Thomas Doubting

Today in one of my lectures the professor analyzed Verrocchio’s Christ and Doubting Thomas (1467-83), which was built for one of the niches on the Or San Michele in Florence. Along the hems of the two figures’ robes is written the story of Doubting Thomas. Christ’s hem reads, “Because thou has seen me, Thomas, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen and have believed,” and  Thomas’s hem reads in response, “My Lord, my God, savior of humankind” (based on John 20:38). The two figures strike a dynamic pose, full of movement expressing their emotional states. The figure is Thomas is the most interesting. He leans forward toward Christ, but at the same time his head moves back. We can see the hesitation in his hand as his wrist bends away from Christ instead of extending to touch his wound. It is as if his moment of disbelief is simultaneously his greatest moment of revelation. He suddenly realizes, mid movement, that this is indeed Christ, God, the savior, and thus realizes that he is unworthy to touch him and recoils. The Christ figure displays an equally dichotomous gesture. His right hand is raised over the head of Thomas. Emerging from the shadow of the niche, light falls upon his upturned hand complete with stigmata, highlighting his movement. He seems to be at once giving Thomas benediction, forgiving him and blessing him, and yet at the same time indicating him as a negative example, as if saying, “Look here at Thomas. Do not be like him.”

As a skeptic of Christianity, I have often both identified with Thomas and been perplexed by his story. He is incredulous. He refuses to believe without seeing. And yet at the same time, his incredulity is both tolerated and relieved, while mine is most obviously not. Christ could have simply said, “No, Thomas. You must believe on faith alone. You cannot have proof,” as he says to me, but instead he grants his wish. He then then afterward explains how those who believe in faith are blessed above those like Thomas, and yet we see very little examples of this sort of evidenceless faith in the Bible.

We can extrapolate from the example of Thomas that the correct way to achieve salvation is to believe in Christ in faith, without asking for proof. If Christ truly wanted us to believe without seeing, without any real evidence, then why did he bother to make his various postmortem appearances? Why not simply disappear from the tomb? He had prophesied his own resurrection, and based on the prophesies of the Old Testament, the disciples and other close followers who truly believed Christ to be the Messiah should have been both expecting and awaiting his resurrection on the third day.

However, instead of requiring this purer faith, Christ appeared first to Mary Magdalene, then to his disciples when they were all together. Moreover, he did not just appear to them, but he displayed his wounds (“…he showed them his hands and side”), just as he would do later for Thomas, yet without rebuke.  Interestingly, the Bible writes, “The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord” (John 20: 20, emphasis mine). Thomas happened not to be with the others when Christ appeared, and the others said to him, “We have seen the Lord!” to which Thomas replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it” (John 20: 25). All Thomas asked for was the same proof given to the others. All I ask for is this same proof.

Now I suppose one could say that Christ’s scolding of Thomas was applicable to the entire group, including later-day Christians, but the fact remains that he appeared on several different occasions after his death, and his clear motive of action was to give physical proof of his resurrection and thus inspire belief. This is yet another area where the Bible is both confusing and incredibly contradictory. Christ’s words say one thing, and his actions express another.

Andrew Wyeth

The American Realist painter, Andrew Wyeth, died today aged 91. He was a figure often overlooked by critics. In fact, I decided to pull out all of my Art History books, and even in my most basic survey text from freshman year, there is no mention of him at all. This is likely because he was working in an out-dated style (Realism) at a time when the avant-garde was king, and abstraction flourished. This simple landscape painter was in competition with the likes of Kandinsky and Pollock.  Although he received little attention from critics and historians, his art was commercially successful, and thus his work has entered the popular conscience of the American people. I would guess that you average American has seen prints of at least his two most famous paintings, Christina’s World (1948) and Master Bedroom (1965).

Master Bedroom

He is typically categorized as a Regionalist painter, which was more of an attitude than a movement, popular in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. While European art was experimenting with radical abstraction, engaging if fierce self-criticism, and pushing the limits of their medium to the breaking point, American painters were concerned far more with content than form, and took up the subject of American politics, economics, pastimes, and national character. They painted an isolated America, cut off from avant-garde Europe and the bustling streets of Paris, unique in its vastness, stillness, and loneliness.

Wyeth maintained this Regionalist style throughout all of his 91 years. Often his work is characterized by the purposeful erasure or exclusion of any visual references to technology or modern life. His paintings are forever situated in the American farmland of the 1910s and 1920s.

Christina's World

Wyeth depicted rural America, the American way of life which had been the norm for one hundred years, but which was beginning to dwindle as children left the farm, following the pattern of urban migration from the 1910s through 1950s, spurred by evens like the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl and the growing amount of factory work and other industrialized forms of labor available in the big cities. For example, the population of Chicago grew from 2,100,000 in 1910 to 3,300,000 in 1930 and the population of Detriot grew from 4600,000 in 1910 to 1,560,000 in 1930.

Wyeth’s paintings seem to speak nostalgically of the times before the complications of urban life, and to speak to the desire for regression that many of the farmer-turned-factory workers must have longed for. They are an attempt to maintain connection with that previous, and ever vanishing, way of American life, intimately tied to the land.

Long Limb (1999)

In several ways, his work reminds me of that of Anselm Kiefer (who I am currently writing a thesis about), a German painter who attempted to reestablish ties with his Germanic roots after the trauma of World War II. Like Wyeth, Kiefer returned to the landscape, reconnecting to the stretches of farmland (a reference to the “scorched earth,” the trauma endured by both the land and the people under Nazi rule) and mythologized forests of his homeland. Through his landscapes he traces German history, often including the names of historical and mythical figures, people he refers to as “Germany’s Spiritual Heroes,” such as Hermann, the semi-mythical chieftain who defeated the invading Roman forces, lead by Varus, at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

Nürnberg (1982)

Varus (1976)

As Kiefer remember Hermann and Varus, Wyeth remembers the Spiritual Heroes of the United States. Those toiling farmers, the quiet hard-working folk who transformed wilderness into homeland. Just as Kiefer felt intimately connected to figures like Hermann, American viewers feel connected to these farmland heroes. They speak directly to our ancestry. Every child descended from poor farmers in Gibson City, Illinois, or Non, Oklahoma, or Amite County, Mississippi recognizes a piece of themselves, of their own history, in these paintings.

Much like the straw used in Kiefer’s landscapes, Wyeth’s grass is always dried, yellowed and browned, as if the season as come to an end. The nearly monochrome brown palette of his paintings seem sad and desolate, the kind of sadness brought on by Autumn’s first frost. But perhaps it is not just the end of a season, but the end of an era that Wyeth has figured, and the sadness related to our own nostalgia.

