Atheism & Philosophy: Quizzes Feb 20, 22

Friday, February 16, 2018

Quizzes Feb 20, 22

Reporters, remember to post your quizzes.

AA 21-23
1. What's the name of Pam's atheist group, and what do they do?

2. What did Pam think she needed, as a child, in order to understand religion?

3. Who was the first openly-atheist person Pam met?

4. What kind of a person does Pam say it makes you, if you're openly an atheist?

5. Why does Pam think it important for atheists to come out?

6. What "murky line" makes it hard to identify religious harassment?

7. What does Sam wonder about theists who are offended by atheists?

8. What pseudonym provided cover for the Amarillo Atheists Society?

9. What have the courts said about withholding medical treatment from children on religious grounds?

10. What is the Bible passage that Jehovah's Witnesses invoke to justify refusing blood transfusions?

11. What book changed Camilo's life?

12. What line do clinical psychology students straddle?

	Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta)
2/18/18, 1:08 PM Newt Gingrich: “Atheist Philosophy” More Dangerous to Christianity Than Terrorists dlvr.it/QGssyg pic.twitter.com/wLXvNlBcqU

	Conatus News (@ConatusNews)
2/17/18, 9:00 AM An in-depth look into what US laws and constitutional history actually say about the separation of church and state! An important reminder in these times. #secularism #FreedomFromReligion with @AndrewLSeidel conatusnews.com/religion-secul…

	Brian D. Earp (@briandavidearp)
2/19/18, 12:00 PM Tennessee GOP Unleashes Attack on “Radical Atheist” Running for State Senate buff.ly/2FdTwHY pic.twitter.com/jBy4mjotcj

Do you have (or want) an "atheist group"?
Do you consider arguing about religion "fun"?
Do you understand or can you explain what it means to have a "personal relationship with Jesus"?
Can you suggest any metaphors ("glasses" etc.) that might help nonreligious people better understand the religious mindset, or vice versa?
Is there a big difference, in your mind, between not wanting to go to church and not believing in God?
Have churches become more like interest groups or clubs? 187
Does the word Atheist still sound "ugly and harsh" to you? Is Humanist better? Freethinker? Skeptic? Bright? ...
Should your career choice determine your willingness to be open and honest about your (dis)beliefs? 188
Are you often asked what church you go to, or if you worship Satan? What's your reply?
Is it rude or offensive to compare God to Santa Claus?
Do you always refrain from discussing politics and religion with coworkers and friends? Or do you "bring your whole identity with you to work" and everywhere else?
Why do you think so many theists feel threatened by nonbelievers? 198
Does the Bible Belt really welcome Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims? 200
Do pluralists patronize too much nonsense in the name of tolerance? 201
Is there a single book that's had the greatest impact in forming your present state of (dis)belief?
Would you ever attend an atheist convention?

Quiz Feb 22

1. How does John think it's possible to talk about his opinions openly without getting into a big fight?

2. What's a good icebreaker?

3. How many millennials are disenchanted with religion?

4. Comparisons of theists and atheists demonstrate what?

5. What puzzled Ulla about God, as a kid?

6. What's Ulla's reaction to pictures from the Hubble telescope?

7. How does Ulla react to "I will pray for you"?

8. What did Betty think the Presbyterian choir in her childhood church was doing?

9. What's Betty's view of people praying for her husband's dementia?

10. What did Margaret's Congregationalist-Universalist father believe about an afterlife?

11. What misconception was perpetrated by House and Bones?

12. Why isn't Margaret afraid of death?

Do you always refrain from discussing politics and religion with coworkers and friends? Or do you "bring your whole identity with you to work" and everywhere else?
COMMENT: "God never gives you more than you can handle."
What's your favorite example of atheist humor?
What puzzled you about God, as a kid?
Do you agree that it's intellectually "easier to be a nonbeliever"? 219
How do you react to "I will pray for you"?
Does Ulla's life in retirement sound appealing to you? 222-3
What do you think of Ulla's statement about exiting life "on my own terms"? 223
Were you afraid, as a child, that God was watching your every move?
What would your heaven be like? 237

8 comments:

UnknownFebruary 19, 2018 at 8:44 PM
Alternative Quiz Questions AA 21-23

1. What kind of reactions does Pam's atheist group receive at their booths at fairs and festivals?

2. Why did Pam hesitate to be openly atheist?

3. Why did Pam's parents insist that she go to a Catholic college?

4. What stereotype was broken when Pam met her future husband?

5. What does Pam consider her intellectual home?

6. Why did Sam's nurse state was her reason for resigning? Does Sam think this is the real reason?

7. Which book, when read by the appropriate religious authorities, supposedly has the power of miraculous healing?

8. What book did Camilo compare The End of Faith to? Why?
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Replies
Skye I.February 20, 2018 at 1:44 PM
Discussion Question Answers:

Were you afraid, as a child, that God was watching your every move?

