Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label religion. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 8, 2026
Sunday, July 7, 2024
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
NONE OF THE ABOVE
Why people are reluctant to call themselves atheists
By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Sun March 10, 2024
In September, standing before a room full of Christian conservatives, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made a bold pronouncement: “I don’t know how you could be a leader without having faith in God.”
Being an atheist is still a political liability in the US — though it’s not as bad as DeSantis would have you think. While a 2020 Gallup poll found that six in 10 people would vote for a well-qualified atheist presidential candidate, fewer people said they would be willing to vote for an atheist than a candidate who was gay, lesbian or Muslim. Only socialists ranked lower among poll respondents.
Though the share of Americans who say they don’t believe in a higher power has increased in the past decade, some people still view atheists negatively. A 2017 study found that people believe atheists are more likely to be serial killers than believers, even though federal data suggests they are far less likely to commit crimes than religious people.
Just like people of faith, not all atheists believe the same things. Aside from their lack of belief in a higher power or powers, atheists vary widely in their answers to spiritual and existential questions.
Given the misconceptions surrounding this group, many people are reluctant to say that they’re atheists — which means it’s hard to pinpoint connections and differences among their numbers.
What is atheism?
An atheist is someone “who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods,” according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary.
Because atheists are defined by what they don’t believe, it’s difficult to generalize what they do believe. In the words of comedian and outspoken atheist Ricky Gervais on X, “Saying ‘Atheism is a belief system’ is like saying ‘not going skiing, is a hobby.’”
Some atheists, like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris, are steadfast in their rejection of organized religion. Others are skeptical or apathetic when it comes to philosophical questions of whether a god exists.
Because of the social stigma atheists may face in the US and around the world, some people have complicated feelings about the term, said Nick Fish, president of the organization American Atheists. Plenty of people who fit the definition of an atheist don’t self-identify as such, instead preferring less fraught terms such as agnostic, humanist or freethinker, he added.
Then there are the cultural Catholics, the non-practicing Jews, the secular Muslims — people who don’t necessarily believe in a deity but identify with a particular faith because of their family upbringing, ethnicity or culture.
“A simple dictionary definition doesn’t necessarily encapsulate people’s self identity, and people use a variety of terms even when ultimately they believe the same thing,” Fish said.
What do atheists believe?
Atheists also have different interpretations of what it means to not believe. While nearly all self-described atheists don’t believe in the God described in the Judeo-Christian Bible, 23% do believe in God or some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe, according to a Pew Research Center report published in January.
Belief for atheists goes deeper than the question of whether there is a higher power.
Notably, a fifth of self-described atheists consider themselves spiritual, Pew’s recent survey on the religious “nones” found. The report contains other surprising insights, too: Most atheists say the natural world is all there is, but nearly a quarter believe there’s something spiritual beyond our present environment. About a third believe animals other than humans can have spirits or spiritual energies, and a slightly smaller share believe spiritual energies can be found in parts of nature, like mountains, trees or rivers. Just under one in five atheists believe cemeteries or memorial sites can have spiritual energies, while fewer than one in 10 say the same about objects such as crystals. Nearly a third of atheists believe humans have souls or spirits in addition to their physical body.
These responses might seem confusing or contradictory, but atheism and spirituality aren’t necessarily at odds. Though some people associate spirituality with a connection to a god, for others it can mean feeling connected to other people or to something else bigger than oneself.
Indeed, there are atheists who believe in cosmic interconnectedness or in transcendent moments of wonder without considering themselves religious. Long distance swimmer and self-proclaimed atheist Diana Nyad discussed this distinction in a 2013 interview with Oprah.
“I’m an atheist who’s in awe,” she said. “I think you can be an atheist who doesn’t believe in an overarching being who created all of this and sees over it. But there’s spirituality because we human beings, and we animals and maybe even we plants — but certainly the ocean and the moon and the stars — we all live with something that is cherished and we feel the treasure of it.”
How many atheists are there?
It’s hard to know just how many atheists there are when some people are reluctant to claim the label.
While a 2018 Pew survey found that 10% of US adults say they don’t believe in any higher power or spiritual force, only about 4% of US adults identify as atheists. A 2022 Gallup poll puts the number of nonbelievers higher, with 17% of Americans saying they don’t believe in God.
