Results tagged “atheism”

There has been lots of excellent heavy thinking at Eric MacDonald's (Canadian!) Choice in Dying blog, which he started in December, and which is not confined to his central goal of making it easier for people to die the way we want to. I particularly like his piece today, which makes a point I think often gets missed about the current New Atheism:

New Atheists [...] are really not sceptical about the existence of a god or gods. We have no question about it at all, and this, not because of unwarranted certainty, but because we have no idea what a god is, and we don't think that religious believers know either.

There are many mysteries in our universe, and always will be. Atheists like me, however, have no reason to think that religion or theology explain or solve any of those mysteries. MacDonald (who is apparently a former Anglican priest) again:

Of course, like real disciplines of knowledge they engage in rational discussions, but at the basis of those discussions lie propositions which are not based on any evidence.

They are based on scripture and revelation, but, in examining the origins of those—whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Shinto, or otherwise...

...We still go back and back, and when we get to the end of a chain of traditions, we find someone with a pen! A human being, just like you and me! So the church, just like the Muslim authorities, took some human writings, no matter how fenced round with sanctity, and then elevated these writings to a stature they simply do not and cannot possess.

Yet theology is founded upon them. Theologians are governed by them. So are whole societies! Not only that, but they can neither be added to nor subtracted from. These are the very words of God—whatever that is assumed to mean within the structure of various theologies.

Here's what's so puzzling to me, who has never been religious (as opposed, perhaps, to those who have "de-converted"): in the absence of evidence-based knowledge or understanding about something, it wouldn't be my choice to make up an answer instead, or to rely on an explanation someone else made up a few hundred or a few thousand years ago.

Yes, I would prefer a good explanation, a truthful one with good evidence behind it. But I would prefer to say "I don't know"—to accept that we are ignorant about many things, and that chaos is out there—than to accept a poor answer without evidence, just to have some answer at all. At their core, at their foundations, religious and theological "explanations" are based on ideas somebody made up, usually with what would now be considered a very superficial, misguided, and simply incorrect understanding of how the world works.

No one knows (yet) what dark matter and dark energy are. No one knows (yet) how life started on Earth. No one knows (yet) why elementary particles are limited to having quantum spin only of certain values.

These are fundamental and important questions. Maybe we will know the answers someday. Researchers have ideas, but those ideas need to be tested against reality before we know if they're right. Not knowing is uncomfortable for me, but as I've written before, "there's no rule that reality has to be comfortable."

Christopher Hitchens holds some political views with which I disagree, but like him, I am a staunch atheist. Last summer he found out that he, like me, has stage 4 cancer, which will probably kill him, again like me, fairly soon. He has talked and written a fair bit about it, eloquently of course.

Most recent is this video interview (with text transcript, via Jerry Coyne), where he talks almost entirely about his cancer and the prospect of his own death. He still finds time to tear into Mother Teresa, though:

He says many things that mirror my own thoughts. However, perhaps because his cancer is so much more recent, he still thinks a treatment might come soon to keep him alive. He also still wants to contribute to treatment experiments, regardless of whether they might help him directly, which something I have decided I no longer want—I have suffered enough in four years.

Hitchens realizes he might never again see his native Britain, because travel is becoming more and more difficult. He acknowledges that, even if he were to know how many months he might have left before he dies, he'd need to know what kind of months those would be before he could decide what to do with them. He talks of profound weakness, of undertaking a simple task one day that might have been impossible the day before, and might be impossible again the next. All give me pangs of recognition.

He and I have never met, or spoken, or communicated in any way, but I feel kinship with Christopher Hitchens. He is 20 years older than I am. Yet we are both on a short road to our deaths, which will be our end, and we both know it.

My pre-death announcement over the weekend turned into a monster: a huge spike in my regular number of daily website visitors, dozens and dozens of comments (I didn't even know that Movable Type breaks them into pages of 50 until now), similar numbers of Twitter links and Facebook "likes" (my friends Bill and Darren mocked up a preferable "un-fucking-like" button instead), and quite a few emails and phone calls. It looks like I'll be on CBC Radio with Stephen Quinn again this week too.

