PHIL 3310. Exploring the philosophical, ethical, spiritual, existential, social, and personal implications of a godless universe, and supporting their study at Middle Tennessee State University & beyond.
Fifty years on, Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" remains an essential, surprisingly upbeat guide to our final act on Earth.
...Only by confronting our own mortality, Becker argued, could we live more fully. To hold that terror is to see more clearly what matters and what does not — and how important it is to grasp the difference. Contemplating death is like a cold plunge for the soul, a prick to the amygdala. You emerge renewed, your vision clarified. "To talk about hope is to give the right focus to the problem," Becker wrote... nyt
"It is said that the Devil has all the best tunes. Whether or not true, humanist lyrics often go unnoticed. Maybe that is because they are sensible, reasonable and usually sung somewhat quietly, not ranted from mountaintops, preached from pulpits. Many distinguished voices are humanist even though with no ‘humanist’ label.
Humanist voices, with or without the label, deserve to be heard – such as:
Charles Darwin: I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: You take the way from man, not to man.
Mark Twain: God’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.
Albert Einstein: A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.
Richard Rorty: The utopian social hope which sprang up in nineteenth-century Europe is still the noblest imaginative creation of which we have record.
Philip Pullman: The true end of human life … is not redemption by a non-existent Son of God, but the gaining and transmission of wisdom.
We could add today, for example, the voices of Salman Rushdie and Jonathan Miller, Terry Pratchett and Christopher Hitchens, Margaret Atwood and Richard Dawkins. From earlier times, we would hear Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, Bernard Shaw and Manabendra Nath Roy. Earlier, we find David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill and Giuseppe Verdi – to mention a few.
From Midwest America’s Christian fundamentalisms to Middle Eastern and Far Eastern Muslims, many believers understand that their duty is to convert, or deal in some way with, non-believers – with ‘devils in disguise’. This affects their ethics, politics and daily living, leading some determined to bring non-believers to see the religious light or, at least, to live according to religious law. When humanists become vocal about the dangers of religion, they therefore are not making a big fuss about kindly and tolerant Church of England vicars who share tea and cucumber sandwiches with parishioners. They are rightly making a big fuss about those whose godly belief leads to the repression of many here on earth, be it through death threats to questioners of religious belief, or punishment to women who dare to remove the veil in public..."
--"Humanism: A Beginner's Guide (updated edition) (Beginner's Guides)" by Peter Cave: https://a.co/1cKWQjT
I'm reading Daniel Dennett's memoir "I've Been Thinking", which begins with the near-death experience that generated my favorite written testimonial of natural gratitude.
"ON OCTOBER 24, 2006, I WAS RUSHED BY AMBULANCE from my office at Tufts University to the emergency room at Lahey Clinic, where doctors discovered the problem: the inner and outer layers of my aorta had come apart—an aortic dissection—and I could die at any moment if the blood from my heart burst out into my chest cavity. The day before I had been in Mackerel Cove on Swan’s Island in Maine on my sailboat, Xanthippe. This was the last cruise of the season, joined by my Swedish friend Bo Dahlbom and his son Fredrik, and as I slowly pulled on the heavy anchor line I felt a slight pain in my chest, reminding me of the pain I had felt seven years earlier when I’d had a “silent heart attack” that had led to a triple-bypass operation. We sailed back to Blue Hill in a stiff headwind, moored the boat, took off the heavy sails, put the inflatable dinghy on the roof of my car, and went back to the farm, before I made a quick trip to the local hospital, where I was told I had not had a heart attack but should see my cardiologist as soon as I could. The next day we drove to Tufts, where I asked the department secretary if she had any Tylenol, and she wisely called the ambulance instead.
