An atheist goes to church — 1stLC

For my first foray back into the fold, I made a conservative choice. I was brought up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) branch of Lutheranism — that is, the liberal branch of that sect. Of course, I haven’t attended a service since I was 20, so it’s been 36 years since I’ve gone through the motions. It seemed most likely to be rustily familiar, and a relatively painless reintroduction to the church life, so we attended the First Lutheran Church of Morris this morning.

First good news: the souls of the damned did not wail a warning as I crossed the threshold, nor did I burst into hellfire or get sundered by lightning from the skies, so we’re off to a great start.

The striking thing about the whole process was how familiar it all was — almost nothing has changed from what I experienced way back when I was an adolescent. Three things jumped out at me as having changed:

  • Padded cushions on the pews! Arr, this generation has gone soft in the fundament.

  • I was an acolyte myself, and we had much fancier dresses: white silky gowns with layered vestments and embossed velvet geegaws all over the place. These poor kids were wearing peasant gowns.

  • The rituals were much the same, but the pastor sang the chants here. He had a nice voice, but it was jarring: I expected spoken chants and spoken responses. Maybe my old pastor just couldn’t carry a tune.

Those are trivial differences. Otherwise, it could have been the same service I heard in Kent Lutheran Church in 1970, right down to the light Minnesööta accent in the pastor’s voice. It was kind of sweet and kind of weird at the same time.

I also observed a number of good things which help me understand why people keep attending church.

The first notable phenomenon is the congregation. Somewhere around 70-80 people attended, and they looked like a highly representative slice of the local population: all ages, from children to the very old, and an equal mix of men and women. There were several people who needed help getting to the pews, and there were ushers waiting who would help them. I noticed one developmentally disabled individual in the congregation, too: there was no segregation at all, everyone was treated as a full and equal participant. I have to give a big thumbs up to the inclusiveness of the group.

Sociability was high, too. Everyone was greeted and welcomed, people everywhere were saying hello to each other. Even us odd strangers got handshakes and hellos. The pastor, of course, was all over the room, personally greeting everyone and having a few word of conversation. He had a little chat with us, too, introducing himself, asking where we were from, clearly curious about these strangers. I noticed a little bit of a startle when we told him our names — I got the impression he suddenly realized who the heck we were — and he rather quickly left us, but that may have just been because he had to greet everyone.

We sat in our comfy cushioned pews (decadence!) and read the announcements that were displayed on a screen in front of the room. It’s a busy organization. Everyone gets acknowledged, the ushers, the greeters, the musicians, everyone by name right up front in a big display. You will not volunteer to help this church and not get gratitude. There’s the usual local events — confirmation classes, a picnic today, people who need prayers — and also a request for donations to the church mission in Senegal. They’re also very open about finances: there was an announcement that said that their operating budget was about $313,000 per year, and that they needed about $78,000 more.

Keep that in mind, atheist groups: a mid-sized local church, one of over a dozen in town, is bringing in somewhere around $300K per year. What’s your budget like?

Then the service began. I was impressed: it began right on time, and ran exactly one hour. This is a well-practiced, smooth-running ritual, I’ll say that for it.

And now, of course, is when my objections begin. As an efficient and rewarding social organization, the church is really, really good. I wish atheists could be this open and welcoming and egalitarian. It’s just that, well, the content gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Like my childhood church, this is not a hellfire kind of church — I noticed in the hymnal a word subsitution with a footnote explaining that some versions of a hymn used the phrase “land of Hell” but this one preferred the phrase “land of dead”, for instance. Liberal Lutherans were never very big on threats and extortion.

Instead, it’s very Jesusy. Lots of songs about “praise to the Lord” and begging Jesus for mercy and “we are captive to sin” — we are all really bad people but we can be salvaged if only we beg the Lord to have mercy. The Bible verse readings were a little daunting, too: 1 Kings 8:22-23, 41-43, which encourages us to help foreigners “know [god’s] name and fear [god]” and Galatians 1:1-12, which tells us helpfully that anyone who teaches any other gospel than Jesus’ is “accursed”.

