Notes from a Radicalized Atheist

Must we?

I try to be fair, I try to be respectful, I try to remember that many of the worthwhile things that have occurred over the last couple of millennia are the result either of the church or their believers. And what, I ask myself, have we atheists ever contributed? Have we started soup kitchens, held the hand of the dying, worked with lepers? So shouldn’t I give organized religion a break?

Want the short answer?

Fuck no.

To any nonbeliever out there, it’s been a bad couple of weeks. Consider, for example, the famous Hobby Lobby case, and can I convince you, Horrified Readers, that the religious backgrounds of the five male justices had noting to do with it? That all five of the justices who voted in favor of Hobby Lobby were catholic (nope, no capitals today, dammit)—that’s a coincidence? Oh, and the other catholic on the court who voted in dissent was a woman—Sonia Sotomayor—otherwise, guess what? It would have been 6 / 3.

Did you know, Hobby Lobby—as yes, I’m addressing you personally, since that apparently is what five people in the US have decided you are—what kind of a crowd you were going against? Because there isn’t one protestant on the Supreme Court (seriously thinking about those caps, too). So you guys walked into the lion’s den and came out unscathed—gotta hand it to you.

Of course, let’s hope your daughter doesn’t work for a closely-held corporation that has strong Jehovah’s Witness beliefs. Otherwise, that blood transfusion? Or the vaccines, which oddly enough have gotten prohibitively expensive? Here, courtesy of The New York Times, is the lead from an article entitled “The Price of Prevention: Vaccine Costs are Soaring:”

There is little that Dr. Lindsay Irvin has not done for the children’s vaccines in her office refrigerator: She remortgaged her home to afford their rising prices.

Guys? Can you imagine what the rest of the world is thinking about us?

Now the situation is so bad that a rabid little college in Illinois—Wheaton College—has decided it doesn’t want to fill out a form telling the government that the college is opting out of the contraceptive clause; here’s the Columbus Dispatch on the subject:

The school had argued that simply doing the paperwork — the form asks only for name, contact information, signature and date — infringed upon its religious liberty because it would trigger the employee’s ability to get the disputed contraception.

What’s this about? Simple—the Supreme Court has just declared the right of corporations to impose their religious beliefs on workers.

Nor did the religious right waste any time, because, the day after Hobby Lobby? A whole gaggle of religious groups sent a letter asking Obama to not issue an order directing the federal government to not award contracts to companies; enter The New York Times, again:

Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s addlebrained Hobby Lobby decision, several groups wrote to Mr. Obama on July 1 asking him to allow federal contractors to fire or refuse to hire workers based on their religious objections to a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

Oh—just for your information, the article is titled “Tax-payer Financed Bigotry,” a statement so pithy that it spares you the need to read further.

Well, we already have the catholic church firing teachers and principals of their schools who have gotten married—to members of their own sex, that is. Oh, and by the way, are those schools entirely self-funded? No nickel of the taxpayers going there?

Here’s a clue:

More than 80 percent of students receiving federal vouchers through the D.C. program attend private religious schools with such civil rights exemptions but no opt-out option for religious instruction. 

Oh, and don’t think, by the way, that all you have to do is worry about federal money, because you also have to worry about what the bastards in your statehouse are doing. Because increasingly, that’s where the action is; consider this, from The Washington Post:

In North Carolina, the state legislature recently passed a bill to divert $10 million of taxpayer money meant for public schools to private schools, including those that “provide an education that is Christ-centered” and teach “the truth of scripture” with “Bible-based facts,” such as: “dinosaurs and humans co-existed on Earth; slave-masters generally treated their slaves well; in some areas, the KKK fought the decline in morality by using the sign of the cross; and gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters or rapists.”

Know what? I’m now radicalized—for (easily) ten years I worked in a company where wearing a gold crucifix around your neck was almost de rigeur, where saying “bien, gracias a Dios” was the standard response to the question of how you were doing. And I shut up because I was respectful, though I admit to fighting the life-size crèche that Human Resources—ladies? Aren’t you guys supposed to be the experts here?—put up one Christmas. But now?

Now, I wish I had turned the company into a battleground. I wish I had said, “god doesn’t exist,” at every turn. I wish I had told everybody that had a crucifix to take it off, because I found it offensive. I wish the whole company had ground to a halt, so that 499 people could have been jumping the throat of little me. I should have duked it out until the end.

Reasonable?

Done with it!

On Faith

I shudder to go here, because there’s no help for it—I am as unable to experience God in any of his / her various guises as a rock. And that means that I’m one of just 5% of the American population who are atheist.

Which is why I found myself watching Richard Dawkins yesterday, as I munched on a tuna fish sandwich in the café. Granted, Dawkins goes after the most extreme of the religious nuts—he tracks down Ted Haggard in Colorado, and yes, I can now tell you: it’s quite likely that the reverend was doing cocaine and call boys. Haggard, perhaps annoyed by Dawkins’s pristine Queen’s English, accuses Dawkins of intellectual arrogance.

