a defense), how about a movement positivity called something like ‘Loving Christians’.”

I agree with Angi. It’s less provocative to take a name for oneself than to lay one on someone else. But her suggestion leaves out many of the rest of us who are on the same page: Atheists, Buddhists, Jews, and Muslims. There are individuals in all these belief systems who honor the same values of compassion, generosity, tolerance and selflessness.

I don’t much like labels because they are so limiting. They are a Procrustean bed that we are forced to lie in when we take one on. But the fact of the matter is, we rely on labels as a shorthand to help us sort the world out and make sense of it. So I humbly suggest that we take on a tag that will help others to distinguish us from those who have given our belief system a bad name. Something simple, like, “Coexist”. It expresses our desire to find common ground, share the planet, seek peace with each other. When a Coexist Christian and a Coexist Atheist meet, they know they can relax. They are not a threat to one another.

It is time for all people of good will regardless of religion or lack thereof to stand together and speak with one voice against hatred, bigotry, extremism and violence. These are the real enemies. Let us be secure enough in our own beliefs that we are not threatened by someone who believes differently. Let us agree that we should be fighting poverty and suffering, not each other.

Let us coexist.

Dealing with Death without the Supernatural

I don’t go on Facebook much. I check every day or so to see if my friend Peter has played his turn in our on-going Scrabble tournament (at the moment, he’s beating me) and sometimes I’ll scan through the feed. I often find links to interesting articles or pick up news of friends. Most recently, I came across a friend posting an appeal about how to tell their child about a playmate who had died. The responses were what you might expect, mostly involving God, Heaven and angels.

I wrote a cynical reply, but thought better of it and deleted it. I don’t want to be one of those people who think that asserting “the truth” is more important than considering someone’s feelings. I have no sympathy for theists who whine when schools or the Government refuse to go along with their particular belief system. But death is tricky. It’s among the most difficult of Life’s misfortunes for any of us to deal with. I’m happy to debate religion under normal circumstances, and in fact, I feel an obligation to present the atheist alternative to counteract theist propaganda (We don’t all hate God, believe in moral anarchy, and suffer in bitterness and materialistic gloom). However, intruding on someone’s grief is just being a jerk.

We didn’t bring up our kids with the supernatural. Oh, we had fun pretending about lots of things. We made up games and imaginary characters. But when a child of any age looks at me in complete seriousness and asks to know the truth, I’m not going to lie. I’m going to explain things as best I can. No, Santa Claus isn’t real. But we can pretend.

That included all the awkward questions. No, you didn’t come to us by stork or cabbage patch. Might have been easier at first to go that route, but it only makes things more difficult in the long run. Withholding information is just prolonging ignorance. If the child is old enough to ask the question, they are old enough for a straight answer. Give them the truth from the start, and they learn that you can be trusted to be honest with them. Put them off with fantasy, and they won’t be sure when they are older if you aren’t doing the same thing when you talk about serious stuff like drugs and sex, lying to them “for their own good”.

But the whole heaven and angels thing is different. People really do believe, and if you contradict them they will only resent it. The tactic may even backfire, with them pitying you because you don’t have the comfort of God. There you both sit, pitying each other for exactly the same reason: each convinced the other is suffering because they can’t accept “the truth”. So there is nothing to be gained by scolding somebody for presenting religious dogma to kids as fact. They honestly think it is fact.

What I have trouble with is an adult doing the equivalent of handing kids a line about the stork, soft-peddling a difficult subject with a fantasy they themselves don’t believe. It starts with doggy or kitty heaven, even if the adult himself does not believe animals have souls. Then they comfort kids whose teacher dies suddenly, assuring them that God wanted Miss Ruth in Heaven to teach all the little children there. Even if the adult has only the vaguest notions of an afterlife, they feel compelled to default to the candy-cane version of Grandma with angel wings looking down on them from atop the Pearly Gates.

I agree, it’s tricky, and one has to consider what is developmentally appropriate for the child. Age figures into it, but the individual child does, too. Some get sophisticated much earlier than others, especially if they’ve been exposed to reality. Farm kids are savvy to where babies come from much sooner than suburban kids. Those who have seen a pet die have a better handle on death when their first close relative or friend dies. It’s always traumatic, but we adults do children no favors by sheltering them from the truth. We help them by being there for them, making sure they know they are loved, and explaining things as best we can.

