Chris Stedman's Blog, page 15

As the Supreme Court Weighs Gay Marriage, Let’s Hear It for the Allies

I have a new guest post for Friendly Atheist at Patheos expressing gratitude to LGBT allies, religious and nonreligious alike. Check out an excerpt below, and click here to read it in full.

My twenty-sixth birthday is two weeks from today. But early April isn’t just the anniversary of my birth — it’s also the anniversary of when I came out of the closet. I was 13 years old, nearly 14, when I came out to my mom as queer. This year, as I turn 26, I will have spent twelve years out of the closet, which is nearly half of my life — and certainly more than half of the life that I can remember.

My thirteen-year-old self couldn’t have imagined that I would reach this point, and he certainly couldn’t have imagined that the Supreme Court of the United Stateswould be hearing arguments for same-sex marriage just twelve years later. But thanks to the tireless activism of many, and the people who have stepped out of the closet and built relationships of understanding, we live in a very different world today.

In Faitheist, I tell the story of how I despaired during my years in the closet because I could not imagine a life for myself as a queer person. Today queer people are much more visible and, with the solidarity and support of allies, we are building a more pluralistic society that enables different people to imagine, and then pursue, an authentic life.

A few days ago I returned from accompanying a group of atheist, agnostic, and non-religious graduate students from the Humanist Community at Harvard on an alternative spring break service trip to rural Kentucky to learn about strip-mining and rural poverty, and to do service work with community members. On the fourth day of the trip, we had a wonderful, extended, moving conversation with three women who volunteer at a community thrift store in a rural coal-mining town, all of whom were widows of coal miners. We heard some devastating, challenging stories about the obstacles they and other members of their community live with, and we worked alongside them.

Near the end of our time there, they began to ask us about who we were. After learning that myself and a couple of other trip participants were queer, they gleefully told us about how they would take their coal-miner husbands to the nearest big city nearly three hours away to go to a gay bar with them and their gay friends. We ended up staying for another hour, talking with them about how different our lives are, but how much we have in common. Talking with them, I was reminded of a simple, important lesson: your assumptions about people with different experiences and identities are often wrong. If you don’t give someone an opportunity to be an ally, you may never know they are one.

That same week, my HCH colleague Chelsea Link and I had a lovely conversation about atheism and Humanism with the Parish Director of the Catholic Church that hosted us for the week we were in Kentucky. On the first day of the trip, we introduced ourselves to her as staff members of a community-building organization for atheists, agnostics, and the nonreligious. She smiled and said that she was glad we were there, that she understands our position, that she thinks we all need to work together, and that people in the church need to not be so afraid of us. Without even hesitating, she was immediately open, honest, and welcoming. It was hugely refreshing, and set a good tone for the rest of the week.

Click here to continue reading.

Which is the problem: dogmatism or religion?

I always feel like there is a group of atheists standing ready to express the most indignant outrage over any mention made by me or my co-bloggers that religion isn’t wholly awful, or that it might in fact have some good things to contribute to the world, or that there are parts of it we can learn from to enrich our secular lives. I stumbled on a really funny and thoughtful and, all things considered, very kind post about our appropriation of a secular Lent, and I think the author captures some of this backlash in a really funny way. The following image and caption from the piece in particular felt very much on point:

Vlad Chituc, AKA The SongSmith of the Devouring Wail, seen here emerging from the realms below (and also giving up trans fats this Lent).

I’ve noticed more and more people, particularly a few friends, expressing some frustration over the state and format of many atheist blogs, and I think that’s definitely something we’re trying to avoid here at NonProphet Status. There is no reason to treat any online disagreement as some kind of arena bloodbath, and we don’t feel the need to demonize some Other when a disagreement pops up. Atheists absolutely aren’t immune from dogmatism or tribal thinking, and I’m trying to do my best to take a slow and measured approach to disagreement. A few Facebook friends can tell you that I’m not always the best at it, but it’s what I’m going for.

All that said, there was a really interesting excerpt from the primatologist Frans de Waal’s upcoming book, The Bonobo and the Atheist, published in Salon. 1 Though I have some small quibbles with the headline—it’s somewhat of a stretch to call an atheist other than Stalin or Mao militant 2 and I always roll my eyes a bit when someone refers to atheism as a religion—I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that it was largely an editorial, rather than authorial, choice.

Though let me play devils advocate for this atheism as religion bit for a second. There’s this misguided tendency I see among some atheists to not only to treat religion as a monolithic entity (e.g. religion is anti-science, religion is anti-woman, religion is anti-gay, etc. etc.), but as also something that captures what we don’t like in other ideologies.

