Eric Maisel is a psychotherapist, philosopher, cultural observer, and widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach. He’s written over thirty books on such diverse subjects as productive obsessions, creativity coaching, and personal meaning-making. Today, I’m talking with Eric about his book, The Atheist’s Way.

MAIA: Welcome Eric. I think that The Atheist’s Way is a very important book. I’m struck by your notion of making meaning and consider it a foundational concept that should be taught to children from day one.

You mention in your book that atheists often receive the common criticism that they’re arrogant because they break from tradition and your reply is: “The mere existence of a tradition is not a good reason to honor it.” This expands your idea that it’s necessary for an individual to accept full responsibility and make its own meaning without the benefit of an external authority. To live like a hero, you say one must look at reality to see what’s required. Can you explain what you mean when you suggest that it’s necessary to “choose where to invest and where to divest?”

ERIC:  You possess an infinite number of meaning opportunities but you can’t take every meaning opportunity there is. You must choose where you will invest meaning. You choose, first of all, on the basis of your life purpose vision: you make meaning investments in support of your life purpose vision.

If you’ve decided to be a lifelong advocate for freedom, for instance, you make meaning investments that reflect that decision. One day you might invest meaning in fighting for an unpopular cause by joining a march or writing an article. Another day you might invest meaning in befriending someone who is fighting for freedom in another part of the world. Another day you might invest meaning in taking pleasure reading about great moments in the history of freedom. Another day you might invest meaning in appreciating the freedom you’ve earned. These activities would look very different to an outsider observing you: he would see you marching, chatting on the phone, reading a book, and toasting with a glass of champagne. But from the inside they would all feel alike as you championed freedom by investing meaning in these four activities.

“Investing meaning” is the phrase you can use to stand for the daily conscious decisions you make about where you intend to make meaning on that day. You don’t think, “Where should I invest meaning today?”; rather you think, “Where do I INTEND to invest meaning today?” There is a world of difference between actively investing meaning in something and believing that something “should” be meaningful, maybe by virtue of the fact that a word like “serious” or “worthy” or “useful” or “spiritual” attaches to that something. Learning the difference between investing meaning based on your intentions and investing meaning based on the insidious pressures you feel is an important life lesson. “Divesting” is exactly the same idea: you decide which activities, including previously meaningful ones, will no longer be getting your time and attention.

MAIA: It would seem that those who look to religion and a god to provide their meaning are in the “should” category. I liked what you had to say to atheists who might experience depression: you ask them to think about the causes of their blues and what they intend to do to release themselves from its grip. Is being an atheist not just about disbelieving in a god, but about taking personal responsibility, not passing the buck in any manner?

ERIC: Yes, exactly. Take the “depression issue” you mention. It is no longer possible to feel sad and blue without someone wanting to call that “depression.” For the longest time human beings made the sensible distinction between feeling sad for reasons (say, because they were jobless and homeless) and feeling sad for “no reason,” a state traditionally called melancholia. With the rise of four powerful industries, the pharmaceutical industry, the psychotherapy industry, the social work industry, and the pastoral industry, it is has become increasingly difficult for people to consider that sadness might be a very normal reaction to unpleasant facts and circumstances. Cultural forces have transformed a great deal of normal sadness into the “mental illness” of depression.

In fact “sadness” and “depression” have become virtual synonyms.  Nowadays if you feel sad you are supposed to get help from a pill, a therapist, a social worker, or a pastoral counselor—even if you’re sad because you’re having trouble paying the bills, your career is not taking off, your relationship is on the sour side, and life did not turn out how you hoped it would. That is, even if your sadness is rooted in your circumstances and your unhappiness with life, social forces maneuver you into the world of the medical model, where psychiatrists dispense pills and psychotherapists diagnose you. It is very hard for the average person, who suffers and feels pain because she is a human being and not because she has a mental illness, to see through this maneuvering.

Many writers have tried to speak to this issue but their voices can’t be heard very well over the incessant din accompanying the latest “miracle” antidepressant. Their books have titles like The Loss of Sadness (Horwitz and Wakefield), Creating Mental Illness (Horwitz) and The Medicalization of Society (Conrad) and their arguments are compelling. But lined up against them are countless books selling the idea that all unpleasant human situations are “treatable disorders” demanding the attention of trained professionals. This is very hard on the average person, who quite often has an intuitive sense that he or she is not being served by the medical industry but who doesn’t know where else to turn.

When you’re sad you certainly do have a problem, since sadness does not feel good. But that is not the same thing as you having a “biological” or a “psychological” problem. Life circumstances can cause our sadness: the problem is not always a serotonin re-up deficiency or a losing battle between our id and our superego. Sometimes the problem may be that we staked a lot on our profession and over time we’ve discovered that we don’t much like it; or that our mate is making faces because we aren’t bringing in enough money; or that our parents and our children need so much attention that we have no time left for ourselves. Sometimes situations like these cause us grief. And we have to do what we can to ameliorate such situations—we have to take personal responsibility and act.