Thank you to everyone who wrote. It's overwhelming. I joked on Twitter:

Social Media Guru Tip of the Week™: Need traffic/comments? Simply develop a terminal disease and announce it on your blog! Ask me how!

If you find that in poor taste, sorry, but I think you'll have to get used to it. As my wife Air says, either we laugh or we cry.

Anyway, I'll admit, this is exactly what I hoped would happen. I've been a compulsive writer all my life. Like Tim Bray, I can't not write, but I've never been able to keep a diary, because I've always wanted an audience. I write my blog for myself, of course, and as something for my family and friends, as a record of my thoughts. But deep down, selfishly, I also want an audience of strangers, people who know me because of my writing, and who find some value in what I publish on its own merits, not because they are my friend or my relative.

Sometimes I've found such an audience in magazines, or on television or radio, or even among people who never knew I was the one who'd written the instructions for their wireless modem. And I've genuinely found it here on my blog, more so than I could have imagined back in 2000 when I started it.

So, instead of getting paid, it's largely for the boost to my ego—and because I'm glad readers find value in my stuff—that I put together long series of posts on why cameras work the way they do, or on my opinions about religion and science, or about music and podcasting, and other topics. That's why I try to write something every day, on average (though I haven't managed it recently). It also keeps me in practice both writing and editing my own work.

What is comforting?

My most important legacy is with my wife and my two daughters, but that is a personal one, in the real world, a legacy that is quite peripheral to my writing, quite local, quite private. In public, it's what I write and say that might have an impact.

Yesterday, I received two especially moving emails. One was from someone who's been reading my blog for several years, but who'd never commented or written to me before. She told me that her father almost died last year, and that some of my posts about death had helped her handle the ordeal.

Like me, she doesn't believe in spirits, souls, or an afterlife, so she appreciated my take on thinking about death without them, while considering the joy that trying to understand life on its own terms can bring to the human mind and heart. To try to see the Universe as it really is, to understand how it works—and, so often, to succeed!—how can mere myths compete with that?

What, I wondered after reading her message, do I find comforting? To know that we are all made of star stuff (in Carl Sagan's phrase, or Moby's), and will be again; to know that every other living thing on Earth is our cousin; to see a blob in the sky and know it's the Andromeda Galaxy, as it was 2 million years ago; not to worry that life is some sort of perverse final exam, and to know instead that when it is over, that really is the end for each of us. Those things comfort me, not sadden me. Some find that hard to understand, but I hope what I write can help explain my feelings about it.

Not to fight

The second email was from someone I do know, whose brother died of cancer about a decade ago. She recalled when he concluded that the treatments weren't working, and how he decided to live after that, for however short a time. (It was a few months.) She wrote that "he may have stopped taking treatments, but he did not stop fighting."

I agree with her sentiment, but I would change one word now, after four years: "fight." I've used that word a lot too, but Christopher Hitchens made me think of it differently after he got cancer this year. It will probably kill him too. He wrote:

People don't have cancer: they are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this. It’s even in obituaries for cancer losers, as if one might reasonably say of someone that they died after a long and brave struggle with mortality.

He's right. Why must it be a fight, a war, a battle? (And Hitchens is no stranger to battles.) Those are stressful, soul-draining nouns, with images of violence and winners and losers.

I think less personally about my cancer than I used to. I fought it hard, I used to tell it to fuck off, I used to imagine the chemo snuffing it out like carpet bombing over Cambodia. More recently I've thought instead, no, cancer has no mind, no evil intent, no demon driving it. It is my own cells, my own tissue, malfunctioning, not able to stop growing when they're supposed to, not capable of doing their job of making body parts that keep me alive.