Trodden Weed (1959)

My grandparents were the first to leave the farm. When I look a Wyeth’s paintings of my ancestral homeland I can’t help but think of the blurry black and white photos of my great grandma sitting on the porch of her wooden farm house in a neat apron. I can’t help but wonder what my life would have been like if grandpa hadn’t left, and if I was born in the same farm house like so many previous generations. When I see a painting like Master Bedroom, which perfectly captures the aura of an era forever lost to me, I can’t help but wonder, is this what my great grandma’s bedroom looked like? Did her farmhouse have simple stucco walls like these? Was there a neat white blanket over the bed to match her neat apron? Wyeth reveals to me so much more about the details of the lives of my ancestors than those blurry photos. I am able to see in vivid detail what their lives might have been like and how they might have lived. For giving me that glace back into my own past, I will always be grateful.

So thank you, Andrew Wyeth, and so long.

Farm Road (1979)

Misconceptions: Atheists hate God

You must be a very angry person.

Another common misconception theists make regarding atheists and agnostics is that we either hate God or are angry at God, and that this is why we claim not to believe in him. Similar in vein is the claim that atheists, and particularly former Christians, are either angry at Christians or were mistreated by Christians in some way, and thus are angry at God and God’s earthly representatives.

I have seen the ridiculousness of this claim pointed out several times, but it keeps popping up, like an unsinkable rubber duck. The most common atheist retort is to compare the notion of God to several other mythical beings that children once believed in, but figured out were not real. “How can someone be mad at something that they do not believe exists? Are you angry at the Easter Bunny? Are you angry at Leprechauns? Are you angry at unicorns?”

That retort, while accurate, does not usually suffice. It is indeed ridiculous to feel anger toward something that you think is nonexistent, but theists often point out that there are no organized groups of Aleprechaunists out there protesting against those who believe in Leprechauns. Another way that it is often phrase is, “If you don’t believe in God, then why do you spend so much time talking and arguing about him?”

Are atheists blind or stupid or what?

Implied within all of these charges and misconceptions is the idea that atheists actually do know there is God, but chose for a variety of reasons to ignore this knowledge. In all honesty, I understand this reaction. To a religious person, God is blatantly self-evident. They see the hand of God in everything from a beautiful forest to a baby’s smile to the warm feeling inside they get when they pray to their holy Bible. To ignore such evidence must seem to them like nothing short of willful ignorance.

In an attempt to explain that atheists are not ignoring evidence, but actually see none, MystryBox has made a very interesting video called, “Are Atheists Blind or Stupid or What?”

In the video, MystryBox gives us a thought experiment. Imagine two worlds: one with a God who is objectively apparent, equally as obvious to every person just as the Sun is equally obvious, and one where there is no God and life arose through natural processes, but out of the desire for a God several religions spring up with conflicting opinions and evidences for their faiths. In the first world, religious people would be the ones accurately observing nature. In the second world, atheists would be those accurately observing nature.

Even if a God exists, the world we inhabit appears to be nearer to the second world. There certainly is not an objectively apparent God. MystryBox asks us to consider that if our world is not like the second world, how is it different? How is our world empirically (that’s the key word) different from a world with no God? The second world is how atheists view our world, and we are doing the best we can to observe it honestly and accurately. There is no willful ignorance involved, and certainly no bitterness or anger.

So why do we spend so much time talking about God, something we do not believe exists, if we really don’t secretly hate him? After all, theists are right, there aren’t any Aleprechaunists. But there might be if suddenly a group of Leprechaunists took vocally to the streets and began evangelizing the Truth of Erin. Atheist communities exist because of the vocal and aggressive nature of theists, and their pervasiveness in our culture. For example, if religion was more like knitting, as PZ Myers as pointed out, we would not be having this conversation. Knitting is a practice which gives many people peace and comfort. Knitters get together in circles and clubs to talk about their hobby and enjoy communion with one another, but they do not believe that knitting is the only way to achieve peace or comfort and they do not believe that if other people do not take up a pair of knitting needles they will be punished for eternity. If religion was a personal pursuit, enjoyed by many but not pushed upon the rest of the population, then there would not be a need for a large and vocal atheistic and agnostic community. If I did not feel like coming out an as atheist to my friends and family would ostracize me from their society and change their opinion of me forever, I would not be an atheist blogger. We are a reaction to you, not your God.

Lousy Christians

The atheist community does exist as a counter reaction to the theistic community and their evangelizing efforts, but it is a misconception to think that atheists are atheists just because they do not like religious people or are angry with them. When I was dialoging with a Christian not long ago, they said to me regarding my de-conversion, “It sounds like it was lousy Christians that have changed your view.” It is a charge that I have heard many times before, but in this particular instance it was completely out of the blue. I was not discussing the reasons for my de-conversion or my previous experiences with the church (which was overwhelmingly positive, by the way). I was actually only pointing out that the purpose of the de-Conversion website was not “campaigning for atheism” as the person had claimed, but a place for former Christians to share their experiences. It matter little what I was saying though, because the Christian had already formed this misconception of me in their mind.

I have read dozens of de-conversion stories, and while the hypocrisy of the church is often a contributing factor, I have never heard of a former Christian blaming other Christians for their decision to become an atheist, yet this theistic explanation for atheism is incredibly popular and often used. Aside from the fact that such a reason would be incredibly intellectually weak, your average former Christian understands very thoroughly that Christians, even according to their own beliefs, are just as flawed as any other humans. As the saying goes, “Christians are not perfect, just forgiven.” As a Bible-believing Christian, it was not watching the actions of “lousy Christians” that convinced me that God was not real, but contrasting the claims made within that book with reality. In fact, just in my own personal experience, I have encountered very few “lousy Christians.” Christians are some of my favorite people. They are my parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, life-long friends, and teachers who shaped my life. Almost every person in my life who I really love and who really matters to me is a Christian. If I was so angry with Christians or hated them as a group, how could I enjoy spending time with my family as much as I do? To be honest, when I was a Christian, and even a skeptical Christian, I found very little fault with my Christian family’s behavior. It was only through the lens of my new worldview that I have come to criticise them, but even still, I love them and think they are good people.

Atheists do not hate God, but we do not hate Christians either. For most of us, like me, Christians are our family and friends. We think that, on average, Christians are good people who should be allowed to practice their faith as they see fit. When we do get a bit angry and begin to organize and react is when Christians attempt to encroach upon our rights, or call us immoral, or say that we are not fit for public office, or should not even be considered US citizens. When we are disparaged, we will react. If you are tired of seeing us “mean” “grouchy” atheists all over the news, if you are sick of our buses and billboards, then perhaps you should consider scaling down your own displays of belief.