To the question, “Where do you go when you die?” I think it’s best to admit we just don’t know. Nobody’s gone and come back to tell us about it. What we do know is that everything in the world is connected. The tiny parts that make us up, and make up dogs and cats and houses and toys, once came from stars, and those parts are never lost. They come together to make a person, and when that person dies, those parts go on to make trees, flowers, and other people. So when Mittens dies, maybe there’s a Kitty Heaven and maybe there isn’t. You can pretend if you like. We know Mittens becomes a part of the world again, to return as a bit of the bush that we planted over the place where he’s buried, and also to ride on the wind, to fall with the rain, to bloom in the garden. This much we know for sure.

And yes, some day you will die, too, because everything does eventually. But you, too, will go on. Parts of you will ride the wind, fall with the rain, and bloom in the garden. Parts of you will become another person, a different person, and life will go on. Death is, indeed, only a threshold, a transition. But it isn’t an immortal soul that lives on, some sort of ghost we can’t know about in some paradise we can only imagine. What transforms and goes on is everything that makes you who you are. Even the Earth will die someday, but still it will go on. All the bits that made up its people and animals, its oceans and mountains, will return to the stars from where they came.

No God, no Heaven, no angels. Nothing supernatural. And yet, it is comforting. I could share that explanation with my children, knowing its what I really believe to be true, and they will know it, too. Whatever their stage of sophistication, they can imagine some invisible part of themselves or their beloved pet riding the wind and falling with the rain, or they might understand the concept of atoms and molecules dispersing and recombining.

If they need to, they can pretend about Heaven. That’s fine. I’m here with honest answers when they need them.

Being Right

A friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in a while came into the Library. I was horrified to see the terrible swelling and bruises on her face and the bandage on her nose. It seems she had been out working with one of her horses and the animal had bolted, knocking her down and trampling her. This was a big work horse, too. She could easily have been killed. As it was, she got off with relatively minor damage, no broken bones or serious internal injuries.

“God and his angels were looking after me that day!” she declared. My first thought was, If God and his angels had been looking after you, my dear, the horse wouldn’t have bolted in the first place.

It would have been useless, and even rather mean, to point this out to her. She is an earnest and deep believer. To her, God and his angels are a very real force in her life. To me, they are as imaginary as unicorns, dragons, and fairies in the back garden. So who is right? And how can we possibly decide?

A great number of atheists have expended a great deal of energy explaining in lengthy logical detail why God is a delusion. Yet they are unable to convince anyone who wasn’t on the fence anyway. Theists, on the other hand, argue back with equal fervor. All right, some of their arguments are laughably flawed and silly. But there have been some genuinely intelligent and eloquent defenses of the reality of the Divine. Belief is not a matter of faulty thinking. Nor is disbelief a matter of spiritual poverty.

It boils down to this: We cannot help but believe what our experiences and worldview tell us makes sense. Period.

Fortunately, there are a great number of things we can agree on. The reality of the sun and its course through the sky, defining day and night, for example. But there have been and still are people who would laugh with disbelief at the assertion that it is the earth moving and not the sun which creates this experience. If I did not have the benefit of a science education, which has shaped my worldview, I would be among them.

I cannot know what convinces a person to believe in God, or in conspiracy theories for that matter. But I can generalize from examining my own reasons for belief that they, like me, accept what makes sense. And all the logical arguments in the world aren’t going to change their minds if they are certain they are right. They have had experiences of God, or met a ghost, or had some other insight that makes the supernatural real to them. Buddhists, whose wisdom I otherwise respect, believe firmly in rebirth. My Western, scientific worldview keeps me from being able to accept that as truth. Does that mean I’m biased? Wrong?

How arrogant of me to assert that no, I simply have a superior understanding of the world thanks to science. Arrogant, and yet, I can’t help it.

And neither can they. Or my friend with her God and angels. Understanding this helps me to be tolerant, and introduces a degree of humility to my certainties. It also makes me wince when my fellow atheists righteously heap contempt upon theists.

But, I remind myself, they can’t help help it either.

Choosing to Believe

“How can you look at the marvelous complexity all around you and not believe in God?” This question is asked of me in honest incomprehension. The person asking really cannot imagine how anyone could not see how obvious it is that God must exist. And it is with equal incomprehension that I reply, “Because your concept of God makes no sense to me.”

