Church of the Churchless

Christian bullshit: "Living as exiles in our own country"

There's nothing so pathetic as a Christian who thinks his religion is becoming a pariah here in the United States. Fox News has made a journalistic career out of this, conjuring up absurdities like the War on Christmas.

The plain fact is that this country is one of the most religious, and it is dominated by Christianity. There's no evidence that Christians are at risk of losing their super-majority status.

Which makes this piece on Time.com by Rod Dreher, "Orthodox Christians Must Now Learn to Live as Exiles in Our Own Country," so absurd I thought at first that the title must be a joke. Sure sounded like something The Onion would come up with.

Recent Onion posting: Nation's Homophobic Bigots Pack It In. Sadly, it's a satire, as proven by Dreher's essay. I've copied Dreher's piece in below. My caustic annotations are in purple. 

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No, the sky is not falling — not yet, anyway — but with the Supreme Court ruling constitutionalizing same-sex marriage, the ground under our feet has shifted tectonically.

For the better. Very much for the better. If Christians had been standing on solid moral ground, you wouldn't be feeling so shaky now that same-sex marriage is legal everywhere in the United States.

It is hard to overstate the significance of the Obergefell decision — and the seriousness of the challenges it presents to orthodox Christians and other social conservatives. Voting Republican and other failed culture war strategies are not going to save us now.

Thank Tao. My non-prayers have been answered, albeit by nobody.

Discerning the meaning of the present moment requires sobriety, precisely because its radicalism requires of conservatives a realistic sense of how weak our position is in post-Christian America.

Sobriety? Wrong choice. I recommend coming to Oregon and getting super-stoned. Marijuana is legal here day after tomorrow. It still isn't being sold, but if you went out on the streets of Portland and yelled, "I'm a sad bigoted homophobic Christian and I need some weed to make me feel better," I bet you'd be showered with quality pot.

The alarm that the four dissenting justices sounded in their minority opinions is chilling. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia were particularly scathing in pointing out the philosophical and historical groundlessness of the majority’s opinion. Justice Scalia even called the decision “a threat to democracy,” and denounced it, shockingly, in the language of revolution.

If Scalia hates a Supreme Court decision, this is a sure sign that it is on sound legal ground. Love and marriage are fundamental rights for everybody in a just society. 

It is now clear that for this Court, extremism in the pursuit of the Sexual Revolution’s goals is no vice. True, the majority opinion nodded and smiled in the direction of the First Amendment, in an attempt to calm the fears of those worried about religious liberty. But when a Supreme Court majority is willing to invent rights out of nothing, it is impossible to have faith that the First Amendment will offer any but the barest protection to religious dissenters from gay rights orthodoxy.

First, marriage -- gay or straight -- isn't about sex. Anybody who has been married for a long time understands this. It is mostly about love. How many hours a month do married people have sex, compared to doing other things? Even if a couple acts like nympho-bunnies, its a small percentage. 

Second, this supposed "gay rights orthodoxy" is simply homosexuals wanting the same rights as heterosexuals. If they were only concerned about getting on board the Sexual Revolution Train, why would they be so concerned about being able to marry their loved one? Many religions consider marriage to be a sacrament. Shouldn't Christians be pleased that gays want to embrace marriage?

Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito explicitly warned religious traditionalists that this decision leaves them vulnerable. Alito warns that Obergefell “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and will be used to oppress the faithful “by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent.”

Ridiculous. Nobody will be forced to marry a person of their own sex. The only "oppression" will be the same requirement for everybody in this country: obey the laws, or face the consequences. Religious belief doesn't entitle someone to be exempted from obeying laws. (At least, it shouldn't.) If it did, every person stopped for drunk driving could whip out his or her Church of Godly Alcoholism card and demand to be allowed to keep on weaving down the road.

The warning to conservatives from the four dissenters could hardly be clearer or stronger. So where does that leave us?

Um, let's see... going along with both a legal and cultural consensus that homosexuals should have the same rights as heterosexuals. Or is this too obvious and sensible an answer?

For one, we have to accept that we really are living in a culturally post-Christian nation. The fundamental norms Christians have long been able to depend on no longer exist. 

I only wish. Unfortunately, this is still very much a Christian nation. But it's true: the times are a'changing. For the better.

To be frank, the court majority may impose on the rest of the nation a view widely shared by elites, but it is also a view shared by a majority of Americans. There will be no widespread popular resistance to Obergefell. This is the new normal.

Wow! Finally, a bow to reality in this essay. Thank you for admitting that homophobic bigotry isn't a value shared by most Americans -- just some fundamentalist Christians. 

For another, LGBT activists and their fellow travelers really will be coming after social conservatives. The Supreme Court has now, in constitutional doctrine, said that homosexuality is equivalent to race. The next goal of activists will be a long-term campaign to remove tax-exempt status from dissenting religious institutions. The more immediate goal will be the shunning and persecution of dissenters within civil society. After today, all religious conservatives are Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who was chased out of that company for supporting California’s Proposition 8.

News flash: lots of people have been coming after social conservatives for a long time. Me, for example. And most liberals I know. LGBT activists, I'm pretty sure, have other things to do with their lives than devoting themselves to taking away the tax-exempt status of gay-bashing religious groups. Though this isn't a bad idea, now that you've mentioned it.

Third, the Court majority wrote that gays and lesbians do not want to change the institution of marriage, but rather want to benefit from it. This is hard to believe, given more recent writing from gay activists like Dan Savage expressing a desire to loosen the strictures of monogamy in all marriages. Besides, if marriage can be redefined according to what we desire — that is, if there is no essential nature to marriage, or to gender — then there are no boundaries on marriage. Marriage inevitably loses its power.

Absurd argument. You forgot to mention that soon there will be efforts to extend marriage to human-animal partnerships. At least, this is what I hear on conservative talk radio. Saying that because two same-sex people can marry, along with two opposite-sex people, this will lead to "no boundaries on marriage" is ridiculous. However, it is true that there is no essential nature to marriage. It is whatever cultures decide it is. 

