Morality, why can't we get there?

 Susan Sontag said, “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.” She did not do sociological research to back up the numbers, but the numbers are not important, no one fits neatly into those three categories. It’s up to us to observe what is true in the relationships we have and within ourselves.

There is data on what she says, see Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind for example. When Robert Sapolsky studied Bonobos, he chronicled what you would expect, a male hierarchy dominated through violence and intimidation. When most of those males died from eating human garbage, the females imposed a new order. They welcomed new young males into the group, but only if they followed the rules of mercy and compassion. Cruelty and mercy were in the minds of all of them in varying degrees and environmental pressures helped one or the other manifest.

There is a Cherokee story of two wolves that live within a person. First, they should get that checked out, that is way too many wolves living in you. One wolf is evil, anger, envy, regret, the other is good, joy, peace, humility, compassion. They fight, and this fight is going on within every person on earth. The question of which will win is answered with, “The one you feed.” Unlike Hollywood movies, the story doesn’t end with one wolf winning. The wolves are always there and always wanting to be fed.

Another version of the story ends with, “If you feed them right, they both win.” If you are familiar with the Star Trek character Captain Kirk, you might remember a few episodes where he spoke well of his evil side and how it motivated him. In a transporter accident, he was split into two people, with one of “wolves” in each. The evil wolf was easily identified and subdued and quarantined. The good wolf was able to hide his thoughts for a while but was unable to make difficult decisions or be a strong leader.

Richard Carrier refers to this as the bell curve of our tendencies, “I claim every human being possesses both potentials, but not to any universally fixed degree. I would claim some are born with less or more of an innate tendency either way (probably matching a bell curve pattern within the population as a whole), but that every human can cultivate one potential more than another well beyond their biological tendencies (provided they actually do so, and by a method that actually works: and there are methods that work, and methods that don't--and working methods include the active, i.e. self-development, and passive, i.e. parental and societal influence and upbringing).”

Any of this would be difficult or impossible to study in an ethical manner. Malidoma Some, who was born into a tribal society in Africa in the middle of the 20th century and was educated at the Sorbonne in France, told me that he knew of tribes that had lost most of their men to wars and it took a generation or more to reinstate a culture of proper development for the youth. We couldn’t design a study to track that. In the current Western culture, language about the deficiencies of certain ethnic groups has been purged from academia, but data is collected and presented that claims to show how much better people do when raised with a mother and father in the household. I find these to be coded in a way to put a veil of scientific reasoning over the prejudice. It also demonstrates that there are underlying values that we share, despite our differences about how to pass on those values and encourage them in others.

From some of what I’ve said here, one might think there is a system, something that we would have discovered by now to put in a book, create a curriculum, or maybe a funny meme on facebook. I’m not leading up to that, or avoiding presenting it, because I don’t know of one. What I have is a system that will help us improve the system. I can’t say that work will ever be completed.

One of the barriers is the lure of easy answers. They are easy to write-up, easy to make them appealing, easy to swallow, comforting to join with others who agree with them, easy. They can persist for centuries, paradoxically enforced by violence while claiming it’s necessary to keep the peace. Recent studies have shown that it is the community support that is more important than the book or philosophy that them together, that is, an atheist with a strong group of friends thrives as well as a member of church.

I think a big part of why this system for creating a moral system is not taught is the way we teach history, and this includes Sunday School. We teach dates and names for great people, usually men who come along with something new and lead others into the new world they create. There are really geniuses and breakthroughs, but they only come from what came before. Great ideas don’t spring into a mind spontaneously, they are nurtured from the fertile soil of a healthy community. We have yet to come up with one big list of what is right, and the list will change as nature changes, and we are part of nature.

The belief that there is an end, a singularity we are all moving toward, a cosmic truth that will one day be revealed, keeps us fighting over who has the best version of it. We spend more time fighting over the latest list rather than reflecting on how to improve the lists. The list gives us something to rally around and distracts us from keeping our minds open to what others are saying or doing.

“Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.”

― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics

Why Milepost100?

I've been focusing less on creating new Milepost100 sermon helpers and instead adding to my background knowledge. One big source for that has been Richard Carrier's recent work, “On the Historicity of Jesus”. In this peer reviewed scholarly book, he applies modern tools to the questions surrounding Jesus and discusses how two approaches to the New Testament have failed; the religious apologist, who attempts to find the meaning that has been handed down by the theologians for centuries, and the historian who looks for some historical truth behind the text.

“Modern apologists respond with implausible ad-hoc harmonizations, while historians attempt to isolate the historical truth behind the conflicting accounts. This method has been found invalid. If the gospels are myth, both efforts are futile. Both assume the author is recording a collection of historical facts reported to them. If instead they are intending to construct myths about Jesus, we don't expect historicity, they aren't trying to distinguish fact from fiction, so the text does not give it to us. External evidence helps, and we can't use this approach to disprove historicity, but it does limit our ability to determine historicity. Instead our focus would be to extract the mytho-symbolic meaning and intent.” 

