“I thought it over and believed it by myself”
Scrambling to finish the complicated manuscript for Voices of Unbelief: Documents from Atheists and Agnostics by the December 1 deadline. Rather than go to complete radio silence on the blog, I’ll share some of the more unusual bits with you.
In order to make this book something more than just another freethought anthology, I set two goals for myself: (1) to include disbelief in cultures beyond Europe and the US, and (2) to fill in the usual 1400-year gap between Ancient Rome and the Renaissance. After nearly a year of careful digging, I managed to do both.
During the initial research, I came across references to Jacques Fournier, a 14th century bishop who was instructed by Rome to undertake local interrogations to root out adherents of Catharism, an unorthodox sect that had been spreading through the south of France. Fournier took the unusual step of having each of his hundreds of individual interrogations transcribed in detail.
Nonbelievers were not the main concern of the late medieval Inquisitions, which were primarily designed to root out heretical Christian sects whose beliefs were not entirely in keeping with Roman Catholic doctrine. Such sects often spread rapidly and were perceived to be a threat to Catholic religious and political power on the continent. But once in a blue moon, an inquisitor came across not a heretic but an outright unbeliever, or at least someone who would cop to being an unbeliever at some recent time.
Sometimes it’s hard to be sure from what was said in the interrogation whether a person’s actual views constituted heresy or unbelief. One such subject, identified as “Guillemette, widow of Bernard Benet of Ornolac,” testified that she had come to believe that the soul was nothing but blood, that nothing survives of ourselves after death, and that Jesus was no exception. Let’s listen in to the end of the interrogation, 16 July 1320, in the village of Montaillou:
BISHOP JACQUES FOURNIER: From the moment that you believed that human souls die with the body, did you believe that men would be resurrected or would live again after death?
GUILLEMETTE: I did not believe in the resurrection of human bodies, for I believed that just as the body is buried, the soul is also buried with it. And as I saw the human body rot, I believed that it could never live again.
JF: Did you have someone who taught this to you, did you learn it from someone?
G: No. I thought it over and believed it by myself.
That’s the lovely sound of free inquiry echoing down through the centuries.
Her neighbors testified to her empirical bent as well, including one who described Guillemette’s response to a child dying in her arms. “When she saw nothing but breath go out of his mouth, she said, ‘Take notice, when a person dies, one sees nothing leave his mouth except air. If I saw something else come out, I would believe that the soul is something. But now because only air has come out, I do not believe that the soul is anything.'”
Back to Jacques and Guillemette:
JF: Did you believe that the soul of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross, is dead or with his body?
G: Yes, for, although God cannot die, Jesus Christ died, all the same. Therefore, although I believed that God has always been, I did not believe that Christ’s soul lived and subsisted after his death.
JF: Do you now believe then that Christ was resurrected?
G: Yes, and it is God who did that.
JF: Do you currently believe that the human soul is anything other than blood, that it does not die at the death of the body, that it is not buried with the body, that there is a hell and a heaven, where souls are punished or rewarded, and there will be a resurrection of all men, and that the soul of Christ did not die with his body?
G: Yes, and I have believed it since the last holiday of the Ascension of the Lord because at that time I heard tell that My Lord the Bishop of Pamiers wanted to carry out an investigation against me about it. I was afraid of My Lord Bishop because of that, and I changed my opinion after that time.
(“Officer, I stopped speeding the moment I saw you.”)
Of the 578 individuals interrogated by Fournier, five heretics were burned at the stake. Most of the remainder were imprisoned or sentenced to wear a yellow cross on their backs for the remainder of their lives as a mark of shame. Guillemette was sentenced to wear the cross.
Jacques Fournier went on to become Pope Benedict XII.
Time to get your ween on
“JesusWeen is a God-given vision which was born as an answer to the cry of many every October 31st. The dictionary meaning of Ween is to expect, believe or think. We therefore see October 31st as a day to expect a gift of salvation and re-think receiving Jesus.
“Every year, the world and its system have a day set aside (October 31st) to celebrate ungodly images and evil characters while Christians all over the world participate, hide or just stay quiet on Halloween day. Being a day that is widely acceptable to solicit and knock on doors, God inspired us to encourage Christians to use this day as an opportunity to spread the gospel. The days of hiding are over and we choose to take a stand for Jesus. ‘Evil prevails when good people do nothing.’ JesusWeen is expected to become the most effective Christian outreach day ever, and that is why we also call it ‘World Evangelism Day.'” — From JesusWeen.com
Well alrighty then.
Most Christians roll their eyes at the fearful response to Hallowe’en, but there are always some who consider tonight’s goings-on to be an embodiment or celebration of evil. It’s even been called the birthday of Satan—a particularly weird idea, since the biblical Satan/Lucifer was originally an angel and therefore created, not born.
Also common among evangelicals is the idea that Hallowe’en was born in the worship of “Samhain, the Celtic God of Death.” Among the many problems with this idea: there is no Celtic god named Samhain.
