I just posted a comment on UD which I thought might be worth expanding on and sharing. The context was this OP from News (Denyse). In it she wrote:
Does any reader know of an atheist who plays Christmas carols every year in front of his family and lab staff, and who reads T. S. Eliot aloud to his wife and daughter on his deathbed? I certainly don’t. I’d be willing to bet Professor Coyne that John Franklin Enders, who has been called “The Father of Modern Vaccines,” believed in God and didn’t view religion as a cause of sickness.
I was very surprised by this. She seems to be assuming that all atheists are cut off from their religious heritage. We are not all Richard Dawkins (although he has always valued the contribution of religion and Christianity to our culture and knows the Bible better than many Christians). I like to go church from time to time and appreciate the role it places in our community. My wife, also an atheist, is a long-standing member of the choir. I absolutely accept the importance of Christianity in moulding who I am and the society I live in and I don’t think of this as a bad (or good) thing. We all live in some context. So why wouldn’t carols, TS Eliot and even the Bible be an important part of my life – just like Shakespeare and the Greek myths?
Atheism is not a religion. I suspect some theists don’t quite understand the implications of this. Atheists have no rituals,no festivals,no classic literature,no community identity,no common beliefs beyond a lack of belief in the supernatural. If you are an atheist then typically your atheism is not an important part of your life. The new atheists seem to be trying to change that. I don’t see why. It seems artificial. There are plenty of other elements to our culture which are more deeply engrained and satisfying than not believing in something. (In fact I signed up as a Bright briefly but I found there was nothing in it for me).
It would be interesting to know how many other atheists here share this attitude.
I expect that many atheists play carols, more of them sing carols and most appreciate carols. It’s a bit surprising that Denyse does not understand this.
I’m reminded of a coffee room discussion at work, a number of years ago. I don’t remember what was being discussed, but it had something to do with religion. I remember asking “What do you call an atheist who attends Church?” Without hesitation, one of my colleagues replied “The organist.” Need I mention that my colleague was an avid organist.
I follow Jerry Coyne’s blog. I follow it for the biology, not for the anti-religion where I think he often goes overboard (as does Dawkins). Like Jerry, I am troubled by anti-vaccine movements, but I don’t blame them on religion.
I sang in a church choir for ten years, and my CD collection (mostly from garage sales) includes about 500 disks of Christmas and Christian choral music. Bach, Mozart, and dozens of less well known composers.
I suppose Denyse doesn’t know that Christmas is a pagan holiday, and that there were about 60 religions sharing similar stories of birth, death and resurrection.
I’m not sure why TS Elliot is considered a paragon of religious writing. His poetry seems well removed from the concerns of evangelicals.
I got nothing to add here — I’m Jewish.
The idea is that atheists can’t just not believe in God, they must be in denial of said being. It’s a caricature based upon the demonization of atheists/atheism by many religious people.
Is it surprising that a site dedicated to demonizing the very bases of sound science would have writers who are as clueless about atheism as they are about science?
Glen Davidson
No surprise, Denyse is an idiot
Despite her distortions, Coyne is right about reigion infecting everything and correct in his opening statement, “… disease spread by a refusal to accept modern medicine, itself based on the assumption that God will heal you”.
The fact that some churches, more sane than the fundies, have accepted modern medicine, does not contradict the basic problem – the general infection of religious thinking with the toxic “god will provide” meme. It’s a learned helplessness and it’s dangerous to all of us in secular society whenever it escapes the confines of one specific church.
As for the Christmas carols’ religious implication, Denyse is even more foolish than her usual self there. Does she think that we atheists should be worried that listening to carols will infect us with a religious mind virus? That would be stupid and superstitious of me. No, there’s no need to rid the word of harmless seasonal songs No, what I want to get rid of is the irrational adherence to the unquestionable word of god, the word which causes parents to let their children die because “god will heal them”, and if not, then god’s will be done. I’m fighting against those RWAs who want t destroy their children’s minds with intolerant dogma, not those who merely want to cheer people up at the holiday season with some harmless carols.
But it’s true that I do fight against christian religion in America is one small way I ink out the “god” from “in god we trust” on every bill I get in change at the store. Atheist money for the win. To hell with any christian asshole who pretends they can force me to acknowledge their god every time I handle our supposed-to-be secular currency. To hell with fundie politicians who state that there can’t really be any atheists in American because we use the currency that they unconstitutionally defaced six decades ago, insanely thinking that if we were true atheists, we would refuse to touch their magic spell words. Well, right, I do refuse – and so should everyone else.
