A few minutes of quiet reflection

Another installment of Heathen’s Progress. It starts with prayer and then generalizes to religious ritual compared to secular ritual.

I’ve recently started praying. Well, not exactly praying, but doing something that fulfils what I think are its main functions. Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator. Many stoics did something similar and some forms of meditation serve the same kind of purpose. My version is simply a few minutes of quiet reflection on such matters each morning.

I don’t see why that should be called prayer at all. It looks to me like thinking, which is not the same thing. Reflection is more like thinking than it’s like prayer, and adding “quiet” doesn’t make it more like prayer. Thinking generally is quiet. [Read more…]

Nirmukta says good-bye to Ajita Kamal

From Nirmukta:

Ajita was raised in the city of Coimbatore, India. His passion for science and reason went back to early childhood.

…

Ajita was an active participant in freethought throughout his years in America, forming ties with freethinkers who would become part of Nirmukta’s extended family. Employing his versatile talents, his contributions towards the cause of reason were manifold: as a prolific and edifying writer, as an insightful interviewer, as an adept podcast host, as an energetic community organizer both on-ground and online, and as a welcoming mentor to many freethinkers young and old taking their first steps towards embracing freethought.

In 2008, he started what would later become our organisation known as Nirmukta.

“Eve teasing”

What? What’s that?

It’s a fun game in India and Bangladesh: stalking and/or taunting women. It has a funny jokey haha name, so obviously it’s totes harmless, even though some women kill themselves to get away from it (silly bitches) and some people get murdered trying to stop it.

Young women often face verbal abuse and taunts in Bangladesh, and sometimes stalked by colleagues at school or other young men.

Some young women, unable to bear the repeated insults, have even gone so far as to commit suicide. [Read more…]

You call that “Light”?

Just what Egypt needs – a mutawiyin like the one the lucky people in Saudi Arabia have.

The radical Islamist Nour party, or “Party of the Light,” has captured more than a quarter of votes in the post-Mubarak Egyptian elections. Nour, which ran second to the Muslim Brotherhood in the polling, is a Wahhabi party, reproducing the ideology of the rulers of Saudi Arabia, under the label of “Salafism.” Its rhetoric presents “Salafism” as pure Islam unchanged by 14 centuries of Muslim history in differing lands and cultures worldwide. Nour is hostile to non-Wahhabi Muslims, repressive of women’s rights, and discriminatory against non-Muslims. [Read more…]

Damn you LEGO

Yet another petition. But it’s a good one. I couldn’t resist (typical woman, eh).

After 4 years of marketing research, LEGO has come to the conclusion that girls want LadyFigs, a pink Barbielicious product line for girls, so 5 year-olds can imagine themselves at the café, lounging at the pool with drinks, brushing their hair in front of a vanity mirror, singing in a club, or shopping with their girlfriends. As LEGO CEO Jorgan Vig Knudstorp puts it, “We want to reach the other 50% of the world’s population.”

That makes my head want to explode, so I signed. [Read more…]

Jessica Ahlquist wins the case

The judge said yes that’s a religious prayer. A Daniel come to judgement. Also a guy who can read with his eyes open.

Why yes, that does seem quite religious, doesn’t it. Also patriarchal.

The prayer banner that hangs at Cranston West High School must be removed immediately said U.S. District Court Judge Ronald Lagueux in his decision issued Wednesday.

According to the Justice’s decision “The purpose of the prayer banner was clearly religious in nature,” and that “No amount of debate can make the school Prayer anything other than a prayer, and a Christian one at that.”

Jessica Ahlquist, a Cranston West student brought suit against the city over the banner saying it made her feel excluded and ostracized because she is an atheist.

Not to mention she is a girl.

Beliefs are mutable (with qualifications)

Josh Rosenau keeps bombarding me with Tweets demanding I explain my views on identity (on Twitter ffs!) and sniping on his blog, so I’ll explain what he professes to find so perverse. I think there is a difference between aspects of identity that are not optional and those that are.

Wo, super twisted and weird, huh? Nobody ever had a thought like that before.

That’s what I had in mind when I said (slightly abridged)

What if there are people whose New Age or “alternative” beliefs feel like commitments and part of their identity?

Well there are such people, and there are also their cousins who are that way about their religious beliefs…

That’s a kind of category mistake, in my view, because beliefs aren’t actually a matter of identity and shouldn’t be treated as if they were.

Maybe I put that too loosely (but it was a blog post, not a scholarly article, so Josh’s outrage is a tad overblown). I realize that people may think of some of their beliefs as central to their identity (that is, after all, what the post was about). My point put more carefully is that we all ought to be (at least) cautious about that, because in fact beliefs are optional or mutable. Yes I know that can be so difficult that that becomes just a theoretical possibility, but still – we can change our beliefs in a way we can’t change our histories.

But it’s complicated. Identities become more or less salient depending on circumstances. Josh is right that atheism is salient that way to gnu atheists and that that’s what makes them gnu. (He didn’t put it that way, so he’s not as right as he could be, but he gestured in its direction, so I’ll count it.) It’s true that the backlash (including the bit of it that Josh manages) makes my atheism more salient. I keep being irritated (as predictably as a clock) that people are frothing at the mouth just because people are being outspoken instead of apologetic about their atheism, so I become all the more atheist. I dig in.

This is where Chris Mooney is right. Embattled identities become more salient. (Cf Sartre on anti-semitism.) New atheism probably makes theists feel embattled, and thus probably makes a lot of them dig in just as I dig in.

But that’s not all there is to it. It’s still the case that ideas and beliefs can change. We all think that, or we wouldn’t bother with all this endless ARGUING, would we.

Call it identity 1 and identity 2 if you like. Identity 1 is what you can’t change, identity 2 is what you can. (And if you choose to be precise and insist that identity means not changing, then identity 2 isn’t actually identity. But whatever – I don’t mind if what feels like identity is called identity. Though I may change my mind about that tomorrow. It’s not part of my identity or anything.)

Addendum: FTB was down, as you may have noticed, so I had to wait to post this; in the interim Rosenau has been yammering at me at Twitter, demanding I give him a yes or no answer to a complicated question, and being fucking obnoxious into the bargain. Remind me never again to engage with his provocations.