Celts recognized only two seasons: summer (life) and winter (death). Samhain (usually pronounced ‘sow-en’ and meaning “summer’s end”) is the name of a month corresponding to November. The “feast of Samhain” on October 31 marks the end of summer and the last harvest of the year. It was symbolized in Celtic mythology as the death of the god (possibly Cernunnos), who would then be resurrected six months later at the feast of Beltane (April 30-May 1). As the website Religious Tolerance puts it pretty neatly, Samhain is not about the God of Death, but the death of a god. In this way, Hallowe’en is rooted in the same mythic impulse as the Christian Easter.
Like the Mexican Day of the Dead, Samhain is a recognition of the relationship between life and death. By equating death with evil, conservative Christianity recoils from and fears it.
Parents who instead recognize death as a natural part of the cycle of life can enjoy digging into the holiday’s origins. At Samhain, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was said to become thinner, and the ancient Celts believed the spirits of beloved ancestors could cross that boundary and walk among the living. Food would be set at the threshold for the departed spirits.1
So before the kids head out tonight, tell them how the tradition of dressing as spirits and going from door to door for treats grew out of this old Celtic idea of caring for and remembering loved ones who had died. A very cool bit of context.
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1Danaher, Kevin. The Year in Ireland: Irish Calendar Customs (Mercier, 1972); O’Driscoll, Robert (ed.), The Celtic Consciousness (Braziller, 1981).
The aspiring rationalist
The brain is an inelegant and inefficient agglomeration of stuff…Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer…The brain is built like an ice cream cone (and you are the top scoop): Through evolutionary time, as higher functions were added, a new scoop was placed on top, but the lower scoops were left largely unchanged.
–David Linden, The Accidental Mind
Though it’s been years now since I taught college courses and public seminars in critical thinking, I still try to practice it once in awhile. I can even get myself to believe for a moment that it’s easy—that the three-pound mass of goo in my noggin is actually predisposed to thinking well.
To counter that illusion, I’d often start my seminars with a perspective-setting exercise. Take a minute to think of areas in your life in which your decision making is to some degree non-rational. Some would quickly start scribbling, but there’d always be a few who stared into space, trying hard to identify any chinks in their critical armor.
After a few minutes I’d go around the circle and invite participants to share their irrational sides. “Dealing with my mother.” “Whenever I’m buying a car.” “Spiders.”
Once I came to a gentleman, maybe in his 60s, who fixed me with a slow-burning glare. “I could come up with something just to play the game,” he said, “but I can’t think of a single thing. Sorry.” He crossed his arms and fumed. A strictly rational response, of course.
“Allow me to help,” said his wife. Ba-boom!
I then listed my own irrationalities. Food, for one. From the Kroger aisle to my choice of mid-afternoon snack to the 30+ times per meal I “decide” whether to raise the damn fork again, eating is an area in which rational thought vies with non-rational impulse — and mostly loses.
There are a hundred good reasons that I love my wife and each of my three children, but it would be delusional to say that my love for them is entirely the result of a rational process.
I went on and on. I am less than fully rational when someone challenges my opinion, mocks me, or threatens me. I wake in the middle of the night convinced without cause that I am dying. When I come up from a dark basement, I feel a tingling on the back of my neck, my step quickens, and my heart races just a bit. There is a rational, evolutionary explanation for my irrational feeling, but that does not make my response to the dark basement (which, unlike basements on the ancient savannah, rarely contains a cheetah) itself a rational one.
One of the most persistent delusions in the non-theistic community is the idea that, having thought our way out of religious mythology, we are now fully rational. This is most clearly on display when we think we’ve spotted a fundamental error in reasoning by another non-theist and we hurl the ultimate high-horse insult:
“And you call yourself a rationalist.”
This arrogant sniff never fails to cwack me up. It implies that the sniffer is a fully rational being, and had perhaps thought the other person to be so until this happened, and is now sorely dismayed by the lapse, and so now clutches the pearls, aghast, while looking forward to the return of the penitent to the fold of the pristine rational.
Silly monkeys.
As David Linden notes in The Accidental Mind, our brains are a mess of jury-rigged responses to a long series of evolutionary pressures—the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine. As for “intelligent design,” only something as haphazard and imperfect as the human brain could come up with the idea that it is so perfect it must have been designed.
It’s amazing, really, that we can walk, much less figure out the distance to the Sun or juggle chainsaws more than once. And yet we do. In his novel Timequake, Vonnegut argues facetiously for a Creator, saying, “There is no way an unassisted human brain, which is nothing more than a dog’s breakfast, three and a half pounds of blood-soaked sponge, could have written ‘Stardust’, let alone Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” And yet it did! Instead of being shocked, shocked when we screw up, the fact that we ever do anything right should be a source of continuous giddy amazement. This perspective can also help us step away from self-righteousness, one of the ugliest human traits, and be a little kinder and more empathetic.
One of my favorite people on Earth is Lee Salisbury, a former Pentecostal preacher turned atheist and critical thinking activist in Minnesota. Lee opened each meeting of the organization he founded, the Critical Thinking Club, with a brilliant turn of phrase. “Welcome to a monthly meeting of aspiring critical thinkers,” he said. “We all want to think better, but we also know we have a long way to go.”
In addition to being a healthy way to think about it, this has the virtue of being exactly right, and carries the potential to completely reframe our approach. We are not rationalists, we are aspiring rationalists. We’ve recognized the rational as a good thing, and we’re reaching for it as hard as we can and often failing. Suddenly we can feel a bit of empathy for the rest of humanity instead of placing ourselves in some exalted camp above them.
