Post by Jim Newman

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Yesterday I attended a Coming Out talk by Greta Christina and then later a Break Out session with Greta, Jamila Bey, and Indra Zuno on coming out as an atheist to the family and at work. I have a split personality in that I am a chameleon on the one hand and a contrarian on the other. That is, I like attention, like to blend, and yet have strong differing opinions, but recoil when people don’t agree, and I wish to agree to have friends or just continue discussion.

 Greta Christina

 Jamila Bey

 Indra Zuno

Perhaps, that is because I was teased for being first cross-eyed, then wall-eyed, as well as being smart, and looking like an eastern European Jew (thanks for the profiling). I was the polite bookish kid that brought stacks of books out of the library, sat in the front row (I needed glasses and needed to listen to get it), actually liked school and teachers, and didn’t do well in sports. I never did well in most college courses because I was distracted,  or couldn’t puke back the crap the teacher was spewing. It was hard for me to brown nose, uhh consult, with teachers to see what they wanted as that was both embarrassing and an unfair advantage to other students–if it is so important why don’t professors schedule consultations with all of their students.

I later married an exfeminist separatist that wished to attend church and raise children with traditions and rituals though an atheist in philosophy–for community, family, and comfort. Her sole thriving point at my arguments was an article her uncle sent out saying Gays did not have to believe the bad parts of the Episcopal doctrine and could still attend church happily (I had insisted that no one could recite the Nicene creed if they were agnostic or atheist and not be a hypocrite etc)–attendance, as Queen Elizabeth noted, was all that was important. Coming out meant not saying Amen if you disagreed–just as Santorum didn’t clap when the assehole preacher spoke filth so bad even Santorum couldn’t agree.

The family I married into is more of a dynasty and I was in the womb of it being married to the eldest of the generation and choosing to live in its ancestral farm house (visualize vast old tidewater-style Plantation Mansion) of some 250 years. Her ancestor had been on the pulpit in Williamsburg, proTory, and mine had been in the second pew wanting independence.

We agreed, or it occurred through attrition, that our children wouldn’t go to church (I was in an asshole mood when they did, which created an aversion to it) but I could not (was not allowed to) openly discuss atheism with the children though it was obvious–had to go along with Xmas, Easter, etc. I went to conventions, wrote about it, occasionally wore a T-shirt, and refused church.

I was banned several times from writing emails to the family forum group. Most notably, the first time when I wrote an angry denunciation of certain family members’ refusal to call a Gay marriage a marriage but instead a celebration, and questioned whether to attend because they were Gay. My point was that it was a marriage and they had no right or humanity to crash their happiness. Finally, I insisted that I would write what I wanted and the family could censor me themselves but otherwise I had to say what was on my mind and they would soon learn to dismiss me as being whatever or not.

All of this is exacerbated by my painful awareness that my father and mother divorced because they could not reconcile their religious differences. My Jewish father met my Protestant mother in Switzerland. He was to become an atheist (she was a functional atheist) when they married. He vacationed home, Long Island, for four months, and came back resolved that she must become Jewish as his family required. She could not and so they divorced, after being married one month–mother, one month pregnant, with another younger illigitimate sister (how she was sent to Europe in the first place), struggling to prepare for a final recital for a piano pedagogy degree.

What struck me at Greta’s talk was her differentiation between coming out gay and coming out atheist. Likewise, I thought, for minorities insisting on their rights. Gays, blacks, hispanics, etc are looking for inclusion and equal consideration–acceptance, fairness, and justice. Atheists are insisting they are right and theists are wrong.

I said, atheists are telling theists they are wrong, not just politically but openly. My sister knows me for being the open one who insists that people have the right to be themselves no matter how twisted because of liberty, freedom, and egalitarianism. That while I am not Republican I believe in democracy and not fascism, getting along, tolerating others, and diversity. Not namby pamby American postmodern multiculturalism or moral relativity bullshit but rather tolerance of difference and change through discussion, except for basic rights for which we must fight.

Greta spoke of a continuum of coming out and the difficulty of arguing but nevertheless it resonated that atheists have to be “in your face.” Coming out atheist doesn’t mean, accept me as a human equal to you. Coming out atheist means, your  theist or supernatural world view is wrong and needs to be changed as I have changed mine. I cannot accept your theism as equal to my atheism. Indeed, as an atheist, I cannot tolerate a president that would speak in tongues for advice on whether to go to war. I cannot tolerate a politician that believes the world is 6,000 years old and Noah built an ark. I cannot tolerate a president who believes a woman has fewer rights than a man because of any particular text. I cannot accept that religion is a topic that is hands off.

I decided I had not really Come Out Atheist and I needed to go to the Break Out session. More that I had a split relationship with my loving wife who did not want to come out openly, though I would hazard, most people suspected it and more importantly most of her liberal family followed “belief in belief as value.”

Jamila is very open and in your face. I am not sure how that helps those who are hesitating to come out though it is inspiring that one can be so brash. It also means she could not live in certain areas or she would be harmed literally–in Texas they hang uppity niggers, as they used to say, and for which many still wish. But I love her brash personality, my alter ego.

What struck me was that most of the people there were there for work reasons. Their very livelihood is dependent on not coming out or coming out in bits and pieces. Greta’s advice about a continuum finally resonated with me. The very practical advice to track performance in writing before coming out and then appealing to the threat of lawsuit or to the waste of work time expended on threats to their coming out.