Some scholars, however, consider these numbers underestimates — an analysis by psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine B. Najle suggests the true count is closer to 26%. Gervais points to Cold War era associations of atheists as “godless communists,” as well as Christianity’s enduring influence on American culture, as some reasons people may be hesitant to identify as nonbelievers.
“The term atheist has attracted some unsavory connotations,” he added. “Also, religion (in the US) is politically and socially rewarded, so people might be reluctant to out themselves as an atheist.”
It’s also worth noting that atheism — at least in the West — is often defined in relation to monotheistic traditions, namely the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As the organization American Atheists notes on its website, older dictionaries previously defined atheism as a “belief that there is no God” — the singular, proper noun typically used by Christians and some Jews. Even Gallup’s 2022 poll asked about belief in “God.”
Framing atheism in these terms doesn’t capture a range of other beliefs that atheists could conceivably hold. Strands of atheist thought can be found in non-theistic traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, as well cultures around the world that practice animism.
What is the difference between an atheist and an agnostic?
There are all kinds of labels to describe nonbelievers. While atheism and agnosticism are among the most common, there are some differences between those terms.
Though the two are often considered distinct worldviews, technically, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Rather, the terms atheism and agnosticism answer different questions, Nick Fish of American Atheists said. Atheism answers whether a person believes in a god or gods, and agnosticism answers whether it is possible to know if a supreme being exists.
But again, dictionary definitions prove limiting here. In reality, many people think of agnosticism as a less stringent form of atheism.
“If you spend a bit of time digging in, I think (many agnostics) will ultimately say, ‘I don’t believe in a God but I’m not sure, so I’m agnostic,’” Fish said.
Jocelyn Williamson, co-founder of the Central Florida Freethought Community, doesn’t believe in a higher power but says she can’t be certain. Technically, that fits the definition of an agnostic atheist. But she said she typically tells people who ask about her religious beliefs that she’s a secular humanist.
“Most people don’t know what that means, and then I can actually have a conversation,” Williamson said. “There’s too many preconceived notions if I just say I’m an atheist.”
The term atheist only conveys what she doesn’t believe in, Williamson said. The term humanist, meanwhile, signals that she’s motivated by compassion for others and that she believes societal decision-making should be grounded in reason and science.
What do people get wrong about atheists?
One of the most common misconceptions about atheists is that they lack morals that others typically attribute to religion.
In a 2019 Pew survey, 44% of US residents said belief in God was necessary to be moral and have good values — in other countries, that share is much higher.
Williamson is all too familiar with such notions. When she was first getting to know faith leaders in her state, through her work with the Central Florida Freethought Community, she recalls a clergy member asking her what stops her from killing other people if she doesn’t believe in a higher power.
“I had always thought that was a meme, a trope,” she said. “I didn’t think anybody actually believed that.”
In fact, various studies suggest that atheists are no more immoral than religious people. They’re also just as likely to participate in civic life as those who are affiliated with a religion and just as likely to engage in community service, according to Pew’s recent survey of religious “nones.”
Atheists also get stereotyped as angry people who vehemently oppose religion and its followers. Like any other population, though, they aren’t a monolith. Williamson, for example, is part of the Interfaith Council of Central Florida and works with faith leaders toward common goals. Plenty of nonbelievers volunteer with religious organizations out of a desire to serve their communities, she added — her father worked as a local director for the Christian nonprofit Habitat for Humanity despite not being religious.
Another misconception about atheists is that they’re certain or unwavering in their beliefs, Fish said. People often tell him that they aren’t sure on the big existential questions, and therefore can’t be atheists. But many atheists are figuring it all out, too.
“Just because we don’t believe in a god doesn’t mean that we have all the answers to everything else,” he said. “In fact, for many, for most of us, it’s the opposite. We recognize that we don’t.”
Link to original article on CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/us/atheism-beliefs-explained-cec/index.html
By Harmeet Kaur, CNN
Sun March 10, 2024
In September, standing before a room full of Christian conservatives, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis made a bold pronouncement: “I don’t know how you could be a leader without having faith in God.”
Being an atheist is still a political liability in the US — though it’s not as bad as DeSantis would have you think. While a 2020 Gallup poll found that six in 10 people would vote for a well-qualified atheist presidential candidate, fewer people said they would be willing to vote for an atheist than a candidate who was gay, lesbian or Muslim. Only socialists ranked lower among poll respondents.
