Whoever said we aren't in the foxholes obviously never looked for us there.
It is difficult sometimes to be in a religious minority group, particularly one so misunderstood and maligned. It is difficult to sometimes put a finger on the subtle changes that a minority faces in ordinary events (whether cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic, or otherwise). Other times, you face sharp reminders that you are not like the others, and that that difference is not something that they enjoy.
Sometimes, those signals are fairly overt. When George Bush (the original, not the cowboy) ran for the Presidency, he remarked to a journalist that atheists ought not to be considered patriots, and ought not to be considered citizens either. When I lived at KU in the student housing, posters by religious organizations were approved by the university and posted in dorm hallways and common areas with a turnaround of only a few days after being submitted for approval. Posters for an atheists group, of which I was the president, failed to ever be approved, though never being rejected either. The posters always seemed to find their way to the bottom of the stack to be approved, in many cases languishing for so long in the bottom of the stack (while others were approved only hours after being submitted) that events the posters advertised as being two weeks away would come and go without ever seeing the light of day. When posters were hand posted to bulletin boards, they were unceremoniously removed, or in some cases vandalized with profanities I’d rather not repeat here.
Not surprisingly, another event has happened which sparked these thoughts to resurface.
Two days ago, my brother phoned me to tell me that he was on his way back to his house after a day-outing to Canada. Along I-5, at that Canadian border crossing stands a monument known as the Peace Arch. The Peace Arch is a massive stone arch that symbolizes the open gate between the United States and Canada, and the freedom to travel from one country to another that epitomizes one of our cherished freedoms in the West – our right to travel.
My brother had been invited to an annual picnic held on the large grassy acres that surround the public monument, and the picnic was largely a success according to my brother’s accounts. Hosted by a collection of Washington and British Columbia-based atheist and humanist organizations, the event was supposed to be a celebration of non-religious ways of life and the respect for humanity such views encourage.
My brother has made the trip to Canada dozens of times to visit their zoos and aquariums, attend business conferences, spend money in their shops and restaurants, and enjoy the cultural landscape that is the lower portion of British Columbia. This trip, however, went less smoothly.
At the border crossing, the Canadian official asked my brother the standard first question of “For what purpose are you entering Canada?” My brother responded that he was attending a picnic at the Peace Arch (within view), and would only be visiting for an afternoon. The border guard asked whether my brother was having the picnic alone or whether he was going with friends, and my brother told him that the picnic was an annual event hosted by a group that he belonged to. The border guard wasn’t satisfied with that answer, and pressed for the kind of group that my brother belonged for. Telling him that it was a religious group (that’s always an easier answer), the guard asked what religion it represented. My brother finally gave in and told him that it was hosted by an atheist group.
According to my brother, the guard’s demeanor then changed. He began looking into the car through the windows, and asked my brother whether the group was a ‘hate’ group, whether they intended to burn any crosses or religious icons, and whether they intended to use any firearms during their festivities.
Ask yourself whether the reaction would have been similar if my brother has said that he belonged to a Catholic organization, a Baptist one, or a Presbyterian group. Try to imagine the outrage that would permeate large fractions of the ‘States if Canadians were asking whether Christian organizations that hold annual picnics were there as representatives of ‘hate’ groups.
It is difficult to be a non-religious person in a religious climate, and sometimes it takes small reminders like that to let me know, however tolerant we pretend to be, racism, sexism, religionism, speciesism, and any number of other forms of prejudice lurk just beneath the surface of our civilization.
Sometimes, those signals are fairly overt. When George Bush (the original, not the cowboy) ran for the Presidency, he remarked to a journalist that atheists ought not to be considered patriots, and ought not to be considered citizens either. When I lived at KU in the student housing, posters by religious organizations were approved by the university and posted in dorm hallways and common areas with a turnaround of only a few days after being submitted for approval. Posters for an atheists group, of which I was the president, failed to ever be approved, though never being rejected either. The posters always seemed to find their way to the bottom of the stack to be approved, in many cases languishing for so long in the bottom of the stack (while others were approved only hours after being submitted) that events the posters advertised as being two weeks away would come and go without ever seeing the light of day. When posters were hand posted to bulletin boards, they were unceremoniously removed, or in some cases vandalized with profanities I’d rather not repeat here.
Not surprisingly, another event has happened which sparked these thoughts to resurface.
Two days ago, my brother phoned me to tell me that he was on his way back to his house after a day-outing to Canada. Along I-5, at that Canadian border crossing stands a monument known as the Peace Arch. The Peace Arch is a massive stone arch that symbolizes the open gate between the United States and Canada, and the freedom to travel from one country to another that epitomizes one of our cherished freedoms in the West – our right to travel.