Indra Zuno, who brilliantly gave her entire talk in Spanish at the Reason Rally, noted the need to have alternative work before coming out. She spoke of her own experience of virtually landing a job until she thoughtlessly friended (Facebook) her future boss who then discovered her atheism and shut her down. Indra, a popular Spanish TV actress, was essentially black listed in Los Angeles from acting in Spanish TV. Luckily, she has a court translator position. Seek a soft landing.

Greta fielded several other stories and then spoke to asking for solutions. The room seemed to be filled with people who had already come out to some degree. One participant noted this and moaned her basic need to explain how she was from work Monday for this conference and not lose her job. A role play scenario was set up and within it was a cover up, a near lie, followed by the advice to seek superiors, doctors in her case, for remediation when it is apparent she is an atheist.

What struck me was the true fear of losing jobs, not being able to support families, and losing economic mobility, perhaps, permanently. I realized I had ignored this in myself until now. I too can not “wear your flair” as Jamila recommended to me when I asked how out should we be out. I am a sole proprietor construction worker and farmer now and I am dependent on finding and pleasing customers–the vast majority of whom are religious. Luckily, I am in a borderline area and I have several means of support. But it is clear that I risk ostracism by wearing my flair. I have worn an Evolve cap to soccer and  noted that few wear anything but Sports type flair. It is bad taste to wear logo t-shirts even.

For two years my spouse tried to ban me from wearing a t-shirt that says “Hell Sucks Because it’s Hot.” Our friends, if they aren’t religious, are fairy lovers, homeopathy lovers, paranormal lovers, or multiculturalists that might not attend physical church in hybrid fashion but would not consider being critical. Building fairy houses and Sacred Sister gatherings are routine. New Age syncretism.

When I mention examples like Jessica Alquist, the response is not how great, but why didn’t she move to avoid discomfort and conflict. My family would move before standing up for rights against persecution.

I am at a loss. I cannot see how I can leave this biosphere called the Bower, a 250 year old 350 acre farm with woods, creeks, hills–a park where we own the view (10% as it is family owned by 14 mostly nonresidential members) with horses, pigs, chickens, and peace but I wonder at how I can reconcile my coming out with the need to get along. The family is getting used to me, and the community is changing but it is after attending these conventions that I see I would be so much more personally comfortable-happy if I could wear my flair without having to wonder if I dare.

And then I feel the guilt of being chicken shit compared to the bravery of pastors that leave and the enormous courage of those like Taslima Nasrin, banned from her country with multiple fatwas.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

www.brightpride.com

Post by Jim Newman

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Religion has long dominated and controlled the most personal and intimate aspect of our lives. Sex. Psychologist and sociologists have long apologized for the evils of religion by trying to prove how religion provided governance, community, redistributive feasting, and psychological support like counseling and impulse control.

The so called confessional, guilt and shame release, and more truthful big brother mentality of sex by priests has been too long a tool of sheer aggression. There is no social benefit to terrorize inindividual’ss bodies. Its only purpose is the usurpation of existing power structures to funnel status and material goods to contrary power structures. And then to maintain power to the priest class.

I am sorry. I do try find good in everything. To make lemonade from lemons. To look at how wild fires clean underbrush, burn thatch, and free tightly bound seeds.

I can find no redeeming feature in the religious control of sex. Its only purposes is the terrorism and oppression of people. An enforced and learned helplessness such that guilt and shame is controlled  by the priest, minister, and pastor class.

There is nothing about the control of sex that contributes to the positive social function of society. That religion tortures its members with taboos, interference, and behavioral dictates blares a blatant power hungry mad man scheme.

American religious people masturbate as much as nonreligious. They watch as much or more pornography. They have more abortions and they have more children out of wedlock. See “Sex and God” and the “War on Sex” for support.

The only purpose is to ensure guilt and shame over the most intimate, the most personal, and the most private aspect of people’s lives. Its only reason is the terrorism and control of people to extract more power and money.

James Michener in “South Pacific” comments on the utter confusion missionaries brought to natives by insisting that sex only occur in the Missionary Position. He ridicules the modern apologist notion that missionaries were trying to encourage more human interaction by making their subjects stare each other in the face while fucking.

It has nothing to do with ensuring this. Do these apologist psychologists really think a missionary that will steal children from its parents to send to missionary school is seeking optimal personal relations among its subjects? Do these apologis psychologists really think, as an aside example, that the impoverishment and slavery of its subjects to build ever larger mission architecture throughout the Americs was about making better relations between the sexes or humans and showing greater lover of God?

Hell no. It was sheer abuse of power. It stands naked in its wanton display of industrialized aggression to people, indigenous and otherwise. It still exists today. In some ways worse. Religious people are more ashamed of sex than ever before!

The cycle of inducing guilt and shame and its partial release by the priest class ensures subjects will have to attend and continue to fill church coffers because they are psychologically and sociologically dependent on them, utterly.

It is a means of control for power and nothing more. There is no healthy reason for a priest to care what position you use. There is no healthy reason to insist sex is only for procreation. There is no healthy reason for a priest to care whether you masturbate. There is no healthy reason for a priest to care how often you have sex. There is no healthy reason for a priest to care whether you talk about sex. There is no healthy reason why you can’t be naked.

The only purpose for any consideration of this behavior is the debased desire for control and power over people to ill and vicious end.