To answer that question, it is more important to look at the background information, the history of what was happening while the scripture was being written, and what earlier scripture they would have had available to them at the time. This is the opposite of how Christianity is presented to us now, beginning with the birth of Christ and following through to later letters written about him as if he existed. It is presented that way, but in actuality, those letters were written first, by someone who never claimed to have met a living Jesus. The accounts of his actions in life, came much later by different authors.

To begin before that, at the beginning, with Genesis and one family, is to ignore all the other creation stories that were being written at the time. It ignores that there were very few who could write at all. There were no fact checkers, no media watch dogs. If you wanted to write a counter narrative to someone else's myth, you wrote another myth, using the same characters, but added a new element that expressed your values and your desired outcome.

Any phrases inserted on an ad-hoc basis that claim the writing is true are there to attach the value message to the story. These were not notes to future readers in future millenia, these were devices for the illiterate, telling them to simply remember the name of John and don't be like those who are like Thomas. The listener then could express their values through that simple formula and had no need to remember a chain of logical arguments or even a list of what the values are. If anyone asked, they could refer them back to the story.

Biblical writing has special challenges because we have so many translations, so many copies and so many differences across those copies. The slight changes made back when copies were done by hand could have been mistakes, or they could have been purposeful redactions to steer the political message in a new direction. We know that this type of changing of the narrative happened in modern times and have no reason to believe it didn't happen back then.

It doesn't help that Romans were attempting near genocide of the Jews just as the gospels were being written in the late 1st century, or as the Romans would have said, “repressing a rebellion”. They lost track of who the authors actually were and they had far fewer tools than we do now for determining truth from fiction in the writings they were left with in the early 2nd century. We can't be certain what later emperors were thinking, but just as myth writers are more concerned with message over facts, the 3rd and 4th century co-opting of the message of this tiny Jewish sect  certainly helped both the emperors and the Catholics.

The rest is history, and history that we can become increasingly more confident about as we get closer to the present. We also get better at interpreting earlier history. We find more artifacts and we determine by the lack of evidence, that some things are highly improbable. We are also very far removed from any conquering Roman emperors who might not want us asking pesky questions.

So I will leave the medieval history to the historians. I may mention it occasionally, but only to point out how a particular verse led to a later belief. I may also mention an early church father who was just as sceptical as I am about the truth of a particular passage. Primarily, I want to put myself into the mind of peasants under extremely difficult living conditions, hearing a message of hope for their people.

Milepost 100. The sermon helper that doesn't tell you what to think.

Truth Remains

Truth is much more comforting than any god. Truth does not change based on my feelings. If I am angry at it or if I abandon truth, it waits there, unchanging.

Why do you think they want you to worship once a week? If you don’t, you’ll notice things don’t get any worse or any better. They’ll tell you god is angry or upset. If you stay away long enough, they will change god or make a new god in an attempt to get you back.

After a while god vanishes and only truth remains. 

Summer Series - Starting Principles

I’m going to attempt another series. It’s summer which is usually slow blogging time and this will require a little more research than usual so it might unfold slowly. It’s not so much about religion as it is “truth discovery”. Before I introduce it, I want to lay down some ground rules for myself. You can police me as you like and keep me honest.

These are some key philosophical points I discovered after asking the questions of how do we know what we know and why do we think the way we think.

  

Principle of Charity

 This is generally accepted among philosophers and was employed widely by politicians a few decades ago. Since the advent of talk radio and then 24-hour news channels it is less well known. The idea is, unless you have very good reasons, assume whomever you are listening to is not crazy. At least on the first run through, give their idea as much credibility as you can stand. Even if you strongly disagree with the person do not immediately jump to the conclusion that they are evil or insane for taking their position.

  

Evidence

David Hume said, “A weaker evidence can never destroy a stronger.” Makes sense, but as Hume found, his own advice was difficult to follow. We all complain about the constantly changing “results of the latest study.” It would be great if “latest” was equal to “stronger” and it often is, but not always. Hume was the ultimate skeptic and said, philosophically speaking, we can’t prove anything. It’s too difficult to live like that but we should always keep in mind that our senses can fool us, we might learn something tomorrow that changes what we know today, that most everyone we know knows something we don’t, and we don’t have it all figured out.

Falsification

This is a major part of modern thinking that quickly fell into our background knowledge because it is so obvious. But it took some of the great minds of the 20^th century to formulate it rigorously. It is attributed to Karl Popper. He changed common sense thinking from truth being based on proof to saying that a theory is scientific if we know what would disprove it. Nothing can be completely proven. We can only increase our certainty until it is considered as a proven fact. For something to be science you must be able to design an experiment that will give you data that will lead to more or less certainty about it. If you can’t do that, it’s just an idea.