MAIA: I like “pastoral industry.” That’s good. Lately the God industry has been amping up its criticism of atheism, so it’s galvanizing to hear more rational voices writing about the importance of taking personal responsibility and addressing how profoundly the passing of accountability to an external authority has become ingrained in our culture.

On that note, you’ve said that you think atheists must sometimes enter into an antagonistic relationship with theists. Whenever I’ve been directly confrontational using rationalism with theists, I get trite responses. It’s almost impossible to draw them out of their comfort zone as they’re so heavily indoctrinated by religious constructs. In your book, you advocate “deconstructing cultural idioms of spirituality” which “helps others move in the direction of rationality.” By moving out of framing its experience in “supernatural enthusiasms” does an atheist demonstrate a meaningful life by not letting a non-existent God get all the credit?

ERIC: I’m not sanguine that people who use spiritual language want to let go of that language. Our best bet, I think, is to adopt a personal vocabulary of meaning that supports the idea of meaning-making and then actively use that vocabulary both with ourselves and in our interactions with others. A vital step in the process of maintaining meaning is acquiring a useful vocabulary of meaning that allows you to communicate with yourself and others about the realities of your life.

If, for example, something disturbing is happening and you can’t identify it as a meaning crisis, how will you handle it? You may misidentify it as “depression” or a “work problem” or a “relationship issue” and head yourself in the wrong direction. If, on the other hand, you possess the language to call it a meaning crisis, then you know what you are obliged to do: make new meaning.

Phrases like meaning threat, meaning spark, meaning leak, and meaning adventure, to name just a few useful phrases, help you think more clearly about meaning. Without such a vocabulary in place, you are stuck with our cultural vernacular that is keen to dub ordinary activities as “spiritual.”

MAIA: Right, the “S” word. Incredible how that one creeps in.

ERIC:  With a vocabulary of meaning in place, you inoculate yourself against using supernatural language. Your cousin says, “I had a spiritual experience.” You reply, “Oh, you had a meaningful experience. How nice for you!” Your co-worker says, “I’ve never had a more spiritual time than visiting the gardens of England!” You reply, “Really? What was meaningful about that experience?” By persisting in using a vocabulary of meaning you keep yourself supernatural-free and help others move in the direction of rationality.

MAIA: I couldn’t agree more, but it’s interesting how some atheists balk at that concept, reducing it to some kind of Fascist ideology. I think that addressing God talk where you hear it is a form of atheist social activism. I like your vision of creating a meaning vocabulary that can bring clarity to communicating with others. It’s like you’re stripping the spiritual BS—you’re defluffing propositions that have somehow become “sacred” constructs. Why do you think this sort of daily work to make meaning, this deconstruction, is such a difficult task?

ERIC: Actually it isn’t that easy to say, “I am a meaning-maker.” First, it sounds a little pompous and arrogant. Who am I to make meaning? How self-important that sounds! Second, it flies in the face of tradition. Most traditions ask you to blend in, serve, and bow to the common will. Third, it isn’t transparently clear what the phrase means or what you might be agreeing to. For these and for other reasons, you may stop on the threshold of announcing that you are a meaning-maker and take an involuntary step backward. The mantle of meaning-maker is there for you to don but you shake your head and refuse, consciously or unconsciously objecting.

Nominating yourself as the hero of your own story and deciding to live a life devoted to intentional meaning-making come with profound challenges—but so does any sort of thoughtful, decent, righteous life. Will you make some choices and some meaning investments that you later regret? Of course. Will you feel unequal to making meaning on a given day? Of course. Still, opting to live this way, as the creator of your life and the hero of your own story, brings the greatest rewards, among them a sense of dignity, real accomplishments, and the experience of joy.  But most people balk—by the billions. 

MAIA: Your idea that meaning is a “wellspring,” inspires me. I got the sense that this is what those who insist on believing in an external authority are missing: discovering this bountiful, infinite inner resource of power, of joy. The wellspring metaphor gives me a visceral sense of what it’s like to be my own authority and renewable resource of creativity. In your own life, do you use this method of getting up each morning with the wellspring image in your thought, and does this help you to make meaning?

ERIC: Yes, meaning is a deep, inexhaustible wellspring and an infinitely renewable resource. To think of meaning as something to find—something like a lost wallet or a lost ring—is to picture meaning as a very paltry thing. In that mental model, meaning is so small a commodity that you can acquire it by taking in a guru’s lecture or by sitting cross-legged in a dark room. You weren’t sure what was meaningful; a guru speaks; now you know. Really? And what if you didn’t tape the lecture and happen to forget what he said? Is meaning lost to you again? And what if you did tape it: do you have to listen to the tape constantly to know what meaning means to you? Is that the way you intend to construe meaning?

Meaning is nowhere out there; and, if it were, that would make it a tiny, trivial sort of thing.

MAIA: Right, it’s neither miraculous nor inconsequential—simply natural.

ERIC: What if you discovered that the meaning of life was to stand on one leg while singing show tunes? What if you discovered that the meaning of life was to praise a one-armed man who lived in a faraway land? Would you find any of those revelations particularly exciting news? There is no way to complete the sentence “The meaning of life is … ” without producing a small, sad result. If meaning were the sort of thing that you could tag on to the end of a sentence, as if it were the answer to a question, it would not be worth considering. But it is not that sort of thing at all.