One of the little-known side effects of open-heart surgery is ministrokes caused by debris from the operation clogging up the capillaries in the brain, and my cardiologist explicitly warned the surgical team that since my mind was my life, they should strive to avoid turning me into a “pumphead”—the ugly term heart surgeons use in private for those whose brains are damaged by the heart-lung machine. After the operation, before they removed me from the machine, they reversed the flow of blood to my brain, sending it into the veins and out of the arteries, hoping to flush out any debris that was about to disable my res cogitans, my thinking thing (my brain, not, as Descartes would have it, a distinct and immaterial substance). So I’ve been brainwashed, quite literally. Did it work? As soon as I could sit up in my hospital bed after the operation I got out my trusty laptop and wrote a short piece to see if I still had my marbles. It was put on Edge.org, where it attracted a lot of attention. What do you think?
Thank Goodness! (November 2, 2006)
There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A. J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder..."
“I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. I want to grow really old with my wife, Annie, whom I dearly love. I want to see my younger children grow up and to play a role in their character and intellectual development. I want to meet still unconceived grandchildren. There are scientific problems whose outcomes I long to witness—such as the exploration of many of the worlds in our Solar System and the search for life elsewhere. I want to learn how major trends in human history, both hopeful and worrisome, work themselves out: the dangers and promise of our technology, say; the emancipation of women; the growing political, economic, and technological ascendancy of China; interstellar flight. If there were life after death, I might, no matter when I die, satisfy most of these deep curiosities and longings. But if death is nothing more than an endless dreamless sleep, this is a forlorn hope. Maybe this perspective has given me a little extra motivation to stay alive. The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better, it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look Death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”
--Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
“Humans have limitations, and no one knows this better than scientists. But a multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a “spirit world” than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.”
—Carl Sagan, 1995
December is a time for remembrance. We connect to others while simultaneously taking stock of another year gone by. A turn of the calendar. Perhaps some more wrinkles and a few more gray hairs. We scroll though celebrity deaths, ongoing political shenanigans, follow the latest natural disaster, or crisis, or war with angst for the future. Maybe we also focus on love and kindness if we’re eternal optimists as many in our humanist camp tend to be. We may glitter and glow from new relationships or mourn the loss of friends and family. One thing is for certain, change is constant both in terms of deprivation and the gains we make across the many social worlds we all inhabit...
When Sagan reminded us that we are all “star stuff” he was speaking about our connection to each other and the universe. An idea that demands we rethink every “us and them” scenario. Every drop of spilled blood over the eons in hate. Every war for resources and territory that have plagued and continues to plague our species on this small blue dot of a planet.
Conversely, Christopher Hitchens was tonally very different from Sagan. Hitchens was a born fighter, a journalist and a provocateur... The Humanist, continues
My comment:
I admire them both, but Sagan was more than just "tonally" different... his less pugilistic style also reflected a greater sympathy for the varieties of ways in which humans seek meaning and value in their lives. Ann Druyan rightly called attention to Carl's appreciation of William James's sense of religion as a feeling of being at home in the cosmos, a sense which he shared but which (like James) he said had less to do with God than with a deep aspiration for "life, more life..." And that makes all the more poignant the early exits of both Carl and Christopher.
"… I sometimes think that the modern world's true cultural divide is not between believers and unbelievers but between those who think life is a puzzle that is capable of being solved and those who believe it's a mystery that ought to be approached by way of silence and humility. I am a problem solver by disposition, but in my heart I am strongly on the side of the mysterians.
As an institution, the Catholic Church is notably hierarchical and dogmatic, and it has often presented itself not just as a solution to the puzzle of life but as the only possible solution. Yet the church has also always been a home for the kind of mystical, contemplative, apophatic faith that Asle represents. It is the faith of the 13th-century and early 14th-century German friar Meister Eckhart, whom Asle quotes at several points. It is the faith of the 16th-century mystic Teresa of Avila and her follower, John of the Cross. It is the faith of the 20th-century theologian Karl Rahner, who said that "The devout Christian of the future will either be a 'mystic'—someone who has 'experienced something'—or will cease to be anything at all." Each of these figures was formally investigated for heterodox belief during their lifetimes, but all are recognized today as vital communicators of Catholic truth.