Stop this power hungry madness and torture of all people. Don’t buy into the crap that we can’t be naked because men will rape uncontrollably. Don’t believe that masturbation is unusual or unnecessary or sick.  Don’t buy into the fallacy and vicious hatred of the body by thinking that viewing sex is objectification or leads to promiscuity. These are all artifacts of power hungry, religious, insane men. That reasonable people believe some of this crap, like objectification,  shows how deep and perverse the power is. Our bodies are ours. Sex is a joy to be praised and enjoyed freely. It is the glue and bonding of human relations. It is a most basic function which  allows families to enjoy life and thrive. There is nothing positively natural about the priestly control of sex.

bright and well, Jim Newman

www.brightpride.com 

www.frontiersofreason.com

Post by Jim Newman

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Egypt is having a spate of issues. While I wonder if Coptics really help keep Islam in balance there is no doubt a conservative trend there as throughout all of the Arab Spring countries. ABC ran a story on a recent immigrant who knows he can no longer live in Egypt.

The grandson of two-time Golden Globe winning actor Omar Sharif “hesitantly confessed” in an article published Sunday that he is gay and half Jewish, and worried about being welcome in Egypt.

Possibly the only thing worse than being a Jew is being an apostate and less, a secular.

Omar Sharif Jr. wrote in The Advocate, “I write this article in fear. Fear for my country, fear for my family, and fear for myself. My parents will be shocked to read it, surely preferring I stay in the shadows and keep silent, at least for the time being. But I can’t.”

Yeah, it’s good to come out!

Sharif expressed his disappointment at the recent parliamentary elections, writing that the revolution gave him hope for a “more tolerant and equal society,” but now he is not as hopeful.

“The vision for a freer, more equal Egypt — a vision that many young patriots gave their lives to see realized in Tahrir Square — has been hijacked. The full spectrum of equal and human rights are now wedge issues used by both the Supreme Council of the Egyptian Armed Forces and the Islamist parties, when they should be regarded as universal truths,” Sharif wrote.

“I write … for fear that Egypt’s Arab Spring may be moving us backward, not forward,” he wrote.

Yup, we’re replacing Reagan “Globalization” era secular dictators with Faithful Fascism. We seem to think it is huge progress. I guess western secularists thought these countries would eschew religious fascism for moderate secular democracy. People love a king. Moderate Islam is an oxymoron. Fundamental Christian is a redundency.

The Jerusalem Post noted that Sharif’s mother is Jewish, making him fully Jewish according to rabbinical tradition.

So, if one inherits their religion then where is the free will of choosing the covenant and its corresponding penalty? Oh, yes, Jews because of oppression and the diaspora have worked hard to ensure their religion remains intact. Seculars often consider this to be because they know who the mother is but it is to ensure continuity.

Indeed, though my father was a Jew I never met, I do feel a strange affinity to Jewish issues. But then that’s because if I had been in Germany I would have been killed and plenty of neonazis and others still consider me a Jew, even by looks, though I have never gone to temple and always been an atheist.

Sharif wrote that admitting he has a Jewish mother is “no small disclosure” for an Egyptian.

“With the victories of several Islamist parties in recent elections, a conversation needs to be had and certain questions need to be raised. I ask myself: Am I welcome in the new Egypt?  Will being Egyptian, half Jewish, and gay forever remain mutually exclusive identities? Are they identities to be hidden?”

No, and thank you for coming out. I think all the more of you!

Sharif, an actor like his grandfather, left Egypt in January 2011, just before the revolution. He now resides in the United States.

No more going back to Egypt! Sharif Sr was born into a Lebanese Catholic family but mostly resides in Cairo.

Omar Sr, grandfather, had this to say about religion:

When one sees what happens in the world between the religions, the different religions – killing each other and murdering each other, it’s disgusting and as far as I am concerned it’s ridiculous. So I thought I might be useful, I believe in God and I believe in religion, but believe religions should belong to you. The extraordinary thing is that the Jews believe that only the Jews can go to paradise, the Christians believe that only a Christian can go to paradise and the Muslims believe that only the Muslims can go to paradise. Now why should God, in his great justice, make somebody born that cannot go to paradise – it is absurd. Please forgive me I don’t mean to say it’s absurd, people made it absurd.

Omar Sr had gotten in trouble from Cairo for starring with Barbara Streisand (a Jew) in Funny Girl. Streisand is supposed to have said “You think Cairo was upset? You should have seen the letter I got from Aunt Rose.”

Indeed, Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia are two outstanding films not to miss. His role as husband to Fanny Brice in Funny Girl stood out to me as an example of the horror of inequality in marital relationships.

I hope Omar Jr does well:

He is most recently known for playfully tussling on stage at the 83rd Academy Awards ceremony with actor Kirk Douglas, who was presenting the award for Best Supporting Actress that evening

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

www.brightpride.com

Post by Jim Newman

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JP Morgan is closing a Vatican bank account because of lack of transparency. From Reuters through Huffington Post:

The move is a blow to the Vatican’s drive to have its bank included in Europe’s “white list” of states that comply with international standards against tax fraud and money-laundering.

The bank, formally known as the Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), enacted major reforms last year in an attempt to get Europe’s seal of approval and put behind it scandals that have included accusations of money laundering and fraud.

The Vatican had stonewalled requests for information. The US State Department has listed the Vatican as being vulnerable to money laundering.

JP Morgan had been seeking information on the Vatican since 2010 when the Vatican had contravened money laundering legislation. Church hierarchy has resisted transparency in its finances. A judge in Rome froze 28.7 million dollars in assets.

The Vatican’s last notorious banking disaster was its involvement in the bankruptcy of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, in 1982.

Its president, Roberto Calvi, “God’s Banker,” was hung under a bridge. It was never determined whether it was murder or suicide.

Another questionable practice is the Vatican’s emptying of its account to other accounts, keeping its money under daily transfer. 1.5 billion Euros had been transferred this way in the last 18 months.

