Indeed, [theologians] resemble lawyers in two ways. In the first place, they accept books and traditions as data that it is not up to them to criticize. They can only hope to make the best of these books and traditions by selecting the most propitious passages and precedents; and where the law seems to them harsh, inhuman, or dated, all they can do is have recourse to exegesis.

Secondly, many theologians accept the morality that in many countries governs the conduct of the counsel for the defense. Ingenuity and skillful appeals to the emotions are considered perfectly legitimate; so are attempts to ignore all the inconvenient evidence, as long as one can get away with it, and the refusal to engage in inquiries that are at all likely to discredit the predetermined conclusion: that the client is innocent. If all else fails, one tries to saddle one’s opponent with the burden of disproof; and as a last resort one is content with a reasonable doubt that after all the doctrines that one has defended might be true.

I retrieved this quote from Jerry Coyne’s blog, Why Evolution is True. Upon Coyne’s recommendation, Walter Kaufmann’s book The Faith of a Heretic is my next book to read on the matter of religion. Oh, so much to read and so little time.

(Source: whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com)

Several years ago, I pitched a freelance piece about black atheism to a prominent magazine geared toward African-Americans. The pitch was denied, but not for any real reason. “That one might be a bit, uh, hard,” is all my editor said. I’d later come to find out that he was merely sheltering me from his ultra-Christian executive editor, who would never let a piece questioning religion run in the magazine.

Black America’s religious problem isn’t that it’s highly religious—most of America is religious—it’s that, in my experience, it’s highly religious to the point of exclusion, as if black people living their lives without God don’t count. Black atheists or agnostics are often looked at by other blacks as alien or pitiable. A black atheist quoted in the New York Times last year said his mother was bothered more by the admission that he is an atheist than the admission that he is gay. Another in the Huffington Post said that declaring she was an atheist to her black friends was “social suicide.”

I can understand where they’re coming from. In high school, I went on a day-trip to a convocation of Black Students Unions, where we were all asked to bow our heads and pray before lunch. I was shocked. I tipped my head out of politeness, but rather than pray, I just sat there and wondered if what we were doing was legal. A few years later, during my freshman year in college, a black girl asked me what church I was going to attend as if it were as certain as asking me where I planned on eating or breathing. When I told her I wouldn’t be going to any church, she wrenched her face away from me, aghast, like I’d vomited onto her lap. “Oh,” she responded, “OK.” We literally never spoke again.

***

I can’t remember exactly when the last line of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” address began to bother me, but I think it was sometime around 6th grade. That was the year my history teacher had the class sit through all 14 hours of Eyes on the Prize, memorizing dates and important heroes and the names “Selma” and “Little Rock.” Growing up with a black history-buff father, I’d heard the speech many times before. But I’d never pored over it in conjunction with a deep dissection of the Civil Rights movement as a whole. And when I finally did, I just couldn’t get over that last line.

“One day, if everyone does get free at last,” I asked my dad, “why would we thank God Almighty? Why not thank ourselves for working hard?” My father, who had been raised in the Baptist church and converted to Catholicism for his first marriage before leaving both, is the person who gave me my initial skepticism of religion, so he laughed at my question. “It’s because if you believe in a certain kind of god,” he answered after a long bit of silence, “you believe that that god provides you with everything. It’s like thanking the sun for an ear of corn. You wouldn’t be able to get the corn without a farmer or a truck, but before those things, you need the sun.”

I always thought that was an elegant description of why some people thank god for even the smallest things, but it never fully sated me. And as I got older and more interested in what my ethnicity meant to me, I grew increasingly troubled by how linked so much of black history—and thus modern black America—is with religion.

To begin with, there are the Reverends King, Ralph Abernathy, Joseph Lowery, Fred Shuttlesworth, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson, not to mention countless others both alive and dead. After escaping from slavery, Frederick Douglass was briefly a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Booker T. Washington taught Sunday school at his Baptist church in West Virginia, and, when he was appointed president of the Tuskegee Institute, he said the school should be sure to impact the “moral and religious life of the people.” Harriet Tubman believed the intense dreams she had of salvation and freedom were gifts from God. Even early America’s preeminent black scientist, George Washington Carver, put his faith in the Lord, saying that the key to his success was a Bible passage: “In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.’”

Elsewhere, there is the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. There are the Christian hymns turned folk anthems—”Go Tell It on the Mountain,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “We Shall Overcome”—that bathed Civil Rights marches in even more Christianity. There is the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which mentions “God” four times compared to the single mention in the “Star-Spangled Banner” (there’s no mention of God at all in the abridged version we sing). There is Black liberation theology, a form of worship that seeks to combat racism via Biblical principles and narratives. Black liberation theology became somewhat of a household term in 2008, when Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was accused of being a radical purveyor of it.