Meaning is a wellspring and a renewable resource. You make it; it comes out of you; it is new each day; it is infinitely variable. It comes in every color and every tune; it arises one day one way because today you are valuing this, it arises tomorrow in another way because you are valuing that. Meaning is a renewable resource: you make it out of nothing but your own decision to represent yourself well and play the hero in your own story. And while it comes from nothing, it becomes like iron. You wake up each morning because nature renews you that way, you arise, you consider your next meaning decision, and you make your next meaning investment.

In my own life, I try to live exactly this way, by recognizing that if on a given day I feel “empty of meaning” my job is to open the spigot and allow some meaning to flow. It is there; I may have to do a little inviting and coaxing but it is there. I don’t have to run anywhere to find it or “do something” to retrieve it. It will bubble up if I let it. And if it won’t come this very hour, I have patience; I can eat a pear and relax and try again in an hour.

MAIA: You clearly show this in The Atheist’s Way, how this wellspring of meaning is not spiritual, it’s not mystical, it’s just tapping into what is simply natural and human. You mentioned in your book about how “god talk is a betrayal of our common humanity.” I’ve thought a lot about that and your observance that atheists sometimes slip and find themselves caught up in supernatural enthusiasms. Most atheists think they’re free of thinking or speaking in supernatural enthusiasms, but still find themselves saying, “Thank God” or “bless you” if someone sneezes. How important is it to wean all god talk and superstitious enthusiasms from our language?

ERIC: It’s very important, because any supernatural enthusiasms that persist in us weaken our ability to respond simply and directly to the supernatural enthusiasms of others. An enthusiasm for Wicca, paganism, past lives, psychic powers, remote viewing, spoon bending, vampires, astrology, Tarot, the I Ching, palm reading, haunted houses, sacred sites, séances, and a thousand other variations of New age, paranormal, and supernatural belief interfere with our ability to assess well, choose well, and live well. Like the god religions and like the “soft religions” like Buddhism and Taoism, our supernatural enthusiasms have their undeniable seductive side, their psychological pull, and their blandishments. But believing in them, affording them time and energy, and imbibing in their metaphoric power diminish us. The more you consult your chart, the more personal power you relinquish; the more you identify a site as sacred, the less real you make it.

The god religions, the soft religions, and the world of supernatural enthusiasms do not really serve you. They are always a hairs-breath away from being hijacked by some snake oil salesman, they force you to rein in your intelligence, they make claims that you do not honestly believe (whether it is a claim about heaven, nirvana, or some mysterious spirit force), they smell of illegitimate short cut, and they hurt your chances of taking a fearless inventory of your beliefs and charting a course that will make you proud.

Like everyone, we have experiences that seem not only inexplicable but that feel as if they contravene our basic understanding of nature. But when that happens we don’t rush to create a new god or jump on some spiritual bandwagon. We simply stand consternated, aware that these feelings amount to meaning crises of a very special sort. You have an unusual experience; you stand baffled; and you must do something in the next second to restore your basic meaning orientation or else risk succumbing to a supernatural enthusiasm.

Life is a project to live, not a mystery to unravel. You can invest your trip to the Andes with any meaning you like, taking it as the chance to meet new people, photograph new images, eat new food, look up at new stars, carve out a needed break from your everyday routine, and so on. These are normal human reasons, normal human motives, normal human desires … and enough. To add “spiritual” to the mix betrays—to make a little joke of it—the Alps and the Rockies. For the sake of authentic living, it is best to excise all spiritual language and all supernatural enthusiasms. If you get in the habit of allowing reason to prevail and human-sized experiences to suffice, you create a life far richer than one held together by supernatural threads.

MAIA: Thanks Eric for taking time to talk about your book and the foundational ideas that went into its creation.

Add Eric Maisel’s voice to those who call for the end of religious idiocy and add his book The Atheist’s Way to your expanding library of freethinking volumes that ask the individual to put fantastic “supernatural enthusiasms” into question, revealing a “wellspring” of its own natural existential necessity and will to live that has nothing to do with vacuous mystical or religious notions. Because when an individual sees for itself, deals with its own existence and answers its own questions within its own direct experiences and thoughts—isn’t that the foundation of atheism?

Today in my continued Conversations with Freethinking Authors, I’m interviewing Ophelia Benson, co-author with Jeremy Stangroom of Does God Hate Women? and Why Truth Matters. Ophelia is editor of butterfliesandwheels.com, deputy editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine and author of The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense.

MAIA: Welcome Ophelia. First, I’d like to say that I loved Does God Hate Women? and agree with Nick Cohen’s comment that it is “At once a joy to read and a call to arms.” With straight forward logic, you and Jeremy Stangroom take apart the arguments of religious apologists and expose their ignorance at a foundational level, even though, as you write, it’s considered that, “Religious law is ‘sacred’ law….and thus fixed, peremptory and inviolate.”