A recent example of “angry” atheists in the public eye is the Christmas display debacle in Washington where a sign was placed in the state capitol building, near a nativity scene and a Christmas tree that read, “At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail. There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds.” The sign was deemed everything from rude to inappropriate, and atheists were labeled as Grinches and bitter curmudgeons attempting to take away the joy of the holiday from the religious. Not surprisingly, these criticisms missed the point. The sign was not put up out of meanness or a desire to ruin Christmas for Christians, but as a way to protest the fact that religious displays of any sort were being allowed inside a government building. The sign was posted by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, not the Atheists Who Hate Fun Holidays Commission. The sign was meant to point out that if one religious view is allowed to be expressed on government property, then according to the constitution, all religious views should be allowed equal expression. The Freedom From Religion Foundation’s hope is not for there to be an atheist sign next to every nativity scene, but for the outrage caused by the sign to inspire government officials to think twice about sponsoring ANY sort of religious expression within their institutions.

None of the above.

Atheists do not hate God, because it is simply silly to hate something you do not believe exists. We do not feel abandoned  by God or bitter because of his treatment of us, we just simply look at the world and see no evidence that he was ever there. We do not blame the actions of Christians for the apparent non-existence of the God they support. We are organized and vocal not because we hate Christians or want to take away religion, because of the organized and vocal proponents of religion who would force their ideas upon everyone else and who insist that those who do not agree with them are immoral.

Misconceptions: Atheists are amoral

Without God, anything is permitted.

One of the most common misconceptions about atheists and atheism that I have encountered is the idea that atheists are amoral: lacking morality or a moral system. For example, I have heard theists claim that, according to an atheist worldview, the concepts of “good” and “evil” are without meaning. Others claim that atheists do not believe in God because they want an immoral lifestyle to be permissible. Both of these claims are untrue and lead to the vilification of atheists as threats to society and conventional morality.

Good and evil without God?

It is possible for notions of good and evil to exist without a divine authority, and thus it is possible for an atheist to understand and to care about the terms.

The theistic idea that we can only know about the concept of “good” if there is a God to impart such wisdom is the basis of this misconception. The idea that morality must come from a God is open to many problems, including the Euthyphro dilemma outlined by Plato. Does God chose good because it is independently good, or is good “good” because God chooses it? Christian scholar Thomas Aquinas attempted to solve this dilemma by stating that goodness is an intrinsic attribute of God’s character, but if God is good because he has all of the properties of goodness then this means necessarily that the properties of goodness are definable independently; the first part of the dilemma is affirmed. To say that God is good, in the sense that his character is full of goodness, suggests that goodness exists outside of God and it is something which he conforms to. To say that God is, and therefore is good, affirms the second part of dilemma, that goodness is contingent upon the whim or definition of a deity. This means that if a God was a sadist, sadism would therefore be rendered “good.”

If goodness is not contingent upon the definition of a particular deity, if it is independent from God and the first part of the dilemma is correct, then it is clearly obvious that atheists could make a “good” moral decision just as readily as a Christian, even if Aquinas’s benevolent God is real.

To take this a step further, we have the fact that each religious person makes a decision to follow a particular God without a set moral basis. Before a person becomes, say, a Christian, they do not put faith in the Christian doctrine to help them make their conversion decision. The decision is made independently. The religion is evaluated and a moral decision is made; the religion is either deemed “good” or “bad.” If only theists (those who know the will of God) are capable of making “good” or moral decisions, then how would one explain each persons’ conversion decision? Even if morality can only come from God, a non-theist could be capable of making a “good” decision.

As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “If an angel comes to me, what proof is there that it’s an angel? And if I hear voices, what proof is there that they come from heaven and not from hell…If a voice addresses me, it is always for me to decide that this is the angel’s voice; if I consider that such an act is a good one, it is I who will chose to say that it is good rather than bad.”

Atheists just don’t care.

Aside from the philosophical, putting away the question of whether or not atheists are capable of understanding “good,” there is the issue of moral concern. Many theists assume that atheists either do not want to be good or do not care about goodness. We are often characterized as utterly selfish beings who are only looking out for our own skin. This is simply untrue. Atheists differ in the way that they form moral decisions, but we are still “good” law-abiding citizens who care about our fellow man.

Instead of basing a moral decision on religious writings or traditions, atheists use several different systems, including everything from the simple Golden Rule to Humanism to Existentialism. What these systems have in common is the basic concept of empathy: the recognition that personal actions can harm others and the desire to promote the well being of fellow men.

The Biblical Ten Commandments, the basis of morality for Christianity and Judaism, are often broken down into two categories: 1-4 are commandments relating to one’s relationship with God, and 4-10 are commandments relating to one’s relationship with other humans. The majority of the Ten Commandments are based on empathy. Atheists still value these sort of humanist commandments, we simply forgo the ones relating to the correct worship of God.

Moral relativism does not equal “Anything goes!”

As I mentioned above, atheists use several different system to help them make moral judgments, and no one system is valued above another. In this sense, atheists are moral relativists. We believe that morality is not a set of specific rules handed down from a God, but rather a socially constructed system which can vary from person to person and culture to culture. In the mind of a theist, moral relativism is often interpreted as an “Anything goes!” mentality, when in fact it is not.

Moral relativism is not equatable to anarchy. Atheists, in general, value their societies and see the purposefulness of laws and social regulations. We recognize the need for an agreed upon legal system that conforms with society’s moral values, and that above all else, as with empathy, promotes the well being of mankind.

I have been asked several times, since I am a moral relativist, if it is okay for a person to commit murder if they feel personally like committing murder is “good” or morally acceptable. The answer is simply: no. Murder, whether the person committing it thinks it is right or not, is a violation of humanism, of the empathetic idea that all people deserve to live.

From my materialistic worldview, there is a continuum of empathy, as with any other trait, like height or hair color. There are some people who are very tall, and some people who are very short, but most people fall somewhere comfortably in the middle. Likewise, your average person is  healthily empathetic, rather than so selfless that they starve to death by giving away all of their meals or so selfish that they are sociopathic.  Those of us who fall in the average middle can form societies and then form laws to protect our members. We can reach an agreement about the laws without the need for a God or religion because our drive toward empathy is a basic human trait. Those at the far end of the empathy continuum, such as a sociopath, have violated the will of society, even if they can defend their actions based on their personal concept of morality.

A better question to examine moral relativism might be whether it is morally acceptable for two people of the same gender to have a sexual relationship. To a Bible-believing Christian, the answer is clear cut: no, according to what is written in the Bible. In my personal life, I have chosen to be heterosexual (Or have I? That’s a topic for another day). Despite my personal decision, I can recognize the fact that another person in a different situation might make the opposite decision. Their actions, although they disagree with my own, do not violate the rights of another person or cause any other person direct harm, therefore it is a morally neutral decision.