Obviously, I reject all that.

The sermon was based around Luke 7:1-10, the story of a Roman centurion who had a sick slave and asked Jesus to heal him. I’ll confess, I was very confused by the story: it was all about how the centurion had “power and authority” and showed respect to Jesus. I had trouble getting beyond the fact that he had a slave, and everyone was very matter-of-fact about it, and seemed to think it was perfectly reasonable for someone to have that kind of power over another. There was also this odd children’s message: the kids were asked to come up, and the pastor asked them questions directly. He asked them who is the authority in their house, and the kids are all saying “my parents”, and the pastor asks “But which one?”, and they reply “Both”, and the pastor then says that was very PC of them, but it’s natural for one to have authority and power.

The sermon itself (short! 10 minutes! Yay!) started off with a nice story about the pastor’s family’s dog, which they found abandoned on a highway and rescued, but then segued into a bit about training animals, and how dogs need an “alpha male,” (I resisted the temptation to raise my hand and explain that the alpha male is an outdated and over-simplified caricature) and how he is the alpha male in his house. This was somehow tied back to the confusing story about the centurion and his slave, and how they were supposed to have faith and hope because of Jesus. I was totally lost, but the whole thing was mercifully short. I think now I’m supposed to roll over and expose my belly to Jesus, anyway. Or at the very least recognize that having a man head the household is the natural order.

At this point I’m neither enthused nor persuaded, but then, I’m actually listening to the content of this service, which is probably not the best thing to do.

It’s all wrapped up with some more hymns, more prayers, a very nice “peace handshake” were everyone shakes hands with their neighbors, the communion (no, I didn’t get in line for a wafer and grape juice), and a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed. Don’t let anyone try to convince you that testimonies of belief aren’t a significant part of religious practice — this is a ritual that spells out precisely what you must believe to be part of this community.

There was an offering plate. We threw in a few dollars because it was the thing to do, and we left. We shook the pastor’s hand on the way out and wished him a good day.

I think the social part of the morning was very pleasant and I’d like to see more of that, but the belief part of the event was…unbelievable. So I haven’t yet seen a reason why people wouldn’t pare away the religious fluff and just have a friendly social hour and barbecue.

An atheist goes to church

I’ve got this book finally coming out in August, The Happy Atheist, and I thought I’d tease you with the opening paragraphs.

On any fine morning in rural Minnesota, I can step outside the door of my home and look a few blocks to the southwest and see the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Just out of sight behind nearby houses and a few blocks to the west lies the First Lutheran Church. About four blocks to the the east is the Federated Church, the ‘liberal’ church in town. Even closer is the Lutheran Campus Ministry, which serves the university at which I work, and the Newman Center, its Catholic counterpart. Since this is Minnesota, I’ve got fairly fine-grained sectarian choices within Lutheranism that I could make: the First Lutheran Church belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, but I could attend Faith Lutheran Church, which is another member of ELCA, or if I wanted something a bit more conservative, I could attend St Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran church, which belongs to the Wisconsin Synod, or Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church, of the Church of the Lutheran Confession. There’s also the Zion Lutheran Church nearby, which belongs to the Missouri Synod.

If I were really broad-minded, I also have a choice of the First Baptist Church, the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Apostolic Christian Church, or the Morris Community Church, which meets in the local high school. I count 15 churches within walking distance of my house; there are no synagogues or mosques, probably because the believers they would prey upon are too thinly populated here to be profitable.

You can see I’m taking a rather personal approach to this religion thing; I’m kind of surrounded. I’ve been to a few of these churches for special events — usually when they bring a creationist into town to harangue the congregation with lies about science, but I haven’t actually attended their regular services. Yet here I am mentioning them in this book (don’t worry, I don’t say rude things about them sight unseen — I only question the need for such excessive godliness), and I’ve been feeling like maybe I ought to do a little more research.

So I’ve decided to start attending church services, a different church each week, all of this summer while I’m in town.