Another way to look at this is to consider your favorite difficult Uncle or somebody in your circle of friends who can’t be argued with. Most of us know someone who has a pet theory or is constantly coming up with new ones and never seems to listen to reason. No matter what evidence you present they have a way of deflecting it. If your evidence is strong, they will fall back on a theory of how that evidence was constructed to cover-up the actual truth. How they know that truth is a mystery.

Objections?

If you are uncomfortable with these principles, to borrow from Steve Novella, if you don’t like science, which part is it you don’t like? If you live in a country with a constitution, which is most of the world, do you not like the idea of “innocent until proven guilty?” There is unevenness in how that is enforced, but it is at its core a scientific principle. Because of scientific thinking, people can no longer accuse you of witchcraft and burn you at the stake, they have to have evidence and they have to prove their case.

Science led to principles that ended slavery and improved civil rights. Science is the fairest system. It allows to you sell a book that claims you can change the weather with your mind, you just can’t claim it is scientifically proven. It allows you to teach your children that the earth is 10,000 years old, it just asks you not to call it science or to teach it in a science class or call it an alternative scientific theory. It allows you say whatever you want and if you can provide evidence it will accept it as truth.

A Handy reference

Carl Sagan developed some strategies for sniffing out good science and put them in his book The Demon Haunted World. Michael Shermer worked some of those into a shorter list. He calls it the “Baloney Detection Kit." I will be employing this list throughout the series as well.

Why I Am an Atheist

I became an atheist after becoming a Sunday School teacher and reading the Bible. I was never a very good Christian so the first thing I had to figure out was exactly what would I teach. I found some dusty old books that said we weren’t descended from monkeys and some more contemporary curricula that talked about how to prepare for the second coming. I modified those lessons while I went on searching.

One of the first things I came across was a quote from Nicholas Humphrey,

“If it is ever the case that teaching this system to children will mean that later in life they come to hold beliefs that, were they in fact to have had access to alternatives, they would most likely not have chosen for themselves, then it is morally wrong of whoever presumes to impose this system.”

This really narrowed down what I could do. I found some history, some ethics and I was allowed to say that the Noah story was mythology, so I got by. Some days I put the Bible aside and talked about Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. One thing I could not get around was the story of how Jesus died for us. No matter how you word it, it involves some sort of miracle. If you change it to a story of a guy who stood for peace and justice, then it is no longer a Christian story.

What I saw when I got down to that one story, is that we don’t need the separate discipline. You can call it religion or theology, we just don’t need it. The discipline of history has informed us who wrote the scriptures and who decided which are included in the Bible. We have archaeology to tell us what was happening in the Levant while the scriptures were being written. We have science to explain rainbows and tell us what food is healthy and understand homosexuality.

A truce was made between religion and science some 700 years ago. William of Ockham said any man can recognize patterns and try to understand nature, but only the church can comment on the miracles of God. This allowed science to continue to be taught in a religious world. But now we live in a scientific world. In most of the world, the church has been tamed. The church is now fighting to maintain sway over what science can or cannot comment on rather than science fighting to make any comment at all.

The final question was the question of morality. I knew science was not informing me on that but religion was failing too. What I found were many ideologies and political processes that have been in play for centuries to inform us of how best to live harmoniously. None of them has proven perfectly successful. A few have done better than religions. Religion only plays a supportive role in this process and often it has backed the wrong horse.

All religion has left for me is community. It is a club. I suspect that this too shall pass. Every purpose that it once served or currently claims to serve is better served by another discipline. No matter how much it cleans itself up, dresses itself up with modern trappings, acknowledges its crimes and invites in new data, it is just not necessary. 

I AM

About 100 years ago, when The Times asked several writers to comment on what is wrong with the world, one of them offered a very simple answer,

Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely Yours,
G.K. Chesterton

Chesterton converted to Catholicism later in life, he wrote poetry, plays and Christian apologetics as well as fantasy. He often employed paradoxes.

In its simplest form, his answer can be seen as a restating of the status of humans as “fallen”. God gave us a perfect world, but because we want to know more and we want to control that world, as represented by Adam eating from the tree of knowledge, we have demonstrated that we can’t just accept the paradise that we are given, so we have to suffer.

In a more reasoned view, one that includes a knowledge of billions of years of suffering by billions of species that never had a sense of where they came from or why they were there, it has a sense of a statement of responsibility. In either view, it is a universal statement. He is not indicating that he actually did something that trumps every other action by every other creature in the world causing the world to be wrong. By stating his willingness to be individually responsible, he invites you to write the same letter, sign your name and publish it.