In that sense, social and religious conservatives must recognize that the Obergefell decision did not come from nowhere. It is the logical result of the Sexual Revolution, which valorized erotic liberty. It has been widely and correctly observed that heterosexuals began to devalue marriage long before same-sex marriage became an issue. The individualism at the heart of contemporary American culture is at the core of Obergefell — and at the core of modern American life.

Again, if all gays cared about was sex, sex, sex, they wouldn't be pressing so hard for the right to marry. I speak as a man who has been married for 43 of my 66 years. As the old saying goes, "First comes love. Then comes marriage. Then comes the baby in the baby carriage." Sex is incidental in this common marital trajectory.

This is profoundly incompatible with orthodox Christianity. But this is the world we live in today.

Yay!

One can certainly understand the joy that LGBT Americans and their supporters feel today. But orthodox Christians must understand that things are going to get much more difficult for us. We are going to have to learn how to live as exiles in our own country. We are going to have to learn how to live with at least a mild form of persecution. And we are going to have to change the way we practice our faith and teach it to our children, to build resilient communities.

Give me a fucking break. In 1970 I became a strict vegetarian. I also embraced the teachings of an Indian guru. Now I'm an atheist. Any Christian who feels like an "exile in our own country" should realize that you guys are the freaking VAST MAJORITY of Americans, and that most people share your basic outlook on the cosmos. Atheists, adherents of Eastern religions, and many other sorts of minorities are WAY more stigmatized than Christians. Get over your self-pity.

It is time for what I call the Benedict Option. In his 1982 book After Virtue,the eminent philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre likened the current age to the fall of ancient Rome. He pointed to Benedict of Nursia, a pious young Christian who left the chaos of Rome to go to the woods to pray, as an example for us. We who want to live by the traditional virtues, MacIntyre said, have to pioneer new ways of doing so in community. We await, he said “a new — and doubtless very different — St. Benedict.”

Going to the woods to pray sounds like a great idea to me. I wish every Christian would do this. And never come out of the woods. This would make life a lot less crowded for us atheists. Can I have your house and car?

Throughout the early Middle Ages, Benedict’s communities formed monasteries, and kept the light of faith burning through the surrounding cultural darkness. Eventually, the Benedictine monks helped refound civilization.

After Christians kept Europe stuck in the Dark Ages for a long time, like, ages. 

I believe that orthodox Christians today are called to be those new and very different St. Benedicts. How do we take the Benedict Option, and build resilient communities within our condition of internal exile, and under increasingly hostile conditions? I don’t know. But we had better figure this out together, and soon, while there is time.

Oh, poor Christians. You are by far the dominant religion in this country, yet you view any criticism of your unreasonable dogmatic beliefs as "hostile conditions." You're so used to having everything go your way, you feel like exiles because many Americans are starting to question aspects of your bigotry. Deal with it. Life changes. Society changes. 

Last fall, I spoke with the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Nursia, and told him about the Benedict Option. So many Christians, he told me, have no clue how far things have decayed in our aggressively secularizing world. The future for Christians will be within the Benedict Option, the monk said, or it won’t be at all.

Great. Head to your monasteries. Preserve your supposedly Undecayed Morality within those walls. I'd be overjoyed to see you do this. Because then you wouldn't be spouting your B.S. in public.

Obergefell is a sign of the times, for those with eyes to see. This isn’t the view of wild-eyed prophets wearing animal skins and shouting in the desert. It is the view of four Supreme Court justices, in effect declaring from the bench the decline and fall of the traditional American social, political, and legal order.

Gee, you talk as if this is a bad thing. I relish in the decline and fall of traditional order.

We live in interesting times.

Ah, on this we agree.

Idea of no-self doesn't translate into no-fear-of-death

Over on Slate there's an interesting piece by Nina Strohminger, Jay Garfield, and Shaun Nichols, "Buddhism and the Loss of Self." I've copied it in below for easy reading.

Surprisingly, research seems to show that Buddhists who don't believe they have (or are) a continuous self are more fearful of death than Hindus or adherents of the Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam).

Buddhists also were less generous in a thought experiment about giving away a single dose of medicine that could extend either their own or someone else's life.

But I guess this really isn't so surprising. After all, our sense of self appears to persist even though we may think we've left it behind.

The way I think about this is, how would a supposedly "selfless" person feel if someone came up behind them on a dark sidewalk, put a gun to their head, and said I'm going to kill you.

I suspect they would react as anyone else would: with fear and trembling.

However, those who believe in an eternal soul will have the comfort of expecting that even if their body dies, their soulful conscious essence won't. So this could explain why Buddhists who embrace a doctrine of no-self are more afraid of death than Hindus, Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

Here's the essay:

Buddhism and the Loss of Self
by Nina Strohminger, Jay Garfield, and Shaun Nichols

Unlike Hinduism and the Abrahamic religions, Buddhism embraces the idea that there is no self, only a sequence of ever-changing and impermanent psychophysical processes. Just as one cannot step into the same river twice, there is no such thing as a continuous self, a single “me” that persists over time. Because there is no continuous self in life, there is no self to preserve in death.

The Buddhist no-self doctrine is sometimes said to alleviate a familiar source of suffering: fear of death. By focusing early and often on how the self is continually dying, many Buddhist scholars argue, one is able to make peace with death of the physical body. Buddhists also believe that embracing the no-self doctrine is central to the elimination of suffering: when one does away with the self, egocentricity and selfishness go with it.

Though the benefits of Buddhism have been oft-repeated, until recently there had been almost no empirical work on whether Buddhists actually are less selfish or less afraid of death. Our research team recently traveled to Nepal and India to examine the impact of these religious teachings on their adherents.

We measured responses from displaced Tibetan Buddhists and Indian Hindus. We also surveyed Americans who were raised in Abrahamic religious traditions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam). Unlike Buddhism, Hinduism and Abrahamic religions characteristically subscribe to the belief that there is a self that persists over time (an ātman or soul), which survives the body in rebirth or the afterlife.