One of the greatest gifts of a nontheistic worldview is the realization that we are not fallen angels but risen apes — and even then only slightly. Given our humble origins and the hot mess we’re balancing on our necks, I’d say we’re doing pretty damn well. But we can do better by recognizing those origins and that mess, and laying off the false presumption that by setting aside one set of irrational beliefs, we’ve left irrationality behind us.
What, me worry? End Times Edition
My daughter Delaney (9) is no sucker. She has a mind like a steel trap, a phrase which I’m sure must mean something. But she’s worried that the world might end on December 21, 2012.
“I know it probably won’t,” she said, almost precisely echoing the preamble of my own fears at different points in my life — of hell, of radon, of cults, of the Mafia, of my heart stopping just for laughs, of that itchy mole. The preamble is always followed quickly, as am I, by a big but.
“…but how do you KNOW?” she asked. “How do you KNOW it isn’t going to end?”
“I don’t,” I admitted. “It might.”
“What?!”
“Well of course it might. Might end tomorrow, too.”
“Yeah but nobody says it’s going to end tomorrow. LOTS of people think it’s going to end in 2012.”
“Why do they think that?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. But they do. And it makes me worried.”
“When you get old enough to see about ten of these end-of-the-world things not happen, you’ll stop worrying.”
“Yeah, IF I get old enough.”
Laney was actually a bit obsessed with this one, simply because of this big unknown Claim, something so entirely credible they’d made a movie about it.
Time for an intervention.
I explained that somebody who knew nothing about the Mayan calendar apparently got hold of it, saw that it “ends” on December 21, 2012, and started in with the Chicken Little. I told her that it “ends” in the same way ours “ends” on December 31. Which is to say it doesn’t.
“We have weeks that repeat, right? When we get to Saturday, we go back to Sunday. Months repeat. When we get to the 31st, or whatever, we go back to the 1st. And when we get to the last day of December, every year, you don’t scream that the world is going to end — you just flip the page, and you’re back in January. The Mayans had another big cycle called a baktun. It’s like 400 years long. And when you get to the end of a baktun, you just flip the page. New baktun.”
“Oh. So somebody just didn’t know how it worked.”
“Yeah. Still worried?”
She paused, then grinned sheepishly. “A little.”
That’s the way it goes. Even with the Wire Brush of Reason, once the chicken has shit, it’s hard to get it out of every corner of the henhouse.
The malformed chicken that is the human brain is in a state of perpetual defecation, so I wasn’t too surprised when only last week I learned that we’ve shit out yet another pellet. Turns out the world is also ending a week from tomorrow. I hadn’t heard.
I immediately informed Delaney, whose eyes inflated nicely.
“Next Saturday?” I knew she was running her soccer schedule through her head.
“Yep.”
“Who said this one?”
I pulled out the news story I’d printed up, with the ridiculous headline, “Biblical scholar’s date for rapture: May 21, 2011“. I said that the guy in the story is not a scholar but some minor Christian radio host named Harold Camping (whose website is still for some reason accepting donations). Seems Camping crunched the numbers in the Bible and came up with a “guarantee” that Jesus will return on May 21, 2011, rapture up 3 percent of the world’s population, and commence a five-month smiting of the rest of you.
Turns out it’s not the first time he made such a guarantee. His book 1994 also predicted the end, though I can’t remember what year.
“Huh. Just like that other guy, with the people on the hilltops.” That would be Baptist minister William Miller, whose prediction of apocalypse sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844 was called, on March 22, 1844, “The Great Disappointment.” He moved the date to October 22, 1884, which became the Second Great Disappointment. His followers, many of whom had sold everything they owned and left crops to rot in the fields, were mostly (to their credit) disinclined to make it a trilogy.
Camping and Miller both used Bible roulette for their calculations, which makes it especially surprising that they came up with such wildly different dates. But I shared Camping’s method with Laney so she could decide whether to worry.
And that, before we get off-topic, is what this post is about — not whether Camping and Miller are reflections on other believers, not whether eschatology in general is silly. This is about how to help kids develop the ability to decide on their own whether to believe a claim.
I looked her in the eye. “When you’re trying to figure out what to believe, a good way to start is to just ask why other people believe it, then decide whether it’s a good reason. So this man says Jesus was crucified on April 1st in the year 33. There are 722,500 days between that day and next Saturday. Now, the number 5 equals ‘atonement’…”
“What?!” Connor (15) had wandered in. “Where’d he get that?”
“Dunno. So he says 5 equals ‘atonement,’ and 10 equals ‘completeness,’ and 17 equals ‘heaven.’ Multiply those together, then square the whole thing, and you get 722,500, again.”
Laney blinked. “So?”
“Well exactly. That’s why I’m not worried — because the reason he gives for believing it doesn’t make any sense. Add that to the fact that he’s been wrong before, and a hundred other people have been wrong before, and I don’t worry when somebody says the world will end on a certain day.”
This might seem like a small thing, but it’s huge, and it applies to countless things, including religion. After years of wondering whether the God question was even askable, I realized I could indeed come to an intelligent conclusion not by looking for God, but by looking at the reasons others believe.
