The View from Nowhere or Somewhere

Since my early twenties I have madly underlined the metaphysical bits in novels like War and Peace and The Razor’s Edge, preferring that philosophy be delivered to me in the pages of a fictional work. One might argue that all great literary fiction illuminates the human experience, but the relatively new philosophical novel genre is burgeoning and undertaking more than a cursory examination of existential questions. The continued popularity of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Sophie’s World suggests that many individuals seek answers to existential queries like “Does God Exist?” through such works, and it is in this genre on this question that Rebecca Newberger Goldstein gives us in her book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God.

Goldstein’s protagonist Cass Seltzer is an academic with a Ph.D. in the psychology of religion who has written a book called The Varieties of Religious Illusion, which becomes a surprise bestseller and earns him the dubious title, “atheist with a soul.” In his book, Cass presents 36 arguments for the existence of God with a skeptic’s precision, and yet it’s obvious that he also perceives the world with a poet’s passionate intuition, symbolized by his choice of the number 36 for its mystical significance rooted in the Kabbalah’s “Lamed-Vav”—named for the 36 righteous who greet Ayn Sof, the divine presence. In Gematria, a form of Jewish numerology, 36 also symbolizes a notion of “two lives.”

“Two lives” are metaphorically represented in 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Cass Seltzer’s devotion to his mentor Professor Klapper (who dismisses skepticism as “positivistic, nihilistic scientism”), and the pure brilliance of the child genius, Azarya, who at the precocious age of six years, discovers that there is no largest prime number. Goldstein poses complex metaphysical questions and precisely takes apart 36 arguments for the existence of God in a manner that will appeal to both the existential thinker and the skeptical questioner—proof that it’s constructive to use metaphor and analogy to bring some clarity to questions about the nature of reality.

To those not schooled in methods of critical thinking, the big questions can seem out of reach, answerable only by minds trained in classic systems of investigation. Many individuals thus unschooled get their existential fix in pop culture, in music and movies such as The Matrix. As is suggested in Goldstein’s title, many still turn to a work of fiction called the bible for their answers to life’s big questions. Biblical scholars would agree that the ancient Hebraic texts were originally written to impart metaphysical truths, but that any pure symbolic references have devolved through messy translation and misinterpretation into a travesty that has rooted a God problem within the belief systems of billions of people worldwide who deify the messenger rather than the message.

Like her protagonist Cass Seltzer, Rebecca Goldstein is a Ph.D. and the author of papers addressing reduction, realism, and the mind, as well as the book Incompleteness: the Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel. She is interested in more than cursory investigations into the nature of reality. As a self-described atheist, Goldstein has also asked herself such questions as, “How does all this philosophy I’ve studied help me to deal with the brute contingencies of life?” and “How does it relate to life as it’s really lived?”

Early in the story Cass Seltzer happens upon Thomas Nagel’s book The View from Nowhere and is struck by the fact that here is a man who shares the same “bedtime metaphysical” question: “How can I be a particular person?” The human thinking process can access realms of thought that are purely objective, and this tells us about the theory of undecidability: whether a proposition can be clearly found provable or refutable in a specified deductive system. Regardless if the “language” used is mathematical or linguistic, subjective interpretation confuses any deductive system. Throughout Goldstein’s narrative, Cass Seltzer’s internal dilemma symbolizes this notion of the impossibility of a purely objective interpretation as he flirts with a point-of-view perception of reality.

When Goldstein quotes from Nagel’s book, one passage is particularly illuminative: “I may occupy TN [Thomas Nagel] or see the world through the eyes of TN, but I can’t be TN. I can’t be a mere person. From this point of view it can appear that ‘I am TN,’ insofar as it is true, is not an identity but a subject-predicate position.” Cass Seltzer summarizes Nagel’s book, surmising that “the basic idea (in the book) is that we humans have the unique capacity to detach ourselves from our own particular point of view, achieving degrees of objectivity, all the way up to and including the view of how things are in themselves, from no particular viewpoint at all.”

I share Cass’s notion that it may be quite possible to access this view from nowhere, but the distinction should be made between a “no place” that is a “thing in itself” and a no place that is “no thing” at all.

