My people!

I just read this article on Friendly Atheist, and boy, did it get me excited! Mary Johnson is one of my people. Her whole journey really resonates with me, and I love that although she is now an atheist, she still can see the value and appeal of religion.

Check out this quote:

I believe that humans need ritual and art and encouragement. I’m in the process of becoming a Humanist celebrant so that I can help people celebrate weddings and births and funerals in a secular context. I’m encouraged that people like Alain de Botton and Greg Epstein and Miriam Muroff Jerris are taking on the challenge of creating meaningful Humanist rituals without supernatural references.

I could have said that! Plus, it takes me back to my original idea for my presentation. Probably, I can focus on deBotton, Epstein and Jerris and that will be enough for one presentation. I wonder if Jerris would answer some interview questions for me. After all, she did reply to my e-mails.

But what REALLY got me going was the discussion in the comment. It seems that Friendly Atheist's readers are up in arms because Johnson used the word "soul" in her last sentence. Personally, I think she was using the word partly as a metaphor and partly because she was asked to address "anyone who is sitting in a church pew right now," so the use of religious terminology was appropriate in that context. But I often say that religion gets a lot of things right, and I think the idea of a soul is one of them.

Let me be clear: I think it's incredibly unlikely that there is any kind of life after death. I don't believe that there is some kind of permanent part of us that is endowed by a deity. 

However, there is the essence of a person. That thing that is not my brain and not my body: the me that metacognates. I know it's not a real thing--it's generated by the chemicals in my brain. But I also know that it is real in my experience of myself and my experience of those I love. It's the thing that makes each of us who we are, different from everyone else. It's the part of my husband that I love all the time, even when his body and his brain are pissing me off. Although I know it's only a concept, it's a concept worth talking about, from time to time, and when we talk about it, we need a word for it. "Soul" is a long-established term for just that thing, and it comes in handy. Because the rest of this paragraph makes very little sense.

And there's another thing. My mother, whose relationship to religion is very confusing so I won't try to explain it here, told me a story that made me wonder about all of this. When my grandmother died, my mother was with her. My mother reports that Nana's last breath was peaceful, and exactly like my first breath, but (obviously) backwards. My mother felt in that moment that death was completely natural. She also says that there is no question in her mind that her mother left the room at that moment, and that she want up.

Do I think Nana went to Heaven? Of course not. But neither do I think my mother is lying, or deluded. She is not a Christian and does not believe in Hell, so there was no interest in her believing her mother went up instead of down, or to the side. What I think is that she experienced something we can't explain. She had a sensation of some kind, and other people have experienced this same thing, and that's where the whole idea of a soul going to Heaven came from. What was it? I have no idea. But I know it brought my mother some comfort. She still had a really tough time with the idea of her mom rotting under the ground. She couldn't watch the body being lowered into the grave, and a few months after my grandmother's death I started singing that lovely childhood diddy about "the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout" and I thought my mom was going to have a panic attack.  (To be clear, I was an adult when all of this happened--there was no child abuse involved.) But she likes the idea that her mom left the room with that last breath, and I can't prove that it didn't happen.

So, to sum up: I don't believe in eternal souls that go to Heaven if we're good, but I do notice that each of us has an essence of some kind and I think "soul" is a useful term for it. Lay off the poor woman.

Yech

The religious are sure making it easy to be a Humanist this week. Ross Douthat is plugging his book Bad Religion, in which he argues that Orthodoxy is good and Christianity had a better influence on us in 1957 than it does today. The Supreme Court may invalidate Health Care Reform and uphold Arizona's immigration law, Dan Savage's excellent monologue about his relationship to Catholicism was replayed on This American Life, and now Paul Ryan says that the Pope says that governments shouldn't help the poor.

Maybe I'm confusing "right" and "left" with "religious" and "humanist." But it's hard not to, when Republicans keep citing religion in the War on Women and Douthat thinks Christianity should have more influence over modern culture. (Actually, I think I probably agree with Douthat's politics more than I disagree. What bothers me about Douthat is his relationship to minority religions.)

I should probably unpack that comment. Douthat is arguing that the US is mainly a Christian nation (true) in the sense that Christianity has more influence than any other religion. He's also arguing that when Churches were the center of town life, the country was a better place. Not perfect, not Camelot, and not without major and even tragic problems, but better. What he doesn't seem to get about that is that segregation was integral to that model. Churches are inherently segregated. Because of the history of our country, African American religion evolved separately from White religion, but that's not even what I'm talking about.

If religion is the center of our society, then we are all divided by our religions, and the atheists have no community. Everyone is then trapped by their social structure into a particular religion, and there is mistrust between the religions because there is little or no social mixing. How is that good? One could argue that the centrality of churches to the social order in the 1950's is part of what gave rise to the social uprisings of the 1960's. In order to fight the political fight, the young people needed to separate themselves from their elders, and the only way to do that was to reject religion, which gave rise to free love and experimentation with Eastern religions--religions that had not ever ruled in the structure of American society.

On to Paul Ryan and the Pope (although you should check out Savage's monologue--it's beautiful.) Oh, I can't get beyond "Yech." Here. Read this and if you don't "Yech," too, explain to me what I'm missing.

I just don't want to be associated with these people in any way. Except Savage. He's cool.

Lent

Obviously I've never been a Christian. There's a lot in Christianity, like the concept of the Trinity, that I just can't fathom or get behind. But there are two things about Christianity that I've always envied.

One is the "Spirit of Christmas." I've always longed to be part of the whole season of joy and I love the idea that everyone is more generous and kind to those less fortunate at that time of year. Of course it would be nice if people were that generous all year round, but as a Humanist, I've got to understand the limits of Humanity, too, and once a year is better than nothing.

The other is Lent. I guess it's an odd thing to envy, but as a child I enjoyed books about old-fashioned girls, like Anne of Green Gables and Betsy-Tacy. The girls were always Christian and church was always an important part of their lives. I enjoyed reading about the challenges and feelings around Lent. I particularly remember Betsy from the Betsy-Tacy series giving up fudge for Lent. Fudge-making was a common activity for teenage girls at the beginning of the 20th century, and at every gathering Betsy would take one piece of fudge, bring it home, and keep it in a box. At the end of Lent she had a wonderful sense of accomplishment and a big box of stale fudge.

Well, today is Ash Wednesday and there's been a lot of talk among my Christian friends on Facebook around the start of Lent. One is giving away candy she won't be able to eat until Lent is over, another is debating what to give up, and a Minister friend of mine posted a pancake recipe yesterday for Shrove Tuesday and is asking her congregants what they're doing to observe Lent. I, of course, jumped right in to these discussions with suggestions and questions, and I learned something new.

Some people do something positive for Lent instead of giving something up.

What a wonderful Humanist idea! Now, I believe that giving things up is good for you. It's why I give up bread on Passover and why I fast on Yom Kippur. Perhaps that's the origin of my Lent envy, or maybe it's the other way around. But giving up sweets or alcohol or meat doesn't really help anyone else (well, the meat does, I guess.) On the other hand, deciding to be nicer to those around you or more generous or to start a new volunteer project does help others. When I heard that Catholics in the town where I grew up have been adding positive acts for Lent since the 1980's, I thought, "Wow! Humanist Catholics! Who knew?"

Which is when I realized that I'm in trouble.

Because I don't see Humanism as having much to do with disbelief in God. I define Humanism differently. To me, it's about putting the dignity of others first and making decisions based on rational, rather than textual, reasons. It's the embrace of science and skepticism. To me, none of that precludes religion. If you do it, you're a Humanist.

So what does that make me?