My first verbal response was to say I could no more speak for all atheists than he could speak for all men. All I could do, I told him, was talk about why I spoke about religion, or about experience as a non-supernatural thing, when and how I did.

First, I asked him why he felt it necessary to broach religion with a person he knew was an atheist because left alone, I’d never talk to him about it.

The question of conversion is a bust. He knows that since he has tried to “offer me the comfort of Jesus” in the past.

He didn’t really have an answer for me, but based on the conversation that followed, it seemed that he thinks of me as a coherent thinker, and he really did want to understand what atheists have against religion.

That’s just so funny. The fact that he comes to me because I am a coherent thinker and he can’t seem to understand that the incoherence of religion is the reason I don’t take solace in “Jesus”__gawd, hilarious.

A bit like “‘arguing” for the literal truth of the Bible by use of empirical evidence. About as incoherent as one can get.

One of the things I told him was that I never approached those that believe in some form of the supernatural to speak about religion. So, I told him, I suspect that if many atheists were left alone to dwell in the secular world and allowed to make use of empirical evidence to run their societies, I suspect he’d never have to discuss religious incoherence ever again. That is, I said, you approached me not the other way around.

I try rather hard to avoid such conversations because they are almost never really desired – conversations that is. What is often wanted is some form of acceptance, or reassurance. Reason must be its own source of reassurance; one cannot argue one’s way to emotional stability.  In other words, you either take empirical evidence as the basic tool of human life or you don’t. In the case of someone who makes decisions based on story, or faith or some other non-empirical structure, no amount of empirical evidence is going effect the system. Not to say the system can’t be effected, of course change is possible. There are plenty of people who give up the supernatural. The question is what causes that shift? I don’t think it’s empirical evidence. It might be the story the evidence makes, but I doubt it is the evidence itself.

Still, if this man wants to live by faith as his primary decision-making rubric, OK. I don’t care. The problem arises when that is not enough for him. Why come to me? Why?

I’ve questioned it in my self, since he doesn’t have an answer when I ask him. There is the hilarity of my “clear” mind, but I think he comes to me because he is not reassured by his own faith. There’s something missing for him. Which leads me to believe it isn’t doing the job emotionally.

Why I wonder?

I’ve heard a good deal about the difficulties of faith, about living with doubt. I wonder at that because I don’t have to do that with empirical evidence.  I can know that some “fact” may be wrong, that what we count as knowledge will change over time, but I never have to question evidence itself. I can stand on the ground (to put this in earthly terms) and know that what I understand the ground to be will change as I discover more in geology and chemistry, but I don’t ever have to seriously question whether there is ground under my feet. That, my friend is comforting in a way, apparently, your faith never achieves.

To go back to the little truck…there could be any number of reasons why the other “kids” won’t let you alone to play with your “truck”.  One might me that it is the only truck and there are dozens of kids who want to play. One might be that it isn’t your truck. One might be that flattening it with big rocks isn’t really playing.  There are others.

How to glean secular models for engagement and inspiration from religious rituals.

Hmmm. Interesting.

Listen:

Autumn

A red-tailed hawk
hangs on a tattered gray cloud
delineating the wind,
a bright leaf caught
in the bellyfur of a torn storm

That’s very precise. The rough meeting between “delineating” and “bellyfur”, the idea and sound of a “torn storm”, these things make the poem something as close as words can get to the feeling of the red desert when there is weather coming on.

I deeply admire that about his work. It’s the exactness, the faithfulness to the things that are, which generated my respect in the first place. And it’s not as if I didn’t know there was a religious component to the poet, but I had hoped he’d honour the world-words enough to keep what he saw to what he actually saw.

So I find myself disappointed in him. Listen to this:

Yovimpa Point
                          for my father

               Job 17:13

A stiff, pine-scented wind. The tough
gnarled trees behind me creak and groan.
Swallows dart from the pink cliffs,
swoop over the escarpment and wheel
through the maze of orange hoodoos.
Three thousand square miles of high desert
fall into southern horizon, down the staircase
to the Coconino where the Kaibab Plateau
hides the great chasm. On the eastern
circumference, the dome of Navajo Mountain
under a hazy sky. Westward,
Mount Trumbull huddles low against the earth.

Through this space I stare into the eye
of time. The rocks I stand upon are young,
rugged, weathered only twenty million years.
A thousand feet beneath this crenation
bland gray cliffs mark one hundred fifty million years
and on the near horizon the deep hue
of vermilion rose upon the belted strata
two hundred million years past. All rest
on a base of limestone twenty-five million years
preceding even that.

                          A vast ocean. A marsh
where giant ferns nodded in the sun and
great reptiles slithered into extinction.
A sleeping desert. A young mountain, thrusting
against a moving sky. The earth opens
before me.