Sometimes Pascal’s wager comes up. If you aren’t familiar with it, Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, suggested that humans are betting with their lives when they assert God’s existence or lack thereof. If God does exist, what an atheist stands to lose is far greater than what a believer loses if it turns out He does not exist. So, reason would dictate that it is better to chose belief over disbelief, since a person would have so much more to gain.

The logic is unassailable, except for one thing: Is belief a matter of choice?

We have a certain degree of freedom to choose our actions, certainly. I can buy a product or not, speak out or keep silent, vote for a candidate or stay home. I could even say the words, “I believe in God,” and follow up by going to church and taking communion. But if the idea of God makes no sense to me, I am not going to believe in it. The mind simply doesn’t work that way. We arrive at our convictions because their reality impresses itself upon us. We cannot help but believe the evidence of our senses and the conclusions of our reason. We can speculate about possibilities, discuss alternatives, conduct thought experiments. But at the end of it all, we go home to what’s real to us.

Granted there are grey areas where we can’t be sure. Sometimes we take a guess. We make a choice based on what we hope is true, or seems most likely. But if we are sure of something, like, the ground beneath my feet is solid, or Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn, we can’t just say, okay, just for fun, I’m going to believe that the ground is actually an illusion and with the next step I’m going to fall through. Or, today I will believe that Huckleberry Finn was written by Charles Dickens.

There are a great many things that I don’t believe in because they just don’t make sense to me, and there seems to be an overwhelming abundance of evidence against them. Ghosts. Unicorns. Santa Claus. Trickle-down economics. God. Now, granted, that last one is slippery because the word is almost meaningless, it gets defined in so many different ways. I’ve heard God described as simply the sum total of all the physical laws of the universe. This depersonalized, intellectualized version is a far cry from the vengeful deity of the Old Testament, who appears in burning bushes and lays down laws about what to eat, who to lie with, and when it’s okay to stone somebody to death.

When I look at the literally inconceivable vastness and age of the universe, the mind-blowing profusion of galaxies, and how ridiculously small we are by comparison, I cannot by any stretch of the imagination reconcile it with the idea of a personal, intelligent god who created it all, yet is paying attention to our impure thoughts and condemning us if we don’t perform proper rituals of worship. I could not choose to believe in such a being no matter how fervently I might want to.

On the other hand, for the believer, it is equally obvious that God must exist. Nothing makes any sense or has any meaning without positing that an intelligent designer is behind it. They can’t help it any more than I can. We must believe what makes sense to us. We have different beliefs not because of free will, because we are virtuous and decide to place our faith in God, or defiantly choose to turn our backs on Him. Or that we are deliberately and perversely choosing ignorance over enlightenment. All right, maybe that is true of some people. We do sometimes choose to hide from things that challenge a cherished conviction.

But as a general rule, I’m willing to grant the benefit of the doubt to people whose beliefs are different than mine. I’m assuming that they are like me, that they are following what inescapably makes sense to them. Our convictions are different because our experience of the world is different. And until some agreed-to arbiter can settle which one of us is right, we have to live with each other and tolerate our differences. We must grant each other the dignity of our intelligence and the validity of our world views. And we have to figure out how to structure a society that allows each of us, as much as possible, to do what the logic of our individual world view tells us to do.

I’m not sure if that’s possible, but we have to try. It’s the only way that makes sense.

Pledge Or Else

If you are a member of the Facebook world, you have probably seen this, or something like it, circulating among your “friends” (I put that in quotes, since most Facebook users include in their “friend” base people they have never met and barely know, straining the traditional understanding of the word).  Posts like this are all too common.  Usually they involve a kind of minor psychological blackmail: If you don’t repost this, it means you’re an insensitive, uncaring, totally bad person.  It’s rather like the good luck one is supposed to reap by passing on a chain letter, and the dire threats of what will happen if you don’t.  The digital age has made it so much easier to circulate these bacteria (like a virus, but not as evil).

This one in particular insinuates that anyone who doesn’t help in this effort isn’t an AMERICAN.  Evidently real AMERICANS like to shout.  And they all believe in GOD.  The propagators of this little piece of in-your-face theistic nationalism fail to understand that Facebook is international.   By attempting to flood Facebook with it they are screaming at Canadians, Europeans, Australians, and just about anybody else who is plugged into the network and can read English.  I imagine that would be pretty annoying.  But I expect folks from other countries may be used to that from AMERICANS.

