Hemant has a rebuttal to the recent “Why are millennials leaving church?” article on CNN. His response is longer than mine was. But none of it rhymes.
Still worth reading.
I guess.
The pope now says
He welcomes gays
Which fills the throngs with hope
“I have no right
To pick that fight—
I mean, what am I, the pope?”
Headline: On Gay Priests, Pope Francis Asks, “Who Am I to Judge?”
But he did say the door was closed when it came to women in the priesthood.
I guess it really is easier to get forgiveness than permission.
“Why are millennials leaving the church?”
They asked, and they pondered and prayed
But the problem, it seems, that they had with their search
Is, they asked a millennial… who stayed.
Over at CNN, there’s a piece by Rachel Held Evans, “Why millennials are leaving the church“. Young people are leaving the church in droves, and the church wants to know why. In this story, the author (who has not left the church) points to the the slick packaging of today’s religion, the selling of sizzle rather than steak, and opines:
Many of us, myself included, are finding ourselves increasingly drawn to high church traditions – Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Episcopal Church, etc. – precisely because the ancient forms of liturgy seem so unpretentious, so unconcerned with being “cool,” and we find that refreshingly authentic.
And a bit later:
You can’t hand us a latte and then go about business as usual and expect us to stick around. We’re not leaving the church because we don’t find the cool factor there; we’re leaving the church because we don’t find Jesus there.
Like every generation before ours and every generation after, deep down, we long for Jesus.
But there’s a problem with her analysis, and much of it I suspect comes from her own personal experience. After all, she did not choose to leave. She chose to stay. Having made a decision, we (at least we WEIRD subjects of the psych experiments examining the process) tend to justify our decision–we focus on the elements that support our decision, and minimize the elements that would have favored the path we did not take. What the church needs to do is ask the people who left… and then they need to actually listen. (I had two links for that sentence, illustrating what I mean, and for the life of me I can’t find them. If I do, I’ll update, and it will be worth it.)
But I suspect the CNN piece actually has the answer, hidden in plain sight:
At 32, I barely qualify as a millennial.
I wrote my first essay with a pen and paper, but by the time I graduated from college, I owned a cell phone and used Google as a verb.
I still remember the home phone numbers of my old high school friends, but don’t ask me to recite my husband’s without checking my contacts first.
I own mix tapes that include selections from Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but I’ve never planned a trip without Travelocity.
The thing is, it’s easier to find answers than ever before. The church no longer controls the information about the church, and has long ago lost the ability to control the information about the rest of the world. The plain truth is, there’s nothing the church can provide that clubs, schools, stores, and the internet cannot provide–except god… and there is less and less use for a god with every passing day.
If the restaurant you are sitting in turns out to have absolutely nothing on the menu… it’s not really surprising if you leave.
I really don’t like it when I type a comment on a site, submit it, and it falls into a black hole. Now, it could be simply that it will be approved in due time… but just in case, this is what I said:
If chaplains provide tangible benefits regarding the earthly needs of members of the Armed Forces (which they do–confidential counseling, unlike therapist visits which are part of the official record, is just one example), House Republicans have just voted not just against the best interest of atheist servicemen and women, but also against the best interest of the military in general.
Apparently, it is more important to define the word “chaplain” as narrowly as possible than it is to see to the needs of Armed Forces.
It is true that only a small percentage of the military self-identify as atheists (however, there are many stories of atheists asking for “atheist” tags and being issued “no religious preference” instead, so the numbers of official atheists must be considered the low end of a range, rather than an accurate count), but that number is greater than the number of Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim troops combined. Each of those groups has their own chaplains–implying that the military knows that A) having chaplains with your own world view is important, and B) it is not simply that there are not enough atheists to warrant similar treatment.
The faith communities of the chaplains are not at all a good match for the faith communities of the people they serve. Some Christian sects are under-represented, while others are vastly over-represented. The current kerfuffle looks like nothing so much as a power struggle, with a handful of denominations trying to consolidate the power they have accrued, against the force of a rising tide of change.
A word can have two meanings?
Why, the notion is absurd!
There can only be one essence,
One true meaning of a word!
