My favorite lines:

As I trust my offspring’s ability to separate fact from fantasy, I am happy for him to participate in your indoctrination process on the proviso that all references to ‘Jesus’ are replaced with the term ‘Purportedly Magic Jew.’

Your inference that I am without religion is incorrect and I am actually torn between two faiths; while your god’s promise of eternal life is very persuasive, the Papua New Guinean mud god, Pikkiwoki, is promising a pig and as many coconuts as you can carry.

If I too knew some guy that had been killed and placed inside a cave with a rock in front of it and I visited the cave to find the rock moved and his body gone, the only logical assumption would be that he had risen from the dead and is the son of God. Once, my friend Simon was rushed to hospital to have his appendix removed and I visited him the next day to find his bed empty. I immediately sacrificed a goat and burnt a witch in his name but it turned out that he had not had appendicitis, just needed a good poo, and was at home playing Playstation.

You raise a valid point and I appreciate you pointing out my failings as a parent. Practising a system of ethics based on the promise of a reward, in your case an afterlife, is certainly preferable to practising a system of ethics based on it simply being the right thing to do.

Many years ago, I lived next door to a Christian named Mr Stevens. You could tell he was a Christian because he had a fish sticker on his Datsun. He used to wave at us kids from his bathroom window on hot summer days as we played in the sprinkler. I learnt a lot from Mr Stevens. Mainly about wrestling holds.

Your job would be made much easier if, after making the school children sit through an hour of church youth group teens dancing, singing and re-enacting Jewish magic tricks, you simply told them that it was just a small taste of what hell is like and if they didn’t believe in Jesus they would have to sit through it again.

Dear Bleaders,

We’re here on this blog together because we don’t believe in Dog, right? Strike that, reverse it, reinstate.

Look. I call my way of seeing things Poetic Atheism. I don’t believe in anything supernatural. I don’t think the universe can think. I don’t believe there is some special being that is separate from the universe and knows about us and cares about us and made us. All of that is the imaginative fantasy of one group of animals on planet Earth.

There is a fungus growing on the third stone from Sol in an outer arm of the Milky Way, a medium-sized galaxy among millions.

Like all matter, this fungus changes, the stuff of the universe is not static, energy and matter are what is the universe and the state of normal is a bubbling cauldron of interactions.

Floating gasses, flowing water, growing crystals, and life (mold, trees, monkeys) are all patterns that fall into self-replicating relationships. The systems are little vortices in the weather of what is. Whatever works keeps working for a while because it works.

It is all explicable in terms of matter and energy, it falls into patterns that generate sameness and that can get really intricate and amazingly fine tuned. It’s amazing, but given infinite time, and the fact that it is true, and there you go, we have to accept that it is possible. The patterns get so fancy that one day they are you. They look up and say, How do you do?

Now that is very strange, but okay, okay fine. Okay, the pattern that is life, that is you, is awakened to itself. It makes friends with other sentient beings. It invents agriculture. It invents writing. It writes Shakespeare’s plays and Bach’s sonatas.

When this being, the fungus that knows itself and makes art, you, when this you lays down for sleep, goes dormant for a third of every daily cycle, it dreams.

It sees pictures in its head while it is unconscious to the world. These pictures are borrowed from the previous day’s sightings and from a whole life of experience, but they are not just pictures. They are stories. And these stories are strange and sometimes horrifying. They waken the fungus, you, us, me, the person awakens in the night, having dreamed of patricide, and is shaken, is quaking.

What is reality? What is real? The universe is real, the speed of light is constant. The universe is big and true.

Also big and true is what is going on in the dark room in the middle of the night awakened by a terrifying vision.

The experience of being human, truthfully rendered, is as much about the feelings in the room as it is about what the universe can be measured to be.

What is truth? What is your truth? Your truth is that you are a life form that knows itself. You are a miracle fungus. You. We have met some smart dolphins and clever whales. If there is life in the universe other than us it is likely to be even weirder than the dolphins and whales.

No one but us is talking, doing, making, trying to get other animal’s attention, like the ant in my first post. It’s just you, fungus. Just us hairless monkeys.

What comes into being when matter and energy fall into such patterns that they look up and say hi and write symphonies? Art happens. It’s very strange and wonderful.

The truth may be real but it is not “matter of fact.” What in fact we have here is a billion fantastically sexy weird interesting stories all going on at once in a great cacophony of experience. How do we make sense of what it is to be human, to be this thing, this sentient matter?

Well I certainly don’t think the magic of consciousness should be considered evidence for something hidden, something else. The magic of consciousness is magic enough. Nothing is gained by adding fantastical imaginative inventions to the wonders that actually are.

But the truth, the what actually is is very strange and overloaded and wondrous indeed.