“Man is Condemned to be free.”

Atheists are nor amoral. We care about right and wrong. “Good” and “evil” are terms that have value and meaning to us. In fact, many atheists spend more time worry about right and wrong than theists do. For theists it is simple; it is all written down in a book and taught on a weekly basis. For atheists, we have what Sartre termed the condemnation of freedom. We do not have a handy guidebook. We must make moral decisions on our own and shoulder the burden of the responsibility of our personal actions. Sartre calls this acute realization of personal responsibility man’s “anguish.” He writes, “the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a law-maker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, can not help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility…one should always ask himself, ‘What would happen if everybody looked at things that way?’” Sartre outlines the realization that most atheists make: we are the moral examples for our fellow man, and with every decision we make we must constantly ask ourselves if we are behaving as correct models of behavior. We do not believe that we are held morally accountable by God, but rather by our fellow man.

I will leave you with one last Sartre quote,

For every man, everything happens as if all mankind has its eyes fixed on him and were guiding itself by what he does. And every man ought to say to himself, “Am I really the kind of man who has the right to act in such a way that humanity might guide itself by my actions?”

Right of conscience: Protecting the religious

In the last few days of his presidency, Bush is trying to pass through legislation that will fulfill the promises he made to the group who are responsible for his election: the religious right. One of these bills is a “right of conscience” law meant to protect health care workers from violating the needle of their own moral compass. Of course we are primarily talking about filling birth control prescriptions. The bill will protect the “religious beliefs or moral convictions” of health care workers, meaning everyone from managers and pharmacists at Walgreens to emergency room doctors. Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick characterizes the bill in her article from early December, Nursing Grudges: “It allows your access to birth control, emergency contraception, and even artificial insemination to turn on the moral preferences of your pharmacist, nurse, or ambulance driver.”

Lithwick recognizes the unfair double standard that this bill creates, contrasting it with a South Dakota law passed in 2008 that requires health care workers to deliver misinformation about abortions, including the fictitious fact that abortion leads to a significant risk of depression and suicide. Lithwick points out that only the moral freedom of one group of people are being projected:  the religious who disagree with abortion or contraception. She concludes, “Something tells me that one’s freedom and autonomy shouldn’t generally depend upon one’s moral or religious preferences…If [health care workers] are indeed seeing their rights and freedoms to speak and work either hugely expanded or severely restricted based solely on which team they’ve chosen in the culture wars, they should be wondering whether any of them are really free at all.”

Lithwick also mentions the fact that the right to abortion and contraception for women is constitutionally protected, but that women require the services of those in the health care field to have those rights met. I cannot fill my own birth control prescription, and if I cannot find a pharmacist willing to do it, then it will not get done. This double standard is the one that really upsets me. Not only does the “right of conscience” bill protect the moral opinions of some doctors while undermining the morals of others, but it completely ignores the moral opinions of consumers and those dependent on the services of those in the health care field. I believe it is not only my constitutional right, but a moral duty to use contraception in order to responsibly plan for my future family and to do what little I can to curb the terrible overpopulation problem facing this planet.  If I go to my local pharmacy and the health care worker there refuses to give me my birth control prescription, and their refusal is legally supported, then their moral opinion is protected while mine is undermined. Their moral conviction that leads them to not hand out birth control apparently trumps my moral conviction that birth control is not only okay, but that family planning is a moral obligation.

Why should religious morality trump secular morality? Why should one group be protected while another is marginalized? More importantly, why should one group of people be allowed to withhold services which are constitutionally protected from another group? If my right to abortion and contraception are truly protected by law, then no one, regardless of their religious affiliation or personal conviction, should be allowed to withhold them from me.

Addendum:
I was thinking about this problem a bit more, and it seems to conform to the cognitive bias of Omission, where action is perceived as worse than inaction. The action of pharmacists handing over perscriptions which they are morally opposed to seems worse (to legislators at least) than the inaction of contraceptives being withheld from women when the two are actually morally equal. My PSA for the day: Know your cognitive biases!

Dealing with Death

A recent discussion over at Friendly Atheist regarding what non-religious parents should tell their children about God and tangentially the concept of death has me thinking. Hemant Mehta quoted blogger Adam Wolstenholme from an article titled “You’d have to be a brutal atheist to tell a child there’s no god,” in which Wolstenholme concludes that the comfort that God imparts to children who must deal with death, the comfort of heaven, is enough impetus to compel all but the most stone-hearted atheists to teach their children about the myth of heaven just like they teach the myth of Santa Clause.  He cites the instance of his coworker, who lost her father at 9 and was comforted by the idea that her father was waiting for her in heaven—that they would someday be reunited. The coworker’s story was so moving, that Wolstenholme decided to “take the path of pragmatic hypocrisy” and tell his young daughter that when people die they go to heaven. He rationalizes this decision saying, “I can appreciate that religion is a comfort for children, a romantic fantasy, like Father Christmas.”

Heaven is a romantic fantasy indeed. But I have to wonder, why does Wolstenholme stop there? Wouldn’t it be equally as comforting to tell children that their dead loved ones aren’t dead at all, but that they just went on a vacation and will be back some day? Or we could tell them that their dead loved ones turned into magical fairies who constantly sit at their shoulder, offering guidance and protection. There is no end to the silly yet incredibly comforting myths we could think up to help children deal with death, and yet, I believe that if I seriously suggested my fairy model that people, even religious people, would decry the purposeful delusion. This is because heaven has what my ghost faries lack: a large population of believers. It doesn’t seem so bad for an atheist parent to hypocritically teach something that they believe to be a lie to their children if the majority of the world actually believes said lie. Regardless of the argument ad populi, I do not believe teaching children a supernatural lie, even a comforting one, is a good way to help them cope with the reality of death.

Implied in Wolstenholme’s article is the idea that Christian (or religious) children are better off than atheist children who have to deal with the cold hard reality of death directly, without any buffers or comforts. The argument that religion provides much needed comfort is one of the best that religion has going for it, and it is a justification for faith that I often hear. Even among de-converted or skeptical Christians, there is a reluctance to take away the fantasy of heaven from children, because it is seen as such beautiful and comforting concept. But is it really?

