Kissing Hank’s Ass

The problem is that religious belief or lack thereof is way to complex to slap on a label and call it described, so then we create the group that tries to split hairs. They come up with terms like agnostic-atheist, agnostic-theist, and on and on and on. It gets tiring, but I understand the sentiment of those who come up with fancier and fancier Greek terms to try and describe their religious or areligious outlook. People want to be understood. They want to scream to the world, “Hey! I have really thought about this shit and this is the most valid conclusion.”

My own personal journey has brought brought me through times of teenage rebellion, intense born-again fervor, Mormon orthodoxy, progressive Mormonism, and atheism. For all intents and purposes, I am an atheist. I do not have a belief in a sentient being that involves himself/itself/herself in human affairs; but does atheism do my world view justice? I do not think so; and its not because my atheistic world view is any superior to others’ worldview, but its because all world views are much more rich than a simple term can communicate. By calling someone an atheist, agnostic, theist or deist, I am doing them a disservice in that I am simplifying their life experience.

So who am I? I am secularist. I believe that public policy should be based on secular reasoning and testable hypotheses. I am an atheist. I am not anti-theist or anti-religious. In fact, I look back on my days as a devout believer, and I think that religion benefited me greatly during portions of my life. I also look back on my days of religiosity and cringe in embarrassment about certain things that I said, did and did not do. I have no beef with religion per se, as long as they do not push purely religious ideals into public policy! The problem is that many religiously minded people do push their religiosity onto others. They try to limit science in the school system, and they try to justify bigotry in legislation. Unlike some, I do not take the stance of Dawkins and say that religious upbringing is child abuse. The problem that I have with Dawkins, is that I am not sure if he has ever really experienced the viscosity and beauty of religion. Is religion ugly? Sometimes. Is religion beautiful? Sometimes. Lets try to reduce the ugly portions and treasure the beautiful portions. Even though I no longer find religious involvement useful to me, I still can appreciate the beauty in ritual, parable, service, and the idea of the unknown. Much of my family is still very religious, and I find no need to stress these relationships with my atheism. In order to participate with family, I often find myself re-framing the definition of God in order to make my participation in certain familial settings more comfortable. When I do this, I re-frame God as a symbol of the universal whole, not as a sentient being, but as an immense complexity that exceeds all of our current understanding and invokes awe within us. This may be a cop-out, and some atheists may scoff at what they see as a lack of back bone. However, I find no reason to abolish religion itself. I only see a need to keep it out of public policy, and when religion collides with public policy, I am vocal about it with anyone that I dialogue with. Also, it should be noted that I have been through enough paradigm shifts that I am anticipating that my current world view will shift and metamorphose as my life continues. I do not think that I will ever believe in God again, but I am confident that my philosophy will be very different in twenty years. If it is not different, that probably means that I am not opening my eyes to the world around me.

Let’s stop bickering. Let’s stop seeing religious belief as silly and stupid, and let’s start trying to understand the complexity of one another. There is a huge spectrum of belief and disbelief, and let’s try to appreciate that. I think that there are battles that need to be fought when it comes to the collision of religious belief and public policy, but let’s fight those battles intelligently and try to open doors of communication.

Joseph Smith,

To you, my friend and fellow human, I raise my glass. I salute your charisma, your capability to ponder the complexity of the eternities and your ability to inspire and give purpose.

I salute you as an equal to Muhammad, Siddhārtha Gautama, Zarathustra and Jesus Christ. I salute you as a martyr! I do not agree with your theology, but I recognize your fervor and accept the possibility that many of your transcendental experiences may have been real, to you.

You are a founder of religions, a provoker of thought and an instigator of piety. Many respect you, many hate you, and many venerate you. I myself ponder your perplexity and purpose, but I do not judge you.

Rest in peace my fellow wanderer of this puzzling reality.

Sincerely,

Shadow of Doubt

First lets gain some perspective. I will not argue that the publicized technique of terrorist suspects are distasteful. I would not like to be kept up for days, nor would I enjoy being water boarded, or threatened with death, especially if I was being falsely accused. However, lets remember that these people were not having their hand put into a meat grinder or having molten lead poured up their asses.

