So basically I won't be posting that much here. Hoped to be pouring my thoughts onto here but it isn't very practical for me, not much time. Oh well, just every once in a while then!
On the subject of religion, being both an atheist and a teacher of 'religious education' in the UK, I feel that it's easier to get to the bottom of religion than to get to the bottom of religious education, which is a strange beast indeed. In fact RE is readily understandable in terms of its genesis and dominant interests etc. but it isn't for all that really very possible, which is to say, it's a bit crap. Now, something in RE is great, and even subversive, but it's also practically exhausting given the countering sway of the subject itself.
Enough of that.
It is easy to turn into an atheist as long as you possess a critical mind, and as long as you're not caught up within your culture or oppressed by people or circumstances. You can also be born an atheist, which is good. But why is being an atheist that much better than being a religous person, or, better, "a person attached to religion"?. This is my own term, which I prefer because you can just be a 'run of the mill' Christian or Muslim or whatever. If you have no special knowledge or interest in your religion but practice it in a basic way without ever really talking about it, you're attached to religion rather than 'religious', which is more nebulous and includes those odd pious people as well, whom it might be better to think about differently (or not at all?).
So why is it better to cut off your attachment to religion, to your spiritual history and perhaps the deeper part of your thinking (should you ever 'go there' whilst sat on the toilet or sat watching the sea, or going to the toilet in the sea while people sit there watching you)? Why should you say 'I'm an atheist' like it means something? Gosh it's even more nebulous than saying 'religious', since the number or religions is finite and atheism doesn't seem to have any conceptual anchor at all! That said of course the usual way of understanding the phrase 'I'm an atheist' involves platitudes to scientific understanding and the ability of science to explain things without reference to a deity (or an ontology, such as in Buddhism... Whatever). But, of course, there are ways of doing and understanding science that are not only not commensurable (yes, that word) with each other but which belong to such different spectra of life (I'm sure aliens must do science) that they can't even come into communication with each other. Religions really seem to be more narrow than sciences in this regard. A Catholic and a Buddhist don't seem so far apart when you consider comparing a warehouse of hairdryers and TV sets displaying the intro to 'Catchprase' to the almost interchangably hideous and beautiful machinations of the planet Tarbog VI.
I really quickly go into too much incidental shit. Does the humour make it better? Who cares.
Erm so you can say 'no' to religion for life-practical reasons. So you notice how much money your church makes whilst appreciating the way that life ensures that you don't have any other than by endenturing yourself, and you say 'Oh. What a bunch of fucks'. Or you use your education to wonder whether miracles can really happen and you say 'Not ever. Which means not then and certainly not as soon as I'm told'. You can disbelieve in religion by noticing how your peers think moronic things, driving you either further into theological madness or out of religion entirely, so this can be out of intellectual interest (like, secondary) or out of disgust (primary. 'Wtf, I hope I'm human'). I can be political, so you see how the church opposes something socially progressive and you think 'But that didn't change my mind. Why not?'.
Probably all of these and more are legitimate and really fine. The difficult thing is realising that you're just one person with one life, and that the institutions of religion and those attached to religion perceive advantages for themselves that aren't real, and that puts you in a bit of a quandary. How are you better off exactly? Is it just by knowing how to assign money by merit? How is that 'really important'? Is it by knowing that the world is too mechanically reliable to rule out the impossible happening? What is the meaning of that universe? Is it by knowing that at least you're not a moron? The smart man among morons tries to become King Moron or ... er... no other alternatives? Is it by riding the tide of history and helping humanity to a future with greater freedom? I'm (almost) always free to kill myself and I might do it if I have a lot of freedom and an entirely pointless existence.
That annoying pop-philosopher Alain De Botton has written a book recently (if you bothered to read this post you can bother to use google. I can't do it because I'm writing this stupid thing). He says, according to an article I read about it (yeah, whatever), that atheists need to look at the advantages that religious people afford themselves and simply not connect these advantages with the core of religion. So there can be a temple where atheists can gather and share social pleasantries, but they just happen not to pray to God, or kiss the slimy warty hand of the priest that you just happened to get rotated to your community (I hate the word community, still this is a 'community' without a 'commune-ication' with Captain oh so white and hairy i.e. God).
YouTube is seriously better than reading this. Go there.
