Death, Rebirth, and the skeptic (metaphorically speaking)

I've got a full blown case of Halloweenitis now. Damn, but I love this time of year.

Mostly, I love the symbolism of this time of year, and of the whole holiday, especially in its pagan roots. Death! Rebirth! Renewal! A time of transition, of liminality. In-betweenness. Which, really, for humans can be scary stuff. We like things nice and settled, mostly. Only life doesn't quite work that way, does it? We always get hit with those unsettled times. The transition moments, when for a bit it's hard to say whether we are this or that, or maybe something else entirely.

Those transitions, that's the stuff of horror and other scary stories. Maybe why we like it so much. It's not just the meditation on death and all that -- it's the dealing with moments of change and transformation.

Watching the atheist community, you get to see a lot of that. I'm one of those members who never did the religion thing much. But many, of course, did. They had to grapple with something that was a huge part of their life. Let go of it, or maybe even have it torn away. And often enough thrust...nowhere. Into Limbo, an in-betweeny place with no sense of whether there is something to be had on the other side, or if there is even an other side.

I have so much respect for people in that boat, the ones who have made that journey. Because that's some scary shit. It takes courage. And it strikes me that this is what lies at the heart of skepticism -- embracing that liminality. Refusing the easy answers, the certainty, the solid ground, and setting out into the unknown, never knowing for sure if there is another shore. Or, really, not seeking a shore. Just seeking. A journey with no end point. No enlightenment, only the promise of always being enlightened.

And Halloween, Autumn, this whole topsy-turvy time of year, it's a good time to meditate on that. Embrace it. Let the wildness of the season sink in and embrace the change. Knowing that even as things die -- our certainties and beliefs and safe little thoughts -- new things will be born. Scary shit, but fun. Me, I've been embracing it a bit the last week or so. Doing some writing like I haven't been doing for a while, thinking and planning, finding ways to upend my life and kill a few things so that new things can grow.

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.

Fidelity vs. Faith, or Nonbelievers at the holidays

The Guardian has a short article about The Atheist's Guide to Christmas, a book coming out about, well, atheists and Christmas. It served to remind me that soon we will be mired in another dismal round of the ol' War Against Christmas nonsense.

I mean, sure, there's atheists who don't do Christmas. People, after all, vary in their tastes. For some, it just isn't their thing. Maybe they were Christian once and now feel weird about the holiday. Maybe they have family-induced issues that turn them off from the holiday. Maybe -- gadzooks! -- they come from a background where Christmas wasn't really a part.

Whatever. Fact is, though, that most atheists and other nonbelievers continue to celebrate the holiday, often with great gusto. And some Christians choose to get mad, because after all Jesus is the Reason for the Season, and the secularization of Christmas has led to consumerism and selfishness and gay marriage and who knows what other horrors.

Of course, Jesus isn't the Reason for the Season, and never was. As we nonbelievers like to point out, over and over, our words falling on largely deaf ears, Christmas is way older than the particular body of myths that adhered to the Man from Judea. People playing the Evil Secularist Misappropriation of Christmas card might want to pull out those huge planks of wood stuck in their eyes, first. To rework a line from Bono, Christians stole Christmas from the pagans, and we're stealing it back.

But all that, really, misses the point. The point, actually, as to do with something from the last post -- the things people hear when they hear words. Many people hear "atheist" and they don't just hear "person who doesn't believe in a god or gods." They hear, instead, something like "someone who utterly rejects every thing that is good and decent, like kindness and ordered society and puppies."

Comte-Sponville makes, in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, a distinction between Faith and Fidelity. Faith is, well, faith -- a blind, unreasoned acceptance of something as being true. Fidelity is a adherence to a tradition or set of traditions -- think of it as membership in a culture. You agree to certain principles, values, you name it. You have fidelity towards them. It isn't faith, because of course it can be a reasoned thing -- heck, the American Revolution was founded on the notion that people could withdraw fidelity, in a fashion, and bestow it on something else. They rejected the King -- they didn't reject society. Their values, and the values of the English back home, were pretty similar. They didn't reject any of that, just one little piece.

For many people, they hear "atheist" and they don't just hear a rejection of Faith -- they hear a rejection of Fidelity to the culture as a whole. The two are conflated, and in most cultures, have long been so in popular thinking. To question God was to question the King. Heck, in ancient cultures they often made it more direct, and made the King a god! But it is conflation -- the two don't have to go hand in hand. Fidelity can exist without Faith (and vis versa -- Comte-Sponville notes that Faith without Fidelity is a very, very scary thing. But that's another post).