Mark, I would prefer you in the way you are, but truht is truth and then I have to answer:
“I absolutely accept the importance of Christianity in moulding who I am and the society I live in and I don’t think of this as a bad (or good) thing.”
This is insane. Because if Gos do not exists, Jesus was an insane man that claimed to be God and his teachings are all based on the existance of God and the afterlife. Our society is moulded in a the teachings of an insane person that talked about thing that do not exists.
We, yes, the god of the Jews, christians, and muslims does not exist. That’s true. But it’s not true that Jesus thought he was himself god; he never claimed to be. He said he and the Father were one, but that does not automatically mean he claimed the two of them were one thing as a whole – it very likely meant “I am united with my father’s purpose” the same way that a small committee meeting would present a unified opinion and say “we’re of one mind on this issue”. Not literally one mind. Not literally being one person.
Of course christianity-based western culture is insane to the extent that any group of persons acts as if god exists and god’s will needs t be taken into account in political/social decisions. But it beats all the alternatives that we can see in history, so yes, we should be appreciative, grateful for what good it has done so far. And now, we should move beyond it, beyond christian bigotry, sectarianism, child-killing, faith-healing insanity. But there’s no need to repudiate all the culture which modern western nations have built upon a christian history.
It’s questionable whether Jesus claimed to be god. Much of Christian dogma was invented by Paul, and much of his teaching contradicts the alleged words of Jesus.
There’s an old saying that the Christian church represents the victory of Paul over James, and Protestantism represents the victory of Paul over Jesus.
By that line of reasoning, we should not look to the Iliad for insight into resentment, jealousy, passion, revenge, forgiveness, shame, and honor, since the Greek gods do not exist and the Trojan War almost certainly did not happen exactly as memorialized by Homer’s immortal prose.
True, if greek gods doesn`t exists resentment, jealousy, passion, revenge, forgiveness, shame, and honor should be redined in a world where there is no god or with a world with a different God. But you cannot give the same meaning to that words that greeks give to them.
If the war happened or not doesn`t matter.
Jesus, Paul or James christian message in an universe without God is insane.
Blas,
Yes, your world is insane. Good, now that you recognize that, you can start helping us fix it instead of arguing with us.
It can be wrong without being insane. People are wrong all the time. You are talking about assertions that cannot be tested.
Blas,
I presume that you regard the Church of the Later Day Saints and all its believers to be insane. Yet, those same beliefs promote strong families and good Christian behavior with more success than traditional American Christianity. There was a South Park episode devoted to this issue that was quite funny.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s07e12-all-about-mormons
Belief in the absence of evidence of or contrary to evidence is pretty much a critical component of insanity. All religions are insane in this regard.
petrushka,
Careful now. There have been many scientists who believed they understood some process before evidence existed. Then again, some would say that String theory is a prime example of insanity.
I tend to disagree. A scientist (operating according to common convention) can speculate on explanations that conform to existing evidence and project hoped for evidence, but a scientist cannot speculate scientifically in ways that are contrary to evidence, or for which there cannot be evidence for or against.
As individual human beings, scientists can be insane or have non-scientific ideas.
We often find ourselves responding to some assertion by creationists and ID types by saying “there is no scientist who would agree with you on that!” And inevitably they are able to point to some scientist who does agree with them on that. We have to keep in mind that maybe 1% of scientists are egomaniacal crackpots who are willing to say crazy things to get attention.
petrushka,
Intuition, which can be so strong as to become belief, should not be ignored nor devalued. Einstein believed that the universe has an underlying certainty. While Einstein would agree that his belief was “unfounded” by evidence, he presumed his faith would be eventually rewarded via the discoveries of others.
A far more important characteristic to note is the ability to revise beliefs, and that is something that Science can do rather nimbly whereas Religion is often inflexible.
Then what do you think about Mark that appreciate a society based on insanity?
Why do YOU appreciate a society based on insanity?
Answer that, Blas.
Then you’ll have the answer to the question you think petrushka should answer about Mark. You won’t need to pester either of them if you’re honest.
For my part, I shamelessly sing Christmas carols. I also sing songs about magic blokes on flying sleighs and snowmen coming to life. I don’t believe any of ’em.
I got married in a church, of my own choice. I love churches, and frequently pop into some of the quite country churches we have around these parts. I love the peace, the sense of history, the earnest belief that we should at least try to be better. I don’t believe a word of it; never have. But it is ingrained in our culture, ragbag of modified pagan celebrations (is there anything more blatantly pagan than denoting Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox?) that it is.