As a child I was terrified that God was watching me, especially once I began to question my faith. I used to work overtime to try to get on God's good side, so as a young kid (like 5 or 6) I would sing bible songs before bed. When I went to the beach at 7 or 8 I would write "I love Jesus" and "Jesus Saves" in the sand in the hopes that it might save somebody and that God would like me. Even today, when I do something that is "sinful" I get a nagging feeling in the back of my mind. Years of conditioning that God is watching and that you might go to Hell is hard to get out of your mind.

What would your heaven be like?

My heaven would be a calm, quiet place where I could relive my happy moment on Earth. Also: cats. Lots of cats would be in my heaven. Going off of this idea, if I had to pick a traditional religion's heaven to go to, I would want to go to Valhalla. Food. Mead. Huge, viking parties all the time. It sounds great.

How do you react to "I will pray for you"?

While I do not think it does any good, I take it as a compliment. To a theist, asking their creator to help me is the greatest thing they can do to help me in my time of trouble. They, in their worldview, are a tiny mortal going before the creator everything and asking him to help me out. That's really sweet in my opinion.
ReplyDelete
Replies
Kathryn M.February 22, 2018 at 12:22 AM
DQ- Do you have (or want) an "atheist group"?
I do not currently have a group, however, this part of the book was probably my favorite because I have thought about finding a group. I have talked with my husband about checking out the Unitarian church in Nashville, but we never got around to checking it out. So, I was very glad to read the descriptions of the Unitarian churches that some of these people visited. I'm very glad to know that so many atheists have gone to these churches, and have felt welcomed and at home there.
I have never really been part of a church, nor have I wanted to be. But, since I started college a few years ago, I have thought about finding somewhere to congregate with like-minded people many times. I felt like a Unitarian church would have a more open-minded and intellectual congregation. However, I did not know there would be non-believers as well. And, honestly, that makes it sound even better.
I think the fact that my family and most of my former close friends have all pulled away from me since I started college has a lot to do with why I even want a community to join when I never have before. I am the first in my family on my mother's side, and only the second on my father's side, to go for a college degree. So, I think that they feel as though we no longer relate, and that may be true unfortunately. I didn't want everyone to pull away. But, after seeing their thoughts and feelings throughout the last year and a half, I don't think we do have much in common anymore. Maybe, we never did. I just didn't know or see it until now.

ReplyDelete
Replies
Skye I.February 22, 2018 at 2:03 PM
Alternative Quiz Questions:

1. What guests did Betty's dad bring home to dinner?

2. What age did Margaret begin questioning her faith?

3. What Christian actions did Ulla find bizarre?

4. What has atheism allowed Chris, Betty, and Margaret to do?
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Replies

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Humanism

“We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an Afterlife. We serve as best we can the only abstraction with which we have any real familiarity, which is our community.” Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who also said...

"Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile."

For more on humanism see Stephen Law's Very Short Introduction-

"humanists believe science, and reason more generally, are invaluable tools we can and should apply to all areas of life. No beliefs should be considered off-limits and protected from rational scrutiny..."

	Five Books (@five_books)
"Humanists believe that morality is something that’s in us, with a basis in biology and built on by culture." fivebooks.com/best-books/hum… pic.twitter.com/tzXAVSCbbx

Death is nothing

"There is nothing beyond the universe (for it has no outer boundary). The human soul, too, is made of atoms, fine atoms that resemble wind and heat. When we die, our souls immediately dissolve, as the body will in time. There is, therefore, no afterlife. This theory of matter is also allied to the larger aim of generating tranquility, since misunderstandings about the nature of death are the biggest cause of anxiety. Death is nothing to us, Epicurus wrote, for that which is dissolved has no feelings, and that which has no feelings is nothing to us. Death is not painful, for the dead cannot feel anything; it is simply the dissolution of one particular cluster of atoms." Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World

Weird

According to a 2009 Harris poll the following percentages of Americans believe in some form of the afterlife and the soul:

Soul survival 71%
Heaven 75%
Hell 61%
Reincarnation 20%

Woody Allen said “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” I am often asked about the afterlife. My response: I’m for it! But the fact that I wish it were so does not make it so. And there is no scientific evidence that anything like a soul transcends the death of our physical bodies, or that there is life after life... Michael Shermer, "The Top Ten Weirdest Things People Believe"("Afterlife" is #2, just ahead of You-Know-Who)

Winterton C. Curtis

My first landlord was an old zoologist at the University of Missouri named Winterton Curtis (1875-1965). He was one of the scientific experts not allowed to testify at the Scopes Trial in Dayton TN in 1925. My parents (and I) rented rooms from him in his home on Westmount in Columbia Missouri while Dad attended Veterinary school at Mizzou in the early '60s, and later maintained a cordial friendship with him. He used to visit when I was a kid and pull dollar bills from my ears. Dad thought that must be why I was always so fascinated by the concept of evolution.

