"The God Virus" Postmortum

I finished the book The God Virus and, really, it was at its best during my last post about it. I mean, overall, the book was okay, but I think it just wasn't for me. The second half of the book was all about how to deal with religious people, as if they were some dangerous foreign race. I imagine that most people out there have had exposure to religion and religious people their whole lives, even if they are an atheist now. I don't need some self-help guide explaining how to conduct myself in a religion-permeated world; I already deal with many of the issues brought up in the second half of the book on a regular basis. After the great section explaining how religious systems interrelate when sharing the same physical environment, the rest of the information was already familiar to me from reading other publications. I might recommend this to someone new to atheism or new to questioning religion even, but it seemed to be strictly written for atheists and would be most interesting to someone who is not yet well-read on the topic.

The highlight of the second half, for me, was a brief mention on the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific. They are a favorite topic of mine - just such a fascinating and telling illustration of the development of religion. Don't get too excited, though, if you also love the story of the followers of John Frum - it was only discussed for about one paragraph.

I also enjoyed the many quotes throughout the book. They make up a majority of my bookmarks.

My overall opinion: This may have been a good book, but it just wasn't right for me.

S.A.M.

Atheist Mortality

Michael Rubinkam/Associated Press

As I was checking the news this morning, I came across a story out of Pennsylvania about an elderly woman who exhumed her dead husband and twin sister and kept them on couches in her house for years.

Somehow, about two-thirds of the way through the story, the article seems to take a turn toward blaming this incident on her lack-of or weak religious belief:

"Well, I felt differently about death."

Part of her worries that after death, there's ... nothing. "Is that the grand finale?" But then she gets up at night and gazes at the stars in the sky and the deer in the fields, and she thinks, "There must be somebody who created this. It didn't come up like mushrooms."
So she is ambivalent about God and the afterlife. "I don't always go to church, but I want to believe," she said.

Dr. Helen Lavretsky, a psychiatry professor at UCLA who researches how the elderly view death and dying, said people who aren't particularly spiritual or religious often have a difficult time with death because they fear that death is truly the end.

For them, "death doesn't exist," she said. "They deny death."

Ms. Stevens, she said, "came up with a very extreme expression of it. She got her bodies back, and she felt fulfilled by having them at home. She's beating death by bringing them back."

What?? Wow. I was temporarily speechless.

That is quite a leap.

Really, isn’t it the religious people who believe that total death doesn’t exist because a spirit or soul lives on in some afterlife? Is that not pure denial of death? And, for a moment, I’m going to be truly nitpicky and say that the phrase, “because they fear that death is truly the end” really irked me. I think that death is “truly the end,” but it’s not a fear – it’s a fact in my mind. I feel like the journalist (Michael Rubinkam of the Associated Press) is implying that the sense that religious views are wrong evokes an unavoidable and deserved anxiety. It’s as if the article is saying that a nontheist SHOULD feel this way when considering death.  Also, why would it be true (as this psychiatrist professor says) that just because a person thinks that biological death is the complete experience of death, they are in denial of death?  Maybe they are simply in denial of life after death, which seems like a pretty rational denial to me.

My other concern is that this generalization was made simply because the woman took an agnostic stance. She didn’t say she was an atheist. She actually sounded like she DID have faith in some type of god despite the fact that she didn’t subscribe to a religion per se. She “wants” to believe in something spiritual, but that was not enough to convince this professor and her interviewer that the overriding reason for this was her lack of faith. I’d hate to see what she had to say about a real atheist.

Clearly, this woman has some psychological problems, but they seem to be rooted more in loneliness or social strain rather than lack of religious vigor. This woman was desperately attempting to console herself and possibly deal with the issue of her own mortality after she was left feeling alone in the world (and I think most people would feel that extreme loneliness in her situation of losing the two people she loved most in life). Her anthropomorphism of the corpses didn’t seem to approach a true delusion – she seems to understand that they are dead on some level. Death DOES seem to exist to her as a reality, contray to what the psychiatrist believes to be true of nonreligious people like her, and she is struggling with that idea and attempting in her own (misguided) way of coming to terms with that.  That fact might actually, in one small way, make her a little more sane than the person who “sees” the dead Virgin Mary visiting them or prays to and makes choices according to the divine direction of long-dead loved ones with the strong conviction that they are still alive somewhere.

This is an extremely sad story, and my heart goes out to this woman. I hope that she manages to get the help she needs to reach a sense of peace after living through the deaths of her two closest loved ones.