My cancer is a random, unthinking, physiological mistake. Some mutations cause cancer, some lead to new and wonderful forms of life. I got the bad one. For me now, my cancer is no more malevolent than bad weather, or an earthquake, or a rock I stub my toe on, or the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. There's no point getting angry at a rock, nor at my cancer, especially now.

I hate that it will kill me, and what that will do to my family. It's sad and unfair. But there's no one and nothing to blame. It's a pure example of "shit happens." (Oh, does it ever.) Like my correspondent's brother, my time has come to win the battle by not fighting anymore, by pushing back against the desire to treat the end of my life as a war and myself as a soldier. We all deserve better than war, whether in the mountains of Afghanistan or in the brain of a cancer patient like me.

I'll live my life, and when it's time to stop, I hope I can accept that when face-to-face with it. In some ways I have it easy: the hardest part is for everyone else, after I'm dead. By then I'll be gone, with not a care (or a thought, or a feeling) in the world. Lucky me?

Today would have been Carl Sagan's 76th birthday, though he died at 62, in 1996, of pneumonia brought on by a bone marrow disorder. He was a big influence on me, in his many publications, and particularly in his PBS TV series Cosmos and its accompanying book.

Although I watched the whole series, and brought the book to school with me often enough that the librarian gave me one of those industrial-strength plastic covers to protect the dust jacket, the first minute of this segment, from Episode 10, "The Edge of Forever," still stands out in my mind.

It was originally broadcast almost exactly 30 years ago, in November 1980, when I was 11. Sagan knew he was treading on dangerous ground, especially in his native America, so he must have chosen his words very carefully:

"If we wish to pursue this question courageously," he says about a godly origin to the Universe, "we must of course ask the next question: where did God come from? If we decide that this is an unanswerable question, why not save a step, and conclude that the origin of the Universe is an unanswerable question? Or if we say God always existed, why not save a step, and conclude that the Universe always existed?"

I had been thinking along these lines myself already. However, perhaps it was the budding writer in me, but I appreciated Sagan's thrift in that statement. It's Occam's Razor at its most efficient: "Why not save a step?" (And in the process, supersede all religions and theologies, incidentally.)

If we can explain the workings of the Universe without the supernatural, he was saying, we should do so. That is both to avoid unnecessary complexity in our explanations, and because it's the basis of science, which has taught us more about our world in the past few hundred years (especially in the last century) than we learned in all the millennia before.

But perhaps more importantly, Sagan suggested, if we cannot explain the workings of the Universe, or the Universe's very existence—at least not yet—then supernatural answers don't magically fill the void. Postulating an incomprehensible deity doesn't make the answers clearer, but murkier. It pushes them another unneeded step away.

That's how we treat things in the rest of life. Take one of my other favourite quotes, from William Strunk, about writing:

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

By the same reasoning, a cosmology should contain no unnecessary gods. That made sense to me at 11, and it still does. Thanks Carl.

The latest episodes of my two favourite podcasts reinforce why I like them so much.

First, Planet Money #219 asks, would you rather live on $70,000 USD a year today (a middle-class living), or $70,000 USD a year in 1900 (when it would have made you stupefyingly rich)? My answer is easy: since I have both diabetes and cancer, I'll take now, since no matter how much money I had, in 1900 I'd be dead. Your answer might not be so obvious, though if you like air conditioning and the easy ability to travel and communicate, you'll probably make a similar choice.

My reason for liking episode #75 of Reasonable Doubts comes down to one quote: "Hinduism is like the Brawny Towel of religions—it can really soak up and absorb just about anything." (The episode is actually about Buddhism.)

I don't listen to as many podcasts as I used to, even though I am the co-host of a reasonably popular one, and also have an occasionally-updated largely musical one of my own. From 2005 through 2007 in particular, I devoured podcasts, listening in the morning while getting the kids ready for school, on the commute to and from work, sometimes at work, while driving in the car or shopping or waiting in line, while falling asleep at night, and even in hospital when I was recovering from surgery.

