We could have math books spiced up with bible quotes.
Or history books that tell us Jesus is the focal point of all history.
Oh, wait. Some American kids are being taught out of books like that.
(via 0xabad1dea)
This past week, I got to meet Jay Lake, a most excellent SF author and current cancer survivor who did not give me optimistic news about his prognosis.
Then this morning I get up to the news that my all-time favorite author, Iain Banks, has issued A Personal Statement in which he announces that he has terminal bladder cancer, is not expected to live out the year, and has written his last book, ever. I have never met Banks, although I’d love to, and now it looks like I never will.
Goddamn motherfucking cancer.
There’s not much we can do, but at least take a look at Jay Lake’s and Iain Banks’ books on Amazon. Good stuff all around.
Hitchens’ own publisher, Verso, apparently commissioned a hatchet job on him, hiring a Marxist-Leninist ideologue to write (using that word loosely) a tell-all called Unhitched to expose Hitch as a plagiarist and heretic and fame-grubbing careerist.
Now I utterly detested Hitchens’ politics; I think he saw the world in binary terms and backed the wrong side in the battle against ignorance because he couldn’t see any other position than GW Bush’s and the fanatical Islamist horde’s. But he was passionate and sincere (not that that excuses anything) in his ideals, and absolutely heroic in his writing and speaking ability. There is room to criticize Hitchens on the facts, and I think a book that looked at the man critically and honestly would both provide an interesting appraisal and honor his talents.
According to the review, this book did neither. The author chose to attack Hitchens by denying his undeniable strengths, and the publisher hired someone who “nature did not intend” to write. The professional calumnist who wants to attack Hitchens post mortem faces a formidable obstacle: the man was a great writer, and every slander is going to look paltry and unimaginative next to Hitchens’ most casual jibe.
Ania, who writes at Scribbles and Rants, has been coping with chronic illness for way too long, so she’s decided to do something constructive about it: she’s raising money to write a book, Young, Sick and Invisible: A Skeptic's Journey With Chronic Illness.
If you identify with her situation, help her out.
I am relieved to announce that this book thingie
The best thing about it: I really, really love editors. They have a skill that they apply well, and they make everything twinkle sninily that they touch. I wish I could take this one and make her copy edit all my blog posts from now on (even though she’d probably correct “sninily” and tell me I have to explain these weird terms.)
The worst thing: this book has been moldering at the publishers for so long that I really felt this terrible urge to rewrite the whole thing from the ground up…an act both temporally impossible and contradictory, because then it would take even longer to get out.
Also, I’ve got other deadlines stacked up awaiting my service right now.
Long time (and I mean grizzled hoary ancient) commenter Zeno has a book, Land of Milk and Money
I have good news and bad news.
The excellent news: I have received the copy-edited manuscript of my book-to-be, The Happy Atheist
The heart-attack-inducing but not at all unexpected news: I’m supposed to review this manuscript and make any corrections and changes (and I’m on a firm deadline, so have no fear, this will not cause any further delays), and when I opened it up, it was a wall of purple editor’s marks — just page after page of nits picked and wording/grammatical errors hacked into submission. Editors are truly scary people, but I know they have an essential role in the ecosystem — I think they’re kind of like a top predator, poised to cull the herd and feast on the flesh of the weak.
Anyway, I can tell what I’ll be doing this week. Licking wounds. But it’s good for me!
I’ve been reading Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief
It’s painful. Hubbard was so clearly delusional and so malevolently manipulative that you find it hard to believe people actually do fall for this nonsense, and fall for it hard. People put up with shocking abuse for years, decades even, all the while apologizing for their behavior, making excuses for the church, and even voluntarily submitting to the most degrading punishments. For instance, Scientology maintains something called the Rehabilitation Project Force (RPF), which is little more than confinement and humiliation. People who question the dogma or annoy David Miscavage (the head of the religion now that Hubbard is dead) or sometimes just on a whim are tossed into basements or kept in trailers with no furnishings, no means of communication, and fed on slops, with frequent punishment drills. It’s like a horrible caricature of a banana republican prison — it is a prison.
