Paul Please note: Due to the large amount of email Paul receives and the limitations of his physical condition he can no longer respond to all email. But please keep sending — he reads them all.
More Problems with Atheism as a Purported School of Thought
2. Scientism: An understanding of the scientific method – the recognition of science’s strengths, coupled with awareness of its limitations – is something shared by clear-thinking human beings, whether religious or atheistic. Scientism, in contrast, is the window dressing that atheism uses when it tries to present itself as a school of thought rather than the simple and tenable rejection of the idea of God. Scientism includes notions like reductionism and the idea that anything that science can’t address is necessarily unreal or less important than those topics that it’s well equipped to study.
3. Reactivity and Negativity: Reading atheist writings, at least on the blogs, one could easily come away with the impression that the only institutions on the planet that contain elements of corruption are religious ones. Religion is the source of all evil. If only religion didn’t exist, God would be in his heaven and all would be right with the world (so to speak) – because, apparently, governments and corporations are just that good . . .
4. Dismissive: This kind of knee-jerk negativity often compels atheists to dismiss the entire field of religion and spirituality as containing nothing true or worthwhile, despite the fact that this extremely broad subject area includes such disparate writings as, say, Madonna’s latest musings along with the Buddha’s Eightfold Path . . .
Another Possible Problem
Mortality and Meaning: Atheists tend to closely identify faith with belief in God and therefore reject it. Death = the final eradication of life. Everyone and everything that we love, cherish, and value is ultimately destroyed. I wonder if it’s possible for this conviction to coexist with an attitude toward life that is positive and meaningful.
Disclaimer: I’m no expert on this topic; my impressions come mainly from reading atheist blogs from time to time. I’m open to being educated/corrected. Also, to atheists who may be reading: please note that my intention here is to be thought-provoking, not antagonistic. See, for example, the previous post where I’ve done something similar with theism and pantheism. Note also that in what follows, I distinguish atheism as the simple and understandable disbelief in God from atheism as a kind of members club posing as a School of Thought.
Having an Attitude: William James describes religion in its broadest terms as a person’s “attitude toward life as a whole.” Atheism isn’t nearly that comprehensive; it isn’t religion’s opposite or an alternative to religion. An atheist can be a misanthrope, a Buddhist, a secular humanist, or someone who’s in despair because he’d like to be a theist but finds it impossible to believe in God. Atheism isn’t a cohesive school of thought or body of teachings about life, but, simply and specifically, disbelief in God.
Problems with Atheism as a Purported School of Thought
1. Religion Bashing: Some atheists, however, do seem to view atheism as a school of thought. This may happen when atheism becomes a major feature in someone’s identity, and the person seeks out other atheists with whom to converse about atheism. From what I’ve read on the blogs, the ensuing conversations often consist of religion bashing. Atheists point to abuses within religious institutions that most religious people also recognize as abuses, and argue against the existence of God. The God that atheists argue against is typically the God of extreme conservatism; many religious people would argue against that God too.
Another prominent feature of what looks to me more like “the atheism club” than any real atheistic school of thought, is a focus on how atheists are maligned by religious people. Atheist club members resent it when the religious stereotype them as immoral; they would like to be free from such persecution to quietly pursue their stereotyping of the religious as ignorant hypocrites . . .
As excerpted from a comment by Hazzbuzz a couple posts back:
“How can you feel more connected to God or more isolated from God if God is nature and nothing more . . . ? Wouldn't . . . it mean doing whatever comes naturally even if that was hitting your neighbour over the head with a large stick? . . .
“I'm still not sure about morality but there is something empty about looking at it that way which doesn't quite fit with my experience . . ."
Pantheistic Problems
Morality: Others have made similar comments now and then that lead me to think they may view pantheism as problematic in the same sense that Hazzbuzz does. The problem is that nature isn’t moral. The perception is that theism is required to make moral sense of life.
Faith: A second problem people often have with pantheism is the idea that nature doesn’t justify faith. Mortality is the central issue; many see the only resolution to the problem of mortality as a supernatural God that brings the dead back to life.
Personhood: A third problem arises for those who want God to be person-like; pantheism is perceived as a radical departure from this.
Theistic Problems
Veracity: The chief problem with theism is that unlike nature or the world itself, the existence of a supernatural God isn’t obvious or even demonstrable. People usually refer to their faith or belief in God and not their knowledge of God. Belief is often predicated on texts understood by believers as revealed truth, but to date no revealed religion has prevailed on the rest of the world to adopt this perspective on their scripture.
