This post on CNN's iReport website was flagged by some readers as 'inapppropriate'. I read it because as an atheist myself I'm always interested in what other non-believers say about raising children. I'm bothering to post a link to it here because of the fact that it was flagged as inappropriate - not by CNN, but presumably by religious readers appalled at the idea of someone not lying to their own kids about there being a god out there who does whatever gods do. And worse, she tells her kids to be good and decent anyway, not just because they'll go to hell otherwise. Flagging such a simple blog post says a lot about the narrow-minded ignorance that comes along with religious faith - the belief that your god has given you and people like you a path to eternal bliss, and everyone else can (literally) go to Hell. It's not a good thing for a society to have people who think that way.
http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Who is this God Person, Anyway?
I recently had a conversation/debate with someone who said he believed strongly in God. Not the Catholic God, not Allah (he's a lapsed Catholic) but his own, personal concept of a god that he was sure explained the creation of the universe better than any natural process possibly could. Due to the late hour and too much alcohol the conversation eventually went off topic and finally degenerated into broad merriment, but the subject of the conversation has been on my mind and is something I've been thinking about, which lead me to the question - what do people mean when they talk about "God"?
(Of course, this is a topic that deserves much more time and energy than I'm giving it here, but these are just some quick thoughts I'm putting down as a distraction from work, so bear with me.)
When people say they believe in God, generally there is a very specific God they're referring to, one who often appeared first in a holy book, or who is the central figure of a major organized religion. But occasionally you hear people refer to personal, new age, generic version of "God" they believe in. It's not the God of the Bible or Koran or the gods of the Bhagavad Gita, of course, because religion is just a cultural construct and God exists beyond any sort of man-made organization or human thought. Et cetera.
But here's the thing that people need to keep in mind, whether they think a god exists or not: God is a cultural construct. He does not exist outside of nature, or as part of nature - God "exists" as much as he is a character in a book (or several books), and the "God" that people either do or don't believe in today can only be a specific God whose characteristics and history were written down and created by a particular culture as a product of a particular time and place. For a person to say she believes in a God that transcends all of this is to say she believes in a God as artificial and created as the gods of those ancient peoples she so correctly rejects. The only difference is that, in this case, she's the one doing the creating. A god produced from one individual's mind does not make that god any more real than Yahweh and his associates/rivals.
If you want evidence of the existence of a god, you have to find that evidence outside of your own head. Logic and arguments (ie, language) will never be sufficient, anymore than Darwin's Origin of Species on its own was sufficient to make the case for evolution - the evidence for evolution is out there, in the real world, inviting skeptics and the curious alike to go observe it for themselves. You'll find no such equivalent when it comes to God.
The nature of God is not understood in any universal way, even by believers in gods like those with the bestselling holy books. That in itself should raise eyebrows - if there's not universal agreement on the nature of God, then either one religion is right and the rest are wrong, or they're all wrong. But God, being a cultural artifact, of course, doesn't actually exist, s impossible for any one person to actually know. If they claim to, they're making it up.
(Title of this post taken from a book title referred to in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
(Of course, this is a topic that deserves much more time and energy than I'm giving it here, but these are just some quick thoughts I'm putting down as a distraction from work, so bear with me.)
When people say they believe in God, generally there is a very specific God they're referring to, one who often appeared first in a holy book, or who is the central figure of a major organized religion. But occasionally you hear people refer to personal, new age, generic version of "God" they believe in. It's not the God of the Bible or Koran or the gods of the Bhagavad Gita, of course, because religion is just a cultural construct and God exists beyond any sort of man-made organization or human thought. Et cetera.
But here's the thing that people need to keep in mind, whether they think a god exists or not: God is a cultural construct. He does not exist outside of nature, or as part of nature - God "exists" as much as he is a character in a book (or several books), and the "God" that people either do or don't believe in today can only be a specific God whose characteristics and history were written down and created by a particular culture as a product of a particular time and place. For a person to say she believes in a God that transcends all of this is to say she believes in a God as artificial and created as the gods of those ancient peoples she so correctly rejects. The only difference is that, in this case, she's the one doing the creating. A god produced from one individual's mind does not make that god any more real than Yahweh and his associates/rivals.
If you want evidence of the existence of a god, you have to find that evidence outside of your own head. Logic and arguments (ie, language) will never be sufficient, anymore than Darwin's Origin of Species on its own was sufficient to make the case for evolution - the evidence for evolution is out there, in the real world, inviting skeptics and the curious alike to go observe it for themselves. You'll find no such equivalent when it comes to God.
The nature of God is not understood in any universal way, even by believers in gods like those with the bestselling holy books. That in itself should raise eyebrows - if there's not universal agreement on the nature of God, then either one religion is right and the rest are wrong, or they're all wrong. But God, being a cultural artifact, of course, doesn't actually exist, s impossible for any one person to actually know. If they claim to, they're making it up.
(Title of this post taken from a book title referred to in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Life, the universe, and atheism
I met my friend J. for a pint last night, and at one point he asked me how central to my identity atheism is. It's a good question, and one I didn't have a ready answer for. I was raised Catholic, and stopped practicing more than 10 years ago, but didn't really think of myself as an atheist until the past few years. J. was raised more or less without religion, so I did say that, basically, having been raised with religion, atheism is a bigger deal to me than it is to him. He agreed with this, and the conversation then moved on to other things. But the question has been on my mind, so I thought it might be worth blog post to look at how central being an atheist is to my identity.