Our data show that Buddhists have internalized the no-self doctrine. While Americans and Indians indicate a high belief in the connectedness of the self and an essential core self that persists across the lifespan, Buddhists strongly disagree with these statements. This was true whether our test subjects were Buddhist monks and nuns or Buddhist laypeople. Buddhists also believe in greater impermanence of the world and everything in it.

We also asked these populations if they coped with death by embracing the no-self doctrine. While almost all Tibetans affirmed this coping strategy, virtually none of the Americans said they did. (Abrahamic religions rely on other means for coping with death, such as belief in an afterlife.) Indian Hindus were somewhere in between.

The no-self doctrine is deeply insinuated into the Tibetan Buddhists, but how do these beliefs affect anxiety about death and selfishness? We gave our subjects the fear of personal death scale to fill out, which contains a series of statements about different kinds of reasons one might be afraid of death, to which subjects rate their level of agreement. The scale allows us to measure both the overall fear of death and the reasons for this anxiety.

We were particularly interested in the items related to self-annihilation, which include, “Dying one year from now frightens me because of the loss and destruction of the self,” and, “Dying one year from now frightens me because of the destruction of personality.” When we asked prominent Tibetan scholars how a good Buddhist ought to respond to this scale, they said that one should have little to no fear of destruction of the self.

Nonetheless, Buddhist monks and nuns—those who were steeped in these religion doctrines day in and day out—exhibited significantly more fear of self-annihilation than Americans or Indians. Buddhist laypeople, who were less versed in the details of the doctrine of selflessness, also exhibited less fear than the monastics. If we consider only the other possible reasons to fear death, such as fear of the unknown, Buddhists were no less fearful than anyone else. In short, the no-self doctrine, rather than equipping the Tibetan lamas with serenity regarding end of life, seems to provoke a deep-rooted anxiety of self-annihilation, and does nothing to reduce overall fear of death.

In another survey, we gave participants a tradeoff task to measure generosity in end-of-life decisions. Imagine, we said, that you have a terminal disease that will kill you in six months unless you take a medication. There is only one dose of the medication available. If you take it, it will prolong your life by six months. If you don’t take the medication, it will go to someone else who has the same condition and, like you, will die in six months. If the medicine would prolong his life by twelve months instead of six, would you still take the medicine? What about two years? How much more life would the stranger have to receive before you would give up your medicine?

What we found surprised us. While Abrahamic and Hindu populations chose to give their medicine away when the stranger would live an additional couple of years, Buddhists were exceedingly reluctant to give their medicine away under any circumstances. If there is a ceiling on how much Buddhists value their lives over others, we never found it. Our scale only went up to “more than five years”—more than 70 percent of Buddhists selected this option.

Much of Buddhist philosophy and religious practice is aimed at cultivating selflessness, rechanneling concerns to the larger moral universe around us. But we did not find this effect in our studies. Ironically, it seems that these teachings, instead of mitigating fear of death and nurturing generosity, engender some of the behaviors and thought patterns they seek to destroy. These effects are especially strong among monastics who have the deepest understanding of these doctrines. They are the most fearful of self-annihilation, and the least generous with their lives.

This cross-cultural research highlights that religious teachings can have a deep and lasting impact on precisely the sort of moral and existential quandaries that religion is designed to help us navigate. However, these beliefs will not always have the impact on practitioners that we intend—and may in some cases even be counterproductive.

Wow! Existence has always existed.

I've done a lot of pondering about the primal mystery of existence.

As noted in the essay I wrote this month for the Spiritual Naturalist Society, I've gone from being blown away by the classic question Why is there something rather than nothing? to being awestruck at the amazing affirmation, There is something rather than nothing.

Read on...

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Wow! Existence has always existed.

Awe-inspiring. Spine-tingling. Vertigo-inducing. Something frequently produces these feelings in me.

It isn’t a theme park ride. In fact, it isn’t even a thing. It is everything.

Existence. Just typing that word produced a chill up my spine — a familiar sensation, because I’ve done a lot of grokking about existence.

The usual way of approaching this primal enigma is with a question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I used to resonate with the why.

I thought that just as the things in the world we’re familiar with can be traced to a cause, so can the everything of existence. But this doesn’t make sense to me now.

There’s a difference between things that come into being, and being itself, a.k.a. existence. Positing a cause for a specific entity entails no philosophical quandary, even if that thing is the entire universe.

This caused that. No problem.

Science says, “The Big Bang created the universe.” Religion says, “God created the universe.” We can argue about the plausibility of rival explanations, but not with the logic of seeking a why for a what.

At some point, though, the chain of why reaches an end. Why the Big Bang? Why God? Why, why, why.

We can come up with possible explanations until… we can’t. Then we’re into mind-blowing territory. Terra firma not only turns into terra incognita, seemingly the very possibility of cognizing an answer vanishes.

In “The Mystery of Existence: Why is There Anything At All?,” a collection of essays edited by John Leslie and Robert-Lawrence Kuhn, Kuhn speaks to this in his own contribution, Why Not Nothing?

The question would become my life partner, and even as I learned the rich philosophical legacy of Nothing, I do not pass a day without its disquieting presence.

I am haunted. Here we are, human beings, conscious and abruptly self-aware, with lives fleetingly short, engulfed by a vast, seemingly oblivious cosmos of unimaginable enormousness.

…Now for my secret. No matter how sensible and controlled I may seem to be, Why Not Nothing still drives me nuts. Every time I revisit the stupefying question, I want to scream. Why this Universe? Does God Exist? In comparison, both questions are small beer. Why is there anything at all? That’s the magisterial Question.

…Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? Why Not Nothing? If you don’t get dizzy, you really don’t get it.

I agree. However, I feel equally dizzy pondering a statement rather than a question: There is something rather than nothing.