Black religious life has always extended beyond Christianity, of course, to notable Muslims like Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, Yusef Lateef, Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def), and the many, many black Muslims who aren’t famous. There is also an increasing number of African-American Jews, who have had some mild fame at least since Sammy Davis Jr. converted.

It’s impossible to criticize the black community for its history of devotion to God. For a long time, black houses of worship doubled as war rooms to plan protest actions and galvanize people made weary by centuries of racist violence and legislation. When many black children attended Sunday school throughout the 19th and early 20th century, they not only received the standard Biblical lessons, they also learned to read and write, skills not necessarily afforded to them, often by law. By the time Dr. King was preaching in churches throughout the South, the strength of the black church was made obvious by how many white supremacists sought to destroy them with explosions and fire—the Klan wasn’t bombing black bars or brothels, and there was a reason for that.

Blacks are now the most religious ethnic group in America, with 86 percent saying they’re “very” to “moderately” religious compared to just 65 percent of whites. Even blacks who purport to have no involvement with any church, mosque, or synagogue whatsoever are generally unwilling to reject the concept of God entirely, making African-Americans also the least likely to call themselves atheist or agnostic. For us people of color with no devotion to religion whatsoever, a tiny minority within a minority, the internal culture clash can sometimes prove awkward. It’s this culture clash that I find so irritating and ugly.

And the job of airing the “black perspective” on cable news is very often given to people like Reverend Jackson or Reverend Sharpton or Roland Martin, who has a master’s degree in “Christian Communications” from Louisiana Baptist University, an unaccredited religious institution. I don’t care that so many African-American leaders are steeped in deep religious tradition; I care that those are the people called upon to speak for all of black America, and they always have been. Most white Americans are religious, too, and yet MSNBC or CNN would never call on the pastor Joel Osteen to dissect the problems facing all white Americans. The networks would understand, rightly, that Osteen’s deep religious conviction makes him an inapt spokesperson for a group of people with diverse beliefs. That those networks don’t afford blacks the same respect is telling, and it’s a tacit acceptance of the myth that blacks and religion, particularly Christianity, are one and the same.

So that I don’t come off as someone content to reject the status quo without offering a solution, I’d like to make a formal nomination: I nominate astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as the black leader America needs in the 21st Century. Though our numbers remain small, African-Americans willing to out themselves as agnostic or atheist represent a growing category, with one report finding that the percentage of blacks calling themselves nonreligious nearly doubled from 1990 to 2008. To that end, it’s important to begin moving away from the near monopoly religious persons have over professional black leadership. This doesn’t mean we have to stop listening to Reverends Sharpton and Jackson. Rather, I’d simply like us to start listening to and seeking out the opinions of blacks who eschew religious faith in favor of finding motivation and glory outside the church. I think we’d discover that many of the opinions religious blacks may think of as churchly are actually similar to those held by nonreligious blacks, which would be a lesson in and of itself.

So why Tyson? Not only because he self-identifies as an agnostic and says that there is “no evidence” to support the fact that anyone benevolent created the universe. But also because Tyson, whose Twitter account and YouTube reputation are stuff of internet legend, seems to be possessed of an inquisitiveness from which I believe the entire world could learn.

One of the things that irritates me to no end about black churches is how many of them spreadnoxious homophobia. Many white churches do the same, of course, but those aren’t the ones preaching to communities being ravaged by HIV and AIDS. To be fair, Al Sharpton has come out against the black church’s anti-gay nonsense before, yet it still persists, supported by pastors who believe the Bible both condemns homosexuality and trumps whatever any mortal like Sharpton says. That’s always the problem with heralding a holy book while attempting to scoff at what people believe that holy book says; it’s hard to have it both ways.

Tyson doesn’t take his lessons from the Bible. Nor does he take his lessons from the Dawkins Manual on Condescending to Theists. When asked if he’s an atheist, Tyson likes to say that the only “ist” he is is a “scientist.” I think it’s time more blacks followed Tyson’s lead and, instead of looking to the Bible for answers, began looking for understanding in the realities and evidence around them. And based on what I’ve seen of the problems impacting the black community, from poverty to illness to violence to crushing racism, if there is a God up there watching us suffer this way, it’s probably time to admit that he’s not coming to save us.

