God-free in Tennessee: July 2014

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Faith, freedom, & dishonesty

at the 9/11 Memorial/Museum.

The "last night" letter of the terrorists is posted on a wall, but without any English translation. And so the deeper truth that religious fanaticism was the whole of their horrible cause--that, in the last-night letter God is cited a hundred and twenty-one times--is elided... They did not hate us for our freedom, they hated us for our lack of [their form of] faith... Their godliness does not exhaust the meanings of religion, any more than Pol Pot's atheism exhausts the meanings of doubt. But is is a central fact of the occasion, not illuminated by being ignored.

Adam Gopnik: Visiting the 9/11 Memorial and Museum : The New Yorker

Some Tennesseans...

"are simply unable to imagine rejecting the literal authority of the Bible. The most they can conjure up, straining until they are red in the face, is a man who is in error about the meaning of this or that text. Thus one accused of heresy among them is like one accused of boiling his grandmother to make soap in Maryland." -H.L. Mencken, Dayton TN 1925

And that's still true of some. Of many. But not all. There's another Tennessee, so here's a site for some other Tennesseans - and anyone else, anywhere else, who is happy to be god-free.

The continuous human community

Up@dawn 2.0

Thursday, July 3, 2014

Faith, freedom, & dishonesty