The Vatican has striven to develop internal financial policies to match the regulations but is struggling to do so. Long term financial practices are being questioned, which makes it difficult for the Vatican to maintain traditional lines of authority and  business transactions.

“Vatileaks”, recently exposed, exacerbates the concern the Vatican mishandles its finances.

Is it not all too typical for the Vatican to consider itself above the law or at least autonomous to its own law? Italy has begun to tax church property (including shopping malls and residential developments) as a short term means to deal with their struggling economy; a revenue of 720 million Euros.

Wouldn’t it be great if, here in the US, churches were taxed as a regular business. Too long has it been assumed that churches do such good works they need an economic incentive. If Rick Warren pillages his flock such that he can reverse tithe, as he brags, perhaps he could help with the economy. If prosperity is the new gospel then it is a business for its own sake and not a public good, even in the most lenient sense.

Once again, just because one is religious doesn’t make one more moral than a nonreligious person. Indeed I have self avowed moral friends who insist they need religion to keep them moral, in which case religion becomes a lightning rod for immoral people. I find this absurd and laughable. It’s as if a secular person turned themselves into the police because they knew they were going to disobey the law.

If religion really attracts immoral people then perhaps we should insist that religious people undergo social work counseling to prevent them from committing civil crime. Perhaps that’s why they join a church. They know they can repent, gain forgiveness, and sin again. Jails would be so much more vacant if crooks could repent and be let loose.

Yet, we jail too many for the wrong reasons and the penal system is its own growth industry–but that’s another post.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

www.brightpride.com

I went to an Episcopal summer school between 3rd and 4th grades. Raised by my mother, a pianist, she occasionally went to church. It was on one of those rare occassions we went to the small church attached to the school. Curious and open, as my mother had little to say about religion but loved some of its music, I took in everything I saw. There were no other children and only a few adults.

The priest wore strange clothes and the small room was filled with many red drapes. Truly, I remember little of the words spoken but was put off but accepting of the formality and seriousness of the occassion. I bided my time, waiting for it to be over. My sister was somewhere else and like most adult things this would be over soon enough.

Towards the end there was a call for communion. We all got up and stood in a circle around the priest. A few of the adults saw me rise and showed signs of mild discomfiture. I sensed it, had no idea why, but rebelled against it, thinking it was right to be with my mother. I was fiercely loyal to her and if she thought to do this then it was the right thing to do.

Soon the wafer and goblet came along and I saw others looking at me to see what I would do. I recognized it as wine and took a gulp, not a big one but more than a sip; I was unsure how much I should take–would it be refilled? Being born in Europe I was used to the idea of children being allowed some small portion of wine now and then. These Americans were not used to this custom but the priest with great equanamity said nothing.

With a few more words it was all over and we left. I asked my mother about it and she said little that I remembered. I hadn’t a clue but it seemed very strange and special. It didn’t seem at all like living life as I expected. I have always had an aversion to extravagance and ceremony though I enjoyed being back stage at recitals and music rehearsels.

She basically said it was about how God could provide though there seemed to be little available. I suppose this was about her life too–having lived in Switzerland for 12 years to become a concert pianist and then coming back home with little prospect other than first, teaching band at a school, and then piano at a college, and raising two children as a single mother.

Years later, in Fred Hagen’s Early Modern Philosophy class I learned the term transubstantiation. Dr Hagen was the first atheist I knew, as an atheist though he did not call himself one in class, and his course was the first time I learned the names for ideas and processes I had long thought were my inner secrets. He was the first one to call me a materialist. Until then, I didn’t get there was a choice.

I was not prepared for learning that Christians truly believed in the miracle of the Eucharist. That it happened every time they performed the rite. There before them they dined, supped,and  consumed the flesh of Christ and his blood. It was not symbolic but literal.

I did not get the spiritual aspect of it. That his flesh might be his spirit or the holy ghost, or some other strange aspect of the trinity. It didn’t even matter. Cannibalism was more in the media then as political correctness hadn’t removed ethnicized head hunters from common lore; those men from Borneo that carried heads on necklaces.

Having read “Alive” the year before, the story of a downed plane where survivors ate the flesh of fellow passengers, I had already dealt with the ethics of the act. As a materialist, though I wouldn’t know that word for a year, I didn’t think the body was so sacred anyway. As a predator and meat eater I never saw humans as being particularly privileged–we gave organs to science, vampire movies abounded, etc. What I got was that it was more of a health issue like raising vegetables in composted feces as the Japanese had done to deal with overcrowding.

What struck me was the strangeness of thinking the miracle actually occurred every Eucharist and the hypocrisy of Christian aversion to cannibalism. The horror and aversion shown in the media to primitives that practiced it and then the utter sacredness of the act in church.

The pastiche that the miracle was symbolic or more that it was Christ who set the tone during the Last Supper when he offered this toast offers me no consolation. Indeed the range of responses of various Christian religions runs the gamut of full-on cannibalism to symbolic sacramental union.

Years later, when my father-in-law died at home of ALS, they performed a service at his death bed and didn’t perform the Eucharist in deference to my presence. A gift I truly appreciated as I had already been intimidated into having my son baptized so that my father-in-law might appreciate life a bit more during the course of his illness.

Yet, a fellow mourner noted her sadness at not having the Eucharist–it was her favorite part of the service. I think this peculiar. It seems too much like the biting into of the Apple of wisdom, except it is either the plenty of Christ, the union to his spirit, the consumption of the trinity, or just because he said to.

More so it still reeks of sheer cannibalism. And most do talk about it as the eating and supping of his body. Why would we abhor it as a practical need but accept it within the confines of a church? The horror, the horror!