Why do so many atheists celebrate Christmas with such gusto and cheer? Or, for

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that matter, celebrate other holidays like, say, Halloween, or Thanksgiving in the U.S.? Because we may not have Faith, but we do have Fidelity. We like our culture. We grew up in it, we're attached to it. Celebrating Christmas is one of the ways that we celebrate that fact. Christmas is part of who we are -- the carols, the food, the pretty lights and the Christmas trees. So we celebrate, and have fun. We may have thrown out the baby Jesus -- except for the carols, many of us love those -- but we haven't thrown out the bath water.

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 better wager than Pascal's

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
-- Thomas Jefferson

=-=-=


Let's make a wager!

We're all familiar with Pascal's Wager, I

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assume. Atheists surely are, since there's always that Certain Kind of Theist who likes to trot it out, always with something of an "Aha! I got ya now, you atheist!" air. The poor fools never know, I think, why we laugh.
Many theists, of course, do know why we laugh, and they laugh right along with us. Pascal was a brilliant man, but the Wager was his great Moment of Monumental Stupidity. It's an argument that appeals to fear rather than reason, that makes our conscience nothing more than chips on the table, and makes God a chump to boot. There's nothing likeable about Pascal's Wager -- it's just sad. The fact that many people still reference it in all apparent seriousness -- and think it's such a slam dunk argument -- is even sadder.

Now, I think it can be safely said that most atheists, like me, admit to the possibility that we are, in fact, wrong. We may not think it very likely, but we can admit that -- there's so much we humans don't know, after all, that in the end knowledge is always a matter of certainties that can never really be 100%. Modern Atheism, in short, tends to use a scientific definition of the word "truth." And that means there's always the possibility of being wrong. We believe the evidence makes the existence of God highly unlikely, and so we don't believe. We are willing to change if, and only if, real evidence comes to light.

So, like Pascal, we make a wager. Only ours is different from the one he proposes. Ours is, well -- that God isn't a dick. That this God would prefer that we explore and learn and question and think and challenge. That this God isn't the sorry bugger seen in so much of the Abrahamic tradition -- needy, abusive, insecure, violent, a sullen bully needing to be constantly placated by supplication, praise, and obedience to arbitrary and cruel commands. We're betting, in short, that if we're wrong, it's more likely that God would be something like Paine's God -- the loving, nurturing parent who says, "Grow, baby, grow, dazzle and shine and show me what you can do." Who laughs with delight when we question yes, even His/Her/Its existence, because we're questioning and thinking, which is why He/She/It gave us these brains in the first place. Who doesn't consign people to Hell simply because they didn't play the lick spittle well enough.

It's a better bet, I think. And, oddly, it's a bet that shows more respect for the Hypothetical Creator than Pascal, a believer, showed with his.

It's a Mystery

Life, that is. Being. Existence.

I'm rereading Andre Comté-Sponville's The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. There's so much in that little book, it's going to take a few careful readings, I think, to fully engage with it. Which, really, is a wonderful thing. I don't go all the way with this guy's thinking, but I'm finding it challenging and inspiring.

When he lays out his reasons that he doesn't believe in God, one of them is one familiar to many atheists:  the idea that as an explanation, God is incomprehensible. That is, if we take a fairly standard definition of God, God is literally supposed to be beyond human understanding, and thus is useless as an explanation -- but gets used as one anyway. God made Man, God made the Universe. God has a Plan for us, and this is it! This is the meaning of your life. Etc, etc, etc.

For something that is supposed to be beyond human understanding, lots of folks seem to have a pretty clear idea in their head of what the dude is about.

What I find interesting is that for Comté-Sponville, it almost seems as if this problem is emotionally, as well as intellectually, unsatisfying. He notes that we are continuously confronted with Mystery, including that big bugaboo, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" That is, why Being itself? There's an amusing part where Comté-Sponville mentions a painter friend who declared that he wasn't an atheist because there was a mystery in life and the universe. "Ha! No kidding!," Comté-Sponville writes, "I, too, believe there is a mystery! In fact, I believe there is not much else!"

We are finite creatures. No matter how much we learn, we are are always going to be confronted with that most basic of mysteries -- why the hell there is something rather than nothing. I personally find that quite glorious, and it's that basic mystery that invokes the awe that can sweep over me when I really let the Cosmos impinge on my consciousness in some real way -- losing myself in a landscape, or in the night stars, or the simple joy and wonder in personal relationships.

