Remembering a beloved companion

Have a blessed day

I said on Saturday that while in Atlanta last week I had a couple of times slipped and "created god" by uttering formulas like "Thank god" and "What a godsend." I of course made no believing reference to "god"; the utterances were habitual in the same way a person might automatically say "Fine" in response to a "How are you?" The interesting thing about my slips was that they didn't bother me. That's a good thing. It seems to indicate that I'm becoming at least somewhat desensitized to the possibility that someone might infer I'm a believer, even though it's important to me both that I am not and that the people I care about know it.

But anyway, this morning, as I stepped out of my commute van in Chapel Hill, I intentionally said to my fellow passengers, "Have a blessed day." That blessing (for it's literally a blessing, a good wish for another person) doesn't involve the word "god" but I think it's fair to say that it's more often than not taken as invoking "god's blessing."

I of course didn't mean it that way, given that I believe there is no god to bless anybody. People who depend on god to take care of them are routinely disappointed. When things turn out their way there are always more reliable explanations, if only the laws of chance. I meant something more like, "Be lucky today" or "May good things happen to you today." In that regard, perhaps my favorite saying (blessing) is "Good on you," or even "Good on you to overrunning cup" (a reference to the Twenty-third Psalm¹, for which I don't apologize, nonbeliever or no, the image is so poetically inspired).

In choosing to say "Have a blessed day," I consciously (and deliberately) used a formula that resonates with my audience. If you read me here consistently, you may remember that most of the members of my commute van pool are believers, even regular church-goers.

It strikes me that in using their language, I made a step toward reconciliation. Without compromising my nonbelief, but also without flaunting it.
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1. "my cup runneth over." –Psalm 23:5

Off San Francisco

Don't you wish it were you?

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.

Remembering Wally

Aside from his human family, no one knew Wally better than the people at the vets. When I picked up his ashes last week, I was also given a card from the staff with these handwritten messages:

Dear Family,
    I was so saddened to hear of your loss. I see so many dogs each day, but Wally was special! He made my day every time he came into the clinic. I will miss seeing him & you also. You gave Wally a great life!
                Take care —
                Alicia

Dear Family,
    I am so sorry for your loss. Wally was such a sweet boy & will be missed by everyone who knew him. He was certainly lucky to be a part of your family for all those years! Please call us if you need anything. Jennifer

Dear Family,
    I am so sorry for your loss. We all loved seeing Wally and spending a little bit of time with him when he was here. He had a great life with you, and I know you will cherish your memories of him.
                ♥
                Kate

The Family,
    Wally was such a lucky boy to have you as his owners. He lived a wonderful life because of the great care you provided for him.
                ♥
                Candie[?]

Dear Family,
    I'm so sorry for your loss. Wally was a wonderful dog and lived a wonderful life because he had you all! Deepest sympathy,
                Elaina

If Wally was lucky and had a good life because of us, we were lucky and had some good life because of him.

At Pawleys Island, South Carolina, June 2005

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.

Siegfried: b. January 24, 2009

The standard poodle pup pictured Friday (and referred to as "Dark Cream Boy") came home with us yesterday.


For a seven-week-old (the next day), he made the 300-mile automobile trip well. After only about eighteen hours in this new place, he seems to be feeling at home. (As are his new mama and papa. It's still new here to us too; the back yard hasn't been fenced yet.)

And here are Siegfried's sire (Gem, who looks very much like Wally, but at seventy pounds is even larger):

...and dam (Blair, about half as heavy as Gem):

Dark Cream Boy

What if...?

Round-the-clock negotiation

From Philip Roth's third Nathan Zuckerman novel, The Anatomy Lesson (1983):

[Dr. Kotler was saying to Nathan: I'm also] studying Holy Scriptures. Delving into all the translations. Amazing what's in there. Yet the writing I don't like. The Jews in the Bible were always involved in highly dramatic moments, but they never learned to write good drama. Not like the Greeks, in my estimation. The Greeks heard a sneeze and they took off. The sneezer becomes the hero, the one who reported the sneeze becomes the messenger, the ones who overheard the sneeze, they became the chorus. Lots of pity, lots of terror, lots of cliff-hanging and suspense. You don't get that with the Jews in the Bible. There it's all round-the-clock negotiation with God. [p. 337 in the 2007 Library of America edition of Zuckerman Bound: 1979-1985]

Wally: May 19, 1996 – March 9, 2009

Last photo, February 22

For more photos and information about Wally....

At Moss Landing, California

January 26, 2009

The bird's a curlew; we've seen some in Mebane, North Carolina as well.

Under the radar

From "Quiet Layoffs Sting Workers Without Notice," by Steve Lohr, in today's New York Times:

I.B.M. is one such company [that "routinely carries out scattered layoffs that are small enough to stay under the radar"]. It reported surprisingly strong quarterly profits in January, and in an e-mail message to employees, Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive, said that while other companies were cutting back, his would not. “Most importantly, we will invest in our people,” he wrote.
    But the next day, more than 1,400 employees in I.B.M.’s sales and distribution division in the United States and Canada were told their jobs would be eliminated in a month. More cuts followed, and over all, I.B.M. has told about 4,600 North American employees in recent weeks that their jobs are vanishing.
    ...
    Depending on how the businesses want to portray themselves to investors and the public, layoffs might not fit the message.