It's a mistake to treat their tradition as a watered-down version of the more certain expressions of faith typically associated with organized religion. The most sincere believers I've known have also been the most humble, the most perplexed. It may be that those who feel most powerfully the presence of God in their lives likewise feel most powerfully the impossibility of adequately capturing that presence in words. And it may be that those for whom God is not a symbol or a cudgel but a lived reality find this reality most mysterious.
Of course, this kind of faith has its critics. On the one hand, many believers consider it a capitulation to secular culture, perhaps even heretical in its mystical acceptance of the many paths to God. On the other hand, many atheists consider it an intellectual sleight-of-hand, an effort to launder with philosophical abstractions the fundamentally irrational and intolerant business of belief.You can call that religion if you want,they'll say, but we all know that's not what most people mean by the word.
To which one can only respond as Asle would: You're probably right about that too, but then again maybe it isn't so simple."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/opinion/jon-fosse-nobel-god.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse
"…how striking it is that when someone has a religious-conversion experience, it is almost always to the religion or one of the religions that are mainly believed in his or her community. Because there are so many other possibilities. For example, it's very rare in the West that someone has a religious-conversion experience in which the principal deity has the head of an elephant and is painted blue. That is quite rare. But in India there is a blue, elephant-headed god that has many devotees. And seeing depictions of this god there is not so rare. How is it that the apparition of elephant gods is restricted to Indians and doesn't happen except in places where there is a strong Indian tradition? How is that apparitions of the Virgin Mary are common in the West but rarely occur in places in the East where there isn't a strong Christian tradition? Why don't the details of the religious belief cross over the cultural barriers? It is hard to explain unless the details are entirely determined by the local culture and have nothing to do with something that is externally valid.
Put another way, any preexisting predisposition to religious belief can be powerfully influenced by the indigenous culture, wherever you happen to grow up. And especially if the children are exposed early to a particular set of doctrine and music and art and ritual, then it is as natural as breathing, which is why religions make such a large effort to attract the very young.
Or let's take another possibility. Suppose a new prophet arises who claims a revelation from God, and that revelation contravenes the revelations of all previous religions. How is the average person, someone not so fortunate as to have received this revelation personally, to decide whether this new revelation is valid or not? The only dependable way is through natural theology. You have to ask, "What is the evidence?" And it's insufficient to say, "Well, there is this extremely charismatic person who said that he had a conversion experience." Not enough. There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can't all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It's even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is."
— The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan
https://a.co/bvUn4a7
It's easy to imagine divine disclosure more direct than subliminal, Carl Sagan observed:
"...it is perfectly possible to imagine that God, not an omnipotent or an omniscient god, just a reasonably competent god, could have made absolutely clear-cut evidence of His existence. Let me give a few examples.
Imagine that there is a set of holy books in all cultures in which there are a few enigmatic phrases that God or the gods tell our ancestors are to be passed on to the future with no change. Very important to get it exactly right. Now, so far that’s not very different from the actual circumstances of alleged holy books. But suppose that the phrases in question were phrases that we would recognize today that could not have been recognized then. Simple example:The Sun is a star. Now, nobody knew that, let’s say, in the sixth century B.C., when the Jews were in the Babylonian exile and picked up the Babylonian cosmology from the principal astronomers of the time. Ancient Babylonian science is the cosmology that is still enshrined in the book of Genesis. Suppose instead the story was “Don’t forget, the Sun is a star.” Or “Don’t forget,Mars is a rusty place with volcanoes.Mars, you know, that red star? That’s a world. It has volcanoes, it’s rusty, there are clouds, there used to be rivers. There aren’t anymore. You’ll understand this later. Trust me. Right now, don’t forget.”