Once I decided the reasons were poor, I stepped away from religious belief, and all the false hopes and real fears it brings, with very little difficulty.
“This just isn’t going to happen”
Late last week, as I sat down to write a post about Rock Beyond Belief, I received notice that it had been cancelled.
Quick summary for those who haven’t followed this:
Last September, an evangelical Christian rock concert called “Rock the Fort” was held at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. Sponsored by the Fort Bragg chaplains, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and 20 area churches, the event was promoted as an opportunity to win souls by “[bringing] the Christian message to all of Fort Bragg and the surrounding community.” Ft. Bragg chaplain Col. David Hillis made it clear in a letter to local churches that “Rock the Fort is evangelical in nature…The concert will conclude with a clear gospel message.”
It worked. Event organizers claimed 700 on-stage conversions of soldiers and civilians.
Rob Boston at Americans United for Separation of Church and State correctly stated that “the military has no business sponsoring a rally that is clearly designed to convert people to evangelical Christianity – or any other religion, for that matter.” The Freedom From Religion Foundation and Military Religious Freedom Foundation likewise weighed in with constitutional concerns. “Churches have the right to reach out to anyone to spread their religious messages,” Boston said, “but the government is not allowed to help them do it.”
The Staff Judge Advocate soothed worried brows with a letter promising equal treatment:
This was echoed in a letter from the base commander.
One soldier at Fort Bragg, Sgt. Justin Griffith, decided to take the base commander at his word. If the military is going to sponsor events of this kind, they must do so for other perspectives as well. Thus was born ROCK BEYOND BELIEF, a day of fun and entertainment featuring secular bands and speakers including Richard Dawkins, Dan Barker, Hemant Mehta, and Eugenie Scott (and me).
Justin was a class act from the beginning. He was determined to make the event a positive expression, not a poke in the eye. Every time someone tried to paint RBB as an anti-religious event or an attempt to “spread the atheist message,” Justin slapped it down. This would be a positive celebration of secular values, but never an attempt to recruit, convince, or attack. No de-conversion or de-baptism ceremonies. High road all the way.
He pulled together a volunteer staff and began the long approval process in November. Funding was a serious concern. But a Freedom of Information Act request by FFRF revealed that Billy Graham’s Rock the Fort event had received over $54,000 in direct support from the Dept. of Defense.
The next step was simple: the base commander had promised “the same level of support to comparable events,” so a request was made for a similar level of financial support for Rock Beyond Belief.
The approval was a no-brainer, and the base legal staff recommended that Rock Beyond Belief receive the same support Rock the Fort had received.
The last step would be the signature of the garrison commander. He “approved” the event per se, but added what Justin rightly called “crippling restrictions.” Instead of the outdoor post-parade ground that Rock the Fort had used, Rock Beyond Belief would be confined to an indoor theatre that holds 700. There would be no financial support of any kind. And unlike Rock the Fort, he required that all advertising carry a disclaimer that the event carried “no endorsement by Fort Bragg, the US Army, or the Department of Defense.”
Justin had no choice but to cancel.
The whole thing rang loud bells for me. Justin was attempting to hold the Army to its own stated principles, not to mention the US Constitution. And instead of progressing straight to court over Rock the Fort, he had chosen to request equal treatment. A promise of equal treatment was made, then withdrawn.
Eight years ago I tried something similar, albeit on a smaller scale. I was on the faculty of a Catholic women’s college that trumpeted an atmosphere of open inquiry and critical thinking in all of its public statements and recruitment materials. All points of view were said to be welcome in this vibrant marketplace of ideas.
The college also considers itself a feminist institution, but the fact that the overwhelming majority of feminist pioneers have been atheists or agnostics was never mentioned. So when an informal student humanist group I advised wanted to bring Annie Laurie Gaylor on campus to talk about feminism and freethought, I thought it a perfect fit with the college’s stated values. Annie Laurie wrote Women Without Superstition, the definitive book on the topic.
We reserved the room, clearly stating the nature of the event, paid the required fee, and received an approved contract. We advertised openly on campus and in the papers for four weeks. But 45 minutes before the event, a security guard arrived and locked the hall, “By order of the president.”
I called Sister Anita for an explanation and was told that I had not reserved the hall. When I replied that I had the reservation in hand, she was silent for several seconds.
“Look Dale,” she finally said, “this just isn’t going to happen.”
The next day, as word of the lockout spread, she sent a campus-wide email claiming that I had intentionally misrepresented the nature of the event. The day after that, the first student protest in the history of the college took place on the quad. Major media stories ensued, and I received some blistering hate mail.
I managed to stay three more years, trying to improve the climate of inquiry on campus, before nausea led me to resign and pursue my current work.
Though religion is in play in both of these situations, the principle applies to countless others as well. If a minority point of view is on the verge of gaining a fair hearing within the rules, someone in the majority will simply change the rules. The women’s movement struggled against the same kind of goalpost-moving, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 essentially said, “Okay, from now on we will follow our own rules.” The majority party in Congress regularly changes procedures to hogtie the minority. Rules are useful, goes the reasoning of the powerful, until they aren’t. At which point etc.
Some defenders of the garrison commander will surely point out that he didn’t cancel the event, Justin did. A bit like saying, “Sure, I shot you, but you’re the one that fell over.”