Because most individuals cannot grasp an infinite nothing, this notion of a “View from Nowhere” has been made into a religion, into a God. Spinoza’s own conclusion was that, “the universe that itself provides all the answers about itself simply is God.” In Buddhism, this “groundless ground” is considered the absolute that can only be accessed by relinquishing the thinking process. Goldstein explores this possibility: can an individual inhabit a position that is not a position? A position neither based in the dual/binary worlds of scientism on one side and intuition on the other? Is it possible to perceive reality from this View from Nowhere, this Ayn Sof, this nothing, this groundless ground and to then understand existence?

Einstein said, “If, then, it is true that the axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be extracted from experience but must be freely invented … I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.” Nagel’s View from Nowhere, the notion of a “centerless world” and the proposition that “none of us occupies a metaphysically privileged position” cannot be proved empirically (although some might argue that Einstein reduced it to a perfect metaphysical equation with his theory of relativity).

Perhaps there is a way to solve Nagel’s “unsolved problem of particular subjectivity.” If it is the case that E = mc² (and this theory has not been disproved), perhaps the very soul-centered position of perception is the key to understanding existence, what Stephen Hawking and other physicists hope to discover as the source of  “what breathes fire into our equations.” This nothing can be noted, using not what Buddhists consider the only manner in which one may perceive objective reality (the meditative state), or a “unique capacity” of intuition, but by utilizing a very specific manner of critical thought. Perhaps that is the only way Thomas Nagel’s questions, “What kind of fact is it—if it is a fact—that I am Thomas Nagel? How can I be a particular person?” can be answered. Perhaps by questioning and noting the clarity of pure thought (as Einstein mentioned) is the only way a particular person is “himself.”

If Heidegger was correct and it is the case that the notion of Platonic forms set ontological investigations back by focusing on existence as a being (a thing with properties and substance), the focus should be directed toward what is prior to being—which he famously referred to as “the nothing.” This then becomes the issue with philosophical investigations that cannot get beyond Platonism—a frustration shared by Wittgenstein when he said, “How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further!”

In the same way that Wittgenstein pressed the boundaries of empiricism and came to das mystiche, works by philosophers such as Heidegger tell us that our “bedtime metaphysical” pondering, this observing of a self and questioning one’s own existence. “Here I Am” should not end in a pat empirical answer, nor some vague transcendental or mystical sensation. Rather, “Here I Am” is simply how it is.

If the universe is both personal and universal as both Seltzer and Nagel suggest, and it’s not possible for an individual to wrap his/her logical thinking process around the notion, one should neither assign mystical significance to this nothing, nor should it seek to empirically dissect it as a “thing in itself.”

Even when Goldstein’s child genius, Azarya, becomes an adult, his life choices show how difficult it is for an individual to resolve their own human foibles or “reconcile the necessary with the impossible.” Can we humans reconcile the often contradictory qualities of our behavior, the messes that we so often find ourselves in when facing the consequences of poorly thought out choices in life? Perhaps when one perceives from the View from Nowhere, one’s previously contradictory axiomatic choices that once reduced life to a series of tautological propositions, come clear, and the ability to understand what has previously been a mystery is revealed.

At the end of Goldstein’s book a Harvard debate occurs between her protagonist Cass Seltzer and a religious apologist who argue the proposition: “Does God exist?” Goldstein shows us that a line in the sand cannot be drawn with precision when Cass concludes his argument with the claim that while an objective point of view from the View from Nowhere is available to us all—individuals are ultimately responsible for their own moral choices.

In her appendix, Goldstein exposes flaws inherent in the weaker arguments one hears from theists (from the Cosmological Argument to the Argument from Pragmatism—William James’ Leap of Faith), but she also points out the flaws in reasoning within more subtle claims, such as The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants and The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness. 36 Arguments for the Existence of God not only delivers what the freethinking reader wants from a philosophical novel, but is a must-read for skeptics who wish to arm themselves with thoughtful ammunition in the ongoing battle to end religious irrationality.

In particular, within the Argument from the Intelligibility of the Universe, Goldstein examines the idea that perhaps no answer exists to certain hard questions. Although I suspect that Goldstein shares Thomas Nagel’s view that Wittgenstein is a philosophical idealist, I think that Wittgenstein mirrors her sentiments as evinced in one of his aphorisms at the end of the Tractatus when he writes, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.” Goldstein evocatively concludes her own book thus: “Maybe some things just are (“stuff happens”), including the fundamental laws of nature. Philosophers sometimes call this just-is-ness “contingency.” Perhaps in the end, we are all humbled by “the brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides.” Perhaps indeed.