Jonathan Haidt says we philosophers have a skewed system of “natural” disgust but I am disgusted at the idea of eating human flesh. Hell, most of us are glad our meat is prepackaged in bright containers.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

www.brightpride.com

The power of religion!

Fox Exclusive: Naked Protest In Front Of High School: MyFoxPHILLY.com

UPPER DARBY, Pa. — A mother and her three children were arrested after stripping off and running stark naked around a Pennsylvania high school parking lot, while chanting and praying to Jesus, WTXF reported.

That is odd.  Can someone explain how this prayer works?

Sarah Butler, 44, daughters Joanne, 23, and Bessie, 22, and her 14-year-old son were taken into custody Friday afternoon after the bizarre incident unfolded in front of shocked students at Upper Darby High School, just outside Philadelphia.

Two of the three kids are adults – I guess they all got naked also.

Upper Darby Police Department superintendent Michael Chitwood said that the family members were screaming, “Praise the Lord, Jesus Christ is good,” while they ran around nude.

Maybe they were just warm.

“It’s pretty crazy. You don’t see that every day, like, especially out the window at Upper Darby High School,” fellow student Meagan Massey added.

The family faces charges of indecent exposure, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct.

Now wait for other christians to say there were not doing it right.

Post by Jim Newman

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Dan Dennett in an Edge article listed eight fallacies of faith. They are the incorrect reasons why people remain in faith.

1. The fallacy of sunk costs.
2. Err on the side of prudence.
3. Religion for art’s sake.
4. What would my mother think?
5. Credal calisthenics.
6. We must fend off moral chaos.
7. Don’t make waves.
8. Dumbo’s magic feather.

Turning them on their head I propose a set of prostheses.

An alternative to superstition is necessary to provide the moral and social foundations of a cohesive and supportive community without a superstitious or socially antagonistic base. This is  not religion for the rest of us. It is clear-headed thinking and social remediation that ensures a better world.

Provide Secular Solutions to Social and Moral Foundational Needs 

If you follow Durkheim’s basic moral foundations, as basic needs, in all societies you have a start:

• Disciplinary, forcing or administrating discipline. Education.

• Cohesive, bringing people together, a strong bond. Community.

• Vitalizing, to make livelier or vigorous, vitalize, boost spirit. Life giving.

• Euphoric, a good feeling, happiness, confidence, well-being. Well being.

All of these social needs can be met by secular institutions as Durkheim recommended. What is important here is to affirm their need and ensure they get met. With these needs in mind we can find specifics that work.

Reverse the Fallacies and Stop Supporting Secular Apathy

Using the eight fallacies listed in Edge, reverse them and see what needs to be satisfied to prevent them or release people from their grip.

(1) The fallacy of sunk costs: “I’ve already invested fifty years of my life in this position, and it would be excruciatingly embarrassing to acknowledge my error. In fairness to myself, I was entrapped in this view when I was too young to know better, and I’ve never been able to find a face-saving exit strategy.”

In education we need to model and teach civil discourse encouraging the willingness to be wrong, the necessity of changing course as challenges occur, and the support to admit error.

Yes, if there is a shred of proof or evidence for a superstition we must change our thinking; whether it is bending a spoon with your mind or the existence of nonmaterial beings.

Books like Carol Tavris’ “Mistakes Were Made But Not by Me” should be taught as routine like Strunk and White was in English classes. Rather than emphasizing authority to a mythical person, emphasize authority to inquiry involving the acceptance of changing the mind. Specific exit strategies for saving face provided to counselors would be helpful. Better employment and career counseling. Social discourse involving grace and saving face should be taught in schools.

There should be career and psychological counseling for expriests. Frankly there should be better career counseling for everyone.

Schools need to teach citizens how to be friends and supportive of each other. Ultimately friends, elders, and educators should have the tools to be a supportive confidante. We need to learn how to heal and support each other–the psychological healing through friendship, and the openness of critical thinking, rather than industrialized medicine.

(2) Err on the side of prudence: ”I can conjure up enough uncertainty about these issues to excuse myself from drawing the invited conclusions, which might be mistaken, after all, and could, I suppose, do some harm to somebody. Where it doesn’t itch, don’t scratch!”

In education and therapy provide specific examples of how critical thinking provides real solutions to physical and psychological issues. Teach it as an ongoing process of deriving success regardless of whether you know how bad it “itches” yet. Think of the process as looking for warning signs before you need mediation. Teach people to think long. Teach them the evitability of their potential over time versus the kinesthetic repair of immediate failure.

Critical thinking is like a vaccination. It is the best help in determining what might itch and what to do if it does.

(3) Religion for art’s sake: ”The only cost-effective way to preserve the great music, literature, and art of the world’s religions is to encourage all people to support these magnificent living museums with their weekly offerings.”

All cultures have importance in our history but some more so than others—lessons of mistakes can be as fruitful as those of successes.. A holocaust history has value as does that of Greece or Summeria. Great works should be preserved and doing so will engender respect of inside and outside culture. As inspiration, as respect, as understanding the other. A heuristic appreciation on top of a general education provides the kind of thinking and satisfaction enabling us to view even what we dislike with respect and an eye to how it improves us.

We need to sponsor art far more than we do now. Art is secular spirituality, so to speak, as well as religious, institutionalized spirit where spirit is not a ghost but energy. Universal aspects of human greatness can be found in religious and nonreligious works. We can emphasize the sublimity, greatness, of climbing a mountain, having a tea ceremony, or Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. We can glorify and learn from the past. Indeed we must. Just as we look to historical science for successful theorems we look to art for successful inspiration and circumspection. Emphasize the sheer euphoria of appreciating great works expressed. We can absolutely love even the ostentatious Oscar dress without wanting to wear one or whether or not thinking it is over the top.