Eight years ago I was heartbroken that what could have been a simple, positive expression of the important place of religious doubt in our history instead yielded a melee of angry protests, accusations, and hate mail because someone decided their own rules were meant to be broken as needed. Now Justin’s attempt to create something positive is instead devolving into ugliness and lawsuits for the same reason.
The suit is justified and necessary (and, as the Military Religious Freedom Foundation’s Mikey Weinstein put it, “a one-inch putt”) — but once again I’m heartbroken at the duplicity and the lost opportunity.
I hope I’d behave better than the garrison commander and Sister Anita in a position of majority power. But if I were to do otherwise, I hope the minority voices I trample on would shame me into integrity.
DADT and the chaplains
A little while ago I said that accepting a certain level of facepalming human malpractice is one of the keys to passing my short vivre with some degree of joie. But I added that some nonsense is misguided and unworthy enough of respect to get me out of my chair. And sometimes, despite every effort to understand, I can’t muster anything but nauseous contempt.
Such a thing came to my attention yesterday in an action alert from the Interfaith Alliance, an outstanding organization that opposes religious extremism and promotes separation of church and state for the benefit of both. It was a letter, sent to the President by retired military chaplains, claiming that the repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” would infringe on the religious freedoms of active-duty chaplains because they would no longer be able to preach intolerance of homosexuality.
That’s not as much of a paraphrase as you might hope. From the letter:
If the government normalizes homosexual behavior in the armed forces, many (if not most) chaplains will confront a profoundly difficult moral choice: whether they are to obey God or to obey men. This forced choice must be faced, since orthodox Christianity—which represents a significant percentage of religious belief in the armed forces—does not affirm homosexual behavior. Imposing this conflict by normalizing homosexual behavior within the armed forces seems to have two likely—and equally undesirable—results.
First, chaplains might be pressured by adverse discipline and collapsed careers into watering down their teachings and avoiding—if not abandoning—key elements of their sending denomination’s faith and practice. Such a result would be the very antithesis of religious freedom and inimical to the guarantees made by our First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Second, chaplains might have their ability to freely share their religious beliefs challenged and torn away in a variety of everyday situations. For instance, chaplains who methodically preach book-by-book from the Bible would inevitably present religious teachings that identify homosexual behavior as immoral. Thus, while chaplains fulfill their duty to God to preach the doctrines of their faith, they would find themselves speaking words that are in unequivocal conflict with official policies.
(The chaplains had the cojones to footnote this with Leviticus 18:22 but weirdly neglected to mention the required punishment.)
The letter is a festival of fallacies, including the slippery slope, special pleading, ad populum, and argument from authority. But poor argumentation and bigotry are not the real problem here. The chaplains are asking not just for the private right to hold these beliefs about homosexuality, which are theirs to keep, but that their beliefs be given pre-eminence — that military policy be bent and shaped to reflect their beliefs, first and foremost, and that the rights of others be foregone to accommodate them.
Balancing private and public rights is tricky, but a lovely body of law and policy has defined that balance over the years. Better yet for the current debate, the Pentagon’s recent DADT report already examined and dismissed First Amendment concerns:
…the reality is that in today’s U.S. military, Service members of sharply religious convictions and moral values…and those who have no religious convictions at all, already co-exist, work, live, and fight together on a daily basis. This is a reflection of the pluralistic American society at large…
Service members will not be required to change their personal views and religious beliefs; they must, however, continue to respect and co-exist with others who may hold different views and beliefs… [p. 135, emphasis added]
It’s heartening to see the Pentagon grasping the balance of private and public rights that eludes so many of their retired chaplains. Unfortunately it also eludes some of the current ones. Again, from the Pentagon report:
In the course of our review, we heard some chaplains condemn in the strongest possible terms homosexuality as a sin and an abomination, and inform us that they would refuse to in any way support, comfort, or assist someone they knew to be homosexual. [p. 134]
I had to read that three times. I hope and assume that any chaplain following up on that disgusting threat would be dishonorably discharged.
But there are others:
In equally strong terms, other chaplains, including those who also believe homosexuality is a sin, informed us that ‘we are all sinners,’ and that it is a chaplain’s duty to care for all Service members. [p. 134]
I could do without the gratuitous crap about sin, but accepting a certain base level of facepalming human malpractice is etc. Still other chaplains, and many religious laypeople, have come out unequivocally in favor of ending the prohibition, and without the backhanded sin-slap. “[Gay soldiers] were forced by the situation, the system, to be dishonest, and that took its toll on them. And me,” said Rev. Dennis Camp, a former Army chaplain. “It was horrible. Right from the beginning, I was saying, ‘This is bad. This is wrong.”
Mindless, pointless hatred is bad enough, but asking others to feed and water it is outrageous. Little by little and against the odds, we’ve pulled ourselves up out of the tar of so many of our old fears despite the resistance of orthodox religious traditions claiming the special right to preserve those fears. As others have pointed out, the same dynamic was in play when the U.S. military introduced racial integration.
It must be difficult to find yourself doctrinally bound to the wrong side of the great moral issues of our time, chaplains. But while you wallow in the tar, don’t expect the rest of us to offer you an ankle.