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?

Both interviews I did with Udo Schuklenk and Ophelia Benson got a lot of talk on Richard Dawkins’ discussion board (Ophelia’s interview had over 200 comments). Thanks to all the kick-ass critical thinkers who responded and to websites/bloggers who linked to those interviews.

My interview with Michael Shermer is coming up. We’ll be talking about his views on “Kool-Aid Psychology.” He and Sam Harris are scheduled to debate Deepak Choprah and Jean Houston in Pasadena, March 14, 2010.

Eric Maisel’s interview will be posted soon. I talked to Mr. Maisel about his book, The Atheist’s Way. You’ll be sure to enjoy his thought-provoking responses. 

Another freethinker who will be featured in my series is Russell Blackford, co-editor of 50 Voices of Disbelief. I’ll be talking to Professor Blackford about his views on accommodationism. Sure to be a galvanizing topic.

Stay tuned!

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?

Today, I’m talking to Udo Schuklenk, co-editor with Russell Blackford of 50 Voices of Disbelief, Why We Are Atheists. Udo is also author of  The Power of Pills: Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Drug Development and The Bioethics Reader.

MAIA: Welcome Udo, and I appreciate you taking the time to talk about your and Russell Blackford’s book. I very much enjoyed reading these essays. Not only was it an opportunity to hear favorite atheist authors air recent thoughts on their personal realizations on what it means to be an atheist, but it also introduced me to other areligious authors and their books. It’s a compelling read and a powerful argument for atheism. Thank you for compiling so many excellent essays.

In the introduction to 50 Voices of Disbelief, you and Russell Blackford write that, “Religious dogmas and organizations are legitimate targets for fearless criticism and satire” and “There must not be special treatment for religious ideas of any kind.” I couldn’t agree more. You also mention the importance of Voices of Reason being heard at this point in our history. Why now more than ever?

UDO: I think there are several good but also quite varied reasons for this. One reason is that the religious backlash against humanist thinking is becoming ever more virulent. The UN Human Rights Council has decided to encourage the organisation’s member state to introduce blasphemy laws.  I have argued in THE ECONOMIST magazine, ‘freedom of speech “must include the right to ‘defame’ religions” (“The meaning of freedom”, April 4th). The UN Human Rights Council, which adopted a resolution decrying religious defamation as an affront to human dignity, is controlled mostly by countries that are among the most prolific violators of civil rights, including the right to speak one’s mind.

The blasphemy document itself is remarkable in its scope and deliberate vagueness. Notorious civil-rights violators like Iran and Saudi Arabia will now be able to claim with some confidence that the UN is on their side when they clamp down on liberal-minded or secular Muslims. Western countries will also be happy to note that the council thinks the human right to free speech is not violated when they enforce their own, less draconian, blasphemy laws. The UN has firmly established itself as a body that is not even prepared to defend the basic principles enshrined in its Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.  This then is the first answer to your question: Religious institutions and the states they control move ever more viciously against freedom of speech to protect themselves from legitimate criticism. We must not allow this to stand. Religious beliefs, ultimately, can only survive if our right to question and criticize them can be efficiently curtailed. If I am right, and we are at some kind of strategic inflection point as far as the influence of organized religions in the Western world is concerned, their fight to maintain their special rights and status will become ever more vicious. Hence, it is important right now for us to speak out and not leave that to very few atheist cheer leaders.

I also happen to think that it is important to demonstrate to the wider public that atheists can think for themselves and that our views about many issues are very diverse. We don’t do ourselves any favors at all by leaving people with the impression that our capacity to think independently is reducible to Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. We are not a hierarchical religious outfit after all. Our book, the 50 Voices of Disbelief demonstrates just that beautifully.