What makes this difficult is that you have no guarantee that anyone else will follow suit. If you publish your letter and the only response you get is laughter, you will feel pretty silly and vulnerable. We know that there are many people looking to blame someone else for what is wrong with the world, so the person who says they are the problem is an easy target. If you publish your letter only because you want others to do the same, then you really aren’t being as sincere as your letter says it is. If you wait until many others have published their letter before you publish yours, then those who blame and criticize will say you are doing it only because everyone else is. You really can’t win.

Really, we live in a world of competition, survival of the fittest, right? There has always been war and nature is full of creatures eating other creatures to survive. It IS our nature. We all knew it and Darwin proved it. We don’t need people taking responsibility, we just need the right people dominating those who are wrong.

Unfortunately the American education system provides a truncated view of Darwin, and it only seems to be getting worse. Our understanding of Darwin was altered in his lifetime by his contemporary, Thomas Henry Huxley and since then by distortions like the idea of an Aryan race. Like any idea, either science or Holy Scripture, it has been misused.

Darwin spoke extensively of cooperation and love in the animal kingdom. Its importance to the survival of species is just as obvious. Humans cooperate in ways unprecedented in the rest of the animal kingdom, but the roots of it can be seen when a school of fish all turn at the same instant, a herd of antelope go to the water hole together or a bees make honey. You might say that democracy is in our DNA.

As yet, I have not seen bees building voting booths to select the queen. Their form of cooperation involves far less choices than we have and their limited communication prevents something like confusion over a book written 150 years ago ever being an issue. If democracy were as simple as checking a box every two years, we would be as blissfully happy as a bee knee deep in pistil. I’m all for writing your congressman and contributing to campaigns, but there is more to it than that. Any truly democratic action begins with a handful of people.

And that leads to the movie that was named after G.K.’s letter. Most of us only have the resources to write little letters, but this film maker is making the statement in a much bigger way. He follows up the “what is wrong with the world” question with “and what can we do about it?” When he discovers in the course of making the movie that over-consuming, hoarding of wealth, and accumulating more than you need is a big part of what is wrong, he sells his mansion and moves into a trailer park.

It makes for a good story, but still he is just one person. The impact of his choices remains to be seen. We can wait to see how that turns out, or we can vote with him and make some of our own choices to contribute to the movement.



Before you get the idea that I am presenting this as something else to believe in, some new dogma, I want to offer one bit of critique about the movie. There is a section about 1/3 of the way through the movie that I wish he had left out. It has to do with “Noetic Science.”

In February 1971, Edgar Mitchell walked on the moon, took out a golf club, and hit the longest drive in history. During his return flight he was overwhelmed with a profound sense of connectedness with the world. He has spent much of his life trying to understand what that was and how to tap into it as a resource to make the world better. This type of study, combining the experiential, individual senses that can’t be validated and quantified, with the data that can be, is called by some Noetic science. Others call it pseudo-science.

It has the appearance of science, but does not have the same rigor and has not stood up to the same type of peer review that non-pseudo-science has. Both of those types of science share the same sense of wonder. Both begin with a suspicion, a feeling, something unexplained that asks to be explained. Both end up leading to more questions as more knowledge leads to more wonder. Both need to be treated carefully, so that their answers are not considered the only right answers. If we aren’t careful, we’re just back to criticizing and competing.

50 blogs on disbelief - 3 Stages

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 168 Julian Savulescu “Three Stages of Disbelief”

Nothing terribly new in this essay, but it is beautifully written, a testimony to the frightening yet exciting experience of life. I won’t try to recreate any of that, just cover the three stages.

Before the disbelief, came belief, at an early age. He was a good Bible student and even made up his own prayers. Religion was a welcome comfort against the fear of death. By age 16, he started seeing the whole project as an invention, a way to exercise control. I think this is inevitable for many in the modern world who become believers when they are young because it is comfortable and reassuring. That was the first stage, he calls physical implausibility.

The second stage lasted quite a while, through different concepts of God including ideas from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Then came medical school and internship, and direct experiences of suffering and death. He calls this the existential senselessness stage. Through this stage he “continued to want to believe”. He spoke to philosophers and other “received sensible, reasoned lines of advice which conflicted.”

The final stage doesn’t have a label, but he presents some interesting questions about how we decide what is morally right and how do we face our eventual demise while enjoying the beauty and fulfillment of our time alive. He has what seems to be an appreciation for tradition, but now finds God irrelevant. I find the questions he asks and the discussion he opens up much more interesting than arguments about existence.

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50 blogs on disbelief - Meta-argument

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 123 Damien Broderick “Beyond Faith and Opinion”

Damien does not claim to have anything more than an average person’s grip on logic and reasoning. Thank God. I am getting tired of the technical essays. If you are planning on seriously engaging anyone on a topic like this one, logic is one discipline you might want to get familiar with. You can Google “logical fallacies” and get several hits on sites that discuss it. It is sort of a combination of speech and math. But this essay is not that. He says he will present a “meta-argument”.