The idea of God not only doesn't explain anything -- it doesn't even, really, add to the awe quotient. Staring up at the night sky, we are still faced with the same unanswerable question. We exist, and Universe exists. There is Being instead of Nonbeing. And it is glorious.

Right there is one of the reasons I'm an atheist. It isn't just that God is an incomprehensible explanation for reality or for questions of how to live our lives -- there's a, well, poetic level, I guess you could say, where God seems just as useless. There's so much to be staggered by just by looking around. You don't need to make up anything.

NonStampCollector reveals the shocking truth about God's Design

*snerk* "Oh, I love being reminded that I exist!"

Madness and Witchcraft

Sometimes, you find yourself staring madness right in the face. I don't mean the metaphorical kind. I mean the honest to goodness mind off kilter kind.

The short form of the story:  sometime ago, back on skin hunger, some of you may recall that I posted a video by a young Christian woman that was...odd. She responded to my post, which in turn led to an exchange of emails. Then she facebooked me. Haven't had much of a chance to chat since. Couldn't really get the heart up to, because I had already seen the pattern in the "conversation" -- there wasn't going to be much of one, frankly.

I knew, from her Youtube videos, that, er, her experience of the world was different than, well, most everyone's. Whether that qualified as some kind of mental illness was not going to be something that I was going to pretend to be qualified to judge. She seems a rather sweet person, really. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt.

But.

Yeah, there's a 'but.'

I've unfriended her on Facebook, largely because, well, she scares the heck out of

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me, especially after this week. Because there's a kind of belief that is so medieval, and so dangerous, that it chills me completely to see a person actually holding it:  she believes in demons. And witches. And Satanists (with real, demonic powers, not just the silly pretenders of the Church of Satan). To wit:  she thinks she is under attack from all of the above.
Really. Honestly. I've never honestly met someone like this, someone with a persecution complex so extreme. Witches working magic against her! Dark Satanic prayers being leveled at her! Demons in the house! Desperate calls for a "prayer shield." It's a simple world view:  people who don't believe what she believes are demon-controlled. Or Satanists and Witches, ie active agents of Evil.


Harmless crackpot? Some of you may also recall a video that made the rounds a bit -- I posted it myself at one point -- that showed people in Africa being burned alive as witches. Those kinds of beliefs have had devastating consequences far too often for me to dismiss her as just another harmless crackpot.

When a person's beliefs are so deeply delusional, who knows where they will lead? We do know where they have led in the past -- to fires and stonings and pogroms. Magical thinking is dangerous, dangerous stuff. It's a floodgate that can devastate everything when it's opened. I can't really hem and haw and say, well, maybe she isn't too scary, maybe she's harmless, maybe she's just a bit odd and all. She's delusional. And delusional people can do a lot of damage.


It's also hard not to notice how her particular religion can reinforce and strengthen her delusional thinking. The persecution complex, the infantile ordering of the world into Good and Evil, Dark and Light, with our Mary Sue as the Stalwart Hero fighting the dark forces. And, of course, being heavily persecuted for doing so. I think we all know how that kind of thinking often turns out in the real world.


Definitely a learning experience. There's always part of me that thinks that everyone is reachable. But. Yeah. There's always a 'but.'

(And, of course, since I wrote this, I am now persecuting her. Or so she'd probably read it. Probably I'm possessed by a demon. Or maybe I'm a Warlock. *tries to cast spell, accidentally sets hair on fire*)

Robert Heinlein's Job: A Comedy of Justice

Funny thing about Gregory the SF fanatic:  it wasn't until a few years ago that I

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really started reading a lot of Robert Heinlein (other than some short stories, and Stranger in a Strange Land in high school, because it was one of those books that all the cool geeks read). And until now I haven't read any of his later stuff. So it was new territory when I sat down with Job: A Comedy of Justice. It was one of his last works, and I've got to say that it was pretty darn nifty. It's definitely something that all godless folk will want to take a gander at.

I have a love-hate relationship with Heinlein's work. On the one hand, he can be highly entertaining and thought-provoking as all get out -- he was never afraid to ask any question in his work, and you always come away with Cool Thoughts when you read him. The other hand is his sexism -- and it's a weird sexism, because he'll write about sexual liberation and women as equals even as he revels in those same women being submissive and dominated. The dude had some issues, let me tell you. Job has some of that -- there's moments where you want to scream or shake your head in disbelief. But the rest, oh the rest..

