No Gods, No Masters vs. Submission to the Will of God

A morning thought, or at least a morning ponder over coffee, induced by remembering a line from U2: "If you wanna touch the sky better learn how to kneel/ on your knees boy!":

There's ways, when talking religion, that you come up against fundamental differences in thought. For instance, atheists often hear the charge that we are rebellious -- that our beef with God is that we don't want to bow our heads and submit ourselves to His Will.  We're prideful, and Pride Goeth Before the Fall and all that.

Which is one of those true/not true kind of things. I mean, it's not true because really, our beef with "God" is that we honestly don't think "God" exists. It's really nothing more than that, at least for the vast majority of us. But it's also true, because you know what? Damn straight we don't want to submit. We hold that Freedom is the most important thing, that to bow your head is to open yourself up to the chance someone will take it off. No Gods, No Masters.

This isn't just an atheist thing, either. It's a rationalist position, one that holds that we should stand on our own two feet and get to work. Paine, as sure a believer as any Christian, didn't believe in a God who demanded or needed submission. Paine would've grumbled at the "No Gods" part of the famous slogan, but he would've been right there with the "No Masters" part. His God was no Master, but a Creator looking for new creators, beings who'd dare to unravel the mysteries of His Creation and stand proud...

So on one side we have atheists, agnostics and some believers who think that humans should stand on our own two feet and trust in our own abilities; and on the other side we have those who believe that humans should submit totally to the Will of God. It's a divide between those who choose Freedom versus those who choose Slavery. It's hard to imagine how to bridge that divide.

There's something lurking behind that word

Greta Christina has a nice piece up, "Atheism and Self-Definition," which got me thinking about words and definitions and battles over same. She's talking about something every atheist has probably experienced -- having the word defined for us, despite our protestations to the contrary.

Mostly, I find myself fascinated by how words can have so much lurking behind

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them.

As Greta notes, one of the most powerful acts an individual or movement can make is self-definition, and we've been hard at work at it with the word "atheist." Any look at the history of the word will send you down a rabbit hole of confusion and head-spinning. What did people in earlier times mean by the word? It can be hard to say, but I can say this:  it was a lot more than the spartan definition of "no belief in a god or gods." In fact, it seems like it has often meant something like "a wholesale denial and repudiation of everything that we value and hold to be true." It meant Evil and Anarchism, dogs and cats sleeping together... I mean, people back in the day called Thomas Paine an atheist!

So one side of the conversation has really weighed this word down. And we are trying to redefine it. Now, many times we will do that by whittling it down. We proclaim the most basic definition, a lack of belief in a god or gods, and say "no more than that!" Not a positive declaration that there is no God, but rather simply a statement that we just don't believe.

But honestly, we're also adding to the word, too. Go read those New Atheist bestsellers. Go take a peek at the atheist blogosphere. Modern Atheism has some definite features that go beyond "No belief in a god or gods." There's Humanism. There's Skepticism. There's Philosophical and Practical Naturalism.

The real battle, in a sense, isn't just the definition of the word -- it's all that stuff lurking behind it. We have our set of lurking ideas; they have theirs.

Or, to put it another way:  for us, atheism is a funny ol' thing these days, because it's really -- if we take that simple, stripped down definition we talk about -- such a very small part of who we are. That other stuff is where we're at. It's what we're about. Atheism? It's just a description for our stance on a particular idea that many folk seem to think is Very Important. It's not where we start from; it's just one of the places we end up. Just a description, folks. I'm male, I'm a sexy dude, I'm an atheist...

I kinda think, though, that many theists think the God issue is where they start from. It certainly seems as if many folk hang pretty much everything on the notion: Morality, meaning, love, you name it.  So they tend to think of atheism in those terms. We must think it's really damn important, too! Only, funny thing is, we're often not quite on the same page with them on that one. Because of all that lurking stuff behind the word.

I guess someone could say that we shouldn't use the word, precisely because of all the lurking stuff and the problems it creates. But to me it seems like we're pretty much stuck with it. So we redefine it, and keep at it, and hopefully, eventually, we get folks to see all that other stuff.

Thinking Aloud About The Animistic Urge

It's Autumn. Not so's you'd completely notice in my parts, since it can still be a tad hot this time of year -- but yes, even here in the Sonoran Desert, you can feel the change in the air. The nights are cooler, and even the days feel...softer. With Autumn comes my inevitable loves of this time of year:  dark fantasy and horror, mythic landscapes composed of Frankensteins and vampires and werewolves, oh my!

Which gets me thinking about the human tendency towards animism. I feel, I think, the most at this time of year. I go for long walks and get caught up in vivid fantasies. The air seems alive. The trees seem -- well, more alive than usual. Shadows seem to have wills of their own. Not really, of course. I may jump headlong into metaphor and not come up for air for a few months, but it's always firmly metaphor in my head. It's more like it's the only way I can think to express the thoughts and emotions that come up at this time.