Today once again, an ancient voice
in the wind calls, the same question
repeated: "Where wast thou when I laid
the foundations of the earth? Declare,
if thou hast understanding."
Even in my silence, as I hold my arms
close against my sides, shivering
before the probing gust,
I grow more and more sure of my answer.
"Here, Lord. I am here. In the beginning,
even now, here." Hues of pink and gold
beneath massive white formations fall
to green basin and the brilliant red horizon.
Gods. A world of gods, at play before me.

For those of you not familiar with Job 17:13 the verse is this: If the only home I hope for is the grave, if I spread out my bed in the realm of darkness    —the whole world is not enough for Job. He wants to be more than eventual dust.

Job’s life has been destroyed in a “game” between God and Satan. Job seeks an explanation for his trials but does not turn from God. It is Job’s stalwart allegiance which is the prompt for godly playtime.

The last line of Job 17 reads: Will we descend together into the dust?

Of course the answer is yes. Not for Job, of course. He is sure he is assured an immortal place with the divine. But in this world, that wondrous world Lee describes? It is the poet’s eventual home – once he is just the chemical constituents of whatever comes next.

Still, the disagreement between my materialism and his religiosity isn’t really the issue. At least not for me. The deal is that in his refusal of the notion of becoming dust, he stops seeing the actual world. That, for a poet of his caliber, is pitiable.

I get what he is trying to evoke. I admire the fact that he can see the immensity of geologic time. But to so leave the fact of rock to make of it a god—no, no. That is wrong. I don’t mean unethical, although it might be that too, but empirically wrong.

What underlies this turn, I suppose, is the awe such enormous time evokes in us when fully realized. Such long history makes of us very little. I get the connection between the power of God in the Job story to pull the Leviathan with a fish hook, especially in comparison to Job’s completely powerless state. Yes, it is a metaphorical connection that works. But it is still wrong, and in that wrongness, it misses what could have been evoked–something right, something actually true about the relationship between the great age of the earth and of human kind. To have lost that is a shame.

On the plus side, at least Lee’s character in the poem answers God with a bit more intellectual verve than did Job. When God (Job 38:4) asks (somewhat meanly if you ask me) where the frack was Job when God was laying the foundations of the world, Job really doesn’t have an answer. What he says (Job 42:6) is “I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes”, which God seems to like. At least the character in the poem realizes that this moment now is the beginning, and I hope, also realizes that this moment here is also the end. But still, in the context of the poem, such a reach into the long-mind could have been accomplished by some other, more real means. It would have been much more difficult I expect, but possible.

What do you do next?

Your mind will make a decision long before you are aware that such a decision was even in the offing.

Our bodies have been crafted by time and environment to assume certain things about the world. Object constancy for example. You see a ball roll behind a bucket, you don’t assume the ball vanished. A two year old knows better than that. A puppy does too.

The decision made by your body in the face of creeping shadow is akin to object constancy. You will have decided, long deep in the unaware, fast-acting system of yours, that there is a presence out there because something must have caused the shadow and the sound to move and act this way.

OK as far as it goes, but now you get to make another decision. This time an aware one.

Here’s a real-life example of what I’m talking about. From Physics Buzz

At a pyramid temple, the pairing of seasonal shadows and sound reflection produces a striking combination. Starting on the spring equinox, in which day and night are equal lengths, a shadow glides down the temple steps and, over several days, transform into different shapes as it moves across the courtyard.

Most scholars believe the shadow represents the serpent god Kulkulkan wearing feathers of the resplendent quetzal, a bird the Mayans called the messenger of the gods.

Lubman thinks the shadow is the bird itself. Its path down the temple represents the straight-down mating dives of quetzal males, wings folded and tail feathers fluttering, that occur at spring equinox. Lubman believes priests stood at the bottom of the temple and clapped their hands. Each of the temple’s 91 stairs scatter the sound. Together, they reflect back a series of echoes that makes a tonal sound resembling a quetzal’s chirp. Lubman suggested that Mayan priests used this uncanny echo to reinforce their role as interpreters of their gods’ messenger.

Notice that last sentence please. And then think about how much detailed observation must have been put into the process of site construction and/or site use to achieve such a sensory bit of wonder.

The observer: the scientist in all of us.

The interpreter: the story teller.

We all have both. How you make that second (but aware) decision will show where you put the weight of value between your observer-self and your interpreter-self.

If those Mayan priests and those Mayan citizens bought the invisible flying god narrative, their valuation falls heavily on the story side of things. This means that observation is at the service of story. There are wonders to this type of thinking. Things like a life spent rocketing from one wonder to the next, from one hair-stand-on-end moment to the next. And there are problems with it_one narrative example: the idea of the holy fool who, following an invisible butterfly, walks off a cliff pulling his followers with him.

If one puts observation first and makes story at the service of sensory data and detail, this is what I think of as Enlightenment science. It can be a bit dry when story plays little part in a life, but on the plus side, it’s this kind of person that notices site properties like the Mayan temple site and it’s this kind of person that can bring such a thing to life for the rest of us.