My brother had been invited to an annual picnic held on the large grassy acres that surround the public monument, and the picnic was largely a success according to my brother’s accounts. Hosted by a collection of Washington and British Columbia-based atheist and humanist organizations, the event was supposed to be a celebration of non-religious ways of life and the respect for humanity such views encourage.
My brother has made the trip to Canada dozens of times to visit their zoos and aquariums, attend business conferences, spend money in their shops and restaurants, and enjoy the cultural landscape that is the lower portion of British Columbia. This trip, however, went less smoothly.
At the border crossing, the Canadian official asked my brother the standard first question of “For what purpose are you entering Canada?” My brother responded that he was attending a picnic at the Peace Arch (within view), and would only be visiting for an afternoon. The border guard asked whether my brother was having the picnic alone or whether he was going with friends, and my brother told him that the picnic was an annual event hosted by a group that he belonged to. The border guard wasn’t satisfied with that answer, and pressed for the kind of group that my brother belonged for. Telling him that it was a religious group (that’s always an easier answer), the guard asked what religion it represented. My brother finally gave in and told him that it was hosted by an atheist group.
According to my brother, the guard’s demeanor then changed. He began looking into the car through the windows, and asked my brother whether the group was a ‘hate’ group, whether they intended to burn any crosses or religious icons, and whether they intended to use any firearms during their festivities.
Ask yourself whether the reaction would have been similar if my brother has said that he belonged to a Catholic organization, a Baptist one, or a Presbyterian group. Try to imagine the outrage that would permeate large fractions of the ‘States if Canadians were asking whether Christian organizations that hold annual picnics were there as representatives of ‘hate’ groups.
It is difficult to be a non-religious person in a religious climate, and sometimes it takes small reminders like that to let me know, however tolerant we pretend to be, racism, sexism, religionism, speciesism, and any number of other forms of prejudice lurk just beneath the surface of our civilization.
posted by The Academian | 12:11 AM
6 Comments:
you consider yourself to be a member of a much maligned minority religious group (first paragraph)and then a non-religious person (last paragraph). does this mean you are a non-practicing athiest?
That is a difficult question to answer because it delves deeply into the very nature of what the term 'atheism' means and how we categorize it as a society.
For many atheists, myself included, it is far easier to simply label atheism a religious potision than to explain precisely why it is not a religious position at all (but rather the absence of such a position).
On the one hand, there is much to recommend labeling atheism as a religious position, and these reasons are quite practical in nature. When I was head of an atheist group on my college campus, if we wished to attract new members, we had to think about where prospective members might look for us in a catalog of groups. Under the heading of 'religion' is a fairly likely place to start searching for a non-religious group, strangely enough. Many people aren't all that interested in the epistemological and ontological differences between religious experience and atheistic experience either, so it saves quite a lot of time for atheists to explain their beliefs as simply another religious choice.
For reasons like this, I usually tend to suggest (on a practical level) that atheism could be equated with a religious position. On a theoretical level, though, this is very, very far from the truth of the matter. Atheism is not another religious position, like Islam, Hinduism, or Lutheranism. Instead, atheism is a direct repudiation of perhaps the most cherished core of most religious thought (that there is a god).
Modern linguistic philosophy tells us that the rule of the excluded middle applies to the realm of language. The rule of the excluded middle states that for any object (X) and it's opposite (not X), the pair occupy the entire field of existence. So, logically, if I have things that are white and things that are not white, this exhausts everything in the universe. There are no things such that they are both white and not white, and there are no things that are neither white nor not white.
Language is the same. Theism is the word used to describe someone who has a belief in a god. Atheism (its opposite) is not a belief that there is no god, but rather not having a belief in a god. An infant is an atheist. A cucumber is an atheist. A starfish is an atheist. All are atheists because they are unable to have beliefs of the complexity necessary to have a belief in god.
There are atheists who go an additional step and deny the existence of a god (I teeter on this edge, vacillating between what is known as positive atheisim and simple agnosticism, which is also atheism). However, as a person not having a belief in god, it is inaccurate to suggest that it is another religious position. In fact, it is the absence of religious positions, by definition.
I'm not really sure what a non-practicing, or practicing, atheist would be, since the only thing that unites atheists in reality is the absence of a belief, and one might easily imagine how difficult that is as a basis for forming any sort of practice if one imagines trying to form a group with set practices whose only shared connection is a lack of belief in the existence of a small china teapot orbiting the sun out beyond Pluto.
I'm exceptionally curious now to discover what a practicing or non-practicing atheist might be. Given that we aren't like Catholics (just picking one of many sects, at random) with set dogmas, faiths, customs, or rituals, I'm not sure what it would mean to practice atheism any more than it does to practice a-teapot-ism.
