Faith In Outer Space   (2015May03)

Sunday, May 03, 2015                                                       11:40 AM

Freedom of religion is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible for me to abstain from religion without being burnt at the stake or beheaded. That’s a good thing. It makes things better all around, for women, for gays, for children—the judgmental authoritarianism that allows the religious to marginalize women, condemn gays, and abuse children is prevented from becoming part of our legal system. And where such dogma is already infused into society, we have legal recourse to remedy the situation, as with the present argument in the Supreme Court over same-sex marriage.

Those with the notion that religious freedom should allow them to treat others differently, such as denying service to gays, do not understand the difference between religion and law. Belief is a mental phenomenon, not a physical one—where belief informs action, however, things get stickier. You can choose to live your own life as a believer, but imposing those beliefs on others is not ‘freedom’, it is its opposite—ingenuous piety notwithstanding.

Having gone from a civilization wherein religion was a given, to a civilization where religion is optional, we have achieved personal freedom. Those of us entirely without religion are tempted to view this as progress, with the inherent suggestion that religion is obsolete and will, one day, fade away. But believers see religious freedom as an accommodation to the variety of religions rather than as a step away from religion in general.

There’s a difference. We can be proud that human beings are the ‘only race’, the reason that God created the universe—or we can have the pride of a young race that is joining the galactic community by reaching the stars. If the former, we are encouraged to stay in our cradle, this fragile planet with limited resources and time. If the later, we know that we must leave this planet, colonize the solar system and perhaps beyond—or just wait to die out when the planet does. We can condescend to the stay-at-homes by justifying space exploration through its useful by-products, the science and the tech—but the real reason is just that we have to leave.

I can imagine some protest at that statement but be assured that I’m speaking in general terms. We don’t all have to leave—you, personally, don’t have to leave—I’m not expecting to get the opportunity to leave Earth within my lifetime. But eventually some of us have gotta go. Enough people have to populate the solar system to ensure the survival of the race beyond the Earth’s expiration date, whenever that may be.

The end of the Earth may not be coming soon, but it’s coming. We know that now—we know that Earth was once uninhabitable, that it will be again—we know that Earth floats amongst a sea of extinction-level-sized asteroids and meteors, any one of which could ‘hit the jackpot’ at any time. And beyond all the cosmological constraints, we also have to face the fact that our use of planetary resources may reach a tipping point long before any of these lesser probabilities manifest themselves.

We need to start getting our raw materials from further away, someplace where we’re not trying to breathe and drink water and grow food. And the human race could also use a little elbow room—one planet for seven billion people requires a lot of natural resources and a lot of real estate. Our solar system is begging to be colonized and developed. And our planet is begging for a break.

Does religion get in the way of this? Well, religion is authoritarian—it wants to be in charge. And those in charge are uncomfortable with change. Space exploration certainly qualifies as change. You do the math.

However, some changes might benefit us. Earth’s population may not benefit directly—even with the ability to emigrate to space, population growth on the surface wouldn’t change significantly. Overpopulation will eventually bleed this planet dry. But at the same time, a colonized solar system would see population growth as a good thing—and restless young people on Earth would have a frontier to turn to. If we’re going to overpopulate ourselves to death, it seems a small thing to allow some of that excess population to take a stab at perpetuating the species outside of our gravity-well. Think of it as back-up.

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“The Explosion of the Spanish Flagship during the Battle of Gibraltar”  by Cornelis Claesz. van Wieringen, c. 1621    (Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum website)

National Prayer   (2015Apr01)

Wednesday, April 01, 2015                                                12:04 PM

April Fools! The “National Day of Prayer” isn’t until Thursday, May 7th. Americans United has a nifty little site: What’s Wrong With The National Day of Prayer, if anyone isn’t clear on there being a problem with it. To quote Rabbi Merrill Shapiro, President of AU’s National Board of Trustees: “The National Day of Prayer is problematic because it presumes that Americans should take direction on their religious lives from the government. It suggests that they will engage in certain religious activities because the government recommends they do. People do not need government directives to pray or take part in any other form of worship.”