The retired chaplains’ letter
The Pentagon DADT Report
“Chaplains’ views on gays strong, varied” – WaPo “On Faith” blog
Countries that allow gays in the military
Countries that disallow gays in the military
The other one
Sleep tight
- August 31, 2010
- By Dale McGowan
- In fear, My kids, myths
- 4
My kids got addicted to myths early on. It’s the best way into comparative religion, which is the best way out of the clutches of any one brand.
We blew through the Greco-Romans in a few weeks, and I started reaching into dozens of other traditions. Eventually we ran out of gods, and it was time for monsters.
In the forest of eastern Paraguay, the Guarani people have a belief system with several elements that sound vaguely familiar. There’s a creator god in the sky (Tupa) who created the first couple (Rupave and Sypave). One of the first gifts of Tupa to his new creations was the knowledge of good and evil. As is usually the case, the Guarani consider themselves to be the first people created and therefore special in the eyes of the god, and they believe humanity quickly bungled this special relationship. Representing evil is a devil of sorts named Tau. Tupa, for reasons far beyond mortal understanding, decided to leave Tau on Earth to mess with humanity.
Guarani belief also has its unique features, one of which is the seven legendary monsters, each with its own domain. One is the god of caverns and fruits—I don’t understand how those go together, but I’ll bet the Guarani do. Another is the god of open fields. Others are the gods of sex, mountains, waterways, and death.
The last of the seven is Jasy Jateré [YAH-soo yah-teh-DAY]. Unlike his six siblings, who are reptiles and monsters of various kinds, Jasy is a little boy with shaggy blonde hair and blue eyes. He is lord of the siesta.
Kids raised in traditional Guarani homes may forget many things about their upbringing, but they always remember Jasy Jateré. Perhaps you’ll understand why. Jasy is said to wander villages at siesta time in search of children who are not asleep. Though invisible as he stalks his prey, he suddenly becomes visible at the bedside of a child who is awake and puts her into a trance with his magic staff. Jasy then leads a procession of hypnotized children to a cave in the forest, where he blinds them with thorns and feeds them to his brother Ao Ao, a cannibalistic sheep-man.
Nice touch.
It’s no surprise that at least one short, blond, blue-eyed visitor to eastern Paraguay reported being pelted with grapefruit by screaming children.
Now at first blush, the legend of Jasy Jateré just doesn’t make sense. There’s nothing more futile than trying to will yourself to sleep, especially during the day. Now add the self-defeating notion of terrifying a child to sleep, and the tale of Jasy Jateré begins to seem cruel and perverse.
And it would be—IF the point was really getting the child to sleep. But it isn’t. The actual intention is not to enforce the nap but to keep children from wandering out of their beds into the very real dangers of the rainforest as their parents sleep. A daily dose of psychic terror is thought to be better than the fate that awaits a child lost and alone in the forest.
It’s easy for me, sipping my latte in a North American subdivision, to say that nothing justifies immersing our children in this kind of terror. But I have to admit that I have any number of ways of keeping my kids safe while they nap, like locking our doors and living 4000 miles from the nearest wild pit viper. Our neighborhood has very few crocodiles and many, many lawyers. If my child is bitten by either one, there’s a hospital four minutes away.
I can only imagine to what lengths I would go to protect my kids from very real, very fatal risks. In the end, I think such warning legends say less about our cruelty than they do about the tendency of natural selection to favor the genes of those who will do anything and everything to protect their children.
At any rate, my kids ate Jasy Jateré up and begged for more monsters. I’ll bring them here in later posts.
Embiggening humanism
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man. — Jebediah Springfield
I’m alternately enjoying and “D’oh!”-ing my way through a controversy of my own creation at Foundation Beyond Belief. The following are my personal thoughts on the matter, btw, not an official statement of the Foundation (which is why they are found here, on my blog, not there, on its).
After repeatedly noting that this secular humanist foundation would consider supporting charities based in any worldview so long as they do not proselytize, we’ve put our commitment to the test. This quarter, FBB is featuring a religiously-based charity as one of our ten options for member support.
The category is Peace, the religion is Quakerism, and the organization is Quaker Peace and Social Witness. And the reaction is pretty much what I expected — a mix of bravos, surprise, outrage, enthusiasm, and revealed (shall we say, and gently) knowledge gaps in some of my beloved fellow nontheists. More on the “gaps” later.
Some blogs ask why on Earth we would do such a thing. “I’m an atheist. I don’t support religious groups,” said one, as if the second sentence follows obviously and necessarily from the first.
So the first reason to do it is to show that it is indeed possible for nontheists to see good work being done in a religious context and to support and encourage it. Far from a contradiction, some of us think that’s humanism at its best.
The second reason is that many of our members want to express their humanism in that way. And since the Foundation exists to allow individual humanists a means of expressing their worldview positively and doing good in the name of that worldview, it seems fitting to occasionally feature a carefully-screened, non-dogmatic, non-proselytizing, effective organization based in a sane and progressive denomination as one of our choices.
“Well,” one commenter said, “if you HAVE TO support a religious group, I mean absolutely HAVE to, I suppose the Quakers would be the ones.”
A glimmer of light there. But we didn’t have to do this. My word, it would have been much easier not to. We wanted to do it. We see value in doing it.