Allan Miller,
Yep. If Easter actually were the death anniversary of that faith-healing, sleight-of-hand-working, heretical, possibly treasonous, Jewish preacher, it would be settled as a specific date, as is his supposed Christmas birthday. Not necessarily the accurate date on the calendar, but one specific date.
An honest Easter anniversary – even if sectarian – would not be moved around in reference to the equinox and full moon. But it was dishonestly done to co-opt pagan tribes’ spring rebirth holiday.
Unholy mother church: there never was anything so low that they would not stoop to it.
I really like some old gospel music, and also some of the religious songs that Johnny Cash sang. Searching, exuberance, longing for a better place, uncertain hope, the wish to be loved and cared for … all things any human might be interested in.
As for TS Eliot, Ash Wednesday isn’t his first poem. The assertion that an atheist wouldn’t read Modernist poetry on their deathbed is bizarre.
For me, atheism is an important part of my life in that the maxim “nothing is sacred” I see as central to my own character and political views. I regard it as a crucial principle for the just maintenance and improvement of society.
The assertion that atheists have no classic literature is just wrong. I don’t see how Heart of Darkness has any meaning unless one accepts that at the very least God is completely silent. What is Joyce’s Ulysses but a rejection of singular truths and an affirmation of humanism? Waiting For Godot wouldn’t make any sense if Godot turned up. And so on.
On the subject of the divinity of Jesus, the gospels are unsurprisingly contradictory. John chapter 8 affirms Jesus as God, and perhaps also denies it. John 20:28-29 clearly affirms Jesus as God. Matthew and Mark both have Jesus saying “The Son of Man has power to forgive sins”, which would seem to imply Jesus was God. However, throughout the gospels Jesus is also reported as denying he is God.
One more thing. “If your eye offends you, pluck it out” is completely insane whether any gods exist or not. The insanity of the metaphor illustrates the insanity of the underlying point.
You are right and I was wrong to say that atheism has no classic literature. There are many outstanding books that are written from an atheist viewpoint. What I meant was there is no equivalent to the Torah, the Bible, the Koran, the Guru Granth Sahib or the Mahabharata. I don’t quite know how to articulate this but those books are central to their religion, bind the community together and define what it is to be a Jew, Christian, Muslim, Sikh or Hindu.
Atheism has no such defining literature and that is how I think it should be. I don’t want atheism to become a cause or a community. I would prefer to promote scepticism and sceptics. If people stop believing in deities as a result that is fine. But that should be a consequence not a guiding principle.
This is a false dichotomy and begs the question Blas. Your statement implies that parables, irony, metaphor, and allegory are the tools of only liars or the insane.
To put it quite succinctly, nothing written in the bible needs be literally true for the biblical stories to present powerful messages and tools for the self and societal improvement. A great many people really enjoyed the movie The Avengers and came away with some lessons and some cultural molding, and I daresay that nobody thought the Chitari or the Asgardians (to say nothing of the Hulk, Stark, Shield, Rogers, etc) were real.
And it can be principled wisdom for a change in the people of the time without being literally true. The power of a concept comes not from its validity, but from it’s appeal to the special and that which is greater than the limits and misery of this world. Just look at Scientology or Mormonism.
Bogus atheist logic.
I do not say I think that the christian society is an insanity. The logic is:
God do not exists.
Then Jesus is an insane.
Then beleive that the society based in on the teachings of an insane is good is insane.
I do not beleive the first premise, Mark and petrushka did. They should explain the logic.
Arguing over the nuances of “what Jesus claimed” is kind of silly, since all attributions to him are at the very least decades after the fact. There’s still no evidence that Jesus was even a single individual, rather than a mythologized composite.
The people who invented Christianity (borrowing heavily from existing pagan myths) were simply wrong. Being wrong is not the same as being insane.
The game of telephone tells us what happens during oral transmission of stories. Add that to the observed invention of religions in the last couple hundred years (for whatever reason, be it insanity or venality) and you have a perfectly plausible scenario for the invention of ancient religions.
There could be some clinically insane individuals in the pipeline, but it isn’t necessary.
Also, insanity does not invalidate what is said by the insane. All statements and assertions need to be evaluated on their own merits.
I have a schizophrenic nephew. He is not a genius like John Nash, but he is gifted. He sees and hears things that other people don’t see, but he can reason quite well. He graduated from college with highest honors.
You seem to have a black and white view of sanity and correctness. It doesn’t comport with reality or the way real people behave.
Let’s see. I was raised in a religion-free household but until the age of 9 I lived in an catholic environment and met with nuns and clergy on almost daily basis. In my child-like ways I got on with them perfectly well. Their belief never rubbed off on me. It took me quite a few more years to realise that most religious people actually believe that those bible stories really happened – I had always assumed that everyone regarded them as vaguely interesting fiction in the same way I did!