Though the share of Americans who say they don’t believe in a higher power has increased in the past decade, some people still view atheists negatively. A 2017 study found that people believe atheists are more likely to be serial killers than believers, even though federal data suggests they are far less likely to commit crimes than religious people.
Just like people of faith, not all atheists believe the same things. Aside from their lack of belief in a higher power or powers, atheists vary widely in their answers to spiritual and existential questions.
Given the misconceptions surrounding this group, many people are reluctant to say that they’re atheists — which means it’s hard to pinpoint connections and differences among their numbers.
What is atheism?
An atheist is someone “who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods,” according to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary.
Because atheists are defined by what they don’t believe, it’s difficult to generalize what they do believe. In the words of comedian and outspoken atheist Ricky Gervais on X, “Saying ‘Atheism is a belief system’ is like saying ‘not going skiing, is a hobby.’”
Some atheists, like evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and neuroscientist Sam Harris, are steadfast in their rejection of organized religion. Others are skeptical or apathetic when it comes to philosophical questions of whether a god exists.
Because of the social stigma atheists may face in the US and around the world, some people have complicated feelings about the term, said Nick Fish, president of the organization American Atheists. Plenty of people who fit the definition of an atheist don’t self-identify as such, instead preferring less fraught terms such as agnostic, humanist or freethinker, he added.
Then there are the cultural Catholics, the non-practicing Jews, the secular Muslims — people who don’t necessarily believe in a deity but identify with a particular faith because of their family upbringing, ethnicity or culture.
“A simple dictionary definition doesn’t necessarily encapsulate people’s self identity, and people use a variety of terms even when ultimately they believe the same thing,” Fish said.
What do atheists believe?
Atheists also have different interpretations of what it means to not believe. While nearly all self-described atheists don’t believe in the God described in the Judeo-Christian Bible, 23% do believe in God or some other higher power or spiritual force in the universe, according to a Pew Research Center report published in January.
Belief for atheists goes deeper than the question of whether there is a higher power.
Notably, a fifth of self-described atheists consider themselves spiritual, Pew’s recent survey on the religious “nones” found. The report contains other surprising insights, too: Most atheists say the natural world is all there is, but nearly a quarter believe there’s something spiritual beyond our present environment. About a third believe animals other than humans can have spirits or spiritual energies, and a slightly smaller share believe spiritual energies can be found in parts of nature, like mountains, trees or rivers. Just under one in five atheists believe cemeteries or memorial sites can have spiritual energies, while fewer than one in 10 say the same about objects such as crystals. Nearly a third of atheists believe humans have souls or spirits in addition to their physical body.
These responses might seem confusing or contradictory, but atheism and spirituality aren’t necessarily at odds. Though some people associate spirituality with a connection to a god, for others it can mean feeling connected to other people or to something else bigger than oneself.
Indeed, there are atheists who believe in cosmic interconnectedness or in transcendent moments of wonder without considering themselves religious. Long distance swimmer and self-proclaimed atheist Diana Nyad discussed this distinction in a 2013 interview with Oprah.
“I’m an atheist who’s in awe,” she said. “I think you can be an atheist who doesn’t believe in an overarching being who created all of this and sees over it. But there’s spirituality because we human beings, and we animals and maybe even we plants — but certainly the ocean and the moon and the stars — we all live with something that is cherished and we feel the treasure of it.”
How many atheists are there?
It’s hard to know just how many atheists there are when some people are reluctant to claim the label.
While a 2018 Pew survey found that 10% of US adults say they don’t believe in any higher power or spiritual force, only about 4% of US adults identify as atheists. A 2022 Gallup poll puts the number of nonbelievers higher, with 17% of Americans saying they don’t believe in God.
Some scholars, however, consider these numbers underestimates — an analysis by psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine B. Najle suggests the true count is closer to 26%. Gervais points to Cold War era associations of atheists as “godless communists,” as well as Christianity’s enduring influence on American culture, as some reasons people may be hesitant to identify as nonbelievers.
“The term atheist has attracted some unsavory connotations,” he added. “Also, religion (in the US) is politically and socially rewarded, so people might be reluctant to out themselves as an atheist.”