Some of it is the Topic of the Season -- Death. In Halloween, in the Day of the Dead, and in the whole general tendency of the season, the focus is on death and

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change and endings. Which, for me, also firmly focuses me on Life, that wondrous thing, so prosaic and yet so mysterious at the same time. So the world around me seems in sharper focus, dancing with Life, and that ol' animistic urge takes hold...
Is it coincidence that, just as traditional religion lost a bit of its privileged place in modern societies, fantasy and its ilk grew as genres? I often wonder if there's been studies done of the fans of fantasy and horror and SF -- I wonder, for instance, if there isn't a larger percentage of  nonbelievers and the like in those groups. Like maybe in these Let's Pretends we let our animistic urge out a bit, let it play, knowing the whole time it's play and nothing else, so it's fun and useful and doesn't carry the dangers that believing our animistic imaginings can cause.

I like the thought, I have to say. Maybe, as we have lost Belief, we have gained Play. That's a pretty damnfine trade in my book, if you ask me. Werewolves would be terrifying things to believe in! But they make delicious fun in stories that explore the darker sides of human nature.

Which leads me to a final thought:  thinking skeptically, using our reason as carefully as we can, doesn't necessarily mean some terrible death match against the irrational parts of our minds. On the contrary, it can give those parts a place to play safely that makes them sources of fun and inspiration, rather than sources of terror and worry. We're always contending against that old stereotype that skeptics are wet blankets -- maybe we need to show, more often, how it can deepen and enrich our experiences. Ghosts are so much more fun when they aren't real.

A worldview that says "yes"

The theme of this here little blog covers a bit of territory. The proscenium in question can be that of humanity -- the way we as a species view ourselves and the Cosmos. It can also be a lot more personal. I've been thinking a lot about that aspect -- about the lens that I view the world through, and myself. If I had to summarize the downside of my life so far, it has been that my personal proscenium has been far too small. My stage is tiny and encompasses little. That is one of the results, I think, of the depression I suffered from for years. Depression makes your world small -- it collapses inwards until it seems like you are stuck in your head. In the last few years, as I've taken good, strong steps to conquer that old nemesis, I've had to learn whole new ways of looking at the world. Heck, I've had to learn to really look at the world!

The best way to make your worldview small, to collapse that proscenium into the tiniest size possible, is to say "no." On a personal level, it can be "no, I can't do this" and "no, I'm certainly not capable of that." Or "no, I should not be like that" or "no, what I am is wrong." There's countless ways to formulate it, countless ways to commit suicide by a thousand tiny cuts.

What's sad is that, if you want to live like that, society will give you a lot of help. Societies have always found it easier to control through prohibition than through inspiration. Don't do this, don't do that, certainly don't do THAT.  Religion is often the willing accomplice, making up prohibitions that have no possible logical reason for existing. Prohibitions against homosexuality? Any logic there? No. Against certain kinds of dress? Nope, not there either. But logic is never the point -- having an arbitrary rule is. A litany of no's. No to this, no to that, don't do that.

On the personal level, the no's a person comes up with for themselves can be every bit as arbitrary and stupid. And, of course, they often take forms created by the culture at large.

Which brings me to Humanism, and what makes it special to me. It is a worldview that is founded in the word "yes." It's about possibility. It's about growing and encouraging growth, about celebrating difference and individuality as strengths rather than as threats. Instead of "no," it says "yes" and "why not?" Being an atheist, being a humanist, has not created any sort of deep, existential crisis for me. I don't think, wow, how depressing. I find it liberating and full of hope. Because at the end of the day, it says, "yes." It's a nice way to beat down the sad litany that I drummed into my own head for so many years.

Thomas Paine pwns organized religion, part 2: Prophecy

Before the Great Death Plague '09 hit me, you may recall that I had a post on Thomas Paine's discussion of the three tools that organized religion uses to bamboozle people: Mystery, Miracles and Prophecy. Mystery he dispensed with quick contempt; Miracles he spent a bit more time on. He finishes his discussion with the notion of Prophecy.

Paine basically has two points to make about Prophecy:

First, if God did choose to communicate future events to chosen "prophets," one would expect that those communications would be a lot clearer than the ones we see in the Bible. Instead of clarity, we have confusion; instead of easily comprehensible meaning, we have obscure statements that can be twisted to fit most anything. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty," Paine says, "to suppose he would deal in this jesting manner with mankind; yet all the things called prophecies in the book called the Bible come under this description."

But secondly, and more devastatingly, Paine simply notes this:  it ain't no never mind, kids. It's exactly the same situation as with Miracles -- say you get a Prophecy from God. Fine. How do the rest of us know you did? We don't. We can't. We can't tell if you are lying, or telling the truth. Imagine if Isiah, say, was in fact given important facts about the life of Jesus -- none of the people around him would have any ability to tell whether he was telling the truth or not, because those events lay far in the future. And even if he were to speak of things in the near future and get them right, how do we know he did so because God spoke to him? We can't. He could be a savvy observer of events; he could've guessed and gotten lucky. He could've read something from a savvy observer. Prophecy is personal experience, and thus can't be considered in any kind of rational thought process. It's like expecting other people to believe you saw a ghost just because you're sure you did.