I can’t argue with that. But a case could be made that National Days are not so much directives as they are responses to popular opinion. Americans United is in danger of making the same mistake as the Tea Party’s anti-government nonsense. The government doesn’t create National Days out of thin air—they are proposed by citizens, often due to an existing, less-official celebration tradition—Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, Fourth of July—these were all popular observances that came from the collective heart of Americans. Their canonization into ‘bank holidays’ came later. And atheist or otherwise, I don’t think anyone can claim that there aren’t a lot of prayer-friendly citizens in this country.

If we were talking about a Mandatory Day of Prayer, then okay, that would be a problem. But a day that celebrates prayer can only be wrong if there’s something wrong with prayer. The fact that I don’t pray may leave me out of the celebration, but that doesn’t make it wrong to celebrate. I don’t have a womb, either—but I have no problem with baby showers.

We’re living in the future, folks. And space-age living requires that we pay attention. There is a distinct difference between what we don’t like and what is wrong. There are lots of things I don’t like—that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with those things. There are lots of things that are wrong—the fact that they may appeal greatly to me doesn’t make them less wrong.

People with seniority, people with power, people with money—such people often get to have things their way—their preferences have importance. This is confusing. Their preferences shouldn’t have importance, but reality says otherwise. We have to reconcile this ongoing condition with its temporary equivalent—a hostage stand-off. Yes, a person holding us at gunpoint has the power to inforce their preferences—but we must decide whether to give in to their threats or to try to rush in and disarm the hostage-taker.  It’s called ethics—and the reason most people avoid thinking about ethics is that having them is often similar to rushing an armed attacker—it can be suicidal. Hence the expression, ‘Live Free Or Die’.

It’s ironic that the non-religious would waste time, effort and attention on something that isn’t intrinsically wrong, like a National Day of Prayer, when they should be focusing on actual wrongs, like the recent states’ legislation legitimizing religion-based bigotry—the anti-gay laws and the anti-abortion laws. Gays make up ten percent of our population. Women make up fifty percent of our population. Between the two groups we can figure that a solid majority of American citizens are being persecuted by religion-based laws. This condition may have spurred the anti-prayer sentiment, but opposing a National Day of Prayer is rather missing the point. Better we should all pray they repeal that nonsense—and maybe start voting for politicians instead of fundamentalist zealots.

It’s Not The Pope’s Fault (2013June30)

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Golly-gee, but we like to quibble, don’t we? Just as the gutting of the Voter Rights Act’s oversight-powers was explained with talking points, without any analysis of the true issue, i.e. racial bigotry, so also did the recent ruling in favor of LGBT marriage (and inclusion, by inference) fail to address the true issue—religion.

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We have, as a society, matured to the point of being less-than-serious about notions of hellfire, angels, effective prayer, and stoning (as a religious duty). While we remain polite and non-judgmental when confronted with fundamentalists who appear to be truly convinced of the reality of a God with whom all people are in daily contact—and are beholden to, in both deed and intention—we grow more and more to hear them as neurotics who are blind to a particular compulsion towards irrationality—like arachnophobics, you know?

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While Faith remains a serious subject, it is nonetheless a good working definition of psychosis—to believe without evidence, to imagine what is not palpable to any of our senses, such as imaginary friends—it is only by the ancient roots of the major faiths and the immediate parental influence to adopt these fantasies that keeps us from laughing at how truly bizarre their cosmologies are, when compared to scientific evidence.

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Let me stop here, now that I’ve used the word ‘science’. I can hear all the debating points racing through the heads of any evangelical who might read this. Let me just say that Science is not a religion, it is a tool. We use this tool for many things in our modern lives—we board jetliners; we get boob jobs; we use skin lotion and SPF protection; we make phone calls; we wear polyester blends. Some of us send robots to Mars, some of us dig up evidence of the Earth’s past, and even the evidence of people who lived before monotheism existed. You can quibble about biological points (like evolution) all you want; you can question the wisdom of using science (a far more attractive debate than the present debate—pitting faith and science against each other) but in the end, we use science because it works—and nothing can be done about that. It’s pitiful, really. With the medical advances made since Moses’ day, the infant mortality rate is way, way down—to the point where many of the zealots questioning Science would have died at birth, if not for the usefulness of modern science.

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And let me just clean up a few loose ends: yes, no one knows anything about the why and how of Creation—even the Big Bang theory doesn’t explain where ‘everything’ came from, to begin with. So, yes, there was a creator—whether it was a being or a piece of energy—nobody knows; why someone or something would choose to create a universe—nobody knows. But Science gives us a hint.