Part of freedom is allowing variance and encouraging specific instantiations. Some may not work such as the corset or the castrato but others do. Inevitably, there is too much culture and art in the world and no one can read more than a few thousand books in a lifetime. We have to forget and ignore as much as we learn but we can do it with respect and inspection. Making lampshades from human skin is not uplifting or technologically useful but considering this atrocity will help refine disgust as socially expected.

We absolutely need to teach science not as lab and field work but as more basically the way to understand and verify reality. Science is as much “Look, is the train coming?” “Yes, it is. I see it.” as it is “adding hydrogen and oxygen with heat creates water.” Before extravagant instrumentation purloined science to technical expertise it was called natural science. Before then, philosophy. Before then, totemic creation myths along with hardcore applied science such as “the fluff of cat tail lights better than cottonwood bark when making fire with sticks.”

We need to reframe this point. It is not science versus religion except when religion is historicized science. Science it is living in the world versus living aside from the world. It is trusting your peers more than yourself. Though we are social, naturally, this is not always intuitive and must be taught.

Our bank of cultural knowledge is ever expanding with a limited apprehension device. It’s not whether we will forget and ignore but what. If religious art is great humanistically it will be enjoyed and preserved. If not we will culturally change towards what is preferred. But it’s an odd thing when people wear an instrument of torture, the cross, for inspiration. I suppose we could wear a torture rack with a clicking wheel so we could count ticks like rosary beads.

Local choices encourage diversity. It should not be about industrializing secularism.

(4) What would my mother think? ”People whom I hold dear, and who depend on me emotionally, would be heartbroken to learn of my defection. I’m going to carry this white lie to the grave, or at least until my parents are safely in their graves and my children and loved ones give me clear signs of being able to take such a confession with equanimity.”

Family acceptance and cohesion is important and should be emphasized but for example like the child that insists on make up or a tattoo, tensions of taboo occur in all families. Good family counseling should be available for everyone and would alleviate a host of issues. Eventually a culture of tolerance and inquiry will help prevent these dissonances from occurring so greatly or will be better understood as the part of the process of growth and meeting change.

We need better parental training. Oral culture can’t keep up. Parents want help and support. How is it that even something like breast feeding is left to volunteer groups like La Leche often closed on the weekend? How is it I have to go to a bar to meet another unoccupied person with whom to talk?

(5) Credal calisthenics: ”It keeps me modest, and fosters a desirable habit of moral reflection that helps me do the right thing ‘without even thinking’. It’s a method of self-purification that keeps me morally fit.”

Yes, morality can be as simple or complicated as you wish. For those who prefer automatic goodness, brief guidelines are available. There is no reason a universal set of rules of social engagement can’t first be taught and sophistication added as desired—yet, not deny the complexity of life. A universal everyday morality is more than possible as shown by the popularity of Ms Manners, Dear Abigail and even Jerry Springer. The social expression of universal morality can be as varied as the imagination. Just being civil, fits into the moral framework of social cohesion.

You can be as basic as Maimonides’ remark that all is commentary after “do unto others” or you can spend your life amidst an army of ideas competing for resonance and saloience. All while still obeying basic civil discourse and law. A credal calisthenics here could mull over this one statement for damned near forever either as a simple idea or as an incredibly thick assumption leading to a copse of contradictory copula.

Personality fits into this and we must learn to look at this more scientifically than astrology charts; which themselves show the very human interest in personality types and negotiation. Some people want a lot of stimulus. Some don’t. Some write a word at a time, some revise boundlessly. We have creatives, analytics, and a host in between. A scalable secular humanism fits all types while maintaining consistency.

We also need to emphasize that critical thinking is difficult but worth the trouble. On a most basic scale we teach a common brain failure to realize that $9.99 is only less than $10.00 by one penny yet it sways decision making more greatly than it should.  There are so many of these we should know them as common knowledge.

(6) We must fend off moral chaos: ”I myself don’t need God to tell me how to live, but some people really do. Religious belief puts the fear of God into some who would otherwise behave reprehensibly.”

Some prefer as appeal the fear of God to the love of God—the former preys on our psychological of preferring to run from pain than to run to reward, the latter emphasizing cue and reward. In either case universal morality can be taught as a love towards others or as a fear of social ostracism. In a liberal society the latter is more difficult. Counseling and education needs to emphasize the positive run to be good. Once some have been shown to improve without fear of God these examples and studies will help. An insistence that people have the right to make mistakes and that values vary in spite of universal morality; as they should. The importance of finding out for yourself is important. I would also guess that these folks are projecting the need for fear of god in themselves to others and that needs to be addressed.

This is hard as so many witness their success attributing it to their religious fealty. You can be deathly afraid of social ostracism as well. Shame versus guilt based cultures. In any case, the goal is to create a consistent tradition of law such that it is easy to know what is right and wrong for most cases. This does lead to oversimplification but some are going to seek that.

We must show again and again examples that people respond better to clear goals and processes, and humane jurisprudence than brute force. Slaves work hard but paid employees do more. We may say it’s survival of the fittest but we work towards more, a humane playing field.

Moral chaos is impossible; people die off or get along. Anarchy is impossible; people self organize as needed. A society that succeeds over time will use stable and enriching social and civil philosophies that can adapt to changing circumstances.