When discussing Stalin, who held specifically anti-religious ideologies and targeted members of the church over and above the general slaughtering going on at the time, 3 many atheists (Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens among others) argue that religion is what’s really to blame—the statist and Marxist ideologies that caused the slaughters of the 20th Century were really just state-sponsored religions worshipping an ideology, government, or whatever figurehead is in power. Fill in these blanks with your regime of choice. But it seems fair to point out, though, that if we want to permit that secular ideologies can be religions, then that leaves atheism as an ideology open to the exact same charge. But this is a digression.

I want to instead draw attention to a quote I rather liked in de Waal’s excerpt (I encourage interested readers to read the whole thing). He writes:

In my interactions with religious and nonreligious people alike, I now draw a sharp line, based not on what exactly they believe but on their level of dogmatism. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. I am particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the blinkers sometimes associated with it.

I think this is a great quote for a few reasons. 4 First, it highlights that the charge that atheism has become a religion—or the sister-notion that new-atheists are fundamentalists of a certain stripe—oftentimes should be read as more metaphorical or analogous than they currently are. Instead of atheism being literally a religion or a certain atheist being literally a fundamentalist, these charges reflect characteristics of religion or fundamentalism that are extremely harmful or off-putting. I think these features are dogmatic fervor, extreme tribal mentalities, and general abstention from nuanced thinking.

The second reason I like this quote is that it draws the party lines differently. 5 Rather than having religion as the main target of our criticism, we ought to have dogmatism, instead. 6

And there are two points I want to make about this. First, it takes the misguided focus away from a false evidence/faith dichotomy—everyone has faith, taken here to mean beliefs without evidence, 7 so we ought to talk instead about what kind of faith is appropriate—and instead shifts to a more flexible and nuanced conceptual space that focuses on dogmatism and open-mindedness. Second, this means that we can acknowledge that believers can be our allies here, 8 and that atheists can be on the wrong side, too. You may disagree about whether the names de Waal mentions are actually dogmatic, but surely you can think of some dogmatic atheists. 9

Thinking about religion in this way, I think, will stop us from falling into many of the the traps that are ultimately harmful to our religious discourse and thinking.

“O Zarathustra, with such disbelief you are more pious than you believe. Some god in you must have converted you to your godlessness. Is it not your piety itself that no longer lets you believe in a god?”

— Nietzsche

Vlad Chituc 10 is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

h/t to friend of the blog Paul Fidalgo at The Morning Heresy ↩though it is worth noting that we sometimes use the word in a less radical way to mean something like extreme (e.g. militant veganism) ↩if you’re feeling morbid and want to feel terrible for an hour or so, skim this Wikipedia article ↩I don’t always agree with Frans de Waal, and I don’t know if I’d go as far as he does, particularly in the headline. That being said, he has occasional moments of extreme lucidity and this, I think, is one of them. ↩It’s also worth noting that, no matter what we do really, we’re going to have some kind of group division. It’s up to us then to first, set up these divisions as accurately and fairly as possible and, second, treat these group divisions as thoughtfully and carefully as possible. This seems like the best way to avoid some of these tribalist traps that can be so harmful. ↩And this, of course, may overlap with religion. The important distinction to me, though, is are we criticizing something insofar as it’s religious, or insofar as it’s dogmatic? I think a focus on the latter is much more justifiable and amenable to life outside the somewhat insular atheist blogging community ↩for what might seem to be a trivial example but I swear it’s not: what evidence can we possibly use to justify the position that evidence matters in a way that doesn’t beg the question? ↩If you can’t figure out how a believer can be nondogmatic, semantic ambiguities aside, just imagine someone who is willing to consider whether they are wrong. Someone who looks at evidence from different angles. I think all readers can imagine believers like this, if they don’t know one personally ↩A few bloggers and the particularly horrendous anti-feminists like The Amazing Atheist come to mind. ↩has been reading too much David Foster Wallace ↩

Pope Francis shows some promise towards nonbelievers

I wrote yesterday that I was optimistic about Pope Francis, particularly when it comes to what seems to be a shift to the left on economic issues and aid for the poor. But I also expressed some hope that he’d continue the interfaith commitments he demonstrated as a cardinal.

I was unsure, though, whether this ecumenical spirit would extend across faith lines to nonbelievers as well. It so happens, though, that yesterday, during a meeting with leaders from various religious groups, Francis assuaged a bit of my concerns. The National Catholic Review Online reports:

Ending his remarks, Francis said he also “feel[s] close to all men and women who, although not claiming to belong to any religious tradition, still feel themselves to be in search of truth, goodness and beauty.”

They, the pope said, “are our precious allies in the effort to defend human dignity, in building a peaceful coexistence between peoples, and in carefully protecting creation.”

As someone who cares about finding and promoting truth, goodness, and beauty, I’ve got to say I find these comments fairly encouraging. And the (notably secular) goals Francis mentions are well worth promoting, even if we might have some disagreements here and there about what they might actually entail. These comments echo a lot of the importance of interfaith work and religious pluralism, and I think these things are important to affect genuine and meaningful social change. So I think some of my optimism has been somewhat validated.

