Neda
It is my sincerest hope that the people of Iran will find a peaceful resolution to the conflict that is tearing Iran apart. It is my sincerest wish that no-one else will lose her or his life, that no more families will be doused with the gasoline of grief and set afire by the agony of losing a loved one.
“Many persons have no idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”—Helen Keller
Mission Statement: [The] purpose of the Humanist Symposium is not primarily to criticize religious beliefs or debunk the latest superstition, but to offer and discuss a positive alternative to belief systems based on the supernatural. [From Ebonmuse.]
Welcome, friends, regulars, and first time visitors, to the 33rd Humanist Symposium! We’ve much to discuss, as ever, and only so much time in our busy lives to do so, I know. Yet it is certain that we need to take this time to peruse and pursue the topics at hand. As humanists, we are confronted with a world poised on the edge of an enormous valley whose plummeting depths are shrouded by perpetual mists and obscuring shadow. It is the Valley of Change and Interesting Times. It is also known as the Valley of Uncertainty and Potential. We all know this awesome valley from personal experience, certes, but each of us has her or his own take on it.
Here is a chance to lend an ear to what others have to say, gathered here for the nonce on this windblown overlook on the Kalends of March (a number of us wearing Darwin tee-shirts, I see), as one by one, alone or with friends, we plot our course into the future that awaits us.
The following works can serve, I think, to help us consider the topics we have to deal with, and help us to choose a path down into and through the valley.
In “Anti-atheism and anti-theism“, Faithlessgod would have us consider our attitude toward theists and how that attitude effects the ongoing dialog between believers and non-believers. Are we all supporting double standards? Does the Golden Rule still apply? How’s our footing?
Meanwhile, in “The Renaissance of Atheist Evangelism“, Ebonmuse, of Daylight Atheism, takes on the usual criticism that “atheist evangelism” is something inherently bad for atheists and the atheist cause generally. A healthy attitude is of invaluable assistance on these slopes.
Negotiating the scree with care, in “Why Evangelical Humanism?“, She Who Chatters makes a solid case for humanistic evangelism being a necessary tool for constructing a better world for all.
Ivaluthy Mahendran shares that vision. He has looked upon the hardship of the world and is ready to shout, so that the valley echoes, “I Have a Dream!!!“—it is a dream of getting through the valley.
In “The Brain, Engine of Creativity“, BlackSun expertly defends the fruits of the Enlightenment against the malaise of New-Age unreality as typified by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Wishful thinking makes for an unreliable guide in dangerous places.
Down into the valley we make our way, and the paths we choose will ever require us to pay attention and to move with care. The Mystic Atheist believes we must pay attention to the old stories told in the valley by the theists. He shares his ideas in The Word of Science: A Story Still to Tell.
While over at Distiller’s Corner, Burak Bilgin considers “A Paradigm Shift for Self-Actualization“. What do we expect to make of this journey?
I humbly submit to the symposium the powerful speech given by author Haruki Murakami on the occasion of his being awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. It is called “The Novelist in Wartime“, and it presents an admirable statement all humanists can support. Our duty as humanists is clear; our responsibility is to help, as best we may, those in danger of falling.
Russell Blackford highlights one of the constant dangers we face on our journey—the slippery slope that ends in a social pitfall—in “Geert Wilders should have been allowed into the UK“, posted at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
And the Examiner.com: DC Political Atheist Examiner, Paul Fidalgo, says in no uncertain terms that “The sorry excuse of offense” must go! We can’t stand still and argue about the danger of avalanches or we won’t get anywhere.
But—no offense intended—Zach Alexander really thinks we also should “pay attention to the aesthetic message our ads send, not just the literal message”, in “Ugly Atheist Buses“. Think of it as being dressed properly for the long trek; you know a well prepared hiker when you see one, right?
In “Curiosity and the ‘Shut Up, That’s Why’ Argument“, Greta Christina admonishes us to both keep up the discussion with friends and family who may not share our views, and to understand where they might differ from us in their conversational expectations. The message is clear on this journey: communication—and good, healthy, open communication at that—is a must if we are to help each other succeed.
Atheist Revolution wonders aloud about what it will take to make a more accommodating space on campus, in “Reaching Out to Atheist College Students“. How can we make the journey a little easier for those still learning to navigate the many paths of this place and time?
There are a lot of questions about this journey. There are a number of viable paths, and many more dangerous ones, and sometimes it seems that the society we live in is geared against our success. So it seems only fitting to conclude this symposium with a hopeful message, one that can lend us strength as we work on finding our way through the valley.
Tom Rees, of Epiphenom, says that a “New ARIS survey will show that US atheists/agnostics have nearly doubled since 2001″. We are not alone on this journey. This is both a reason to rejoice and a reason to consider our role in helping so many others—people who may now be embarking on an adventure that some of us have been on for some time already. I know we’re up to it.
