atheism

The Virtuous Atheist or Atheist Maligned: Atheism Comforted and Confronted in my Religious Plays, Part One

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ASU's Binary Theatre Company's production of A Roof Overhead, October 2012
ASU’s Binary Theatre Company’s production of A Roof Overhead, October 2012

WARNING: Spoilers ahoy! If you want the context of the play referenced, A Roof Overhead, the majority of the production by ASU’s Binary Theatre Company was recorded and is up on You Tube. It’s not the highest quality recording, and it was a matinee (thus, historically, less audience engagement and laughing), but you get a good sense of that particular production. The Utah production, unfortunately, was not recorded due to technical difficulties (so not even I got to see it!).  Of course, I think the issues the essay raises go beyond the actual play, so feel free to read it if you haven’t the time to watch an entire play at the moment.

James Goldberg’s award winning one act play “Prodigal Son” is a stirring play that flips Jesus’ proverb of the same name, showing the relationship between a former Mormon turned atheist and his son Daniel, who joins the faith his father had long since rejected. The tension and conflict caused by the reversal of the parental disapproval is both ironic and effective. Set in this gem of a play is a haunting monologue addressed to the audience by Daniel’s father:

We’re far too casual, I think, in the way we talk about losing. “I’ve lost my keys,” for example, really means you’ve mislaid them. We say we’re “lost” when we’re just disoriented. And we lose our tempers all the time, only to find them again a few minutes later—

I wish we wouldn’t dilute the best word we have for when things are truly and permanently gone. “Lost cause” is a good phrase. It’s a cold, hard dose of reality. No one goes out to find a lost cause. It’s just lost. That phrase understands the power of the word’s finality…

So when I tell you that a long time ago I lost my faith, I don’t want you imagine that I’ve misplaced or that I could be capable of finding it again. Lost faith is like a lost limb…if it’s broken and bleeding, if you try to patch it up and ends up being inflamed and infected…at some point you have to cut it off. And after you’ve lost it the only thing left is the occasional flash of phantom pain.

I lost my faith. Twenty years later I lost my wife. And now maybe I’m losing my son.

Don’t take away from me the only word I have to cope with that.[1]

Coming from a practicing Mormon like Goldberg, the monologue is unusually and beautifully sensitive towards this fictional father’s disbelief in God and religion. It shows a well of compassion and charity on Goldberg’s part towards what really amounts to a religious minority (at least in the United States and other predominately religious countries, although that trend is fast reversing in many places in the world). It’s an unexpectedly poignant moment in a beautiful play.

In this way, Goldberg has shown that he is particularly ready to clarify the way of the atheist to believers, and pleas for understanding on the his atheist friends behalf—perhaps even to the point of being a warm ambassador or a defensive patron when discussing atheism among believers. Thus it makes sense that, in his review of my play A Roof Overhead, he was quick to come to the defense of the doubter, even though such a vigorous and heated defense was hardly needed considering the context of the play’s intended message of tolerance and pleas for mutual understanding.

As Goldberg is not the only critic to misrepresent my representation of atheism, including a handful of antagonistic reviews written against my plays Swallow the Sun and Prometheus Unbound, I feel compelled to address the issue directly. I normally like my plays to stand on their own artistically, so that people may interact with them based on their own experiences and what they personally bring to the play, without constant and intrusive commentary from me.

However, some have tried to tie me to a pattern of intolerance towards atheists, even resorting to rather personal slights and warnings to others against my work. Thus, in the name of my reputation, I feel it best to clear up what my intent is, and what my intent decidedly isn’t, towards atheism and atheists. After all, if I’m to be lambasted on the matter, I would prefer to be lambasted for something I actually believe.

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Richard Dawkins: Troll

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Richard Dawkins - Eid tweet

I couldn’t manage even a dozen pages of Dawkins insufferable smugness in The God Delusions, and his ghastly guerrilla interrogation of Brandon Flowers on a talk show is equally painful to watch, but I had assumed that, being a noted academic and so forth, he still had some handle on basic civility and common sense. Apparently not.

All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.

There’s his Tweet on Eid, the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Responding, Nesrine Malik makes two observations:

  1. To wearily engage with his logic briefly: yes, it is technically true that fewer Muslims (10) than Trinity College Cambridge members (32) have won Nobel prizes. But insert pretty much any other group of people instead of “Muslims”, and the statement would be true. You are comparing a specialised academic institution to an arbitrarily chosen group of people. Go on. Try it. All the world’s Chinese, all the world’s Indians, all the world’s lefthanded people, all the world’s cyclists.
  2. The whole process of trying to parse the painfully obvious fallacy reminded me of the task of arguing against extremist Muslim clerics when they try to denigrate non-Muslims, the same momentary sense of helplessness and not knowing where to start.

Her logic in point #1 is impeccable and as for her feelings in point #2: they are sadly, sadly familiar. Reminds me of trying to respond to counter-cult accusations about my own faith. It’s sad to see another example–and so prominent!–of this kind of lazy bigotry, but nice to take some solace in commiseration with someone else who gets it.

Salon’s New Atheism Takedown

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2013-06-26 Salon New Atheist Takedown

I’m pretty much over the New Atheists these days, probably because the one Facebook friend of mine who posted Dawkins and Hitchens quotes most frequently left Facebook. Funny, how our worldview can hinge on such inconsequential matters. Even when we know all about selection bias and problems with small sample sizes, it just takes too much cognitive power to keep a constant watch on unruly intuitions.

In any case, this is a particularly good take-down of New Atheism (specifically: of the late Christopher Hitchens) and, surprisingly enough, it comes from Salon.

Even more surprising? It cites a “The Most Misunderstood Book: Christopher Hitchens on the Bible,” which is  an article from the FARMS Review of the Maxwell Institute out of BYU.