Well, Dawkins gets around—from Colorado to the Middle East, where he interviews a Jew turned Muslim from New York. The Muslim angrily accuses Dawkins of dressing women as whores; Dawkins retorts hotly that he doesn’t dress women, they dress themselves. Not good enough for the Muslim—by allowing women to dress as whores, it’s as good as dressing them. Short version: women are chattel, to be dressed according to male dictates.

Every bush has a nut hiding underneath it, and Dawkins beats every bush. There’s the Reverend Keenan Roberts, who hit on the wonderful idea of the Hell House—a dramatic working-out of the post-life experience throughout all time of those who don’t personally accept Christ. Here’s the clip:

Oh, and here’s the description, as provided in YouTube:

Check out this "movie trailer" promo for the upcoming 2013 FIRE & THE FLAME theatrical outreach, presented by New Destiny Christian Center of Thornton, CO. This heaven and hell drama wowed audiences last year, and the spiritual impact was incredible! This year's production will feature 4 new scenes. Performances will be: Saturday, March 23 at 6pm, Sunday March 24 at 6pm, Saturday March 30 at 6pm, and Easter Sunday March 31 at 8:30am and 11am. All performances are free. A love offering will be received. Nursery available for children through 3 years of age. For more info visit www.Godestiny.org or call 303.289.1547. Senior Pastor: Keenan Roberts.   

In fact, this clip is substantially tamer than what Dawkins filmed—and Dawkins got right into it with the pastor. How old, he asks, should a child be before he is allowed to see the play—which features leaping flames and gay people groaning in agony and the devil leaping around tormenting people? And the reverend has the answer—twelve would be a good age. Dawkins protests—wouldn’t that be somewhat searing for a child’s mind? Better that, says Roberts, than growing up godless and falling into perdition.

Well, Dawkins goes through every lunatic religion and denomination—though curiously, he missed the Mormons—until at the very end, he found himself a good English Anglican, whose moderate views fell like manna in the desert.

Today, I started out watching Dawkins on the third of his series on The Age of Reason; today’s topic being the growth of “alternative medicine.” And I had just gotten to the wonderful picture of Dawkins sitting bemused and very much open-eyed as all the others in the room visualized a pearl, into which they were invited to step, and there they would find…

…their real selves!

Well, Dawkins has to find out about that, so he goes off to interview the healer, who claims to be able to alter DNA and who also informs him that most people have a double strand of DNA.

Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, in evolutionary biology.

He was, then, very much interested in the topic—were there people who had more or less than a double strand of DNA?

The healer doesn’t miss a beat.

“The people of Atlantis had 12 strands of DNA,” she explains.

Predictably, Dawkins goes nuts.

Dawkins thinks that reason and science are under attack, and is out to challenge all religions—on the grounds that they promote irrational thought as well as divisions.

I’m both more extreme and less extreme. Though I cannot feel God, there are people who can, and who struggle as hard as they can to live up to beliefs that are truly admirable. And these people, acting together as a community, can accomplish what I—a solitary atheist—cannot. And these people adopt a theology that is both liberating and challenging—one that could help the world, if it ever got adopted.

My friend Susan, in fact, is one such person, and sent me a clip of another such person: John Spong, a retired Episcopal bishop. Right—if I could hear God, I would hang with Spong, and his flock. Check out a clip of a remarkable man:



I said that I was both less and more extreme than Dawkins. Why? Because for every man like Spong, there are men like Scott Lively, the evangelical who has exported homophobia to Uganda and Russia. This is a level of hypocrisy and hatred that even Dawkins doesn’t contemplate. And according to Wikipedia, Evangelical Protestants make up 19% of the American population. The mainstream protestants? 15%.

So I’m on the fence. In general, I cannot enter churches, and the smell of burnt-out candles is particularly upsetting to me—I associate the smell with the end of services at Christ Presbyterian Church. I dislike seeing crosses anywhere, and especially around people’s necks. And nuns—of which we have a full convent in Old San Juan? Don’t ask….

But before I throw out the bathwater, I’d like to see if somehow, somewhere, there might be a baby….

Let Me Just Slip Into This Black Robe, Here

Well, the first thing that has to be said about Alain de Botton is that he’s phenomenally wise, profoundly insightful, unimaginably creative and wonderfully incisive.

I say all this, by the way, to avoid a repetition of the 2009 incident in which de Botton wrote, “I will hate you until the day I die,” to a New York Times critic, who had been less than kind about a book de Botton had written. 

In fact, I have liked all of the de Botton talks that I have seen on YouTube—he does have a razor-sharp mind, but who, graduating with a double-starred first from Caius College, Cambridge, wouldn’t?

