Threaten Me, Please…

As an atheist, I have a recurring conversation with many believers. They can’t understand why I bother to try to be a good person without the impending fear of judgement and damnation. If I don’t think God is watching me and keeping score, why don’t I just go on a hedonistic binge of barbarism?

I always try to patiently respond that my motivation is mostly internal. I want to judge myself to be useful, productive, helpful, and caring. There is an external aspect to it as well. I want my family and friends to judge me positively. I don’t believe in life everlasting. My only shot at living beyond my mortal years is in the recollections of those who might remember me. And for reasons of my own making, I want that legacy to be based on fondness, respect, and maybe even admiration, not on infamy. That is what I aspire to, and what inspires me.

What I don’t usually share is that their question frightens the hell out of me. The implication (or in some cases, the outright admission) is that the only thing standing between them and a life of raping and pillaging is belief in some exogenous force poised to reign retribution down upon them. They are not a tamed animal, they are a caged one.

Of late, I’ve begun to wonder if this same need for external fear-based motivation extends beyond the realm of religion and morality. In economics, I hear the repeated notion that minimum wages, guaranteed health care, food stamps, unions, and any other program designed to help the poor or the working poor is inherently destructive. It removes the incentive to work harder, train harder, or even to work at all. The underlying assumption seems to be that absent the fear of homelessness and starvation, no one would get out of bed in the morning. It isn’t enough to have a sizable carrot in front of you unless there’s a big angry stick behind you to keep you moving.

This same attitude seems to bleed into foreign policy as well. The notion that the USA must remain the preeminent military power on the planet because otherwise we’ll lose our ability to influence other countries seems predicated on the notion that our power comes from fear that we instill. We repeatedly demonstrate that fear of terrorism will motivate us to actions we would otherwise never consider. In fact politics has largely degenerated into a game of which party can paint the scarier future if the other guy wins.

It even strikes me that much of our gun-culture stems from fears that everyone else, left to their own devices, would pose a threat. It is only by being a bigger threat yourself, that you’re able to keep them at bay.

I do believe that most people view others through their own life-lens. That is, they project their own desires, tendencies, and morality onto the behavior of others. People who worry about the downside of atheism, economic security, and world peace are reacting from the awareness that they themselves realize that in such a world, they would rapidly fall into an existence of varying degrees of unfettered sociopathy.

That there exist so many people contained only by a variety of fears is more than disconcerting. And it would be one thing if there was a recognition that fear-based motivation was destructive and there was a collective consensus to mitigate it. Conversely, what we’re seeing is a resurgence in the idea that fear-based motivation is essential and good.

I had hoped for better, but in the end, maybe we are just barbarians with iPhones.

Einstein’s God was not Yahweh

The quote attributed to Einstein, “The more I study science, the more I believe in God,” is getting a lot of play around the interwebs. I though it might be interesting to look at what he might have meant by the statement.

Einstein is also widely quoted as saying, God does not play dice with the universe.” Together, these quotes are oft cited as evidence of scientists believing in God—usually by fundamentalist Christian groups defending themselves against the encroachment of science on their literal interpretation of their mythology.

First, Einstein was neither a Christian or even a Jew. He was raised as a Jew and was schooled as a Catholic. He had ample education in the Abrahamic religions, but rejected them nonetheless.

Still, Einstein is not properly classified an atheist either. He rejected the notion of a personal god. Instead, he said, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”

In other words, he was a Deist, and was in the spiritual company of Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, George Washington, Ethan Allen, and Thomas Paine. Deists believe that reason and observation of the natural world, without the need for organized religion, can determine that the universe is the product of a creator.

So Einstein’s quote is an observation of the mathematical beauty, the order, the ever unfolding revelation of the inner workings of the universe that he perceived. It’s not remotely an affirmation of the bible.

Einstein’s god never intervened in human affairs or suspended the natural laws of the universe, and absolutely did not have a supernatural existence or the capacity for miracles. This makes Einstein a curious poster boy for Christians in specific, or even theists in general.

Atheism, homosexuality, and other reasons your neighbors look at you funny

June is LGBT Pride Month, and what better way to celebrate than to talk about how much easier it is to be gay now than to be an atheist. Would my parents feel better if I was gay instead of atheist? That’s not at all clear. (But I’m pretty sure my fiancé prefers the latter.)

Ronald Lindsay’s essay does make the accurate point that the LGBT movement is farther up the acceptance curve than atheists are. Sure, gays are only despised in many areas of the country, while atheists are a scourge throughout it.

Yet it’s pretty clear that equal rights and social equality for gays and lesbians is inevitable, even if they must first wait for all the Baby Boomers to die. I think atheists will get there too, but that may take an additional generation. Repeated studies have indicated that a Muslim Hispanic lesbian high school dropout with a kitten drowning fetish would be elected to the Oval Office long before anyone entrusts the nuclear codes to an Ivy League educated white male golf-playing baby-eating atheist.

Clearly, there are parallels between the groups, much as any of these freedom movements have parallels, but they are not the same. One of Lindsay’s points of difference is that atheists, unlike homosexuals, make a choice. I’m not so sure.

It wasn’t that long ago that the conventional wisdom was that homosexuality was a choice. Genetic studies and other scientific evidence have since dispelled that myth. I strongly believe that gays being born that way has contributed more than a little to their societal acceptance.

If you talk to a few gay people it becomes pretty clear there was no point in their life when they decided to be gay. However, most do have a point where they stopped pretending to be heterosexual. Those are not remotely the same things.

Science has yet to nail down a “god gene”, but there is work going on that does at least suggest a genetic origin for predisposition toward the spiritual. I think discovery of such a DNA based origin for faith or the lack of it would go a long way toward making atheists less threatening. However, I won’t be able to stop snickering at the delicious irony if it turns out religion was an evolutionary trait along.