I’m not going to be confrontational, I won’t be leaping up in the middle of a sermon and shouting, “HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”, I won’t be sneering at the congregation…I’ll just be going to politely observe and take notes. And, of course, discussing the experience here. I’ll be taking an anthropological view, as neutral as I can be. Let’s find out what it’s actually like to be a church-going Christian in a small town in the upper midwest!

So stay tuned. Every Sunday I’ll talk about my local experience.

My yacht is the very best yacht

A Stanford professor of anthropology, T.M. Luhrmann, has a curious op-ed in the NY Times. She studies evangelical religions, and she takes the time to explain to us atheists and other secular people why people like to go to church. You know all those questions we ask, about whether god exists or what evidence there is for gods? They don’t think about that. We’re missing the point if we think that those are real problems for evangelicals.

These are the questions that university-educated liberals ask about faith. They are deep questions. But they are also abstract and intellectual. They are philosophical questions. In an evangelical church, the questions would probably have circled around how to feel God’s love and how to be more aware of God’s presence. Those are fundamentally practical questions.

Unfortunately, Dr Luhrmann is missing the point herself. We already know that. Seriously, I don’t know any atheist who believes that all we have to do is lay out the logical case for atheism and the believers will abandon the church. We still try to explain the problem with believing in god, though, just like we point out the moral failings of church leaders, the injustices of church policies, and the harm that religion does in the real world because the way you wake someone out of the delusion of faith is to jar them with the contradictions between what the religion claims and how the world actually works, and get them thinking about both the abstract questions and the practical questions.

The “practical questions” she cites are simply not. The answer to the abstract question that all these evangelicals are skirting, the existence of god, is no, gods don’t exist, which makes all their fussing about how to please the gods and appreciate the gods more wildly impractical.

It’s as if I were trying to deal with all the pragmatic minutiae of owning a yacht — leasing a dock, picking the best brand of brass polish, buying a fancy commodore’s hat so that I look good while striding about the deck. Only I don’t own a yacht, and don’t even live anywhere near where I could sail a yacht. So sure, I could doddle about, trying to make a real decision about whether I want this hat or that one, and I might even have fun exploring the choices, but to call it practical when the fundamental core of my hobby, the yacht, is completely absent is, at best, over-generous. When that core belief makes people invest unwisely, or leads them to make unfair or injust choices, it does active harm, all in the name of a feel-good phantasm.

The anthropologist needs to spend a little time looking at seculars in addition to the religious, though. She really doesn’t understand us at all.

To be clear, I am not arguing that belief is not important to Christians. It is obviously important. But secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.

And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

Uh, no. I have no illusion that people talk themselves into god-belief and then go looking for a church that accommodates them — that doesn’t even make sense. Why then would people so often end up in the same church as their parents? Personally, I spent much of my childhood going to church without believing in god at all. It was only when I was told that believing was part of the deal with being a Lutheran (remember the Nicene creed? It’s basically an oath saying you promise to believe in X, Y, and Z as part of the church) that I parted company with them. But I was in the church in the first place because that’s where my family went, that’s where all my neighborhood buddies of similar ethnic persuasion were, it was part of the tradition. I was kept in the church by a net of obligations: Thursday was choir practice, the pastor would make altar boy assignments for which of the two services I’d have to attend, I’d have my assigned bible readings and verses to memorize for Sunday School, there was VBS in June.

I know that you can have a satisfying time going through the motions of church attendance, focusing on just the day-by-day patterns and interactions. So why is Luhrmann lecturing me on the obvious, as if we atheists are completely clueless about the daily rhythms of religion? Does she think we’re stupid or something?

I think she’s just setting up her happy-clappy conclusion by loading up on the straw premises.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

“If you can sidestep the problem of belief” — right. Tiny little problem, we’ll just pretend it doesn’t exist at all, then we can continue to blithely troop off to church and do whatever without worrying about whether it’s important or not. It doesn’t matter whether my yacht exists at all, as long as I’m happy wearing my hat. That people can be readily sucked into an illusion is nothing controversial psychologically, but we generally think that well-adjusted, productive people are better attuned to reality.