I grew up a Christian child who fully believed in heaven, but I do not believe it helped me cope with death. First of all, the idea of heaven implies the idea of hell. Any child who learns about heaven will inadvertently learn about hell. I’m not an expert in religious studies, but I have never heard of a religion with a heaven-like afterlife where a hell was not also present, or where everyone was allowed into heaven. Children develop early on a very keen perception of good and bad (usually embodied in the phrase “No fair!”), and so they understand that if heaven is the place where good people go, that there must be a place for the bad people. As a Christian child and adolescent, I was afraid of hell just as much as I was comforted by heaven. I  never experienced the loss of a loved one, but if I had, I can only imagine the sleepless nights I would have spent worrying that they weren’t the right sort of Christian and were therefore suffering in hell. The older I became, the more I feared hell, because I understood that to God, the distinction between good and bad was quite blurry. God might turn to even devout believers after death and say to them, “I never knew you.” I spent the majority of my life afraid of the afterlife that was supposed to be my greatest source of comfort. I was actually so afraid of death, due to the uncertainty of my final location, that I found myself wishing that instead of living on we just went out like candles.

As a child and adolescent, I never had to cope with the death of a friend or family member, but that did not save me from learning about death. When I was 12 years old my horse had a filly. I was so incredibly excited and I absolutely adored the baby. I named her Felicity because she was my happiness. The summer after she was born we put her and my mare into a large pasture where the filly could really run around and kick up her heels. I was a little bit nervous about having my baby away from the barn, but when I saw how much fun she and the mare had in the open space I knew it was the right decision. Not long after, a pack of coyotes attacked the filly. She ran into a barbed wire fence and got so tangled that she broke her neck and died. That was my first experience with death. The life of a beautiful, strong, vibrant young animal was cut short violently and unexpectedly. It completely broadsided me. I cried for days straight. I just couldn’t believe that she was gone. And the worst part of the ordeal was that my faith in God and the afterlife taught me that Felicity, because she was an animal, was not valued enough to be admitted into heaven. I loved her so much, but I felt like God did not love her or care about her at all, because I knew from church and Bible class at my Christian school that God did not given animals souls, but only to people, and that only people with souls redeemed by Christ were let into heaven.

The supposidly comforting myth of heaven gave me no comfort when I first experience death. I had to deal with it the same way that atheists do: I had to come to terms with the fact that Felicity was gone and I would never see her again. It was difficult, but eventually I moved on. I do not believe that there is any real way to shield children from death, or make death any less difficult. The Christian concept of heaven did not shield or comfort me. It did not ease my mind when I thought about death. Contrarily,  it caused me pain and anxiety. I think that before anyone decides to lie to their children in order to give them comfort or protect them from the harshness of reality, they should question whether such lies actually give comfort, or if their comfort is as mythical as that which they espouse.

Tinguely’s Black Knight

Jean Tinguely’s Black Knight from 1964 is a mechanized kinetic sculpture made from scraps of black metal. Two curved metal bars with curling ends are joined together and attached to a square base, forming the backbone and support of the sculpture. Jutting off from the twisted spine are wires and bars, convoluted and looking like sickly limbs. A large circle is attached to the top of the spine, fastened by two screws close together and near the edge, its heaviness and means of connection lending it an unbalanced sense of asymmetry. This asymmetry spreads throughout the helter-skelter structure, causing the entire mass to appear as nothing more than a junkyard tangle.

That impression, however, vanishes when the mechanized sculpture is activated. The motors click on and the sculpture whirls to life, revealing how all of the jumbled parts work together to create cohesive motion, and how they are not random but deliberately placed, each with its own importance. The large circle turns clockwise. Behind it two flat metal brackets twirl like insect wings. Cutting across the sculpture transversely, a long wire moves through a hole in a jutting bracket. From that long wire, connected by a bracket twisted into shape by the clumsy force of the hand, dangles a gear-like disk from another wire, which sways from the extended movement of the original long wire, rising and falling as the wire is pulled and pushed through the hole in the bracket. Attached to a small black motor toward the middle of the sculpture is a crank-like metal bar, bend like an elbow. It is attached to a long, thick, straight bar that thrusts back and forth through the loop of a large eye screw sticking out off the curved spine. The metals of the two parts grate against each other as the bar rocks forward and backward through the stationary loop.

The sculpture has an anthropomorphic appearance, created by the spine-like supports and limb-like metal bars. Its title adds to these human associations. Called Black Knight, one can easily imagine a gyrating warrior clad in black armor moving towards them. The large rotating circle held out in front of the spiny figure looks like a shield, while the thick bar that passes through the eye screw looks like a penetrating lance. Or if not a human, perhaps the knight is a war robot, a killing machine.

One thing is certain: a sense of violence is pervasive. The harsh black metal with its perverse twisting and thrusting motion is suggestive not only of mechanized violence, but bodily and sexual violence. The turning circular shield threatens to crush us like a steamroller while the erect rod passes through the circle of the eye screw with a jarring sense of penetration. Both masculine and feminine sexual identities are represented, the former by the straight rods and wires, and the latter by the circles which the rods and wires push through and pull out of. The knight seems to be raping the damsel.

Tracing the art historical lineage of Black Knight, an obligatory nod must be made to Alexander Calder. Tinguely’s use of sculpture in motion as well as his spindly wires and curving geometric shapes are reminiscent of the mobile sculptures by Calder, and while Tinguely is surely indebted to him for the role he played in inspiring kineticism, I believe Tinguely pays more tribute to the legacy of Duchamp. Black Knight shares a striking resemblance with Duchamp’s The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) from 1915-23, both in their mechanized aesthetics and theme of sexual violence and tension.

Like Black Knight and much in the tradition of Duchamp’s techniques, The Large Glass is made from odd scrap materials: found objects taken from everyday life, including metal foil and wire. It features mechanical elements, most noticeably the so-called “chocolate grinder” on the bottom pane, whose series of gears and rods hold the implied motion of rotation and friction within their static lines. In The Large Glass there is a suspended physics, much like that found in the stationary Black Knight.

Both The Large Glass and Black Knight deal with sexual violence and frustration. The two panes of The Large Glass, accord to Duchamp, hold a bride apart from her suitors. As in Black Knight, both the male and the female are expressed (the bride in the upper pane and the bachelors in the lower), but while they meet in Tinguely’s sculpture and are allowed to grind against one another, in The Large Glass they are forever separated. This separation permeates the Glass with a sense of sexual frustration; one can imagine the little robotic-looking bachelors turning around and around, the wheels and gears of their “chocolate grinder” working away, but never bringing them closer to their bride. And maybe it is a good thing that the bachelors will never reach the bride, because Duchamp, via his title, has promised us that when they do they will strip her bare. Their sexual frustration will be relieved through rape. Tinguely literalizes the inert, yet suggested, forces of sexual violence and frustration in The Large Glass through his penetrating rods and wires. Interestingly, even the two titles are alike in their violent appropriation of romantic ideals. Duchamp’s Glass presents the romantic bachelor, who is supposed to become the loving husband, waiting for the bride with devious plans in store, while Tinguely presents the chivalrous knight, clad in black matte armor instead of gleaming white, who rapes the damsel instead of rescuing her.