MAIA:  I couldn’t agree more that atheists and anyone who cares about freedom of speech and human rights must act rather than remain silent. In your introduction, you reference contributing essayists, saying: “… some are even wary of the words atheism and atheist—words that can carry unwanted connotations in many social contexts.” This is a theme also picked up in Michael Shermer’s essay in the book. He wrote, “Words matter and labels carry baggage,” going on to say that people associate atheism with “… communism, socialism, or extreme liberalism,” and that “… we can try redefining the word in a more positive direction.” There’s an ongoing debate among atheists/skeptics/agnostics/freethinkers/rationalists as to what an unbeliever should be called. Do you think the word “atheist” is a viable term? Or should a new name be coined that would more accurately represent the areligious? 

UDO: That’s a very good question. I hold it with Karl Popper on labels really. It’s unimportant to me what label we use as long as it is clearly defined (and packs a punch in the public arena). To me it matters not at all what label it is, but it would be nice to have not too many competing such labels about as they only distract from the main messages and are indicative of sectarian scheming and territory marking. You might recall in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, there is this scene where our would-be liberationists sit in an arena introducing themselves to each other. They all follow pretty much closely aligned (albeit not exactly aligned) agendas and have nearly all the same name bar some small difference in labeling. They go on arguing forever about their small differences and miss the bigger picture as a result of that. I think we would be well advised to go about this more professionally by surveying which label the wider public would be most comfortable with, take that label and move on from there. A good example of how successful this is is the self-labeling of anti-choice campaigners in the context of reproductive rights. They call themselves ‘pro-life’ which clearly sounds much better than ‘we-don’t-care-about women’, or ‘we decide for pregnant women’ or ‘anti-choice’, which is what they really are. Marketing in this context clearly matters, unless we think that our agenda is entirely theoretical and inconsequential.

 MAIA: I’ll have to watch Life of Brian again for that scene you descsribe. Good analogy for what goes on in the many-labelled freethinking/atheist community. In your introduction you also write, “It is high time we took charge of, and responsibility for, our own destinies without God, or God’s priestly interpreters, coming between us and our decision-making.” It’s a theme that Ophelia Benson picks up in her essay when she writes: “I refuse to consider a God ‘good’ that expects us to ignore our own best judgment and reasoning faculties.” Do you see more people taking responsibility for their own destinies? And what is the danger when they do not?

UDO: The fact that the number of people clearly affiliated with mainstream religions has been decreasing in the West for more than a decade by now indicates that more and more people have begun thinking for themselves. I suspect, ironically, this is even true for many religious people who confronted the atheist challenge, and on reflection decided to remain with their God. Reflecting on these issues is a good thing. We can only truly live our own lives if we make a considered choice as to the values (and basis of those values) that guide our lives. If we don’t, if we follow religious (or other authority) blindly, we live an other-directed life, and in that sense we don’t actually live our own lives. The ongoing public exchanges between non-religious people and people believing in some kind of higher being actually serve that purpose.

MAIA: “Other-directed life” is an excellent way of putting it. I couldn’t agree more that ”otherness” is a foundational problem, and many individuals don’t realize how thoroughly they are plugged into “they” and “we.” In 50 Voices of Disbelief, a common recurring theme among the atheist contributors (yourself included) is an early questioning of the status quo of the religion you were brought up believing. Why do you think some people believe willingly, accepting without question their entire lives, and others question early, and reject the façade of belief?

UDO: You are asking an empirical as opposed to a philosophical or ethical question. I’m not trained to address this question as a professional. I can think of only one good reason for why someone might decide (unconsciously, if there is such a thing as an unconscious decision), and that is that there is quite a lot of comfort one can take from believing in a higher being. This comfort might be mistaken if there is no such being, as we atheists happen to think, but surely one got to acknowledge that confidence in an afterlife will make it easier for many religious people to cope with miserable lives. This is especially true for miserable lives that seem to have no end. I have always thought, call it arrogant, that those who are stronger willed or stronger minded are more likely to question this comfort and its pseudo-answers than people who are psychologically weaker. Surely there is comfort in knowing that a good, all-knowing entity is watching over you. It’s delusional, no doubt, but believing this must give you a warm and fuzzy feeling, and possibly the strength to deal with life’s adversity.

MAIA: In your own contribution to the book, an essay titled Human Self-Determination, Biomedical Progress, and God, you raise what I think is a very important issue, writing, “Political correctness today seems to demand that progressive intellectuals pretend that the barbarism that pervades many Islamic countries is not happening.” Political Correctness has become pervasive. Do you think that in general, atheists should be more aggressive in criticizing Islam?and exposing harmful religious ideologies?