There are many reasons my listening habits have changed. Since I've been on medical leave for cancer treatment, I'm not commuting, and I'm also not often working on non-language right-brain stuff (such as editing images) that doesn't interfere with spoken-word podcasts. Now that I have an iPhone and an iPad, when I have time to kill either at home or out running errands, I'm more likely to fire up Twitter or a web browser or a game than to listen to a podcast.

And, because of my newfound cancer-driven appreciation for the little things in everyday life, when I go for a walk around the neighbourhood (often with the dog), I usually leave the earphones at home, and simply listen to the sounds around me.

Making a show un-missable

So while I still have quite a few podcasts in my iTunes subscription list, I miss a lot of episodes and delete many of them unheard. There are two shows I never miss, though: National Public Radio's Planet Money, and the indie show Reasonable Doubts. (Though I don't catch every episode, I also listen to almost every release—ahem—of Savage Love, after a recommendation a couple of years ago from my wife, and CBC's Spark is a regular too.)

Here's why I find both Planet Money and Reasonable Doubts un-missable: They're about the right length and frequency—around 20 minutes several times a week for Planet Money, less than an hour every week or two for Reasonable Doubts—that I can stay caught up without being overwhelmed (a problem for Leo Laporte's ever-increasing and ever-lengthening stable of shows on his TWiT network).

Both of my favourite podcasts are well-structured and excellently produced, telling compelling stories in an interesting format. Most importantly, I learn a lot about subjects that previously didn't interest me much at all: business and religion.

Clarity and economics? Really?

Before Planet Money came along, I found most business journalism about as interesting as a fishing show, or the farm report that used to come on TV before cartoons in the early mornings when I was kid: in other words, so dull it was physically painful. But when the team that would later create the standalone Planet Money podcast produced the "Giant Pool of Money" episode for This American Life in 2008, I was hooked. A single show somehow managed to explain the global economic crisis of that year, and the American housing-market meltdown that triggered it, clearly and concisely, without dumbing the subject down.

Planet Money takes a similar approach to all sorts of topics in economics, global finance, and other business subjects that I'd never normally want to delve into. Yet it fascinates me every time. This week, for instance, I learned about how Brazil changed its currency to stave off runaway inflation in 1994. Yawn, right? Not when the show has a title like "How Four Drinking Buddies Saved Brazil."

Religions explained and criticized

Reasonable Doubts doesn't emerge from a professional radio network like NPR. It's a labour-of-love amateur effort by three academics in Grand Rapids, Michigan (or "the clasp on America's Bible Bra," as they like to call it): philosophy professor Jeremy Beahan, psychologist Luke Galen, and English and mythology teacher David Fletcher. All three were raised as fundamentalist Christians, but found themselves "de-converting" in adulthood. So they bring a particularly well-informed approach to talking about, explaining, and in the end debunking the tenets of various religious traditions.

There are plenty of podcasts about rationalism, skepticism, atheism, humanism, critical thinking, and similar stuff, but many of them spend a lot of time taking apart conspiracy theories, UFOs, New Age woo, ghosts, psychics, and pseudo-medical quackery. Those are all fine, but as an atheist myself since childhood, I find that I don't know much about the religions that influence most people around the world. And the Reasonable Doubts team talks about them: Christianity (Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox), Islam (Shiite, Sunni, and other sects), Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and more.

It's not just cheap chat and atheist dismissal, either. I've learned about Christian dispensationalism, Buddhist dukkha, and the philosophical debates around determinism and free will, for instance. The hosts are careful to explain the subjects they address as carefully and completely as possible, so that their analysis and criticism make sense. And they're pretty funny in a nerdy white-guy way that appeals to me.

Keep learning

I like these shows for the same reasons I enjoy the science essays and books of Stephen Jay Gould, the TV series of James Burke, or radio programs like "Quirks and Quarks." They teach me things I didn't know before, and point me in interesting directions to learn even more.