Poetry uses the precision and dedication to accuracy of science, with the scope of everything (the scope of religion, the scope of art), with the widest scope possible.

What can we say that is not invention, that is all fact, but that takes into account everything at once? That’s what Poetic Atheism is about. Looking at the magic that is real. How can we think about what is absurd and amazing and true, dreams, devotion, generosity, the wonder of everything from ecosystems to echolocation, without making stuff up and getting sloppy and believing nonsense? Very carefully! Is it easy to know the world through poetry? No! But it is possible and it is marvelous and it is ours.

I’ve worked very hard these past several decades to get this down in print, to make sense of it and share out what sense I can make. I wrote five books about it. If you are interested in what I am saying, please read The Happiness Myth, and Doubt: A History, Funny, The End of the Soul: Scientific Modernity, Atheism, and Anthropology and The Next Ancient World. Thank you very much.

And for the love of Pete, don’t kill yourself. Stay here and suffer with me. It will be fun. We will drink beer and talk about what it all means. It all means.

Love,

Jennifer

PS. The Boston Globe Ideas section picked up on another little act of skepticality of mine — on cultural myths and the gym.

What’s your favorite?

When the “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell recently predicted the departure of the contestant Jermaine Sellers, the young singer shook his head in disagreement. “I know God,’’ he replied, pointing upward.

Two days later, when Mr. Sellers failed to make the cut, he still had faith. “What God has for me is for me,’’ he said. “In God there is no failure.’’

Mr. Sellers is not alone in his belief that God pays attention to reality television contests. New research shows that most Americans believe God is directly involved in their personal affairs, and that the good or bad things that happen are “part of God’s plan,’’ according to a report in the March issue of the journal Sociology of Religion.

I wonder if the day will ever come when most Americans will not believe a god is involved in their personal affairs? I think it will. Do you?

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

—Edward Abbey (1927-1989), as quoted in The Quotable Atheist, p. 3.

I was a TrueChristian™ for about eight years starting back in 1981. I attended a Pentecostal non-denominational church (Glad Tidings-Boise) back in the first five years of my time as a believer. It was there that I learned to accept the idea that my first duty to God was to tithe to the church. I was absolutely faithful in my giving of tithes and offerings. I was a “happy giver.”

After five years at Glad Tidings I became drawn towards Calvary Chapel of Boise. The vibe at C.C. was way more up my ally. I’m a professional musician and C.C. was just then forming in Boise and I fit perfectly into the youth-oriented fellowship.

Calvary’s Pastor (Bob Caldwell) and I became really good friends. We not only built the C.C. fellowship together, we also did a lot of prison ministry and even had some “leadership retreats” together.

Backsliding

After three years as C.C.’s music minister, I met some other musicians in the church and we decided to start doing some secular gigs just for fun (I even had Pastor Bob’s blessing on it). It wasn’t long before I wanted to get back full time into the professional music club circuit.

Pastor Bob and I parted company at that time … but we parted on the very best of terms. There was no condemnation from him towards me, and, I had no negative feelings for leaving the church. This would turn out to be the key to why he would eventually grant my “request” for a refund of my tithing contributions to Calvary Chapel.

Of course, I soon backslid into partying and wound up getting a divorce. After several years of living the old musician lifestyle, I met my current wife (of twenty years), stopped drinking, settled down and had two daughters. Once I quit drinking (without A.A. or any other “spiritual” assistance) I began to read Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. Once I discovered the internet (Infidel Guy Show) there was no turning back. I found complete freedom from religion.

Giving

After some time, I started to remember an incident that had happened to me way back in my days at Glad Tidings Church. I had been watching the P.T.L. Club on TV and got suckered into believing that the Lord wanted me to send P.T.L. a thousand bucks! I sent the money. When my Pastor’s wife (sister Barnett) found out that I’d sent P.T.L. $1000, she took me aside and scolded me that the Lord wanted his people to give their money to “where they are fed” i.e., Glad Tidings. She suggested that I call P.T.L. and ask for my money back.

So I did. When I asked P.T.L. to return the money they agreed and I allowed them to keep $100.00 for being so understanding. I then gave the remaining $900.00 to Glad Tidings. After all; had I not already given the money to “The Lord”?

Fast forward to 2006. One faith-free day I happened to recall my P.T.L. experience and began to ask myself: “Why not simply ask, not demand or insist, but politely ask for my money back from Calvary Chapel?” All they could say was “no,” right? I had left the church on excellent terms, and Pastor Bob was a very cool, very laid back guy.

Refunding

By that time Calvary Chapel was huge. I knew Bob would remember me, so I wrote him a short email asking if he could help me with some questions that I had involving donations to the fellowship. Bob wrote back almost immediately with a nice letter saying that he had thought about me many times over the years and had meant to contact me and that he was sorry that he had never actually done it. He was very sweet and kind as always.