I'm reminded by this idea about an atheist temple (and yes, of course, more besides I imagine, but I'm not going to read the stupid book), of that little psychological game you can play where you tell someone to remember words that you call out, or show on flash cards, and you give words associated with 'sweet' but you never say 'sweet', but the person then proceeds to pick it from a list of words at the end. That's just one way of saying that meanings reinforce each other and one idea calls up another (basic philosophy of mind anyway, I'm sure). In this way, going to a temple is always religious given that the meaning of a temple is very much settled as a religious building related intimately with the idea of the presence of God and so on. I wouldn't personally be able to walk into a temple without to some degree being affected by the idea of God. And that's not great when you want to cut him out of your life. I actually IRL happened to visited no temples today, so this was a better day without God than De Botton's idea of an atheistic future! (and it was free too).
So the idea of being an atheist can't be (I'm generalising ridiculously much but who gives a damn) supported by appropriation of religious apparatus, such as churches or chanting or impractical but expressive clothing, just because those are religious things. In order for a 'change' to occur where temples aren't where God lives, or where chanting doesn't conjure up religious sentiment, or wearing a sequined apron doesn't make you feel like a wizard, requires more than a 'just do it' attitude. It likely isn't impossible, but it still can't be done, as you would have to change so much as to have already undone religion before giving any fluffy community-minded positive meanings. Making an atheist cathedral would be pretty funny, but its use would be, well, along those lines, and used for specific things, such as sticking it to the man or whatever. That's not without its advantages, but it's not of De Botton's logic.
So I've spent too much time writing about baldy and forgotton that I wanted to say what is so great about being an atheist, or rather what could be so great about it from one perspective. So far I talked about reasons to be an atheist from a kind of set of limited perspectives that rely on a sort of common and limited reasoning. For me I don't think I'm an atheist for those reasons, as I'm capable of being more of a fantasist than all that and could probably bear most of the incidentally or methodlogically bad things about religion as long as I continued to feel a certain way about the universe and my own existence. I might well have been able to bear racism should my social awareness have been different, and so on, so that perceived racism wouldn't have been a barrier to faith. I remember calling the Hindu family at the estate shop the 'pakis' at the 'paki shop' when I was about 7, as other children used that word - my parents didn't but that hardly mattered. I was taught to hate racism first at school and that was actually a pretty good enlargening of my consciousness. If I'd continued to be racist into adult life I could have, as so many people do, paid lip service to caring about racial equality whilst harbouring deep suspicion of 'the darkies' or whatever.
So I could actually be a far, far worse person able to maintain racism (or whatever) and never really attribute the racism amongst my peers to the institutions that are pervaded by that racism, be it church or work or whatever. I'm not saying that religion makes you racist - swap the example with anything I can't be arsed. There's certainly an argument that in the UK the seats given to the CofE bishops in the House of Lords represent an overwhelmingly 'white' interest group (and for only religious-historical reasons do these positions exist), but I don't want to bang on about that, I'll just mention it. If it's ok by you, which of course it is because you don't really exist. Battleship.
I think the interesting thing for me is the tension between those strange thoughts I'd have as a religious person and the thoughts I allow myself as an atheist. If atheism is just a brute fact of efficiency, that is, if most atheists are atheists because society just has an amount of secular institutions and reasoning, then I couldn't really give any good argument for atheism. Atheism therefore seems a bit arbitrary. I might even, if my life had been slightly different, be religious, and if in such a hypothetical world atheism was to be argued for in this manner I would likely not really bat an eyelid at it. But atheism needs to be more than incidental, or politically generated, if it is truly better than religion.
And there's a better idea - that atheism be truly better - because although religions bang on about the truth, it can be denied by disbelief in its metaphysics. I'm talking about the vision of the entire universe as shot through with design, with punishments and rewards that are petty and far-fetched, the idea that humans live forever even though they don't, that there are souls that defy physics, that there are separate realms of existence and unseen heirarchies of beings, that it is possible to create something from nothing, that nothing ever truly makes sense without a completely unlikely story featuring characters that never make any sense in lieu of whatever never made sense in the first place, the miracles, the 'witchcraft', and so on. All these things can be said to be 'incorrect' in a very everyday sense, in which, perhaps, the amount of power possessed by angels could be suspected to increase when the amount of land possessed by the Greek Orthodox church increases. But you could then say, theologically of course, that the correct perspective first cares about the world of angels and only then about the world of land and coin.