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In its discovery of the nature of our solar system, our cosmos, and all the billions of other galaxies and nebulae, Science shows that the God who supposedly spoke with Abraham, Moses, or Joshua didn’t know any more about Astronomy than those ancient people did. Thus we must entertain the idea that the God that spoke with such prophets was speaking from inside their brains. Science helps us here, as well—the perception of voices and visions is a natural part of the human condition—especially under duress, such as during a long fast, or the prolonged oxygen-deprivation of a smoke-house, or incense smoke.

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Thus we find—those of us prepared to be sensible about things—that the science indicates religion was born from one-part magical thinking and one-part manipulation of groups through claiming spiritual authority. That second part was addressed by Karl Marx in his Das Kapital, and produced the phrase ‘Religion is the opium of the masses’. It still works today for many church leaders and hypocritical power-brokers—they perpetuate the myth that there is some sort of reason why the few are wealthy and the rest of us have to live on their leavings, working for their benefit, until we die.

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By now, we’ve reached an even deeper level, where our society is a fragile, complex creation that must be lubed and fueled constantly—and any upset to the rich and powerful is seen, locally, as a ruined economy. In other words, we’ve created a civilization that can get by without cooperation from a few malcontents, that can get by while still firing millions of people, for years at a time—all as long as the cowed and silent keep worrying about their kids, about their elders’ medical care, and about keeping their homes.

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So, don’t be misled by my jocular tone—these problems are not simple, nor are their solutions clear. Our society’s weaknesses are as much a part of our lives as its strengths—that is why ‘violent overthrow’ never accomplishes anything better than before the old leaders toppled. We cannot say, “This is bad. That is bad. It must stop immediately!” Absolutism is a great way to draw the lines of battle, even if it does cover up the heart of the problem.

Opnamedatum: 2010-03-01

We have to look for small incremental changes that trend towards a more perfect society. We have to bring our socio-political involvement up by an exponential rise—the bait-and-switch razzle-dazzle of the Media is trying to entertain us, not inform us—and certainly not educate us. We must take our political involvement away from mass media and network it as individuals, keeping open minds and searching for compromises that we can all live with.

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And such an enlightened constituency would be big trouble for the Powers That Be—hence the constant mass media razzle-dazzle. However, an ‘enlightened constituency’ never even pops up, as a subject for discussion—we are all too busy playing the Media game, taking our debating prompts from their sound-bites and photo-ops. They pick sides and we jump to do likewise, approaching each issue from the same perspective we bring to our professional sporting events—when most major issues are more complex than the media ever even hints at.

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The far-Right are disputing our society’s inclusion of the LGBT population as equally human, and they always boil down the reasons to Religion. Which is strange, when you think about it—I’ve read the bible—nobody gets stoned by Jesus because they went ‘against God and nature’. The only impetus for making this a religious issue is that homosexuality, as evil, has been in the cannons of the major faiths, put there by church ‘leaders’ with a bit of a self-identity problem. As children, anything of a sexual nature evinces the response ‘eew!’, whether hetero or homo, and these childish reactions have come to be established church dogma without, as I said, any direct instructions in either Bible on the evil of non-hetero impulses.

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It wasn’t until the 1960s that we began a conversation about what was okay to ‘talk about’ so, in a way, even heterosexuality was considered ‘evil’ up until that time. It couldn’t be mentioned at a party, it couldn’t be debated by politicians, and it couldn’t be covered in school. The 1960s were the first time Americans recognized that teaching children about the biological facts of reproduction, birth-control, family planning, and disease might be worthwhile. Before then, it was very little different from the 19th century’s Victorian-era hypocrisies and ignorance.

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At the same time, those rigid conventions disguised a society of misogyny, domestic child-abuse, racism, and an unstated, classist view of women, poor people, non-white people, non-Christian people, and the rich and powerful. So the LGBT community shouldn’t feel too badly towards their hetero brethren and sistren—we haven’t been out of the closet all that long, ourselves. Thus, that whole ‘spiritual purity’ business is somewhat be-smeared, and that was before all the priests got busted for buggery.

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Another problem between the gays and the far-Right is the whole ‘division of church and state’ issue. The Neo-Cons, the Tea Party, whatever you call these yahoos, have actual been bending this rule all along—and recognition of gays is a repair of that leak in our national ideals. The Evangelists don’t disapprove of LGBT citizens as dangerous, they disapprove of LGBT citizens as ‘against God and nature’.