Part of answering this is making people feel safe. Doing that requires economic mobility, social stability, safety and security. Positive economics will sway people to secular innovations. The great love of science enveloped in Victorian reserve was due to the great success technology was having in the world. It doesn’t matter what people believe if they are hungry and in fact they will believe the evermore outlandish as certain for success; what was at hand didn’t work so believe the ridiculous as it has a bigger possibility.

Show heroes that didn’t need God or religion to be good. Show animals that behave well without God. Show how it is not necessarily God that is great in the bible but the individuals in the stories that are good in spite of God.

(7) Don’t make waves: ”I have more than enough substantive controversies that I would rather spend my energies on. Why discard alliances, make enemies, lose the affection of powerful friends and associates by raining on their parade?”

When you get a divorce it effects everyone knowing the family. Coming out is a most difficult decision; even Neil deGrasse Tyson ran back to agnosticism and entrenched his activism to science education. If education, counseling, and social services emphasized the subject, the individual, the need to believe in oneself and to have a self-directed life what one does would become less important. In this transition stage encouraging those to come out may mean finding what is important to them that overwhelms their need for familial acceptance. Counseling should be readily available and regular to families to help work out the very many familial controversies. Priests, bishops, and pastors often work as therapists. Educators, psychologists, and other medical staff need to pick this up.

This is also personality. Some like to work inside the system, some outside the system. Conversion to activism is redolent with frustration. As such we need to show the need for change now. For example, the plotted removal of Planned Parenthood might encourage some who otherwise wouldn’t care. It was Alan Dershowitz who when asked how to fight the display of the 10 commandments said don’t fight it. People will get so mad at it when it occurs it will change. I don’t like this approach but you have to have an argument available good enough for AD and when it gets through, he needs to advertise it.

Integrity leads to pride and a stronger sense of self. Knowing that you are doing the right thing provides a reward that can be greater than living in dissonance. It’s very likely that these people will feel better if the issue is resolved rather than avoided. There is a plethora of supportive literature on this from the gay community.

(8) Dumbo’s magic feather: ”Religious belief is a moral prosthesis: it strengthens the resolve and courage of many who want to be good but don’t have the true grit they need. If I recant, I contribute to the dissolution of an aspect of the world that they truly depend on. I have no right to take away their crutch.”

More social support will help people see other ways work more effectively. First you have to show how the crutch is hurting the individual in the long run or could be better. If there is still resistance then you have to return to the right of self choice to the limit of harming others. If they participate in a relatively harmless superstition we don’t care. It is the harm to others we most wish to avoid. Comfort is not allowed to harm others or reduce basic rights and freedoms.

There are plenty of historical figures that make inspiring heroes. Their statues need to be around. We need to be talking about our great cultural leaders. We need to admire knowledge, wisdom, clear thinking, curiosity.

We also need to emphasize the strength of the personal; our bodies can be trained, our minds expanded, and our resolve toughened. Emphasize the classic American trait of self-reliance with the new need to get along more in an ever more crowded, ever more entangled world. Or we need to reduce population so we aren’t so dense as to require greater cooperation.

It is important to educate about “training wheels”, therapy, and adjustment. We often learn tasks by a process of steps and incremental difficulties. It is true as children we love our teddy bears. As adults we may keep them. But we might be better off when lonely as adults to call a friend, focus on a task, or some other level-appropriate fix. In the end, it becomes a question of freedom and support.

How foolish a lawyer would look in court if when asked why release the defendant he said “do unto others”. As we become adults we become more sophisticated. As our problems become greater we need stronger remedies. As we experience ongoing frustration we need to seek comforts that alleviate beyond childhood solutions.

Jim Newman, bright and well

www.frontiersofreason.com

www.brightpride.com

Alain de Botton goes off the deep end again without flippers or a life jacket. I wouldn’t comment except he’s is getting enough reach that we need to be aware of his nonsense and respond to it.

“For centuries in the West, there was a figure in society who fulfilled a function that is likely to sound very odd to modern secular ears. He (there were no she’s in the role) didn’t sell you anything or fulfill any material need, he couldn’t fix your ox cart or store your wheat, he was there to take care of that part of you called rather unusually “the soul,” by which we would understand the psychological inner part, the seat of our emotions and sense of deeper identity. I’m talking about the priest, the stock figure of pre-modern western life, who would accompany you throughout your years, from earliest infancy to your dying breath, attempting to make sure that your soul was in a good state to meet its maker.

I’m sorry, it’s just stupid to think that a priest was just to save someone’s soul as a psychologist. The is like saying a chemist is really a modern alchemist–we’re all just scientists in the end. The role of a Catholic priest may have been to minister his flock but it was far more. They would have opinions on what drink to sup or what roof to utilize. In a small village the Catholic priest or the modern Mormon bishop would interfere with, uuuh, support near all family projects.

“Because in many Western countries, the priesthood is now a shadow of its former self, a key question to ask might be: where have our soul-related needs gone? What are we doing with all the stuff we used to go to the priest for? Who is looking after it? The inner self has naturally not given up its complexities and vulnerabilities simply because some scientific inaccuracies have been found in the tales of the seven loaves and fishes.

Alian is so tedious. He’s all over Catholic priests and those before the reformation. This has nothing to do with the vast and expansive field of protestant pastors. The inner self had plenty of philosophy around it. He seems to think only theology had a philosophy

“The secular response to the needs of the soul has tended to be private and informal: we find our own solutions, in our own time, we construct our own salvations as we see fit. Yet there remains in many a desire for more interpersonal, structured solutions to help us deal with the serious issues life throws us. Probably the most sophisticated communal response we’ve yet come up with to the difficulties of what we might as well keep calling, with no mystical allusions whatever, “the soul” is psychotherapy. It is to psychotherapists that we bring the same kind of problems as we would previously have directed at a priest: emotional confusion, loss of meaning, temptations of one kind or another and, of course, anxiety about mortality.