Duchamp and Tinguely’s work also share a Dadaist critique of rationality. The Dada artists rebelled against the calculated, mathematical endeavors of modernized culture, those that had resulted in the horrors of the First World War, in favor for the chaotic, random, and irrational, epitomized by the strange composition of The Large Glass. Tinguely, himself living in the post-World War II world, took up the Dadaists’ mockery of technology and rationality through his useless machines with their violent movements.

Tinguely is considered a neo-Dadaist because of this critique of rationality as well as his attack on the idea of the authority and genius of the author, seen in his use of use of machines made of found scrap metal to make abstract drawings and paintings, called Metamatics. While Black Knight is not a Metamatic, its found object aesthetic downplays the authorial and creative role of the artist and situates it within the Dadaist critique of authorship.

In the tradition of the neo-avant-garde, Tinguely borrowed elements from the avant-garde artists who came before him, like Duchamp, but took the elements in a new direction. According to Bazon Brock, the achievement of neo-avant-garde artists, such as Tinguely, was their ability to look back through the timeline of art history and recognize elements of old styles “that could not have been perceived before their work began to exercise its effect.”  Tinguely appropriated the use of everyday found objects and other themes and aesthetics from the historical avant-garde, but also literalized that which the historical avant-garde merely suggested. Duchamp himself created a few kinetic sculptures, such as Rotary Demisphere from 1925, but his efforts focused more on optical experiences rather than mechanized motion of sculpture, which is implied, although never realized, in The Large Glass. Tinguely fused the motion of Duchamp’s kinetic visual experiments with the suggested mechanical motion found within the Glass while also literalizing the Glass’s mechanization of sexual frustration. He brought to life the sexual tension and violence implicit in The Large Glass that is only fully realized after time has allowed to “exercise its effect” upon the viewer, in thise case: Tinguely.

Conspiracy Theory Mentality and Creationism

The muddled logic of those given to conspiracy theory mentality is incredibly frustrating. It is a self-sustaining and self-reinforcing system. There are a few basic tenets that allow for the cycle of illogic to spin around and around:

• Whatever “they” say cannot be trusted, because “they” are attempting to deceive us. “They” usually refers to some sort of authoritative body, like national governments, large corporations, and scientists.
• We have the truth, and “they” are trying to suppress it. It does not matter what the evidence is or what it is about. If the “suppressed” group is in possession of it, it must be dangerous to the status quo. This is basically an inflated persecution complex.

Ardent biblical Creationists happen to also exhibit these tell-tale signs of conspiracy theory mentality. They believe that there is a large, organized, authoritative body of scientists who are working to suppress any evidence that problematizes evolutionary theory. “They” are the ones who are in control of institutions of higher learning and textbook production. “They” are planting lies and leaving out information in order to further their model of a godless world.

There are a few basic problems that all conspiracy theories share. Foremost are the staggeringly large numbers of silent and complacent people who would be needed to carry out any conspiracy. The September 11th attacks are a good example of this. In order for the World Trade Center to have been demolished in a controlled fashion, hundreds of people would have had to be involved. There would  be those doing the planning, their aides, the construction crews sent in to install the explosives, any janitor or person staying late at the office who might have encountered the crews, the firemen who had to lie about what they saw inside, the airlines and pilots who had to stage the high-jacking of three planes, and not to mention all of these people’s spouses or confidants who they surely told. Conspiracy theorists suggest that out of these hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who could have known about the event, no one accidentally said something they shouldn’t have or felt guilty enough to confess. It is statistically incredibly, if not impossible.

Now just imagine nearly every scientist in the world, every member of  college or university administration, every science book publisher and author, plus all of their spouses and confidants, united to take down the “dangerous” idea of biblical creationism. And of course they are all silent, and no one ever gets wind of their diabolical plan. It is plainly illogical.

The idea that the case for creationism is being suppressed by a scientific conspiracy is made more plausible in creationist eyes by the fact that there have been scientific forgeries and truth-stretching in the field of evolutionary biology. One classic example is the case of the Piltdown Man. In England in 1912 a few remains were found that were assumed to belong to an early human ancestor. By 1953 it had been revealed as a complete hoax: the jawbone of an orangutan with the head of a modern human.

The Piltdown Man looks pretty bad for evolutionary biologists. Missing links were needed to further the theory of evolution, and so someone made one up and planted it. But who was it that found out it was a fake? Was it a pious pastor who opposed the materialist worldview that Piltdown suggested? Was it a creationist biologist looking to disprove evolution? No. It was other evolutionary biologists. When these evolutionary biologists, experts in their field, examined Piltdown Man, they became skeptical. It just didn’t seem right, so they investigated further and were able to prove that it was an artifice. That is why science is known as a self-regulating system. Scientific finds are subjected to the peer-review process, and errors are exposed. Piltdown Man proves that this process works, and proves that hoaxes and conspiracies will be revealed for what they are. If a small conspiracy like Piltdown Man cannot survive, how could a large-scale, international conspiracy to keep the “evidence” of creationism hidden possibly succeed?

Ironically, Piltdown man did not even help further the case for evolution. As Wikipedia tells us, “The Piltdown man fraud had a significant impact on early research on human evolution. Notably, it led scientists down a blind alley in the belief that the human brain expanded in size before the jaw adapted to new types of food. Discoveries of Australopithecine fossils found in the 1920s in South Africa were ignored owing to Piltdown man, and the reconstruction of human evolution was thrown off track for decades.” This just goes to show that suppressing information and presenting false information do not work in the scientific process.

Another common problem with conspiracy theory thinking is the fact that conspiracies are formed by misunderstanding simple information. To return to the example of the September 11th attacks, several “9/11 Truth” advocates, as they call themselves, claim that the Towers were destroyed through controlled demolition because the fires caused by the plane crashes are not hot enough to melt steel, and because the floors fell in succession as if each one were rigged with explosives. They are partly right. Those fires were not hot enough to melt steel, but they were hot enough to weaken steel, and when steel is weakened, it can no longer support its weight, and down it goes. The steel in the immediate area where the planes hit was engulfed in flame. The steel on those floors were weakened, and they collapsed down onto the floor below them. The steel supporting the floor below was not as weak, since it was not as close to the fire, but when the upper floors fell it could not support its own weight plus the new weight of the fallen floors. It fell too. And so on, one by one, in an exponential domino effect until the entire building collapsed. When supporters of the 9/11 conspiracy say that steel cannot be melted by fire, they really think they have a hot discovery on their hands, but really they are just not understanding some simple aspects of chemistry and physics.

The majority of arguments used by Creationists follow in this same vein. They really think they have found some true evidence that supports their theory, but it can be easily refuted by someone with more knowledge. Take, for example, Kent Hovid’s arguments against the radiocarbon dating process. One argument he advances is the fact that a recently deceased seal was carbon dated and shown to be a thousand years old. This same anomaly happened with living or recently dead mollusks and penguins, he says. Now that seems pretty damning. It seems like there must be a big flaw in radiocarbon dating, and according to Hovind and his ilk, no one is addressing these apparent flaws. They go further and claim that scientists are attempting to cover them up, because if they cover up the flaws then they can stick to their model of the billion-year-old earth that supports evolution. If they address the flaws, they will have to admit that their dating system is wrong, that the earth is young, and that Creationists are right.

Besides the implied false dichotomy (if you are wrong, I must be right), what is going on with this flaw in carbon dating that Creationists love to point out? It is not very different from the error in the logic used by the 9/11 Truth theorists. Creationists know a little bit about something, like the fact that carbon dating is used to date old things, and when they see a place where carbon dating seems to fail, they leap at the opportunity to expose it, without really knowing what they are talking about. Just as the 9/11 conspiracists did not realize that, while fire cannot melt steel, it can still weaken it significantly, Creationists do not realize (or do not acknowledge) that scientists have explained this apparent anomalous flaw. Radiocarbon dating has several limitations: samples can be easily contaminated by younger carbon; it has a 30-70 year margin of error, and because of the half-life of C14 it can only be used to date organisms that are less than 50,000 years old, and even then the margin of error spikes significantly when things are older than 11,000 years. Radiocarbon dating also cannot be used to date fossils (something Kent Hovind does not understand), because fossils have been completely mineralized, meaning there is no carbon left in them to date. Another well-known limitation to radiocarbon dating is called the reservoir effect. Some organisms obtain carbon from the air, while others obtain it from other sources, like water and limestone. When radiocarbon dating was first developed, it was based on the large amount of C14 in the air, so it does not work well for organisms that get their carbon from another source. Fish and other marine animals get carbon from the water which they live in. The ocean is referred to as a “reservoir of carbon,” meaning that it stores more old carbon than the air. Since the ocean holds more carbon, and more old carbon, organisms living within it will date older than they actually are. The reservoir effect can also contaminate the carbon of organisms that eat diets high in seafood. That explains the seal and penguin. The mollusk Hovind cites is another victim of the reservoir effect. Mollusks who live in areas rich in limestone incorporate old carbon, and even dead carbon (C14 that has completely decayed) from the limestone into their shells. When mollusks are dated and the results show them to be thousands of years older than they actually are, what is actually being dated is not the mollusk itself, but the source material of its shell.

Of course, scientists do not try to cover up these limitations to radiocarbon dating as Creationist conspiracy theorists would like us to believe. In fact, they are even taught to students at the most elementary levels of anthropology. This is not information that only PhDs know about. This is material that I pulled right out of my Intro to Archeology textbook  (Archaeology: Down to Earth by D. H. Thomas and R. L. Kelly), and that was covered in depth in that very generalized introductory course.

Misinformation of the Hovind and 9/11 Truth sort is quickly propagated because the average lay person does not know enough to refute it, and does not have the critical thinking skills to compel them to investigate it before they buy into it. People hearing a speaker at church talking in an authoritative tone about a mollusk that disproves carbon dating have no reason to doubt him or question the information he presents. Do they even care enough to look up radiocarbon dating on Wikipedia? Not usually. They are hearing information that they want to hear, and that conforms to their pre-established worldview. Nothing seems fishy (no pun intended).

But what if curiosity is sparked? What if there is a guy who goes home from church and thinks, “I wonder if that Hovid guy is right about what he said about carbon dating?,” and decides to look it up on the internet? Sadly, it won’t make much of a difference, because, coming full circle back to my first tenet of conspiracy thinking: “they” are lying to you. A Christian could find out all of the evidence supporting evolution, carbon dating, the big bang, the age of the universe, the age of the earth, and everything else, but they have a preset defense against all of it, and it’s the preset defense of all conspiracy theorists: it’s nothing but lies. People are brainwashed by scientists. Scientists are lying and trying to deceive us all. The government is covering it up. BigPharma doesn’t want you to know about this.

Once a person, whether they be a Young-Earth Creationist, a 9/11 Truth supporter, an Anti-vaccinationist, or a UFO believer establishes the Us vs. Them mentality, then it is a lost battle. As I said above, the mentality of conspiracy theories is a self-supporting system. It cycles in upon itself, and I have no idea how or if it can ever be broken. Once a person has decided that there is a “they” out there trying to lie and deceive them, what can anyone say to change their minds? What can anyone do that will not just automatically be construed as the propaganda of “them”? A Christian is not going to believe an argument from an evolutionary biologist, no matter how sound it is, just as the 9/11 Truth supporters are not going to believe analytical documents published by the government relating to the September 11th events, because they are presented from their opposition.

How can I know that scientists/the government/BigPharma/JP Morgan are not just lying to me to accomplish their own ends? I suppose I cannot ever rule it out 100%. It is an unfalsifiable theory because if there is a truly master-minded, air-tight conspiracy at work, I will never be able to find out about it. But what I can do is look at the evidence around me. From my day to day experience, I have learned that people are, for the most part, truthful. I have learned that lying is a difficult thing to do and that it causes feelings of guilt and anxiety. Couple those simple observations with the statistical and historical improbability of the success of a large and perfectly covered up conspiracy, and I can say with a high degree of confidence that “they” are not out to get me or to suppress me or to withhold information from me or to brainwash me.

I believe that Christians are readily given to this kind of conspiracy thinking, the kind that I can avoid through logic and observation, because of their doctrinal beliefs in the power of Satan and his goal of stealing as many souls away from God as possible. Christians do not just believe in a human “them” like a national government or a mega-corporation, but a “them” with supernatural powers and an agenda of pure deception. Satan wants to deceive men to keep them apart from God. He wants to aid scientists in convincing the public to believe in evolution so their “minds may somehow be led astray from [their] sincere and pure devotion to Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3). Christians have the  conspiracy theorist’s Us vs. Them mentality ready-made: a persecution complex, plus the fear of deception on a supernatural level.

What can we do? It all seems so hopeless. Sorry to end on a pessimistic note, but I just cannot see this sort of mentality ever resolving itself. The best thing that we can do is teach future generations how to avoid it by instilling in them the values of critical thinking and skeptical inquiry.