As for this journalist - Michael Rubinkam – I hope that at some point he learns to be a little more careful about balancing his stories. Choosing your sources wisely is part of getting the story right. His editor will certainly be getting a letter from me.

Maybe in the future I should write a little more on the subject of mortality from an atheist perspective. It’s certainly an under-discussed topic, in my opinion.

S.A.M.

United States Receives "Creation"

Great news!

But first of all, Happy 4th of July!  I hope everyone got a chance to celebrate America's Birthday (and one of the least-religiously-linked holidays we get in this country)!  I personally thanked all of the atheist, agnostic, deist and skeptical founding fathers who made this country what it is today.  I spent the day watching the History Channel's marathon of "The Story of US," which I just loved.  It's like everything I learned in one year of 7th grade civics all condensed into one day of exciting high-def viewing experiences.  Really, my biggest impression was that, in general, America is a hard-working, work-loving, opportunity-making populace, and has been that way throughout its history.  It also left me thinking, "Damn, can we get a break?!" Our current economic situation seems pretty mild compared to all of the other crisis that we have faced.  And for the Pat Robertsons of the world who really think that every hurricane is a punishment from God for recent behavior or the people who say our weather is totally wacky in ways we've never seen before due to some new global warming - watch the segment on the freaky dust storms that swept across the country.  Hurricanes look pretty normal after that.  And while I'm in this psudo-review, I'll mention that my favorite segment was the invention of the light bulb.  :)

ANYWAY, the great news!! I saw an advertisement for the "Creation" movie!  It was released a few days ago on DVD in the US.  That made me smile.

May The Fourth Be With You!

S.A.M.

Because I (Heart) Science Education

I love this! Found it on Dead-Logic.com's Blog.  Had to share, and thank Dead-Logic for sharing as well!

God Going Viral

I am about half-way through the book The God Virus by By Darrel W. Ray, Ed.D. My first reaction was that the book seemed unnecessarily stand-offish. Do I think religion is fantasy? Absolutely. However, religion is a significant and complex sociological phenomenon and shouldn’t be treated as “silly.” While I might not respect the tenets of any religion, I do respect and support the study of religion itself. I think it’s incredibly important to understand how these behaviors began and continue in order to correct for them toward a more rational society.

I initially got the impression that Ray found religious people to simply be silly, or at least the oblivious victims of a god virus. I disagree that victims are completely oblivious, and I strongly hold that maintaining a religious perspective involves conscious decisions made to that effect as much as one would continually face decisions while living life as a skeptic. Still, half-way into it, the author takes his analogy a little too far from time to time. However, I think the goldmine in the book is not his leaps to make the analogy between religion and a virus seem closer than it is, but rather his look at the propagation and history of religious development when he is momentarily free of his “virus” idea. I wonder if the analogy would have made a great introductory paragraph or chapter if left at that – it’s possible. I look forward to reading more of his real theory, free of his attention-grabbing illustration.

S.A.M.

Happy Summer Solstice!

Today is the Summer Solstice!  I'm wishing I was at Stonehenge or enjoying a "Midsummer's" night dream!
I thought I'd share a little article on the "spiritual" aspect of the day and its history!

Of course, here'a a good dose of science for you, too, courtesy of Wikipedia.

The Summer Solstice occurs exactly when the Earth's axial tilt is most inclined towards the sun at its maximum of 23° 26'. Though the Summer Solstice is an instant in time, the term is also colloquially used like Midsummer to refer to the day on which it occurs. Except in the polar regions (where daylight is continuous for half of the year), the day on which the Summer Solstice occurs is the day of the year with the longest period of daylight. Thus the seasonal significance of the Summer Solstice is in the reversal of the gradual shortening of nights and lengthening of days. The summer solstice occurs in June in the Northern Hemisphere, in December in the Southern Hemisphere.

S.A.M.

The Look of an Atheist Artist

I found this great collection of artwork on Flicker by an artist called BiSQUE.  I'm fascinated and I love it!However, I can't for the life of me find a website for this artist.  The closest I got was a mention on the blog of someone else who saw the gallery show.  Thanks to that, I can also tell you the artist is from Illinois and a mother of three.  I hope Bisque is not languishing in anonymity, and that the problem is that I am just not a great Googler.

Hope you Enjoy!  If you know more about this person, please let me know!

SAM

PS - I apologize to any readers (if there are any! haha) for my absence.  A personal health issue slowed me down significantly over the past few weeks.  Things are looking better now, though!