Several of my FB connections reposted this before it finally died a well-deserved death (although it’s probably still out there somewhere; nothing ever really goes away on the Internet, as much as you might wish it would).  They are nice people.  But they didn’t think it through.  After several “Right on!” comments, the other side began weighing in.  Commenters began gently pointing out that this is really kind of offensive and intolerant.  One of the reposters went to great lengths to defend herself and affirm how tolerant she is; she was just reposting it as a favor to a friend who feels strongly about it.  Well, meant, I’m sure.  But again, not well-thought-out.

This, by the way, is probably what started the brouhaha, a decision made by NBC to voluntarily return to an earlier version of the Pledge that does not mention God.  For those who may not be aware of it, The Pledge has gone through several incarnations since it was adopted.  Here’s a brief and interesting summary of its history.  The “under God” business is pretty recent, added during the paranoid era of the 1950s as a response to “godless” Communism.  Rabid patriots act as if the current Pledge were penned by George Washington himself, forgetting that the Founding Fathers went to great pains to make this a secular government that would distance itself from any religion in order to assure tolerance for all, or none.  Hence the No Religious Test clause found in the Constitution, Article VI, paragraph 3: No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.   By the way, kindly mention this next time you run across somebody who, in one breath praises the Constitution, and in the next advocates barring atheists from holding office.

So, going back to the little exercise in the overuse of capitals and exclamation points that started this off, besides forgetting that there are others besides AMERICANS that use Facebook, and disregarding the fact that many who are, in fact, loyal American citizens also happen to be atheist, how does reciting the Pledge without the words “under God” show disrespect for the country, the flag or the military?  There simply is no logic to this.  None whatsoever.  So, what is the point of all this capitalized outrage that must be reposted ad infinitum ad nauseum?

Beyond this teapot tempest of frantic religious flag-waving, I’d like to take issue with the Pledge itself.  I do not recite it, and do not encourage others (including my sons) to recite it.  I advocate standing respectfully but silently should others do so.  My allegiance lies with a body of principles, not a body of government.  Governments, institutions, and individuals within governments and institutions can become corrupt, and when they do, they not deserve either respect or support.

I respect those in the military who have served honorably.  I do not respect those in the military who have used their service as an excuse to bully and brutalize.  I support my government when I think it is acting properly.  I do not support it when it acts in a manner which I judge to be immoral.  I respect theists whose belief in God leads them to act with kindness and compassion.  I do not respect theists who think their religion gives them license to act with hatred and intolerance.

Thus, I am not going to take a pledge that my moral compass might prevent me from keeping, whether it is under an arguably fictional deity or not.   An allegiance I can confidently pledge is one to the principles of compassion, tolerance, understanding and forgiveness, to defend the rights of others no matter their national origin or belief system, and to resist the forces of violence and warfare whenever possible.  Write that one up, and I’ll happily sign on.

I might post it on Facebook but whether you want to share it or not is your affair.  You’re just as good a person if you choose not to.

Magical Thinking Nation

Faith that does not fear truth is a faith that will endure.

There seems to be a prevailing mindset among the people of these (dis)United States that if they believe something loudly enough, it will be true. Conversely, if they deny something passionately enough, it becomes not true. There even seems to be something heroic about it in the national imagination; the brave, idealistic soul, staunchly clinging to his convictions in spite of the facts arrayed against him.

Thus certain groups dispense with evolution and substitute Intelligent Design, deny global climate change, insist on the reality of angels, visiting aliens, assorted conspiracies and Bigfoot, and force their prejudices and illusions into the public discourse. Politicians, talk show hosts and entire networks cater to what would otherwise be fringe thinking and base wildly successful careers on it. It creates a dangerous feedback loop, as the deluded find their delusions validated in the media, and believe them all the harder, picking up more converts on the way. Hey, it was on the news. An important person (important because he was on TV or radio) is taking alien abductions seriously. Maybe I should, too.

