Losing her religion

There have been countless memoirs of people losing the religion of their raisin' (like Tara Westover's Educated)... here's another:

LEAVING THE WITNESS
Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life
By Amber Scorah

Though religious fundamentalism has surged globally in recent decades, the anti-intellectualism of these authoritarian movements, their staunch refusal to cede ground to reason and empiricism, often confounds nonbelievers. How can people devote the totality of their lives to the unseen, the unevidenced? How can faith subsume thinking?

But reason is a poor weapon against the believer whose very religious identity springs from an embrace of the unreasonable. Many fundamentalists are conscious of the seeming absurdity of their position, but it is precisely the stridency of their faith, their ability to withstand the irrational, that confirms for them their exceptionalism and salvation. They reject modernity’s demystification project and instead construct meaning in the supernatural. Their faith becomes very thick armor indeed, one that even the sharpest Enlightenment rationalism won’t penetrate.

But the stunted psychology of those raised in extreme religion is another problem altogether. For these children, there is no obvious forfeiture of common sense or flight from existential chaos that informs adult conversion. Rather, they experience a totalizing indoctrination that so severely limits the formation of an adult psychology that many don’t ever achieve maturity in the way secular society conceives of it, a state of empowered capability that permits complex life choices, a state in which contradictory ideas can be held in tension without psychic recoil. Instead, the fundamentalist child, raised on fear and limitation, lives a life of diminished options, constrained by strict dualisms: black and white, good and bad, God and Satan, and (perhaps most alarmingly for the broader culture) us and them... (nyt, continues)

Atheists Who Believe In Ghosts

Credulity is an odd mix with atheism.

After all, the atheist has had to wade through a large network of theological ideas, parse them, critique them, and reject them. This requires incredulity to begin with and it enlarges incredulity along the way. The labor is tantamount to a seminary of impiety, multi-year courses involving skeptical intellectual work.

And so it shocks sensibility to discover that rare atheist who believes in ghosts.

Ghost belief is older than belief in Gods and is likely traced to the dream life of prehistoric peoples, all of whom saw dead relatives and dead neighbors in their nighttime slumbers and reasoned therefore that the dead were still alive. Acts propitiating ghosts, like leaving little offerings of foodstuffs here and there, eventually became elaborate theistic liturgies appeasing the Gods.

Why would an atheist consider a God to be as fantastic as a Phoenix bird, as unbelievable as a one-horned horse, and yet find a ghost credible?

Perhaps it’s that ghosts have not had enormous libraries assembled on their behalf, or that ghosts have not had immense buildings erected for their worship, or that ghosts have not had venerable hymns choired in their names. Maybe it’s this underdog status that makes the credulous atheist sympathetic to the lowly ghost.

Or maybe the atheist permits himself one lone mental vice, since he otherwise practices an almost ascetic intellectual morality. This is not unlike the single and celibate cleric who allows himself good alcohol and fine tobacco as compensation for doing without.


Or it could be the allure of the horror genre that makes ghosts appealing. Who does not like a good ghost story?

Here is a proof of ghosts I heard recently: ‘I felt an eerie presence and my dog was barking wildly at thin air in the corner of my den.’

Really, that’s a proof of ghosts?

One might respond, ‘Dogs have noses that smell things we cannot smell and dogs have ears that hear things we cannot hear. Might your dog have smelled and heard a mouse inside the wall of your den? As the your eerie feelings, don’t you suppose your dog barking at apparent thin air created those feelings in you?’

A few ancient Greek thinkers saw that everything about a human personality was assembled within the human body, and no continuation of personality could exist after the demise of a body. They saw that a ghost was an impossible idea and indeed that immortality was an impossible idea.

With what does a ghost see, lacking the body’s eyes? With what does a ghost hear, without the body’s apparatus for hearing? With what does a ghost speak, lacking a mouth and tongue? With what does a ghost feel, without the brain’s chemistry?

If an incorporeal God is incredible, why isn’t an incorporeal ghost equally so?

BY J. H. MCKENNA, PH.D.
17 COMMENTS

patheos

Ruse on meaning (Is meaning a ruse?)

A Meaning to Life

Michael Ruse

Philosophy in Action

• Advocates for a unique approach -- Darwinian existentialism - to the meaning of life
• Written accessibly and presents complex issues in an entertaining way
• Integrates Darwinian explanations of human life with deeper existential questions about meaning
• OUP

Humanism

Can you describe #humanism in 10 words or less? Here are some definitions we recommend to help. (#WorldHumanistDay is June 21)https://t.co/jBXdq6wqxV

— American Humanist (@americnhumanist) June 17, 2019

Bedside Reading

To the Editor:

When asked in By the Book (May 12) what books are on his nightstand, Adm. William McRaven responded, “I always have the Holy Bible close by.” Subsequently in the interview, he included Voltaire (“incomparable mind”) in his list of three invitees to a hypothetical literary dinner party, and when asked who might be chosen to write his life story he named Mark Twain.

Voltaire, in his “Philosophical Dictionary,” described the Bible as “what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach and young children are made to learn by heart.” Twain, in “Letters From the Earth,” wrote that the Bible contained “upwards of a thousand lies.”

This interesting mix of choices begs additional explication.

RICHARD SLETTVET
HANSVILLE, WASH.

