C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

This morning two of my friends from Alabama in the Universism movement were guests on the Russ and Dee Show. After some Alabama listeners were discussing on Universism's "Faithless Community" chat room what they heard on the show, I called in and spent almost a half hour on the line with the host, my two friends, and a guest theologian. The Universists on the chat room were ecstatic about how I came off on the radio and responded to the theologian. I think it's been recorded and maybe I can eventually get it as a download for you.

While examining human motivation at ConVocation, which I blogged about this weekend, I turned the microscope on my own views of the world, religious, relational, and political. The techno-progressive Dale Carrico, with whom I had what might count as my first political debate last week over the connection between technology and libertarianism, sparked some thought on broader connections.

I can talk your ear off about secularism but I'm not very political. When I'm asked in a poll or a voting booth to think about broad social policies, I just extrapolate from personal relationships. I used to be a very compliant and trusting child, a dutiful husband, and a devout follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Those arrangements were all bad and I'll never again get into relationships of parent/child, till-death-do-us-part, or worshiper/worshipee. I have no policy statistics, I've never paid much attention to laws and their outcomes, I don't claim to be an expert in society or governance, so I cannot be looked to for anything more specific on politics than a treatise of first principles. I merely have life experiences that teach me hyper-individualism, which manifests as suspicion of all authority and an aversion to entitlement. By entitlement, I mean home, family, church, government, and other communal relationships in which people basically feel like they can have free run to abuse each other and praise it as "self-sacrifice." So when I found libertarianism and technological culture, they fit like a hand in a glove. God, marriage, parents, government, nature, it's all of a piece. Technology attempts to break the wheel of nature, that we are in relationship with, and which governs us.

I wonder if left-liberals and moral-majority-conservatives have more trust, or are comfortable in interdependent relationships, whether it be with their parents or spouse or religion or children, or their DNA for that matter, which carries over to government. In the "perfect idealistic world" of my imagination there would be none of those. But I acknowledge a world of all adults, a world of artificial intelligences who can just self-modify whenever they don't like their own nature, is not where we are right now, and I have no good reason to expect it to become that way.

It's heartening to encounter a kindred spirit. If I collected my essays and published them as a book, it would take the same essential positions as this bestselling book that Sam Harris has now published, titled The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. You need to read this interview. I'm far from the only person who has come to these realizations, and it's clearly spreading. Click this link to join us tonight at 8pm Eastern for a live chat interview with Sam Harris of which I will be one of the moderators.

Lately I've been taking my discontent with America's religious climate and hitching it to the wagon of the recent election in the hopes of waking up politically-motivated people to become motivated about religion, so that they can work on the disease and not the symptoms. Now, however, there is a backlash, because there are two kinds of Christians.

First there are the majority of Christians, among whom are many of my good and worthy friends, who pray a lot, and claim to follow some vague idea of "Jesus" which they possibly got from a painting of a robed fellow with long hair holding a baby sheep. If a person claims to follow Jesus, and Jesus transforms into whatever their idea of goodness happens to be, is such a person "following" in any meaningful sense? They follow themselves. I'm glad they do so, but if I were to refer to this as Christianity, words would become meaningless noises.

Second are the ones who actually read and follow the Christian scriptures, such as the American Family Association and Bob Jones University and the Concerned Women of America and other politically active Christian Supremacist groups, and the huge grassroots of congregations who they motivate with press releases, sermons, and letters so extreme they actually deserve phrases like "American Mullahs." I know that they are following the actual book, because because I grew up reading, believing and obeying it until several years ago.

I and other informed secularists then apply phrases like "American Mullahs" to those who read, believe and obey the literal bible, including all the cancerous Christian Supremacism found within. Then liberal/nominal Christians, utterly ignorant of what is actually in their own religion's teachings except for a few warm huggy sound bites like: "love thy neighbor," and silly self-contradictory nonsense like: "judge not lest ye be judged," call us intolerant for criticizing faith. What's worst is that even non-religious liberals join them in this. The cultural attitude at the root of so many problems is unchanged as a sacred cow, and from there proceeds business as usual in America.

The reason this happens is that there exists fashionable nonsense among liberals and progressives that there is no such thing as a right or wrong truth claim if somebody slaps the label of faith on it. This is found nowhere in the Christian bible, which only uses the "get away with faith free card" to exempt itself at the expense of everyone else. Then they make the claim that opposition to faith is also faith, because there exists no evidence one way or another for paradoxical mysteries, which is
BULL
SHIT.

This claim that every stance is a retreat to faith is called irrationalism. At least the postmodernist irrationalists differ from the absolutist irrationalists, in that there is no winner or loser. However, they seem to oppose Christian or Islamic political supremacism not because they present truth claims about religion that are wrong, but because they present any at all. This is self-defeating because everyone will ultimately present truth claims anyway regardless of our pretenses otherwise. For instance, if you claim everything is just faith, than you are giving me a pass to say by faith that you're wrong. You can't do diddly squat about it unless you're willing to say that one faith is better than another and I should stop having mine. Which undercuts your ability to say I can't tell you to stop having yours.

Of course I'm just playing along with the idea that not having faith is the same as having it. Naturally there is a difference. I act like these issues can be resolved not through authority, but through reason based on observation, and irrationalists (religious and non-religious alike) insist they have to be faith-based pre-suppositions immune from challenge. There is something on which I agree with the absolutist bible-believers: that there is truth. We just disagree on whether we can personally know it with absolute certainty. There is something with which post-modern irrationalists agree with the absolutist bible-believers: that we can't know anything without retreating to a pre-supposition. But I say that hope lies only in the discovery that we can.

True tolerance and fairness under the first amendment means a level playing field in which the claims can be judged against each other, without favoritism. This competition is meant to be fair, but like any competition there is a winner and a loser! Claims are accepted and rejected! But inevitably whoever believes that there exists a knowable reality, and takes sides accordingly, is made out to be the bad guy.

More and more often I find myself referencing Eric S. Raymond's essay Dancing With The Gods. It's very close to Karen Armstrong's book The Battle For God on my required reading list for the power of the explanatory models of religious experience and institutional development that these writings provide. The essay makes me wonder if god archetypes have ever manifested themselves in me, and if so, which ones. Perhaps if I brought it up somebody would say "oh yeah, we see you acting like so-and-so sometimes." Dancing With The Gods left me with some questions.( Read more... )

Agnostics, deists, atheists, pantheists, transcendentalists and other freethinkers are meeting for the next local Universist meetup at Barnes and Noble Booksellers on Washtenaw Ave. in Ann Arbor at 8:00 p.m. Thursday, September 2. Those who are curious are invited to join us. Universism unites freethinkers by replacing the traditional concept of faith with reasoned credibility, inspiration in nature, and hope in progress.

Pardon me while I vent some steam about what I'm feeling right now. ( Read more... )