He starts off telling the story of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an early 20th century philosopher. The famous anecdote goes that he once asked a colleague,

“Why did people believe the Sun went around the Earth?”
“Well,” the colleague mused, “I imagine it was because it looks as if it does.”
“Ah,” said jesting Wittgenstein, “What should it look like if the Earth went round the Sun?”

I assume this story was made up to some extent, especially since the colleague has no come back. With regards to Sun and Earth movement, yes, the heliocentric model or earth centric model would look the same. But if the Earth were moving, how would birds keep up with it? Wouldn’t something tossed high into the air seem to move away as we on the moving Earth moved away from it? Wouldn’t we at least feel a little breeze? We are moving at 1,670 mph after all? Pope Sylvester II (Gerbert of Aurillac), around 1000 AD had a pretty good sense of the size of the Earth and asked similar questions.

People thought the Earth revolved around the Sun because Ptolemy had a model that said it did and it worked pretty well for hundreds of years. People did not study and attempt to refute the math beyond it, anymore than I would consider sitting down and having an argument with Stephen Hawking. Scientists working in the Vatican in the time of Copernicus were studying heliocentric models, but they did not predict as well as Ptolemy, so they were not adopted. When Galileo got a good look at other planets, they finally figured it out. But I digress…

Damien makes an interesting analogy to when it is a good idea to consider disbelief. Many people disbelieve that smoking tobacco conduces to lung cancer. Knowing that humans are fallible, he considers that actively accepting that might not be a good idea.

He then shifts to his personal history, raised pious Catholic, all the way through seminary. At the end of it, he told his family he wasn’t sure about the doctrines of his faith. He goes through a pretty standard list of problems with the miracles and clergy transgressions. But not a bad read overall, and he ends saying he can’t be “absolutely” sure.

His point that we need to be aware of how we process information and decide what to believe is an important one. There was a recent Dateline NBC program that showed people being taken in by 3 Card Monte in Central Park New York. They also reproduced the famous Milgram experiment, showing how an authority figure can override our reasoning ability. You can find it on MSNBC.com, but it has commercials and the usual overly repetitious format that Dateline uses. Here is a link to a synopsis of the Milgram experiment.

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Summary of the 50 Voices of Disbelief blogs

I’m getting close to finishing these essays. I have looked ahead a bit and there is one lengthy one that has some interesting suggestions, but I don’t think it is too early to start a “best of” list. I will update this list and move it to the top of the list as I change it.

Overall, I categorize the essays into three groups.

1. The really good ones.
2. The “what’s wrong with religion” ones. Mainly complaining about fundamentalist Christians or Muslims.
3. Logical arguments about the non-existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-knowing, all-loving God who consciously manages the universe.

The third group doesn’t interest me much anymore because I have been over them a few times. It always ends up with a matter of choice or faith or a premise that can’t be proven. If you have never been through these arguments and you want to know about them, this book covers them all pretty well. There is some repetition, which is good for getting perspectives, but you might be tired of them by time you are done.

A lot of people reject the theology of their parents or their teachers, without considering that there are other theologies. A lot of people reject any theology once they realize that there is more than one. There is some logic to this, especially when you consider there are currently thousands of options, but it rejects the notion that there might some good with one, or from similarities in the many, and I can’t do that.

The second group is interesting, but I’m not sure short essays are the best approach. Again if you are familiar with none of the issues, this is a good place to start. However there are much better sources to learn about the rise of the religious right or the roots of fundamentalism or the history of Islam in Iran.

Buy the book for the best ones, they are:

Why Am I a Nonbeliever – I Wonder (This is the best one on evolution)
Confessions of a Kindergarten Leper
The Accidental Exorcist
The Unconditional Love of Reality

He has published this one on his own blog

Giving Up Ghosts and Gods

And a sub-group, a couple more on evolution
Gods Inside
An Ambivalent Nonbelief
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50 blogs on disbeleif - Wonder

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 28 J. L. Schellenberg “Why I am a Nonbeliever? – I Wonder…”

I would recommend this book for this essay alone.

You can buy this article individually here. 50 Voices - I Wonder

I haven’t found any free articles by this author, but there are plenty of reviews that might give you a sense of what he has to say. I will keep looking and attempt to summarize it. I don’t know if I can do it justice.

“Plato says that philosophy begins in wonder.”

So begins this essay, rather innocently telling the story of his very religious upbringing in rural Manitoba. He felt the wonder of the world through the lens of Christianity. Through post secondary education he discovered,

“The New Testament was a decidedly human construction, a shining record of personal liberation in places, but also pockmarked with all the prejudices and proselytizing aims of it authors,…”

He goes on to tell about his discovery of Buddhist and Taoist wisdom as well as others. He spent time in the library and discovering new people on the streets of the city. He knew he had learned humility, honesty and commitment from his Christian upbringing and he struggled to integrate this with his new found knowledge. As he says,

“It hurts to have your neat picture of the world torn to shreds; your emotions left jangling. But no one said that a commitment to live in wonder, straining for real insight and understanding, comes without cost.”