…
A few final words. I’d like to thank Adam Lee, (Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism), for giving me this opportunity. I really appreciate it. I’d also like to thank those who have hosted the Humanist Symposium previously—most recently, A Superfluous Ramble—and those who will be hosting it in the future—such as your next host, Atheist Revolution (on March 22nd). I feel myself to be in the best company with all of you. These symposiums are of benefit to the greater community of the world, however small and intimate they may seem, and to host one is a privilege that should always be celebrated and gratefully acknowledged.
Finally, I’d like to thank you, the readers of these posts. It feels good knowing that there are people all over the world who are interested enough in the humanist perspective to take the time to read what secular humanists have to say. I think the most important thing we need right now is an open dialog that allows for honest questions and answers. That sort of thing begins here… and in the comment sections of blogs everywhere.
Stories from Curious Outsiders
hitotoki : A Narrative Map of Tokyo. (See also New York, London, Paris, Shanghai, and Sofia).
This is one of my favorite sites to visit. What you are presented with is an active Google map of the city with placemarks to identify where each story happens. You also get a few pictures that link to the various stories, as well as text links that quote a line of any given story. The layout is pleasing to the eye and straightforward.
The stories are often, I have found, amazingly well written and I always wind up feeling like I know the place a little more, in a significant way, than I did before. Mind you, I have never been to the majority of these places, yet I have gleaned from these personal recollections and anecdotes what I believe to be a genuine sense of them. This is a wonderful thing.
The site enhances our sense of the greater world “out there”, and it shows us that people are not so different from one place to another, even as it illustrates the differences that do exist.
Highly recommended.
And the sky tonight as the sun went down was breathtaking. Deeper and lighter purples shading into ruby and blood orange, gold spending itself in smudged powder coral, cerulean steeped in lilac and bruised rose, iron out of focus behind a damp and gossamer veil of baby’s breath. Naturally, I spent an inordinate amount of time looking into my rear view mirror, trying to take as much in as possible, as I traveled northeastward home, sometimes, surreptitiously, craning my head around to glance at the sky. Dangerous, I don’t doubt, but I didn’t really care too much if it was. The sky seemed to respond, becoming more blood and fire, more lead and ocean depth, more cruel in its beauty. I wondered if there was a volcano spewing ash somewhere, lofting ash into the sky. (In fact, Tungurahua, in Ecuador, recently erupted, but I still have no idea if that’s why the sky was so spectacular.) The light seemed to capture a still life fraught with kinetic portent.
Ahead of me the mountains lay like monstrous blue-black waves, foam capped, with fairy lights irregularly spangling their flanks. The distant view of home. I flew along in my little cockpit, the car a machine toned by its inertia, an inhabited bubble with thoughts like psychological bacteria swimming in that living space curved upon itself. The sunlight faded steadily, unstoppable in its gradual disappearance, silent as silence itself, superimposed upon by the constant whoosh-rush of my heartbeat pushing past my inner ear, upon which, superimposed, the drone of the seemingly endless conversation on NPR, to which I no longer had any attention to pay.
Imagine me, you reader, if you care to. This falling night, here in my particular hemisphere, alone in my car, fairly floating along the inmost lane of the freeway like a blood cell caring not whither I would go, yet arriving almost certainly there. Imagine that within me there is that sunset exploding and diffusing itself across the vast plain of my heartland. And in that place are no freeways nor destinations, and light itself is called breath and wind emotion. And if you can so imagine this, then you may catch a glimpse of history unfolded like the night across the bed of the unfathomable sea of being. Nor does it matter aught, save insofar as you know it in yourself and prise the meaning from the nonce.
The weekend comes, the weekend goes; the work week looms on the horizon. I think a lot about my work week for a number of reasons. I recall the lines from the World of Skin song, “24 Hours”: “24 hours split three ways. Because you bought one third, you own everything.” My days at work are not so bad, really. My days at work are dealt with. I go, I make the effort, I do my best, and in the end they tell me that they appreciate me. And then there’s the fact that they pay me. There’s just enough money in my bank account — never mind the overdraft charges — to keep the world from rending my flesh, to keep the world from snapping and splintering my bones. I need my job, and I am grateful that they appreciate me. I am five nines certain (haha) my job is safe and secure… and that I am, by extension, safe and secure.
Still, I know that I’ll be the only one showing up in a shirt with the likeness of Hunter S. Thompson on it. Trust me on that; not a single person at my job even knew who H.S.T. was. So it should not be surprising that I am quite sure I’ll likely be the only one ever to talk about anything outside the — to my eyes oddly coffin-shaped — box of broad social mores, American culture (defined by the vox populi) and whatever pop music/TV/literature permeates the air where I work. I know that this is in part because they know, as well as I do, that work is “not the place” for philosophy, art, politics, religion, sexuality, or other discussions of intimately personal import. Risking a test comment in those areas now and again has only ever led to glazed-over eyes and the apprehension of an imbalanced discomfort that quickly corrected itself with an uncomfortable silence. Sadly, safer topics like, say, space exploration and the sciences have proven themselves to be of no interest to my coworkers. They are, for me, a front row ticket to the theater of wistfulness. So in the end it is simply my misfortune that those are just the things that make me feel alive in the world.