Ever since the time of Plato,
Though the world itself is real,
We have understood that meaning
Is a heaven-sent ideal
Since a chaplain is a chaplain
Which we must admit is true
We must look at definitions
Not at what the chaplains do
We define them by the sacred
And this usage makes it plain
They must focus on your spirit
And ignore the mere mundane
Why, a chaplain’s not a therapist
A chaplain’s not a friend
A chaplain’s not a man on whom
A soldier can depend
A chaplain serves the sacred, but
He’s useless here on earth
There’s nothing of a chaplain
That is any worldly worth
So it doesn’t really matter
What a chaplain really does
Cos the meaning is the meaning
And it’s what it always was
And it doesn’t really matter
What the soldiers say they need—
Cos… an atheistic chaplain?
It’s preposterous! Indeed!
Involved philosophical rant, after the jump: [Read more…]
We need a sort of language
To describe the indescribable—
To build a firm foundation
To discuss what no one’s seen
A light to shine on empty space
To highlight shared experience
So others of my tribe will know
Exactly what I mean
We’ll say it’s all quite cryptic
But that faith will make it knowable
That hearts perceive reality
Our eyes can never see
Since none can quite describe it
Why, it matches to a T…
This effing the ineffable
Sounds effing strange to me
So I was listening to Fresh Air on NPR (This story in particular), and the guest author said something along the lines of (the full transcript is not yet up, as of this writing) “the language of religion, by definition, attempts to describe the indescribable, to give a common language to speak about the ineffable”.
Which is quite an interesting feat. If we all agree that something we experienced was “indescribable”, that does not mean we agree. I mean, two of us could call the same dish “indescribable” and yet disagree whether it was good or bad!
Mind you, having faith that your words mean the same as someone else’s is relatively small potatoes when compared with having faith that [insert religious belief here].
What should I do, when I used to be praying,
When now I no longer believe?
No longer a god who can hear what I’m saying,
No heaven that I can perceive.
There’s really no need; there’s no formal injunction,
You simply don’t pray any more
But should you desire, just examine the function
Of just what your praying was for:
Some prayers are a message directly to god
Singing praise, or a note of thanksgiving
Such notes may, of course, though at first it feels odd,
Be directed at those who are living—
The doctors, the farmers, the builders, the teachers
Society’s helpers, too many to name;
Your coach and your teammates; your mom in the bleachers
Who, much more than god, helped you out in the game
Some prayers are intended to say you’re repenting,
And humbly requesting forgiveness for sin
If you’ve done someone wrong, perhaps prayer is preventing
Your focus from where the real damage has been—
If you’ve done someone wrong, and need some forgiving,
Not god, but that person, is whom you should ask
It’s harder to ask of a person who’s living
But you’re in the wrong, and so that is your task
Some prayers are petitions, for health or protection,
For knowledge, or favor, or rain, or success
To make the world good (since we can’t have perfection)
Without too much work, or a whole lot of stress
There are things you can do to prepare and be ready
To limit your loss when the world goes berserk
When disaster might hit, you can keep your hand steady,
Then you—and not god—can just get down to work.
So, yeah… one of the search terms that led someone to my blog today was “what to replace prayer with now that i’m an atheist”. And I have to admit, my first thought was “what? why? I just found out I’ve been doing something useless–what should I replace it with?” And of course, there is no need to do any particular thing instead of praying; anything at all, from walking the dog to writing poetry to trimming your toenails, will be at least as useful as prayer.
But of course, that’s a pretty shallow analysis–my faithful friends all tell me that prayer is very meaningful to them. That is, it has a purpose, or rather, it may have several purposes. And so, the real answer is to analyze the function of prayer, and to see if you can accomplish the same function (or even more) in an alternative fashion.
It is not difficult to find multiple different functions of prayer, given the number of faith communities on the internet. I looked at a few functions; the same analysis can be done for any more.
Two separate but related functions are praise and giving thanks–respectively, “attaboy, god!” and “thanks!”, both offered as a response to something about the real world (yes, you could offer these in response to the promise of heaven, but my assumption is that the new atheist won’t be missing this particular function). “All glory to god”, says the winning athlete, or the tornado survivor, or the rescued miner, or the hungry person looking at a bountiful table. What to do instead? Thank the actual people who have helped! Thank your teammates, coach, trainers… the parents who brought you to practices for years, and the organization (school or club) that made facilities available. Those people are actually there, and actually did something, and deserve every bit of the praise and thanks that you are giving to some invisible proxy figure.