Wow. The cosmos is. Always has been. Always will be. Probably.

I need that caveat, “probably,” because there’s no way to know whether the human mind is capable of coming to grips with the is’ness of existence. Most of us visualize existence as, well, existing.

In space and time, as a sort of thing. But how could existence be a thing? It’s what makes things possible. No existence, no things.

In Kuhn’s essay, he lists nine levels of Nothings. Which, in reverse, implies nine levels of Somethings. Here’s #1 and #9, the alpha and omega of nothingness.

(1) Nothing as existing space and time that just happens to be totally empty of all visible objects (particles and energy are permitted — an utterly simplistic view).

(9) Nothing where not only there are none of the above (so that, as in Nothing 8, there are no abstract objects), but also there are no possibilities of any kind (recognizing that possibilities and abstract objects overlap, though allowing that they can be distinguished).

No possibilities of any kind. Now, that is really nothing. So much so, I can’t imagine this ultimate Nothing could exist.

Of course, that’s an absurd word to use for it: exist. Level 9 Nothing is the absolute absence of existence. There is no way it (of course, it isn’t an “it”) could have preceded existence, since that Nothing has no possibility of being other than what it is.

Or rather, isn’t.

Thus I’ve lost interest in the why of existence. Why is there something rather than nothing? is a meaningless question. As Kuhn points out, absolute nothing contains no way for existence to exist.

So while religious believers are awestruck at the supposed existence of God, I find an equal or greater measure of awe in the fact of existence itself.

This isn’t a feeling of being in the presence of something greater than myself. After all, I exist. A grain of sand exists. A subatomic particle exists. We all are on the same basic ontological level; we exist.

For me it’s more like looking into a bottomless pit. I feel like I’ve reached the end of my knowing. And not only that: anyone’s knowing.

I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility.

Perhaps some human with a consciousness far different than mine, or an alien being with abilities beyond my capacity to fathom, would be able to look upon the mystery of existence and see it as…

Words fail me. Unsurprisingly.

I simply am open to the idea that however dizzying I find the notion of ever-existing existence, the necessity of existence having always existed, the blunt facticity of the cosmos that is at odds with my experience of everything else having a why, a cause — my mind could be as incapable of grasping the essence of reality as a chimpanzee’s is incapable of grasping calculus.

There’s another possibility: the mystery of existence is a non-existent problem.

“It is nonsense to say that I wonder at the existence of the world, because I cannot imagine it not existing.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein

“I should say that the universe is just there, and that is all.”
— Bertrand Russell

Well, it’s hard to argue with these perspectives. But being more wonder-filled than Wittgenstein, I’ll end by quoting myself (one of my favorite activities):

My mind gets boggled when I try to envision existence existing eternally, outside of time. This is the far side of the mystery of existence. Endlessness. Eternity. Being without becoming. Effect absent cause. Yet I’m equally boggled by the near side of the mystery of existence.

This present moment. What’s right here, right now. The fact that I’m experiencing what I am, given how much is’ness there is in the cosmos.

Mystery doesn’t only lie beyond the horizon of my consciousness. Mystery is immediately before me. In fact, is me. Because I exist, and no one knows why anything exists, nor if “why?” is even a valid question when asked of the entirety of existence.

In between the near and far sides of the mystery of existence, knowledge can be known. Science guides us. Explorations of causes and effects can steadily enlighten the darkness of what it is possible to know, yet presently isn’t. This illuminating has no end.

Except at the near side and far side of the mystery of existence.

Here, I believe, all we can do is WOW! And that one word is, for me, all the religion, spirituality, and mysticism I need in my current churchlessness.

Belief in design of the natural world runs deep in human brain

Here's another bit of scientific evidence showing that false religious belief comes easy, while true secular rationalism requires effort to attain.

The title of the piece, "Even atheists intuitively believe in a creator, study finds" is a bit overblown.

It's more, as you can read below, that humans have an innate bias toward finding design in the natural world, even when something like a tree obviously wasn't intentionally designed.

This helps explain why the vast majority of people on Earth subscribe to religious beliefs. Psychologically, it's the easy way to go.

What's difficult is to carefully assess the evidence of non-directed evolution and other signs that however the cosmos came to be as it is -- many questions remain unanswered, and may aways remain so -- there is no need to posit an "intelligent designer." 

Most people automatically anthropomorphize the world, jumping to the erroneous conclusion that because stuff created by humans has designer, so does natural reality.

Here's the piece:
Download Even atheists intuitively believe in a creator, study finds

Since the discoveries of Darwin, evidence has gradually mounted refuting the notion that the natural world is the product of a deity or other outside designer. Yet this idea remains firmly lodged in the human brain.

Just how firmly is the subject of newly published research, which finds even self-proclaimed atheists instinctively think of natural phenomena as being purposefully created.

The findings ''suggest that there is a deeply rooted natural tendency to view nature as designed,'' writes a research team led by Elisa Järnefelt of Newman University. They also provide evidence that, in the researchers’ words, ''religious non-belief is cognitively effortful.''

In the journal Cognition, Järnefelt and her colleagues describe three studies conducted at Boston University, the first of which featured 352 North American adults recruited online. All were shown a series of 120 photographs, including natural landscapes and human-made artifacts.

They were instructed to assess whether ''any being purposefully made the thing in the picture'' by pressing keys designated ''yes'' or ''no.'' Approximately half of the participants did so under the ''speed condition,'' in which they had no more than 865 milliseconds to respond to each photo.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that ''religious participants’ baseline tendency to endorse nature as purposefully created was higher'' than that of their non-religious counterparts. More importantly, however, they found that non-religious participants ''increasingly defaulted to understanding natural phenomena as purposefully made'' when ''they did not have time to censor their thinking.''

The results suggest that ''the tendency to construe both living and non-living nature as intentionally made derives from automatic cognitive processes, not just practiced explicit beliefs.''

The second study used the same procedure as the first, but the participants were 148 North American adults ''who were recruited via the e-mail lists of atheist and other explicitly non-religious associations and organizations.''