I know for me personally, I could not choose to be religious. My brain is simply not wired that way. I could choose to act religious, but that’s not the same thing. Especially in this country, the bar for appearing Christian is quite low in most communities. Simply don’t talk about religion, wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and show up to church every Easter. That clearly doesn’t make you religious, but you’d pass as a default Christian in the average American town.

This may be the real key difference between gays and atheists in society. Homosexuals are not asexual. If they were, they would have no desire for romantic attachment. As an asexual, it would be fairly easy to just keep your mouth shut and let everyone assume you were single and straight—much like the closeted atheist.

But homosexuals do have desires. They want to be in relationships, have families and all that social-centric stuff. In religion terms, being gay is more like being Hindu than atheist. They want to practice, just differently. It’s definitely easier to just decline to play rather than want to play, but by different rules.

So, I think it is harder being gay in society than atheist. And I think the ease of ignoring or hiding one’s atheism is also why getting atheists to come out of the closet will always be more problematic. Hence,the reason the movement toward atheist’s rights will progress slowly… glacially even. We’ll get there, but probably not in my lifetime.

My mother always said I could grow up to be President. It turns out that’s not so true.

It’s Political God(less) Rally Weekend!

Later today, people of all faiths will gather is Washington at the Nationwide Rally for Religious Freedom. Tomorrow, people of no faith will gather in the same spot for the Reason Rally. Both sides claim the timing is a coincidence.

Moreover, both gatherings are hopelessly misnamed.

The Rally for Religious Freedom is actually motivated by the new mandate from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that requires all employers provide free contraceptives through their health plans. Further, it’s organized by two anti-abortion groups, the Pro-Life Action League and Citizens for a Pro-Life Society. So the freedom they are advocating for is the freedom to observe their religious laws over secular ones. While I suppose you can argue that’s freedom of a sort, it’s certainly not the sort enshrined in the First Amendment. And let’s be clear, while cloaked as an “all faiths” gathering, this is a Christian rally.

Meanwhile, the Reason Rally is advocating for the acceptance of atheists as normal non-threatening members of society. In part. the hope is to also encourage more atheists to come out of the closet by making them less alone. While that’s a noble goal, a good place to start might be to name your rally something that doesn’t imply that all theists are irrational. The concepts of faith and reason extend far beyond the notion of God. Rejecting God doesn’t make you incapable of having faith in anything, nor does accepting God make you immune to reason.

What’s also interesting is that both groups are positioning themselves as the victims.

The Christians, despite being in the vast majority, feel the secularists are launching a war on their religion. This is as comical as the claims that the LGBT movement is destroying the family. Just because you don’t get to impose your values on everyone else does not translate to a conspiracy to deprive you of your beliefs.

The atheists, who actually are a minority struggling for acceptance, are staging “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history” in an effort to appear less threatening. They are trotting out speakers like The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins, who is a perennial lightening rod for those fearing so-called militant atheism. Granted, when atheists get militant, they tend to write books rather than buy guns, but it’s hard to see this as a vehicle for winning the hearts and minds of those who fear you. This is much more like the secular version of showing up in ass-less chaps and chanting “We’re Here! We’re Queer! Get used to it!”

In the end, expect a lot of noise in the news cycles about each event, expect a fair bit of manufactured outrage, expect a lot of unhelpful rhetoric, but don’t expect too much productive to come of it.

The GOP is Running Out of People to Alienate

There was a time when party politics was about appealing to the majority of voters. Minimally, this meant getting people to feel like the party had their back in some way or another. However, for many groups the GOP increasingly seems to be asserting they not only don’t have their back, but they find the members of the group to be somehow unsuitable as members of society.

If you are part of, relate to, or support one of the groups below, you should know how the GOP feels about you or your loved ones:

Women – unscrupulous homicidal baby incubators who left unregulated and controlled would be hurling infants off seaside cliffs in hormonal rages.
Gays/Lesbians – an affront to God, family, and good clean living; they won’t rest until they’ve turned everyone gay and destroyed the institutions of marriage and parenthood.
Immigrants – the illegal ones are job-stealing leeches on the underbelly of society that should be deported just as soon as the crops are in; the legal ones are sketchy too—they talk funny.
Scientists – a cabal of liberal tree-hugging geeks in white lab coats bent on corrupting children, destroying religion, and crimping oil industry profits; except the ones working on smartphone technology—they’re okay.
Atheists – an evil, amoral, hedonistic scourge sent by Satan to lead the weak of faith straight to Hell and plunge America into darkness… which would be bad, unless it’s the End Times.
Poor People – lazy, shiftless, unmotivated, drug-addled drains on society; they need to get off their asses and out in the fields for sub-poverty wages so we can send all the damned illegals back home.
African Americans – entitled and lazy, they will resort to crime and drugs if they don’t get their food stamps and welfare checks; except pro athletes—they’re valuable.
Muslims – terrorists… all of them; this is America dammit, and we do not sit idly by while some freedom hating loonies with exploding underwear try to rob us of our religious freedom.
Hispanics – see Illegal Immigrants; and even those that are legal are only hear to try and figure out how to sneak all their friends and relatives over the border.
Future Seniors – current seniors are good to go; future seniors had better cinch up their Depends because this notion that you should have health care and a government pension is unsustainable; but don’t worry, if you do it right during your working years, then you’ll be rich enough to enjoy retirement; if you didn’t… well, try to die unobtrusively.

…and I’m sure I missed a few groups, or maybe the GOP just hasn’t gotten around to them yet.

I can’t fathom how alienating all these groups will help the GOP in the election as these groups represent some significant portions of the population. Their only election day salvation would seem to be keeping all these undesirables from the polls. Oh yeah, that’s already under way.