What to do with the stuff that's not crazy.

For those of you who don't know, in my fair city of Chicago, we recently had the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's 2012 summit. Despite all reports it was something of a clusterfuck for anyone who wasn't a foreign dignitary. I was on my way back to the general area when the violence between cops and protestors broke out and I paid rapt attention. On one report I heard a protestor mention the tactics of Gandhi and another dismiss him off hand. Now I am a big fan of Gandhi as a political leader and as a spiritual one. He seemed, to my mind, not to be Hindu because of some overt belief in the superstition as much as a respect for the place it held in his cultural upbringing and the development of his mores.

This, however, got me thinking of the place of religious figures in the development and life choices of Atheists. You see I have always been a big fan of Jesus. I think his church is a piss poor example of controlling fucks trying to wield power over people, but I have always been a big fan of the Jman himself. I respect the way that he stood up to power without leading a his people hopelessly against it. He played a long game and like Gandhi was martyred for his troubles. (It should be noted that I have not seen compelling evidence that Jesus didn't exist. If it's out there please send it to me so I can adjust accordingly) then faith steps in and makes him a god. Suddenly his word is inviolate and can't develop or change as the man himself inevitably would have. Now we have a church filled with powerful men who see a means to consolidate their power. But the question remains, what of the man at the source.

As the name of this blog suggests I say that the man at the source needs to be taken for what he's worth. As I began to study Christianity in confirmation I realized that the church was full of shit, even my rather liberal and open minded church. For many years I rejected the whole thing outright. Tossed out the baby with the bathwater. But as I finally sat down and began reading the Bible and the Analects and the Tao Te Ching. I realized that there was a some great stuff in all of these documents. I became a disciple of Jesus in the truest sense; I learned from him.

This approach to religious figureheads has a couple of major benefits. I am a big fan of JC's work. I appreciate how it inspired the Black Church in the 60's to stand up for their rights. I can see how Gandhi used Christianity to develop Satyagraha. I can see how Muslim philanthropists use the tenet of Zakat to do good in the world and how father Mike Pfleger in Chicago can use faith to be such a powerful source of social justice. I can take all of these things from the great Super Best Friends and then I can stop. I don't have to listen to the bit about hating your family and following God. I don't have to care when a text tells me to hate someone. I get to openly pick and choose what advice I want to take and then as with any other source of wisdom, I can stop when it gets crazy.

Every member of the faithful does some cherry picking to decide what they believe. Some of them struggle with the idea that a gay relative is going to Hell. Some of them don't even struggle, they just cut off the love immediately when faced with a person close to them making a decision they dislike and blame it on God. I don't have that escape nor do I have that obligation. I get to think what I want and say fuck all to rest.

An Easter Post

Hey guys. So tomorrow is Easter and I figured that, what with this being an Atheist blog, I'd write a little something on the subject.

So pretty much anytime that we find ourselves coming round to a Christian holiday of some importance, I find myself marveling at exactly how much of “Christian” tradition has been ripped off or co-opted from conquered religions. And that is essentially what these fallen faiths are; conquered. They are taken over and the bits that the conqueror finds useful are acquired while the rest is discarded. That seems to be simply the nature of cultural evolution. Like so much, some times it is a conquest and sometimes a collaboration. Either way there is always something discarded. But I digress.

Let's start with the obvious. The name of the holiday itself. Originally, and still to this day in much of the world, the holiday that we know as Easter, was called Pascha or some derivation there of. This in of itself is something of a borrowing as it stems from the Hebrew word for passover. Passover also happens to be the time when Jesus was crucified, so the relationship is obvious.

So then where does the English name for the holiest day on the Christian calendar come from you ask. The same place pretty much everything we associate with Christian holidays does: The Pagans! Easter is the modern evolution of the name Eoster or Ostara. Eoster was the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility and spring. Now it should be noted that this etymological evolution comes from a single source, a early Christian historian by the name Bede. The thing is without any other options, it would seem that Bede is the best authority on the matter for now.

Moving on. One of the animals associated with Eoster was the hare. Rabbits have long been tied to fertility, given their tribble-like (you're reading a blog, don't pretend that you don't get this reference) ability to reproduce, so it only makes sense that such an animal would be tied to a fertility goddess. So of course the hare becomes tied to Jesus at the time of his rebirth.