UDO: Oh, absolutely. As writers like Henryk Broder have rightly pointed out, what we see across the Western world is the political left and political liberals continuing their arguments with Christians, but not with the arguably much greater threat to secular multi-cultural societies, that is conservative Islam. The UN Human Rights Council has already decided to deliberately muddy the waters by claiming that Islamophobia is a form of racism. How offensive is that to anyone who has ever been attacked or otherwise discriminated against because of their ethnicity? People choose these religious ideologies, you don’t choose the color of your skin. – As an aside, if these people argue that they have not even consciously made the choice to be Muslim (or Christian, or Scientologist or Aquarian for that matter), there is even less reason to take their religious convictions seriously, because they’re not meaningfully their own. – I think the conflation of such issues is deliberate.

There is also this continuing stuff about how peace loving Islam and its adherents are, yet most acts of religiously motivated violence we have seen across the world during the last decade or two were motivated by the ideology of Islam. We have all seen time and again on TV how adherents to this ideology have burned effigies of leaders of Western countries where cartoonists ridicule their God. What makes them think that their strongly held beliefs, baseless as they clearly are, deserve special respect? What makes them think that there is some divine right of Muslims not to be offended by people who disagree with their beliefs? I am offended all the time by their views on a lot of normative issues. Do I go out and burn effigies of Islamic countries’ leaders or prominent religious figures? No. Do I bomb Iran’s airline? No. There is no special moral entitlement of Muslim or other religious folks not to be offended by someone who disagrees with the ideology they hold dear to their heart. Protecting religious ideologies from the same acerbic wit that other ideologies (communism, capitalism, liberalism etc etc) have to endure is mistaken. This is what the rough and tumble of liberal democracies is all about. It is important for us as atheists to protect these freedoms against the onslaught of religious (and other) ideologies.

MAIA:  I agree with you whole-heartedly on that. In your essay, you also bring up a very important point about the special rights that health care professionals have under “conscientious objection,” that if they “strongly hold personal religious beliefs that are in conflict with what would normally be required of them as a health care professional, they can “legitimately object to providing such professional services on grounds of personal conscience.” This practice is reprehensible and as you write, “It is arguable that, if individuals abuse that privilege by discriminating against particular patients because of their personal convictions, they violate basic standards of professional conduct.” This sort of thing goes on, and yet atheism is considered the unethical force. As you say, “religious consciences are reaching arbitrary conclusions about what is right and what is wrong.” Do you see the need for atheists to organize a more united front and demand that this kind of unfair practice be controlled by government legislation?

UDO:  I have written on this issue on my blog and various articles during the last few years. I do believe we should do away with the right to conscientious objection in medicine altogether. Here are my reasons for this: Usually in the context of the abortion controversy, religiously motivated health care professionals claim the moral (and often legal) right to conscientious objection to the provision of certain health care services. The basic idea is that if, say, Christian doctors and nurses object for religious (conscience) reasons to abortion they should not be forced to provide such services. On the face of it this seems uncontroversial. I think both accepting such conscience based refusals to provide health care services as well as assuming that such decisions are uncontroversial is mistaken. Let me explain why.

First things first: health care professionals such as doctors and nurses are first and foremost called upon by us as members of society as professionals and not as members of the Communist Party, the Klu Klux Clan, the local chess club, or a particular church. They provide a public service. In return for this we as society grant them a monopoly on the provision of such services (eg doctors have a monopoly on the provision of many health delivery services, including the prescription of drugs). We as society also invest substantial amounts of public funds into their training.

In many countries abortion is legal to some extent or other. In other words, societies have decided that it is ethically acceptable for women to make such choices (usually within certain well-defined limits). In societies providing public health care, women are entitled to receive abortion services through health care professionals that are publicly funded. These professionals are seen by pregnant women for the purpose of having an abortion. They are sought out as professionals and not at all as private individuals with their own private views on the morality or otherwise of abortion. I think it is preposterous to suggest that such professionals could kind of opt-out of the provision of some services because they feel strongly about such services. Religious provisions are more or less arbitrary. Some make sense, others don’t, and among religions there is little consensus on what is and isn’t ethical. To permit the delivery of health care to be controlled by what amounts essentially to a lottery is unacceptable.