Religion News Services expands on Francis’s comments a bit, though, and that does give me some apprehension:

Francis echoed his predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, saying that the “attempt to eliminate God and the divine from the horizon of humanity” has often led to catastrophic violence.

So it seems that Francis doesn’t present a complete break from Benedict’s tendency to hold secularization as the culprit for many of the problems in the world. So we still might have some room to quabble, it might seem.

Ultimately, though, it’s tough to generalize broadly from so few quotes so early, and it’s true that talk is relatively cheap. So while I have some optimism—though obviously not without some reservations—I’m still waiting to see how his commitments and comments hold over time, and relate to future policy.

It also seems that I’m not the only atheist optimistic about the new papacy. Jake Wallis Simons writes for the Telegraph:

This is a man who pays his own hotel bills, travels by bus and jeep, wades out into the crowds unguarded, and makes his own telephone calls. (Yesterday, he telephoned the main number of a Jesuit residence in Rome. The receptionist, upon hearing the identity of the caller, responded “yeah, and I’m Napoleon”.) This might seem like no great shakes, but given the luxury normally showered upon his office, it takes guts.

In other words, whatever one may think of his views, the Pope has genuine humility. This is such an unusual quality these days that it is like a beacon, outshining our reservations about him. Indeed, the term “Jesuit”, formerly associated with tyrannical school regimes and sadism in the public imagination, has started to be rehabilitated.

False humility can be spotted a mile off, of course, and we are all used to doing that. But Pope Francis has proved that authentic humility can be just as immediately visible. This most straightforward of qualities has been absent from public life for so long that we have almost forgotten it were possible. If our politicians had a bit of this to offer, the world would be a very different place.

If nothing else, I can’t say I disagree.

h/t to commenter “JM” for the link.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Why this atheist is (tentatively) optimistic about Pope Francis

Almost immediately after the longshot election of Pope Francis (née Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio) a week ago, many of his older comments and actions were excavated and exposed for scrutiny. This isn’t altogether a terrible thing, considering that Francis has taken some questionable stances on gay marriage (the devil’s work and a “destructive attack on God’s plan”) and gay adoption (it’s discrimination against children), as well as showing troubling complacency during the mass-killings of left-wing dissidents in the Argentinian Dirty War. 

The less-than-clear relationship with Argentinian juntas aside, I’m actually somewhat pleasantly surprised and optimistic about Pope Francis. That Bergoglio decided to take the name of Saint Francis of Asisi, a champion of the poor, fills me with some optimism. There’s a lot to object to in the social policies of the Catholic Church (less so among everyday Catholics, who are actually fairly liberal when it comes to social issues), but that doesn’t mean that the church hasn’t been a largely left-leaning institution when it comes to economic policy—an area that the church can do some real good in.

As I see it, major change on social issues in the Church hierarchy was never going to happen. 1 That’s not to say we shouldn’t ease pressure off the Church to modernize on that front, but it seems somewhat unrealistic to express pessimism that the Pope is acting as any Pope would when it comes to issues like homosexuality. What gives me some hope, though, is the attitude that the new Pope Francis has towards religious tolerance and economic issues, because those were the issues that were open to change for better or worse, not social policies that will likely remain entrenched for the foreseeable future.

The word humble is used a lot to describe this new papacy and it’s hard to argue otherwise (putting the irony of a humble papacy aside). The Atlantic writes on the topic:

[Pope Francis] is celebrated for his humility, and has eschewed worldly possessions. He chose to live in his own small apartment instead of the Cardinal’s (more opulent) residence in Buenos Aires. And he doesn’t take chauffeured limousines, instead traveling around Buenos Aires by bus.

Pope Francis is also the first Jesuit Pope, 2 and it seems that these values have followed him to the Vatican. It’s worth noting that Pope Francis has eschewed some of the more extravagant elements of the papacy—in lieu of the Pope’s traditional jeweled cross, he wore instead his simple insignia, and the infamous red and not-actually-prada shoes have been noticeably absent.

Francis also seems to be promising worker towards interfaith cooperation. The topic is treated in detail in this AP report, but just a snippet for reference:

This dialogue between religions “isn’t just a photo op,” Omar Abboud of the Islamic Center of the Argentine Republic said then. “It’s a genuine and well-reasoned commitment under construction, because we know that we cannot get by without this dialogue.”

Guillermo Borger, president of the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association, said Bergoglio came often to the association’s headquarters, which was rebuilt on the site of Argentina’s worst terrorist attack, the still-unsolved 1994 bombing that killed 85 people. “We’re sure that given the sensitivity that Cardinal Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, had here, I really believe that he’ll continue to support us.

It’s not clear whether and how Francis will engage with the nonreligious, or whether he’ll follow Benedict in seeming to blame nonbelievers for many of the world’s troubles. During an early press-conference, however, Francis extended his blessing to non-Catholics as well as nonbelievers. That, and the fact that Francis said  he’d like a “church that is poor and for the poor,” gives me a little bit of hope.