A quick plot summary:  fundamentalist minister Alec Hergensheimer, a member of a particularly fire and brimstone sect in an alternate America/Earth, is on a Polynesian cruise and goes fire-walking. After the walk, people are calling him Alec Graham, his ship -- and indeed, the whole world -- has changed, and everything he knows is gone. It also turns out Alec Graham has been shacking up with his stewardess, Margrethe, whom our Alec quickly falls for, despite being married.

Then things get weird. A iceberg hits the ship, he and Margrethe find themselves in still another world, and they are off on a journey to America and Kansas through a stream of Earths that keep changing faster and faster. Alec thinks the End Times are on, and worries that Margrethe -- a dedicated heathen -- is doomed to hellfire. By the end of the book, we have seen the Rapture, Heaven (it is pretty but boring, and angels are assholes), Hell, and met Saint Peter, Yahweh, Lucifer, Loki and Odin -- oh, and their boss, too.

It's not a book that will make the deeply religious very happy. This is Heinlein, after all, the man who once said, "One man's religion is another man's belly laugh." And this book is very definitely critiquing the Judeo-Christian world view. It's gentle -- Heinlein knew very well how silly all people are to be too bitchy towards one particular brand of human silliness -- but pointed nonetheless. There's some good one liners that will make the godless chuckle ("Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything."). But it's the heart of the book that interests me most -- the use of the Job story.

Alec, needless to say, is our Job. Lucifer is, however, the good guy, greatly regretting his role in the earlier Job affair. Yahweh is a dick, really, and you really see that when we finally see Heaven, a place where Rank Hath its Privileges, as the angels constantly remind the "creatures."  It's through Lucifer that we get to the core idea of the book, namely that the whole basis of the Judeo-Christian system is based on injustice:

"Alec, Justice is not a divine concept: it is a human illusion. The very basis of the Judeo-Christian code is injustice, the scapegoat system. The scapegoat sacrifice runs all through the Old Testament, then it reaches its height in the New Testament with the notion of the Martyred Redeemer. How can justice possibly be served by loading your sins on another? Whether it be the lamb having its throat cut ritually, or a Messiah nailed to a cross and 'dying for your sins.'"

(I think Richard Dawkins would love that bit) And Lucifer notes how the Lord's Prayer gives up the game:

"Stop. Stop right there. 'Thy will be done--' no Muslim claiming to be a 'slave of God' ever gave a more sweeping consent than that. In that prayer you invite Him to do His worst. The perfect masochist. That's the test of Job, boy. Job was treated unjustly in every way day after day for years -- I know, I know, I was there, I did it -- and My dear Brother stood by and let Me do it. Let Me? He urged Me, He connived it, accessory ahead of the fact."

It's a very Heinlein moment, with Lucifer challenging Alec:  will he be a lickspittle and take Yahweh's abuse, or will he stand up for himself?

Alec does stand up against the ill-treatment, with the help of Lucifer. Lucifer's reasons for helping him are wonderful -- sure, there's the desire to stick it to Yahweh, his brother, but there's something more. Earlier in the book, in the midst of his endless tribulations, Alec had encountered Lucifer in disguise -- and worried that this nice man was hell-bound, tried to save him. It doesn't matter to Lucifer that Alec was deluded in his ideas -- he's only interested in the fact that, despite his own very real and huge troubles, Alec thought of him and his family and tried to save them from the danger he thought they were in.

It's a sweet and thoughtful moment, and serves to note that the basic keys to human happiness -- freedom, love, kindness -- can get obscured by the silliness and arbitrariness of religion. But Heinlein is an optimist -- even Alec, as perfect a follower of the biblical Yahweh as you can imagine, comes through in the end.

A good read, over all, funny and sweet and wise. With, you know, the occasional Heinleinism. But this is definitely a book where I can forgive him that.

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.

Miracles would be proof?

Over at Unreasonable Faith, Daniel Florien has a nice post on "Why We Should Trust Reason Over Emotion." Mostly, I just want to chime in and say, yeah, what he said -- but with one "but."

It's that last part of the post: Miracles would be proof. Daniel writes,

Jennifer says that it is “ignorant” to dismiss miracles. And if there were real miracles, I would agree — why would someone dismiss amazing things that really happened?