Patients treated by a public sector doctor belonging to Jehova’s Witnesses wouldn’t get blood transfusions, those falling into the hands of an adherent to the Scientology Church won’t receive antidepressants, the list is endless. It’s easily imaginable that a racist doctor belonging to a suitably racist church could refuse to provide life-preserving services to patients from ethnicities other than her own. The conscientious objection to abortion crowd might not like to hear this, but there is no in-principle difference between their objection and that of the medic belonging to the Aryan Nation Church of Jesus Christ Christian. They will, of course, claim that they have ‘better’ reasons and that the competing church (ie the smallish racist outfit) is either not a ‘real’ church or that the racists are ‘wrong’ etc. The thing is, strictly speaking, none of this can be shown to be true, because, as it happens all monotheistic religions depend on untestable claims about the existence of ‘God’.

A reliable delivery of health services (and this includes equitable access) depends on guaranteeing timely access based on health need. Conscientious objections are a serious threat to precisely that. If you are a pregnant woman living in a rural area with a limited number of predominantly conservative Christian or Muslim doctors you might well not be able to execute your legal right to have an abortion at a certain point in time, if respect for conscientious objections was considered to be of greater importance than your access to services.

This argument is very powerful indeed, when you consider the dearth of health care professionals serving the public sector in developing countries. So, the sooner we get rid of the right to conscientious objection, the better for us, the public. And to be clear, if health care professionals feel strongly enough about this matter, they should be invited to leave the profession and do something else with their lives. We cannot reasonably permit a pick-and-choose type interpretation of professionalism to become the norm. As someone who has taught for many years in medical schools, I can testify to quite a number of people who have chosen dentistry over medicine, for instance, because they did not wish to ever have to face the moral conflicts that come into play in the abortion controversy or end-of-life decision-making. In all honesty, these professionals deserve our respect for what I think is a grown-up understanding of what it means to be a professional. I think a strong case can be made for atheists targeting this serious problem policy wise.

MAIA:  In Michael Tooley’s essay, he writes, “Most people in the world accept the religious beliefs of their parents with relatively minor changes, and never think critically about those beliefs.” He asks an important question: “Can anything be done to enable ordinary people to step back from their religious beliefs and to consider whether those beliefs are really true?” This question is echoed by many other atheist contributors, among them: Julian Baggini: “Why do intelligent people continue to believe?” Susan Blackmore: “God and the paranormal …. inspire deeply held beliefs and have spawned highly evolved memeplexes that are very infectious and difficult to root out once they are installed in the human mind,” Dale McGowan: “How do we go on, century after century, skating on the thin ice of a system so self-evidently false and self-contradictory?” and Ophelia Benson: “A lot of people think they know things about God which seem to be contradicted by everything we see around us. It’s odd that the discrepancies don’t interfere with the knowledge.” Because the theme of questioning is prevalent in my own book, I’d like to hear what you think can be done to turn the penchant of humans to believe rather than question. Is it possible?

UDO:  Another empirical question. I suspect as atheists we probably need to offer an alternative to the needs ‘God’ satisfies (well, doesn’t satisfy in reality, but psychologically – you know, the afterlife, redemption for wrong-doing, some good all powerful big guy watching over you, that kinda stuff). We need to show that a life without ‘God’ can be meaningful and satisfying. I think humanist groups presiding over non-religious weddings and funerals have made a good and quite successful start in many countries on this front. Beyond that, it’s up to each of us individually to provoke believers into explaining themselves and their beliefs. After all, as Dawkins (yes, Dawkins) said once, ‘There is more to vicars than giving tea parties, there are evil consequences.’ US evangelicals were by and large behind attempts to introduce the death penalty for certain homosexual sex acts in Uganda.

I think it might well be worth re-focusing humanist efforts, like the religious organizations have done for many many decades, on developing countries, supporting free speech and liberal causes and their supporters there more pro-actively. The fights humanists have on their hands in places like Nigeria, India and other such countries is arguably of much greater significance than the skirmishing we engage in with Christians in the developed world.