This all isn’t to absolve the new pontiff of many of his shortcomings. 3 It’s still too early to see whether all of this talk will really translate into positive policies, and it’s indeed hard to read accounts like this without seriously calling into question Francis’s behavior during the Dirty War. It’s also worth noting and noting often that lofty commitments to the poor might be better served, or at least well-complimented, by supporting female reproductive rights and a more liberal position on condoms. Nonetheless, the new papacy exhibits what, to me at least, seems like a refreshing and sincere focus on social justice.

Francis is far from perfect, but I can’t help but think that he’s much better than what I could have honestly expected. 4

Vlad Chituc 5 is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

in the foreseeable future ↩To any readers who, like me five minutes ago, don’t know what that means: Jesuits are members of the Society of Jesus, an order founded in the 16th century by St. Ignatius Loyola. Jesuits take vows of poverty and are known for their scholarship and work for the poor ↩Nor am I suggesting that we ought to ignore them ↩And it of course goes without saying that I’ve been following this only slightly more closely than I do any other major news item that pops up on my Twitter or Facebook feed. If I’ve missed something noteworthy or relevant, don’t hesitate to share ↩has been reading too much David Foster Wallace ↩

Atheist Lent in Religion News Service and also Other Places

Kimberly Winston, a reporter for Religion News Service, has a really thorough and nice write up of our secular Lenten fasting. Reflecting a bit, it’s been a really cool experience and I’m glad to see it’s largely been received so well.

Readers of the blog might find our comments to be pretty familiar. And for anyone who wants my take on Flynn’s comments and objections to our practice, check out my response from a few weeks ago. I was really pleasantly surprised to see that Winston had interviewed a Catholic theologian for her perspective. I’ll limit myself to quoting this section, but do give the whole piece a read:

Virginia Kimball, a Catholic theologian at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass., who mentors people in Lenten practices, sees nothing wrong in atheists borrowing Lent. The desire to find meaning in ritual, she said, is a universal human desire.

“I give every credit to these young people who are humanists and atheists because they are sensing that human life is more than just animal processes and that is worthy of the great philosophers,” she said.

That made my day a bit. And now that I’m over my really nasty flu, I’ll be updating and reflecting more on Lent as a practice. 

And in case you missed it, it looks like we’re not the only nonbelievers who think Lent is cool. The New York Times had a recent cool writeup about a few other atheists taking part, which seems to connect more to cultural Christianity I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more of in the coming years:

Mr. Corvino, the author of the new book “What’s Wrong With Homosexuality?” says that his Lenten observance has something to do with cultural nostalgia: “I wore a black suit and a purple tie on Ash Wednesday this year. Didn’t tell anyone why I was doing it, but for me, it signaled the first day of Lent.” But he also appreciates Lent as an opportunity for “discipline and self-improvement.”

If readers have any stories to share or contribute, please don’t hesitate to contact us by email or in the comments.

P.S. The links have popped up on USA Today and the Washington Post’s On Faith. Check them out!

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

We Should Be Really Critical of Mother Theresa

Earlier this week, Celeste Owen-Jones, associate producer of the Huffington Post Live, went viral with a blog post defending Mother Theresa in light of new study which emphasized Theresa’s  “…rather dubious way of caring for the sick, her questionable political contacts, her suspicious management of the enormous sums of money she received, and her overly dogmatic views regarding … abortion, contraception, and divorce.” Rather than respond in substance to these immensely critical findings, Owen-Jones instead attacks the researchers as well as those who would advance a challenging narrative about Theresa:

Surely there are a lot worse people than her in this world who deserve your energy! And if Mother Teresa did such a bad job helping others, why not save that time spent criticizing her to instead try to make a difference in this world?

I write this response not just because I think this is an incredibly bad argument to make, but because it further acts as a socially damaging mechanism of silencing legitimate inquiry. When we stigmatize critical evaluation of moral figures or philanthropic ventures, who are we really defending? To behave this way only preserves corrupt institutions which, simply put, aren’t doing their jobs. Yelling at those who challenge problematic people or institutions is a highly objectionable response.

Owen-Jones identifies a “simplistic yet fundamental” concern she has with public condemnation of Theresa:

… who are we, sitting in our office or in the comfort of our home in our cocoon-like world, hiding behind books and computers, to criticize a woman who abandoned everything to spend her life and bring attention to the forgotten of this world? The day someone will lead a similar life to Mother Teresa’s and still criticize the way she acted, then I will truly respect that opinion. But unsurprisingly that day still hasn’t come.

Who are we, indeed? We are people with standards and conceptions of what it means to live a morally exemplary life. We are people with the capacity to fact check. We are people who can apply standards to figures and institutions who claim to be doing the work of saints. When we find out that Theresa actively failed to prevent suffering that was well within her means because she saw beauty in poverty, illness, and suffering, we are people with the capacity and obligation to object.