In your book, you say that “… religion has for millennia helped the stronger to go on dominating the weaker.” You also write, “The control of women is dual. The goal is to deny access to woman’s genitals to all men in the world minus one and to guarantee access to one” and “Most people who have grown up in liberal secular societies fail to realize how taken for granted it is elsewhere that girls and women have no rights over their own genitals or their own lives.” And “It’s impossible not to notice what a convenient theology this is, for the men who originated it and the ones who perpetuate and preach and enforce it. It’s impossible not to think that God and the Prophet are simply a fig leaf for a naked and brazen system of sexual slavery.” Because religion is “man-made” is it simply a proxy for men to enforce their will over women?

OPHELIA: Religion isn’t simply that, because religion is a lot of things. But are religious rules governing women and their bodies and their sex lives that? Broadly speaking, yes. Mind you, I don’t think it’s as simple as men sitting down and thinking, ‘Now what’s the best way to guarantee each man exclusive access to at least one woman? I know – pretend it’s what God wants.’ I think it’s more like projection. ‘There is a way things should be; this includes women belonging to men and not being allowed to roam off whenever they feel like it, and it also includes men being in charge and women being submissive. Because that is how things should be, naturally it is how God wants them to be.’ There is no need to think of it as a conscious trick – on the other hand I think it is reasonable to think of it as a large failure of imagination. It’s taken humans a remarkably long time to realize that treating some people as radically inferior is really neither necessary nor desirable.

MAIA: So it’s not so much an evil conspiracy of men plotting to keep women down, but perhaps an unconscious, outmoded ideology. Further on this subject, you write that the reasoning behind religion’s edicts is so flimsy and irrational that it’s a surprise it continues to hold such power, writing that a “combination of chapter and verse and a mere gesture at a secular utilitarian reason is not much on which to base the subordination of more than half of humanity.” It isn’t much at all, and as you say, if women rose up and questioned this perfunctory reasoning, it would be easy to end much suffering and subjugation of women world-wide. Yet women do not rise up. Are women conditioned from birth to be compliant?

OPHELIA: Some women rise up, fortunately, and others would like to but not at the price of getting killed or beaten up or thrown out of the house or losing their children or alienating everyone they know. But, of course, globally most women are indeed conditioned from birth to be compliant. That’s part of the religious rules, based largely on men’s sense of the way things are supposed to be. It’s also part of other things – it’s a large and complicated subject. But along with being conditioned to be compliant, women and men are generally conditioned to obey the religion they were raised in and the customs of those around them. Being able to think skeptically about one’s own traditions can be seen as a privilege that is available to only a tiny minority of the world’s people.

MAIA: I’m interested in the reasons behind men’s fear of women. A fear which is so strong, men have written religious scripture, creating a god who proclaims them superior to women and thus charged with dominating them. You say that men distrust women’s reproductive and sexual power.  Existentially, why do you think men fear women?

OPHELIA: I’m interested too – partly because it strikes me as out of proportion so much of the time. It’s as if women are not just irritating human presences whose wants conflict with Mine – it’s as if they’re monsters, demons, fiends from hell. How else can one understand men who kill their own daughters and are proud of themselves afterwards? Or the remarkable library of misogynist literature that stretches from Eve to ‘Fatal Attraction’? So the short answer is I really don’t know. The long one is something about Resenting the Mother, something about fear of rebellion and treachery, something about fear of blood and childbirth, a lot about sexual suspicion and fear (she can always get pregnant by someone else, you know, and do it secretly), a lot about having to be brave and strong and tough and resenting people who don’t have to be all that – and so on. I can think of various things that could well be part of the picture, but basically it mystifies me.

MAIA: I’m intrigued by your Resenting the Mother theory. Do you think that maybe men hate and fear woman because she’s a creatress? After all, a woman births (throws) a man into the world. When you think about it, man looks to his mother for answer as to why he exists and of course she can’t answer because there is no answer to the question ‘Why do we exist?’ The creator of the child knows not what it does and she really should know because after all, she’s its creator. The mother creates the child, but she can’t say why/how. A female doesn’t have this same anger/fear because she understands that she also has this power of creation. The male projects his fear and anger toward women in general and thus an angry misogynist God is created to keep this object of fear under control.

OPHELIA: There is something fundamentally scary about it – a human being who can manufacture another human being inside her body. If we weren’t so used to it it would sound like something in a horror movie – well it would sound like Alien. And there is also something enormously enviable about it, so that too may be a factor. This is kind of amateur Freudianism (not that I believe there’s a professional kind!) – spinning plausible theories that seem to make sense but who the hell knows.