Now lets discuss the issue. The government claims that these techniques were successful in getting important information to prevent terrorist attacks. I am not wholly convinced that is the case, but lets say that it is. The government claims it walked a tightrope in the sense that they walked right up to the line between persuasive interrogation and torture, but that it did not cross that line. Again, I am not sure where that line is and I am not sure that the government did not cross it, but for the moment, lets assume that they never crossed it.

Now: If these techniques are effective and they are not “torture”, then why are they not used in the American criminal justice system? Why are police not allowed to rough up a suspect, keep him up for days or hook him up to cables? If your child was being held by a predator, would you not want the police to deliver a few painful blows to the head and ribs to get information? Would you care if the suspect was water boarded to extract information on the whereabouts of your child? I assume that many parents would not care. However, for some reason we have legislated against such methods and we have done so to protect the falsely accused and to respect what we have labeled as Human Rights. Not rights that we think only Americans should have, but rights that we think HUMANS should have. This is what burns my hide. It is the double standard.

I propose that if the government really thinks that these methods are acceptable, then we should allow them to be implemented within our own criminal justice program. If for “some” reason the government/public is not willing to do that, then we need to shut up, stop making excuses and cease using these methods on ANYONE. We can not maintain a facade about this. Either we decide it is wrong or we decide that it is right and we implement these methods on our own people.

Arthur Koestler said the following about one of his trips with Leary: “There’s no wisdom there.  I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.  There is no quick and easy path to wisdom.  Sweat and toil are the price of knowledge.”

Koestler’s thoughts on his hallucinogenic experience summarize my feelings on psychedelics as well.

However, I feel like the ambiguity of transcendental experience can be applied to religion as well.  I had a very earthshaking “spiritual awakening” in my teens.  The experience was potent, lucid, and pretty damn emotional, yet I am not sure what knowledge I gained from it.  I remember a friend asking me one time, “and what did you learn from that?”  I was left a little confused because even though I had the experience, the experience could not be articulated well.  Any conclusions that I drew from that experience were largely driven by my religious upbringing and not necessarily from the experience itself.

What am I saying?  I am not sure, but I guess I am saying that many of us yearn for transcendence, but that the transcendence, although it feels good, may not really mean anything.  How’s that for cynicism?

She eventually abandons Islam but details her journey out, and the cognitive dissonance that initiated this journey.  For anyone who has dealt with religious paradox, contradiction and cognitive dissonance, this book is for you.  Ayaan ends up making a short film with a man named Theo van Gogh who is shot, stabbed and has a letter impaled to his chest addressed to Ayaan as a result of the film.

This film was named Submission Part I

I am left conflicted by books like these.  We are constantly told that Islam is a religion of peace.  Yet Ayaan, a once devout Muslim, is a strong opponent of this statement.  Furthermore, when I read the Qur’an, I find plenty of passages that justify violence and terrorism.

To maintain the anonymity of the participants, I have changed all the names in the story. The story is also condensed and summarized. This is not an actual word for word account.

Who is who:
Kate = my colleague with whom I am conversing
Susan = a colleague with whom we are annoyed with often
Marie = a colleague that is always extremely annoyed with Susan

Kate and I were recently discussing some of the people within our professional circle and Kate said, “you know Marie came up to me and told me that she just celebrated her tenth anniversary of meditating twice daily.”

“Wow, that is impressive dedication”, I replied with sincerity.

“You know, I would think that someone who practiced meditation for ten years would be much more tolerant about other people. Marie is always extremely irritated with Susan, and I would think that a serious meditator would be much more relaxed about it.”

“Why? Are you into meditation, Kate?”

“Yes. In fact, I am trying to meditate every morning, and I look forward to the day when I will be able to sit in a 2 hour trance. It will be awesome.”

After pondering Kate’s response, I replied “well maybe you should be less critical about the practitioner and more critical about the practice itself.”

“You are right, maybe Marie is just not meditating correctly and that is why she is easily irritated with Susan.”

“No. I mean maybe meditation is not all that it is cracked up to be. Maybe meditation does not work.”

Kate replied briskly. “No, meditation definitely works.”

“Kate, I really think that maybe this is cause to question the validity of the claims made by practitioners of meditation. Maybe, meditation just doesn’t work as well as some say. Why do you think it works so well? Shouldn’t you be skeptical of its value?”

“It will work. I am sure of it. People say it works and I am going to have success.”

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Begging the question is stating a “truth” and assuming the truth of that “truth” without using any other evidence to support it. The above dialogue is a classic example and it irritated me. Why not engage in skeptical dialogue about the claims of a methodology that often purports transcendence and spiritual enlightenment?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and begging the question is not providing any evidence.

There are a few different forms to this fallacy, but two common ones are, 1) arguing the truth of something because it can not be disproved, and 2) jumping to an untested conclusion because you are ignorant to the source of something.

Examples:
1) Statement: Aliens built the pyramids.

No they did not, there is no evidence that points to aliens

Well you can not prove that they did not build the pyramids, so they did. – argumentum ad ignorantiam

2) Statement: There is a funny noise in the cellar at night, and I do not know what it is.  The noise must be a ghost. – argumentum ad ignorantiam.

It really bothers me that shows that should be promoting good science are just feeding irrationality in the general public.  One of the people on the mentioned (aliens and pyramids) show said something along the lines of, “What I like about the aliens hypothesis is that it forces us to think.”  Au contraire my friend, it prevents you from thinking.  It creates an absence of thought when complex ideas are needed.  It is a cop out.

The truth is that ancient civilizations are much more complex than some give them credit.  Do we have the answers for all of the architectural and astronomical mysteries within these ancient cultures?  No we do not.  But saying, “this ______ is complex, aliens must have helped” gets us no closer to finding the answer to these ancient puzzles.

When we are confronted with mystery and complexity, we need to form testable hypotheses and test these hypotheses to approach the truth.  Blaming complexity on aliens or the supernatural is a cop out, generally untestable, and is not productive.  Unfortunately popular television is not helping promote critical thinking in society.  Shame on them.

I have a variety of feelings about the issue:

I understand the desire that Mormons have to keep their rituals secret from public scrutiny and discussion.  I feel that a sense of privacy and the sense that they share something of “their own” adds to group cohesion and helps them take their rituals more seriously.  This desire to have secret ceremonies is shared by many other groups, which include religious groups as well as secular and fraternal. However, many Mormons (and people in general) display an enormous double standard about these things.  They are eager to discover other people’s secret things.  They watch tribal ritual on the National Geographic channel like it is perfectly ok to scrutinize others’ religious ceremonies.  They were fascinated about Opus Dei when they were Hollywoodized in The Da Vinci Code, and found their use of the cilice belt intriguing.  Who would not be excited and curious to discover the secret ceremony of the Skull and Bones fraternity, or who chooses to turn off the history channel when it reenacts sacred Egyptian funeral rites or when it speaks about the Hajj?  The issue always arises when a personal secret is revealed.  This is why so many Mormons are angry.  Their secret is being publicly displayed, and they feel like their secret is too sacred for public display.  I think that this sentiment is shared by many.  Humanity finds it painful when personal things are put under the public microscope, but we are quick to look down the eyepiece of the microscope at other people’s personal things.

I personally find Big Loves decision to display Mormon temple ceremony as insensitive, yet I do not think that there is anything inherently wrong with it.

For Mormons who are offended by the public display of temple secrets I have a few points of advice:

1)  Many of your secrets are really borrowed/stolen Masonic secrets, so you shouldn’t feel too possessive of them.

2) Transcripts of the temple ceremony are already available online to whomever wants to look at them.  I find LDSendowment.org most useful.

3) HBO isn’t the first television program to discuss temple topics on air.  I saw a Cold Case episode that displayed a Mormon wearing garments and a Law and Order that showed garment symbols in detail.

4) Do you get equally upset when other people religious rites are put on public display?

I understand why many Mormons are upset about this, but I think that the larger question is, should religious rites in general be fair game for public discussion?  I think that the answer is yes, and that even though it may be uncomfortable for those people being scrutinized that they need to realize that if it offends them; the best solution would be for them not to watch it.