The results mirrored those of the first study, in that atheists ''increased their tendency to endorse nature as purposefully made by some non-human being when judging natural entities under speeded conditions.''

A third study of non-religious people from Finland, a country where atheism ''is not an issue, and where theistic cultural discourse is not present in the way it is in the U.S.,'' produced similar results.

''Design-based intuitions run deep,'' the researchers conclude, ''persisting even in those with no explicit religious commitment and, indeed, even among those with an active aversion to them.''

So ''true non-belief may be even rarer among adults than previously suggested," as Järnefelt and her colleagues put it. This, they argue, helps explain why so many people misunderstand the theory of evolution.

We tend to absorb ''newly learned scientific information'' into our existing belief systems, the researchers note. In this case, such an attempted synthesis leads to the mistaken notion that natural selection is ''a quasi-intentional designing force that gives animals the functional traits that they need in order to survive.''

So members of the new atheism movement shouldn’t get too cocky that their ideas will eventually prevail. And science educators trying to instill the basics of evolutionary theory will have to find a way to do so while acknowledging their students' instinctive tendency to make the leap from creation to creator.

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There's no need for a "theology of atheism"

At one time I probably would have agreed with a call for a theology of atheism. But now this strikes me as both absurd and unneeded.

Sure, I've got a blog called Church of the Churchless. That sort of sounds like the same thing. Aren't I trying to foster a belief system for people who don't believe in God or the supernatural?

Not really. 

This might have been part of my motivation when I started this blog back in 2004. Hard for me to say. I'm a considerably different person now than I was back then, just as I'm a slightly different person today than I was yesterday.

Now, I view knowledge and experience of the natural world -- the one we're born in, live in, and die in -- as all that's needed to get through life successfully, happily, wisely.

Atheism simply is the absence of a belief in the existence of a god or gods. This word is needed because most people do believe in a god or gods, and their beliefs strongly shape human cultures and societies.

There isn't such a term for people who don't play golf.

They simply are people who don't play golf. For avid golfers, that game is really important to them. However, non-golfers don't feel a need to come up with a coherent explanation for why they don't play golf. 

They just don't play golf. Instead, they do other things.

So the notion of a theology of atheism strikes me as being similar: unnecessary. Atheists are just people who don't believe in the existence in god or gods. Instead, they believe in other things. Like the obvious reality of the natural world.

Molly Worthen, though, has a piece in the New York Times called "Wanted: A Theology of Atheism."

As nonbelievers tangle with traditional Christians over same-sex marriage and navigate conflicts between conservative Muslims and liberal democracy, they will need a confident humanist moral philosophy. The secular humanist liberation movement, in its zeal to win over religious America, should not encourage nonbelievers to turn away from their own intellectual heritage at the time when they will want it most.

OK. This makes pretty good sense to me. What bothers me about Worthen's essay is the attitude reflected in this passage:

Atheism, like any ideological position, has political and moral consequences. As nonbelievers become a more self-conscious subculture, as they seek to elect their own to high office and refute the fear that a post-Christian America will slide into moral anarchy, they will need every idea their tradition offers them.

In line with how I started out this post, I don't see atheism as being an "ideological position." Rather, it is the absence of one. 

The "idea their tradition offers them" is simply knowledge and experience of the natural world. In other words, reality.

Why is there a need to justify a belief in reality rather than illusion, in truth rather than falsehood? 

Between theism and atheism... Taoism?

Since I'm now a regular contributor of essays to the Spiritual Naturalist Society, I've been perusing the posts of other people who share their writings on the group's web site.

Thomas Schenk's "Fertile Ground Between Theism and Atheism" is an interesting take on Taoism. Here's how the piece starts out.

The two concepts, “God” and “Tao,” have much in common and significant differences. The concepts “Tao” and “Atheism” also have much in common and significant differences. By examining these commonalities and differences I hope to show that there is a fertile ground between theism and atheism.   

In this fertile ground, there are forms of spirituality of great depth that are free from untenable, supernatural beliefs and the mindsets such beliefs engender. Here we highlight one of those forms, philosophical Taoism, and compare and contrast it with theism and atheism.

I agree with Schenk that, as usually is the case, a binary division such as "theism" and "atheism" doesn't capture the richness of how things actually are. The Taoism symbol, of course, reflects this.

In yin there is yang; in yang there is yin. Each blends into each other.

On the whole, I'd say that Taoism is closer to atheism than theism, since there is no personal God in Taoism, nor any sense that something external to the universe created, directs, and sustains it.

Schenk probably would agree, but his emphasis is on how Taoism lives in the large middle ground between theism and atheism, without specifying where in that conceptual space philosophical Taoism lies. He writes:

It is around the concept of agency, that the two ideas are most divergent. The theistic concept of “God” generally includes the idea of a being that has agency in much the same way that we think of ourselves as having agency. 

If we imagine God as the creator of the world, we imagine him (for convenience I’ll stick with the convention of using the masculine pronoun) creating it in somewhat the same manner as a human architect creates a building. 

First he has an idea and from this idea he creates the material world. For the theist, the world is the realization of God’s idea of the world. There is a master plan and purportedly we humans fit into that plan in some way. Specific theist religions specify various ways in which we fit, and how we are to behave in this life based on how we fit.

...Taoism has a diametrically different idea of agency. The Tao is neither an agent nor a plan. Nature arises from the Tao and sustains itself spontaneously. There is no master plan, no governing agent.  For Taoism, Nature left to itself tends toward organization. 

The celestial orbs follow their path through the sky and the seasons follow each other in due succession.  And again, what is true for the great cosmos is true for the microcosm.

I'd never thought of how a Taoist version of the Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program might operate. Schenk has. He thinks it is possible to turn oneself over to the Tao in somewhat the same way as a theist would surrender to God.

Maybe. I'm not sure about this.