People often parse over definitions, so perhaps your definition of atheism is different than mine. But in my mind the claim to be an atheist (one who declares affirmatively that there is no God) is absolutely mindboggling. I have no qualms with agnostics (one who may not believe in God, but ultimately holds that knowing whether God exists is unknown and likely unknownable to humans), but I wonder how atheists can support their sweeping claim based on how little we as humans really know about the earth, science, the universe, and the "beginning" of all things. Everyday science is redefining itself based on new "findings"... in a hundred years from now our knowledge will completely eclipse and likely overturn much of what we "know" now... as will our knowledge again in yet another hundred years. Given how little we really know, how can one make such a claim, to "know" there is no God? That seems more fantastic that someone knowing there IS a God... at least that person could claim that God revealed that knowledge to them. To support his/her claim, a true atheist must have at hand a God-like knowledge of all things... so I say you're an agnostic, not an atheist (under my definition).
Good to hear from you again, Marc!
Your definition of atheist (one who affirmatively denies the existence of a god) is the common conception of what an atheist is, but it is not an accurate definition. That is the definition for a sub-type of atheism known as positive atheism. Atheism itself is the pure negation of theism, and includes those who affirmatively assert there is no god (positive atheists), those who assert the existence question is unanswerable on epistemological grounds (agnostics), those who simply haven't made up their minds (which is NOT agnosticism as the common definition would assert), conscious things that don't have the mental capacity to hold a belief about a god (infants and the like), and inanimate objects as well.
You can see that the word 'atheist' doesn't really tell you much about the positive beliefs of anyone or anything so described, but this division is necessary to preserve the law of the excluded middle from failing when describing linguistic terms.
Because I do not hold a belief that there is a god or gods in this existence, I am an atheist. More often than not, I would contend that the question in unanswerable due to the nature of human knowledge and its pure limitation to things showable on empirical and experiential grounds. Since the divine cannot fall into this category (since we cannot emote, taste, smell, feel, see, or hear it), we must suspend our answer to the question of whether anything divine exists. When arguing this way, I fall under the rubric of an agnostic atheist.
There are arguments, though, for the assertion of positive atheism that are not done away with casually. For example, one could argue that the very idea of a god is internally inconsistent (and as a violation of the laws of logic, must not exist else the laws of logic fail to accurately describe the world, which opens up a huge problem in reasoning).
An interesting argument I heard recently dwelled on the meaning of the term 'exist.' The lecturer presenting this argument asked what it could possibly mean for an object or person to 'exist' apart from having a definite mass at some specific location in space-time. Under most conceptions of a god, the divine being fails to have either a mass or a location in space-time. To assert that a god without these qualities exists is to either use a very novel meaning for existence, dehumanize a god to some type of non-person force, or have an internally inconsistent statement.
From a practical standpoint, although untenable from a theoretical one, positive atheism is the norm for most all atheists (agnostic included) for the sole reason that people tend not to believe in things for which they have no reason to believe.
Bertrand Russell made famous the teapot analogy for the god-question. He suggested that there might be a small china teapot orbiting the sun, but for which we had never accumulated evidence (it has no appreciable gravity, it is too small to be seen by our telescopes, etc.). While we would, in theory, have to suspend our judgement of whether such a teapot exists, Russell suggested that in practice, we are all teapot-atheists.
Leaving open the question of whether a god exists on a practical level (albeit not on a theoretical level) demands that on a practical level we also leave open the question of whether unicorns, fairies, dragons, elves, dwarves, tiny china teapots orbiting the sun, the Easter bunny, Santa Claus and his flying reindeer, or the Trix rabbit actually exist. In practice, it is much easier to simply assume that these things do not exist because we have no credible evidence to suggest that they do, in fact exist.
It seems clear to me that trying to live one's life in such a way as not to offend the sensibilities of any of these proposed beings (and the list of things for which we have no evidence is infinitely long), would be catastrophic.
Another interesting puzzle is the atheism (indeed, frequently positive atheism) of many people who are quite religious, when it concerns the deities of other religions. A devout Baptist is certainly a theist when it comes to belief in the Christian God, but an atheist when it comes to belief in Kali, Vishnu, Poseidon, or Freyja.
Put simply, the evidence for these deities is every bit as strong as for the God the devout Baptist believes in, but for reasons which seem purely sociological (what was the dominant religion of the person's country? What was the religion of her parents?), she believes in one God, but not in any of the others.
If we are to purely suspend judgement, not just on a theoretical level, but a practical level too, then how is the devout Baptist in my example to act? Thor might very well have commands which conflict with the commands of Oranos that conflit with the commands of Allah. Without adopting (at least in practice, if not in theory) positive atheism, it can be a very crowded sky.
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