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And I’d like to nip that ‘against nature’ business in the bud, right now. Naturalists and zoologists have documented many examples of homosexuality across the entire range of the class mammalia. As with tool-using and intoxication, our animal friends are similar to us in this way as well—so to describe it as ‘against nature’ is ‘against common-sense’.

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No, their objections are religious in origin. “It goes against God” is their problem—and an especially knotty one, since there are no ‘Thou shalt not’s in the New Testament specifically against LGBT lifestyles. On the contrary, Jesus, as portrayed in the bible, is all about inclusion, tolerance, and love—the only thing that seems to upset him is money-changers. I wonder why we don’t have long debates about money being evil?—Christ didn’t seem too keen on it—But not a word about persecuting Gay people. I wonder why?

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No, the ‘sin of homosexual behavior’ is dogma, not faith. It is something the CEOs of the churches included out of ignorance and fear. They could change their position on it. And they will. Acceptance of gay pastors and priests is already happening, and the new Roman Pope, Francis I, seems to see the writing on the wall, as well—and the Catholics could use all the good press they can manage, right now.

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But for the present, that land-that-time-forgot, below the Mason-Dixon line, is still trying to tell folks that both archeology and evolution are delusions of satanic origin, that Science can’t have everything its own way (although it can and does—even against the scientists’  preferences) and that heterosexual, missionary-position-only reproduction is the only acceptable sexual activity. Now, these are wacky positions to take on issues which the vast majority of human beings have already become comfortable with on a secular level.

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That vast majority is not atheists, either—it is the vast majority of modern day people who keep their religion for its benefits, not for its intellectual shackles. They believe in love, charity, forgiveness, and mercy—but they don’t believe in fairy tales. They believe that there probably is a life after death, but they don’t believe they will be judged by a St. Peter’s Basilica fresco that Michelangelo painted. They are, bluntly stated, the ones with some common sense.

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But our nation’s guarantee of Religious Freedom forbids any attack on the beliefs of the fundamentalists—and I would be the last person to attack them—I envy those simple enough to truly believe the whole story. They know a happiness that is out of reach for atheists like me. And don’t assume I see myself as smarter than the fundamentalists —I am only less credulous. They have obviously used a great deal of brain power to keep alive the tatters of old-time religion—and they shouldn’t be counted out yet, by any stretch. It wasn’t all that long ago that pagans like me were ostracized and persecuted nearly as bad as Jewish people.

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Ah, the good old days, when strangely dressed Arabs’ religions were beneath our contempt. Now a small group of them are a threat to world peace and unity. The extremist Muslim suicide-bomber is an iconic image in our current culture. Yet nobody characterizes the shootings of abortion clinic doctors as the acts of extremist Christians—nobody calls the DHS on those people.

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The Protestants had a good thing going here in the USA. For most of the last two centuries of our country, while we espoused religious freedom, we actually had persecution of Jews (and Atheists). And our legislation has a particularly Calvinist bent to it—as if Protestants’ religious convictions had somehow innocently crept into the halls of power and leadership. Imagine.

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But the civil rights of our LGBT citizens have brought into question a long-established, dogmatic rule—that homosexuality is a mental disease, a perversion of all that is good and sweet. There are still ‘clinics’ that offer a ‘cure’. Ha.

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No, the big shots have had their diversion tactics reduced by one—support of LGBT civil rights is nearly unanimous in this country which, in this age, cannot be said about almost anything else! They’ll get by—they still have plenty of paper tigers plastered all over the media—people are still a long way from recognizing how wholly, how boldly they’ve been played. What was that rule-of-thumb? The bigger the lie, the easier to believe—yeah, that’s the one. Hitler’s fav, I believe.

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There’s an old bumper sticker that read: Hire a teenager, while they still know everything!  —not so funny when you use ‘priest’ instead of ‘teenager’, though, is it? So, next time you’re tempted to watch MSNBC or FOX, or even CNN, when you think the story will support your ‘team’ in the politics-olympics, save yourself the agita, and read a book instead.