“and the related politics, which can be so distracting” — WTF? Distracting? Look, if all religion were was a hobby, a cheerful little game that brought people together socially, I’d have no objection to it at all. But to pretend that it doesn’t bring along a cargo container worth of bad baggage is ludicrous. Those evangelicals are corrupting science education, because their religious beliefs tell them that evolution is false. It has fanatics throwing women on the pyre of their idolatry of the embryo. It justifies ostracizing, jailing, and even killing people who have different sexual interests. Those are mere “distractions”? They are minor problems Dr Luhrmann will wave away in her efforts to explain how freaking happy religions make people?

I understand that people join a church because it makes them feel good (sometimes, though, the reason they feel good about is the church loads them up with so much false fear and guilt that they feel compelled to alleviate it — it’s an elaborate circular engine of self-serving pain). The shot of joy, that pandering to a smug, small-minded sense of importance, is certainly an important component in the process of maintaining involvement in religion, but that doesn’t make it good or virtuous.

Even if it isn’t a proximate cause of church attendance, ultimately the question of whether god (or the yacht!) exists is essential in determining whether their faith matters in the world. That human beings are really good at closing their eyes and pretending is not an argument for living in a delusion.

Oh. Luhrmann has won a Templeton Foundation grant. All is explained.

What does evil look like?

Big fangs, horns, a hideous face, wielding brutal instruments of torture? Or maybe something sleek and military that can explode in a gout of flame? Sure, those are evil all right, but real evil can be distilled down to something as simple as a lawyer signing a piece of paper, a doctor averting their eyes, a citizen ignoring an act of inhumanity because the victim isn’t worthy…or an entire nation so soaked in godly lies that they will let a young woman die to protect their sanctimony.

I wrote about Beatriz’s case in El Salvador before. She’s 22, she’s very sick, and she’s pregnant with an anencephalic fetus. The fetus is doomed and can never live outside the womb, but the pregnancy is worsening Beatriz’s condition, and could kill her, too. The solution is simple: an abortion would give Beatriz a chance.

But no, El Salvador has an absolutist law on the books that completely outlaws all abortions, no exceptions, not even to save the life of the mother. It is a very Catholic country — yet again, religion poisons everything. This is a law very much like what the far right pecksniffs in the US would like to impose on us, and it’s operating effectively in El Salvador.

Beatriz’s only hope was that the El Salvador Supreme Court would see the light of reason and make a rational exception. They didn’t. They condemned her to die.

That’s what pure evil looks like. It’s a bureaucrat hearing the pleas of a dying woman and turning their back on her to worship the letter of the law. It’s a whole nation with their heads stuffed up their asses as an act of piety. It’s symbolized by this man, with his rituals and rites and his bullshit theology.

pope-francis

That’s the face of evil, neatly coiffed, smiling, seemingly benign. People are petitioning the Pope to save Beatriz’s life, and I find that offensive as well. By what goddamned right does this foolish old man have the power of life and death over anyone? Shouldn’t everyone have autonomy and a right to live?

That’s evil too, that we accept that some people have the power to inflict death and destruction, directly or indirectly, on others.

An obsession with permanence and secrecy

The next few months may prove to be very interesting — and damning — for the Catholic Church. The courts are poised to crack open a huge trove of church files, files that document the worst behavior of some of its priests, from child rape to murder. This facet of Catholic culture which insists on preserving every record, which was historically useful in preserving records of the past, is about to bite them in the butt, hard.

Why did the church hold on to decades-old evidence of its priests’ sins?

The explanation lies in centuries of Catholic Church history and is a tale involving secret betrothals, scandal, even a murder or two. Since the time of the Enlightenment, the Catholic Church has maintained two sets of records: one for the mundane and a second "secret archive" for matters of a sensitive nature. The cache — known as sub secreto files, Canon 489 files, confidential files or C-files — was to be kept under lock and key, only for the eyes of the bishop and his trusted few.