Books for a "doubting Xian"

A friend has a book request so I thought I’d see what Twitter thinks. Give me your suggestions! Especially if there’s a book that was influential in your deconversion. “S’pose you had a doubting Christian ask you for a book on science and religion. What book would you recommend?”

— god Free World (@godFreeWorld) May 28, 2019

Losing Religion and Finding Ecstasy in Houston

Personal History
Christianity formed my deepest instincts, and I have been walking away from it for half my life, fifteen years dismantling what the first fifteen built.

By Jia Tolentino
May 20, 2019

The church I grew up in was so big we called it the Repentagon. It was not a single structure but a thirty-four-million-dollar campus, built in the nineteen-eighties and spread across forty-two acres in a leafy, white neighborhood ten miles west of downtown Houston. A circular drive with a fountain in the middle led up to a bone-white sanctuary that sat eight hundred; next to it was a small chapel, modest and humble, with pale-blue walls. There was also a school, a restaurant, a bookstore, three basketball courts, an exercise center, and a cavernous mirrored atrium. There was a dried-out field with bleachers and, next to it, a sprawling playground; during the school year, the rutting rhythm of football practice bled into the cacophony of recess through a porous border of mossy oaks. Mall-size parking lots circled the campus; on Sundays, it looked like a car dealership, and during the week it looked like a fortress, surrounded by an asphalt moat. At the middle of everything was an eight-sided, six-story corporate cathedral called the Worship Center, which sat six thousand people. Inside were two huge balconies, a jumbotron, an organ with nearly two hundred stops and more than ten thousand pipes, and a glowing baptismal font. My mom sometimes worked as a cameraperson for church services, filming every backward dip into the water as though it were a major-league pitch. There was tiered seating for a baby-boomer choir that sang at the nine-thirty service, a performance area for the Gen X house band at eleven, and sky-high stained-glass windows depicting the beginning and end of the world. You could spend your whole life inside the Repentagon, starting in nursery school, continuing through twelfth grade, getting married in the chapel, attending adult Bible study every weekend, baptizing your children in the Worship Center, and meeting your fellow-retirees for racquetball and a chicken-salad sandwich, secure in the knowledge that your loved ones would gather in the sanctuary to honor you after your death.

The church was founded in 1927, and the school was established two decades later. By the time I got there, in the mid-nineties, Houston was entering an era of glossy, self-satisfied power, enjoying the dominance of Southern evangelicals and the spoils of extractive Texan empires—Halliburton, Enron, Exxon, Bush. Associate pastors flogged fund-raising campaigns during Sunday services, working to convert the considerable wealth of the church’s tithing population into ostentatious new displays. When I was in high school, the church built a fifth floor with a train for children to play in, and a teen-youth-group space called the Hangar, which featured the nose of a plane half crashed through a wall.

My parents hadn’t always been evangelical, nor had they favored this tendency toward excess. They had grown up Catholic in the Philippines and, after moving to Toronto, a few years before I was born, had attended a small Baptist church. When, in 1993, they moved to Houston, an unfamiliar and unfathomably large expanse of highway and prairie, one pastor’s face was everywhere, smiling at commuters from the billboards that studded I-10. My parents took to his kind and compelling style of preaching—he was classier than your average televangelist, and much less greasy than Joel Osteen, the better-known Houston pastor, who became famous in the two-thousands for his airport books about the prosperity gospel. My parents began regularly attending services at the Repentagon, and, soon afterward, they persuaded the school’s administrators to put me in first grade, even though I was four years old.

I would regret this situation when I was in high school at the age of twelve. But, as a kid, I was eager and easy. I pointed my toes in dance class and did all my homework. In daily Bible classes, I made salvation bracelets on tiny leather cords—a black bead for my sin, a red bead for the blood of Jesus, a white bead for purity, a blue bead for baptism, a green bead for spiritual growth, a gold bead for the streets of Heaven that awaited me. During the holidays, I acted in the church’s youth musicals; one of them was set at CNN, the “Celestial News Network,” and several of us played reporters covering the birth of Jesus Christ. When I was still in elementary school, my family moved farther west, to new suburbs where model homes rose out of bare farmland. On Sundays, as we drove into the city, I sat quietly in the back seat next to my cherubic little brother, ready to take my place in the dark and think about my soul. Spiritual matters felt simple and absolute. I didn’t want to be bad, or doomed. I wanted to be saved, and good.

Back then, believing in God felt mostly unremarkable, occasionally interesting, and every so often like a private thrill. In the Bible, angels came to your doorstep. Fathers offered their children up to be sacrificed. Fishes multiplied; cities burned. The horror-movie progression of the plagues in Exodus riveted me: the blood, the frogs, the boils, the locusts, the darkness. I was taught that the violence of Christianity came with great safety: under a pleasing shroud of aesthetic mystery, there were clear prescriptions about who you should be. I prayed every night, thanking God for the wonderful life I had been given. On weekends, I would pedal my bike across a big stretch of pasture in the late-afternoon light and feel holy. I would spin in circles at the skating rink and know that someone was looking down on me.

Toward the end of elementary school, the impression of wholeness started slipping. A teacher advised us to boycott Disney movies, because Disney World had allowed gay people to host a parade. Another teacher confiscated my Archie comics and my peace-sign notebook, replacing this heathen paraphernalia with a copy of the new best-seller about the Second Coming, “Left Behind.” Three girls were electrocuted when a light blew out in the pool where they’d been swimming, and this tragedy was deemed the will of the Lord... (continues)

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