I've got to disagree. I've got Paine too much on the mind right now, I guess. What I'd like to argue is that the very notion of miracles is somewhat incoherent. As Paine noted, the idea of calling something a miracle involves a truly stupendous claim -- namely, that one knows, absolutely and totally, what is and is not possible. Something may be inexplicable by current human understanding, but that does not, in any way, mean it's a miracle. It is far more likely that it just means there's something we don't understand yet. To establish that something is a "miracle," you'd have to know a heck of a lot more than we do now. Or will ever likely know, quite possibly.

But there's another point, and I'll illustrate it with an example: let's say that tomorrow, every single person on the planet hears a big, booming voice, saying (in the language of every hearer) "I am the Lord God. Bow before me, humans, lest you be doomed to hellfire!" That would, I think you'll all admit, be pretty amazing. It would be a singular event in human history, and come as close as one can to the notion of "miracle." So, wow! God spoke to us! Right?

Says who?.How would you know that the voice is God? Just because the event is amazing? Just because the voice says so? That's a pretty big leap. Maybe it's some weird alien. Maybe it's a being from another universe having some fun. The leap -- from the event to the explanation -- is huge, however "miraculous" the event appears to be. What would this miracle truly be proof of? Not much. Just of itself, really. We could say, wow, something amazing happened. But going beyond that, well, you get into pure speculation. In science, you extrapolate from your data to make a claim -- but it's important not to extrapolate any further than the data allows (that, incidentally, is one of the biggest differences between science and pseudoscience).

And that's the problem with miracles. As Paine noted, even if they did happen, it wouldn't matter -- they explain nothing. They teach us nothing. They establish nothing. They wouldn't prove anything. At most, you could say, wow, something really interesting happened. Anything else would be nothing more than speculation and wild guessing.

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

Image by adamrice via Flickr

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.

Reality's simple joys

Sometimes, working weekends really, really sucks. Friday and Saturday nights gone, or at least mostly so. Missed opportunities for socializing, having fun. Last night, for instance, I could've been at my sister's, hanging out with cool people. Instead, work, noon to 9:30pm. Gah.

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I can perhaps be forgiven if, while I was biking home, I was feeling a bit cranky and dissolute. The weather didn't help -- the whole day had been a big build up to a storm that didn't happen, the air always tingling with suppressed energy waiting to be released, and...nothing.

So, I'm biking home, and on the western horizon is a sight you can't claim to see too often -- a huge, and I mean huge, crescent Moon, burning through a wisp of cloud above the Tucson Mountains. I've always had this weird thing with the Moon -- seeing it relaxes me, awakens that sense of awe that can sometimes get pummelled down by the relentless march of the mundane in our everyday lives. The Moon is so amazing. Earth's companion, one that has shaped this world and the life on it. A big dose of beauty in our night sky. Something that 12 of us have voyaged to and stood upon.

The Moon is a constant presence in our lives, and so we are always imbuing it with meaning. From ancient mythologies to modern Moon races, it's a focus of a lot of human thought. Maybe that's why it's so comforting to me -- it's not only an amazing natural phenomena, but it makes me think of some of the important things in human life.

So I stopped, and gazed at the Moon for a while, and some of that ick feeling faded away, and I remembered my day and all the little interactions with people that were fun and sweet and nice, and it all didn't seem so bad.

Of course, I got home and into my apartment, and some of the icky angsty feeling came back. The moments of quiet sanity can be so short. But it's nice to have them. No supernatural, no Big Man in the Sky saying he loves me -- just a quiet moment with a bit of reality. It's a healing thing.

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.

Welcome!

Welcome to Expanding the Proscenium! Partly, this blog is skin hunger 2.0. Partly, it is something else. When I started skin hunger, I didn't really know what I wanted it to be. But several months of writing and thinking have done a lot to clarify things for me, and thus Expanding the Proscenium is born.

I am an atheist, but this isn't, quite, an atheist blog. It is about the deeper, more interesting, and more important, issue: Reason vs. Faith.

Carl Sagan wrote, in Pale Blue Dot, that

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Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

That's what this blog is about. It is about expanding that "tidy anthropocentric proscenium." It is about Reason, and the poverty of Faith. It is about growing our imaginations to match the scale of the universe. Art, science, geeky fandom, philosophy, you name it -- it'll have a place here, as long as it challenges us to expand the proscenium of the theater of our minds.

I hope you'll join me on this journey! In the meantime, please pardon the dust. Everything will soon be up and running properly!