MAIA: Thanks for joining me today, Udo. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to address these topics.  If you’d like to know more about Udo Schuklenk, please visit his website. And if you haven’t read 50 Voices of Disbelief, I highly recommend it. Let’s raise our disbelieving voices and be heard.

Stay tuned for my next interview with Ophelia Benson, author of Does God Hate Women? and intrepid fighter of fashionable nonsense at Butterflies and Wheels

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.

Existential thought simply means, ‘not of and prior to belief.’ Thinking is prior to belief in that thinking is a necessary condition of existence, and requires no subject to be the function called thinking. The trouble with belief is that it always requires a subject. All belief is a belief-‘of’, a belief – ‘in’, and so is secondary to thinking.

What some one means when they say “I’m an atheist’ is that they are an existentialist. No beliefs in pre or post existence, no fantasies, no ghosts and monsters or any supernatural beings floating around in empty space, no mysteries that cannot be solved by clear, critical thinking.  

As Eddie says in the book, “The genuine atheist has no interest in whether an other believes or doesn’t believe in a god or gods, whether the idea is right or wrong, good or bad. If there’s no apple in the room, why talk about an apple?”

He lights a cigarette and continues, “The contemporary atheist doesn’t realize that by engaging the religious believer in discussions of God or no God, it’s allowing theism the home advantage. It’s playing within theistic notions and language. Theism and atheism are comprised of belief and non-belief in the same subject, so that whether one believes or not, it’s unable to rid its self of the subject. The religious boy has no such beliefs to impose. The question is: how it that the atheist bothers with the notion at all?”

When Globe journalist Samantha Hart asks, “What’s the atheist’s point?” Eddie replies by asking another question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

“I would think either none or an infinite number,” Sam says. To which Eddie responds, “It’s a foolish question. An infinite number is no number at all. An angel is a religious notion and a pin is a physical thing. You can watch two people argue over something and realize that the thing is absolutely of no interest. Each would be better off if the thing never existed. That there aren’t and haven’t been gods is a simple fact that the atheist has to enjoin the religious. Attempting to prove in the positive is a mistake. It energizes the fool to have a supposed enemy playing its game. The fool has already won.”

So are you an atheist or an existential thinker? If billions of people went around saying they believed in unicorns, would you, as someone who did not believe in unicorns, identify yourself an aunicornist?

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?

My God is I

Because I choose not to pray

My skies should be grey and dark

The skies are the same for everyone

Does conscience burn for eternity?

I’d much rather live my only life without rules

My god is I

Believers seek the weakened souls

I am told to believe in lies

The death of god occurs in the mind

And freedom is reborn

My god is I

Believers teach faith and hope

To children who believe in unicorns

People chase love; they can find it in nothing

The whole world is lost, trying to find something

My god is I

Only the nonbeliever is destined to hell, no murderer

A rational mind is by far the worst sin

I am punished for not needing imaginary support

The earth is not a waiting room for afterlife

My god is I

How many must die before we learn

The only time we have is now

Nobody will save us, except ourselves

Save yourself while you can

You will keep saneness and mind

My god is I

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.

Satan is afoot? I stare at this sort of thing and wonder why humans continue to let themselves be  manipulated by Hollywood. Not only does Hollywood prey on primal fear by churning out horror films depicting the most awful stuff (think the Saw series), the presence of a shark with the taste for human flesh (Jaws), serial killing cannibals (Silence of the Lambs), or Zombies (Night of the Living Dead), but it makes us pay for their efforts.

So then we need a greater force to save us from the shark, the serial killer, the predatory zombies. Where is God anyway, when you’re home alone at night and a serial killer comes to call? Or swimming in the ocean and a dorsal fin suddenly appears? Where’s the big guy then?

We have a primal fear of being alone. And yet each individual is born alone, lives alone and dies alone. Is there anyone else in here? Nope, I checked and it’s just me. The existence of the few people around us is tenuous, the chance they’ll hang around forever not a guarantee. So the belief in a god, a tooth fairy, a Jesus, a Buddha, a Santa Claus, police, government, some form of good promises salvation, a small candle we light in the dark of our forgetting to keep away the fear of annihilation, the fear of the unknown.

But what happens when each individual snuffs out the candles it has lit and stands alone for the first time? Will it die? Anything can happen, any thing, but if you’re still alive, if you’re still breathing, YOU still exist. So what’s the fear? You’re either dead or you’re alive.