His new views of the world brought the problem of evil and hiddenness argument for atheism into focus. At the time he was asking these questions the term “hiddenness argument” hadn’t been coined. Up to this point, this seemed like just another essay. It seemed he was going to miss the point about the value of his upbringing and how it led to his later insight, but he did give it a nod. Then he started talking about his recent thoughts and said,

“And through yet another strange twist that I am still in the midst of navigating, it appears that in the depths of evolutionary religious skepticism can be found the seeds of new life for religion.”

I had to read that a couple times, “evolutionary” what? To clarify it, he first covers some basic science. Scientists pretty well agree that the earth will be around for another billion years. Let’s put that into perspective.

Earliest human ancestor walking upright 6,000,000 million years ago
Homo Erectus (walking upright) humans 2,000,000 million years ago
Homo Sapiens Sapiens (that’s us) about 130,000 years ago
Oldest beads 80,000 years ago
Cave painting 30,000 years ago – that is, scribbling on a wall
Human agriculture 10,000 years ago
Pyramids built 4,780 year ago

Years remaining that we can continue to create a better world
1,000,000,000

30,000 years to get from scratching on a wall to watching Avatar in the palm of your hand. What could we do in 30,000 more years? How about 30,000 times 30,000 years?

Getting back to the essay, he says, “Apply this now to religion.” Although we have dominated and altered the planet, our maturity is still questionable and our propensity to violence hard to excuse. Those cave paintings are evidence that we humans started thinking about something beyond our own existence long before we could preserve those thoughts in writing and at a time that violence was the solution to most of our problems.

Given that we have created not only language but ways of communicating across language barriers, including instant communication around the globe, we can not only think about how we might evolve, we can affect the course of our evolution, setting a pace of evolution faster than previous generations.

He says all of this better than I ever could. I have added a few of his books to my reading list

Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion 2005
Available in Google books
Divine hiddenness and human reason 2006
The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticisim 2007
The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion 2009

See Review Review of Will to Imagine

I will try to find some more of his works.
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50 blogs on disbelief - Respect

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 33 John Harris – Wicked or Dead? Reflections on the Moral Character and Existential Status of God.

Intriguing title. It is based on what he thought after his father died when he was 12. He was curious about philosophical questions, but never found reason to believe in God.

He starts off saying he won’t provide arguments against existence, a welcome break from some of the recent ones I have read. He provides a very good reading list if you want to look into that:

“Why I Am Not Christian” by Bertrand Russell
“The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins
“God is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens
“Breaking the Spell” by Daniel Dennett
And for comic relief
“The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” by Douglas Adams

In this essay I found out why there are so many that start out with “if God is an all-powerful, omniscient, good entity running the universe”. It is because the editors asked them to explain why they do not subscribe to that view. Maybe a future book will start with the question, “Now what?” As Nietzsche asked, now that we have declared God dead, what do we do?

To get you started, Mr. Harris provides a few excerpts from the above list and some of his own entertaining commentary. He then shifts to a conversation of respect for people’s beliefs. This was another pleasant break from some of the recent believer bashing. He quotes Voltaire,

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

And also Bentham,

“each counts for one and none for more than one.”

Two simple guidelines for treating everyone as if they matter, physically and morally. We are creatures that are aware that it matters if our existence continues. We should respect each other simply because we exist. He then distinguishes that this does not mean that what you do or what you believe is automatically deserving of respect. Every person has dignity, but beliefs must be judged independently of those that hold them. He says,

“If, by respect for beliefs, we mean an individual’s entitlement to form, hold, and express whatever beliefs they like, so long as the expression or observance of those beliefs does not involve the violation of the rights or disregard of the important interests of other persons, then of course we should respect anyone and everyone’s beliefs…”

Hard to argue with that.
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50 blogs on disbelief - Believing you believe

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 41 Adele Mercier “Religious Belief and Self-Deception”

I didn’t particularly enjoy this essay, although it had a few good points. Much of it was spent discussing how we think about our own beliefs. It included a lot of statements like, “knowing that I know” and “believing that one believes”. Interesting if you are interested in epistemology. She does apply all this in ways that make you say “hmm”, for example when she says,

“…whatever they may think or say about what they believe, most people believe that life ends at death”

This is one of those odd things about religion. So much is made about how great the after life is, but no one seems to want to hasten their way there. Suicide could get you to the wrong place, but heroic measures to add a few years to the end of a long and good life just don’t seem to be in tune with an eternity in heaven. Adele spends some time discussing this and gets a bit crass at times, so I’ll skip on.

She compares this idea of believing that you believe to membership in a country club. It is more about social status, not one’s golf game. What matters is that others believe you believe, not what the beliefs are. As she says,

“This is shown by the fact that people spend a lot of more time defending and justifying their right to religion than defining and justifying their purported beliefs.”