MAIA: I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s interesting thinking of how the so-called ‘miracle’ of birth is so taken for granted but really, you’re right, if we weren’t so used to it, it would seem like the parasite/host scene from Alien. In the chapter of your book called Holy Groupthink, you explore the idea that religions “…often declare some kinds of people subordinate to other kinds of people, and they also often deny the right of humans to contradict such claims.” You then give an example of a UN meeting in 2008 where a delegate was giving a statement in regard to rights of women and was interrupted twenty seconds in by delegates from Egypt and Pakistan who insisted the delegate had no right to discuss Sharia law in the UN council and that “Islam would not be crucified” in such a manner. You go on to say that this sort of thing amounts to “protecting an abstraction, a particular religion,” and “specious protection for a social construct at the expense of real people.” This is a notion that is explored at some length in my own book. I maintain that it’s only the individual that can right these types of wrongs and remove the mask of the persona and destroy social constructions. This means that instead of blind belief/faith, questioning and logical thinking is required. What further dangers are inherent in what you call “intense group loyalty”?

OPHELIA: Boy, there’s a big subject. One big one is overlooking or never noticing the fact that groups are not people; groups don’t suffer, groups aren’t conscious, groups don’t have feelings. It is the individuals who make up the groups who are and have and do all that – and each one does it separately, one at a time. The feelings of all those individuals do not add up to one big feeling that the group has – they remain separate. That’s not a reason for people to act as selfishly as possible, but it sure as hell is a reason for people to remember that group prosperity does not automatically translate to happiness for every individual in the group. The same of course applies to families. People who focus all their concern on groups or families or ‘communities’ risk simply forgetting that some members of groups have more power than others, some have different interests and needs from others, some see the world differently from others. How this cashes out in practice is of course that the men of a particular ‘community’ are taken to represent the whole community when in fact the women of that community may have radically different wants and needs from the men.

MAIA: Islam apologists are being criticized in the press lately as defaulting to a kind of “political correctness.” Do you see apologists as acting in a politically correct manner or do you think it’s more a matter that they fear personal harm if they dare to criticize Islam? Have you experienced any backlash for your criticism of Islam?

OPHELIA: Both are in play. Some people admit to simply being afraid of consequences, which at least has the virtue of not prettying things up. Some people are reluctant to criticize Islam because Muslims in the West are a vulnerable minority. This is true, and well worth keeping in mind, but it’s short of a conversation-stopper. Just for one thing it falls foul of the blindness about groups mentioned above. ‘Muslims in the West’ are not just people who want to live by the most conservative possible versions of Islam, nor are they all men who want to impose the conservative versions on ‘their’ women. Some Muslims in the West are women and girls who want to get out from under those rules, so being all politely respectful of Islam no matter what is not automatically doing all Muslims in the West a favor.

I’ve experienced almost no backlash for my criticism of Islam. Madeleine Bunting called me shrill and strident – but coming from her that’s a compliment. Sholto Byrnes gave the book a scathing review in The Independent – but his charges were so sweeping that he seemed to be talking about a different book. There is a Facebook group called ‘Against the book “Does God Hate Women?”’ – and that’s pretty much it for backlash.

MAIA: It’s said that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so that Facebook page is helping book sales. In your book, you quote several letters written by Pope Benedict, one in 2004, the other in 2008 where he writes, “God entrusts to women and men, according to their respective capacities, a specific vocation and mission in the church and in the world…” You write that it’s incredible that more people do not openly criticize an “exclusively male hierarchical priesthood laying down the law to women—all women, women as such—when women have no voice in making the law and no channel of dissent.” Why do you think more women in the Church do not question the authority of a male hierarchy and demand at least some forum for discussion and recommendations for change?

OPHELIA: I think because it simply seems natural. One could call it the Walter Cronkite effect. Just as it seems natural to have a man with a sonorous voice reading the news, so it seems natural to have a man with a more or less sonorous voice in the pulpit. I think women mostly don’t really particularly want women in the pulpit, and I think they mostly don’t stop to realize that the male priesthood also means that only men make the rules that both sexes are supposed to obey. One could also just call this habituation. It’s always been this way – it would be such a hassle to change it – there’s laundry to do – I’ll worry about it some other time.

MAIA: Eric Maisel in his book The Atheist’s Way writes that it’s important to speak up when hearing “God talk,” that to remain silent is to give strength to the social construction of religion and its idiocy. Do you think the same way about misogynistic talk? That by saying nothing when it’s bandied about is tantamount to handing power to social constructions that subjugate women?

OPHELIA: Oh, yes. Do I ever. I get into endless, tedious battles over this – over sexist language, in particular. I don’t like it when people who disagree with something a woman wrote call her a stupid bitch – and I like it even less when I say ‘can’t we criticize the article without using sexist epithets?’ and people defend the use of sexist epithets. This drives me nuts, but it happens over and over again – including among atheists. I have this perhaps fatuous idea that atheists should know better, but in fact only some of them do.

MAIA: I think that some atheists should know better, or at least think better. I’m just waiting to be called shrill and strident. Then I’ll know I’m disturbing some foundational injustice that the status quo would like left alone. In my experience, it’s usually women who use the “shrill” and “strident” words, as if they’re dirty. It’s ironic that the women who call other women fighting for justice for women, ”strident,” when the women who fought for their right to vote were called strident too. Any woman who speaks up can be called strident or shrill. It’s cop-out name calling. I want to say, “Can’t you do better than that? It’s so last century.” Thanks Ophelia for agreeing to let me interview you today and for being a powerful voice of reason in the world. It was a pleasure talking to you.