What I find most interesting, though, is the attitude that Paine shows in all of this. It's contained in that quote I used above. "It is conceiving very irreverently of the Almighty..." Paine is a believer. He believed in God. He believed God to be powerful, an Beneficent Creator who had showered mankind with gifts. When push comes to shove, Paine's beef is simply this:  Christianity, and indeed all organized religion, spits in the face of God, hacks away at Him until he is a small and puny thing fit to sit in the confines of weak human imagination. A God who would use such tricks as Mystery, Miracle and Prophecy is worse than a clown, and simply not something worthy of worship.

As an atheist, I sympathize with Paine here. My biggest complaint with religion

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has always been just that -- it is so small, so limited, putting up images that don't challenge our small imaginations in any way. It's easy to laugh at people who, say, see Jesus in a tortilla or a dog's butt -- but really, that's pretty much what organized religion does. It creates small, tiny plays, with small, tiny actors, played out on small, tiny stages. The "religious imagination" is so easily pleased! The vaguest statement can be accepted as a stirring Prophecy. The silliest, flimsiest events can be declared a Miracle. And when in doubt, simply declare something to be a Mystery. Paine, as you may recall from the last post, titled this chapter "Of the Means Employed in All Time, and Almost Universally, to Deceive the Peoples." He forgot, perhaps, to note that they are as much the ways that "the Peoples" deceive themselves. This priestly tricks work because people are so willing to let them work.

Misogyny and unreason

Girl shunned by family after alleged rape.

What's the harm, we're often asked, in this irrational belief or that irrational belief? Does a belief in God really hurt anyone? Is a person who believes in magic really dangerous? Who are they hurting?

Maybe, just maybe, the harm is illustrated by an eight year old being abandoned by her family because she was raped. Let's be clear about something here: wherever you find misogyny, you will find it based in irrational beliefs. They could be religious, or "cultural," or whatever. But they will be irrational. Certainly, any system that blames the victim of a crime for the crime will be nothing like rational.

Whatever the brand of hate -- racism, sexism, homophobia, classism -- it never has a rational basis. It is always founded in irrational beliefs that are never held up to

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the light of reason, never questioned, never tested. Every advance in human ethics has come about because of Reason -- people asking real, honest, difficult questions. Arguments that seemed sound and reasonable were, when subjected to that scrutiny, shown to be nothing more than flimsy rationalizations. Cultural beliefs about women, about gays, about different races, you name it, all shown to be absurd when simply subjected to the simple test of asking "Yeah, but is that true?"

The price for not asking questions, for not subjecting every belief we have to scrutiny, is situations like this. It doesn't even matter what the source of irrationality is in this case -- it could be religion, culture, the conditions created in that culture by decades of war. Maybe all of that. What matters is that the irrationality be fought, that it be called out for what it is. To do that, we have to question every belief, no matter how dear it is to us or someone else. Anything else is, frankly, unethical.

A Failure of Imagination

I'm reading Thomas Paine right now, The Age of Reason, and he provides the

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perfect opportunity to talk about one of the themes that will come up here:  imagination, and the failure thereof. Here's Paine, in Chapter 10 of the Part 1:

In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence to himself, that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising from this evidence, that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist; and this first cause, man calls God.

The reasoning here is familiar to everyone. I have no wish to refute it. I'm after a different fish:  how it represents a failure of imagination.

What Paine does here -- and what the whole Argument from Design does -- is a basic exercise of imagination. He takes his own experience, and extrapolates from that to reason about something he doesn't have direct experience of. We can call this the first step in imagination. It's an important one, and damn handy. Heck, it's this ability that probably makes our brains such handy blobs of cells to have on hand. We use it all the time -- in trying to understand nature, and even just to understand each other.

The usefulness of it, though, has limits. Our failure of imagination comes in how often we forget that, and settle for that first step. Whether it's Paine making an analogy about makers, or a person trying to decide why their lover is pissed at them, we often stop right there with the first, simple extrapolation from our own experience. We don't go the next step, and ask the Big Question: Yeah, but is it true? That's when imagination truly soars. It's one thing to posit that Nature, like the items we create, must have a creator -- it's another to then ask, but is that true, or could something else be true? Do our experiences fail us here?

Science has shown us, after all, that our experiences and perceptions fail us all the time. Our senses only show us part of the universe. Our brains don't wrap themselves easily around Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. And Evolution has shown us that the appearance of design is by no means a sure sign that design, in fact, exists.

My biggest gripe with religion is just that failure of imagination:  it settles for the simple analogy, with its horizons set firmly in the boundaries of the human mind. I won't beat up on religion too hard, though, because it's a common human failing -- heck, I could write several books about the ways I've fallen into that trap. But all the incredible stuff we humans have accomplished in the past few hundred years -- all the science and technology, the social advances, you name it -- has come from that second step of the imagination, the daring to envision the possibility that there could be another answer, another possibility. The daring, at the end of the day, to imagine possibilities outside of the confines of our own heads.