The Problem of Evil: Given belief in God as a supernatural entity, the world still remains what it is. Nature doesn’t behave morally, and people often behave much worse than nature. Enter “the problem of evil:" a pre-moral natural world and an often immoral human world whose existence appears to contradict the existence of an all powerful/all good Entity.
Can people think of any additional major problems with pantheism or theism?
PS: I should probably mention that these more thought-provoking posts are only meant to be, well . . . thought provoking. From time to time, people read me as someone who is personally grappling with intellectual problems around God. I really don’t. That would be Kermit.
What follows came to me in a dream last night. Kermit told me that this is his final and yet strangely non-definitive version of the famous ballad. I do not know if my experience or the automatic writing that followed were natural or supernatural. Perhaps they were just sort of unnatural.
It’s Not Easy Being Being
It's not that easy being being Having to blend each day with other kinds of things When I think I might prefer being ontologically distinct Or something multisyllabled like that.
It's not easy being being It seems you blend with Cheney-Bush and such depressing things And people tend to pass you over 'cause you're Not standing out like flashy quarks or supernova Or graham cracker pies.
But being's the color of spring And it can be so totally not spring And being can be big like an ocean or confusing Like trigonometry or stuff like that.
When being is all there is to be Why, it could make you wonder why not me And pantheism, or if panentheism might not do But I was raised a theist and still think
There might be something to that… It’s not easy being theistic When you have pantheistic tendencies And also tendencies to worry about harboring
The mark of the beast and other nasty Eschatological kind of stuff like that Which might end up sending you to hell Which I hear is not a pleasant place to be…
How do we distinguish the supernatural from the natural?
To know that an event or presence was supernatural would seem to require that we know all there is to know about nature. Otherwise, however unusual the experience was, how could we be certain that it was not a rare natural occurrence? Perhaps bleeding statues, miracle cures, communications from the dead, and so forth, don’t exist in defiance of nature’s laws, but express footnotes and exception clauses.
Going from minor supernatural events and entities to the major one: what about God? Let’s emphasize the possibility of a completely supernatural deity by viewing God as the radically Other creator of creation and not as a divine principle or animating energy.
Wouldn’t the Entity that generated all creation be intimately connected to it? What would make such a God supernatural rather than the supremely vital Force of Nature?
The material in the previous post was edited out from the manuscript for Original Faith; in the discussion thread, Pauline asked why I removed it.
To me, an interesting aspect of writing the book was that in the end, I found myself deciding to omit quite a bit of material that I thought was fairly good and at times very good. At some point in refining and organizing my drafts, the following criterion emerged for whether to include material:
Does it contribute to developing the book’s message? Does it contribute to the flow of the whole?
If not – if, say, it was a redundant idea despite being expressed well, or well written and yet somewhat off topic, or personally meaningful but not really such a great illustration or example of a particular point – then I found that such material detracted from the impact of the book as a whole. It bogged it down.
Running on Empty
Also in the previous post’s thread, this from Lady Luxie: "How can I disappear to emerge nothing but myself?"
I like this question, which gets straight to what Original Faith is about. Here I can just point in the general direction of an answer.
What comes to mind is the expression “full of oneself.” If someone is full of themselves, what they’re full of is pretty small. The more that disappears, the more that who the person really is can emerge.
We can take this approach to our work. We can even take it to our lives generally. The editing procedure I sketched above is a small example. I needed to leave myself behind a bit to do that. But who did that? Me.
Disappear until you become nothing but yourself in the eyes of God. Raise up the low places, level down the high. Foremost and first, become the inverse of who you once took yourself to be first and foremost. Comprehend, like the ocean, sky, or the land ages before people claimed and divided it, the elemental self-unimportance of discovering that you are not great, but vast.
I wouldn’t have posted a series on this subject if I thought the personal story I included was a rare hiccup in a well-run health care system. “HMO horror story” has become a cliché over the last couple decades because people around the nation have similar experiences every day.
With the federal government abdicating responsibility, individuals and families who’ve been run over by their health insurance companies and still have the will, energy, and health left to protest usually have to settle for doing what they can to help push health care reform at the state level. But state politicians are heavily lobbied by the insurance industry too. And so it goes. . .
Incidentally, they should really be called “Health Insurance Horror Stories.” When mine was covered by the New Hampshire media, I noticed that they referred to it as an HMO horror story; however, I was paying premiums for my employer’s best plan and never did belong to an HMO. Most importantly, these stories are just one aspect of widespread and systemic failures in American health care, some of which I’ve summarized at http://www.hmoappeals.com/.
All That Glitters. . .