Do you think that humans will evolve beyond the need for a saving force? A god?

“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?

What if the universe simply exists and never was created?

What if this god thing is only a human delusion, a psycho-emotional need?

What if  “god” is really nothing special or more specifically, no special thing?

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.

But I digress. Back to Twitter: @expatina said she found that if you scratched down deep enough on an agnostic, you’d find a believer. I replied that agnostics like to keep god around to hedge their bets. An interesting question was then posed by @enlightenmentor who asked, “Isn’t ‘keeping god around to hedge bets’ true skepticism? Even Richard Dawkins agrees.”

Let’s look at the language used: “True Skepticism.” That’s an interesting proposition. It’s like saying “Business Ethics.” The two words are a contradiction in terms. And then deferring to Dawkins’ expertise as a “true skeptic.” Dawkins is an evolutionist, which is an empiricist doctrine. Looking at skepticism epistemologically, there are the rationalists on one side and the empiricists on the other. A rationalist uses reason/logic/math/idealism, and everything is reducible to mind with no reference to the external world. To the empiricist, common sense/sense impressions/intuition rules, referencing the external world.

Skepticism is about engaging in critical thought. Skepticism is the methodology of questioning. It’s different than critical thought because skepticism as a theory begins from an answer rather than starting from a question. Critical thought, on the other hand, never assumes an answer but always begins with a question. It’s a necessary condition for every atheist to be skeptical of religion but skepticism is insufficient. What’s required of the critical thinker is to put even its own skepticism into question. Every atheist is a skeptic because he/she has bothered to think, not take it from authority that a mythical being lives in the sky carnally interested in our well-being and ready to wrap its loving arms around us when we die.

I find it interesting that in the midst of this so-called atheist revolution, in the midst of what is brought forward by science and critical thinking and questioning, there lies more doctrine.

As an empirical scientist, Dawkins puts forth in his book, a scale, an attempt to categorize atheistic thought by number, that runs one to seven. Seven being a strong (complete) atheist and one being a strong (complete) theist. Dawkins is adamant that he is not a strong (complete) atheist. Apparently, he’s a six or a six point nine because as he says, “I can’t know absolutely that god doesn’t exist.”

As an experiment, I tweeted Dawkins’ scale and asked my godless heathen followers where they’d classify themselves. A few of them were reluctant to classify themselves, because I presume they were hitting on some clarity, that one cannot know any thing, and god, promoted as a being, is a thing. Is it possible that a new designation can be made that is prior to the notion of designation?

Empiricism demands that all theories be tested against observations made by the senses. Rationalists look to thinking, logic, math, with no external reference/deference, or so they believe. There always exists a reference to external. And every Buddhist knows that there’s no escaping the external. Buddhists attempt to escape the empiricist realm by meditating, accessing the realm of no thought to transcend the illusion of physicality. But what if there were a philosophy that illuminates that which is prior to the physical, wiping out the foundation of rational and empirical thought and coming to the center, where clarity resides? Would you be interested in accessing that realm? And exactly how far is it from your everyday reality?

A clear, areligious individual would not classify itself on the atheist scale. It wouldn’t have a scale at all, because a clear individual can see thing. And can see the scale of thing, measure, as secondary. Not only does it think outside the box, but it notes there is no box. Just as there is no real measure for theist/atheist, there is no measure for good/bad, true/false, right/wrong.

So, to answer the question put forth by @enlightenmentor, “true” skepticism is an itiotic term. The “true” doesn’t exist because one cannot “know” any thing. All Dawkins is saying that as a being, as a thing, the propositional god he speaks of cannot be empirically proved or disproved. So one is left with this “god” resting fully bounded within probability theory, which of course has nothing to do with the two simple absolutes: yes or no.

In my book, the character Eddie Other, sees the error in Dawkins’ and Descartes’ skepticism. He looks at the error at the very foundation of the illusory social constructions of religion and science and blows the dual/binary as well as notions of monotheistic/one-ness out of the water. No matter how much you might think you “know,” your inertial frame of reference conveys only a single reality, an empiricist reality. And in the land of measure, that might be right, it might be wrong, but probably it’s just not clear. So what constitutes the clear? Stay tuned to find 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?