This is America, a country designed specifically to encourage crank ideas, on the premise that some of those crank ideas might turn out to be valid. But for a crank idea to prove itself and become mainstream, it needs to be tested by reality. Do the facts support it? Can science prove it? Do people who have devoted their lives to understanding how the world works think the idea has merit? Thus we have moved forward in an often lurching, erratic path to find answers that work, that cure diseases and provide the framework for amazing new technologies.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line we decided to skip that validation process and allow the crank ideas to hit the mainstream without being tested by anything other than popular opinion. Thus travesties like Creation “Science” get to be taken seriously when they have absolutely no validity at all outside the misguided imagination.

I do not mean to attack religious belief per se. One is free to gather together into congregations and express whatever spiritual truth feels good and righteous. Just keep it in church and don’t come into the classroom or the halls of government with it. That’s what we mean by separation of Church and State.

Magical thinking may be helpful to people in their personal lives, to get them through the struggle of dealing with a world that is often cruel and unfeeling. There is comfort in the idea of “letting go”, allowing Jesus, or God, or angels or whatever take over and do the driving. But please don’t do that literally on the highway at rush hour. People will get killed.

Perhaps there is something to prayer, psychologically or otherwise, that can heal a person. But if your child is seriously ill, diabetic or badly injured, take them to a hospital. Don’t take them to a church and pray over them. Children whose parents do that die.

Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and The Moral Landscape

And if you are a politician, it may play well to your constituents to adhere fervently to some crackpot notion. But please pay attention to the facts, to reality, when you vote. No matter how much you want to believe that Saddam Hussein is hoarding weapons of mass destruction, no matter how determined you are that the war you want to fight will be a great success and will fulfill all sorts of greater political ambitions, if the experts tell you it just ain’t so, believe them. Because otherwise, people will die. Lots and lots of people.

Human happiness is real and measurable. The efficacy of a particular medical practice can be studied and evaluated. The success of a political policy can be observed, and if it fails, it should be discarded. Believing something to be true does not make it true, and there are reliable means of testing one’s beliefs. The Bible did not tell us how to cure polio, Sharia Law did not give us the computer, and meditation won’t keep ocean levels from rising as the glaciers melt. The Bible, Sharia Law and meditation may all have some use, but Reality trumps everything.

To Forgive

Erica and me, Christmas, 1957

It’s been a rough couple of months. Losing the first cat wasn’t so bad (I wrote a nice article for the newspaper about that). The second cat was a lot harder (see the previous post). But that was nothing.  Nothing.

My brother-in-law called yesterday morning and told me my sister had died. I didn’t even know she was ill. Everyone else did. All her friends, the entire family, her church. Not me. Because she had expressly told them she didn’t want me to be told. They had their chance to visit her in the hospice where she lay dying of cancer. Not me. They begged her to let them tell me. She refused. Why?

Because I am an atheist.

It was her final gesture to me, her final retribution for my lack of belief in her god.

We had been estranged for a long time because I did not share her fundamentalist Christian beliefs, or in fact, any belief in a god at all. I am not an “evangelistic” atheist. I don’t push my beliefs aggressively on others, although if they push theirs on me I’ll readily push back. If a claim, religious or otherwise, seems patently ridiculous to me, I have little patience for it. But although I do not believe in God, I do believe in tolerance. Besides, she was my only sister. Our parents and grandparents were gone, and she was the only close family I had left. She could have believed in alien abductions and fairies in the back garden and it wouldn’t have mattered to me.

Those who knew her and loved her, knew what they had lost when she died. I can never know because she denied me that. Even at the end, when she was dying, she denied me the chance to speak with her one last time. That was the deepest cut of all. But I don’t blame those who knew she was dying and didn’t tell me. It was her wish and they felt compelled to honor it. I forgive them, and moreover, I feel deep sympathy for them because of the terrible position they were in. I am sorry they had to deal with that on top of dealing with Erica’s death.

I cannot know what possessed Erica to do this to me. She said it was because I had no faith. Because I am an atheist. She held her love for me hostage, demanding a payment I could not give, because belief is not a choice. It comes from the heart. It is a conviction that you cannot argue yourself out of even if you try. It is what makes sense to you, even if it is because you must throw up your hands and admit you don’t understand. Credo quia absurdum. I respect that.