A second argument Owen-Jones presents somewhat accepts the fact that Theresa did not do all she could have, but hey, it’s better than nothing! It seems like criticizing Theresa just isn’t a battle we should involve ourselves in. After all, the researchers didn’t visit any of the missions and however lax their conditions were, it was probably better than dying in the street. I find this argument deeply morally confusing. Admitting that Theresa did not do all she could have (a weak concession considering the damage and suffering she can objectively be seen to have sustained), we’re still left with an image of Theresa that seems less than saintly. “Hey, she was kind of bad, but it sure was better than the alternative” hardly seems like the epitaph of a moral saint. That the researchers did not visit Calcutta is a distracting point. Similarly, I don’t need to visit Nike headquarters to know that they profit from more or less slave labor and, therefore, my university should stop investing in them.

Owen-Jones’ refusal to criticize Mother Theresa for her stance on abortion and safe-sex practices (including contraception) is further confusing. Again, Owen-Jones presents an argument which silences:

I am not saying that in order to do good in the world one necessarily has to be against abortion, that would be stupid; I’m just saying that her belief in the sanctity of life was her main driving force to do the good that she did, and that looking back at her work I do not believe that, in the grand scheme of things, she can be criticized for [her opposition to contraception and abortion].

Regardless of Theresa’s spiritual convictions, the fact of the matter is that by not providing relatively cheap contraceptives and actively opposing their use, Theresa and the Catholic Church greatly contributed to an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease, widespread suffering, and death. The fact that scientific consensus rejects the notion that “life begins at conception” should carry significant weight. So, too, should the philosophical dilemmas that any 8th grader who has heard Monty Python’s “Every Sperm is Sacred” song can easily raise and explicate. People’s lives are at stake. People have died and will continue dying, have suffered and will continue suffering. Why wouldn’t we want to be critical of this?

Owen-Jones asks, quite frustratedly, “What do we need to be a saint?” If we confront our intuitions about what it means to be a saint, we might derive a basic criteria such as “alleviates suffering on some grand scale at great cost to the saint in question.” Indeed, this what the “media conception” of Mother Theresa holds. So, when it comes to light that Theresa did not comport her philanthropic service in this basic way but rather cultivated suffering (alongside significant capital gains and questionable political alliances), we can feel confident in excluding Theresa from the classification of moral exemplar.

In a way, I share Owen-Jones’ annoyance. It seems that individuals who lack compassion often pretend to care about justice when it might afford them an opportunity to be self-righteous or bring another down. We have a similar problem in the atheist movement, wherein individuals will express outrage over the sex abuse scandals of the Catholic Church while at the same time contributing to the culture of victim blaming, misogyny, and apathy which make sexual assault such a widespread problem. There’s a grand irony in hating the Catholic Church for hating women while hating women yourself. However, the place where we should file our criticism in this case is not with the fact that these atheists criticize institutionalized hatred and abuse. Rather, we should direct our concerns when they fail to apply this same critique to themselves or their theological kin. Is it frustrating that there are people genuinely uninterested in justice yet spout off about the moral failings of others? Yes. Still, these criticisms, even when they come from such people, pressure us to be more transparent and effective in our service to humanity. Rather than refuse to engage with criticisms of our moral saints, we should welcome them. That Mother Theresa failed to help countless suffering individuals (when she could have, and almost certainly should have, done otherwise) has been quite well established. Rather than get frustrated with people who point this out, we should welcome their challenges and pose higher standards for our heroes. Before we praise another, especially when substantial claims contradicting their moral virtue have arisen, we should ask: are they being transparent? Are they actually alleviating suffering, or are they, like Mother Theresa, maintaining poverty and refusing to treat preventable disease out of the misguided notion that suffering brings one closer to God? These are minimal standards, and we should never feel guilty for employing them.

Stephen Goeman is an atheist and Humanist. A senior at Tufts University, he is the former president of the Tufts Freethought Society and now serves as their Community Outreach Representative. He is also an Interfaith Youth Core alumnus and a member of Students Promoting Equality, Awareness, and Compassion, a peer education program that coordinates student responses to acts of intolerance at Tufts.

Secularizing religious practices: respectful or reductive?

I shared a brief reflection with the  Huffington Post the other day about practicing Lent as an atheist. I encourage those who might have missed it to read the whole thing (you know, if you want), but there was one part in particular that I think might warrant some broader discussion.