Consider also wars with religious roots. However they might be justified or whatever has come out of them, they have always been out of step with the beliefs of the religion they claim to be defending.

I happened to be reading Garrison’s Keillor’s “Homegrown Democrat” at the same time I was reading this essay, and I think Keillor puts this much better:

Everyone has to look in his own heart and ask, “Do I really believe or do I not.” Jews do it in the Fall, Christians in the Spring during Lent. Most people do not believe. They’ve tried to believe and they wish they did and they are sorry they don’t because they like to be around people who do so they come to church and enjoy the music and the décor and the hallowedness of it all, but the faith is not in them. They don’t need to tell me about it, they only need to answer to God on this, and he will understand. If they do not believe, He already knew that. The tragedy is when people who don’t believe are so tortured by their unbelief that they set out to scourge their fellow unbelievers”.

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50 blogs on disbelief - An African Seminarian

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 226 Peter Agedoke – Kicking Religion Goodbye…

Continuing the multi-cultural theme, Peter is from Nigeria, a very religious nation. He admits his scientific education was stunted. Somehow his creative mind developed skepticism at early age. His cultural bias was strong however and at 19 he went to Pentecostal Baptist Bible College hoping to discover the truth of Christianity. He loved the orchestra of the Apostolic Faith Church, but was disturbed when he read of a woman who died because of birth complications because that church chose divine healing over a medical doctor.

He continued to read and visit other denominations, eventually landing at CAC Theological Seminary. There he had a common experience of 20th century seminary students. He learned the difference of actual church history and what most people think. For example, that there is no “original Christianity”, it did not start as an organized movement, it had “a lot of colorations” and influences from Eastern and Western cultures. It was influenced by the works of Plato and shaped by Constantine.

This and the behavior of classmates and teachers exposed him to hypocrisy. Already frustrated with the classic problem of evil and seeing poverty all around him with no sign of salvation, he kicked religion goodbye.

I can’t say that I blame him. In John Shelby Spong’s book, “Jesus for the Non-religious”, he discusses how seminaries came to this curious situation where they teach things about Christianity that very few preachers repeat to their congregations. Most of this is now freely available although without the context of 4 years of study, I think it causes confusion for many. Spong makes some recommendations on how the Church needs to change its message in a more enlightened world. If it doesn’t, the world will go the way of Mr. Agedoke.
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50 blogs on disbelief - Bollywood

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p. 263 Prabir Ghosh – Why I Am NOT a Theist

Prabir Ghosh talks of what he calls his “crusade against blind faith.” The essay is interesting for its insight into the culture of India. He tells the story of some clay idols of Lord Ganesha (a popular Hindu god, the one that looks like an elephant) appearing to drink the milk that is offered to them.

He selects four common arguments in favor of theism and how he has tackled them. I did not find the discussion edifying. In the first one, he compares the feeling of being loved by God to a boy’s experience of feeling that a Bollywood star loved him. The boy was taken to a psychiatrist. I see no value to this comparison.

The other three are variations on “you can’t prove God doesn’t exist”. Most of the other essays are way beyond this level of discussion.
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50 blogs on disbelieft - Strange Bedfellows

50 Blogs on Disbelief
My thoughts on the book, 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Athiests, edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schuklenk. Written as I read them in no particular order. The page number of the essay is provided at the top of each entry.
p 323 Udo Schuklenk - "Human Self-Determination, Biomedical Progress, and God"

Udo took the time to make a comment on an earlier blog, so I thought I would start the second phase of this project with his essay. He begins with two questions:

“Why am I an atheist? Why do I think it is important to speak out against the harmful consequences of religious interpretations of the world and of our place in it?”

I think his focus is more on the second question, and the answers to it lead to the answer of his answer of the first question. He prayed to God when he was young for youthful wishes such as help with his homework and, regarding God, figured that,

"If you are omnipotent and omniscient, helping a desperate teenage out of the claws of 'malevolent' Latin teachers should be a walk in the park."

His thoughts on God became more sophisticated and led him to the big theological question of “why is so much going so wrong so often?” In later studies he found that many people had asked the same question. Eventually he could not reconcile the existence of a God and the facts of events such as the Holocaust. He refused a Leibnizian interpretation.

I had to look up Gottfied Leibniz. He was 17th century philosopher and mathematician who had met Baruch Spinoza. I hope to find the time to study more of Spinoza, but the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument did not appear to offer much. Udo Schuklenk recommends Voltaire’s “Candide” whose character Pangloss has this view of the world. Udo would have been at peace just leaving it at that, but he could not ignore the “harmful consequences” of those who continue to believe. He goes on to list a few of these consequences.