You may pray for forgiveness. I’m told this is difficult. Frankly, what’s difficult is finding the actual person you have wronged, and asking that person’s forgiveness. They may not give it. You may have to earn it. You may have to undo the damage you have done. Asking forgiveness of an invisible proxy might make you feel better, but if that is what you miss and want to replace, honestly, you were doing prayer wrong.
Prayers of petition (intercessory prayers) plead with god for rain, or recovery from injury or illness, or guidance, or (frankly) money. I am told that these prayers are never (ha!) taking the place of actual action; to the extent that they are not said while actively working, they at least compete for valuable time. But rather than pray for rain, work for water conservation. Rather than pray for recovery, work for better 911 coverage, better training for trauma teams, regulations curbing ineffective quackery and promoting evidence-based treatment. Rather than praying for the hurricane not to hit, get your disaster kit ready. Rather than pray for good grades… study. Rather than… you get the idea.
So… what to do instead of praying? If there are real world things you were praying for, these are things you can work for. If you were praying just to keep from actually having to work for them… I dunno–try masturbation?
Atheists are a miserable lot—
Just horrid, each one that I’ve found;
They’re grumpy and angry and touchy and mean—
Or, they have been, while I’ve been around.
In an odd sort of editorial at the Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Dr. Joe McKeever (preacher and cartoonist) gives a lesson in caricature. That is, he writes a piece honestly, that serves as a caricature, so broadly sketched, distorted and unsubtle. He addresses the “atheistic peddlers”, who “are sure that we mindless theists have never considered the superior evidence for the positions they hold.” (Interestingly enough, I have never known any atheists who have actually gone door-to-door peddling their atheism, but just this past weekend some Jehovah’s Witnesses seemed surprised that I had, in fact, read the bible and considered the evidence they figured I, as a mindless atheist, had never considered. I’m sure my atheist readers will confess to their peripatetic atheism-peddling in the comments.)
Most of the solid believers I know have considered atheism at one time or other. I did, while in college. This is not to say I joined the humanist society of Birmingham or majored in skepticism at Birmingham-Southern. But I read some of the stuff, talked to a few of the people, thought about the ramifications of it all, and made my choice to take my stand with believers.
I’ve never regretted it.
Here’s why.
That is, here are seven incredibly bad, old, trite, and useless excuses. Each has been answered many times over; hell, each has been answered here, in verse.
1) As a rule, atheists tend to be a pretty miserable lot, while the best Christians I know are also the most put-together, positive, and effective people in the room.
Today’s verse is in response to this one. Dr McK has distilled a common factor–atheism–from his interactions with a bunch of miserable atheists. Now, I’m an atheist, but I am not miserable, as a rule. I do wonder, though, if I might not be pretty miserable around Dr. McK.
2) Since faith is required for either position, choosing to believe this amazing universe came together by chance and will go out the same way requires far more faith than this Alabama farm boy can muster. As has been said in the book by this title, “I don’t have faith enough to be an atheist.”
It takes more endurance *not* to run a marathon, you know.
3) While it’s true a large portion of Christians have probably not investigated various apologetic aspects–evidence for the resurrection, the historicity of Jesus, the integrity of Scriptures– a great many have. I sat in the room with Dr. Carl F. H. Henry in the summer of 1978 as he said to some of us, “Christianity is the only world religion that has come through the scientific revolution and emerged intact.” Some of the others are fighting tooth and claw to keep modern technology from taking a look at their authoritative writings.
Regarding the first part… so, does the good doctor agree that children are believing for the wrong reasons? As for the second… wow. If by “intact”, you mean “splintered into tens of thousands of sects”, and by “only” you mean “one of many”, and you ignore the clash between science and christianity in schools across the nation, he might have a point.
4) I do like the old line of reasoning that goes: “If the atheist is true and after death, we all disappear into nothingness, then as a Christian I have lost nothing. But if Jesus Christ is true and after death life just begins to get interesting, then the atheist is in a lot of trouble.” What about that can they not see?
Ah, Pascal’s Wager. I used to keep running tallies of a) people who used Pascal’s Wager as a serious argument, and b) people who sincerely argued that no Christian ever used Pascal’s Wager as a serious argument anymore. Here’s one response. Here’s another.