What if black Americans woke up this weekend and didn’t go to church or Sunday school? What if they instead took that time to enrich themselves in other ways, like talking to their families about their worries and insecurities, or reading books? What if the thousands of black Americans who follow Creflo Dollar, a multimillionaire megachurch pastor in command of mansions and a Rolls Royce, stopped donating their money and time to him, and instead used those resources to improve their own lives? What if they, as Tyson has done, became scientists out to explore their world in new ways? Would they get happier? Would the ones who hate gays finally be able to get over their fears? Would some of them sit at the kitchen table with their mothers and sob because the world seems so confusing and hurtful all the time? I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, and perhaps they’re the wrong questions to ask. But I do know that improving the black community via the church is an idea that seems to have run its course, and I’d like to move forward.

My paternal grandmother was a sweet woman with a third-grade education who spent her life working as a maid in a wealthy white factory owner’s mansion. She was a Christian, and she prayed and said that God had blessed her and me and our family, and I loved her dearly. I now miss the sound of her voice.

One story my father tells about my grandmother is of the time he was standing with her in her kitchen in 1969, talking about the impending moon landing. “I just don’t know how they’re going to be able to do it,” my grandmother said to my dad. “It seems impossible.” “You don’t understand, mom,” my dad, who at this point had been to Vietnam, college, and law school, said. He motioned to the home around them. “The space shuttle is bigger than this entire house!” “I know that,” my grandmother said. “So how’s something that big going to get around all those teeny, tiny stars?”

My grandmother prayed for me until the day she died. I thank her for that, along with everything else she did for me, but I often wish she’d spent that time learning about the stars instead.

Cord Jefferson is the senior editor at GOOD magazine.

(Source: Gawker)

As everyone is jumping on this fabulous Kony 2012 bandwagon (I’ve still not seen the video) I feel it is my turn to hop on board the express train. I will concede that the Invisible Children group, does have some merit to their campaign to remove Kony. However, I am more inclined to agree with the critics that note that this particular approach, simplifies the complicated nature of the bush war that has been waged in Uganda for nearing three decades now. I am also inclined to agree with the assessment that the nature of this campaign certainly has some elements of, “white man swooping into the troubled region of Africa to solve the problems of the brutal savages” feel to it. And finally that there does not appear to be much participation by the Ugandan people or even the Acholi people themselves in this whole campaign effort to remove Joseph Kony.

Having said that though, I would like to draw folks attention to the fact that this was a matter Christopher Hitchens addressed in his book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. In that book, Mr Hitchens points out what could possibly the be underlying religious and spiritual motivations for the actions of Mr Kony and his “Lords Resistance Army”. A fascinating read, written with the same razor-sharp insight, typical of Hitchens. I have quoted the section on Kony and the LRA below.

In northern Uganda in late 2005,1 sat in a center for the rehabilitation of kidnapped and enslaved children in the land of the Acholi people who live on the northern side of the Nile. The listless, vacant, hardened little boys (and some girls) were all around me. Their stories were distressingly similar. They had been seized, at the age of anything from eight to thirteen, from their schools or homes by a stonefaced militia that was itself originally made up of abducted children. Marched into the bush, they were “initiated” into the force by one (or two) of two methods. They either had to take part in a murder themselves, in order to feel “dirtied up” and implicated, or they had to submit to a prolonged and savage whipping, often of up to three hundred strokes. (“Children who have felt cruelty,” said one of the elders of the Acholi people, “know very well how to inflict it.”) The misery inflicted bythis army of wretches turned zombies was almost beyond computation. It had razed villages, created a vast refugee population, committed hideous crimes such as mutilation and disemboweling, and (in a special touch of evil) had continued to kidnap children so that the Acholi were wary  of taking strong countermeasures lest they kill or injure one of their “own.”

The name of the militia was the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (LRA), and it was led by a man named Joseph Kony, a passionate former altar boy who wanted to subject the area to the rule of the Ten Commandments. He baptized by oil and water, held fierce ceremonies of punishment and purification, and insured his followers against death. His was a fanatical preachment of Christianity. As it happened, the rehabilitation center in which I was sitting was also run by a fundamentalist Christian organization. Having been out into the bush and seen the work of the LRA, I fell to talking with the man who tried to repair the damage. How did he know, I asked him, which of them was the truest believer? Any secular or state-run outfit could be doing what he was doing—fitting prosthetic limbs and providing shelter and “counseling”—but in order to be Joseph Kony one had to have real faith.

 

To my surprise, he did not dismiss my question. It was true, he said, that Kony’s authority arose in part from his background in a priestly Christian family. It was also true that people were apt to believe he could work miracles, by appealing to the spirit world and promising his acolytes that they were death-proof. Even some of those who had run away would still swear that they had seen wonders performed by the man. All that a missionary could do was to try and show people a different face of Christianity.