Lastly we run across Easter eggs. Once again we are borrowing from our Pagan ancestors. The Egg has long been a symbol tied to the cycle of life. The cycle that seems to be celebrated with the coming of spring in virtually every culture on the planet. Eggs represent the potential for new life, waiting to be fulfilled. I have read recently that the egg also represents the empty cross or empty grave. I think however this represents a bit of retroactive continuity on the part of the Christian church.

Then we come to things like sacrificing for lent and abstaining from meat. Historically speaking this has rather mundane roots. Christianity was founded in the middle of the desert. They had bodies of water which produced plenty of food, but little rain fall for what meager crops could be grown. Any farming was dependent on irrigation. This meant that land based meat producers; lamb, pigs etc. would be a drain on resources. The fish however weren't taking up any resources that were already in use. They simple used the water that was just sitting there anyway. So how do you take a religious people and turn them towards fish. You say God wanted it to happen. Bam! You now have one day a week where you HAVE to eat fish or not get your protein.

All of this is even predicated on a notion that in of itself might not be true. That Jesus actually existed (I think he probably did). The thing is whether he did or didn't, there are a remarkable number of Jewish and Non-Jewish legends that he seems to fit. The ties to Passover are straight from Jewish lore, while the resurrection and virgin birth are distinctly pagan ideas. Even the Bible has conflicting genealogical histories of his ties to King David (a prerequisite for messiahdom). So it seems reasonable that when a small off shoot sect of Judaism wanted to gain some ground after a couple hundred years of oppression, they started a marketing campaign to sell their boy as the one and only true anointed one.

I am not writing this today to place any judgments about Christianity. It's Easter and that would seem to me to be in bad taste. I just think that it's important to understand the context that surrounds those things we hold holy and dear. Understanding how the Church co-opted and corrupted the holidays and traditions of other cultures can help gain some perspective on whether or not we should place quite so much stock in the traditions that we seem to think are inviolate.  Easter is at it's heart a spring holiday.  It celebrates, as much as any other vernal shindig, the coming of new life and in ancient Rome the new year.  Our traditions reflect that celebration without being shoe horned into some story of resurrection with out the brain eating. 

Grief

Last week the father of a friend of mine passed away. It was quite sudden and left all who knew him in something of a state of shock, especially my friend. As is custom I attended the wake and offered my very sincere condolences to my friend during a extremely difficult time. His father was a lovely person and although I did not know the man well I along with everyone else will miss him. This brings me to my point du jour. What do I as an Atheist say to someone who has just lost a loved one.

This to me seems a more pressing issue than what to say to the dying. They are in a position to face death and when it comes they are no longer in a position to care. Those left behind however find themselves with a deep sense of loss and without the hope of an afterlife to sustain them I find myself wondering what to say as an Atheist or in turn to an Atheist who has lost a loved one. As I thought over the matter I tried to think of the losses in my life, and what words gave me solace. I never was terribly faithful so promises of heavenly reunion never held much water. As I thought about it I came up with a couple of things that have granted me some perspective in times of trouble.

The first thing is somewhat obvious, and is pretty universal. We need to be grateful for the time we had with the dearly departed. Not grateful to some god or heavenly overlord, but just grateful that we had the opportunity to know the person who has died. However much they enriched our lives it is vital to know that the pain we feel will fade, while that gift of their companionship will not. When the funeral is over and the mourning is done those memories, joyful or painful, will be what remain.

The second thing that struck me came when I read a quote from a famous physicist , Lawrence Krauss,as retweeted by of all people Miley Cyrus. To quote: “You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, all the things that matter for evolution) weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in stars. So forget Jesus. Stars died so you can live.” I think that reason I find solace in this is it shows us our true place in universe. We are nothing more than the products of collapsing bits of stars and matter that have been around since the beginning of the universe. This is true whether we are alive or dead. The idea that something has changed when we die is a mere perceptive shift. A redistribution of energy and matter. Nothing of the substance that made up the one we loved has ceased to be. It is only the collaboration that has ended. Like actors parting ways after the final bow of the last show. The parts have simply moved onto other sums.

The last thing I have found some semblance of solace in is the oddness of time in a cosmological sense. I should note that I have a very superficial understanding of this and if I am completely off base I welcome being told so. Time is a dimension. As a dimension it exists as a giant expanse in which we each have a designated size. The thing is like other dimensions it is not necessarily linear. It all exists all at once and it is only our memory that leads it to be linear. This entire blog could be written in moments that lie on opposite ends of my existence, but my memory of them lines them up next to each other in my head. The upshot of this is while you may feel that your loved one has passed on, those moments you treasure and miss may still be yet to happen and it is only something as trivial and the nuances of how we feel time pass that hide that fact from you.

I don't know if this will help anyone but me. I hope it will. In times of loss it is easy to find ourselves wishing for a higher purpose or some ethereal plane in which we can reunite with those gone before us. I would never be so cruel as to tell a believer who is grieving that they are deluded. At the same time the need to comfort is no less in those who don't believe and my hope is that some of what I've written here might help to provide that solace.

Why the Right tends to be more religious than the Left, and what it says about their politics.

I have been thinking for a long about the various and sundry reasons that the political right is so much more religious than the left. Jesus was clearly a centrist if not squarely on the left. Even if there is a case to made for Jesus as a conservative, there is still very clearly a mixed message at best. So what is it that makes them claim such stronger ties to religion than liberals. I think that the answer comes down to faith.

After much thought on the matter I think that it isn't in fact that being conservative makes them religious, I think that they are right in as much as, being religious makes them conservative. To be more specific, the qualities that are reinforced by religion are the same qualities that lend themselves to a conservative ideology. Religious belief is essentially predicated on certain notions. A religious person must be able to rely on faith alone for truth. Evidence and fact are the inherent enemies of faith. To believe in a deeper force behind this life on Earth you must first create a cognitive dissidence between that which is observed and that which you believe. Religion sprang from our attempts to find answers to our natural inquisitiveness. We were trying to explain the world. Now though, to maintain a strict literal belief in the tenants of most religions, you must crush that inquisitive impulse. So many questions of where we came from and how and why have already been answered that you must tamp down the desire for knowledge so you can ignore the answers to the questions that we all ask.

Either that or create a work around.

Now how does this serve a conservative world view. Well from the get go the word conservative indicates an oppositional stance to things which are new. This means that the search for knowledge must be quelled. That search means new things, answers to the unanswered and then new questions to be answered in their turn. It is also (to those who take the Bible and literal truth) the direct byproduct of the original sin. People who don't seek knowledge find it easy to be in lock step with each other because they never have cause to question whether they are right or wrong.

Abandoning the search for knowledge leads one to rely on faith for their world view. Thus you don't need to look at the overwhelming evidence that societies with a smaller wealth gap do better. You can ignore essentially unanimous climactic data and assume that your passing observations of the weather are enough to tell you what is going on in the atmosphere. You can ignore studies that show the benefits of limited population growth because God will stop you breeding when it's time. You can look at the failures of austerity as a curative measure and still preach it and you can see the faults of the past as lost strengths. You can look at a country that is acting in it's own defense and in a manner that your country does and call it an aggressor.

Cognitive dissidence is the key to a fundamentalist world view. You have to be totally devoted to the idea that you know the truth in order ignore all of the other truths out there. This is a hallmark of conservative thought because as the name suggests, it assume that whatever has been before is inherently worth saving.

I would think God had better things to do.

Hey guys, It's been a while.  I miss you.  Now that thats out of the way I wanted to tackle the notion that comes up ALL THE TIME with religious folks.  Since I first started looking into religions I have constantly heard the term "personal God"  come up over and over from Christians.  As I understand the phrase, it refers to their belief that God speaks to, cares about, watches over, and is generally interested in each of us individually.  He is concerned about each of our sins and is hurt personally by them.  It is not a simple matter of accounting but rather, each transgression is a slight directed directly at the Lord of the Universe himself.  Likewise every time we pray to him (which is apparently the only positive thing he gives a damn about because he seems somewhat petty)  he hears it and it fills his heart with glee that he is getting attention.  This has always seemed to me something of an undesirable trait in a deity.  
    If you will permit me a short analogy.  The God of Christianity seems to me to be somewhat like Michael Scott from the Office.  He spends less time running his office than meddling in the affairs of those that are in his charge.  He cares about the running of the branch with which he is the head, but more so he cares about making sure that everyone is happy, and in a good mood and most importantly in adoration of him.  Meanwhile it is only the skill with which his underlings do their job that allows the branch to survive.  If they were entirely unsupervised it in conceivable that they would be just as effective a work force as they are with him there.  Indeed he is probably not necessary to the completion of their work at all.
    My point in all this, aside from the Office being a pleasant but somewhat over-rated show,  is that it is not necessarily a desirable quality in an administrator to have him overly concerned with all the personal details of those underneath him.  I would think that even a omniscient deity who knows about all of the minute happenings in the universe would be better off maintaining a certain level of emotional distance from those whom he might be put in a position to send to an eternity of torment.  Without out that distance how can we trust his decisions to be made in the best interests of the universe or even of humanity.  Maybe leaving Hitler around as long as he did was giving a loved son a second chance, or striking down Heath Ledger was displacement for somebody in Mumbai mugging an old lady.  Having a  personal God that loves us all so much is only going to invite distraction.  I would think that God had better things to do than worry over the minutia of my life, which I would rather he stayed out of.
    Now I know the one of the counter arguments is going to be that God so loves us that he wants to make sure we are all okay.    But that love is the very thing that makes the idea of us betraying him punishable by an eternity of fire.  Only that love and be strong enough to create that rage.
    So why then is this concept of a personal God seen as so enticing?  I think it has to do with the search for meaning.  I have come to grips with a universe that doesn't care about me.  That is incapable of caring about me.  I have realized that on a cosmic scale everything terrestrial is just a game and so I, in my turn I play the game until I am removed from the board.  But I think that for some the idea that the universe doesn't care is intimidating.  I think for some it is hard to reconcile the idea that even though there is no God to care, they can still have people, friends, family, loved ones, coworkers and kind souls who care about them.  This is why we go on.
    I don't believe in God, or a god.  But if in some cosmic twist it turns out I am wrong, I still write this blog without fear.  Because I am sure that if he's running the whole show, he has better things to do than worry about some snot-nosed lower being with a keyboard.

Appropriation

So this is going to be something of a primer for where I'm going with this blog from here on out.  It also can act as a sort of glossary for some of the terms I may use that are commonly used in a religious purpose but in my case have a less theist meaning.  This blog was started to focus on the awe and mystery of the universe as seen through the eyes of a secular humanist.  This leads me to utilize many terms that have either been co-opted or created by the religious community.  So here goes.
Miracle (miraculous)-  This is often used to explain things that are done by God and lack any scientific explanation.  In my use of the word I am keeping it closer to the original Latin roots.  Miracle comes from the Latin word Mira which means wonder or wondrous.  This is essentially what I mean.  Something that is a miracle or miraculous by my definition is something that fills me with awe at the intricacies of the natural world. 

God:-  I don't really use this term except as an expletive.  I have no love for the idea of Spinoza's God or any other deist interpretation of the divine power illusion.  On this one I have to side with Einstein.  Any reference to God is simply a common reference point to be used euphemistically or metaphorically for something big and influential (the quote "God does not play dice" refers not to an actual deity but to an aversion of the Universe to creation from disorder.

Holy and or Sacred-This refers to things of value beyond oneself or a place or item of reverence that is held largely as inviolate.

Reverence- A respect for something that you hold above yourself or your own immediate needs or desires by its merits or nature.  (I have a reverence for the beauty of nature)

Sin- This has two different uses to me.  One is essentially the same as a vice.  A habit that is not necessarily healthy but is enjoyable none the less.  The other is as doing evil.  This generally refers doing harm to others unnecessarily or acting without any regard for the well being from others or the common good. 

Thats it for now.  I'll add to the glossary as I come up with more usages that might be confusing.  I also encourage anyone who reads this blog to reclaim these words for their own.  Commonality is the only true way to change the language. 

Proof that I'm still here

I think you should be careful of people who actively try to "teach" you their religion.
-Laura Murphy (a very good friend of mine)