He starts with abortion, and tells of Catholic hospitals that are prepared to sacrifice pregnant women’s lives for the purpose of rescuing embryos. I have never heard of this before, and he does provide a footnote (Judith Hendrick, “Law and Ethics in Nursing and Health Care” [New York: Nelson Thornes Ltd, 2005] p. 54), so I could research it myself. He has another footnote when he states that Muslim women “frequently” die in labor because their husbands do not permit a c-section.

Both of these cases seem extreme to me and say very little about 6,000 years of human history. By citing extreme examples, he skirts the issue of whether or not it is ethical for a couple to agree to abort their pregnancy. Our laws vary from state to state regarding how old a fetus can be when it is aborted and people’s responses to questions of abortion vary when a pregnancy is caused by incest or rape. These moral questions do not have definitive secular answers. Claiming that religion muddies the waters appears more like avoiding the question to me.

His next set of reasons for having a problem with religion I am in partial agreement with, but again, he takes an extreme position, which I think weakens his overall argument. He brings up the issue of homosexuality. I agree the United States has been slow to deal this and the church has been on the wrong side of if for too long. I also agree that the religious justifications for not doing stem cell research are just plain crazy (that is my extreme language, not his).

He then makes a statement that I can’t really argue with, “Churches routinely campaign against civil right protections that would guarantee the equal and fair treatment of all of a country’s citizens”. HOWEVER, I don’t attend those churches. I attend the churches that have a Peace with Justice Committee, the ones that march in the Gay Pride parade, the ones that organize campaigns to raise awareness about the School of the Americas and in the tradition of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., support civil rights.

He goes on to discuss “conscientious objection”. This is a law that allows for protection of professionals who choose, for religious reasons, not to provide services. Again I had never heard of this before, and he provides many footnotes for those who would wish to look into it. This goes beyond just not serving in the military, it extends to not providing services, such as abortions or even condoms because you object to them on religious grounds. Apparently precedence has been set in the US and UK. Then he provides a hypothetical example that gets a bit tough to swallow:

“An Aryan Nation church might well give its members a conscientious reason to refuse treating Black patients. Why should their conscientious objection be any less acceptable than that of members of any other church?”

He does not answer his rhetorical question, but I will. That would not be acceptable because it would violate laws that were fought for and debated over for generations by citizens of this country, many of them good Christians. I don’t think choosing not to abort a potential life and refusing to help a grown person even belong in the same class. This is a “slippery slope” argument, a logical fallacy.

His third and final reason regards death with dignity. Here we are in agreement again. The strange relationship Christians in particular have with death was demonstrated in 2005 when Pope John Paul II was on his death bed. At the same time, in Florida, people were arguing over keeping Terry Schiavo alive, someone who had been in a vegetative state for 15 years. Many people could not accept that we should “play God” and decide if she should live or die. The Pope, who lived 85 wonderful years, had deteriorated to the point that heroic attempts to resuscitate him and prolong his life would have been cruel. His final words were, ““Let me go to the house of the Father”.

So Udo is one of the strange partners that I have in a very confused world. We live in a world where thousands are mobilized to keep a feeding tube in someone who has no recognizable brain function, but just a few hundred miles away children are dying of hunger and none of them notice. We live in a world where criticizing a Muslim for abusing the women in his life is misconstrued as racism. I agree with him that we should vigorously confront the political activism of these fundamentalist regardless of race, creed or color. Church should not interfere with human rights. Mr. Schuklenk and I part company when he claims the solution is to confront belief.

My recent reading of David James Duncan’s “God laughs and plays” has helped me understand this form of atheism. He abhorrence with stories of a God that are sometimes violent and followers that feel it is there duty to choose how grace is distributed led him to reject anything related to religion and find and expose the worst of it. He does this in honor of his humanity. I hope he can understand the humanity of those who continue to honor the traditions.
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A word about skepticism

I thought I might pause for a moment from the 50 Voices to talk about skepticism.

One of the important voices that led me to this blog was Julia Sweeney. Her movie, “Letting Go of God” is currently showing on Showtime. Julia’s story is a spiritual journey that ends in atheism. I have heard other similar stories that reach a similar conclusion but the story doesn’t end there. There is an epiphany, a walk in the woods, a dream, a prayer answered even when feelings of belief seem to have been long gone.

There is no college major in skepticism, it is not something that people become aware they don’t have then seek out. Usually they are just looking for answers. Belief in UFOs and alien abductions and alternate realities can be dismissed fairly easily. Religion has been around for a long time. Evidence for its claims may be hard to find, but there is a lot of data to sort through. Even historical questions are difficult because they deal with some of the oldest texts that exist. Then there are all the people that say it works for them.

I equate what people report they get from religion with what Joseph Campbell calls the “power of myth”. I have seen it work its magic. Stories of people reading an old story, or examining the archetypes and being affected by it usually come off sounding like something from “Chicken Soup for the Soul”. I generally don’t tell them.