You can criticize an atheist taking part in religious practices from two fronts. There’s the “everything-attached-to-religion-is-really-really-bad-and-you’re-a-bad-atheist-for-trying-it” style of argument that comes from some atheists, and I find that to be pretty weak. But there’s also the idea that religious practices really aren’t ours to take, and that we’re in some sense mistreating sacred and religious holidays, either in a bare utilitarian way, as I seem to be looking at Lent, or in a trivial way, as many atheists treat more casual holidays like Christmas or Easter. I wrote:

I realize that, to a Catholic, this must seem rather like a stranger taking an urn full of your relative’s ashes and saying to himself “this would make a really nice paper weight.” It’s trivializing and reductive, I think, to secularize religious holidays and traditions.

As often happens, James Croft of Temple of the Future and I disagreed (at length) on this point. We hashed it out on Twitter, 1 where he seemed to make two points: first, that copracticing a ritual or custom is a way of showing respect (by say, covering one’s head when entering a temple); and second, that Lent doesn’t belong to Catholics to begin with—it’s a human holiday.

This second point strikes me as weird, since Lent seems indelibly tied to Catholicism. I feel that the head covering analogy breaks down, though I can’t quite pinpoint where. 2  The first point, though, strikes me as more interesting. Issues of cultural appropriation are always somewhat sensitive, particularly when the reappropriation seems to remove such a vital element of the original practice. I like the comparison I made between an atheist using Lent as a lifehack and a stranger using a relative’s urn as a paper weight—there’s a sense that outsiders are taking a shrewd, utilitarian look at something sacred.

I don’t think the right way to handle this objection is to minimize the religious aspect of the holiday—just as we wouldn’t say “oh it’s just superstitious nonsense that you think this urn is special, anyway” to a concerned relative. 3 Instead, I think it’s best to just admit the inherent insensitivity of what we’re doing, so we can smooth it out from there.

But I’m hardly an expert at this, and I can’t say I have much experience tactfully handling situations like these. 4 I’m not sure why Lent feels so much different to me than Christmas does—I have almost no problems at all celebrating Christmas, but maybe just because I celebrated Christmas growing up. Maybe I’d feel less bad if I were a cultural Catholic.

Anyway, I’m always curious to hear other’s thoughts, since mine are so clearly jumbled.

Vlad Chituc 5 is a lab manager and research associate in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Notes:

I’m finding the “no internet comments” part of my Lent commitment somewhat tricky to navigate. Just about all of the internet can be construed as some kind of comment—tweets are basically comments, all blogs seem to be at least commentesque, and there are comments all over Facebook. Which if any of all that do I ignore? I probably should have thought this out better and made a clearer commitment, but I think I’m definitely (i) committed to ignoring blog comments and (ii) trying to avoid pointless internet fighting. I’m having more success with the former than latter.  ↩I’m thinking it has to do with the fact that Sikhs might, for example, request that you cover your head when visiting their temples. But I can’t think of any Catholics asking atheists to show respect to Lent or Christmas by joining in. ↩Though I don’t doubt that there’s a certain subset of atheist who would. ↩Though there’s an element of cultural appropriation in hipster circles, I think it’s much less blatant than “hey, I’m going to take this holiday you celebrate that I don’t believe in and do it anyway.” ↩has been reading a lot of David Foster Wallace lately. ↩

A support of Secular Lent (and a response to Tom Flynn)

It seems that our group commitment to practice a secular Lent has raised a few eyebrows, and I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. There’s a somewhat small fringe among atheists who seem to recoil at anything that might have the slightest taint of religious baggage, even on topics most of us are mostly ambivalent about—for example, Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry magazine and Executive Director of The Council for Secular Humanism, not only thinks that atheists shouldn’t celebrate Christmas, he even goes so far as to reject the Humanist knock-off versions, too.

I don’t think many nonbelievers have a problem with celebrating a ritual or holiday in a completely secular way, and I don’t think this compromises anyone’s secularism.

But Tom Flynn seems to disagree. That’s not too surprising given the above, but it’s not just him: a reader was so concerned that they emailed Flynn noting that we were “going out of [our] way to bring back religious backwardness” (emphasis theirs). Anyone who has exchanged presents, spent time with family, and decorated trees around the holidays can tell you, though, that rituals are neutral. Theology isn’t, and we’ve done nothing at all to touch it.

Which is why I’m so confused by Flynn’s response, since it’s almost like he didn’t bother to read what we wrote, let alone to make a good faith effort to understand what we’re doing and why. One of our participants, Paul Fidalgo, said that he wasn’t sure why we were doing Lent, in what I think was a tongue-in-cheek post. But I think we made it pretty clear, and another blogger at CFI, Cody Hashman, had the same idea last year, too. He also explained his reasoning rather straightforwardly.

For me, at least, my interest in Lent stems from a nuanced perspective on the human condition. Our failures aren’t always failures of rationality, but instead of willpower and habit. Sometimes we don’t do things we know we should, and other times make decisions we know we shouldn’t. This is an interesting psychological puzzle with serious human implication, as anyone who has slept with an ex in a moment of weakness can tell you. Lent helped me last year, so why not try it again?