5) If we know people by their fruits, then philosophies should identify themselves the same way. So, does anyone know any charitable ministry ever started by the atheists? Show me one and I can show you a hundred hospitals and colleges, children’s homes and crisis centers begun by Christ-followers.
I wrote this before what’s-his-name noted that there were no atheist groups helping Oklahoma (and, obviously, before he got roundly spanked for making the same mistake Dr. McK makes. I wrote some after Katrina as well (and yes, donated both money and blood–but there is no way in Cuttletown to have my money marked as an atheist contribution), and contrasted the church response at the time.
6) There are the miracles, such as the existence of Holy Scriptures (the uniformity of them, the prophecies, the clarity, and a thousand other aspects), the existence of the Man of Galilee (His birth, life, death, and resurrection; His teachings and promises, etc), the existence of the Church (so flawed, without its divine nature, surely it would have vanished long ago), and the existence of honest inquiry among believers (a sure sign, if you ask me, that God’s people are into Truth and nothing else).
Yes, the evidence leads directly to Jesus. Except when it is simply too bizarre and unbelievable to be false.
7) My testimony–and yours–on the power of Jesus Christ who changed our lives. And, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, if a skeptic scoffs that my life is so far inferior to what a true Christian should look like, I do not argue with that, but reply that my life is still so far beyond what it would have been without Christ.
Ok, I actually have quite a bit on this, but I’ve chosen a bit of musing on special pleading–Dr. McK has exceedingly high standards for atheists to meet, but when it comes to sufficient evidence for his own beliefs, his own testimony trumps all. Just because.
There is more to his essay, but nothing you haven’t heard a thousand times. I don’t think they are taking comments at the NOLA site, so I’m afraid you can’t let the good doctor know what you think of his reasoning. But hey, you can vent here.
The religions of the world, it seems, are largely in agreement;
They’re seeing different facets of one God
Not long ago, faiths disagreed on what, exactly, “we” meant
So this putative agreement just seems odd.
Religions had their enemies (and likely always will)
But their foes are vastly different now (we checked)
While interfaith “believers” have one message to instill
Through their histories, they’ve battled other sects!
Why, the Catholic’s bitter enemies were Methodists, at first,
Till the Baptists formed a bigger, badder foe
While today we see the atheists among the very worst
Were the godless problematic then? Well, no.
Cos the Christians fought the Christians (and the Muslims and the Jews)
And the atheists were folks you never met
But what could hammer unity from once-opposing views?
Is it possible the godless are a threat?
I’ve written before of my personal experience with what once appeared to be a bunch of separate religious views seeming to change over time to come together in a common cause (whether for political gain or to oppose atheism, I can’t say). Today, my aggregator throws at me an essay describing the same phenomenon over the past centuries of American religions. The essay speaks of the phenomenon as the effect of a religious free market, where competition among producers of religion for the limited consumers of religion was fierce:
The nineteenth century saw a fervor of religious inspiration, entrepreneurship, and frantic competition. In 1800, most Americans belonged to no church or denomination; many others were only nominally committed to the stuffy and stern established churches of several states.
But now, a host of young, energetic, and plain-speaking preachers evangelized all across the country for new denominations like the Methodist Episcopalians, Disciples of Christ, and dissident Baptists.
The Catholic Church, rooted in a continent where people were born into a faith and never left it, was shocked by the competition. One priest dispatched to Maryland complained in 1821, “There are Swarms of false teachers [Methodist preachers] all through the Country, in every School house, in every private house—you hear nothing but night meetings, Class meetings, love feasts &c &c.”
Historian of religion Martin Marty described “a competition in which the fittest survived,” one in which backwoods ministers found that their “first enemy was neither the devil nor the woman but the Baptist” – or any number of evangelists. (Later in the century, even atheists came together in formal association.)
I won’t quote more–it’s a really nice read, though, and while not a huge surprise (given the Bartonian mythology of America’s early years, though, it’s probably a huge surprise to someone), it’s refreshing to see.
Only just last week I was reading something about “the overall message of all religions”, which seemed a bit of a desperate attempt to gather allies, at the expense of historical accuracy. I guess it always seemed to me a bit of an insult, to have the Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door claim common ground with other Christians, with Muslims, Jews, and others, when trying to show how reasonable and commonplace belief is. I mean, if there is such agreement, why the various sects? These are differences that once merited banishment from a state, or discrimination in the workplace, or war–how is it that now you all believe the same warm, fuzzy things?
