Sweet or not

Sitting in a window seat on my flight to Atlanta Thursday morning for an overnight professional meeting, I was itching so uncomfortably to get back to my blog and say more about Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s statement that "God and religion are not synonymous" that I was pleasantly distracted by a remark from the traveler sitting next to me, a man I judged to be perhaps a couple of years older than my son.

He was a big guy and I had been glad I was already seated when he and another big guy arrived. They were bantering pleasantly about how they'd once had to sit next to some really big people, and they chuckled amiably when I remarked that they were pretty slim guys themselves.

The plane took off and they discovered that they worked in similar industries and proceeded to talk matter of factly about finance and insurance, as though everything in those industries was normal and nothing had changed.

What led up to the middle guy's diverting remark was that the server came along and asked what beverage we wanted. When I ordered coffee (not to mention orange juice and water as well), she said, "Cream or sugar?" and I said black. After she had poured and delivered all our beverages and peanuts and proceeded up the aisle, the middle guy said, "When my dad is asked how he wants his coffee, he usually says, 'I like my coffee the way I like my women, black or white, sweet or not, so long as it's hot.'"

That sort of put things back in perspective for me, although I don't think I could have explained why. It no longer seemed so urgent to elaborate on Pitts's statement, which I initially said I agreed with (because, as I said, god doesn't exist and religion does). It no longer even seemed particularly important to point out that the statement, "God and religion are not synonymous," is a paradox: god and religion are actually precisely synonymous, because god only "exists" because religion created "him" (or "it" or "her") and continues to do so with every act of prayer, worship, oath, etc.

In Atlanta, at least twice in conversation with my colleagues, I had similarly "created god" by uttering formulas like "Thank god!" and "What a godsend!" with only the slightest sense of discomfort at having slipped.

So, it's good to be home with Siegfried and his hot mama this morning.

The growing denomination "None"

Heartening news from Frank Rich's op-ed piece ("The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off") in yesterday's New York Times¹:

The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.
    This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in “Since Yesterday,” his history of the 1930s published in 1940. But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”
    The new American faith, Allen wrote, was the “secular religion of social consciousness.” It took the form of campaigns for economic and social justice — as exemplified by the New Deal and those movements that challenged it from both the left and the right. It’s too early in our crisis and too early in the new administration to know whether this decade will so closely replicate the 1930s, but so far Obama has far more moral authority than any religious leader in America with the possible exception of his sometime ally, the Rev. Rick Warren.

I'm of course cavalier in calling the decline in church affiliation "heartening." But my regular readers will know why I say this. For example, just this morning on NPR, I was listening to a commentary about the need for Christians and Muslims to cooperate to further human rights. True enough that cooperation would be nice, but the commentary might more usefully have included some information about how both religions stand in the way of various human rights. Christians in the way of rights for gays, for example. Muslims in the way of rights for women. And on and on.
    As Sam Harris rightly recommended in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, progress demands that religion not be given a free pass when it comes to criticism.
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1. It has come to my attention that columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. has also written about these findings, in his syndicated article, "Wake-Up Call for Organized Religion," in the Miami (FL) Herald, March 14, 2009.
       Pitts allows that "God and religion are not synonymous." I agree; god doesn't exist, religion does.

In your face

After timidly experimenting with a couple of insipid titles for yesterday's post, I finally settled on the more in-your-face title, God didn't vault Adam and Eve to the top of the mountain, which by the way prefigures the first paragraph's reference to the jehovahs, who insist that Adam and Eve were real people.

But is the title I finally settled on too in-your-face? An op-ed column reprinted in today's Burlington, North Carolina Times-News by Miani Herald "Pulitzer Prize-winning" columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. contains an apology for asking of Sarah Palin last week, "Does she really take the parable of Adam and Eve as literal truth?" Pitts writes now that that column

unleashed a flood of e-mails from people angry that I had demoted the Christian creation story [Christian?!] to the status of parable [sic] and suggested by implication that anyone who believes it is, as one reader put it, a "fool."

After apologizing (Pitts has to try to keep all of those readers; he's a paid columnist, after all), he tries to regain his self-respect:

Let me be clear: I don't believe the Bible's account of creation. Never have. Leaving aside Darwin [why? afraid of offending yet more of those valuable readers?] and taking the story on its own merits, there are still holes in it big enough to walk a dinosaur through. Not least of which is the conundrum of how, short of incest, humanity reproduced itself if there was only one family on earth.
    And had I framed my question more narrowly—Does Sarah Palin really want the Bible story of creation taught in schools?—you'd be reading no mea culpa here. Science classes are for science and faith is not science. Nor, in a pluralistic society, does anyone have the right to impose faith on someone else.
    But I didn't pose a narrow question. Instead, I airily dismissed a belief which, in and of itself, hurts no one, marginalizes no one, and is a fundament of faith for millions.
    That was needlessly...disrespectful. It also was arrogant. Which is, oddly enough, the one trait of the lately resurgent atheist movement that vexes me....

Then, after maligning atheists, too, for a paragraph, he steps back in a sort of apology to them!

In fairness to atheists, though, I've always suspected that was a reaction to the equally irksome arrogance some religious conservatives—let the Rev. Jerry Falwell stand as avatar—have exuded upon the rest of us for 30 years.

Poor Leonard Pitts! The guy's trying to please everybody, but is surely pleasing only the most complaisant.

An unfortunate consequence of trying to please everybody is that Pitts fools himself into thinking that a religious belief can be "in and of itself" and (therefore) "hurts no one [and] marginalizes no one," and should (therefore) be given a bye because it "is a fundament of faith for millions." But there is no such thing as a religious belief "in and of itself." A person's basic beliefs affect everything. They affect what parents want taught in schools. They affect how people vote—or whether they vote (jehovahs, I'm told, abstain). They affect whether people sign up to detonate themselves in a crowd.

It's important to believe things because you know they're true (and not otherwise)..