After the files became known to prosecutors and plaintiff’s lawyers, the American justice system has pried open the doors to an archive long kept sealed. Thousands of additional pages are set to become public in coming months, as more than a dozen Catholic orders — Salesians, Claretians, Vincentians and others — prepare to bare their own secrets pursuant to agreements with victims. L.A. County Superior Court Judge Emilie Elias could set the date for their release at a hearing Tuesday.

We may be about to get something as electrifying to the US as the Cloyne report was to Ireland. Poor Bill Donohue is going to be wearing out his fax machine.

Pell indicts the Australian Catholic Church

Whoa, my twitter feed is on fire with all these angry Australians. It seems Cardinal George Pell is getting grilled about child abuse within the Australian Catholic Church, and he’s being his usual callous, dogmatic self. “Some of the victims themselves aren’t entirely blameless,” indeed.

The Age has an article summarizing the inquiry so far, but it’s rather tepid compared to the outrage I’m seeing expressed by the Australians listening in. It’s clear that Pell has admitted there was abuse of children, and also that there was a cover-up; he also had lots of excuses.

“I would agree that we’ve been slow to address the anguish of the victims and dealt with it very imperfectly,” he told the inquiry.

“I think a big factor in this was not simply to defend the name of the church.

“Many in the church did not understand just what damage was being done to the victims. We understand that better now.”

Cardinal Pell said the sodomy of children was always regarded as totally reprehensible.

“If we’d been gossips, which we weren’t … we would have realised earlier just how widespread this business was,” Cardinal Pell said.

He admitted that lives had been ruined as a result of the cover-ups and that they had allowed pedophile priests to prey on children.

“I would have to say there is significant truth in that,” Cardinal Pell said.

He said he did not believe there had been a culture of abuse.

“I think the bigger fault was that nobody would talk about it, nobody would mention it.

“I was certainly unaware of it.

“I don’t think many, if any, persons in the leadership of the Catholic Church knew what a horrendous widespread mess we were sitting on.”

Cardinal Pell agreed that placing pedophiles above the law and moving them to other parishes resulted in more heinous crimes being committed.

“There’s no doubt about it that lives have been blighted.

“There’s no about it that these crimes have contributed to too many suicides.”

He also blamed lax standards for admission to the priesthood 50 years ago, something the pope babbled about a while back, too. Damned hippies!

But basically Pell got up and admitted that all the accusations were true and that he knew about it and that the only reason they didn’t do anything about it was that they didn’t realize how widespread the problem was. I want to know how big it had to be before they would have cracked down: I would have thought ONE child raped by a priest would have been sufficient to trigger a response, but apparently Pell didn’t think it important until it hit some other magic number.

If you’d like to see some real rage against the Catholic Church, follow #abuseinquiry on twitter.

How do you know it’s an abuse of religion?

An interesting article by Nervana Mahmoud describes the shift of “Allahu Akbar” from exclamation of wonder to one of vengeance. I’ll take her word for it, but it made me wonder — how can you say something is an abuse of religion?

Not much good comes out of horrific crimes such as the one in Woolwich, yet the graphic video that later emerged serves as another reminder to many devout Muslims of the glaring abuse of their religion, and has led the Muslim community in Britain to stand firmly against this abhorrent act. Meanwhile, in the Arab world, many Muslims continue to fight hard against radical Islamism to reclaim Islam from hijackers who use and abuse their religion for a wide range of purposes, ranging from winning elections to violent crimes.

As so many would like to claim, religion is supposed to be the source of morality. If that were actually true, there would be no way to argue against a religious definition of a moral act — it would have to stand alone, as a declaration by fiat by an absolute moral monarch. To claim that something is an abuse of religion requires an external frame of reference.

In order to claim that a religious act is an abhorrent act, you must have some definition other than the one in the holy book for what constitutes a good act…and I suspect that what we’re seeing in Muslims who can criticize actions taken in the name of their god is an unconscious acceptance of a different source of morality. I don’t think it’s an alternate religious source, either — they’re drifting towards humanism and an ethic that transcends their cultural biases.