Or, “A body in motion tends to remain in motion. Don’t think that bodies have to be moved to keep going. It’s just the opposite, really. So later on you’ll understand that if you didn’t have friction, a moving object would just keep moving.” Now, we can imagine the patriarchs scratching their heads in bewilderment, but after all it’s God telling them. So they would copy it down dutifully, and this would be one of the many mysteries in holy books that would then go on to the future until we could recognize the truth, realize that no one back then could possibly have figured it out, and therefore deduce the existence of God.
There are many cases that you can imagine like this. How about“Thou shalt not travel faster than light”? Okay, you might argue that nobody was at imminent risk of breaking that commandment. It would have been a curiosity: “We don’t understand what that one’s about, but all the others we abide by.” Or“There are no privileged frames of reference.”Or how about some equations?Maxwell’s lawsin Egyptian hieroglyphics or ancient Chinese characters or ancient Hebrew. And all the terms are defined: “This is the electric field, this is the magnetic field.” We don’t know what those are, but we’ll just copy them down, and then later, sure enough, it’s Maxwell’s laws or theSchrödinger equation. Anything like that would have been possible had God existed and had God wanted us to have evidence of His existence. Or in biology. How about, “Two strands entwined is the secret of life”? You may say that the Greeks were onto that because of the caduceus. You know, in the American army all the physicians wore the caduceus on their lapels, and various medical insurance schemes also use it. And it is connected with, if not the existence of life, at least saving it. But there are very few people who use this to say that the correct religion is the religion of the ancient Greeks, because they had the one symbol that survives critical scrutiny later on.
This business of proofs of God, had God wished to give us some, need not be restricted to this somewhat questionable method of making enigmatic statements to ancient sages and hoping they would survive. God could have engraved theTen Commandments on the Moon.Large. Ten kilometers across per commandment. And nobody could see it from the Earth but then one day large telescopes would be invented or spacecraft would approach the Moon, and there it would be, engraved on the lunar surface. People would say, “How could that have gotten there?” And then there would be various hypotheses, most of which would be extremely interesting.
Or why not a hundred-kilometercrucifix in Earth orbit? God could certainly do that. Right? Certainly, create the universe? A simple thing like putting a crucifix in Earth orbit? Perfectly possible. Why didn’t God do things of that sort? Or, put another way, why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?
I think this is a serious issue. If we believe, as most of the great theologians hold, that religious truth occurs only when there is aconvergence between our knowledge of the natural world and revelation, why is it that this convergence is so feeble when it could easily have been so robust?
So, to conclude, I would like to quote from Protagoras in the fifth century B.C., the opening lines of his Essay on the Gods:
About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen."
The belief that spectres and evil spirits can invade a body and take agency over a person’s actions has been found in almost every culture throughout human history. Stories of crazed lunatics performing supernatural acts like climbing up walls and shampooing a buffalo are abundant, but most can be dismissed as undiagnosed psychiatric conditions that release stress hormones, such as cortisol and adrenaline, which can cause abnormal feats of hysterical strength, like when a terrified mother lifts a bus off the ground to save her Kenny Chesney CDs, or when my uncle Leonard inexplicably ran onto the track and won the Belmont Stakes.
There are, however, rare instances in which medical science and psychiatric treatments are not enough, and the subject may require spiritual intervention. One must look no further than scripture, to the Gospel of Mark, which describes Jesus’ time in the Gerasene region where he cast a legion of demons out of a man using only a mackerel and a bazooka. The Pharisees accused Jesus of being in league with Satan because of his ability to command demons so easily, to which Jesus replied, “I’m the best aroundeth, nothing’s gonna ever keep me downeth.” Then he got on his donkey, gave the deniers yeast infections, and rode back to Nazareth giggling and asking his Apostles if they saw what he did back there...
"I want to show people, look, the magic of life as evolved, that's thrilling!" says philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. "You don't need miracles."
