Rushdie on "Charlie Hebdo"

Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect. Salman Rushdie

The never-ending party

“It’s considered perfectly normal in this society to approach dying people who you don’t know, but who are unbelievers, and say, ‘Now are you gonna change your mind [about the existence of God]?’ That is considered almost a polite question.” “It’s a religious falsification that people like myself scream for a priest at the end. Most of us go to our end with dignity.”

After spending years as an unapologetic atheist, Hitchens also wasn’t going to start believing in an afterlife  — or what he half jokingly called “The Never Ending Party.” 

Zuckerman Unbound

Living the Secular Life by Phil Zuckerman, reviewed by Susan Jacoby.

Adults unaffiliated with any religion now make up nearly a fifth of the American population, but only about 30 percent of this group chose to identify themselves as atheists or agnostics in a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center. The rest described themselves as “nothing in particular,” giving rise to the media label “Nones.”

While slightly more than half of Americans say they would be less likely to vote for an atheist for president, the comparable figure in 2007 was closer to two-thirds. It is not inconceivable that the negative American image of atheists is beginning to change in a fashion that might one day resemble the dramatic shift in opinion about gay rights 

For now, though, many atheists find it impossible to eschew a slightly defensive tone, calibrated to show that they are as virtuous as anyone else. Zuckerman, whose previous works include “Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment” (2008), is no exception. He extols a secular morality grounded in the “empathetic reciprocity embedded in the Golden Rule, accepting the inevitability of our eventual death, navigating life with a sober pragmatism grounded in this world...” (continues)

Atheism and death

The Friendly Atheist passes along Greta Chritina's "Comforting Thoughts About Death":

Greta Christina just released a short ebook compiling several essays on the subject of death. It’s called, very straightforwardly, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God.

Contrary to popular prejudice, atheists do death just fine, thanks.* Another great read on the topic: Samuel Scheffler's Death and the Afterlife, whose main message was featured in The Stone:

 I believe in life after death.

No, I don’t think that I will live on as a conscious being after my earthly demise. I’m firmly convinced that death marks the unqualified and irreversible end of our lives.

My belief in life after death is more mundane. What I believe is that other people will continue to live after I myself have died. You probably make the same assumption in your own case. Although we know that humanity won’t exist forever, most of us take it for granted that the human race will survive, at least for a while, after we ourselves are gone.

Because we take this belief for granted, we don’t think much about its significance. Yet I think that this belief plays an extremely important role in our lives, quietly but critically shaping our values, commitments and sense of what is worth doing. Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths — even that of complete strangers — matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones... (continues)

I think I sense a developing theme for the next rendition of our course: "Atheism, death, and life's rich pagaent," maybe?

Or more broadly, perhaps, we could subsume the mortality theme under Varieties of Irreligious Experience. We'd begin with appropriate selections from James's Varieties, making common ground with the godless over his point that the religious impulse is less a speculation concerning an invisible transcendent deity behind life, than about the quality and quantity of life itself. Then we'd read Sagan's Varieties, Philip Kitcher's Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism, Bayer & Figdor's Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart, maybe Sam Harris's Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion. Russell and Comte-Sponville too. So many possibilities.

I've also been pondering the possibility of doing something with John Rawls' "veil of ignorance"  thought experiment, trying to enlist students in the exercise of contemplating a godless universe without explicit knowledge of their own religious or secular personal histories. If you didn't know your own attitude towards life and its earthly terminus, how would you read these texts? What might you conclude? What principles of (im)mortality might you prefer?
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*Case in point:

In Carl Sagan's Death, an Amazing Life Lesson

Posted by Ross Pomeroy December 22, 2014

18 years ago last Saturday, the human race lost one of its finest. Carl Sagan passed away. As an astrophysicist, a science communicator, a husband, and a father, Carl Sagan spent much of his adult life inspiring others. Not by spouting flowery falsehoods, but by conveying -- as perhaps no one else could -- the radiant majesty of reality.

Sagan's death at age 62 to myelodysplasia, a rare blood disorder, represented one of the harsher realities of life. But while undeniably unfortunate, it was no less beautiful. As told by his wife Ann Druyan to magician and skeptic James Randi:

"I held Carl’s Hand as he died and I looked at him and he smiled and I said ‘Goodbye, Carl.’ And he said 'Goodbye, Ann.' And he closed his eyes and he died. We knew as we said those words we were never going to see one another again, and it was okay. It was very sad. But it was okay."

"Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions," Druyan later recalled. "I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is."

Sagan knew that death represents the final brushstroke of a glorious painting. During our limited time in the universe, we get to style the work of art that is our life as we see fit. What an opportunity that is!

"My parents taught me that even though it’s not forever — because it’s not forever — being alive is a profoundly beautiful thing for which each of us should feel deeply grateful," Carl's daughter Sasha wrote in April. "If we lived forever it would not be so amazing."

"We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . ." Ann Dryuan wrote. "That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully inCosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years... I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful."

http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/12/how_carl_sagan_died.html

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newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4742/ways-to-go-meeting-death-without-religion 
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Hitch on the never-ending party - http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/is-there-an-afterlife-christopher-hitchens-speculates-in-an-animated-video.html

Wickedly unfair

The trouble with the Christian idea of Lucifer the devil is that neither Jesus nor the early prophets believed in him. The idea of the devil originated later, and was based solely on the King James Version of the Bible in English, when Lucifer was mistranslated on purpose, to help explain evil in the world and terrify anyone tempted by the wages of sin. That seems wickedly unfair to a dazzling planet...

Diane Ackerman, Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day

Created sick, commanded to be well

A student yesterday told us that God is love, that her purpose in life is to share and spread it, and that all who "deny" God are destined to an eternity in Hell. After all, we're all given a choice. And, none of us deserves grace.

But, what if someone sincerely disbelieves in that loving God, on the basis of an honest evaluation of the evidence and its absence? Their choice, their foul, their eternal damnation. Feel the love.

It's certainly not the first time I've heard the casual expression of such breathtaking inhumanity in my classroom, here in God's country. But this time it really rang a bell, on a day when we also discussed Hume's Law and its corollary that Ought implies Can. I was reminded of Mel Gibson, going with "the chair" and consigning his saintly God-fearing wife to the flames:

“Put it this way. My wife is a saint. She’s a much better person than I am. Honestly. She’s, like, Episcopalian, Church of England. She prays, she believes in God, she knows Jesus, she believes in that stuff. And it’s just not fair if she doesn’t make it, she’s better than I am. But that is a pronouncement from the chair. I go with it.”

And, I was reminded of the late Saint Hitch's lament for theistic incoherence: created sick, commanded to be sound.

Oh, wearisome condition of humanity, Born under one law, to another bound; Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity, Created sick, commanded to be sound.
― Fulke Greville (quoted by Christopher Hitchens)

What we have here, picked from no mean source, is a distillation of precisely what is twisted and immoral in the faith mentality. Its essential fanaticism, its consideration of the human being as raw material, and its fantasy of purity. 

Once you assume a creator and a plan, it makes us objects, in a cruel experiment, whereby we are created sick and commanded to be well. I'll repeat that. Created sick, and then ordered to be well.

And over us to supervise this, is installed a celestial dictatorship; a kind of divine North Korea. Exigent, I would say, more than exigent greedy for uncritical praise from dawn until dusk. And swift to punish the original sins with which it so tenderly gifted us in the very first place. An eternal, unalterable, judge, jury and executioner, against whom there could be no appeal. And who wasn't finished with you even when you died. However! Let no one say there's no cure! Salvation is offered! Redemption, indeed, is promised, at the low price, of the surrender of your critical faculties. 

Religion, it might be said, must be said, would have to admit, makes extraordinary claims, but, though I would maintain that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, rather daringly provides not even ordinary evidence for its extraordinary supernatural claims. To insist that we are created and not evolved, in the face of all the evidence.
Religion forces nice people to do unkind things and also makes intelligent people say stupid things. 

Handed a small baby for the first time, is it your first reaction to think, "Beautiful, almost perfect. Now please hand me the sharp stone for its genitalia, that I may do the work of the Lord"? No!

As the great physicist Stephen Weinberg has aptly put it, "In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you'll need religion. 

Religion, and in fact any form of faith, -because it is a surrender of reason, it's a surrender of reason in favor of faith, is a fantastic force multiplier. A tremendous intensifier, of all things that are in fact divisive rather than inclusive. That's why its history is so stained with blood. Crimes against humanity, crimes against womanhood, crimes against reason and science, attacks upon medicine and enlightenment, all these appalling things. There is no conceivable way that by calling on the supernatural, you will achieve anything like your objective of a common humanism, which is I think you're quite right to say, our only chance of, I won't call it salvation. 

Eliding a deeper truth

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