He then referred me to his Assistant Pastor (Mike Sasso) for help with my questions. I send a courteous response thanking Bob for his kind words and attention. I then connected with Pastor Mike and began writing questions back and forth. I wrote to Mike that my understanding was that when I gave money to the fellowship, I was essentially giving the money to God and that the church was merely “the conduit” between me and Jesus.

At first Mike was very friendly and eager… on his best pastoral behavior. Once my questions began to turn towards a “could the church ever refund money that had been given” type of query, Mike’s language became stiff and defensive. He then referred me to deal directly with Pastor Bob.

In my next email to Pastor Bob I selected my words very carefully.

Dear Bob,

I know that what I am asking is probably a first and highly strange request; even for someone like you who has spent so many years in the ministry. Please always keep in mind that what I am proposing is a request, not a demand. You can deny my request and I give you my promise that there will be absolutely no hard feelings on my part.

Here is my request:

Would you be willing to return to me all or any part of the money that I gave to the ministry at Calvary Chapel during my years in the fellowship?

If you say “no”, I will fully understand. Your choice is final and that will absolutely be the end of my inquiry. I await an answer at your convenience.

Cordially,

Billy….

I did not hear back from Pastor Caldwell. I waited for a couple of weeks, sent another similar letter and included an apology stating that I understood that he (Pastor Bob) must be very busy, but I would really appreciate a response.

Again, there was no response.

I sent a third letter stating (paraphrasing here:) “Thank you for the time and attention that you have already given to this matter. I will assume your silence means ‘no’ to my request.”

Eventually his decision came.

Pastor Bob wrote me back telling me that he was handing the situation over to the church accountant and that he would be authorized to work with me towards a settlement!

I want you to imagine the reaction that Bob’s “concession letter” caused from me and my wife! My jaw dropped and my eyes almost popped out of my head. We were hysterically laughing, jumping and shouting, “It’s a MIRACLE!” We never in a million years seriously expected to see a dime of that money, and now here I was reading a letter from Pastor Bob granting my request for a refund.

After a phone conversation with the accountant at Calvary Chapel, Jim agreed to send me monthly installments of $500 until the agreed amount of $3200 was paid off. The checks came every month and were quickly deposited into my storehouse.

That was the end of my contact with Bob and Calvary Chapel.

Ye Have Not…

I can only speculate what Pastor Bob’s motive was for granting my request for a refund. My circumstances were probably not typical for the way that many people wind up leaving the fold.

Deconversion can be a very difficult and challenging process. I found the action of facing (if only through email contact) my fear of my old authoritative figure (Pastor Bob) very liberating and empowering. Even if things would have turned out differently, I’m proud of myself for standing up to the fear that use to control me.

The moral: “Ye have not, because ye ask not”!

I think it’s a better name — shorter and catchier.

The film is a personal, independent narrative that takes a sensitive but critical look at at religion in America. FAITH follows two different people and the evolution of their belief in god after personal tragedy befalls them both.

Chris is a devout, fundamentalist Christian whose son is bi-polar. When prayer doesn’t work, and his son commits suicide, Chris’s worldview is thrown into disarray.

Betty is a teacher at the local community college who grew up in the church. With a father who was both Pastor and philanderer, Betty dismissed religion as hypocrisy and simplistic fable. But she just found a lump in her breast. As she faces her own mortality, the attraction to some kind of higher power might be too strong to ignore.

FAITH juxtaposes two narratives to uncover the ways we are pulled towards – and away from – God. The film exposes the hypocrisy and arrogance of fundamentalist Christianity while exploring the need to call on a higher power during times of crisis.

The film will be shot in and around California’s Central Valley, which forms the setting and ideological backdrop of the story. Eli Daughdrill, the film’s writer/director, grew up on an Almond ranch in the valley and knows the people and place very well. The characters in the story are fictional but certainly feel like real residents of the valley.

You can support the project through Kickstarter and follow the progress on @themoviefaith.

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

A dear cousin recently wrote me a note on the internet telling me of his interest in my public atheism and saying that he agrees with my poetic atheism, except for the atheism part.  He had a smart mystic believer’s argument: How can such little things as us know that there is no great mind out there pulling all the strings – especially given how weird the world is (consciousness, for example, and life itself). I wrote back and I like what I wrote back so I’m posting it for your reading pleasure.

I, by the way, am Jennifer Michael Hecht, who wrote Doubt: A History, and The End of the Soul, and I’ve been invited to write you a few posts. BTW, I call the audience reading me whenever I write blog posts, “bleaders,” for a host of obvious reasons. So, dear bleaders, I’ve cut some family chat, but am otherwise sending you what I wrote back.

My Charming Atheist Response to My Cousin’s Clever Statement of Belief

Dear Cuz,

What you wrote here is subtle and beautiful. I’m really delighted by it.

