…well, not really. But this cartoon is pretty good. (via Friendly Atheist)
Category Atheism
A Minister And An Atheist Walk Into A Bar…
Gimme That Old Time Non-Religion
Steve Martin and and the Steep Canyon Rangers harmonize on “Atheists Don’t Have No Songs” (but we do have Sundays free)
Myth…Busted
Last week, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the stars of MythBusters, were in town to accept the 2008 Outstanding Lifetime Award in Cultural Humanism from the Harvard Humanist Society.
Adam, who is not only an atheist but, as he mentions, a fourth-generation atheist, delivered a wonderful acceptance speech that references Carlos Castaneda’s philosophical tome “The Eagle’s Gift” as his inspiration to expand his consciousness through science and reason. The folks at BoingBoing not only transcribed the speech, they made a cool looking webpage just to display it.
Jamie’s remarks haven’t been similarly posted yet, although one commenter at that link who was apparently there said that he started off by saying “What he said.”
No Monopoly On Beauty Or Truth
You have to love the very idea of Stephen Fry: a comedian, actor, AND public intellectual. Can you imagine ANY American celebrity who could publicly debate religion in a serious forum and also do a sketch like this?
Well, anyway, here’s one of those annoying YouTube things where someone took an audio clip and set it to some random visuals, but it’s worth listening to. In it, Fry counters the argument from his debate opponent that secularism deprives the world of beauty, poetry, and imagination. It’s kind of long, but thoughtful and well-said:
If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him
Buddhist writer Stephen Batchelor has just published a new book called Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist, which tries to pare away the theistic/religious trappings of contemporary Buddhism to get to the philosophical core of Buddhism, which has a lot of non-theistic elements to it. This book review in the Manchester Guardian by religion writer Mark Vernon explains the root of Batchelor’s observations. Batchelor writes that the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism resonate with non-theism: the focus on self-reliance and self-awareness, the derivation of meaning from real experience, and the acceptance of the world as it is without supernatural explanations or magical beliefs. The book has drawn praise from none less than Christopher Hitchens, and has also been embraced by Harvard humanist Greg Epstein, both of whom should be familiar to readers of this blog by now.
A lot of my own approach to an atheistic worldview is similarly informed by those parts of Buddhism, though I would never consider myself a Buddhist in any way. I’m not sure how I feel about the effort to attach that to the touchy-feely humanist movement, but I can see where using the sort of arguments Batchelor is making about demystifying religious cultures certainly can be applied. Looks like this book and it’s predecessor, Buddhism Without Beliefs, are worth a read.
Atheist In A Foxhole
You are, I’m sure, familiar with the expression “there are no atheists in foxholes”, but it’s a statement dripping with irony, because while the implication is that deep down everybody is really a believer, the actual meaning is that in moments of terror people will say or do ANYTHING to save themselves, regardless of how it fits with their normal worldview. In other words, what it really demonstrates is the hypocrisy of espousing a religious viewpoint in a moment of mortal weakness, not the “underlying inevitability” of religious belief. You know, sort of how like torture will make people say anything to make it stop…a sort of Spanish Inquisition, if you will. (insert obligatory Monty Python clip here)
To wit, the story of this New Hampshire fellow, a World War II veteran named (amusingly enough) Milton Christian, who was recently awarded the Bronze Star for his military service — an award that was held up for decades due to red tape. His heroism earned him a chest-full of other military decorations, too, but as he reminisced about the horror of being in combat, he explained that it was the very experience of being trapped in a foxhole that made him come to the conclusion that there is no god:
“Some things you forget; other things stay with you and you replay them over and over again in your mind, like it was yesterday,” he said, closing his eyes.
“The very first time I heard artillery fire, I’ll never forget the sound, the whistling that filled the air. You dive in a hole, smoke rising all around you. There were six or seven of us together that day, and as soon as it’s over, you look around to make sure everyone is still alive. That time, we all made it,” Christian said. “That is your baptism.”
“They say there are no atheists in foxholes. But as we sat in those holes, praying that God would save us, I thought about the fact that the other side was doing the same thing. And then I wondered if God is just playing some kind of game with us. Pretty much I decided at that point there was no God,” Christian said.
“For the rest of my life, I’ve tried to do the right thing. I raised a beautiful bunch of kids — and they truly are my greatest accomplishment. So I’m not worried about what’s next. If there is a God, I think he’ll know that I just did the best I could. That’s all a man can do.”
I am reminded of another aphorism, too:
An Apology
A former Christian publicly apologizes for being a shit-head for all those years.
Money quote:
3. I apologize to all my former Sunday school students because I taught you that the bible was the word of god. I perpetuated a myth that the bible is a special book that should be regarded ‘much more highly than it ought’. I encouraged you to trust this book, to think this book contained sacred ideas about life and god. I made you think that the stories in the bible were intrinsically valuable and could teach you about how god works and who god is. I apologize for always referring to god as a ‘he’, thereby further anthropomorphizing a pretend deity and making you think ‘he’ was real and decidedly masculine. I apologize for teaching you to think that you were a sinner and that Jesus had to die for you when you are really just a beautiful child, perfect in every way from the minute you were born (except for when you aren’t). I apologize for telling you that Jesus conquered death and that you should put your trust in him when there is not a shred of evidence of the resurrection except for what is in the bible. I apologize for not respecting your intelligence and glazing over thorny issues and rationalizing all the bullshit that is so present at all times in ‘god’s word’. (I apologize for saying bullshit in this apology). I apologize for ever calling the bible ‘god’s word’. It isn’t ‘god’s word’. It’s just a book. There are a lot of other much better books. There are books that helped humanity move beyond misogyny and slavery and tyranny. There are books that led to scientific discoveries which led to medicine and helpful machines and made the world a better place. None of those books are in the bible. In fact, the bible helps people to justify misogyny and tyranny and slavery and the bible made church leaders fear science and so they burned scientists and doctors and smart people because what those smart people were learning was often in direct conflict with what the bible and the church taught. I apologize for not telling you that the bible and christianity are two of the main reasons that it took people so long to move from tyranny into democracy, from slavery to human rights, from cruel religious mandates to civil law. I hope someday you will figure that out for yourselves in spite of what I taught you.
The unfortunate thing is that she gets so much Christian hate-mail, she’s shut off the comments on her blog, so I guess they haven’t exactly accepted her apology.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