(To be absolutely truthful, there is an inordinate amount of awe and wonder in the apprehension of complex molecules, but to get there, to that place of scientific narrative glee, a shit load of knowledge has to be gained. People often find the illusions of the body an easier endorphin fix because the bodily knowledge needed is gained by virtue of human evolution and just moving around the world following your birth.)

If I had to choose between these two extremes? Of course I would pick observation. Much more powerful a position. Need I remind you that Mayan civilization, despite possible priestly claims, is no more?

Humour aside, there is a third option, but to maintain it requires a delicate balance, an exact stance on a very thin line between the two sides of a single mountain peak. The two sides: story and fact. The mountain top: the function of awareness in the vast mountain of unaware decisions made every moment by your unaware body/mind.

You can try to retain an equal weight on both observation and story, but for it to work well, you’ll need to make sure your dominant foot is on the observation side. What does this mean? There should be a pang when your current story-bubble pops at the pricking of its skin by the sharp-stone of observable fact, but pop it must. You need your emotional attachment to the narratives that ring your sense of self. It is attachment that causes those feelings of bliss, awe and sublime terror when something in the world slides by, clittering echoes in its wake. But to wake up, the attachment has to be thin skinned and breakable by the hard stone of the world that actually exists under your foot.

So here I am paying taxes and being forced  by law to subsidize tax-exempt religious institutions which irritates my moral fibre one huge amount.  It irritates me, in part, because I recognize, since there is no god, that these are social institutions for the benefit of members – like the German Club, or the Ukrainian Hall down to road. Are those social clubs tax exempt? Nope.

Since it is my atheism and its attendant beliefs that prompt me to be irritated by being forced to support social clubs built on fantasy to which I do not belong and which actively try to make my life more miserable, do those that think atheism a religion grant that their tax-free status is infringing my rights as a “religious” person?

So they’re going to quit taking public funds and free my dollars to go to organizations that do in fact do good – like Planned Parenthood, for example?

I don’t begrudge the church its efforts to re-engage the public in a debate about the morality of contraception. But I do wish it would keep specious claims about religious freedom out of it. Of course, the church’s opposition to contraception, among other articles of faith, is none of my business. Of course religious leaders have a right to speak and lobby against whatever they consider sinful. Of course they have a right to care more about the welfare of embryos than torture victims. But while the right to lobby is included in religious liberty, the right to lobby successfully is not. When the church fails to persuade Congress, the courts, or regulatory agencies to impose sectarian ideals on secular institutions, it fails to gain power but loses no liberty; the rest of us, however, might gain some.

Wonderful article over at The Atlantic.

via peardg

And here’s where the Catholic women come in. According to the Public Religion Research Institute poll released today,

A majority (55%) of Americans agree that “employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception and birth control at no cost.” Four-in-ten (40%) disagree with this requirement.

Key breakdowns

• 58% of all Catholics agree employers should be required to provide their employees with health care plans that cover contraception. That slides down to 52% for Catholic voters, 50% for white Catholics.
• 61% of religiously unaffiliated Americans say employer plans should cover contraception.
• 50%of white mainline Protestants want the coverage. However, for evangelical Protestants, that drops to 38%.

And perhaps of greater note among election-watchers:

Women are significantly more likely than men to agree that employers should be required to provide health care plans that cover contraception (62% vs. 47% respectively).

This is from pandagon.net:

The religious arguments have no real effect on men’s support or non-support of it; they either think it’s a benefit or they don’t. And the majority don’t. The spread between men and women on whether or not contraception should be a covered benefit is 15 points. The non-existent spread between Catholics and non is drawing a bunch of attention, but here is the real story. The only reason this is controversial is that a majority of men oppose it.

So. I have some questions. Boehner has a wife. Her name is Debbie. Debbie has two daughters, Lindsay and Tricia. Does the fact that they have two kids mean that they only had sex twice or does it mean Debbie does birth control? I wonder if John knows?

Then there’s Mitt and Ann Romney. They have five kids but wait, they were married in 1969. Kid 1 came in 1970 so probably no birth control there. Kid 2 appeared in 1971 so maybe Ann had a few weeks of no sex with Mitt after kid 1 was born and maybe there was no contraception between the the two births. But then kid 3 didn’t appear until 1975. So what does that mean? No sex? A string of miscarriages? Mitt succeeded in the pull-out lottery (why doesn’t that count as birth control?)? Then kid 4 shows up in ’78 and kid 5 in ’81. And none since. Hmmm. Curious. I wonder how they managed that?