It’s also worth noting that atheism — at least in the West — is often defined in relation to monotheistic traditions, namely the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. As the organization American Atheists notes on its website, older dictionaries previously defined atheism as a “belief that there is no God” — the singular, proper noun typically used by Christians and some Jews. Even Gallup’s 2022 poll asked about belief in “God.”
Framing atheism in these terms doesn’t capture a range of other beliefs that atheists could conceivably hold. Strands of atheist thought can be found in non-theistic traditions such as Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, as well cultures around the world that practice animism.
What is the difference between an atheist and an agnostic?
There are all kinds of labels to describe nonbelievers. While atheism and agnosticism are among the most common, there are some differences between those terms.
Though the two are often considered distinct worldviews, technically, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Rather, the terms atheism and agnosticism answer different questions, Nick Fish of American Atheists said. Atheism answers whether a person believes in a god or gods, and agnosticism answers whether it is possible to know if a supreme being exists.
But again, dictionary definitions prove limiting here. In reality, many people think of agnosticism as a less stringent form of atheism.
“If you spend a bit of time digging in, I think (many agnostics) will ultimately say, ‘I don’t believe in a God but I’m not sure, so I’m agnostic,’” Fish said.
Jocelyn Williamson, co-founder of the Central Florida Freethought Community, doesn’t believe in a higher power but says she can’t be certain. Technically, that fits the definition of an agnostic atheist. But she said she typically tells people who ask about her religious beliefs that she’s a secular humanist.
“Most people don’t know what that means, and then I can actually have a conversation,” Williamson said. “There’s too many preconceived notions if I just say I’m an atheist.”
The term atheist only conveys what she doesn’t believe in, Williamson said. The term humanist, meanwhile, signals that she’s motivated by compassion for others and that she believes societal decision-making should be grounded in reason and science.
What do people get wrong about atheists?
One of the most common misconceptions about atheists is that they lack morals that others typically attribute to religion.
In a 2019 Pew survey, 44% of US residents said belief in God was necessary to be moral and have good values — in other countries, that share is much higher.
Williamson is all too familiar with such notions. When she was first getting to know faith leaders in her state, through her work with the Central Florida Freethought Community, she recalls a clergy member asking her what stops her from killing other people if she doesn’t believe in a higher power.
“I had always thought that was a meme, a trope,” she said. “I didn’t think anybody actually believed that.”
In fact, various studies suggest that atheists are no more immoral than religious people. They’re also just as likely to participate in civic life as those who are affiliated with a religion and just as likely to engage in community service, according to Pew’s recent survey of religious “nones.”
Atheists also get stereotyped as angry people who vehemently oppose religion and its followers. Like any other population, though, they aren’t a monolith. Williamson, for example, is part of the Interfaith Council of Central Florida and works with faith leaders toward common goals. Plenty of nonbelievers volunteer with religious organizations out of a desire to serve their communities, she added — her father worked as a local director for the Christian nonprofit Habitat for Humanity despite not being religious.
Another misconception about atheists is that they’re certain or unwavering in their beliefs, Fish said. People often tell him that they aren’t sure on the big existential questions, and therefore can’t be atheists. But many atheists are figuring it all out, too.
“Just because we don’t believe in a god doesn’t mean that we have all the answers to everything else,” he said. “In fact, for many, for most of us, it’s the opposite. We recognize that we don’t.”
Link to original article on CNN:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/us/atheism-beliefs-explained-cec/index.html
Thursday, September 24, 2020
BEAUTY: Photography--Ronny Behnert
Photographer Ronny Behnert travels the world photographing special places and I particularly like his series called Torri.
"I met Shintoism and Buddhism, the most widespread religions in Japan, all over the country. Shrines and torii, the traditional Japanese gates that symbolize the entrance to a Shinto shrine and form the transition from profane to sacred spaces, can be found in the most remote places in Japan. Even in the Pacific along the coast, high up on Mount Fuji and in the dense, uninhabited forests outside of the big cities, the torii are not uncommon.
In order to give each torii the necessary space for a dominant presence and at the same time to achieve a simple, minimalist image effect, I used strong neutral density filters for taking photos, which helped me achieve exposure times of five minutes and longer to make all the disturbing elements in the photo disappear . The longer the exposure time, the more clearly the existing wave structures of the troubled Pacific become blurred in order to take away even the smallest, disturbing picture element from the main subject.