Here are my questions. I agree that the existence of this strange universe and our consciousness and feelings is freaking wacky and amazing. (That’s just plain true.) I also agree to making the choice to see this amazingness as essentially benevolent and beautiful. (That’s poetically true.)

But you go a step farther. You guess that there is a mind out there in some way, in addition to the world we know.

Now, why should that be? I see your point that we can not prove it to be untrue and we can see examples of pawns who seem to think they are making their own decisions.

What I want to ask you is why isn’t the world as it is sufficient? Can’t “meaning” be real in its own right? Does it really have to be backed up by some kind of mind or being or spirit?

I believe that our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning. Meaning is real, it is proved by its existence.

Can I imagine a vaster and more objective “eye” out there who would have more knowledge about what’s really going on than I do (like an ant in a plastic ant farm in my office doesn’t know about me or the history of plastic)? Yes, I can imagine it. But why should I imagine it? What’s wrong with what we seem to actually have?

And if there is some mind out there, why doesn’t it contact us in some clear way? Seriously — dogs can’t talk but they make eye contact they bark they let you know they exist and want your attention. Ants don’t seem to have the kind of mind that allows them to recognize us as fellow beings and possible friends. If they did, they’d wave, dance, follow our line of sight until we noticed we had a little friend.

I think if we had a friend out there, we’d know it. What we do know is that we have friends here. Isn’t that marvelous and isn’t that just as good?

“It means something because it means something” is a statement that is weird but has poetic truth.

“It means something because I think it’s possible there’s a larger mind out there and He knows what it all means, and since I think this is possible I go all the way and choose to believe it is the actual case” is a statement that goes off into untruth. we have no indication of this secondary level of meaning. but why do we even want it?

If we want to be what we truly are, it seems to me we have to believe only things we have clear indications of. If that means we have to bear the burden of meaning ourselves, well that is a great and noble adventure and I think we are up to it.

In a post at Religion in American History, I just learned about an atheist newspaperman who I’d never heard of before. His name was Charles Chilton Moore (1837-1906), an atheist who modeled himself after his contemporary, Robert Ingersoll.

One major difference was region – Moore resided in Lexington, Kentucky, surely one of the holes in the Bible Belt. That’s where Moore started up his paper, The Bluegrass Blade, one of America’s earliest (the earliest?) papers that was explicitly atheist.

Thanks to the Library of Congress, I was able to find a few scans of the Blade online. Having read through a few, I realized that the Blade was very much a personal extension of Moore himself. Articles do not attempt a dispassionate or unbiased voice. Many articles deal directly with Moore’s own experiences.

Then it struck me: Moore was a 19th century blogger.

Consider this selection for the issue dated February 11th, 1900:

Fifteen hundred years ago, Constantine, who murdered his own wife and children, started the Christian religion.

From that day to this that religion has been the greatest curse that ever afflicted the earth.

This religion teaches that 6,000 years ago God made the first man out of dust – not even mud – and the first woman out of a bone; that God cursed the whole human race because a snake made the woman eat an apple; that God had a son by another man’s wife, and that he had this son murdered in order to keep himself from sending all the human race to hell.

This son taught that any man who did not believe that piece of ignorance and priestly lying would go to hell and burn eternally in fire and brimstone.

The Bible, in which these things are taught, favors drunkenness, murder, slavery, lying, stealing and lechery.

So you can see that Moore had mastered that cautious, non-judgmental tone that we bloggers are known for. Incidentally, all of this was just the lead in for his story about the assassination of William Goebel, the Governor of Kentucky.

Under the motto, “Edited by a Heathen in the Interest of Good Morals,” Moore published his paper for over twenty years, despite several stays in jail for blasphemy and related crimes. He advocated atheism, prohibition and women’s rights.

Were he alive today, I’m guessing he’d have a site on blogger that would make PZ Myers say, “You know, maybe you should tone it down a bit…”

One of two East Texas church arson suspects kept books on demon possession and atheism as well as assault rifles and guns, and may have left graffiti offering inside information about one of the attacks in a local store bathroom, according to court records. [...]

A search of Bourque’s home after his arrest recovered books titled Demon Possession and The Atheist’s Way.

In fact the newspaper was so concerned that the headline is “Atheist books, guns found at home of arson suspect.”

First of all, Demon Possession does not sound like an atheist book. That sounds like a religious book. Second, what the hell does an atheist book in his house have to do with arson? Why didn’t they say, “Christian books, guns found at home of arson suspect”? Because it doesn’t matter if he had Christian books in his home. Nor would it matter if he had atheist books.

It seems they’re are trying to casually link atheism with arson… or maybe I am overreacting.

What do you think?

(via Calamities of Nature)

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