I don’t have an answer. If wishing worked, I’d find indisputable evidence that the great coming-together was a reaction to the growing threat of atheism. But it could be simple political pragmatism, and the functional equivalent of coalition-building. Or maybe each religion is evolving… Nah.
“All of human experience, over millennia, suggests a richness and complexity of reality beyond the material.”
I’ve heard there’s a heaven, its streets paved with gold,
Where diamonds and platinum gleams
It’s as real as my hand is, or so I’ve been told,
Though it might just be Swedenborg’s dreams.
I’ve heard I have angels who watch what I do
And act, if I do something rash
The lady who told me, she swore it was true
Then she charged me a whole lot of cash
I’ve heard I can heal any ailment at all
But first, I just have to believe
No matter what problem, how big or how small,
But science just cannot perceive!
I’ve heard there are miracles, wonders, and more,
Overflowing reality’s cup
And I’m thinking it’s something I ought to ignore…
Cos it looks like just making shit up
So yeah… my aggregator threw this at me today. From the Jamaica Gleaner, it’s “Science and Religion: a clash of two faiths”. The title alone tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the author’s position. The only additional info you might need is to note that this article is a response to a previous article… or, as the present author puts it:
Every now and again, some of the puff-chested doctors-cum-priests of science and a wide variety of coat-tail-hanging quacks emerge to advise us that religion, and particularly Christianity, is terminally ill. This is especially strange since modern science is irrefutably a product of Christian faith, more particularly of Protestant Christian faith.
So here comes another one, Dr Patrick White, who holds a doctorate in engineering and has led research groups at Bell Labs, puffingly announcing ‘Christianity losing race against science’ (Gleaner, July 1, 2013).
Initially, I was a bit confused as to whether science or puffery was the enemy. Turns out it’s science.
Science is replete with its own pet prejudices, bigotry and religious zealotry. At its epistemological core, science, as preached by many practitioners and bandwagon believers, operates on two weak assumptions: The reductionist view that reality is purely material, the interplay of matter and energy; and that the only way of truly knowing is by ‘scientific method’.
All of human experience, over millennia, suggests a richness and complexity of reality beyond the material. Science has been quite glibly willing to dismiss the mountain of evidence of non-material reality in defence of its own pet prejudice and in a deliberate and concerted effort to get rid of ‘god’ and the supernatural, which might be more properly described as the ‘othernatural’ rather than the ‘supernatural’.
Go ahead and read it… look for the critique of religion that matches the critique of science. Science is critiqued, and by virtue of a version of special pleading, religion is there to pick up the pieces.
Taking science on its own ground, no hypothesis of origins can be established by scientific method because it simply cannot be tested, a key requirement of validating hypotheses. Origin, whether of matter or of life, is a unique, one-off, non-replicable event of the distant past without human witnesses. Scientific method proceeds by examining replicable phenomena for attaining reliable and valid results. In matters of origins, we all ultimately stand on a platform of faith.
The only rational, purely natural ‘scientific’ position is that we, conscious and self-reflective human beings, find ourselves here. We do not know where we came from. We do not know why we are here. We do not know where we are going.
Science can answer none of these critical existential questions. And science can assign no value to human life. The object cannot value itself. Value is derived from being valuable to another.
Sure, religion can’t answer scientific questions, but that’s not its fault:
Religion, and Christianity in particular, has often been its own worst enemy in the contrived conflict with science. The Bible is not a science text and was not intended to be. The pronouncements of the mediaeval Roman Catholic Church upon cosmology which led to its ‘routing’ by Copernicus and Galileo, over which Patrick White now gloats, had no warrant in data sources available to the Church.
The article concludes
As powerful and productive as they have been, science and scientific method are not without boundaries of competence to define and to examine reality. Trespassing outside those boundaries is definitely not scientific, and bluff and bluster by the doctors, priests and quacks of science cannot change that simple fact.
which the casual observer will note does not advance the cause of religion one inch. The argument is, roughly, “if it is not the 4th of July, it must necessarily be Christmas.” Sorry, but knocking down science (worse, knocking down science based on your inadequate understanding of it) does not strengthen religion.
Tearing down my neighbor’s house does not strengthen my own. Pretending to tear down my neighbor’s house is just as futile, with the added benefit of making me look like a fool.