I tend to view the Tao as all-encompassing naturalistic processes rather than as a thing. So if there is nothing other than nature, and we're part and parcel of nature's doings, this portion of Schenk's essay seems a bit off-base to me.

For the purposes of this step both God and Tao can represent a “higher power” to which we can turn over our will and our lives. This is a recognition that there are limits to human agency and beyond the ego’s agency there are “forces” beyond that ego that can lead to spiritual transformation. 

The theist sees this “force” as an at least partially external deity.  Taoism simply accepts it as part of the mystery.  The important thing for the Taoist is the efficacy of this presence, not the how or why of it.

Read the whole essay. I think you'll find it worth your time -- thought-provoking and original.

Godly superstitions are what are dangerous, not disbelief in divinity

Here's three recent news items that fit together in my churchless mind. The first is a letter to the editor in my local newspaper, the Salem (Oregon) Statesman Journal.

I have no idea why the paper publishes this crap.

I doubt they would regularly fill up space on the editorial pages with letters praising Zeus and warning that failing to believe in the Greek Pantheon of gods will lead to this nation's cultural downfall, so why publish this religious gibberish?

When the Ten Commandments were introduced to the world in about 1475 B.C., they were presented to a primitive theocratic society. 

This meant all laws were God's laws, including civil laws. Therefore, those who did not obey God's laws were probably lawless people who could not be trusted and were probably put to death.

Even later, when Mohammad was alive in the 7th century A.D., they still followed the same protocol. They decapitated people who they thought did not obey God's laws.

It is almost impossible for people growing up and living in America to visualize a world so primitive that it required such ungodly behavior. But re-read Deuteronomy 13.

However, not worrying about decapitation, if Christians in America want to be thought of as trustworthy or successful, they must still honor the Ten Commandments. (No one trusts liars and thieves.) Even atheists agree to that.

So why can anyone object to displaying the Ten Commandments in our public buildings and schools? Could it be that we do not want to offend Muslims who still think they want to live under laws that were necessary in the 7th century?

Sam McCoy
Salem

McCoy assumes that Statesman Journal subscribers have already read Deuteronomy 13. This was my first exposure to this primitive Biblical claptrap. 

The general message, based on a quick overview, is that even if someone seemingly has divine powers, don't believe in him/her, because they're trying to lure you away from the One True God. Even more, that someone should be put to death. 

Even if the lurer is your son, daughter, wife, or best friend. You cast the first stone; then other true believers follow. That sounds really moral.

I don't understand what McCoy is getting at in the rest of his letter, though.

He says that we don't have to worry any more about being killed if we don't obey God's laws. (Leaving aside the question of which God?) But he wants the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public buildings and schools. 

McCoy doesn't favor following primitive Islamic laws of the 7th century, but he is fine with following primitive Biblical laws that are much older than that. Oh, well. It's no surprise when religious believers fail to make sense.

The second piece that caught my eye was on the World Religious News site, "Richard Dawkins feels the rise in None's could be 'even worse'."

By None's, he means the rapidly growing number of people who don't subscribe to any organized religion. By even worse, World Religious News seems to want its readers to believe that Dawkins views "spiritual but not religious" folks as more dangerous than adherents of traditional religions.

Well, that is overstating things, based on a video where Dawkins said that None's who embrace Deepak Chopra are "even worse." HIs expression and tone of voice reflect a dry British wit, so that statement isn't meant to be taken very seriously. 

 

Third, the outcry over nude and semi-nude tourists doing their thing on Malaysia's "sacred" Mount Kinabalu is a great example of how religiosity and supernaturalism lead to ridiculous moral judgments. 

Residents in the Malaysian city where a group of tourists are being held after posing naked on the country’s highest mountain have spoken of their anger at the stunt.

Four western tourists, including a 23-year-old Briton, Eleanor Hawkins, appeared on Wednesday handcuffed and dressed in purple prison uniforms in a court in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah state. 

They were part of a group of 10 trekkers who were last month photographed stripping on Mount Kinabalu. Malaysian officials later linked the stunt on the sacred mountain to an earthquake six days later which killed 18 people.

The four tourists were remanded in custody in the city, which lies about 55 miles (90km) south-east of Mount Kinabalu, while investigations are carried out.

Fendi Adam, a teenager, is a member of the Dusun tribe, which believes spirits live in the mountain and that the naked tourists caused the earthquake. 

“The spirits don’t like what they did. They should be kept in jail for a long time,” he told the Guardian.

Well, I'm not sure how authorities could investigate whether the mountain's spirits were bothered enough by the nudity to respond with an earthquake. That sure sounds ridiculous. 

Just as ridiculous as the assertion by Christians, Jews, and other religious crazies that immoral behavior here in the United States caused Hurricane Katrina. So says Wikipedia.

Various political and religious leaders have suggested that Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,836 people, was sent as a divine retribution for the sins of New Orleans, or of the South, or for the United States as a whole.^[1][2] New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is said to have asserted in a speech on January 16, 2006, addressing the effects of Hurricane Katrina, "Surely God is mad at America".^[2] 

Various different reasons have been given for God's wrath. Some victims of the disaster also made attributions to supernatural causes, that they were being punished for their sins, or that God was testing them, or even that the event was "the work of Satan." 

Misanthropic Principle: Universe is fine-tuned against life

I like this guy's way of thinking. He has a letter in the most recent issue of New Scientist where he points out how ill-suited the universe is for life. 

This is, he says, the Misanthropic Principle -- as contrasted with the Anthropic Principle. It doesn't appear to be his original idea. Googling this term, I found a post by a Jewish astrophysicist, Howard Smith, who says that he coined the term.

 Here's the New Scientist letter:

From Nathaniel Hellerstein

Michael Slezak says that the universe is fine-tuned for life (2 May, p. 32). Balderdash. 

Inspection of the night sky reveals that the universe is almost entirely cryogenic pitch-black irradiated empty space, void of life, or indeed of anything much. To a high order of approximation, the universe resembles a vacuum.