You see, I had no problem with Erica’s faith. We cannot know what compels a person to believe in one thing and not another. We argue, debate, but we rarely change each other’s convictions. Still, if the debating is done in the proper spirit, it has its use, as a means to help us understand what it is that each believes. Because we must all learn to live together, in spite of our differences. We can do this through compassion, through understanding, through tolerance and forgiveness. This is what I believe. It is not a Christian thing; it is not a Buddhist thing; it is not an atheist thing. It is a human thing.

I always hoped that some day Erica would relent, and would welcome me into her heart and let me know her. Now that she is gone, so is that chance, that hope. That is what I have lost. She was my only sister. We should have been close. We should have forgiven each other our differences and shared the love of family. Her nephews, my sons, will have no memories of her. She denied them that. What a tragedy. She said she believed in a god of love and compassion, why then had she none for me? She said she believed in a forgiving savior, why then, could she not forgive me? It baffles me.

But I forgive her, because she must have had her reasons, reasons I cannot understand. And if I am to see any good come from her death, and the way she denied me, it is by appealing to all of you, theist and atheist alike, but especially Christians: Do not shut others out of your heart because they do not share your faith. If your god is true and real and as powerful as you believe, what defense does he need? I am an atheist, but I am not the enemy. I do not seek to deny you your faith, or the faith of any other. If you act in love, compassion and forgiveness, then I have no quarrel with you. Let this be our common ground.

There are so many things that set us against one other. Please don’t let differences in belief be among them. Do not let forgiveness be solely the prerogative of the Divine.

Why I am not a Buddhist

The Skeptical Buddhist

I am not a Buddhist because I can’t accept the notion of reincarnation, a central tenet of their worldview. Note that I didn’t say a central tenet of their faith, because on the whole, Buddhism isn’t a faith-based belief system. It isn’t a religion in the Western sense of the word. There is no deity, no dogma, no revealed truths that must be taken on faith. It was founded on observation and empiricism.

Buddhist philosophy has never been at odds with science the way Western Theism has. It has never been put on the defensive for its worldview by discoveries made in the laboratory or the field. Quite the opposite. Monks sit smiling as fMRI scans lend evidence that their theory of mind is solidly grounded in experimentally verifiable fact.

As for reincarnation, it’s a working theory that Buddhists are quite convinced of. However, in a conversation with Carl Sagan, the Dalai Lama admitted that, should science one day prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that reincarnation does not happen, he would be forced to discard it. “But,” His Holiness added with a puckish grin, “You are going to have a very hard time disproving that one!”

Reincarnation is not a deal-breaker. It isn’t central to their belief system the way accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior is in Christianity, or professing that Allah is God and Mohammed is His Prophet is in Islam. Buddhists could, one day, sigh heavily and acknowledge that okay, maybe reincarnation is just a nice metaphor, not a literal truth, and everything else about their way of thinking would hold together quite solidly and coherently. It would still be a philosophy of mind and living, founded by the Buddha, inspired by great teachers who were exceptionally enlightened. Maybe a bodhisattva is not the literal rebirth of a soul, but someone whose exceptional intelligence and spiritual qualities make them identical for all practical purposes. Dharma and karma would have to be recast as metaphor, but would still work extremely well as a way of saying that your actions have consequences.

I can’t think of any meaningful way that Christianity could continue to call itself that if it abandoned the idea of a Savior who died for our sins, who was the manifestation on earth of God the Father, creator of Heaven and Earth. Toss out the mystical supernaturalism and you just have a secular philosophy based on the teachings of a really wise human being. No miracles, no water into wine, no revealed truths, no tests of faith. There are some progressive branches of Christianity that essentially have done just that, but they are so far removed from the belief systems of their Fundamentalist brethren that it make absolutely no sense to me to identify their faith with the same name.

As an atheist who feels the best way to understand the world is by the use of our intellectual faculties and the scientific method, there is no possible way I could ever embrace Theism in any form. Which is not to say that there aren’t elements to some versions of Theism that I accept, such as forgiveness, pacifism, and service to others, particularly the poor. These are elements Theism has in common with most wisdom traditions. Like Buddhism.

I’ll allow this much, though: the notion of the survival of some personal essence after death — a soul if you will — that is reborn according to how its previous life’s experiences shaped it, is less preposterous to me than the idea of a personal God as most Theists envision Him. Dharma is a lot more plausible to me than Original Sin and the Crucifixion.

Perhaps, in my next life, I will be a Buddhist.