That’s a good thing.

By the way, this is also why I’m not very keen on attempts to turn morality into a scientific conclusion. Any attempt to make science the sole source of moral rules is going to be just as dangerous as making Islam the sole source.

A Curse in Miracles

Woe is me and alas! Pity me, for I am a secular humanist and gnu atheist embarked on trying to read the quintessential New Age non-dualistic blueprint for spiritual transformation, Dr. Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles.

And it is heavy going indeed. All I’ve done so far is download the free excerpt from kindle (which goes on and on past the 9th chapter at least), I’m 88% through, and I’m not sure if I have the heart to continue. According to the book I don’t, of course – but more on that later.

It’s not that the book is hard to read. Nor is it even particularly hard to understand. I was an English major and now I am old and I have read plenty of books which were far more philosophically and technically difficult, to be sure. But I keep alternating between frustration, boredom, anger, and an almost stupefying astonishment that the book is really as bad as it is. I am, however, learning quite a lot. It’s just not what I am presumably supposed to be learning.

I’m also surprised. A Course in Miracles was not quite what I expected.

[Read more…]

The diversity of Diversity

Atheists are not popular. This comes as no surprise to us or anyone, really. As far as I can tell we are dead last in every U.S. poll in which we are included and explicit terrorists, Nazis, and the Westboro Baptist Church are not.

I suppose the cultural assumption that ‘you need God to be good’ should be explanation enough for our banishment from the realm of the acceptable (Would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want to be one? Nuh uh.)  But I keep running into a common plea that no, the problem is not really atheism. Atheism isn’t necessarily okay, of course … but after all it’s a free country and people have the right to believe what they want to believe. It takes all kinds. Just be nice and you’re okay.

No, the problem isn’t atheism itself – it’s atheists. But not all atheists. The tolerant believers discern critical distinctions in the group. There are Good Atheists who don’t manage to believe in God themselves but who still manage to show the courtesy to respect those who do. And then there are the ones like Richard Dawkins . The outspoken ones, the militant ones, the shrill ones who won’t shut up and try to blend in and instead write books and articles and letters meant for the general public. The stigma is focused like a laser on the atheists who act ‘just like fundamentalists’ by trying to convert people and thereby change their minds. The arrogant. The not-nice.

Gnus.

It’s an insidious trope which appeals to values like respect, acceptance, and inclusion: why would anyone be so  rude as to try to get other people to not believe in God? What about diversity? Diversity is good. We ought to let people be who they are.

Outspoken atheists then are disparaged even by those who claim to be “fine” with atheism because we are seen as breaking the social contract which values diversity and individuality. Atheists attack people’s deepest identity the way racists attack race or bullies attack those who are different than them. When you get right down to it — they’re bigots. Telling people their religion is wrong is being judgmental.

This is apparently a major charge made against us. I feel as if I see and read and encounter variations of it all around. I suspect most of us do. It’s a theme which seems to run more often through liberal communities than the conservative ones (which are usually just fine with the assumption that you can’t be good without God) but many of us live in such communities and engage regularly with those who seem so frustratingly on the edge of rationality.

So I’ve been attempting to figure out exactly what is happening and why,  working it out mostly here and there in parts and pieces. Since PZ gave me the keys while he’s away, though, I’ll take advantage and will to try to expand a bit, to see whether people in this forum think it makes sense. Because I think that, once again, theists are making a category error when it comes to religion. And they’re getting a lot of non-theists to go along with them because they are appealing to values which are essentially not religious, but humanist.

Bottom line, there is a sort of equivocation going on with the concept of “diversity”  – and it’s helping to fuel the general antipathy towards atheists.

Consider it this way: it might be said that there are two basic frameworks in which we value ‘diversity’ as a modern virtue. One of them is what I call the Diversity Smorgasbord. The other is what we can call the Diverse Problem-Solving Group. [Read more…]