"...In his new memoir, I've Been Thinking, Dennett, a professor emeritus at Tufts University and author of multiple books for popular audiences, traces the development of his worldview, which he is keen to point out is no less full of awe or gratitude than that of those more inclined to the supernatural. 'I want people to see what a meaningful, happy life I've had with these beliefs," says Dennett, who is 81. "I don't need mystery...'" nyt
"Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!" Robert G. Ingersoll, The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. III
Today we celebrate the 190th birthday of Robert Green Ingersoll. The Center for Inquiry is the caretaker of Ingersoll's birthplace home in Dresden, New York, and we consider it an honor to be the guardians of The Great Agnostic's early home and personal artifacts.
Although Ingersoll's name has, sadly, been lost to history for many Americans, he was a celebrity in his time and remains a hero to freethinkers everywhere. He crisscrossed the country delivering nearly 1,500 speeches on freethought, reform, politics, and the arts to sold-out audiences that sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands! These speeches were three to four hours in length and were delivered by memory.
He was, for all intents and purposes, a rockstar in the Victorian era. In fact, during his time, no human being had been seen or heard by more Americans—or would be until the advent of motion pictures, radio, and television.
Although Ingersoll is no longer with us, CFI has picked up the torch of reason and freethought and carries it forward in his name.
Today, on the anniversary of his birth, we have an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come since Ingersoll's legendary life—and yet how far we still have to go.
At this very moment, we find ourselves in the midst of a populist movement—fueled by the ideology of Christian nationalism and determined to dismantle the institutions of American democracy. I am reminded of the words of Robert Green Ingersoll, words that I wish would enter the hearts and minds of those who are so lost to their religion that they have forgotten their oath to the Constitution and their commitment to freedom of conscience … for all. He states:
The truth is, our government is not founded upon the rights of gods, but upon the rights of men. Our Constitution was framed, not to declare and uphold the deity of Christ, but the sacredness of humanity. Ours is the first government made by the people and for the people. It is the only nation with which the gods have had nothing to do. And yet there are some judges dishonest and cowardly enough to solemnly decide that this is a Christian country, and that our free institutions are based upon the infamous laws of Jehovah.
Robert Green Ingersoll, "Individuality" (1873) from "The Gods and Other Lectures"
It shocks me that Ingersoll's words are as true and applicable today as they were over 100 years ago. I wish that we could celebrate this birthday milestone by proclaiming, "job done," but we still have many miles to go.
We will continue to work toward Ingersoll's and CFI's shared vision of a better world where people confront challenges using the tools of science and reason guided by compassion and respect for the dignity of every individual.
If you share this vision, I hope you will partner with us by making a donation to this important work.
Thank you for all you do for CFI and for taking a moment to honor the life and legacy of the "most remarkable man most people never heard of," Robert Green Ingersoll.
"..,this isn't an "atheist club" for Congress, as some critics have suggested. This is just a group of lawmakers dedicated to promoting reason-based public policy, keeping church and state separate, opposing discrimination against non-religious people, and championing freedom of thought around the world. There's really no reason anyone should be against this. That's why there's nothing hypocritical about the fact that nearly every member of this Caucus is religious…"
Belief in the supernatural is at an all-time low, according to a new survey from Gallup. While the majority of Americans still believe in God, angels, Heaven, Hell, and Satan, those majorities continue to dwindle, which could be bad news for the religious institutions that treat fiction as fact.
“That kind of skeptical, questioning, "don't accept what authority tells you" attitude of science — is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other.”
"What makes my attitude towards religion complex is that, although I consider some form of personal religion highly desirable, and feel many people unsatisfactory through the lack of it, I cannot accept the theology of any well-known religion, and I incline to think that most churches at most times have done more harm than good." — Bertrand Russell
Houses of worship are, uniquely, one-stop shops of meaning, continuity and support.