OMG, Alain do you really think we seculars go running about looking for people to tend our soul. F—k no, we’re busy getting good paying jobs and raising families with women with whom we wish to share our lives and deepest thoughts, if we even have the f—king time to have deep inner thoughts.When we go to therapy it’s because the problem is so bas it’s messing with our lives and then we don’t want an amateur who’s got a theological agenda.

“From a distance psychotherapists look like they are already well settled in the priest-like role and that there is nothing further to be done or asked for. Yet one could argue that there are in fact a number of ways in which contemporary psychotherapy has failed to learn the right lessons from the priesthood and might benefit from a more direct comparison with it. My suggestion is that society would benefit if therapists were more explicitly reorganised along the model set by the priesthood; that therapists should be secular society’s new priests.

I can only be thankful that we don’t have a priesthood philosophy. The TV series “How I Met Your Mother” has more pertinent philosophy about family than most priests. By elevating priests to therapists you give them too much power.

Shit, therapists are at least trained and professional. Even at the worst a pseudoscientist’s psychotherapist has some semblance of science. A priest is just a theological puppet bowing down to his authoritarian bastard father. Maybe in Ireland the priest was father of the community but since the reformation pastor hood has been more oblique and thank goodness for that. It’s just too cute to think of a priest as a psychofather. It’s a bastardization of  Durkheim.

“For a start, therapy remains a minority activity, out of reach of most people, too expensive or simply not available in certain parts of the country. There have been laudable efforts on the parts of activists like Lord Layard to introduce therapy into the NHS, but progress is slow and vulnerable. But the issue isn’t just economic. It’s one of attitudes. Whereas Christian societies would imagine there was something wrong with you if you didn’t visit a priest, we tend to assume that therapists are there solely for moments of extreme crisis — and are a sign that the visiting client might be a little unbalanced, rather than just human. A principally physical model of the self is popular, which leads to a preference for problems to be addressed by pills rather than interpersonal relationships. This isn’t to say that drugs are not important in many situations, simply to make a supplementary case for therapeutic conversation with a sympathetic other.

F—k, the global village emphasized by Marshall McLuhan has long addressed a media based solution to community, a global village, if that’s what you want. Social media may be twisted in its own impersonal way but it still sate’s the deep need for like minded people to get together.

“There’s also, in a serious sense, an issue of branding here. Therapists are hidden away. You don’t see them on the high street. They still aren’t regulated as they should be. We don’t make a place for them among other needs like those for bread or electrical goods. Imagine if the need for therapeutic dialogue was as honoured and recognised as the need for a haircut or a go on an exercise machine. Imagine if seeing a therapist wasn’t a strange and still rather embarrassing pursuit. Imagine if one could be guaranteed a certain level of service. Imagine if the consulting rooms looked better and were more visible, to make a case for the dignity of the activity.

I finally agree here that psychotherapy is too absent in people’s lives but that has more to do with how US society deals with psychology and not how we need to honor secular priests. The issue is religious people don’t believe in therapy and not that priests are therapists. There has been plenty of a science for a long time. It’s resistance to science that’s the issue not that we need secular priests.

“Modern psychotherapists’ understanding of how humans work and what they need to cope with existence is, in my eyes, immensely more sophisticated than that of priests. Nevertheless, religions have been expert at creating a proper role for the priest, as a person to talk to at all important moments of life, without this seeming like a slightly unhinged minority thing to do. Many people may well say that the pub and a few mates are all they need; after one or two big challenges, a great many more may feel that life is sufficiently complicated that they’d benefit from regular dialogue with a sympathetic third party in a stigma-free reassuring location. For those interested in the challenge, there’s a long way to go before therapy really plugs the gap opened up by the decline in the priesthood.

Frankly a more cohesive society of drinking mates, male and female, would resolve a lot of issues. The physical isolation of people from each other is part of the problem. OMG, this man wants secular priests and hasn’t a clue what therapy means. Serious therapy is not about a buddy coming over and telling you how to change the oil in your psychic soul. There is no soul. Frankly most priests were megalomaniacs that knew how to milk the material goods of the people to their own ends.

I can agree that we are an alienated society but the facts are that more than ever before diverse people can find each other in spite of their shallow local lives, if you will,  at least in western nations where electronics allow a commuted being.

Thank goodness we don’t have to rely on mail anymore to reach out to those like us to whom we depend for psychological symmetry. Thank goodness we don’t have vicious philandering and immoral priests preying on us.

I absolutely agree that we need more therapy for all but mental health now is not about replacing priests with therapists. Priests have too often been power hungry, aggressive idiots and not your friend at all. To imply such is like saying tigers and lions are really sweet animals that want to be friends with us. Priests have been part of a vicious power struggle and not interested in our benefit. They are more like capitalists and politicians that would win than would help.

Alain wishes to pluck specific religious rituals and occupations out of context and insert them into a new framework. While I can agree in some general way the silly notion of priests as therapists reinforces the religious belief that priests are already therapists so why not just become religious–believe in belief because it is comforting and psychologically supportive.

Any competent theologian is going to comment the real solution to Alain’s dilemma is a return to religion.

What are needed are new rituals suited to modern society and culture. What we need psychologically is an insurance industry that pays for it. What we need socially is more contact. We don’t need an all-interfering village monarch called a priest. I don’t want to go back to the dark ages.

My worst f—g nightmare is a secular priest called a therapist.

Jim Newman, bright and well