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(The illustrations for this essay were provided BY: Wikipedia.com and BY:

the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, from their collection of the works of Sir Anthony Van-Dyck (March 22 1599–December 11 1641))

NOTE: The Netherlands’ world-reknowned Rijksmuseum opened a new website, Rijksstudio, which allows downloading of hi-def images of the over 125,000 masterpieces in their museum’s collection–and provides software that allows art students to design their own projects using the museum’s digital-graphics resources. To join the fun, goto :  https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en

Oh, Come On, All Ye Faithful

Oh, Come On, All Ye Faithful

The world is full of sad, suffering, bitter, frightened people—so much so that there are even those who have been ‘broken’. We once had an unspoken agreement in our society that anyone who was obviously psychotic or deeply stupid would be nudged away from any responsible role in civics or business. Not that we didn’t like them—just that we could see their behavior as problematic in any ‘position of authority’, where the broken may not see such a problem within themselves. I guess Bush, Jr. put an end to that tradition—if not his election then, certainly, his re-election—and now the floodgates of ‘stupid and mean’ have opened wide.

Additionally, we now have evangelical politicians (that used to be an oxymoron in this country) who disregard all the serious people who, for generations, kept their religion on simmer—just to avoid that all-too-easily-approached position wherein a person may choose their faith’s dogma over common sense. Not to mention this unspoken Neo-Con campaign to change America from the ‘land of religious freedom’ to the ‘land of Christian theocracy’. And how the public figures dance around this issue, being coy and arch and never coming out and saying the thing they truly believe—because they know the real world will take their bald admission of their loyalty to the church and hold it up as the childish bedtime story it really is.

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Admittedly, this issue is skewed, publicly, due to the fact that morons will shout their stupidity to the mountain-tops, but reasonable people of faith will allow for the give and take of scientific reality and mathematical truth and, more importantly, are too busy leading productive lives to make nearly as much hullabaloo as the extremists they far outnumber. But it remains a major point of cognitive dissonance in politics. While science professors in top colleges would not be reluctant to admit they’re Atheists, politicians must still keep to the establishmentarian position of ‘morals by religion’ and no other avenue of ‘understanding good and evil’.

The evangi-lantees  (you like that? I just made it up.) take advantage of this virtual strait-jacket whenever they imply that ‘godlessness’ is synonymous with ‘evil’. Most of my friends and acquaintances would scruple (I certainly hope) at describing me as Evil. Yet the holy-rolling, bible-thumper set would have me, an Atheist, be seen as a threat to my country, my community, and my family. No national candidate for high office has as yet proclaimed their atheism (not to my knowledge, anyway) yet the greatest horrors of our times—9/11, genocide, warring and bloody revolutions in the Mid-East—all these violent upheavals were perpetrated by certain people claiming religious motives or religious authority for their behavior.

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Shouldn’t the Atheists be preferred as being more objective about religious dogmas and the different cultures and life-styles of different religious groups? If we only accept some sort of Christianity in our political candidates, aren’t we enabling the evangelicals’ “Freedom of Belief as Long as its Christian” agenda. Why should we accept different views in our teachers and scientists than the views we expect from politicians? It’s a conundrum. Here’s another: Why don’t Europeans see this happening in their countries? Why is the USA the only country that sees the rise of evangelism and pseudo-Christian extremism? Is it because they’d already gotten over their Reformation by shipping all the crazies over here?

The fundamental divide between Atheists and Christians (or Theists in general) is in our ‘reality’s. True believers live in a reality where God is real. Atheists live in a reality that excludes specific faiths and precise dogmas—we see civilization as the progress (or evolution, if you will) of humanity from ignorance to enlightenment. We see the churches of today as vestiges of a time when the world had no better solution to the riddle of existence than myths. We see the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition as a movement from very primitive, multi-divinity traditions into a monotheistic paradigm. This gives us a perspective in which today’s major faiths are only different from Greek Mythology in that there are still people that take their ‘myths’ seriously.

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This accounts for the accusations of rudeness, crudeness, and anti-social tendencies that Christians will often make against Atheism. They think we are insulting an actual ‘being’. And we Atheists are trying to find a way to tell adults, “there is no Santy Claus” without being condescending—or going crazy ‘banging our heads against a wall’.