Rolling forward into mind almost all the time now, A past denied its future climbs back into view. I lie and watch it surge to spot the old and new. Vagaries: the smile, half-hidden, of a third-grade girl From long ago; a granite stone, half-buried in the dirt Below a porch; a dream of bicycling and glimpse of lake That’s shadowed nearly black with island shade. I’m on the road again, but feel I’m being undermined.
Another surge. A wide arm of the ocean nears, Inviting swift descent. Outside, the rain forgets its patter. When it stops, a child’s outcry, mild and at play. The outcry comes again and sweetly bends, This time just to hear itself I think, A child that stands inside a seeming field of solid ground in time. My stricken mind just streams: A river finger-thin to fall back toward the rollers climbing in, Dimpling the low tide’s hard-packed glitter.
Paul Martin
. . . Are the Golden Toenails
It will be four years in December since I’ve been able to leave the house; I’m semi bedridden and without access to relevant health care. Too fragile for safe transport and with adaptive needs too unique for an institutional setting, no specialist will come to my residence. One exception: the podiatrist who comes once a month to cut my toenails.
There’s a good market for that specialty. I’m only fifty, but this is a service often needed by the elderly.
If you don't count the toenails, a case like mine, admittedly rare, is too much time and bother under an insurance-dominated medical system that is market-driven to the point of not simply profiting but profiteering at the direct expense of the financial and physical well-being of US citizens. There’s no financial incentive to serve someone like me; there’s no danger in neglecting someone like me. Choose your illness wisely.
Yet the same goes for cases that are not at all rare: for example, the millions of uninsured, underinsured, and retirees from employment of every sort who today are increasingly likely to lose the health benefits that came with their jobs as their former employers try to cope with ever rising health insurance premiums.
I hope people will include health care on the short list of issues they view as important at election time.
Spirituality & Adversity with a Healthcare Emphasis: IV
Agreeing to Agree?
It seems to me that much of the angry divisiveness in discussions about health care and other matters today comes from the top down. Whether it’s the media’s need to reduce thought to slogans that fit into sound bites or politicians who deliberately oversimplify issues to score easy points – probably some of each – I think they often set a poor example.
On health care, I believe that most people, if given an honest overview of what’s going on today, would agree that significant reform is needed even where we disagree on details or even the general approach.
The Rhetoric of Politicians
The simple recognition that reform is needed is critical. There are politicians who very much want to keep things as they are for their own political reasons and who mislead the public to the point of outright lying. Example: The ever-popular “We don’t need health care reform because patients already have the right to sue.” Although you may be (happily) unaware of the details as to why it’s rarely feasible to sue a health insurance corporation, it’s clear to anyone upon a moment’s reflection that the last thing somebody with a health problem needs is suspension of treatment to engage in a few years of litigation!
Another sound bite I happened to hear the other day: supposedly, funding the Schips program to reduce how many millions of our children remain uninsured is the first step toward “socialized medicine.”
The Common Sense of Citizens
As if our only choices are pure capitalism vs. pure socialism! Historically, America has avoided ideological extremes to embrace common sense “what works” approaches. We provide strong incentives for people to hold jobs and start their own businesses, but this doesn’t keep us from valuing “social security” – not “socialized security.” Stuff happens. We know that without social security plenty of people, often through no fault of their own – for example, they could easily find their life’s savings eaten up by uninsured heath problems… would experience an old age of destitution.
We like having the USDA inspect our food. We like having strict government oversight for asbestos in school buildings, lead paint in toys, standards for workplace and air traffic safety, pollution, etc. We even like having the government own and operate the military. (Notice how well this administration’s “private security contactors” like Blackwater seem to be working out…)
In sum, when it comes to matters of life, death, and bodily harm, I think few of us would say “In matters critical to our health, safety, and security, let’s trust business to reliably put our individual and national well being ahead of increased profit margins in situations where additional profit could be obtained by compromising the quality of goods and services.” Not going along for this ride doesn’t mean enrolling in the communist party or risking another Red Scare in which maybe we’d have to worry that we’ll be infiltrated and taken over by… Cuba?
The Wisdom of the Founding Fathers
To my mind, the founding fathers had it right with the concept of a balance of powers. They were not, however, in a position to foresee how much power big businesses would amass and the necessity of protecting our form of government from its highly funded and well organized political financing and lobbying operations.
But we are. And the role of big money in determining who runs for and wins races for higher office runs counter to the principles on which our nation was founded. I believe it’s undermining democracy right here at home even as we’re told that we're exporting it abroad.