..."If all the nones were represented by just five people, one of them would be an atheist, another one would be agnostic and three of them would be nothing in particulars...” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opinion/religion-affiliation-community.html?smid=em-share
Most things you ‘know’ about science and religion are myths or half-truths that grew up in the last years of the nineteenth century and remain widespread today.
The true history of science and religion is a human one. It’s about the role of religion in inspiring, and strangling, science before the scientific revolution. It’s about the sincere but eccentric faith and the quiet, creeping doubts of the most brilliant scientists in history – Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Maxwell, Einstein. Above all it’s about the question of what it means to be human and who gets to say – a question that is more urgent in the twenty-first century than ever before.
From eighth-century Baghdad to the frontiers of AI today, via medieval Europe, nineteenth-century India and Soviet Russia, Magisteria sheds new light on this complex historical landscape. Rejecting the thesis that science and religion are inevitably at war, Nicholas Spencer illuminates a compelling and troubled relationship that has definitively shaped human history.
The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway
...Some people, usually self-described atheists and agnostics, said they didn’t miss anything and were happy to be rid of anything resembling worship. Unsurprisingly, those groups had the highest rate of dechurching of all: 94 percent for atheists and 88 percent for agnostics.
But many said they did miss aspects of traditional attendance, and often these people still believed in God or certain aspects of their previous faith traditions. They’d sought replacements for traditional worship, and the most common were spending time in nature, meditation and physical activity — basically anything that got them out of their own heads and the anxieties of the material world...
"…I detest the call to the morning prayer — that's when they execute those young kids who did nothing but fight for their rights. I have begun to question Islam. I believe that our generation doesn't truly believe in it, a religion that for so many years, in school, in the university, was imposed on us. If we are fighting them, then why should we believe in the same things they do?" … Dreaming of a New Iran
In the face of world-altering invention, with the power of today’s tech barons so concentrated, it can seem as though ordinary people have no hope of influencing the machines that will soon be cognitively superior to us all. But there is tremendous power in defining ideals, even if they ultimately remain out of reach. Considering all that is at stake, we have to at least try.
Transparency should be a core tenet in the new human exchange of ideas—people ought to disclose whenever an artificial intelligence is present or has been used in communication. This ground rule could prompt discipline in creating more-human (and human-only) spaces, as well as a less anonymous web.
… Now is the time, as well, to recommit to making deeper connections with other people. Live videochat can collapse time and distance, but such technologies are a poor substitute for face-to-face communication, especially in settings where creative collaboration or learning is paramount. The pandemic made this painfully clear. Relationships cannot and should not be sustained in the digital realm alone, especially as AI further erodes our understanding of what is real. Tapping a “Like” button is not friendship; it’s a data point. And a conversation with an artificial intelligence is one-sided—an illusion of connection. Read the full article.
Earlier this month, in one of the funniest repercussions from the right-wing book-banning crazy, the KJV Bible was removed from the shelves in one Utah school district after an unnamed parent said it violated a law prohibiting school books with "pornographic or indecent" content.
Republican lawmakers in the state are now furious that their attempts to censor certain books have ensnared their personal favorite book in the process.
A quick recap in case you need it: Last year, Utah lawmakers passed a bill paving the way for the banning of school books that contain "pornographic or indecent" content. Those words, however, were not defined, allowing right-wing groups to declare just about anything they don't like as unfit for kids.
That's why it was amusing when at least one parent moved to get the Bible on that list... Hemant Mehta
Why Do People Lose Their Religion? More Than 7,000 Readers Shared Their Stories.
For some, faith is malleable.
...three trends emerged. Several had switched religious affiliation more than once; I'll call them seekers. Others had an abrupt break from church in their youth, after which they became atheists or agnostics; I'll call them skeptics. And there were others who drifted away from religion fairly late in life; I'll call them slow faders, because their religious evolutions took time... nyt
Across the world, the number of non-religious people is growing all the time. It is estimated there are 1.17 billion people in the world who are religiously unaffiliated, which means they identify as atheists, agnostics or describe their religion as "nothing in particular."