I became an atheist over time - there was no eureka moment of sudden clarity. It had been years since I stopped believing in God or going to church (except with family on holidays) when I started considering myself an atheist. Looking back, I'd say there were a few things that converged in a relatively brief period of time, like starting to read science books, the appearance of the New Atheists, the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and, not long after, the build up to and birth of my own daughter. These are all things that combined to force me to think about what it is I really believe and know, and why.
Reading more science books filled in enormous gaps in my knowledge of nature and the universe, and that really didn't leave much for God to do in the universe, as far as I can see. But it was the birth of my daughter that really focused my thinking about religion. My wife is Jewish, and with overall a positive experience of being raised Catholic (though not practicing for several years), I tried to find ways to keep Catholicism as a part of my cultural identity. Being Jewish is an advantage here in that Jews can be atheists and still be Jewish. As Paul Giamatti said, "there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews".
Before conceiving, and during the pregnancy, we had several conversations about how to raise our child, and while trying to decide whether or not to baptize her (before I knew it was a her) I came to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way to have a cultural baptism that is not also an expression of religious belief. I realized that I want to be honest with my daughter about the world, I want to be able to justify my decisions regarding both her life and my own, and it is easier to justify to myself and to her not having her baptized than making her a member of an organization with whose raison d'être I fundamentally disagree. So, in that way, in the sense that atheism colours and informs real life decisions that I make, I do have to say that atheism is a big part of my life and, probably, a big part of my sense of identity.
Of course, being an atheist is just a starting point - recognizing that God does not exist is essentially a matter of overcoming an inhereted cultural belief, but it's no more a statement about the universe itself than (to bring Richard Dawkins into it) recognizing that goblins and fairies don't exist. So while atheism, and my opinions on religion and science and all that, are a big part of my life, they don't exactly come up in conversation everyday. I think that's one important distinction to explain - calling yourself an atheist only tells people what you don't believe, and it says very little about what you actually do believe, or like, or enjoy doing in your free time.
To sum up, because being an atheist is something I'd say I've accomplished, through reading, thinking, and looking at the world, and being convinced of a godless universe after a religious upbringing (I'd say I'm symapthetic to Douglas Adams' "radical atheist" position) it's a small, personal intellectual accomplishment that I can even say I'm proud of.
I became an atheist over time - there was no eureka moment of sudden clarity. It had been years since I stopped believing in God or going to church (except with family on holidays) when I started considering myself an atheist. Looking back, I'd say there were a few things that converged in a relatively brief period of time, like starting to read science books, the appearance of the New Atheists, the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and, not long after, the build up to and birth of my own daughter. These are all things that combined to force me to think about what it is I really believe and know, and why.
Reading more science books filled in enormous gaps in my knowledge of nature and the universe, and that really didn't leave much for God to do in the universe, as far as I can see. But it was the birth of my daughter that really focused my thinking about religion. My wife is Jewish, and with overall a positive experience of being raised Catholic (though not practicing for several years), I tried to find ways to keep Catholicism as a part of my cultural identity. Being Jewish is an advantage here in that Jews can be atheists and still be Jewish. As Paul Giamatti said, "there are no better atheists in the world than the Jews".
Before conceiving, and during the pregnancy, we had several conversations about how to raise our child, and while trying to decide whether or not to baptize her (before I knew it was a her) I came to the conclusion that there is absolutely no way to have a cultural baptism that is not also an expression of religious belief. I realized that I want to be honest with my daughter about the world, I want to be able to justify my decisions regarding both her life and my own, and it is easier to justify to myself and to her not having her baptized than making her a member of an organization with whose raison d'être I fundamentally disagree. So, in that way, in the sense that atheism colours and informs real life decisions that I make, I do have to say that atheism is a big part of my life and, probably, a big part of my sense of identity.
Of course, being an atheist is just a starting point - recognizing that God does not exist is essentially a matter of overcoming an inhereted cultural belief, but it's no more a statement about the universe itself than (to bring Richard Dawkins into it) recognizing that goblins and fairies don't exist. So while atheism, and my opinions on religion and science and all that, are a big part of my life, they don't exactly come up in conversation everyday. I think that's one important distinction to explain - calling yourself an atheist only tells people what you don't believe, and it says very little about what you actually do believe, or like, or enjoy doing in your free time.
To sum up, because being an atheist is something I'd say I've accomplished, through reading, thinking, and looking at the world, and being convinced of a godless universe after a religious upbringing (I'd say I'm symapthetic to Douglas Adams' "radical atheist" position) it's a small, personal intellectual accomplishment that I can even say I'm proud of.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Neither practising nor believing, but Catholic even so
An interesting article on secular Catholicism in Quebec. The idea of being a secular Catholic is one I think about but, despite what you read here, I'm not sure it's really possible in the way it is to be, say, secular Jewish. I've found that as my personal belief as wained over the years, I've found it harder to participate (honestly, at least) in religious ceremonies, even just out of tradition - or habit.
An interesting article on secular Catholicism in Quebec. The idea of being a secular Catholic is one I think about but, despite what you read here, I'm not sure it's really possible in the way it is to be, say, secular Jewish. I've found that as my personal belief as wained over the years, I've found it harder to participate (honestly, at least) in religious ceremonies, even just out of tradition - or habit.
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