Salon quoting Mormons to take down Hitchens? The world is truly upside down.

“Never Once Did I Have to Sacrifice My Intellect for My Faith”

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2013-04-28 Atheist's Dilemma

A simple, beautiful recounting of one young woman’s journey from atheism to Catholicism. I loved it.

I also thought how it might be a really great thing for someone to come to Christianity after a life of atheism rather than the other way around. So often the folks who are raised in the faith have a hard time coming to grasp the value of what has always been right in front of them. Does a fish really understand what water is? Because someone wandering through a desert absolutely will.

Religion & Happiness: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

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There’s been a great deal of research on the connection between religiosity and happiness, and the consensus finding is that religious people tend to be happier and to suffer less from anxiety, depression and stress. (Summary via Wikpedia.) I don’t think this necessarily tells the whole story. A study by the Council for Secular Humanism argued, essentially, that if you looked at “resolute atheists” (instead of merely non-religious people) that finding disappears. That seems reasonable, and in my mind the simplest explanation is that people with extreme beliefs are happier because they experience less cognitive dissonance.

But every now and then you’ll find some particularly militant atheist who simply cannot abide the scientific evidence connecting religiosity and happiness. The most recent such eruption occurred on AlterNet a couple of days ago. The basic thesis is this: states with high religiosity have higher anti-depressant use, ergo religion makes people sad. This isn’t a new theory, it goes back to at least the 1990s when Cherrill Crosby wrote an article for the Salt Lake Tribune called “The Ups and Downs of Prozac” in which she implicated Mormonism for making Utah women unhappy. Unfortunately for the decades-old thesis, the doctors that Crosby interviewed wrote a rebuttal stating, in part, that Crosby had decided to:

ignore one of my most important observations: the fact that Prozac is widely used in Utah may be evidence that [psychiatric] treatment in Utah is superior to other parts of the United States which might benefit from increased prescriptions of antidepressants. Epidemiologic studies clearly show that depression is markedly under-diagnosed and under-treated in the United States. How different the article would have been had the author used this point as her underlying assumption!

The photo from the AlterNet article about how religions makes everyone cry.
The photo from the AlterNet article about how religions makes everyone cry.

So, to recap, militant atheists for the last 20 years have chosen to ignore solid, direct evidence that religiosity makes people happier. Instead, they prefer to rely rely on shaky, indirect evidence and unreasonable assumptions to believe the opposite. So much for science, eh?

What’s really telling to me, however, is that this is a win-win proposition for atheist. If religion makes people happy, it’s the opiate of the masses, and atheist depression shows that they are suffering for their integrity. It religion makes people depressed, it’s an oppressive institution and atheist joy shows they are enjoying their liberation from captivity.

If there’s one thing that human beings are good at it, it’s finding a narrative to fit the data that protects their preconceptions. It’s not surprising that religious people do this (after all: isn’t religion just one big story to shield us from our fear of mortality?) but it’s a bit richer in irony to the see the scientific skeptics engaging so brazenly in the same sort of inventions.

(The story about the Salt Lake Tribune and the rebuttal quotes come from the article “Religiosity and Life Satisfaction among LDS Women“.)

Faith Is Rational

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My guest stint at Times And Seasons went well enough that they decided to let me join as a permablogger, for which I am both grateful and excited. This coming Monday, I’m going to start posting weekly with the first in a series I’m planning about modern secularism and Mormonism. But I’ve got some general comments about the claims of modern secularists that I want to get to right now.

1. Atheism and Christianity: Not Apples to Apples

Any debate between a modern secularist (i.e. New Atheist or New Skeptic) and someone of religious faith starts with a tactical advantage for the atheist because atheism, as a category, has no history, no text, and no dogma. There’s virtually no content and therefore nothing to defend. The representative of religion, by contrast, is expected to answer for the history, text, and dogma not of theism (which, like atheism, is a mere category), but of Christianity (or other religions), which is a particular instance of theism.

2013 02 13 New AtheistsA fair debate would either pair generic atheism with generic theism, or it would pit a specific instance of atheism against a specific instance of theism. It’s not as though there are no organized instantiations that fall under the broad umbrella of atheism, after all. Maoism would be one particularly unpalatable example, since it clearly embraced atheist belief in the non-existence of God and drew the conclusion atheists often draw which is that religion is irrational and dangerous. As a result, Mao bloodily repressed religion during the Cultural Revolution. Am I suggesting that atheism ought to be held responsible for the actions of every instantiation of atheism? Absolutely not, nor am I suggesting that Maoism is typical of atheism any more than radical Islamic terrorists are representative of religion (or even of Islam). I’m just illustrating how much of a tactical advantage it is to only have to defend a generic abstraction.

The reality is that the New Atheists actually do make specific, concrete claims that deserve scrutiny and require defense. In particular, the New Atheism entails myopicy materialism, radical reductionism, and extreme empiricism. Each of these is a contentious philosophical proposition, and none of them can be defended by pointing to scientific, quantitative experimentation. Nope, it’s experimentation itself that actually requires philosophical defense.

It’s not that modern secularists are deliberately avoiding these tough questions, of course. It’s more a matter of the fish not knowing what “wet” is. Scientism is so ascendant in particular regions of Western civilization that folks aren’t even aware that they have a specific paradigm, and much less that it might have feet of clay. 

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Secular Pro-Life Founder on WBEZ

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My friend Kelsey Hazard founded a pro-life group to help diversify the largely religious tenor of the movement called Secular Pro-Life.  I think it’s a great new voice to add diversity to the pro-life cause.

Secular Pro Life Header

A couple of days ago she was interviewed along with Erin Matson (representing the pro-choice side) by WBEZ Chicago Public Radio. Check out a recording, and read Kelsey’s thoughts on the interview.