This is where the idea of religious freedom breaks down—two types of adults can try to discuss their differences, but in this case we are attempting to discuss our different underpinnings of our respective realities. Truly, it is easier for Muslims and Christians to discuss their differences than it is for either of them to debate Atheists. It’s kind of funny, in a way—if I told a Christian I didn’t believe in Islam, there wouldn’t be a problem; if I told a Muslim I didn’t believe in Christianity, again, no problem. There is an Atheist joke that points out how theists disbelieve in every other religion except their own, so Atheists are just off by one more religion. Funny, but true.

It doesn’t help that ‘enforced Atheism’ was a property of the old ‘Commies’ during the Cold War—the idea that people could be arrested because of their religious practices is the opposite of religious freedom. It was one of our main points of ‘superiority’ over the ‘Iron Curtain’ countries—in the Free World, we had no limits on religiosity. It seems ironic, now, what with Islam becoming a ‘suspect’ religious group—and not just for their being blamed for the fundamentalist extremists who flew the jetliners into the two towers, but also for their apparent misogyny and their concept of sharia law (pretty much the opposite of ‘separation of church and state’.)

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As always, the differences between theist and atheist are aggravated by the polymorphism of language. Fundamentalism, Extremism, Zealotry—words that once meant ‘deeply religious’ have been transformed by Terrorism into buzz-words denoting ‘random, delusional violence’. By the extremists’ insistence on hardline dogmatism, they make life difficult for the average believer in more ways than one. Being co-opted into implicit guilt of terrorist attacks is one way. Having their beliefs extended to the furthest extreme by the fundamentalists, thus highlighting the cognitive dissonance of any faith in the modern world, is another difficulty—in that it makes the majority of a faith’s believers begin to question their choice of outlook. In other words, terrorism (never a sane approach, for whatever objective, in the first place) may have the effect of driving away the majority of a faith’s more moderate and nominal adherents. Where the churches once created communities and connections, they are now in danger of being recognized as sources of conflict.

Atheists have their own problems—in my case, it is my reluctance to change my ethics to be in line with my discarding Catholicism. I’ve been consistently troubled by this issue for most of my life—if religion is false, what are the reasons for social behavior? I’ve always preferred to be a polite person, kind and sympathetic—and I hope that I have, by and large, been so—and I also know that, at times, I have not been what I hoped. But having given up any hope of taking any religion seriously ever again, I have never been changed in my feeling of the rightness in being the best person one can be.

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But, without any explanation or evidence, I have no formulation of logic that leads to my behavior—in the Atheist’s existence, there is no true rationale for anything, for being nice, for being helpful or having any care for others, not even for staying alive. And the closest I’ve come so far is this: There is no reason for anything, but there is likewise no reason not to care for anything. It’s not much, but I’ve used it for a long time and, frankly, I’m afraid it may be the only ‘answer’ to that particular issue. In other words, for me, ‘meaning’ is a subjective thing—but no less integral to happiness, and no more changeable than another’s faith, regardless of being my ‘choice’.

At ten years old, I announced my conviction that, having thought it all over, this God business was a crock. In my teen years, I tried out several other churches services in search of a believable faith—the Bahá’í seemed the closest—Quakerism was also pretty sensible, as was Unitarianism. These other faiths appeared to be far more humane than my childhood faith, but none could offer anything more sensible than Catholicism, in terms of logic and reason. In almost all cases, another religion would be far less silly than Catholicism—but that didn’t change the core concepts—unknowable being, constant surveillance from cradle to grave, life after death, souls—all the things that in a different context would be called ‘paranormal’, perhaps even ‘delirium’. In other words, if I had been shopping for a better religion, there were several contenders. But I was looking for a religion that was true—like science is true.

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Thus I became an agnostic, still willing to entertain new evidence and different perspectives. But then I ran across the archeology of religion. I learned that modern-day faiths were evolved from earlier forms, not set in stone from day one. I learned that many religious holidays were superimposed on dates that were held sacred by pagans prior to the intrusion of monotheism.

I learned that witch hunts and burning people at the stake were as much part of the destruction of the older faiths’ perspective as they were a ‘Jihad against Satanists’. Witches were revered matriarchs in Pagan culture—they were experts in medical lore, botany, midwifery, and other important contributions to their communities. They were living demonstrations of a Goodness unconnected with the churches—and they were far more effective and successful than the newer, so-called Doctors. That made them unbearable members of society in the eyes of both the new leaders and the professionals of this new, Christian ‘way of things’.