I don’t know what there is to do about it, but I think I ought to, for my own sake, do something. Kisha has suggested to me a few times now that I need to make friends outside of work (other than her, my best friend and true love, of course). I’ve not got the foggiest idea how to actually go about doing that, but…
Life seldom seems to give without a bit of taking, to build without a little destruction, to improve without some fraction of degradation. Life is an ongoing practice in sacrifice… of the bridge, baseball, chess or insane variety, I know not from day to day. What I do know is that one can sacrifice everything — and remember that ‘to sacrifice’ means ‘to make sacred’ — and wind up with nothing, which on some days truly makes me wonder if indeed nothing is sacred. Of course, if you have nothing to begin with then perhaps the sacrifice is worthwhile. And maybe it is that I am deluded in my thought, in my feeling, in my belief, that I once had something. Something, that is, that I wouldn’t ever sacrifice willingly, because it was truly sacred already anyway. I really don’t know. And, you know, the truth is that I don’t think there is a metaphysical holiness to life; life is not inherently “sacred” — it’s just life, and I have to be the one who decides for me what that does or doesn’t mean. That is, I don’t think there is some sort of Platonic argument to be made for an essential, archetypal, transcendent, universal form of “holiness” or “sacredness”. I find the belief in such to be, for far too many people, the first step to boorish codswallop and aggravating woo-woo, which all too often rush on to churlish zealotry and belligerent ideology if left unchecked.
Semantics and whatnot aside, it pisses me off to no end when certain people in the world imply that an atheist can’t understand what’s sacred, what’s holy, what’s worth or due great admiration, reverence or veneration. That’s just the ill-informed nonsense of people who can’t think outside the box, or who don’t properly know what’s actually in the box. At its root, sacred, related to consecration, basically means “dedicated as holy”, and at its root holy is related to the concept of wholeness. So these ideas lead most people back to “God”, because “God” is seen as the force/being that/who makes everything whole. Put another way, they see “God” as the “universal form” or quintessence of holiness, not to mention its conscious arbiter. It is easily argued — and I dare say rightly — that this is not at all necessarily so, and that there are plenty of reasons not to assume so. For an atheist, for me, the goal of apprehending the wholeness (or holiness) of life is an ongoing quest of comprehension (or consecration).
I want very much to bring that goal with me wherever I go. I don’t ever want to forget that that is the process I am dedicated to. Call it my religion, if you want.
In its etymology the word religion means (or so it is generally agreed upon) “to bind together”, so it would not be too gauche for an atheist to say that the apprehension of (i.e., the grasping and laying hold of) the wholeness of life is for her or him a religious process, in other words it is a process of taking that which has been laid hold of and binding it together so that it may be comprehended in the light of the whole. Such a religion shall ever be, I’m sure, very personal and particular to any given individual, but there will also be a great deal of universal material provided by the arts and sciences and by the fact that we are, as humans, as mammals, as animals, as living beings, greatly alike one another in myriad ways. This is already necessarily true, after a fashion, of religions with a “God” or “gods”, but the abrahamic religions that most of the world’s people follow — and that the rulers of the currently most powerful countries in the world believe in — are built on faulty premises, overrun with contradictory ideas, bogged down by questionable interpolations and doubtful interpretations, tangled in misinformation and ignorance, and are, as “timeless truths” go, sorely outdated.
Any human endeavor that might be called religious in the sense I’ve outlined above will be prone to error at some point. That is because it is a human endeavor. It seems to me that the safest way to navigate betwixt the Scylla of fanaticism and the Charybdis of nihilism is to never forget that what one believes must forever be in review, it must be falsifiable, and one must remain open to changing one’s mind in light of new data that calls for such change. We must deal scientifically with our personal religion.
If I am ever to make friends then I will have to find people with an understanding at least similar to mine. I see them often enough on the Web, but with only a couple notable exceptions such friendships have never lasted long or come to fruition. After all, I live in the United States during, as Eric Frank Russell or Terry Pratchett might call it, interesting times. My country is steeped in all manner of foolishness, and though there are many good people attempting to flush out the nonsense there is yet a great deal of happy, affirmative consensus, even among those “on my side”, on matters I find contrary to me and painfully stupid. Al Gore is a great man, for example, and I’d be happy to be his friend, but that doesn’t make his “God” real, and I cringe whenever he starts in with his beliefs. Still, I have broad hopes among my peers. It is possible that some day, some stranger will appear in my life with an extended hand and a knowing smile. It has happened before. And, really, I have to admit that I am not going to be satisfied with anyone who, when contrasted to the people I work with, is less than exceptional. But I know in my heart that it’s possible I’ll meet someone good for me. And, really, I’m willing to sacrifice something for it.
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