I feel a bit critical of IBM myself. Even before I left after thirty years (at the end of 1996), "IBM" had come to stand for more than International Business Machines.

It is time

Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation (2006) opens with A Note to the Reader:

Since the publication of my first book, The End of Faith, thousands of people have written to tell me that I am wrong not to believe in God. The most hostile of these communications have come from Christians. This is ironic, as Christians generally imagine that no faith imparts the virtues of love and forgiveness more effectively than their own....

The first time I read Harris's Letter, I don't think I read it in a single day, but I did today, its argument was so much more impelling than I remembered. I found so much I might have highlighted or underlined if I hadn't borrowed the book from a library. For example:

The conflict between science and religion is reducible to a simple fact of human cognition and discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Everyone recognizes that to rely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact is ridiculous—that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma. It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail. [pp. 66-67]

And god was the word

My skeptical friend Ed wrote me overnight:

I don't know if you have noticed, but you seem to be talking more about God now that you don't believe than before.

Well, I pointed out to Ed, I had noticed something like that. In the footnote to my preceding post ("The GWB proof of the non-existence of god"), I had written:

And maybe I did "decide" to become an atheist, after all, because I considered the question carefully, qualitatively sifting and weighing the evidence. Obviously, I'm still trying to sort out the best way to think and talk about it. If I'm concerned about appearing to be obsessed about this, maybe I shouldn't be. It's just a natural process of thinking. [emphasis added]

But I also pointed out that I have definitely not been "talking more about God." I have not been talking "about god" at all, for there is no god to talk about—or to pray to or be aided, hindered, inspired, judged, forgiven, saved, or condemned by.
    What I have been talking a lot about is not believing in god and believing in no-god, which of course is quite different. I wouldn't trouble to comment on Ed's use of language (which was likely intentional, for the sake of irony), except for the fact that serious philosophical problems arise from misapprehending language.
    For example, the Gospel According to John opens thus:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

What this can only, truly mean is that god is only a word¹. Theologians have for centuries tied themselves into knots trying to interpret it otherwise. Maybe if they'd noticed that John could have been dyslexic....

There are many reasons, psychological and social, for my dwelling on what I believe. My own dear mother was a devout believer, "rest her soul." But for her I would likely never have become as involved in religion as I did. All four of my sisters have been believers and many if not most of my aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. (Only two of my sisters survive, and one of my previously many aunts and uncles; "rest the souls," too of those departed.) I come from a religious background. Thus, "becoming" an atheist is very much to go my own way. I have had to endure many tsk-tsks and "I'm praying for you's." I've had to choose between keeping quiet or exposing myself. Obviously I haven't kept quiet, so I've had to deal with the reality that I've amazed and even offended people.
    More than half of the members of my commute van pool talk of going to church. At least the two drivers know that religious radio programs offend me. When I objected to their tuning them in, I told them that I'd signed up to commute, not to attend church. Some of them know that I read books by Ian McEwan and Richard Dawkins. But maybe not everyone had picked up on this: "What's that you're reading?" The Blind Watchmaker. "Is it a novel?"²
    Some of my neighbors are evangelical Christians. One of them has the email address, everyoneneedsjesus@...Now, that's evangelical!
    Etc.
    So, in addition to the "joyful sense of liberation that I feel as a result of [seeing religion for a sham]," I also have a sense of sadness at having made myself peculiar³ to a number of my relatives, possibly some of my friends, and perhaps one or two of my neighbors. But being somewhat estranged from them is a price I'm willing to pay for refusing to join them in their superstition. Centuries of clever Jewish, Christian, and Muslim apologetical book-keeping have not rendered the superstitious beliefs of the fearful ancient Israelites—that groveling, guilt-ridden, image-worshiping, animal-sacrificing, women-subjugating people—any less superstitious today.
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1. As Christopher Hitchens writes in his 2007 book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (dedicated to Ian McEwan):

   [Kant] undid the ontological argument by challenging the simpleminded notion that if god can be conceived as an idea, or stated as a predicate, he must therefore possess the quality of existence. This traditional tripe is accidentally overthrown by Penelope Lively in her much-garlanded novel Moon Tiger. Describing her daughter Lisa as a "dull child," she nonetheless delights in the infant's dim but imaginative questions:

   "Are there dragons?" she asked. I said that there were not. "Have there ever been?" I said all the evidence was to the contrary. "But if there is a word dragon," she said, "then once there must have been dragons." [p. 265]

2. The Blind Watchmaker, by Richard Dawkins, explains how natural selection, acting over millions and millions of years, fashioned the human eye, bat echolocation, and other marvels of nature.
3. I recall a Pentecostal sermon that was preached at me over fifty years ago. The preacher told us that as Christians we were "peculiar," which he explained at length (in the way that such preachers loved to go on glossing words) to mean that we were "circled about" by people who were not like us. To be really circled about in our society today, be an atheist.