To reject religion metaphysically first looks like a better choice from my perspective. And oddly, its not an investigation to cut out 'metaphysical nonsense' - I don't have a problem with nonsense per se - but just an investigation to move horizontally as it were, away from the possibility of religion and into other possibilities. Of course, if religion is metaphycially true (or consistent) then we've no right to be atheists, if that's the ground on which atheism stands and falls. Metaphysics. Wossat. In part it's the picture of the structure of the universe from the perspective of thought thinking to itself. 'Speculation' in the most formal sense is 'doing metaphysics', if you like. Suits me. Anyway, that (largely Christian for no particular reason) picture of the universe I gave a moment ago is a metaphysical picture (as I probably said but can't remember).
What bothers me is really the power of religion, the coersion. It's a bit of an assertion to say this but that's a pretty good read on how false something is. 'The old bastard is interfering again' we might say to ourselves - that's what it feels like when religion intrudes, limits freedom or oppresses thoughts. Atheism can possibly define itself in opposition to the metaphysical core of religion. It can define itself effectively therefore against the supplication, the being-subject-to, and the necessary power that seems to adhere to arbitrary forms of superstition.
A base speculation - religion corrupts creativity and doesn't allow life to expand and express itself in its diversity (at least according to me and why wouldn't you agree? If you've read this far you're probably me anyway, perhaps bothering to finally edit this piece of shit). Therefore atheism can see the metaphysics of the world expressed in terms of the generativity of all the diversity of nature (she-ra! I sound like a 1980s academic!) and eschew all coercive power.
What's the opposite, therefore, just as a starting point, for considering the place of the lowly limited creatures that humans are in terms of an unlimited creative capacity of nature? How about 'a God that desires no love for itself'. Make a religion out of that. Can't, can you? No. Good.
Now I'm tired and I apologise to myself should I have violated my rule of not using 'we' and 'as a society' or whatever. I'm trying but it ain't easy when you don't edit your writing even one bit before publishing it! How funny. Maybe if someone reads this post they will actually see a bit of ice lolly dribbled onto it with a bit of fluff attached or something. That would be pleasing, but beyond my technical abilities I'm afraid, as well as my inclination. So I'll write it down just to make a long turd even longer. Oh and the v key doesn't work very well on this computer so if there's vs missing it's only partly my fault. (I've fixed the vs -Ed) Who's Ed?
V
On the subject of religion, being both an atheist and a teacher of 'religious education' in the UK, I feel that it's easier to get to the bottom of religion than to get to the bottom of religious education, which is a strange beast indeed. In fact RE is readily understandable in terms of its genesis and dominant interests etc. but it isn't for all that really very possible, which is to say, it's a bit crap. Now, something in RE is great, and even subversive, but it's also practically exhausting given the countering sway of the subject itself.
Enough of that.
It is easy to turn into an atheist as long as you possess a critical mind, and as long as you're not caught up within your culture or oppressed by people or circumstances. You can also be born an atheist, which is good. But why is being an atheist that much better than being a religous person, or, better, "a person attached to religion"?. This is my own term, which I prefer because you can just be a 'run of the mill' Christian or Muslim or whatever. If you have no special knowledge or interest in your religion but practice it in a basic way without ever really talking about it, you're attached to religion rather than 'religious', which is more nebulous and includes those odd pious people as well, whom it might be better to think about differently (or not at all?).
So why is it better to cut off your attachment to religion, to your spiritual history and perhaps the deeper part of your thinking (should you ever 'go there' whilst sat on the toilet or sat watching the sea, or going to the toilet in the sea while people sit there watching you)? Why should you say 'I'm an atheist' like it means something? Gosh it's even more nebulous than saying 'religious', since the number or religions is finite and atheism doesn't seem to have any conceptual anchor at all! That said of course the usual way of understanding the phrase 'I'm an atheist' involves platitudes to scientific understanding and the ability of science to explain things without reference to a deity (or an ontology, such as in Buddhism... Whatever). But, of course, there are ways of doing and understanding science that are not only not commensurable (yes, that word) with each other but which belong to such different spectra of life (I'm sure aliens must do science) that they can't even come into communication with each other. Religions really seem to be more narrow than sciences in this regard. A Catholic and a Buddhist don't seem so far apart when you consider comparing a warehouse of hairdryers and TV sets displaying the intro to 'Catchprase' to the almost interchangably hideous and beautiful machinations of the planet Tarbog VI.
I really quickly go into too much incidental shit. Does the humour make it better? Who cares.
