The bear and the atheist

At my bridge club, on one of the days of the week, there is a tradition of someone, who is I think the oldest person in the group, starting the session with a joke before we start playing. Her jokes are usually raunchy and pretty funny, and she tells them well. But on days when she is absent, someone else will tell a joke and this week the person told one about an atheist and a bear. It is an old joke, the kind that gets circulated that you can read here. I had heard this same joke about ten years earlier and wrote about it then.

It struck me this time that although the atheist is supposed to be the butt of the joke whom we are supposed to laugh at, Christianity comes off worse, with their God being portrayed as vengeful and vindictive with a cruel sense of humor, hardly the loving and forgiving deity that is advertised nowadays. The atheist, on the other hand, comes across as a reasonable, honest, and principled person, not pretending to have a religious conversion even as he faces death. I wonder if the Christians who like to relate this joke realize this.

I was also amused because I do not think that the people in my bridge club (other than my bridge partner) know that I am an atheist. In general, I do not make a point of talking about my beliefs unless it comes up naturally in conversation. I know and like the woman who told the joke. I wonder if she would have made the joke if she knew about my lack of belief in gods.

Atheists, agnostics, and Catholics are the most supportive of vaccines

Although the anti-vaccine and anti-mask protestors get a lot of media coverage, a new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that a majority of the American public (by a margin of 62% to 37%) see the health benefits if the Covid-19 restrictions as worth the costs, even though the restrictions have “hurt businesses and economic activity and keep people from living their lives the way they want”. But many also fear that the worst is yet to come.

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Supreme Court blocks religious vaccine exemption

The US Supreme Court yesterday refused to grant an injunction to stop the implementation of Maine’s requirement that nearly all health workers be vaccinated or lose their jobs.

Maine requires nearly all health care workers to be vaccinated against Covid-19. It argues that this requirement is necessary because those workers are unusually likely to interact with patients who are vulnerable to the disease, and because the state’s health care system could potentially be disabled if too many health care workers are infected. The state does exempt a very narrow slice of health care workers, however: those who risk adverse health consequences if they are vaccinated, such as people with serious allergies to the vaccine.

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The religious exemption card is getting harder to play

In the US, claiming that some action is based on their religious faith tends to give people wide latitude. So it is not surprising that people reach for it even in situations where it is hard to discern any religious basis. We see this now as states and companies are issuing vaccine mandates requiring that their employees get vaccinated or conform to various kinds of other requirements such as regular testing or get fired.

But people who are trying to use religious exemptions to get out of vaccine mandates are not finding it as much of an easy sell as they might have expected. We saw how basketball player Andrew Wiggins had his request for such an exemption denied and now the head football coach along with four of his coaching staff of Washington State University were fired for not getting vaccinated as required for all state employees.
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How I lost my religious faith

There were some comments in response to my post on writing sermons during the time I was a lay preacher in the Methodist Church that expressed surprise that I had been religious at one time and curious about what caused me to abandon my faith. So I thought I would write an explanation.

The main thing that I want to emphasize is that Christianity has been an important part of my life. My personal experience with religion was very positive all the way through. What caused me to leave was not any kind of anger or disillusionment with religion but simply an inability to reconcile my growing understanding of science with even the most minimal formulations of what a belief in the existence of a god implied. I started the transition to atheism in my mid-30s, after I got my PhD in physics. The small seeds of doubt were always there but one can always rationalize away their existence if one is determined enough. In fact, in the progressive, intellectual religious circles I moved in, doubt as a part of belief was taken for granted, not viewed as a sign of weakness or a lack of faith.
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Excellent documentary on Afghanistan

Now that the US has pulled out of Afghanistan, one already sees a drastic decline in media coverage of that country. The PBS investigative program Frontline has just released an excellent documentary Taliban Takeover on the twenty-year old war that the US waged in Afghanistan.

What makes this program particularly notable is that the journalist Najibullah Quraishi is himself an Aghan who was born and raised in that country and has covered the war all this time, providing him with a breadth of knowledge of the country’s languages, history, and peoples that enables him to provide an in-depth perspective that is lacking in most western sources. He has contacts with key members of the Taliban, al Qaeda , and ISIS and was embedded with these groups at various times and thus has access to them and was able to interview them. He also interviewed many courageous women who are wondering what the future is for them.

His reporting shows that the departure of the US and installing of the Taliban in power has brought some stability to the country but at the cost of freedoms as the government seeks to rule according to Islamic law and that now there are power struggles within factions of the Taliban and with al Qaeda and ISIS.

For those seeking to better understand what is going on there and why the US mission was pretty much doomed from the start, I can highly recommend this 53-minute program.

The sermon in Christianity

As long time readers know, I used to be a lay preacher in the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka. What is meant by ‘lay’ is that I was not a fully ordained minister for which one has to go to divinity school and get a degree. Instead I took some courses and exams while continuing my secular life. I did this between the ages of 20 and 25 until I left for the US to start graduate school in physics.

My duties as a lay preacher was that about once a month, I was assigned by the circuit superintendent to go to a church in the region and conduct Sunday services in place of their regular minister. I had to do the full service but not the communion part which could only be done by a fully ordained minister. In the Methodist Church, unlike the Catholic or Anglican churches, full communion services were held only once a month so that restriction was not a problem.
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Death and the final exit in The Good Place (spoilers)

I recently re-watched the TV series The Good Life which I have praised highly in the past but did not discuss the way it ended because I did not want to spoil it for others. But since almost two years have passed since it ended, I feel that it is safe to do so.

Those who watched the entire series know that it begins with four people who have died being fooled into thinking that they have entered the ‘Good Place’, which is a euphemism for a heaven but without a deity, because they have lived exceptional lives on Earth. But in reality they are in the ‘Bad Place’ (a euphemism for hell) as part of an elaborate hoax by demons who are experimenting with a new form of torture in which they get people to torture each other by making each others’ lives miserable by squabbling over all manner of things. You know, just like people do on Earth. Most of the series involves the four, after they discover the hoax, trying to figure out how to get into the real Good Place and avoid eternal torment.
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