Humanists are non-religious people who strive to lead fulfilling, meaningful and ethical lives, using reason and empathy to guide their decisions and actions.
Humanists base their understanding of the world on reason and science, rejecting supernatural or divine beliefs.
Humanists reject all forms of racism and prejudice, and believe in living in harmony with one another, respecting everyone's human rights, including the right to freedom of religion and belief.
Humanists believe we have a responsibility to respect and care for one another, and to protect the natural world.
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. –Winterton C. Curtis (1875-1965; Mizzou zoologist, my first landlord, Scopes witness in Dayton TN 1925), Science and Human Affairs from the viewpoint of biology(1922)
The full-length, published version of this article can be found here.
The Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) share more than just the belief that Abraham was an important prophet. They also hold in common the view that God is the perfectly good creator of the world who has designed it so that any gratuitous evil is of our choosing rather than God’s responsibility.
The origin story is the same in outline, and it is found in Genesis. God placed Adam and Eve in a garden free of evil. However, Adam and Eve knowingly and willingly disobeyed God. They introduced evil into the world by rebelling against their creator. God bore no fault in their fall.
Suppose we grant that there is a creator. It does not follow that humans have an overriding moral obligation to praise and obey the being who created them. On the contrary, if the creator is responsible for a morally unsupportable evil, then it follows that the creator is not perfectly good.
Consider the following origin story, which we can call “The Garden of Blameless Disobedience”. In this story, the creator gives Adam and Eve conflicting commands. Adam is told they can eat every fruit in the garden except apples, and Eve is told they can eat anything except strawberries. Suppose Adam eats strawberries, and Eve takes great delight in the occasional apple. Each disobeys a command the creator has given. However, assume each has an all-things-considered obligation, or one that trumps all other commitments, to obey the creator. In that case, the creator could not have a morally sufficient reason for giving them conflicting commands, because no moral good could possibly result. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are wholly responsible for introducing gratuitous evil into the world. In contrast, in the Garden of Blameless Disobedience, the creator is responsible for the evil and hence the creator is not God.
There is a variant of “The Garden of Blameless Disobedience” in which Adam and Eve are also not culpable for introducing evil into the world. We can call it “The Garden of Blameless Confusion”. In it, the creator commands Eve not to eat strawberries, but the creator does not speak to Adam. However, Adam sincerely but mistakenly believes that God has given him a command that the only fruit they cannot eat are apples. In this garden, the creator designs Adam so that, through no fault of his own, he does not reliably form beliefs about what the creator has commanded. He accepts some commands as originating from his creator when they do not. As a result, Adam and Eve quarrel unnecessarily about what fruit they can and cannot eat. Again, assuming they have a paramount or overriding obligation to obey their creator, Adam’s sincere but mistaken belief that they should not eat apples can serve no greater moral purpose; there cannot be a morally sufficient reason for doing what is all things considered morally wrong. In the Garden of Blameless Confusion, the creator does not deserve unsurpassed praise and unquestioning obedience and therefore the creator is not God.
My argument in “God and the Problem of Blameless Moral Ignorance” is that our world is much more like the Garden of Blameless Disobedience or the Garden of Blameless Confusion than the Garden of Eden.
Any creator whom we have an overriding obligation to praise and obey cannot be responsible for or the cause of any of our wrongdoing. God cannot create a state-of-affairs in which we stumble into evil. But suppose there is a creator who is the architect of a world in which we sometimes blamelessly attribute false commands to her or him. In that case, that creator is responsible for the ensuing evil. Since it is morally better that we don’t disobey God, even unwittingly, or violate one of our fundamental moral obligations, it is not enough that we are not culpable when we do. That we are blameless does not exonerate the creator.
Some theists agree. They deny that God is responsible for our mistaken moral beliefs or for attributing commands to Him that he did not give.