Erm so you can say 'no' to religion for life-practical reasons. So you notice how much money your church makes whilst appreciating the way that life ensures that you don't have any other than by endenturing yourself, and you say 'Oh. What a bunch of fucks'. Or you use your education to wonder whether miracles can really happen and you say 'Not ever. Which means not then and certainly not as soon as I'm told'. You can disbelieve in religion by noticing how your peers think moronic things, driving you either further into theological madness or out of religion entirely, so this can be out of intellectual interest (like, secondary) or out of disgust (primary. 'Wtf, I hope I'm human'). I can be political, so you see how the church opposes something socially progressive and you think 'But that didn't change my mind. Why not?'.
Probably all of these and more are legitimate and really fine. The difficult thing is realising that you're just one person with one life, and that the institutions of religion and those attached to religion perceive advantages for themselves that aren't real, and that puts you in a bit of a quandary. How are you better off exactly? Is it just by knowing how to assign money by merit? How is that 'really important'? Is it by knowing that the world is too mechanically reliable to rule out the impossible happening? What is the meaning of that universe? Is it by knowing that at least you're not a moron? The smart man among morons tries to become King Moron or ... er... no other alternatives? Is it by riding the tide of history and helping humanity to a future with greater freedom? I'm (almost) always free to kill myself and I might do it if I have a lot of freedom and an entirely pointless existence.
That annoying pop-philosopher Alain De Botton has written a book recently (if you bothered to read this post you can bother to use google. I can't do it because I'm writing this stupid thing). He says, according to an article I read about it (yeah, whatever), that atheists need to look at the advantages that religious people afford themselves and simply not connect these advantages with the core of religion. So there can be a temple where atheists can gather and share social pleasantries, but they just happen not to pray to God, or kiss the slimy warty hand of the priest that you just happened to get rotated to your community (I hate the word community, still this is a 'community' without a 'commune-ication' with Captain oh so white and hairy i.e. God).
YouTube is seriously better than reading this. Go there.
I'm reminded by this idea about an atheist temple (and yes, of course, more besides I imagine, but I'm not going to read the stupid book), of that little psychological game you can play where you tell someone to remember words that you call out, or show on flash cards, and you give words associated with 'sweet' but you never say 'sweet', but the person then proceeds to pick it from a list of words at the end. That's just one way of saying that meanings reinforce each other and one idea calls up another (basic philosophy of mind anyway, I'm sure). In this way, going to a temple is always religious given that the meaning of a temple is very much settled as a religious building related intimately with the idea of the presence of God and so on. I wouldn't personally be able to walk into a temple without to some degree being affected by the idea of God. And that's not great when you want to cut him out of your life. I actually IRL happened to visited no temples today, so this was a better day without God than De Botton's idea of an atheistic future! (and it was free too).
So the idea of being an atheist can't be (I'm generalising ridiculously much but who gives a damn) supported by appropriation of religious apparatus, such as churches or chanting or impractical but expressive clothing, just because those are religious things. In order for a 'change' to occur where temples aren't where God lives, or where chanting doesn't conjure up religious sentiment, or wearing a sequined apron doesn't make you feel like a wizard, requires more than a 'just do it' attitude. It likely isn't impossible, but it still can't be done, as you would have to change so much as to have already undone religion before giving any fluffy community-minded positive meanings. Making an atheist cathedral would be pretty funny, but its use would be, well, along those lines, and used for specific things, such as sticking it to the man or whatever. That's not without its advantages, but it's not of De Botton's logic.
So I've spent too much time writing about baldy and forgotton that I wanted to say what is so great about being an atheist, or rather what could be so great about it from one perspective. So far I talked about reasons to be an atheist from a kind of set of limited perspectives that rely on a sort of common and limited reasoning. For me I don't think I'm an atheist for those reasons, as I'm capable of being more of a fantasist than all that and could probably bear most of the incidentally or methodlogically bad things about religion as long as I continued to feel a certain way about the universe and my own existence. I might well have been able to bear racism should my social awareness have been different, and so on, so that perceived racism wouldn't have been a barrier to faith. I remember calling the Hindu family at the estate shop the 'pakis' at the 'paki shop' when I was about 7, as other children used that word - my parents didn't but that hardly mattered. I was taught to hate racism first at school and that was actually a pretty good enlargening of my consciousness. If I'd continued to be racist into adult life I could have, as so many people do, paid lip service to caring about racial equality whilst harbouring deep suspicion of 'the darkies' or whatever.