Accepting Evolution

Accepting evolution was one of the big turning points in my personal evolution from fundamentalist Christian to atheist. It was only four years ago that I was in my high school Bible class being taught falsehoods about evolution. Foremost in my mind was the “fact” that evolution is not supported by the fossil record. I remember being read that line Darwin wrote about the dire need for transitional fossils to prove his theory, and then being told that none had been found. Of course I took my teachers’ words on authority. They were godly men who had dedicated their lives to understanding the Word and serving the Lord. Assuming from their high moral characters, they likely were not being deliberately dishonest, but rather were just ignorant about the amazing evidence supporting evolution. This ignorance, the fact that so many Christians, including Christian leaders, seem to be completely clueless about the real evidence which concertizes the theory of evolution is shocking.

The strangeness of this complete lack of information really struck me today as I read about the possibility of resurrecting the Neanderthal species. While fundamentalists Christians are still insisting that Neanderthals never existed, and that their fossil remains are simple weird looking humans that aren’t nearly as old as their carbon dating results say they are, scientists have nearly decoded its entire genome and are considering the ways to bring one bake to life. Christians are still holding fast to the idea that Neanderthals are a fiction while scientists have so thoroughly proven their existence and their distinction from modern humans via their unique genome that they are close to bringing a Neanderthal back to life to stare these religious fossils square in the face. The contrast is dramatically stark.

In a world where scientists understand evolutionary history and chronology well enough to be able to hypothesize that a specific transitional fossil will be found in a specific location within a specific strata and be dead on, fundamentalists Christians are still living in denial. Even Catholicism, which is steeped in ancient tradition, has been able to modernize itself and face the fact that evolution is more than just a nice theory. Of course they maintain that God guided the evolutionary process, but fundamentalists Christians struggle to make even that leap. They may accept “microevolution,” the idea that there is variation within individual species, but they vehemently maintain their rejection of “macroevolution,” the idea that evolution with a species can lead to the creation of a completely new species. And the do this in the face of mountains of evidence, which often require the formation deliberate lies from the leading proponents of creationism (Kent Hovin, Ken Ham and their ilk) to defend their increasingly impossible worldview.

Do we call it cognitive dissonance? Do we call it simple ignorance? Do we call it willful ignorance? The fact of the matter is that most of the followers of fundamentalists Christianity have no idea about these mountains of evidence. How this state of ignorance came to be is a phenomena in and of itself, but a clear product of the lack of critical thinking encouraged by religion. Theirs is a worldview that discourages questioning and the search for wisdom (aside from the wisdom that is said to come from studying the Bible). When I sat in Bible class and “learned” “information” about evolution, no one from my entire class thought to say something contrary or to ask a question. We were quite, submissive learners, just as the Bible instructed (Romans 13:1-5 is just one example that comes to mind). How can anything but ignorance come from this sort of learning model? Christians allow themselves to be deceived by the concocted lies of their superiors and go about the world wearing their Bible-blinders that obscure any suggestion of information contrary to what they have already established to be true based on nothing more than some inner stirring and a very old book. Compund that with their unchecked “Us vs. Them” mentality, which leads them to believe that scientists produce deliberate lies to build a world that doesn’t need God, and to believe that Satan and his minions are constantly working to deceieve them and drag them over to the dark side, and I’m afraid they will never be able to leave their self-made caves of ignorance. It’s kind of sad, really.

The Vaule of Prayer (Requests)

The last article I wrote was about the biggest benefit religion possesses: its strong sense of community. That feeling of unity and belonging that the Christian community provided is maybe the thing I miss most about being a religious person. But coming in at a close second is prayer requests.

For the ten years I went to Christian school, every day started with the opportunity to share prayer requests followed by a prayer that dutifully addresses all concerns. Prayer request time was supposed to be time set aside for spiritual introspection and communion with fellow believers, but it always devolved into nothing more than story-telling time. And I loved it. We had a way of taking a story that we wanted to tell and twisting it to make it either a prayer request or an object of praise: “Last night, when we were coming home from soccer practice, it was really dark outside. A dog ran right in front of our car and my dad had to slaaaam on the breaks! We all started screaming because we thought he had hit the dog. My sister even started to cry. My dad got out to make sure the dog was okay and saw him walking along the sidewalk across the street. He got back in the car and told us the dog was alright. My mom said that maybe we should go pick it up so that it wouldn’t get hurt or cause an accident. So we took the dog home and called the number on its tags and its owner came and picked it up. I’m thankful to God that my family and the dog were not hurt and that it got to go home to its family.”

Human beings love to tell stories. It’s the primary way that we learn and relate to each other. I can still remember the feeling of excitement as I sat at my desk with my hand raised, waiting for the teacher to call on me so that I could tell the entire class my new and exciting story–err–I mean, prayer request. One thing that I particularly loved about prayer request time was not only the fact that I got to tell stores and listen to stories, but that I got to listen to stories from people who I wasn’t necessarily friends with. My own stories also reached this larger audience of my school-mates, where normally they would be relegated to the realm of the lunch table in the corner that my friends and I always shared. These were people who I wouldn’t usually converse with, but I nonetheless had a desire to share events of my life with them because I felt a sense of connectedness and community with them.

As I go about life as a secular adult, I find myself often wishing I could go back to my fourth grade class room and share some of my prayer requests with a communal audience. I find that I have have so many stories to tell, but no good platform from which to do so. Sure, I can talk to my husband when he gets home from work, but it isn’t quite the same as telling a story to a large group of casual acquaintances who can actually learn something about me through my story. I wish that I could tell my entire German class that I saw a squirrel holding up one of its paws as it ran past me that morning, and that I really hoped it would be okay and that it wasn’t in pain. I feel the same sort of connectedness and community with my German class that I did with my fellow fourth-graders. We’re all students at the same school, we all live in the same area, we all know each others’ names. But the reality of the situation is that in this grown-up day-to-day life there is little opportunity for that kind of random non-sequitur, self-revelatory story. I wish I could feel like my German class was enough of a community that I could be permitted my non-sequitur for the sake of bonding and communion, but rules of propriety keep me quiet.

I see the value of prayer requests from a Humanist perspective. They help inspire and support the structure of a community. They allow a large community to freely share stories with one another—to relate to one another—without worrying about propriety, without worrying about sounding self-centered, and without worrying if the other person actually cares. If it is a request to God, there is always a legitimate reason for sharing. Not so with my squirrel story and my German class, unfortunately. I worried about that squirrel all day, and I wanted so badly to feel like it was okay to tell someone about it, but I never found the opportunity. If only I still went to church.