I find the Christian narrative utterly unbelievable and often totally incomprehensible. At the same time, I love much sacred music, was inspired to learn to play the organ because of Bach’s genius, and go out of my way to visit medieval cathedrals and abbeys that often make a deep impression on me. What I admire in such artistic expressions of religious belief is the amazing potential of man to create such complex and astonishing works of beauty, inspired by spirituality and a sense of the eternal. I accept that there are deep Christian undercurrents in Western history and society which have shaped the world we live in to a large extent, but I am also grateful that I live in the post-Enlightenment era where we are able to see things through a different lens.
What I don’t get is that believers don’t see that their religious explanations are rather more likely to be man-made myth than god-made truth.
Instead of projecting myself onto the cosmos and call it God, I prefer to quietly wonder about the unknown and my little place in the grand scheme. If people want to call that atheism, fine with me. To each their own.
fG
To argue that the “teachings of Jesus” are without value because the stories about him are not literally true is to deny the value of myth and fiction, art and music.
Every individual seems to draw the line differently between what they accept as fact and what they think is myth. I don’t think it matters unless one side or the other attempts to impose their beliefs on others by force.
Blas,
Well, of course you do not believe the first premise – that god does not exist – but in reality, it is your so-called conclusion which is blatantly false. In reality, modern culture is (mostly) based on the prior insanity of religious belief AND it is (mostly) good. You may sputter that is a contradiction, and yet, that’s the truth about our society. In reality, the Abrahamic god does NOT exist And yet, somehow, you – and we – continue to find value in a culture largely based on the insanity of widespread devotion to a non-existent god. Where you can find value, so can others, and for similar reasons: because that insanity has inspired brilliant music and folk carols, high architecture and charming white-painted country chapels, and art in every vernacular. It – sometimes – inspires marvelous efforts to aid one’s fellow citizens, to volunteer at hospitals, to feed orphans, and clothe the homeless. (Also it apparently helps to restrain at least some immoral people who admit that without a belief in god, they would indulge themselves in any criminal desire that occurred to them.) In reality, it matters not one bit that the origin was in the cultural insanity; what matters is what the result is. That’s not atheist bad logic; that’s reality.
You’re entitled to your own beliefs; you don’t get to redefine reality, Blas.
I do not how can you beleive in logic if you think that something false can led to something right.
I do not how can you beleive in logic if you think that something false can led to something right.
I never used the term or the concept “leads to.”
But among readers of literature there is an aphorism, “Fiction is a lie that tells the truth.”
Mark Frank:
7th Circuit Court of Appeals:
Let’s see if I have this right. Atheism is not a religion, but adherents of the [non-religion of] atheism want to be accorded the same rights as if atheism were a religion.
Go figure
I don’t know the background to that appeal – but to me it sounds wrong. I accept that some atheists are trying to give atheism the status of a religion and I think they are sorely mistaken.
Laws respecting atheism or impeding the free exercise of atheism are obviously excluded from this first amendment protection.
Mark,
I agree. Rather than elevating atheism to the special status of a religion, I would prefer to see religion’s special privileges revoked. For example, apart from their charitable activities, I see no reason why churches should be exempt from taxes.
Wrong again: http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-7th-circuit/1467028.html
Seriously?
Mark Frank:
Richardthughes:
Mung,
Atheism is afforded the same protection for legal purposes. It’s not hard, Mung.
If atheism is a religion, I completely understand. But if atheism is not a religion, what protections are afforded it?
From the OP:
Is Mark just deluded?
“For legal purposes” is atheism a religion?
Mung,
What’s your word for absence of religion, Mung? Or do you have to have one?
It’s not that hard. Right, Richardthughes ?
No, it isn’t:
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/419/678/617423/
”
The Supreme Court has recognized atheism as equivalent to a “religion” for purposes of the First Amendment on numerous occasions, most recently in McCreary County, Ky. v. American Civil Liberties Union of Ky., ___ U.S. ___, 125 S.Ct. 2722, ___ L.Ed.2d ___ (2005). The Establishment Clause itself says only that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” but the Court understands the reference to religion to include what it often calls “nonreligion.” In McCreary County, it described the touchstone of Establishment Clause analysis as “the principle that the First Amendment mandates government neutrality between religion and religion, and between religion and nonreligion.” Id. at *10 (internal quotations omitted). As the Court put it in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 105 S.Ct. 2479, 86 L.Ed.2d 29 (1985)”
Enjoy your driveby, get those feet looked at.
Richardthughes: