Why I am not a Republican: Stupidity

80% of Republicans view Sarah Palin as a viable Presidential candidate. This despite her inability to finish her term as Governor, ignorance on how the Fed works or the nature of economic data, or a personal sense of any Supreme Court decision.

I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal but when a majority of a party has momentum in this direction I need to step aside and let them speed past. I fear they are heading towards a cliff. I hope they don't take the rest of our country with them.

A child molester I knew is dead

The Detroit Free Press has a story today on the Detroit Archdiocese's difficult in dealing with clerics convicted of sex abuse. The featured priest used as illustration of clerical alienation is a man I knew, Fr. Ron Williams.

Fr. Ron was an attending priest at my grade-school and was Chaplain of my High School. He also enabled the alcoholic drinking of me and my friends in our teens by throwing beer bashes in the rectory where he served and he sexually accosted a good friend of mine.

His crime against my friend was the trigger point for his demise.

My friend brought charges against Fr. Ron when the priest was going to be instituted as Chaplain of the Michigan State Police. My friend having been raised as an orphan by his Detroit Police Officer aunt and uncle chose to lean on his legal sense of right and wrong and protect future victims from a man who had a badge and was a sexual criminal. He wanted to protect potential future victims who might fall prey to Fr. Ron's authority. He did something the Roman Catholic Church still can't bring themselves to do. He admitted the truth and pursued legal protection to preserve a safer society for his fellow human beings.

Fr. Ron's first reaction was to call me at college and plead his case saying that he was a double victim to society's standards because he was both black and homosexual. He wanted me to denounce my friend's testimony. I didn't do that but, I didn't stand by my friend either. I chastised my friend for his action and tried to defend Fr. Ron as a person. I realize in hind-sight that I was not seeking a moral argument. I was defending the Catholic Church because it was how I was raised. I was raised to defend the institution. What my friend chose to do was moral and good and what I chose to do in seeking to shame him for his betrayal of the power I knew was wrong.

This story helps shape my belief that all religions are false and that they provide inferior ethics. My personal choice was to accommodate the authority of religion rather than the truth of action and I deepened the wounds my abused friend had suffered. I can no longer do this and it is one of the reasons why I am so outspoken against the pragmatic arguments for religion people make in denouncing crimes that religion enjoys while defending their personal enjoyment of practicing and defending the religion.

The cliche I most often hear when I assert my belief that religion is an institution that enables evil is that, "I shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water." I understand the position because I once held it and applied it to a young man who had to suffer the pain of alienation from a priest who abused his father-figure status. I feel shame when I remember my choice and recognize it as a defense of authority because I believed that authority would keep me safe regardless of the unjustifiable position that authority had proven as evidenced by the victim I was admonishing.

Fr. Ron is dead and his death has further illustrations to the crimes committed by church authority (his abandonment by the Archdiocese, the Vatican's unwillingness to involve civil law for their own self-protection keeping Fr. Ron from the mental health-care he needed) but my shame is still alive and I hope it never leaves me because I never want to ignore the pain of an individual for the sake of securing religion's authority.

The word God is the product of human weakness

As an addendum to my appreciation of the need for numinous feeling (e.g. "god"). I found this letter from Einstein illuminating. So many religious, especially Christians, want to ground their belief in truth citing Einstein's intelligence and his use of the word "god" in certain writing as evidence their belief is a product of critical thought. Not so, the money quote for me:

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish . . . I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things."

Join me in proclaiming your Holy Evidentialist nature

I've really pissed people off with my willingness to "come out of the closet" as an atheist. I've confirmed this week the loss of a couple of friends due to what seems their Roman Catholic commitment and the discomfort my outspoken disbelief brings. One friend said that my criticisms of the current Pope's collusion to child rape seems like I am shouting in his face that his mother is a whore. I don't understand the accusation and an atheist I respect said, "Well if his mother is a whore, it isn't your fault." (I think it's reasonable to make that moral assignation with the Catholic institution based on the evidence we have).

It is a tough realization to see friendships driven by nostalgia rather than shared values but that isn't the most startling thing I've discovered in my new atheism. The most startling thing is the willingness of the religious to shape their belief with a subjectivism that seems to put them in very close proximity to atheism.

The most common response to the assertion that I am an atheist is that others could never be because they just have to believe.

When I say that my perspective is driven by a lack of real evidence to the character the religious claim in god, the response is that a person doesn't need evidence because they "feel" god is real.

I can respect the psychological draw to the numinous but doubt that these devoted "feelers" deny the power of evidence in the rest of their lives. In fact, the evidence of my worth to them in my actions keeps me as a respected and moral person despite the doctrinal commitments their faith demands to see me guilty of eternal sin or, at least, as Matthew 10:14 says, covered in the dust from their feet.

But that isn't the case. Most believers still like and respect me (except for the aforementioned Catholic friends who see my honesty about my disbelief as a source of persecution).

It seems that the rule of evidence the Enlightnement gave us as a gift IS a respected value of god believers but isn't applied with my level of incredulity or skepticism. And that little application seems the only difference between their religiosity and my atheism.

So, I would like to call a truce and invite all subjective believers who want to believe in their feelings of god yet still respect my moral ground (in opposition of their religion's doctrinal commitments) to join my church of St. Evidence of the Numinous where we can all be Holy Evidentialists. I allow you to believe your god is real because you "feel" the need to believe that belief and as long as your need to "feel" this belief doesn't lead you to conclude that those who don't share your "feeling" will be tortured for eternity or are enemies of the imagined person you believe to be true or claim your "feeling" should apply to everyone then, you can join me in proclaiming your Holy Evidentialist nature.

For everyone else, your mother is a whore.

The Human Faces of God (A Review)

American's Biblical literalism has a shocking burliness. Gallup reported in 2007 that 1/3 of Americans believed that the bible is literally true. The strength of this hermeneutic increases when the 47% of people believing the bible is "Inspired by the Word of God" is factored. The unquestioned authority among Americans of the bible becomes 78% believing that the book is a literal document or has its authorship in an invisible deity.

This is an unsettling statistic since archeology, the critical-historical method, Radiocarbon dating, The Burgess Shale, and philosophy of religion offer reasonable defeaters to this claim and provide evidence to consider the minority position the bible is, "Ancient fables, histories and legends recorded by man".

We see consequences of biblical literalism in obvious public positions against the idea that legal protections should be afforded by all people both in history's record (with slavery) and today's headlines (opposition to gay marriage) and in more subtle positions where Christian Zionists oppose a two-state solution because the eschaton of Revelation demands a hegemonic Israel prior to King Jesus's Millennial reign.

Biblical literalists will graft themselves to their tradition as the only viable morality because the bible confirms that their literal belief in the bible is true. This of course is circular reasoning and illogical but, the biblical literalist will rest in appeals to authority found in their community. The most onerous of these community pillars is the tradition of biblical inerrancy articulated in the Chicago Statement formulated in 1978 by Evangelicals frightened that their moral authority would be displaced by liberal interpretations of scripture being considered in the face of scientific evidence and progressive political policies (e.g. The Feminist Movement).

The opening paragraph of its preface exposes the attachment to authority and controlling obsession with obedience Evangelicals seem to need for emotional and psychological balance,

"The authority of Scripture is a key issue for the Christian church in this and every age. Those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are called to show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying God's written Word. To stray from Scripture in faith or conduct is disloyalty to our Master. Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture is essential to a full grasp and adequate confession of its authority."

Thom Stark's excellent book "The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When it Gets God Wrong" takes a deliberate step towards the bold assertions inerrancy makes and debunks the exegesis as less than the moral authority it presumes.

Stark provides insight how when one reads the bible as a psychological history of ancient people looking to make meaning of the ineffable it is easy to empathize with things like the Israelites desire to post-rationalize their hostility towards outsiders in God's demands for the Canaanite genocide but, when one takes the bible as the flawless systematic blueprint for humanity then one must either mutilate the text to afford genocide or practice moral relativism to explain it away.

Thom (he and I have exchanged emails so I am going to risk the familiar here) is an honest man who draws from respected sources to show that the harmonization the inerrancy movement wants is not the reality of the text and it leads to a psychological immaturity that defers moral agency to an imagined authority.

He shows by using the bible and the Chicago Statement how that the bible is not a systematic meta-narrative pointing to a singular moral conclusion but an argument around morality that demands we examine ourselves if we are to conceive moral evolution. He exposes the fallacy of biblical inerrancy by showing how the Chicago Statement defends itself with special pleading and tautologies that affirm an authority before the fact until after the fact what is revealed does not comport with modern ethics (e.g. slavery, and the aforementioned genocide). He reveals how the bible itself exposes the myth of monotheism and indicates that Yahweh was a warrior god amongst a pantheon who receives his Israel inheritance from a superior being and then defends it in bloody battle against his brethren deities. Thom illustrates how my favorite books, the wisdom books of Job and Ecclesiastes, auger a disbelief in an after-life or supernatural agency that will save and instead show a god who conspires with Satan in the former to test our stamina or an absent god in the latter which demands we see reality for the opportunity to love those closest to us without precondition or dogma. He exposes the Jesus movement for their inaccurate understanding of the Eschaton (the end times) as an imminent reality and traces this misunderstanding to Jesus himself as a failed apocalyptic prophet. Yes, Thom says (as far as we know by the Synoptic Gospels) that Jesus was wrong (gasp)!

I loved this book. It builds my personal appreciation for the bible as a source of cultural understanding without playing to the fear-based need for certainty Evangelicals practice in their selfish worship of it. I find Thom's work to be kindred to the efforts of Robert M. Price and his Bible Geek Podcast, Robert Wright's "Evolution of God" and humble skeptical inquiry from blogs and podcasts like "Reasonable Doubts" or "Common Sense Atheism".

The real shocker is that Thom is a practicing and professing Christian with what seems like an abiding faith commitment (despite fundamentalists attempts to indict him with the crime of Marcionism). He details how his scholarship altered his view of religion in the final chapter of the book and while I have trouble with some of his analogies I think that I could trust to have a functional relationship with him as I maintain the peace and justice commitments Christianity gave me while respecting reason, skeptical inquiry, humanism and atheism. His exegesis is not the fundamentalism of many of my former church-mates and public leaders like Al Mohler that can only increase ethnocentrism and denialism but neither is it the post-modernism of emergent churches that seek to rescue Jesus from his historical milieu with an appeal to neurotic emotionalism.

Thom is an honest scholar who practices a disciplined approach to a biblical hermeneutic that does not ignore the horrors it can invite but also does not deny the inspiration it can bring. My hope is that his honesty will help change the Gallup statistics so that believers' beliefs hone to a more humble scholarship that will seek real solutions to the realities we face.

The Narcissism of Believers

Wikipedia defines Narcissism as, "the personality trait of egotism, vanity, conceit, or simple selfishness. Applied to a social group, it is sometimes used to denote elitism or an indifference to the plight of others."

I have found this trait more and more evident within religious believers as I progress in my Christian deconversion.

Theists want their personal beliefs endorsed because they "feel" them to be true and when these heart-felt superstitions are challenged for the consequentialist immorality they invite (see William Lane Craig's defense of genocide), the theist demands counter-conclusions to trump theirs. They want to hold a rationalization "pissing contest" rather than enage in a conversation rooted in deliberative thinking and falsifiable evidence.

They seem to be saying that they have conclusions for the questions and if you don't then they win.

It seems they do this so they can feel safe within their belief and to insulate themselves within their social group's mores as a defense against dissent.

Michael Egnor (a fellow of the Discovery Institute - the PR organization that tries to deny biological evolution for the sake of Judeo/Christian creationism and theocracy - see their aims articulated in "The Wedge Strategy") offers excellent evidence of this obsessive psychological quirk towards certainty when he creates a "strawman" argument against "New Atheism" at the Discovery Institute Web-site.

Egnor writes,

"But what about arguments for New Atheism? Casual perusal of New Atheist discourse reveals recurring themes. The New Atheism Cliff Notes: 1) There are no gods 2) Theists are IDiots 3) Catholic priests molest children. Surely there's more to New Atheism. Some old atheism (Epicurus, Lucretius, Hume, Russell, Quine) was pretty profound. New Atheism should be even better. Reason, Modern Science, Brights, etc . . . I want to learn more about what New Atheists really believe. So I'm asking Moran a few questions, although other atheists (Myers, Coyne, Novella, Shallit, etc) are invited to reply on their blogs, and I will answer."

His questions,

1. Why is there anything?
2. What caused the Universe?
3. Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
4. Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
5. Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
6. Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself?
7. How can mental states be about something? Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)?
8. Why is there evil?

First off, Eignor's unwillingness to enable comments at his blog post indicates he does not want to know what "New Atheists" believe. Rather it indicates a desire to preach to his choir with a false definition of "New Atheism" and declare victory a priori based on his social groups preferred superstition that "goddidit".

Secondly he is dishonest. He does not disclose that he is a Roman Catholic in his post nor does he offer his position on atheism relative to this bias. Instead he exposes the equivocation theists embrace by illustrating that multiple (and competing) religious world-views have wrestled his questions with their unique theologies. He aligns himself with religious views he would deem either atheist or heretical (and atheist arguments -- further equivocating by asserting atheism has a metaphysical ground, it doesn't). He does this to intimate consensus for his strawman. He states,

"I'm not expecting a treatise on each. Theists don't have all the answers. I don't expect New Atheists to have them either. But each metaphysical tradition -- Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, animist, old atheist, heck, even Scientologist and Raelian -- has addressed at least some of these questions, for better or worse."

I find his challenge and the series of questions evidence of how theists are unable to consider worldviews other than their own.

I have read the "New Atheists" with appreciation. I have enjoyed the work of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, PZ Myers, Daniel Dennett, Opehlia Benson, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins.

I find no ideas where the "New Atheists" are offering a “New Atheism” with a catechism or set of conclusive answers.

Egnor’s premise for asking these questions rests on the belief that the "New Atheists" are offering a definitive belief system. He is equivocating on the “New” qualifier. The “New” in “New Atheist" refers to the strategy of social engagement today's atheists employ. It refers to the willigness to embrace the taboo that one must give automatic deference to religion and ignore consequentialist arguments against it. That is the only thing "New" and if one reads Thomas Paine one would have to argue that this "Newness" is not "New". The "New Atheism" should only be seen as a tactic to thaw the cognitive biases left over from the Cold War where covert military strategy sought Christian iconography to rally public sentiment against a dangerous "other" (e.g. "In God We Trust" on our money and "Under God" in our pledge). If one didn't assert theism then one was a godless communist.

The only "doctrine" inherent in "New Atheism" is a desire to observe a secular society and evidentialist arguments (see PZ Myers frontal assaults on Chris Mooney's accomodationist atheism or the recent debate between Coyne and Myers on what would constitute as evidence for a deity).

Critical thinking is not conclusion and that’s where Egnor gets everything wrong.

Claiming an allegiance to the "New Atheists" does not preclude an organizing doctrine to a certain world-view nor an obsessive need towards conclusion.

That type of divine command grounded in pre-suppositional dogma is the epistemology of theists, not atheists.

I am sensitive to the "New Atheists" and might even consider myself one because I am sick of having to give religion a pass but am more interested in the “Christian Atheism” of Robert Price than Sam Harris’s neuroscience. My preference comes from my interest in literature and mythology over experimetnal science. Therefore my answers to the questions would not stem from a “New Atheist” belief system (because there isn't one) but rather simple atheism which only asserts the disbelief in god(s).

This is why Egnor’s challenge serves as a strawman because it attempts to challenge an epistymology (New Atheism Metaphysics) that doesn't exist. He has his preferred superstitious answers to these questions which revolve around his version of god and/or the discredited notion of Intelligent Design (AKA "God of the Gaps"). He doesn't want dialogue but rather he wants to assert his superstitions as superior due to their well-rationalized conclusions.

He admits in his challenge that any religious answer to this is nothing more than psychological preference by offering the diversity of theological method used to answer each.

None of these questions has a conclusive answer and the “New Atheist” position would not be a definitive answer but rather a suspension of superstition as “the answer”. "New Atheists" ask that we apply critical thinking to continue the human conversation regarding ethics rather than deferring to dogmatism and sacred texts to assume authority. Egnor projects his bias onto his opponent and only succeeds in staring at his own reflection as evidence that the world is as how he sees it.

For the record, here are my answers to his questions (I'd love to read yours because, unlike Egnor I am interested in critical thought and have thus enabled comments):

1. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.
2. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.
3. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.
4. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.
5. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.
6. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.
7. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.
8. I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers and non-believers.

The Fourth Trimester and Beyond

Griffin Patrick O'Connor is exiting the "Fourth Trimester". I was made aware of this term by Griff's namesake and maternal grandmother Virginia (Griffith) Brenner. Mom Mom Brenner is a child development professional and she helped me contextualize Griffin's dynamic changes.

The little man had spent the first 40 weeks of his life in a darkened cramped space gaining nutrients from his mom so finding balance outside the womb hasn't been easy. He's learned how to digest, burp, and grow muscle (through "tummy time" see photo). His emergence ex-gestate demands patience and awareness. I think breaking experience into a paradoxical phrase like "fourth trimester" appropriate to the human condition.

I like to consider that I am no longer on the verge of my 42nd birthday but instead am approaching my "168th trimester". It's more accurate somehow because it demands a shorter time-horizon where forecasting can be modified when life gets in the way. I don't have to make a fallacious five year plan but only need to get through the next 3 months.

There seems to be a tendency to accelerate our personal experience along a Cartesian plane up and to the right but time often doesn't cooperate with our imagined development. We craft stories and biases that bring ignorance to life's randomness. It doesn't matter that I have a 165 trimester jump on Griffin because what I predict to happen this next year probably won't. One only need to look at the roller-coaster sine wave generated by recent financial expectations to realize that any consideration of hopeful prophesy is bullshit.

This is known as the "Anosognosic's Dilemma". Something is wrong but we don't know what it is. It is the unknown unknown. Errol Morris did a good series on the concept in the NYT this summer. I recommend it. We all labor under the failure to recognize our own functional defects. One only need to watch early-round footage of "American Idol" or witness my son shake his fist at his morning farts to know that the surprises of being human are often rude and painful.

Six weeks ago Mom Mom Brenner was told she had a mass growing in her uterus and blood work indicated a high cancer probability. We all hoped for the best but surgery showed us that we didn't know what we didn't know. There were two growths. One the size of a grapefruit and one the size of a baseball. Both malignant. All this happening in a clean living woman who could stare down Jacob Marley and get him to give up his chains with indefatigable optimism.

The biopsy turned our hope for a "Stage 1" diagnosis upwards to "Stage 3C" and deflation.

Mom Mom started chemo-therapy two weeks ago with her hope intact and a willingness to issue faith as a hedge against microscopic fast growing cellular activity. That seems wise but her sickness does not inspire me towards anything but humility and gratitude bound by stoicism.

I recently re-read Thornton Wilder's "Our Town". I did so because my memory of it is reduced to the 1980's Pepperidge Farm commercials, bucolic and sentimental but earlier this year I listened to a talk given by the playwright Arthur Kopit where he referenced the play as an existential wonder of failed American optimism. I never saw it before but the third act reversal is the "Anosognosic's Dilemma" dramatized. Emily post-mortem returns to the living only to realize that trivialities too often upset meaning and she asks the Stage Manager, "Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? Every , every minute?" And the omniscient stage manager says, "No."

I have no wisdom in relation to my mother-in-law's cancer or my son's growing independence.

I stare at both and surrender any hope to make meaning of either. I'm trying instead to be simple and recognize that my anticipated future will be changed by the next moment and the next and what I think true of myself in perpetuity will need to modify itself to my encroaching trimesters.

I don't know what my necessary adaptations will be but am comfortable knowing that what I consider strengths probably aren't and the surprise of living the human condition will reveal more, (or less, who knows).