If you want to know more about the role that religion and culture play in the oppression of women, and why many Western liberals, leftists and feminists have remained largely silent on the subject, I highly recommend Does God Hate Women?

The Church is providing us today with a lesson in physical chemistry. Let us sit in science lab with our bunsen burners powered up and observe:

An army of fundamentalists is mustering in Africa. From the looks of an article written today by Charles Lewis for the National Post, religious fervor is growing there at an alarming rate. Three hour church services, thousands baptized into the mother Church on a daily basis. The Church is seeing its decades long mission there pan out, its work to shore up fighters for a war.

And Africa has provided perfect recruitment ground: soaring birth rates, little or no education for the masses. Come up with some selective and carefully propagandized health care, serve it up with a side order of Jesus, and you’ve got yourself a new army to fight the increasing numbers of individuals in the western hemisphere who are questioning the idiocy of religion and staying away from churches in droves.

From the article by Charles Lewis: “According to World Christian database, 2% of the world’s Christians lived in Africa in 1900; today it’s 20%. In less than 40 years, Africans will comprise 30% of the world’s Christians.” Later in the article, Father Michael Czerny is quoted as saying “I see people turning to the Church like in the Gospels they turned to Jesus, namely with inarticulate faith and trembling hope that He can resolve their most pressing afflictions and ailments.”

Inarticulate faith and trembling hope. Well, praise the Lord. If you can come up with two more powerful human motivating forces for an external authority, I’d love to hear what they are. It’s disconcerting that not only do too many humans on this earth have blind “inarticulate” faith in a mysterious supreme being, but that their number is growing in the face of this supreme being’s blatant disregard of their intelligible pleas. And since when is inarticulate faith a positive human quality? It’s a cry in the wilderness, a bleating of sheep.

The Church has always played a numbers game or as Father James Okoye, a Nigerian theologian says in the article, “The entire history of the Church has been one of reordering balance, in which areas with the most fervor and numbers find their way to the regions in religious decline or need.” Religious balance? You can almost see the Vatican church boys applying Fick’s First Law of Diffusion as they pour over a satellite map of Africa, postulating that the flux of increased fervor there will quite naturally flow to regions of low concentration with a magnitude that is proportional to the concentration gradient.

Just when rationalists get a foothold in North America, and the art of questioning is gaining popularity, we must brace ourselves for an influx of religious fervor from across the pond. What’s worrisome is that this new evangelical movement does not bode well for women. As John Allen, author of Future Church writes, “Issues such as abortion, condoms, and female priests will not even be on the table in part because of the African influence.” Looks like we’re going to have to shore up the concentration of thinking and questioning and rationalism to stem the tide of idiocy that is threatening what little ground we’ve gained.

If you haven’t read Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. and intend to, I suggest you don’t read this post. It’s not a book review, but a discussion of the theme of the lost symbol, which acts as a spoiler. The ”mystery” inherent in this supposed “lost symbol” isn’t revealed until the very last chapter of the book.

Years ago, with the rest of the world, I read The Da Vinci Code when it came out, just to see what all the fuss was about. Dan can churn out a great page-turning thriller, complete with gruesome murders and torture that haunts my dreams. He does so much research to get the exact names of weapons and private jet engines, he can’t resist salting too much of that information into a sentence, which produces humorous results: “CIA agent Simkins checked his watch as the modified UH-60 chopper skimmed in low over the Potomac.” Or awkwardly phrased scene direction: “The primly dressed African American staggered through the stacks, obviously out of breath.”

Now that I’ve got the writer’s craft stuff out of the way, I’d like to focus on the message in The Lost Symbol. I’ll issue another spoiler alert here. Only continue reading if you’ve already read Danny’s book or if you don’t intend to read it all and don’t care if I spoil the “surprise” ending. It seems that the lost symbol, the lost “word” that the Masons in this book are protecting from the itiot humans who are not ready for its message is: wait for it … the Bible.

Yes, you read that right. Now, as an atheist, I find this interesting, not for the reasons you might think. Unlike many atheists who regularly trash the Bible, I quite agree with Dan Brown’s message: that it is a mystical allegorical text that has been widely misinterpreted. In fact, this is a message in my own book. Although Eddie Other would like to see religion shot on the grounds of incompetence alone, he also notes the clarity in the mystic language of the Old Testament. Too bad that after thousands of years and translation from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to English the language of the Old Testament has lost a lot of clarity along the way. There are now so many ridiculuously perverted passages, that it’s an easy target to ridicule.

So why do I object to Dan Brown making the language of the Bible a “mystery”? Because it’s within the faculty of every individual who’s interested, to read the Bible as pure allegory and decipher the hidden meanings.  But Dan persists in making mystic language, “ancient secrets” that must be protected by noble Masonic secret societies that are in charge of keeping the mysteries safe from the idiot humans who apparently aren’t “ready for them yet.” 