 

I was impressed by this man’s frankness. There were some other defenses that he might have offered. Joseph Kony is obviously far away from the Christian “mainstream.” For one thing, his paymasters and armorers are the cynical Muslims of the Sudanese regime, who use him to make trouble for the government of Uganda, which has in turn supported rebel groups in Sudan. In an apparent reward for this support, Kony at one stage began denouncing the keeping and eating of pigs, which, unless he has become a fundamentalist Jew in his old age, suggests a payoff to his bosses. These Sudanese murderers, in their turn, have for years been conducting a war of extermination not just against the Christians and animists of southern Sudan, but against the non-Arab Muslims of Darfur province. Islam may officially make no distinction between races and nations, but the slaughterers in Darfur are Arab Muslims and their victims are African Muslims. The “Lord’s Resistance Army” is nothing but a Christian Khmer Rouge sideshow in this more general horror.

(Source: )

Led by the biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of “The God Delusion,” atheism has taken on a new life in popular religious debate. Dawkins’s brand of atheism is scientific in that it views the “God hypothesis” as obviously inadequate to the known facts. In particular, he employs the facts of evolution to challenge the need to postulate God as the designer of the universe. For atheists like Dawkins, belief in God is an intellectual mistake, and honest thinkers need simply to recognize this and move on from the silliness and abuses associated with religion.

Most believers, however, do not come to religion through philosophical arguments. Rather, their belief arises from their personal experiences of a spiritual world of meaning and values, with God as its center.

In the last few years there has emerged another style of atheism that takes such experiences seriously. One of its best exponents is Philip Kitcher, a professor of philosophy at Columbia. (For a good introduction to his views, see Kitcher’s essay in “The Joy of Secularism,” perceptively discussed last month by James Wood in The New Yorker.)

Instead of focusing on the scientific inadequacy of theistic arguments, Kitcher critically examines the spiritual experiences underlying religious belief, particularly noting that they depend on specific and contingent social and cultural conditions. Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning. This “cultural relativism” argument is an old one, but Kitcher shows that it is still a serious challenge. (He is also refreshingly aware that he needs to show why a similar argument does not apply to his own position, since atheistic beliefs are themselves often a result of the community in which one lives.)

Even more important, Kitcher takes seriously the question of whether atheism can replace the sense of meaning and purpose that believers find in religion. Pushed to the intellectual limit, many will prefer a religion of hope if faith is not possible. For them, Tennyson’s “‘the stars,’ she whispers, ‘blindly run’” is a prospect too bleak to sustain our existence. Kitcher agrees that mere liberation from theism is not enough. Atheists, he maintains, need to undertake the positive project of showing how their worldview can take over what he calls the ethical “functions” of theism.

There are those — Dawkins, for one example; existentialists like Sartre, for another — who are invigorated at the very thought that there is no guiding power in the universe. Many others, however, need convincing that atheism (or secular humanism, as Kitcher prefers) has the resources to inspire a fulfilling human life. If not, isn’t the best choice to retreat to a religion of hope? Why not place our bet on the only chance we have of real fulfillment?

Kitcher has a two-part answer. First, he offers a refined extension of Plato’s famous dilemma argument in “Euthyphro” to show that contrary to widespread opinion, theism is not in fact capable of grounding the ethical values that make life worthwhile. Second, to show that secularism is capable of grounding these values, he offers a sophisticated account of how ethics could have evolved as a “social technology” — a set of optimally designed practices and norms — to satisfy basic human desires.

Kitcher’s case is open to serious objections, but it has the conceptual and logical weight that is lacking in the polemics of the scientific atheists. It also lets Kitcher enter into genuine dialogue with believers like the philosopher Charles Taylor, whose defense of religion in “A Secular Age” offers an essential counterpoint to almost everything Kitcher says.

For a long time, meaningful engagement between believers and nonbelievers was, especially in the United States, blocked by an implicit mutual agreement: religious belief was exempted from challenge, provided it remained within a private sphere of religious life, and was not asserted as relevant to any issues of public concern. Over the last few decades, however, conservative Christians have rejected this agreement, particularly over issues like abortion and evolution. The scientific atheists, led by Dawkins, rightly responded with their aggressive insistence that militant believers justify the claims they wanted taken seriously in the public sphere.

The resulting polemics cleared some murky air but now have little use except to keep assuring each side of the other’s perversity. Kitcher’s secular humanism reanimates the debate, promising much needed serious reflection on whether the divine can or should be eliminated from our moral lives.

Such a debate may not result in a victory for secular humanism. But even if it does, secular humanists would still face the much greater practical task of embedding their convictions in secular versions of the religious institutions, rituals and customs that even today remain vital fixtures in our social world. But Kitcher’s challenge, unlike Dawkins’s, is one that reflective believers have no easy way of evading, and meeting it may well seriously revise their understanding of their faith.

(Source: The New York Times)