Flynn gestures vaguely to some problems with Lent as a practice—it’s an arbitrary stretch of time, we can do goals whenever we want, we shouldn’t follow a calendar for a religion we don’t believe in, secular humanists shouldn’t be bound by religious rituals, and so on.

But anyone who has studied the relevant science will tell you that Lent has most everything we might want to make and complete a goal—there’s a clear and distinct goal that lasts long enough to break or solidify a habit, but short enough not to seem daunting. There is built-in support from your moral community, a group aware of your goal that is practicing one of their own. There’s an (admittedly) arbitrary time of year, from the non-religious perspective, when everyone takes part, together.

So all of those problems Flynn raises actually make Lent a compelling and successful ritual. If you want to make a change in your life, a practice like Lent will stack the odds about as high in your favor as they can get. Who cares if it’s a practice that comes from Christianity, set to a Christian calendar? That’s not promoting religious backwardness, that’s recognizing and appropriating what religion does well.

Flynn seems confused about this point, because he spends a good third of his piece railing against Christian dogma. Yet we make it clear that we’re not interested in that at all, only the ideologically neutral practice. We think Humanists should be able to practice whatever they’d like—be it Christmas, meditation, or Lent—but it seems that Flynn frowns on this with distate. There’s only one proper secular humanism, apparently, and the rest are just varieties of the religious kind. And as we all know: Secular Good, Religious Bad.

We cut off our noses to spite our faces when we insist on irrationally ignoring the possibility that religious rituals might have positive secular benefits. I don’t even think an attitude like this makes me a religious humanist, since I’m not even sure if I’m an actual humanist. I’m definitely not a Humanist in the philosophical sense.

I look forward to finishing up Lent, since it’s been rewarding so far. I made some delicious quinoa tabbouleh today and haven’t even read a single comment on Tom’s post. I’m sure I missed out on some great and original “I gave up religion/irrationality/Lent for Lent” jokes, but such is the nature of sacrifice.

To me, Lent is about trying to form good habits, train my willpower, and be a better person in general. If that’s too wild and religion-like for Tom Flynn, then I think he’d be comforted to know that my feelings won’t be hurt if he and other Humanists don’t take part.

Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.

Paul Fidalgo of Near-Earth Object joins our Lent festivities

Since our commitment yesterday to take part in Lent, we’ve somehow roped in Near-Earth Object‘s Paul Fidalgo to join in. Read his statement below, which has been added to our main post from yesterday:

Paul Fidalgo

For 40 days I will give up a piece of my utterly-fragile ego. I will abstain from checking up on the pageview stats on my blog (Near-Earth Object), and I will go out of my way to avoid finding out how many folks have retweeted my material or followed me on Twitter. I may look for other ways to eschew self-validating Internet quantification as I think of it, but these two jumped out at me. I waste a lot of RAM in my own brain in being concerned about that kind of thing, so maybe I’ll become, magically, A Better Person by letting all of that go for a while.

There are, of course, blog comments, which I know Vlad is avoiding. I won’t be ignoring them, as much as I hate them most of the time, because sometimes there is sincere and well-meaning discourse to be had there. Oh, maybe I’ll ignore it anyway. We’ll see.

Facebook is different, as a red-badged notification number often means there’s a message from family or something, not just “likes” on a post, so I may have to keep those up for now.

I’ll have to engage in work-related analytics, of course. I do have a job, you know. So get off my back.

NPS does Lent, 2013

I’m an atheist, but a year ago I became a vegan for Lent. I was inspired by Alain de Botton’s book, “Religion for Atheists” and a general realization that bad habits and failures of will were the biggest barriers to getting where I wanted in life. I figured that Lent’s 40-day trial period was a nice religious practice that could be easily translated into secular life.

We’re continuing and expanding that tradition this year at NonProphet Status. I asked our contributors, as well as some of our favorite people, to share what they were giving up for Lent.

Vlad Chituc

I had a few accidental dietary transgressions last year, and I quickly learned how easy it can be to ignore what’s in what we’re eating. For the most part, though, I solidified a lot of the eating habits I have today. Though I’m not entirely vegan (yet), I’ve been gradually replacing eggs and dairy in my diet. I maintain a vegan diet for most meals in any given week, so I’m going to give veganism another try this year, hopefully for good.

It’s boring, though, to do the same thing two years in a row. So I’ll follow through with some sage advice from this Twitter feed: I’ll be reading no internet comments for the next 40 days, comments here notwithstanding. I’ve wasted way too many hours arguing with strangers on the internet for no discernible reason, and there’s no sense in wasting my time and harming my mental health on something so petty. I’m convinced that very little, if any good, has ever come from the average comment thread in any website. I have never heard anyone say “Wow, I’m really happy I read that insightful comment section,” so I think this is for the best.