Fraser’s “Golden Bough” was a ground-breaking book published at the turn of the last century. It cataloged the many threads that wound through civilization’s history, connecting our present day beliefs to traditions begun by far more primitive belief-systems. It is basically impossible to read that book and still take modern religious rituals as seriously as when one assumed one’s religion was ‘made from whole cloth’.

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Most troubling of all is that the book was archeological in nature—it didn’t defend or attack any specific faith. Fraser diligently searched out carvings, scrolls, parchments, temples, and historical documentation for what would become his conclusions. Worse yet, it wasn’t long afterwards that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered—an Archive of older versions of today’s Bible, displaying far-ranging variations on what was previously ‘known’ to be a single, full compendium of Christianity—the New Testament.

We may not see the excitement-factor in such musty scholarship, but to the Vatican these scrolls were a potential death-blow. They sprang into action, acquiring the majority of the ‘treasure’ and spending years in so-called translation of these bomb-shell documents. Eventually, serious people started getting impatient with this suppression of such important historical material, and the scrolls were released to public study. A library found at the Nag Hammadi (Nag Hammadi Scriptures and the Gnostic Gospels) added its own confusion to the pile-up—including one very surprising “Gospel of Mary Magdalene”!

So, maybe it’s just me but, after many years of digging to get to a truth of my own, I felt I had found it—religion was evolved from our earliest, most primitive thought-processes—our fear of death, our preference for an ordered life-style, and our curiosity about the big ‘Why’s—Why does the universe exist?; Why are we here?; Why do we live, only to die? The worship of the Sun, of nature, of animals, of father-figures in the sky—all these things were part of how human ratiocination operates. They seem natural and real, because they are the natural result of our thought-processes.

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And I had seen my own changes—as a boy, we Catholics were forbidden to eat meat on Fridays; Catholic priests celebrated the Mass in Latin; and the congregation remained silent throughout. By my tween years, the ‘no meat on Friday’ strictures were dropped—(a real blow to seafood restaurants); the Mass was performed in English; and we were suddenly being taught how to do antiphony—the ‘call and response’ portions of the Mass. It takes some strong faith, in God as well as in oneself, to make alterations to the rituals of one’s faith. To a youngster like myself, it seemed little different than saying all my study of the Catechism was just a joke. “We’re changing things around—we may change again—nothing is set in stone.”—that’s what I took away from the experience. And what is the good of belief if it isn’t set in stone? I asked myself—belief should have the same permanence as arithmetic.

That’s me all over—I took Catholicism too seriously as a kid, then I took their changes too seriously, then I took science too seriously. I have found, in my older, more recent years, that everything has a ‘balance’ to it—taking something too seriously has the effect of creating an ‘imbalance’. So I try to take things less seriously now—but it is my nature to be demanding, compulsive, and fussy, so I have little success in my attempts at sensibility.

I admit my life is worse for not having joined a faith—much of society is oriented around religion. But how lucky I was to be born in a time and place where my lack of faith wasn’t a death sentence. Society wasn’t always merely oriented around religion; it has been for most of our history as accepted-as-fact as arithmetic was—indeed, if there were to be a lack of agreement between arithmetic and the church, it would have been the arithmetic that would have been ignored.Image

The acceptance of Science as our baseline reality is a surprisingly recent change in civilization—so recent that many parts of the world still live their lives in thrall to dogmas, rituals, and mysticism. That their society and their religion are inseparable presents a problem when these far-off lands are negotiating with the developed countries—once again, the very foundations of their realities differ so much that points of contact are elusive and mercurial. And the many people in the developed world who retain their families’ faiths, but take them with a grain of salt, so to speak, are as repugnant to the true believers as Atheists like me.

In some ways, I side with the zealots on this issue—if I did truly believe in my religious precepts, I wouldn’t half-ass around about it, either. I have always had great respect for the Shakers—they believed that, if original sin was a sin, then they would never commit that sin. They lived in celibacy—the only new members of the Shaker faith were orphans and runaways adopted by the Shaker community. Still, there came a time when they were all gone—they had obeyed their God by never having children—now, that’s faith, bub! They had their own Rapture, by sheer commitment to their faith. We who remain on Earth today could well be waiting for a Second Coming that already came and went.

So, I can take the high ground here if you all are the type of church-folk who skip services during football season, or cheat on your taxes, or cheat at cards, whatever… And the rest of you—keep the faith, baby! (If that’s your thing.)

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