So I could actually be a far, far worse person able to maintain racism (or whatever) and never really attribute the racism amongst my peers to the institutions that are pervaded by that racism, be it church or work or whatever. I'm not saying that religion makes you racist - swap the example with anything I can't be arsed. There's certainly an argument that in the UK the seats given to the CofE bishops in the House of Lords represent an overwhelmingly 'white' interest group (and for only religious-historical reasons do these positions exist), but I don't want to bang on about that, I'll just mention it. If it's ok by you, which of course it is because you don't really exist. Battleship.
I think the interesting thing for me is the tension between those strange thoughts I'd have as a religious person and the thoughts I allow myself as an atheist. If atheism is just a brute fact of efficiency, that is, if most atheists are atheists because society just has an amount of secular institutions and reasoning, then I couldn't really give any good argument for atheism. Atheism therefore seems a bit arbitrary. I might even, if my life had been slightly different, be religious, and if in such a hypothetical world atheism was to be argued for in this manner I would likely not really bat an eyelid at it. But atheism needs to be more than incidental, or politically generated, if it is truly better than religion.
And there's a better idea - that atheism be truly better - because although religions bang on about the truth, it can be denied by disbelief in its metaphysics. I'm talking about the vision of the entire universe as shot through with design, with punishments and rewards that are petty and far-fetched, the idea that humans live forever even though they don't, that there are souls that defy physics, that there are separate realms of existence and unseen heirarchies of beings, that it is possible to create something from nothing, that nothing ever truly makes sense without a completely unlikely story featuring characters that never make any sense in lieu of whatever never made sense in the first place, the miracles, the 'witchcraft', and so on. All these things can be said to be 'incorrect' in a very everyday sense, in which, perhaps, the amount of power possessed by angels could be suspected to increase when the amount of land possessed by the Greek Orthodox church increases. But you could then say, theologically of course, that the correct perspective first cares about the world of angels and only then about the world of land and coin.
To reject religion metaphysically first looks like a better choice from my perspective. And oddly, its not an investigation to cut out 'metaphysical nonsense' - I don't have a problem with nonsense per se - but just an investigation to move horizontally as it were, away from the possibility of religion and into other possibilities. Of course, if religion is metaphycially true (or consistent) then we've no right to be atheists, if that's the ground on which atheism stands and falls. Metaphysics. Wossat. In part it's the picture of the structure of the universe from the perspective of thought thinking to itself. 'Speculation' in the most formal sense is 'doing metaphysics', if you like. Suits me. Anyway, that (largely Christian for no particular reason) picture of the universe I gave a moment ago is a metaphysical picture (as I probably said but can't remember).
What bothers me is really the power of religion, the coersion. It's a bit of an assertion to say this but that's a pretty good read on how false something is. 'The old bastard is interfering again' we might say to ourselves - that's what it feels like when religion intrudes, limits freedom or oppresses thoughts. Atheism can possibly define itself in opposition to the metaphysical core of religion. It can define itself effectively therefore against the supplication, the being-subject-to, and the necessary power that seems to adhere to arbitrary forms of superstition.
A base speculation - religion corrupts creativity and doesn't allow life to expand and express itself in its diversity (at least according to me and why wouldn't you agree? If you've read this far you're probably me anyway, perhaps bothering to finally edit this piece of shit). Therefore atheism can see the metaphysics of the world expressed in terms of the generativity of all the diversity of nature (she-ra! I sound like a 1980s academic!) and eschew all coercive power.
What's the opposite, therefore, just as a starting point, for considering the place of the lowly limited creatures that humans are in terms of an unlimited creative capacity of nature? How about 'a God that desires no love for itself'. Make a religion out of that. Can't, can you? No. Good.
Now I'm tired and I apologise to myself should I have violated my rule of not using 'we' and 'as a society' or whatever. I'm trying but it ain't easy when you don't edit your writing even one bit before publishing it! How funny. Maybe if someone reads this post they will actually see a bit of ice lolly dribbled onto it with a bit of fluff attached or something. That would be pleasing, but beyond my technical abilities I'm afraid, as well as my inclination. So I'll write it down just to make a long turd even longer. Oh and the v key doesn't work very well on this computer so if there's vs missing it's only partly my fault. (I've fixed the vs -Ed) Who's Ed?
V