His character, Peter Solomon, a 33rd degree Mason says:  ”Concealed within these pages, there hides a wondrous secret.”  Secret my ass. The Bible, as is any ancient mystic text like the Bhagavad Gita, the Koran, The Torah, Patanjali’s Sutras, is there for anyone to read between the lines. Why the mystery? High Mason Peter Solomon gives us this: “Unto you is given to know the mystery, but it will be told in parable.” No shit. Well, all it takes is to see clearly by thinking beyond parable and allegory.

Solomon continues, saying to our dear Harvard symbologist, Robert Langdon: “This information is powerful. The Ancient Mysteries cannot be shouted from the rooftops. The mysteries are a flaming torch, which, in the hands of a master, can light the way, but which, in the hands of a madman, can scorch the earth.” More horseshit. The allegorical language in the Bible is easily penetrated. There is no mystery or secret. If one clears what has been interpreted by others out of the way, one can see what is being said in those pages. The “mystery,” if there is any, is that what is beyond the physical, what idiot humans have aggrandized as “God”—the greater authority they seem to need to get themselves personally off the hook for their thoughts, feelings and actions—cannot be adequately expressed in the physical. There are limits to what language can express. I disagree with Dan Brown’s approach: making mystical language a “mystery” just because what is mystical is difficult to express either by written or spoken word. Thus the need for allegory. Doh. Hardly a mystery.

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: ”There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words” and “What the law of causality is meant to exclude cannot even be described” and ”They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

Apparently, in his research, Dan Brown did not delve into the clear meaning behind what appears to be secret or mysterious: that reality is pure empty space without causation, that pure empty space could give a flying fuck whether we live or die, and we are just matter existing upon it. Please Dan, either write a book that gets to the clear message in mystical texts or stop misleading your millions of fans into believing that reality is a matter of “secrets” and mysteries.” If you can’t adequately penetrate the “mysteries,” I suggest you take a hint from Wittgenstein’s last aphorism in the Tractatus: ”What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.”

But “silence” doesn’t sell many books, does it?

I watched the world series with great interest, and in the seventh-inning stretch, when someone got up to sing God Bless America, I’d grip my Coors Light, jaw slack, wondering WTF people were doing with their hands over their hearts, singing along. It reminded me of what Nietzsche wrote in Human All Too Human: “When we hear the old bells ringing out on a Sunday morning, we ask ourselves, can it be possible?”

Flummoxed, I did some research on the origins of God Bless America and discovered that it was written by Irving Berlin in 1918 and revised in 1938, as the fires of Nazism were being stoked in Europe. Since 9/11, it’s been sung during the seventh-inning stretch in all post-season ball games. I find it beyond ironic that terrorists destroying the World Trade Center inspired a renewed interest in a god that not only didn’t bless America on September, 11, 2001, but seemed only too happy to file its non-existent nails while thousands were burned to death.

Only Dodger Stadium and Yankee Stadium play God Bless America all year in the seventh-inning stretch. Evidently there was a kafuffle when a fan at a Boston Red Sox game at Yankee Stadium got up to go to the bathroom while God Bless America was being played and was restrained and ejected from the game by members of New York’s finest. When the person sued, the Yankees announced that they would no longer restrict the movement of fans during the playing of the song. ”Did this happen in 1629?” you ask. ”During the darkest years of the Inquisition?” No, it was August, 2008. That’s little over a year ago. It’s good to know that I can now attend a Yankee game and go to the restroom without putting my hand up to ask for permission. Up to one year ago, I would not be permitted to visit the restroom while everyone sang God Bless America, even though I do not believe in this non-existent mythical character. Now that’s freedom!

This past summer, three high school teens were thrown out of a New Jersey minor league game for refusing to stand during the playing of God Bless America. Their resultant lawsuit is still in the courts. I thought the first amendment states that each individual has freedom of speech? That each individual has the freedom to believe in a religion or not to believe in a religion? I’m tempted to go to a Yankee game next season and see what would happen if I remain seated during the singing of God Bless America, but relish the thought of  being thrown out in the street for my temerity. At ball games in Canada, there’s a seventh-inning stretch. Literally. The team mascot leads the crowd in a yoga moment, then everyone sits down and play resumes. No voices lifted in song in praise of mythical characters and no threat of being ejected if you don’t stand or have the gall to go to the bathroom.

It’s as if humans don’t think anymore about what’s going on around them, what they do by rote. Question what this song is saying: Be grateful for a land that’s “free,” even though you are not free to remain sitting whilst a song plays about how wonderful that freedom actually is. Even though the framers of the country you live in, this free place, created the Constitution to protect your rights and freedoms, even making sure to include amendments that would further protect your individual rights from being violated.

And why raise your voice in “solemn prayer?” Instead, ask: “Does solemn prayer actually work?” If one could ask any of the fifty million people who were killed during WWII if this evasive god character made them safe, I think they would beg to differ. I”ll leave you with another quote from Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human: “How can one bind the realm of freedom?”

How indeed.

The other day, I picked up Eric Maisel’s book The Atheist’s Way, because I want to familiarize myself with all the free thinking authors out there. Because Maisel is a psychotherapsit (among other things) and has written self-help books, I was expecting a sort of new age rendering of what it means to be a non-believer. Instead, in the introduction, Maisel comes out loaded for bear:

“If a passing pastor accuses you of sinning, you feel free to rebuke or ignore him. You know that he has no special knowledge and that he is only betraying your common humanity by quoting gods.”

I also loved: “Every sensible, educated, modern believer knows in a corner of consciousness that she is buying her solace on the cheap.”

He doesn’t mince words, and for that kind of honesty, the courage to stand firmly on atheist ground (not a defacto atheist barbed wire fence), he has my respect. I’m just starting the book, so it’s premature to give it a review, but I’m looking forward to hearing what Maisel has to say about atheism.

Has anyone else read The Atheist’s Way? If so, what do you think of Eric Maisel’s strong call of action to atheists?

“We need atheism to grow as a movement because we need to remove the god card from the hands of the selfishly self-interested.” 

Last week, I said much the same thing and was accused of Fascism. So when are non-believers going to take more action and stop accusing each other of being anti-humanity? If a child is playing with fire, you take away the matches, you don’t let it burn the house down around you.

Skeptics/rationalists/atheists/whateverists unite and let’s end religious idiocy so that individuals can progress, so that humanity can progress. What do you think? Is this stance too harsh? And if so, do you enjoy living your life ruled by political powers that hold the god card over your head?

I found out yesterday that tomorrow is Blasphemy Day International. There’s a Facebook page you can go to, but everyone knows that Twitter is where revolutionary topics get air. I just read an article called Why do the Heathen Rage by Albert Mohler. Um, we’re not raging Albert, you Christians just aren’t used to individuals thinking for themselves and questioning the existence of an imaginary god. Apparently they are going to try and turn the other cheek tomorrow and pray for our depraved souls. Wish they’d had that much love in their hearts when they were burning heretics by the millions in the dark ages, but that’s water under the bridge.

It’s time this religion fantasy went the way of the Dodo. Events like these are for thinkers to be heard, who’d like to see the separation of church and state a reality, and the end of religious persecution once and for all.

Hopefully Blasphemy Day International will become a trending topic on Twitter, but who will make sure of that? It’s last minute, but as a tight community of godless heathens, surely we can make this important day go viral. After reading several great blogs about Blasphemy Day by @DailyAtheist and others, I was DM’ing with @MaggieTheEA and we thought it might be good to start hashtagging it early so that Twitter gets the message. It’s already Sept. 30th in Australia and other parts of the world. So let’s start tweeting the blasphemy my heretics. After all, they can’t burn us alive this time can they?

I was talking to Eddie Other, and he said that there should be a lawsuit for cosmic harassment for when these theists pray for us heathens. I don’t like to be prayanoid, but perhaps we can smack them with a suit for violating first amendment rights limiting our free speech. He’s getting his lawyers on it.

If I see itiocy, I have to say something. This past week, I had the opportunity to read a two part blog at Greta Christina’s blog. I’m not sure how to post a hot link, but if you Google Greta Christina’s blog and click on Atheism hot link, you can check it out.

The author wrote about how white males seem to dominate the atheist movement. First of all, I wasn’t aware that there was an atheist “movement” or that white males were dominating it. If it’s true you bastards, I want the video.

On Twitter, there are many atheist usernames and avatars that are pointedly non-gender biased. I follow atheist cats, dogs, fish, even a godless teapot orbiting the planet. There are just as many atheist females as males (not that I’ve been counting). If you want proof, look at who I follow. There are many kick-ass female godless heathens out there, so I don’t know where Greta Christina gets her numbers.

I won’t go into the entire two part article. You can read it if you have the patience. When I read something, I read with an open mind, looking for clarity. One thing I can’t stomach is whining, or the sense that the author is talking about her perceived victimization.

Did you atheists know that in our supposed areligious “movement,” there is a willful victimizing going on? As if atheist men are subsuming atheist women. The idea is absurd. But that’s not what I find reprehensible about those two blog posts. What is most disturbing is the focus on duality, on me vs. them. This is exactly the kind of bullshit that atheism is attempting to eradicate from the face of this earth.

Greta, perhaps you are empowering women atheists the world over, but you don’t represent me. I don’t identify as a “white female atheist.” I’m areligious. Period. And I’m sure you’ll come up with some post-modern feminist crapture to support your claim that I am deluded as to impervious heinous and insidious male repression, but that’s your reality, not mine.

Atheist women are just as irreverent and powerfully vocal as atheist men. Atheism is not simply about ending the idiocy of religion, but the idiocy of anyone who sits firmly in a black/white, female/male, right/wrong binary belief system. A-theism means quite literally, “away from religion” which, to me, means away from stupidity.

Religion has quite nicely received a shot in the head. It’s in its death throes. That’s obvious, so let’s not waste our energy quibbling over how atheist women or atheist women of color are not being represented in a “movement” and just stand as individuals. Away from man/woman or any kind of duality. Strength in the atheist movement (if there is such a thing) is that we are all individuals first.

Question: Atheist women, do you feel that those bad boy atheist males are dominating us poor helpless girls?