And Santorum and crew…well they have 8 kids. Here’s the wikipedia paragraph about that:

Santorum met his future wife, Karen Garver Santorum, while she was a law student and he was recruiting summer interns for the Kirkpatrick & Lockhart firm.^[18] They have seven living children. In 2008 at the age of 48, Karen gave birth to her eighth child Isabella, who was diagnosed with Trisomy 18 Edwards syndrome, a serious genetic disorder, with only a 10% chance of survival past the first year of life.^{[162][163][164]}

In 1996, the Santorums’ son Gabriel was born prematurely and died two hours after birth. Karen wrote that she and Rick brought the deceased infant home from the hospital and introduced him to their children as “your brother Gabriel”, before a funeral and a burial.^[1][165] The handling of their infant son’s death attracted criticism in January 2012 following Santorum’s success in the Iowa caucuses. However, mental health experts interviewed by ABC News said what the Santorums did was encouraged at the time, although no longer recommended.^[166] Writers who had experienced a stillbirth defended the Santorums’ actions, with columnist Charles Lane writing that he personally regretted not showing the body of his stillborn baby to his then-six year old son,^[167] and Jessica Heslam, writing that holding her own stillborn baby brought her “much peace”.^[168] Four of the Santorum’s children appeared with their parents on Piers Morgan Tonight in January 2012, and said they were all glad to have seen Gabriel because they were able to see him, and they hold a place in their hearts for their brother.

So let’s grant for a moment that Rick and Karen haven’t used any form of birth control (even the pull-out lottery). Is Karen’s life (if you take away the money and power) what most women want? Frack no. Oh so decidedly frack no.

If Karen is happy doing not much else but be pregnant and mother, OK. The Santorums can afford help, health care for their last baby and the rest of the family (The Santorums have stopped having sex or what? Karen’s menopause probably isn’t over yet and she still has a chance at yet another pregnancy). But many of the rest of us can’t afford to “choose” such a life thanks to policies created by “thinkers” like Santorum. Can you imagine the result of a yearly salary of around $12,000 and 7 children? Oh right. The poor in societies that don’t much like women.

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This was passed through Congress in 1797 by a unanimous vote. Imagine what would happen today!

ROTFLMAO

Do an experiment for me. Because science involves getting your hands dirty (sometimes literally). Go for a walk outside and clear your mind. Don’t think about work or school or whatever your friends are doing. Just clear it out so you have room to appreciate what you’re seeing. Look at trees, clouds, shadows. Animals if there are any around. Flowers. Take a close look at plants and try to find insects on them. Look at lamp posts, at fences, at cracked bits of paving, at bicycles. Go up close and have a good look at peeling paint, spots of rust, chips, and cracks. Look at dirt. Look at water.

Think a little bit about how each of these things came to be there, how it works, what makes it look the way it does. In some cases you might know. Think about metal and its interaction with oxygen in the air, the exchange of electrons that leads to chemical bonding, and how that forms spots of rust. In some cases you might not know. But have a think anyway – wonder why the shadows of things close to the ground have sharp edges, while the shadows of things further away are softer and blurry. And if you find something that you don’t understand deeply, remember it when you go back inside and look it up and try to find out why.

Now when you look at the world in this way, don’t you find it more amazing and interesting and wonderful than when you wander around in a daze thinking about work or school or not missing your bus or whatever?

Cathy sent me a link to this article on Irregular Webcomic!. It’s essentially an explanation of why knowing science adds to your sense of awe and wonder with the world instead of detracting from it as (apparently) so many claim and/or fear.

The key sentence:

Understanding leads to appreciation.

Yes it does.

But it also requires a certain level of comfort with change because new understanding also leads to new ways of thinking. And that can be scary.

But there’s another critical thing here. People often seem to assume that feelings are irretrievably linked to a specific narrative. So if you’ve found or created a life narrative (an explanation that explains your situation to yourself – that makes sense of it and thereby gives you some little sense of control) that provides moments of hope, or awe, or wonder, the threat in losing that narrative (of having it proved wrong, for example) is that we will simultaneously lose those precious feelings. And sometimes it is only that hope that we will, in some future moment, feel that awe or wonder that keeps us going.

Feel lousy this morning? You can get up and move through the morning work routine because your story tells you that there will be a payoff at some point in the future. In times like those it’s really hard to give up the story – even when the narrative is itself the reason you feel so frakkin lousy (which btw is often the case).

That’s really the point underneath the article. And it is important.

Our feelings are a critical point in any narrative, but the narrative is an ephemera compared to the feeling set. No matter how awful things get, we as a species still have the same set of feelings. We do hope and awe and wonder if we are slaves or if we are masters. It doesn’t matter what narrative we construct, those same feelings will find a home within the story.

So if feelings are not a useful criteria for choosing which narrative to live by, what criteria are appropriate?

Aha! Now that’s the question.

What’s your answer? (Mine was decided many decades ago, but I really do want your answers before I reveal mine. Post them to comments here or email me mary (at) tailfeather (dot) ca