In a way, this should be a non-issue. Individual members have full control over the distribution of their donations and can zero out any category any time. Some members, disinterested in supporting a religiously-based organization no matter how progressive, have made perfect and appropriate use of this flexible system by shifting their funds elsewhere this quarter. Others — including such strong atheist voices as Adam Lee of Daylight Atheism — have actually increased their Peace donation in support of this idea. That’s freethought in action.
Not all religious expressions are benign, of course. The more a religious tradition insists on conformity to a received set of ideas, the more harm it does. The more it allows people to challenge ideas and think independently, the more good it does. Religion will always be with us in some form. It’s too hand-in-glove with human aspirations and failings to ever vanish at the touch of argument or example. So I think one of the best ways for humanists to confront the malignant is to support and encourage the benign, the non-dogmatic, the progressive.
Speaking of whom.
Liberal Quakers are utterly non-dogmatic, include many nontheists in their ranks, and hold that no individual can tell any other what to believe. That’s a religious organization embracing the essence of freethought. It’s no coincidence that they also have a brilliant history of social justice work. While Southern Baptists fronted biblical arguments in support of slavery, Quakers were among the most courageous abolitionists (along with Northern Baptists). While the Catholic Church vigorously opposed women’s voting rights, Quakers were often leading the movement and getting themselves arrested and imprisoned in the process (along with many Catholic individuals who recognized bad dogma when they saw it). And while multiple denominations rend themselves in twain over gay rights, Liberal Quakers were among the first to openly support gay rights and gay marriage. (This last is not so much the case with Orthodox Quakers, who differ from the Liberals in several respects.)
In the area of peace and nonviolence advocacy, Quakers are second to none. Continuing a centuries-old tradition, Quaker Peace & Social Witness is at work in the Ugandan conflict, supporting and training groups working on peacemaking and peacebuilding; facilitating truth and reconciliation work to deal with the past in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia; managing teams of human rights observers in Palestine and Israel; working to strengthen nonviolent movements in South Asia; and advocating at the UN for refugees and for disarmament policies. In 1947, QPSW shared the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Maybe you can see why we’re proud to support them.
Making discernments is difficult, but it’s worth doing. That’s why the (don’t say ignorance, don’t say ignorance) misinformedness of some atheists about the spectrum of religion has troubled me.
“I am NOT giving money to somebody who’s going to hit me over the head with a bible or say my kids are going to hell,” said one. Fair enough. Of course there’s as much chance of a bluefooted booby doing either of those as a Liberal Quaker.
Others who probably recognize a slippery slope fallacy if someone else uses it (“You can’t let gays marry. Next thing you know, farmers will be marrying their tractors!”) went ahead and employed one themselves. “It’s a slippery slope,” said one email. “A year from now, you’ll be paying for Catholic missionaries!” (I especially enjoy it when someone calls a fallacy by name, then pulls the ripcord anyhow.)
And on it goes. This is what siloing will do to good and smart people. It makes them sloppy, myself included. And we talk nonsense, and end up looking silly to anyone outside of our silo.
One atheist friend predicted we would lose a third of our members overnight. In the two weeks since we announced the decision, two members have closed their accounts (neither mentioning the Quaker choice) and 24 have joined.
The weakness of the arguments against our choice has reassured me, and the majority of responses I’ve heard have been strongly supportive of the idea of providing members with this option. “I’m so proud to be a part of this,” said one member. “Honestly, it’s like the free thought movement is growing up all at once. Thank you for showing vision beyond the usual sounding of alarms and building of barricades.”
Can’t you just feel the embiggening?
Image problems
Our family visited Washington DC last year. Among the usuals, we were toured through something I’d never heard of before: the Capitol Crypt.
Beneath the dome of the Capitol Rotunda, below the ground floor, is a round room with forty Doric columns. A star set in the middle of the room marks the spot from which all streets in the capital were laid out.
The plan was to inter George Washington there in a stately sarcophagus. But Washington’s family refused to allow it, as George had opposed any imperial tendencies in the Presidency. He is said to have declined the title “Your Excellency” in favor of “Mr. President,” resisted a second term and refused a third, returning instead to life as a gentleman farmer.
The crypt now lies empty, a monument to our refusal of monarchy.
I loved this story instantly and was quite disappointed later — though not surprised, I guess — to learn that it’s mostly fable. After initially resisting the idea of moving his remains from Mount Vernon, Martha Washington acquiesced in 1800. Construction delays and the War of 1812 pushed the plan back. By the time it was finished in 1827, tensions between the North and South were such that Southern legislators and others refused to allow his remains to leave Virginia. So the Capitol Crypt lies empty as a tribute not so much to high democratic principle as to simmering provincial enmity.
Rats.
But it is apparently true that Washington opposed having himself revered. And we, being what we are, revere him for that.
In 1865, a fresco The Apotheosis of Washington was completed in the oculus of the Rotunda dome (“apotheosis” = “to transform into a god,” from Greek apotheoun) to show Washington that he wasn’t about to win a battle between what he wanted to be and what we needed him to be:
A close look reveals just how George would have felt about it:
This is what we do. No matter how much the founder of a movement or tradition or religion resists deification, we’ll start building the temple the moment s/he’s gone.