The universe isn't 100 per cent lifeless, but 99.9999999999 per cent lifeless is pretty good fine-tuning. I deduce that the universe is fine-tuned not for life, but against it. I call this the Misanthropic Principle.

San Francisco, California, US

To me, the Misanthropic Principle argues against religious conceptions of the cosmos. Smith, though, says that it can have both secular and sacred interpretations.

The implications for religion are serious: We are blessed (or lucky, if you are an atheist). As I argued at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting, from my Jewish perspective of the Bible, being blessed means that we therefore have responsibilities: to act with humility and charity toward each other and the whole Earth and its inhabitants. As a religious person, I think it is not completely sensible to imagine that our blessed condition is just the result of inevitable chemical reactions.

Well, maybe not completely. But mostly. That's the prevailing scientific view, at least, which I share. So call me a believer in the non-blessed Misanthropic Principle.

Knowledge must be based on facts

Recently I wrote about "Five criteria for a 'God Theory' that religions fail." One of philosopher L.R. Hamelin's criteria related to private knowledge.

If her theory can be tested only by private revelation, not by observations available to everyone, she unjustifiably claims private knowledge.

Someone left a comment on this post, wondering why private knowledge wasn't justifiable. This was my reply:

Here's how I see the issue of "private revelation" and "private knowledge."

Can knowledge be private? Only if we define knowledge in a way that makes it virtually (or completely) synonymous with subjective experience. But then it isn't really knowledge -- something that holds true for more than just a single experiencer.

I feel uplifted when I gaze upon a rushing mountain river in early morning sunlight. (Just did that half an hour ago, actually.) That experience happened to me. But can I call this "knowledge" and expect others to accept it as such?

Well, they can trust that I did indeed have that experience. But there's no way that I, or anyone else, can prove that I really did. Even brain scanners, if one could be hooked up to me on the riverbank, could only show broadly what is happening in my brain, not the experiential feeling associated with this.

So I think the author of that quote was claiming something defensible: a private experience is unjustifiably claimed as private knowledge. Meaning, a person's subjective experience can't be held out as actual knowledge of some objectively real aspect of the world without evidence that is more than private.

Otherwise, what are we left with? Anyone could claim anything to be true, demanding that others accept it as true. I get pulled over by a policeman for speeding. I tell him "God told me that I needed to go that fast, so speeding is part of my religious freedom." He or she should laugh at me.

Yes, satsangis and other religious believers make claims to private knowledge. All the time. So does everyone else. Whenever I say "I feel..." or "I dreamed..." I'm claiming private knowledge. But like I said, this really is a claim to a private experience, which isn't objectionable. 

I can accept that you had a private experience, because I assume you have subjectivity, just as I do. However, if you want me to accept your private experience as something true about the world, you need to bring forth more than just a subjective claim.

Reading on in the book the "private knowledge" reference came from -- Jerry Coyne's "Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible" -- I've found some passages that echo what I said.

What is true may exist without being recognized, but once it is it becomes knowledge. Similarly, knowledge isn't knowledge unless it is factual, so "private knowledge" that comes through revelation or intuition isn't really knowledge, for it's missing the crucial ingredient of verification and consensus.

..."I'm hungry," my friend tells me, and that too is seen as extrascientific knowledge. And indeed, any feeling that you have, any notion or revelation, can be seen as subjective truth or knowledge. What that means is that it's true that you feel that way. 

What that doesn't mean is that the epistemic content of your feeling is true. That requires independent verification by others. Often someone claiming hunger actually eats very little, giving rise to the bromide "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach."

...As William James argued, it is the subjective and revelatory aspects of religion that gives it the most purchase: the feeling of certainty that religious claims are true. But when one has a religious experience, what is "true" is only that one has had that experience, not that its contents convey anything about reality.

To determine that, one needs a way to verify the contents of a revelation, and that means science. After all, while some Christians accept the existence of Jesus because they have mental conversations with him, Hindus have mental conversations with Shiva, and Muslims with Allah.

...I've argued that science, construed broadly as a commitment to the use of rationality, empirical observation, testability, and falsifiability, is indeed the only way to gain objective knowledge (as opposed to subjective knowledge) about the universe.

Replace beliefs with working hypotheses

Here's a great letter to the editor that I came across in the May 9, 2015 issue of New Scientist.

From Ray Norris
According to Graham Lawton, "Beliefs, more than anything else, are what make us human" (4 April, p 28). I guess I'm not human, then, since I decided as a geeky astrophysics student many years ago to live in an evidence-based world in which beliefs are replaced by working hypotheses.

At least, I think I did, unless somebody produces strong evidence to the contrary. Once you renounce beliefs, life seems very straightforward, and totally self-consistent. I don't believe in global warming, but I think there's strong evidence to support it. I don't believe in the scientific method, but it seems to work remarkably well, so far. I don't believe in god, but wouldn't it be awesome if somebody produced evidence for a god? (I invite gods to try their hand at this).

A world without rigid intolerant belief is probably a gentler, kinder, more fault-tolerant world, with less persecution of those who don't share our beliefs. Whether you have (irrational) beliefs or (evidence-based) working hypotheses probably makes little difference to daily life, but an enormous difference to the way you view the world. I am always aware of the possibility that anything I say, including this sentence, is wrong.

Racism, sexism and all the other nasty-isms could probably not survive without belief. Unless I believe I'm superior to you, it's very difficult to justify killing you, or discriminating against you.
Baulkham Hills, New South Wales, Australia

Directionless, I feel like I've found my way

Nice title of this post, if I do say so myself.

Which I did about a week ago -- choosing to use those words, "Directionless, I'm feel like I've found my way," as the name for my first essay written for the Spiritual Naturalist Society, where I'm now a contributing writer.

You can check it out on a Society page. Or read it below.

Directionless, I feel like I’ve found my way

For thirty-five years I was on a spiritual path. 