The GWB proof of the non-existence of god

George W. Bush's becoming and "serving" as the President of the United States was a catalyst for my coming out of the closet for atheism¹. I may even have discovered yet another proof of god's non-existence in this:

George W. Bush, a self-styled born-again Christian, became President of the United States.   Therefore, there is no god.

The "proof" occurred to me this morning, as I was recalling an interchange with my friend Roger a week ago. He had written:

In the past [your sister] has briefly discussed your lack of faith in God. So out of curiosity, I have always wondered how you came to believe what you do.

And I told him:

How I came to believe what I believe about god (that there isn't one) is actually fairly well documented publicly, insofar as my blog is public. I "declared" for atheism on September 9, 2007, and the post for that day ("All in or All out") gives the proximate reason.
    The main considerations leading up to the declaration are covered over the preceding year or a little longer. Interestingly perhaps, the Bush administration had a little bit to do with it, as I saw what fundamentalist Christians were doing. I guess that made me mad for one thing, sort of set my teeth on edge, motivated me to figure out whether I really did or didn't believe some essential theological things in common with these people.
    The agony of the food chain was perhaps the single most contributing factor: my utter disbelief that a "personal god" could have engineered the mayhem and murder of creatures up the chain devouring creatures down the chain. This is obviously related to the problem of life's injustice. I believe that men are motivated to believe in god and heaven not only because they fear death and want to live forever, but also because they abhor the injustices they see about them and long for a judgment followed by reward for the good and punishment for the wicked. But because that belief is so obviously designed to satisfy men's wishes, it seems obvious to me that it (and god too) were concocted for solace and consolation—created lock, stock, and barrel by the fearful mammal man.
    I was also struck by the fact that the children of Christian parents tend to become Christians, and the children of Muslim parents tend to become Muslims. In other words, the "revelations of god" that they accept (those of the Bible on the one hand, those of the Koran on the other) are simply a matter of where and of whom they were born. So, if a child who is taught to believe the Bible could by accident of birth just as easily have been taught to believe the Koran, then that seemed to undercut any inherent authority of the books themselves. Since there is utterly no evidence whatsoever for the Bible's claim to authenticity, nor for the Koran's, and no evidence for heaven or miracles, etc., and all of the arguments for them can be explained in terms of wishful thinking, the desire of the priestly class to control the rest of mankind, etc., I can only conclude, as a thinking person willing to accept that I will die and not be resuscitated or resurrected, that religion is bunk.
    And the joyful sense of liberation that I feel as a result of concluding so is also a kind of evidence.
    Quod erat demonstrandum.
    In a nutshell, that's how I "came to believe." As you have time or interest, you can, of course, nose around in Moristotle.

Roger replied:

I want to thank you for sharing your thoughts concerning Christianity and GWB. We indeed think very much alike, when it comes to GWB. I too have been very angered by the behavior not only of this self-proclaimed "Born again Christian," but of so many of his supporting fellow Christians. As far as I am concerned, over the last 8 years, Christian hypocrisy has been at an all-time high. I mean, how stupid and ignorant can so many of these people be? To me at almost every turn, Bush and his gang were guilty of behavior that totally contradicts biblical principles, and yet so many of his Christian followers had no apparent problem with this. I despise these people to no end. And one of the unfortunate things about all of this, at least where I am concerned, is that practically all of my friends, and most of my family, fall into this group. You talk about feeling isolated. Some days it can be a bit too much. These days, many of them are so quick to forget about Bush's obvious screw ups. Now they only have time to criticize Obama.

And he sent me a link to a web page describing a documentary by Brian Flemming about "The God Who Wasn't There." I've asked my local librarian to acquire it.
    Hmm, I wonder whether there are librarians, as there are doctors and other health professionals, who will refuse to cooperate in such a request on the ground that their religion forbids it? "I couldn't possibly order—or even utter the name of—that DVD!"
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1. If "coming out of the closet" is what I did. I originally worded this, "catalyst for my becoming an atheist"—in the sense of deciding to be one—but it isn't clear that one can decide to become an atheist (or decide to believe in god); one either is or isn't (or believes or doesn't). In my case, I realized that I didn't really "believe in god," so the question I asked myself was: Do I believe in no-god?
       Not-believing in god is quite different from believing in no-god. One can not-believe in god, but also not-believe in no-god. That's what an agnostic does, because he or she doesn't accept that there's adequate evidence for either.
       I had to think about the question a bit to see what my answer was. My own choice of no-god is based on what I consider an extremely high probability rather than a certainty. It was useful to consult Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins for assistance. I am grateful to these authors.
       And maybe I did "decide" to become an atheist, after all, because I considered the question carefully, qualitatively sifting and weighing the evidence. Obviously, I'm still trying to sort out the best way to think and talk about it. If I'm concerned about appearing to be obsessed about this, maybe I shouldn't be. It's just a natural process of thinking.