Dr. Curtis wrote, in 1921,

The humanistic philosophy of life, which flowered in Greece and which has blossomed again, is not the crude materialistic desire to eat, drink, and be merry. It is a spiritual joy in living and a confidence in the future, which makes this life a thing worthwhile. The otherworldliness of the Middle Ages does not satisfy the spiritual demands of modern times. Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology

Of the Scopes Trial itself, he wrote of the 1925 Dayton Tennessee spectacle:

The courtroom audience impressed me as honest country folk in jeans and calico. “Boobs" perhaps, as judged by Mencken, and holding all the prejudices of backwoods Christian orthodoxy, but nevertheless a significant section of the backbone of democracy in the U.S.A. They came to see their idol “the Great Commoner” and champion of the people meet the challenge to their faith. They left bewildered but with their beliefs unchanged despite the manhandling of their idol by the “Infidel” from Chicago.... A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial

Image result for evolutionary progress caricature

Requiescat in pace, Dr. C.

A selective evolutionary bibliography:

Michael Boulter, Darwin's Garden: Down House & the Origin of Species

Eugene Byrne and Simon Gurr, Darwin: A Graphic Biography

Matthew Chapman, Trials of the Monkey (Darwin's great-great...grandson comes to Dayton TN)

Winteron C. Curtis, "A Defense Expert's Impressions of the Scopes Trial" from D-Days at Dayton: Fundamentalism vs Evolution at Dayton, Tennessee (1956)

----"A damned-yankee professor in Little Dixie" (1957)

----Science and Human Affairs From the Viewpoint of Biology(1921)

Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life

Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist

----Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin's Views on Human Evolution

John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy

Randall Fuller, The Book That Changed America: How Darwin's Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation

Adam Gopnik, Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life

Jay Hosler, Sandwalk Adventures(a graphic novel)

Philip Kitcher, Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith

Edward Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion

Loyal Rue, Everybody's Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution

Rebecca Stott, Darwin's Ghosts: In Search of the First Evolutionists

Hanne Strager, A Modest Genius: The story of Darwin's life and how his ideas changed everything

Emma Townshend, Darwin's Dogs: How Darwin's Pets Helped Form a World-Changing Theory of Evolution

And don't overlook the compendious website Darwin online.

Darwin discussion questions, quotes etc. here.

Russell reads Mill

I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day at the age of eighteen I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. Why I Am Not a Christian

Atheist or Agnostic?

I never know whether I should say "Agnostic" or whether I should say "Atheist"... I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.

On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist, because when I say that I cannot prove that there is not a God, I ought to add equally that I cannot prove that there are not the Homeric gods... all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line.

-Bertrand Russell

Reasonable Atheism

We aim to show that religious believers who believe that atheists must be dishonest, irrational, amoral, untrustworthy, mean, deceitful, delusional, and unintelligent have false beliefs about atheists... Our argument is not that being an atheist makes one a splendid person, but that being an atheist does not make one a bad person. The difference between bad and good people does not turn on their religious beliefs or lack thereof.

-Scott Aikin & Robert Talisse, Reasonable Atheism: A Moral Case for Respectful Disbelief

The continuous human community

Atheist Spirit

Not believing in God does not prevent me from having a spirit.

The human spirit is far too important to be left to priests, mullahs or spiritualists. It is our noblest part, our highest function… Renouncing religion by no means implies renouncing spiritual life.

We are ephemeral beings who open onto eternity… This “openness” is the spirit itself. Metaphysics means thinking about these things; spirituality means experiencing them, exercising them, living them.

The universe is our home; the celestial vault is our horizon; eternity is here and now. This moves me far more than the Bible or the Koran. It astonishes me far more than miracles (if I believed in them). Compared to the universe, walking on water is a cinch!

Why would you need a God? The universe suffices. Why would you need a church? The world suffices. Why would you need faith? Experience suffices.

-Andre Comte-Sponville

Nature's God

“America’s mainstream religion is at bottom one form or another of popular deism, and popular deism is just atheism adapted to the limitations of the common understanding of things. To say that the United States is “one nation under God” is to conceal behind a euphemism the fact that it is and always has been one nation under nature. Whatever else we pretend to believe, we are in practice mostly atheists now--and for that we should be grateful.” p 426
― Matthew Stewart, Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic

Atheism & Philosophy

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Friday, February 16, 2018

Quizzes Feb 20, 22

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“My God is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.” Bruce Chatwin

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