In the modern world, we're always encouraged to keep learning for a lifetime. My favourite podcasts make that easy. I'd encourage you to give them a listen too.

Today was International Blasphemy Rights Day, the second annual one, but it didn't get as much publicity as last year. I totally forgot about it until now, god damn it.

There, that's better.

While I'm a full-blown atheist, I find the idea of Ramadan fascinating for its key component: fasting during daylight hours, and only eating after the sun goes down, for a month. As an insulin-dependent diabetic who has to manage when and what I eat rather carefully, I couldn't even do that if I wanted to. But aside from their religious significance, the Muslim sawm (the fast itself) and iftar (the meal that ends it) are reminders of the significance of food and eating in all human societies.

Humans are far from the only animal to share food. Our closest relatives among the great apes do it. So do wolf packs and prides of lions. The whole structure of many communal insect societies (anthills, beehives, termite mounds) revolves around the procurement, storage, and distribution of food. But with our big brains and language, and with our elaborate methods of cooking and otherwise preparing meals, we have ritualized eating like no other creature, going far beyond food's role as fuel to keep our bodies running.

We organize our days around mealtimes. A gift of food or drink is appreciated as much—often more—than durable goods or money. Eating is a big part of our celebrations of holidays, birthdays, graduations, weddings, and other special events. We also serve snacks at funerals, eat for comfort when we are alone and sad, and offer a last meal to prisoners facing execution. Personally, one of the very worst periods of my life was three years ago, when I was unable to eat (or drink!) for several days in a row due to surgery. Our keenest memories often involve food: there's a reason one of the most popular new shows on the Food Network is The Best Thing I Ever Ate.

So when observant Muslims make a point this month of fasting each day, all day, and then breaking fast—almost always in groups—at sundown, it's a constant reminder of the value of food to all of us, and of our rituals of food. It's a tradition that secular society could learn something from, and perhaps even adopt in a less-regimented way, the way we have co-opted Christmas to celebrate the Winter Solstice and the end of the year with presents and coloured lights, and Easter to recognize springtime (which, come to think of it, is how those holidays got started anyway).

At the least, a secularized version of Ramadan would be a great incentive for a bunch of dinner parties, not to mention good business for restaurants.

A couple of days ago, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—author, politician, activist, and polarizing figure worldwide—appeared on CBC's Q radio show to discuss her second memoir, Nomad, with host Jian Ghomeshi.

Ali, who was born in Somalia and raised there, as well as in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, later emigrated to the Netherlands and became a strong critic of Islam (especially how Muslim societies treat women) and of multiculturalism policies in the West. As a Dutch parliamentarian, she faced threats of assassination from Islamist extremists, and eventually moved to America.

I blasted through her first memoir, Infidel, a few months ago—it's a riveting account of her physical and mental journey. There's little doubt why she thinks the way she does now. She's a little younger than me, but her life well deserves two books (so far).

It seems to me that the core of Ali's argument on the radio was that no moral or political ideas should be respected or endorsed simply because they emerge from religion or other ideologies, culture, or traditions. She pointed to societies that cling dogmatically to such ideas, as in Somalia, who remain backward and fail. Conversely, societies like those in the Netherlands, the U.S., and Canada are largely successful, prosperous, and safe because we analyze and debate ideas of all kinds, make decisions about which ones are better—and then improve because of it.

We're far from perfect at it, of course, but it is an ideal we strive toward. And it applies not only to ideas coming from immigrant communities, but to long-standing homegrown ideas as well. In Canada over the past few decades, analysis and debate helped us decide that Indian residential schools were wrong, fomented the Quiet Revolution in Québec, and are bringing gay people into the legal and cultural mainstream. Similar progress happens much more slowly, if at all, in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, North Korea, Haiti, Burma, Malawi, or even China.

Isn't it an inherently good idea that one of CBC's top-rated national radio shows is hosted by a guy named Jian Ghomeshi, who didn't have to change that name to seem "more Canadian?" It would have been unimaginable 40 or 50 years ago.