On his deathbed, the Buddha is said to have laughed when his followers suggested he was a god. They had the last laugh, as survivors do. But Buddha is quoted in the Digha Nikaya discouraging representations of himself “after the extinction of the body” because he saw it as a denial of that extinction. The prohibition was followed until the first century CE, at which point Greek influence led to a flowering of Buddhist iconography.
Buddha could not be reached for comment.
Christianity and Judaism also have a clear prohibition on images, one that’s ignored by way of clever abridgement. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image,” says the version we know and say and carve into courthouses. The rest is less convenient: “…nor any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above, nor that is in the earth beneath, nor that is in the water under the earth.” The Sistine Chapel has some ‘splainin’ to do.
I’ve also recently learned that the Islamic prohibition on images of Muhammad, so much in the news of late, was originally intended not to elevate Muhammad to divine status, but to prevent exactly that. From an outstanding recent article in the Washington Post:
“In the Holy Koran of Islam,” says political scientist As’ad AbuKhalil, a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, “the one sin unforgivable is that of polytheism. The prohibition is intended to protect the faithful from that sin. The fear was that intense reverence for the prophet might if unrestrained cross over into worship.“
Well what do you know. Once again, we silly monkeys take a good idea and flip it inside out. A rule established to avoid intense worship of the wrong thing instead fuels that worship. Ironically, then, the creators of the prohibition on images of Muhammad and the creators of Everybody Draw Muhammad end up sharing a principle with each other, and Buddha, and George Washington: opposition to the slavish worship of the wrong things.
MORE
Great article on aniconism
A site with images of Muhammad through the ages (currently making the rounds among moderates in Islamic countries)
Muhammad and the Middle
There’s a tactic that we self-imagined reasonables are prone to, and it just kills me, especially when I do it, and I too-often do. It’s the Knee-Jerk Middle. A controversy erupts, and we, in an effort to show how reasonable we are, declare that the truth lies “somewhere in the middle.”
Sometimes it does, of course. But just as often, it’s a pose that helps us avoid taking a position.
There was a lot of this going on Thursday, which (in case you’ve been living under a rock) was Everybody Draw Muhammad Day (EDMD), a day on which all are encouraged to answer violence with nonviolent action by simply drawing a picture.
It’s wrong for Islamic extremists to kill those who draw the Prophet, say the reasonable middlists, but it’s also wrong to offend for the sake of offense by intentionally violating the rule against drawing the Prophet. So a pox on both houses. It’s the way to appear reasonable without the bother of doing any real thinking or offering an alternative. I consider free expression to be not just fun and interesting but essential to progress. There exists a serious threat to free expression. If not EDMD, what response is best?
The focus on the extremes avoids the much more interesting conflict between regular old Islam, which forbids depictions of Muhammad (not just among Muslims, but by anyone anywhere) and people who find silly the idea that any group can dream up a prohibition and enforce it on the planet (“Respect our Prophet!” demands the FB Group Against ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’).
Add the violence perpetrated against those who ignore the prohibition, and ignoring it is about much more than “offense for the sake of it.” The idea has then gone from silly to obscene, at which point I’d say challenging it becomes a moral imperative.
I may be wrong about that. But don’t try to keep me from raising the question in the first place.
Everybody Draw Muhammad Day raises fascinating and worthwhile questions, my favorite kind. Add to that the fact that it’s silly for any primate to think any other primate is obligated to get moony over the same things. Sprinkle on a bit of collective courage in diluting the fatwa (“I am Spartacus!”) and I’d say you’ve got yourself a thing well worth doing.
It would be nice if we’d all do it thoughtfully and well, but we are what we are, and many have taken the opportunity to depict Muhammad grotesquely. I don’t prefer these because they confuse the issue. Far better have been a handful of drawings from the day that test the question itself in creative ways. For a collection of those [plus some that stupidly muddy the message], plus every other point I had planned to make, damn him, click over to Friendly Atheist.
Not all opposition to Everybody Draw Muhammad Day was knee-jerk middlism, of course. So for those who opposed it, a question:
Members of one culture insisted that those of another culture set aside one if their highest values (free expression) out of respect for a value of their own (non-depiction of Muhammad). A few responded with violence, and the threat of it continues. What response do you think would have been more appropriate?
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UPDATE: A terrific conversation in the comments, on Facebook, and elsewhere has me clarifying my position. I should have made a much clearer statement against grotesque, racist, or intentionally repugnant depictions of Muhammad. They don’t just “confuse the issue”; they fuel hatred and misunderstanding, and while supporting the right to do it, I condemn the choice.
This critique goes to my heart. I am on record criticizing (e.g.) moderate Christians for not speaking out more forcefully against those who do harm in the name of their faith. By failing to directly address the ways in which EDMD was used to further the cause of hatred and misunderstanding — by saying, in essence, “Yeah yeah, some people are doing this stupidly, but back to my point…” — I am guilty of precisely the same lapse. Thanks for setting me straight(er).
I’m a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to free speech, and that includes stupid speech. But that position can cause me to gloss over other valid concerns. I think I’m coming out of this EDMD thing re-convinced that mass actions of this kind are nearly impossible to pull off effectively because of the difficulty of controlling message and method. They are a victory for free speech that often loses so many other battles they may not be worth doing.
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ADDED MAY 21: A fascinating article recommended by a friend in Malaysia.