Chris Stedman

I haven’t observed Lent since I was a Christian, so this is something new. But I like trying new things, so here goes. Instead of giving something up for my first atheist Lent, I’m going to add a practice: every day, I will make an effort to tell at least one person in my life at least one of the reasons that I am glad to know them. Often times, in the busyness of life, these kinds of feelings go unexpressed. We just assume that people already know that we love them, or that we demonstrate our gratitude sufficiently through our actions, or that we’ll get around to verbalizing it later. This Lent, I’m going to try to be a bit more intentional about expressing my gratitude for the many ways other people enrich my life.

Chelsea Link

I really like the idea of Lent – like Vlad said, giving yourself a set amount of time to try breaking a bad habit (or forming a new good one, like Chris is working on) seems like a really healthy practice. The combination of a predetermined end-date that you can always look forward to as a willpower booster and the solidarity of lots of other people taking on similar challenges at the same time makes Lent a smart tradition for anyone to adopt, Christian or otherwise.

This year, in an effort to both take better care of my body and be more financially prudent, I’m giving up alcohol for the next 40 days. I’m making an exception for the bottle of champagne I’ve been saving to celebrate my boyfriend’s last day of work this weekend, because rituals and traditions should be flexible, not dogmatic. But I feel like I’m somewhat making up for that rule-bending in a few weeks since I’ll be keeping kosher for Passover during the last week of Lent. Borrowing from two religions at once has got to count for something, right? Thank goodness Ramadan is still a few months away.

Adam Garner

My phone is for all intents and purposes an extension of my body. If I’m not obsessively checking Twitter or refreshing my Facebook news feed, I’m getting into internet fights on Reddit. It’s bad enough that when I go out to dinner with my girlfriend I have to surrender my phone as soon as we sit down. So for the next 40 days I’m going to make a potentially futile attempt to wean myself off of neurotically checking my phone every 3 minutes. That’s not to say that I’m going to give it up completely. I’m about 98% sure that would break me. But I really like the idea that for the next couple of weeks I’m going to make a conscious effort to only check it once every…hour. Yeah. I think I can do that.

On top of trying to wrangle in an obnoxious addiction, this is going to be a weird experience for me. Being that I was raised Mormon and am now a godless heathen, I’ve never observed Lent. Actually, up until about 2 hours ago I never even considered it a possibility. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. There’s something powerful about millions of people over the same 40 days trying their best to conquer bad habits and collectively distance themselves from those things that we trick ourselves into thinking we need.

Keith Favre

A few months ago, I would have dismissed the term “cultural Catholic.” But I’ve since developed a near obsession-level interest in religion, and that’s taught me to appreciate the positive aspects of the tradition I was raised in. It seems natural to capture the spirit of Lent in my own secular practices, just as it does with Christmas and other religious rituals. Following this logic and some inspiration from Vlad’s piece “Lent for Atheists,” I decided to give adopt a vegetarian diet for Lent this year. I would try veganism, but one step at a time.

That’s not the only thing I’m giving up for Lent, though. As it turns out, a lot of those lessons from Sunday school many years ago have stuck in my head. Every year we would have the Lent discussion; everyone wants to give up things like chocolate or soda, but that’s missing the point. Thinking theologically, what you give up should be some vice that’s distancing you from God. From a secular perspective, then, it should be something that’s distancing you from being a better person. In this way, it seems to me that the purpose of the Lent tradition is self-improvement. My sacrifice of meat-eating will be my 40-day experiment, as Vlad put it. The vice that I’ll be giving up, though, is procrastination. It’s a popular subject for jokes on the internet, but it’s also something that has started to become a serious problem for me. I’ll hopefully end these forty days with less stress from work and more awareness of the challenges I’ll face with my inevitable full transition to a vegetarian diet. Let the games begin.

Paul Fidalgo

For 40 days I will give up a piece of my utterly-fragile ego. I will abstain from checking up on the pageview stats on my blog (Near-Earth Object), and I will go out of my way to avoid finding out how many folks have retweeted my material or followed me on Twitter. I may look for other ways to eschew self-validating Internet quantification as I think of it, but these two jumped out at me. I waste a lot of RAM in my own brain in being concerned about that kind of thing, so maybe I’ll become, magically, A Better Person by letting all of that go for a while.

There are, of course, blog comments, which I know Vlad is avoiding. I won’t be ignoring them, as much as I hate them most of the time, because sometimes there is sincere and well-meaning discourse to be had there. Oh, maybe I’ll ignore it anyway. We’ll see.

Facebook is different, as a red-badged notification number often means there’s a message from family or something, not just “likes” on a post, so I may have to keep those up for now.

I’ll have to engage in work-related analytics, of course. I do have a job, you know. So get off my back.

Walker Bristol

I’ll give up tweeting raisin puns for Lent.

“Joseph Raisinger”, “Singin in the Raisin’’, “If emotion without raisin is blind, then raisin without emotion is impotent”, “Raisin Rally”…