There was the talk on atheism 2.0. The old version of atheism only established one thing: there is no god. OK—but what about the good things that religion brought us? A sense of community—there are times when a congregation carries a grief-stricken parishioner through dark times. Or what about morality? Yes, you can argue that a person shouldn’t need god to be moral; as well, many atheists are moral. But the church, ideally, was or is a constant, drumming force for reminding us to be living a moral life. And I liked what de Botton said about religion’s view on art: it is completely not art for art’s sake. It is strictly utilitarian; the purpose of art is to elicit emotion and teach lessons. That’s why you have that depiction of Christ on the cross, or the last supper, or Moses parting the Red Sea. It’s there for a reason.

I followed him through the lecture, “A kinder, gentler, philosophy of success.” Interesting, there, what he had to say about meritocracy, which he, in general, favors. Who couldn’t—it’s the belief that anyone, with enough work, can get what he deserves. That’s great in the case of Obama, but what about me? Iguanas has sold maybe six copies, so am I a dud? Do I deserve my failure?

De Botton says no—remember Mathew 24:13? “The race is not given to the swift nor the strong but he who endures to the end?” (Franny may be channeling me, or I her, but shouldn’t it be “him who endures?”) OK—that wasn’t actually his point, on rereading Mathew. De Botton thinks that despite all of our efforts, the playing field will never be entirely level. And he should know—his father was a seriously rich guy, though not, apparently, a terribly supportive one. My father was middle class but supportive—so who had the better deal? The thing is that in both cases it makes a difference, and neither he nor I had any say in the matter.

Then of course I had to listen to his talk about “How to think more about sex.” I mean, what guy wouldn’t? And that, finally, led me to Barbara Ehrenreich, whose book Smile or Die; How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. I had liked the book, and could especially relate to it, since I had been through about 94 doses of quite concentrated positive thinking in my seven years at Wal-Mart. We had a monthly meeting, a regular feature of which was the motivational speaker. One particular speaker was a charming old lady who had to be lugged up to the stage because the cancer treatment was still affecting her but. not to worry, because the world was getting.., and here she broke into song…

Mejor, mejor, mejor!

Yes, her world was getting better, better, better—sing it, group! Sing it, everybody! Put your heart in your mouths and a smile on your face and beam your positive attitude into the radiant white light! Let’s hear it again!

We sang it again.

And even though it’s Monday, and it rained all weekend, and the housework never did get done—we’re alive, we’ve got jobs, we’ve got our families, and every day we can be sure that we are getting…

She put her ear to the microphone….

I loved all that stuff. Well, most of it. There was a day, in those months when I spent waiting for the ax to fall, when I came upon the in-house motivational speaker, Milton, filling up buckets of water before a Human Resources meeting. And no, he wasn’t the kind of guy who mops floors.

I could bear it no more; the meeting was mandatory and I skipped it.

Which may be why I’m not there.

Ehrenreich states that the main reason people are canned is because of their bad attitude, and asking skeptical questions about everybody’s great idea—hey, let’s give mortgages to people with lousy credit and then bundle ‘em up and sell ‘em off (sorry, the mortgages, not the people)—was a classic example of negativity. It’s not, of course; it’s a critical part of an organization. There’s a place for the people who refused to be swayed by the latest craziness.

Well, de Botton has started The School of Life; here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

The School of Life is a social enterprise founded in 2008 and based in a small shop in Central London. The School offers a variety of programmes and services concerned with how to live wisely and well, addressing such questions as why work is often unfulfilling, why relationships can be so challenging, why it is ever harder to stay calm and what one could do to try to change the world for the better.[1] The School also offers psychotherapy and bibliotherapy services and runs a small shop which has been described as 'an apothecary for the mind'.[2]

Wow—what a seriously good idea! Oh, and what do atheistic you do when you’re in London on a Sunday morning? Here’s the answer:

On Sunday mornings The School of Life hosts secular sermons in which cultural figures are invited to give their opinion about 'what values we should live by today'.[7] These theatrical events are usually held at Conway Hall in London. Past preachers have included Tom Hodgkinson on Loving Your Neighbour, Geoff Dyer on Punctuality, Sam Roddick on Seduction and Alain de Botton on Pessimism.[8] The Financial Times described the sermons as being 'hedged about with all sorts of ironic paraphernalia, designed to reassure the trendy young audience that they are not about to be harangued by a religious zealot'.[9]

Oh, and that bibliotherapy up there? Here’s the answer:

 The School of Life offers a literary consultation service it calls bibliotherapy.[10] For a fee, people are able to meet with a bibliotherapist who will talk to them about their reading habits and 'prescribe' books which relate to their interests or concerns. The School of Life's bibliotherapists include the novelist Susan Elderkin.

Confession: I completely screwed up my last goal, which was to tell everybody in the world by midnight, 31 December 2012, that they could have a good, peaceful, spiritually charged death in their home at the hour (or thereabouts) of their choosing.

 I fucked up.

Alain, can I come give a sermon?