I felt like I knew where I was going: back to God. I felt like I knew how to get there: meditate every day, have faith in the guru, follow certain moral vows. I felt like I knew what the milestones along the path were: mystical sights and sounds, along with other inner experiences.

There’s a lot of satisfaction in being on a path. 

You don’t have to think about where to go or what to do. Just take one step at a time in a well-marked direction. Associating with other people who are traveling the same way brings a sense of community.

Once my wife and I went cross-country skiing after heavy snowfalls had come to the Oregon Cascades. Starting off from a ski resort, at first the trail was easy to follow.

But when we got further around the loop some of the trail markers were covered by deep snow. Tracks were minimal. We were alone in the woods. For the first time in my life I thought, “We might be lost. The sun is setting. 

My wordless feeling… near-panic. I realized that we could be heading into a wilderness area, rather than back to the resort parking lot. All we could do was keep trekking along through mounds of pathless snow. 

When I saw two people coming towards us, I wanted to hug them. “Is the resort that way?” “Yes,” they told us, “just a little ways further.”

I’ve never forgotten the horrible feeling of being lost in dangerous territory. 

It was like having a nightmare intrude into waking consciousness. The stability of everyday life that I counted on — knowing where I was, knowing where I wanted to go, knowing how to get from here to there — had vanished.

Scary. Super-scary. 

Which emotionally wasn’t far afield from an intense fear of non-existence that has popped into my psyche at unpredictable moments. Dying is a lot like being lost. Permanently. 

Unless you have faith in a Way, a Path to a hoped-for supernatural place of eternal rest: heaven, paradise, ultimate reality, god. 

Thus just as being physically lost leads us to long for a well-marked path, so does a sense of being spiritually lost. When I decided to leave the religious group I’d belonged to for so long, those still devoted to it would say, “Brian, you’ve lost your way. You’re off The Path.”

(Yes, both in print and in tone of voice, members of this organization viewed their way as the only genuine way back to God, hence the capitalization.) 

Well, a simple realization led me to commit the supposed heresy of rejecting the spiritual course I was on: we humans create paths, nature doesn’t. 

I’m not saying that mammals, birds, fish, insects and other creatures fail to travel on well-defined routes. They do. However, only us Homo sapiens conceptualize our paths. 

More broadly speaking, we mentally embody our physical experiences. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote a book about this, “Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and It’s Challenge to Western Thought.”

Conceptual structure arises from our sensorimotor experience and the neural structures that give rise to it. The very notion of “structure” in our conceptual system is characterized by such things as image schemas and motor schemas. 

This applies to Eastern thought also. My Indian guru would speak of “going within,” “ascending to higher regions,” “treading the spiritual path,” “dragged down by karmas,” and such.

As Lakoff and Johnson point out in their book, these sorts of spatial metaphors are taken to represent mental or non-physical realities. Our bodily experience leads us to see paths, higher and lower places, ascents and descents. This is how we come to understand the world philosophically: as a metaphor of embodied life.

Imagine a concept of love without physical force — that is, without attraction, electricity, magnetism — and without union, madness, illness, magic, nurturance, journeys, closeness, heat, or giving of oneself. Take away all those metaphorical ways of conceptualizing love, and there’s not a whole lot left.

What’s left is the mere literal skeleton: a lover, a beloved, feelings of love, and a relationship which has an onset and an end point. Without the conventional metaphors for love, we are left only with the skeleton, bereft of the richness of the concept. 

True enough. However, in the case of supernatural entities that almost certainly don’t exist — God, heaven, soul, and so on — removing the embodied metaphors does more than leave us with only a skeleton.

We’re down to nothing, really. Nothing, at least, that isn’t brain-based and physical. Emotions, thoughts, perceptions, imaginings, hopes, desires.

When I came to realize this, how I’d taken the very real experience of following a path in this world and accepted it as a metaphor for a theorized supernatural way-finding, the foundation of my faith started to slip away.

With a great sense of relief.

I didn’t need to worry about being lost, because I wasn’t. I didn’t need to fear being off The Path, because such didn’t exist. These notions weren’t part of objective reality, just the subjective theology I’d accepted. 

As trite as this may sound, in my current churchless state of mind I’ve become enamored of the saying, “It is what it is.” While this is a clichéd oft-heard response by members of a losing sports team after a tough loss, there’s a lot to like about the phrase. 

It reminds us that however we try to categorize, analyze, deconstruct, and systematize the universe, there’s no way of knowing if our all-too-human descriptions come close to capturing its ultimate nature.

I used to believe that it was possible to get much closer to the “truth that passeth all understanding,” if not stand spiritually right on top of it. This presumed, though, that close and far are meaningful concepts in regard to the cosmos as a whole.

Now I resonate with what Alan Watts says in his book, “Nature, Man, and Woman.”

The harsh divisions of spirit and nature, mind and body, subject and object, controller and controlled are seen more and more to be awkward conventions of language. 

These are misleading and clumsy terms for describing a world in which all events seem to be mutually interdependent — an immense complexity of subtly balanced relationships which, like an endless knot, has no loose end from which it can be untangled and put in supposed order.

No longer feeling like I need to escape the tangled web of materiality, I’m content with meandering along the intricately woven threads of existence. One moment I’m here, the next, there. 

I don’t know where I’m going until I get there. Having arrived, I’m content with not staying very long. Moving on, the absence of a path doesn’t bother me. 

I’m not even sure there is a “me” who is doing the going, the staying, the moving on. Alan Watts doesn’t think so.

The Taoist idea of naturalness… is the concrete realization that all our experiences and actions are movements of the Tao, the way of nature, the endless knot, including the very experience of being an individual, a knowing subject.

…Every movement in the endless knot is a movement of the knot, acting as a total organism, though the parts, or loops, of the knot are not looked upon as passive entities moved by the whole.

For they are parts only figuratively divided from the whole for purposes of recognition and discussion; in reality, the loops are the knot, differences within identity like the two sides of a coin, neither of which can be removed without removing the other.