Nonetheless, they also hold that every acceptance of a false command and every fundamental mistaken moral belief is due to sin. They believe God has given us a faculty, the “sensus divinitatis”, which, somewhat like a conscience, provides all who do not hate God with knowledge of His existence and basic demands. According to them, all false beliefs about our fundamental moral obligations and God’s commands originate in pride and a rebellious desire to direct one’s life rather than submit to God’s will.
However, we have overwhelming evidence that this latter claim is false. While it is undoubtedly the case that human beings often knowingly and willingly do what is wrong, there are also many instances in which people do what is wrong while sincerely aiming at the good and fulfilling God’s will.
Consider the following example (I discuss more in the paper). Some theists believe God has commanded them to provide women with abortions under certain circumstances. Others think that God has forbidden abortion in every instance. Can this difference in belief in every instance be attributed to a hatred of God? Surely not.
There are a host of cases in which sincere believers, roughly equal in charity and devotional practices, disagree about what our fundamental moral obligations are.
Given the existence of blameless moral ignorance, it is inconceivable that God exists. God cannot be responsible for evil which serves no greater moral purpose. Any creator who designs human beings so that they are blamelessly mistaken about what they most ought to do is a lesser god.
There cannot be a morally sufficient reason for either causing or allowing rational agents to do what is, all-things-considered, morally wrong. For the Creator of the world to be worthy of the highest praise and unquestioning obedience, the moral structure of the world must be good, and recognizably so.
F. J. Elbert received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on the implications of blameless fundamental moral disagreement in the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
Hundreds were drawn to a remote wilderness in southeastern Kenya by the End Times preaching of pastor Paul Mackenzie. Relatives and ex-members tried to intervene, but some did not want to be rescued.
...The sister said, “He was happy, because he thought he would be dying soon for Jesus.”
As for Mr. Mackenzie, she added, “he is a murderer.”
"Emerson was a genuine moralist whose mistrust of moralism led him continually to complicate and deflect his own formulations. He was a preacher whose message was: Don’t listen to preachers. “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching,”33 as he put it in the essay on “Self-Reliance.”
We are still going to church, in other words, but we’re no longer there to hear someone else tell us what to do. Emerson represented the tradition of the New England churchman, which is one reason he became an honored and respected figure despite his anti-institutionalism; and, at the same time, he represented that tradition’s final displacement. Unitarianism had rescued the integrity of the individual conscience from Calvinism. Emerson rescued it from Unitarianism—which is why after his famous address to the Harvard Divinity School in 1838, in which he scandalized the Unitarians by renouncing organized Christianity in favor of personal revelation, he was not invited to speak at Harvard again for thirty years.34
By the time he returned, religion was no longer an issue most people in Cambridge cared to fight about; the last of the anti-Darwinists were just going under. “I regard it as the irresistible effect of the Copernican astronomy to have made the theological scheme of Redemption absolutely incredible,” Emerson announced in 1832, in a sermon in which he also announced his disbelief in a supernatural Jesus.35 He had, as usual, gotten there about a generation ahead of schedule."
"The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America": https://a.co/9b9ayvq
…His thesis, as he wrote in the book, was straightforward: "It becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don't hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.
Rabbi Kushner also wrote:
"I don't know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don't understand are at work. I cannot believe that God 'sends' illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don't believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best.
"'What did I do to deserve this?' is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is, 'If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?'"
He was making the case that dark corners of the universe endure where God has not yet succeeded in making order out of chaos. "And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless," he wrote, "because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God's goodness."
Unpersuaded, the journalist, critic and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, reduced Rabbi Kushner's thesis more dialectically: "diminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being — to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.
"In effect," he wrote, "we need to join Him in rooting for good — our job is to help cheer Him up."
Rabbi Kushner argued, however, that God was omnipotent as a wellspring of empathy and love…
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/books/rabbi-harold-s-kushner-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, Reassuring Best-Selling Author, Dies at 88