But there aren’t locks on the doors. The inmates stay there, punishing themselves, begging for more, all in the hopes of achieving redemption in the eyes of the psychotics running the show. The whole book is a lesson on how human psychology can be warped and used by religion, leading people to submit to commands that I can’t imagine ever respecting…but they are led step by step into an earthly hell, all the while thinking it’s paradise.
One thing that struck me is that Scientology is a pathological extreme, but in substance it’s no different than other religions. And this was confirmed in a discussion of the numerous court cases that challenged Scientology. Scientology had its tax exemption as a religion stripped from it for a long while, and fought hard to get it back (and they eventually did, in a craven capitulation by the IRS). One of their allies in these trials was a former Franciscan friar and product of the Harvard Divinity School, Frank Flinn, who happily defined religion for the courts and pointed out that Scientology was just like Catholicism.
Flinn defined religion as a system of beliefs of a spiritual nature. There must be norms for behavior — positive commands, and negative prohibitions or taboos — as well as rites and ceremonies, such as initiations, prayers, and services for weddings and funerals. By these means, the believers are united into an identifiable community that seeks to live in harmony with what they perceive as the ultimate meaning of life. Flinn argued that Scientology amply fulfilled these requirements, even if it different in expression of them from traditional denominations.
Like Catholicism, Flinn explained, Scientology is a hierarchical religion. He compared L. Ron Hubbard to the founders of Catholic religious orders, including his own, started by Saint Francis of Assisi, whose followers adopted a vow of poverty. Financial disparities within a church are not unusual. Within the hierarchy of Catholicism, for instance, bishops often enjoy a mansion, limousines, servants, and housekeepers; the papacy itself maintains thousands of people on its staff, including the Swiss Guards who protect the pope, and an entire order of nuns dedicated to being housekeepers for the papal apartments.
The Catholic Church also maintains houses of rehabilitation (like the RPF) for errant priests hoping to reform themselves. Flinn saw the RPF as being entirely voluntary and even tame compared to what he experienced as a friar in the Franciscan Order. He willingly submitted to the religious practice of flagellation on Fridays, whipping his legs and back in emulation of the suffering of Jesus before his crucifixion.
…
One of Flinn’s most interesting and contested points had to do with hagiography, by which he meant attributing extraordinary powers — such as clairvoyance, visions of God or angels, or the ability to perform miracles — to the charismatic founders of a religion. He pointed to the virgin birth of Jesus, the ability of Buddha to “transmigrate” is soul into the heavens, or Moses bringing manna to the people of Israel. Such legends are useful in that the bolster the faith of a community, Flinn said. The glaring discrepancies in Hubbard’s biography should be seen in the light of the fact that any religion tends to make its founder into something more than human.
I found myself agreeing entirely with Flinn: Scientology is a religion, different in no substantial way from Catholicism, and I think it should be classified as such. No problem.
What irritates me, though, is that anyone can read that and argue that any religion deserves a tax exemption, or should be regarded as anything more than a self-aggrandizing perpetual money-making machine for the hierarchy. As I said, the IRS did eventually give in in an out-of-court settlement and let the Church of Scientology have everything they wanted…but the message they should have taken away is that no church deserves special treatment. Tax ’em all. Remind the world that all of their mythologies are lies, and that all are just as corrupt and just as fraudulent as Scientology.
Kylie Sturgess has a documentary on the Australian Scientology RPF. Another thing brought up is how they keep children in ignorance, a point also brought up in Wright’s book with an example of one young woman.
Lauren was told that Scientologists shouldn’t look at negative stories about the religion. She was supposed to be saving the planet, so why was she wasting her time reading lies? Because of her isolation, and the censorship imposed on her education, when Lauren finally graduated from high school at the age of twenty, she had never heard anyone speak ill of Scientology, nor did she question the ban on research about her religion. She thought, “I guess I’m not supposed to do these things. I will stay away.” Like her father [Paul Haggis], she learned it was easier not to look.
We need a lot more of these. Check out Little Changes by Tiffany Taylor.
Almost every day, I get a pugnacious email or a tweet saying something like this:
Atheism is the lack of belief in the existence of gods. Period.
It’s been that way for about three years now, ever since I gave a talk in Montreal in which, in a brief aside (at about the 18’30” mark), I decried the dogmatic dumbness of “Dictionary Atheists”, a talk I followed up with a post in which I explained why dictionary atheism is wrong.
I had made the mistake, you see, of pointing out that atheism is more than just disbelief. I suppose I could have mentioned that a painting is more than pigment on canvas, families are more than just small groups of people, and that people are more than ambulatory arrangements of carbon compounds, but let’s not go crazy here — it was heretical enough that I expected atheists to do more with reason and rationality than simply deny god. How dare I confront people with history and context, and meaning and consequences, when all they wanted was a simple statement that made them better than other people?
I was actually surprised and disappointed at the volley of denunciations that followed that post, and like I say, almost every day I get reminders from indignant atheists who insist that their ideas are meaningless and inconsequential, and must be interpreted in the narrowest way. Sadly, another kind of email I get (with lower frequency, fortunately) comes from people who are growing disenchanted with atheism, precisely because so many dogmatists refuse to apply reason to their lives and everyone’s lives, while demanding that they be acknowledged as “True” Atheists, that is, Dictionary Atheists.
Dictionary Atheists disbelieve in gods and dislike religion, but that’s it. The fact that the universe is an uncaring place, that we’re products of chance and necessity rather than benevolence, that we only have each other to help ourselves through this life…none of that matters. So when you say that reason demands equality, when rationality dictates community, when justice ought to be part of the godless agenda, they reflexively throw out that dictionary definition to deny any expectation that there ought to be more to atheism than cussing out gods. They’re intellectual cowards who run away from the full implications of living in a godless universe.
So I get despairing letters from people who once saw atheism as a shining promise, and now see it as a refuge for the same old haters, the same old deniers, the same old reactionaries trying to use their received wisdom as a too to silence new voices and new ideas. And sometimes I feel a little despair, too.
But I haven’t given up. I still think atheism is the best path to comprehending our world and making it better — better in all ways, not just scientific and technological, but also socially. The atheist movement is not in the hands of dictionary atheists, and it’s not growing by recruiting more narrow-minded deniers; it’s growing by helping people realize that it’s something more and something beautiful.
There are also still plenty of people who appreciate the depth of freethought, and are willing to discuss its roots and meaning. And one of my favorites is Susan Jacoby, who really gets it.
This widespread misapprehension that atheists believe in nothing positive is one of the main reasons secularly inclined Americans — roughly 20 percent of the population — do not wield public influence commensurate with their numbers. One major problem is the dearth of secular community institutions. But the most powerful force holding us back is our own reluctance to speak, particularly at moments of high national drama and emotion, with the combination of reason and passion needed to erase the image of the atheist as a bloodless intellectual robot.
It’s not just speaking that we need to do: we need to find common cause in human concerns. And rejecting religion just isn’t that great a concern — it’s a side-effect, not a goal, of realizing how the world works, as a great natural, material process. You lack belief in the existence of gods? That’s nice, you’ve taken your first tiny baby step. Now what does that mean for human affairs? What will you do next? When will you stride forward and do something that matters with your new freedom?
Freedom is the word, after all. Many of us have noted that rejecting god and religion is a liberating act. But now that you’re free, you should do something, and being an atheist means we are enabled to do more.
The atheist is free to concentrate on the fate of this world — whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital or advocating for tougher gun control laws — without trying to square things with an unseen overlord in the next. Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions on earth.
Today’s atheists would do well to emulate some of the great 19th-century American freethinkers, who insisted that reason and emotion were not opposed but complementary.
There’s the step the Dictionary Atheists don’t want to take — that once you’ve thrown off your shackles you’re now obligated to do something worthwhile with your life, because now all of our lives shine as something greater and more valuable and more important. That with freedom comes responsibility.
We must speak up as atheists in order to take responsibility for whatever it is humans are responsible for — including violence in our streets and schools. We need to demonstrate that atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect. And although atheism is not a religion, we need community-based outreach programs so that our activists will be as recognizable to their neighbors as the clergy.
But not as clergy, as privileged people set apart from others by a special paternalistic relationship. How about as a community of equals? What if every atheist, rather than some particular special subset of atheists, were to acknowledge their part in building a better society?
Maybe then this movement could change the world.
(By the way, Jacoby has a new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought
