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

Modern Cosmology Versus God's Creation

"Atheism is the default position in any scientific inquiry, just as a-quarkism or a-neutrinoism was. That is, any entity has to earn its admission into a scientific account either via direct evidence for its existence or because it plays some fundamental explanatory role. Before the theoretical need for neutrinos was appreciated (to preserve the conservation of energy) and then later experimental detection was made, they were not part of the accepted physical account of the world. To say physicists in 1900 were “agnostic” about neutrinos sounds wrong: they just did not believe there were such things."



Modern Cosmology Versus God's Creation - NYTimes.com

Is There Justice in the Book of Job?

Or is the divinely-sponsored suffering of His good and faithful servant yet another nail in God's coffin, driven by the problem of evil?

The problem was stated most succinctly by David Hume: “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?” 

One logical answer is that there is no God. But before the eighteenth century, and during most of it, atheism was not an option, even for the most strong-minded. To choose between two positions, a person must have two to choose from. Before the Enlightenment, the vast majority of Europeans did not... Joan Acocella: Is There Justice in the Book of Job? : The New Yorker

The earlier impossibility of non-belief is overstated. If you doubt the pre-Enlightenment existence and availability of the atheism option, read Jennifer Michael Hecht's Doubt: A History.

But Joan Acocella's essay is good. Of  Mark Larrimore's “The Book of Job: A Biography” (Princeton University Press) she writes:

Larrimore maintains a supremely tolerant position. He approves of the wealth of “interpretative openings and opportunities.” Everything is O.K. with him, and he thinks that whatever disagreements there are may lead to community. (This is interesting, since an absolutely crucial aspect of Job’s trial is that he suffers alone.) Such a latitudinarian approach is perhaps appropriate to a reception study, telling who thought what, and who, after them, thought something else, but eventually it comes to seem anti-intellectual. At times, Larrimore sounds like a kindly Unitarian minister, or like Mister Rogers.

With a God like Job's, Mister Rogers would surely be a comfort.

Sunday Assembly

Just heard this on NPR, about a pair of comic Brits who so value church without the "god-bit" that they've gone and organized it. There's even a secular Sunday Assembly chapter here in Nashville.

“There’s a ton in the U.S. We went on a road show to go on and sort of launch the first one and sort of give a bit of an example about how it’s done. So we went to New York, Boston, Washington D.C., and Nashville – that was a hoot! The band was so good, unsurprisingly. Then there’s quite a few in California – they have taken it up quite nicely with San Diego. And even in the Deep South there are some in Georgia and Texas. So it’s really exciting to see that people just come forward. There’s a basic human need to get together as a community. And this seems to be a way in which lots of people like doing it.”

Here's where to find them in middle Tennessee this weekend. They're on Twitter too, @SundayAssembly.

Hallelujah!
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UPDATE, Jan. 8, 2014: NPR story on Sunday Assembly

It sometimes feels like church in the auditorium of the Professional Musicians union in Hollywood. It's a Sunday morning, and hundreds of people are gathered to meditate, sing and listen to inspirational poetry and stories.

But then the live band starts up — performing songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Jerry Lee Lewis. And instead of a sermon, there's a lecture by experimental psychologist and neuroscientist Jessica Cail about the biology of gender identification and sexual orientation.

This is a Los Angeles meeting of Sunday Assembly, a church for people who don't believe in God. The brainchild of two British comedians, the movement has since spread across the globe, and there are now about 30 chapters from Dublin to Sydney to New York... (continues)

St. Hitchens' Day.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Brothers, Sisters, Comrades...Friends.

That's the line I use to start every radio show I do.  It's the line I use when introducing myself to a group of people.  I have used it in every speech I have given in the past couple years.

It's how Christopher Eric Hitchens used to address his audience.

I still remember where I was when I found out that Christopher Hitchens had died.

I was in a hotel in Birmingham, Alabama--headed home for the holidays.  I had only just, a matter of weeks before, come across some of Hitch's work--as with all great things, I discovered Hitch while mindlessly running around YouTube.  I saw his debates, and fell in love with the "Hitchslap."  I ran out to Barnes and Noble and bought god Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything or, as I like to call it (because of its distinctive color), "the big yellow f**k-you to religion."

I remember falling in love with that tone of his--the vocabulary that was 10 miles long, and yet I understood every word from his mouth.  There are times I felt he was talking directly to me.

"Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence." 

--Letters to a Young Contrarian

Hitch spoke to me, as I suspect he spoke to so many of us.  He's a divisive figure, to be sure, but when he spoke he was nothing less than bulletproof.  I am reminded of this particular setting of Hitch's debate with Tony Blair, known as the Antitheist's Anthem.

It's got a couple of Hitch's Greatest Hits, if you will: created sick and commanded to be well, Divine North Korea, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and so on.  But it's the line at the end that brings a tear to my eyes every time: 

"No seconds left, I've done my best, Ladies and Gentlemen.  Believe me, I have more."

That's the line that has broken my heart since his death 2 years ago.  Hitch was silenced by nothing more than a clock.  Reading his Mortality proves that beyond any doubt.

Hitch was a voice for all things good in the world.  He refused to tolerate dictatorship and he abhorred religion, but he absolutely loved people.  Hitch was everything I've ever wanted to be--intelligent, witty, funny--and more.  He lives on in his writings and the youtube videos that bear his trademark wit, and in the hearts of all those who admired him.

And so, on this, as I call it, "St. Hitchens' Day," a reference to a quote from the man himself ("atheists don't have saints and we don't have martyrs") I cope the only way I can, by watching his videos, reading some of his essays, and starting my day, as he invariably would, with a "decent slug of Mr. Walker's amber restorative."  "Johnnie Walker Black.  Breakfast of Champions.  Accept no substitutes."

In loving memory

of Christopher Eric Hitchens

April 13, 1949-December 15, 2011

Bertrand Russell was inconsistent, spiteful,

and one of our greatest guides to the terrifying consolations of human life, says his biographer Alan Ryan in a new introduction to Russell's What I Believe.

There are two sorts of atheist – Russell called himself an agnostic to indicate that it was not impossible that there should be some sort of God, but he was perfectly certain that God did not exist, and atheist seems more apt. The position of the first sort of atheist is sometimes paraphrased as “there is no God, and I hate him...”

-New Humanist/The Rationalist Association 

==

Also of note: "Wrong in the Right Way," on Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God

Reality is rough

but it could have been worse. We could have been faced with reality in all its roughness plus a God who made it that way." Alex Rosenberg

==

Atheism & Philosophy texts, updated

Coming to MTSU in January

Spring Semester-

Atheism & Philosophy: 

PHIL 3310 – Atheism and Philosophy. This course examines various perspectives on atheism, understood as the belief that no transcendent creator deity exists, and that there are no supernatural causes of natural events. The course compares this belief with familiar alternatives (including theism, agnosticism, and humanism), considers the spiritual significance of atheism, and explores implications for ethics and religion.

Our central theme this semester: the meaning of Atheism

What's the meaning of a godless existence? What gets atheists, humanists, naturalists and other godless folk out of bed in the morning? What reconciles them to belief in life non-eternal? How do they deal with their mortality? What  are their sacred texts, if not the Christian Bible, the Koran, the Torah, the Book of Mormon, the collected works of L.Ron, ...? Whatare the possible "meanings of life" regarded strictly in its finitude?

Classes will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:40-4:05 pm in James Union Building (JUB) 202 beginning January 16, 2014.

Texts:

• A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible ("there is experience also, which is what makes good and its opposite, In both of which humankind seeks to grasp the meaning of things")
• Owen Flanagan, The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World ("Life can be precious and funny. And one doesn't need to embrace fantastical stories—unbecoming to historically mature beings— about our nature and prospects to make it so.")
• Christopher Hitchens, Mortality (“To the dumb question "Why me?" the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?”)
• Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions ("Reality is rough. But it could have been worse. We could have been faced with reality in all its roughness plus a God who made it that way.")
• Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God ("Carl admired James's definition of religion as a 'feeling of being at home in the Universe'... science opens the way to levels of consciousness otherwise inaccessible")

Also recommended:

• Ronald Aronson, Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided ("the number of Americans who find “meaning and value in life 
  without looking to a god" is so great that they would constitute the majority of adults in all but a handful of countries")
• Julian Baggini, Atheism ("it is certainly not the case that only endless activities can be meaningful")
• Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non=believers Guide to the Uses of Religion ("culture might be no less effective than religion in its ability to guide, humanize, and console. One would be able to have meaning unburdened by superstition"
• Ronald Dworkin, Religion Without God("religion is deeper than God... belief in a god is only one possible manifestation")
• A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: the Case against Religion and for Humanism ("the major reason for the continuance of religious belief in a world which might otherwise have long moved beyond it, is indoctrination of children before they reach the age of reason")
• Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History ("the point is to teach us to live, well and wide awake, in our strange place between meaning and meaninglessness... to understand the schism between humanness and the universe")
• Hitchens, ed., The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-believer ("the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be empty and devoid of meaning”-Einstein)