The entire series is very important to me, as I have a very emotional connection to the Torii for an indefinable reason. So I am all the more pleased that the photos in this series were awarded 1st place at the Sony World Photography Awards in the landscape category."
https://www.bewegungsunschaerfe.de/de/torii
"I met Shintoism and Buddhism, the most widespread religions in Japan, all over the country. Shrines and torii, the traditional Japanese gates that symbolize the entrance to a Shinto shrine and form the transition from profane to sacred spaces, can be found in the most remote places in Japan. Even in the Pacific along the coast, high up on Mount Fuji and in the dense, uninhabited forests outside of the big cities, the torii are not uncommon.
In order to give each torii the necessary space for a dominant presence and at the same time to achieve a simple, minimalist image effect, I used strong neutral density filters for taking photos, which helped me achieve exposure times of five minutes and longer to make all the disturbing elements in the photo disappear . The longer the exposure time, the more clearly the existing wave structures of the troubled Pacific become blurred in order to take away even the smallest, disturbing picture element from the main subject.
The entire series is very important to me, as I have a very emotional connection to the Torii for an indefinable reason. So I am all the more pleased that the photos in this series were awarded 1st place at the Sony World Photography Awards in the landscape category."
https://www.bewegungsunschaerfe.de/de/torii
Friday, July 10, 2020
The War On Science Has Been Long And Hurts Us Now
Foes of science faced ridicule at the Scopes trial. We’re paying the price 95 years later.
Opinion by
Max Boot
Washington Post Columnist
July 8, 2020 at 11:01 a.m. PDT
Why is the United States the only wealthy country where novel coronavirus cases are hitting new highs while elsewhere the virus is being contained? A lot of it has to do with the rejection of science by many on the right. A Gallup survey reports that while 98 percent of Democrats reported wearing a mask outside the home, only 66 percent of Republicans did. The same denialism extends to other important issues: A Pew survey reports that 75 percent of Democrats regard climate change as a top policy priority, compared with only 25 percent of Republicans.
President Trump — who rejects his own government’s warnings about global warming and keeps insisting that the coronavirus will “miraculously” disappear on its own — is more a symptom than the cause of the problem. The right’s reign of unreason long predates his presidency.
This week marks the 95th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial — the most famous battle of the early 20th century between science and religious fundamentalism. The story is well told in Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account, “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” which is even more timely now than when it was published in 1997.
On July 10, 1925, high school science teacher John T. Scopes went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. While “Modernist” (liberal) Protestants and most Catholics and Jews had accepted evolution as a manifestation of God’s design, conservative evangelicals known as “fundamentalists” insisted that God had created the earth in six days and denied that mankind is related to monkeys. At the urging of the fundamentalists, Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution. The prosecution of Scopes was a test case contrived by the town fathers of Dayton to put their sleepy burg on the map.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Two of the most famous orators in America volunteered to try the case — William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, “attorney for the damned,” for the defense. About two hundred reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the carnival-like proceedings, which were broadcast on radio and filmed for newsreels, and later inspired the play and film “Inherit the Wind.”
The culmination of the trial was Darrow’s July 20 cross-examination of Bryan — a populist on economic issues but a conservative on social ones — about whether he took the Bible literally.
“Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” Darrow asked about a biblical passage that speaks of a miraculously lengthened day.
“I believe what the Bible says. I suppose you mean that the earth stood still?” Bryan replied.
Darrow first feigned innocence (“I don’t know”) and then sprang his trap: “Now, Mr. Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it had stood still?”
“No,” Bryan replied. “The God I believe in could have taken care of that.”
Darrow: “Don’t you know it would have been converted into a molten mass of matter?”
The jury found Scopes guilty, and the judge fined him $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court vacated the fine on a technicality but upheld the anti-evolution law, which remained on the books until 1967. But the popular verdict was that the anti-evolution side had been defeated by being made to look ridiculous. As Harper’s Magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen wrote: “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost … and the slow drift from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”
It’s true that fundamentalism became less assertive after the Scopes trial, but it hardly went away. By the 1980s, it had migrated to the Republican Party (Bryan was a Democrat) and had become a political force to be reckoned with. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, actually thought that Bryan was a sellout for admitting, under Darrow’s cross-examination, that the world was not created in six 24-hour days. Falwell said that Bryan “lost the respect of Fundamentalists” for conceding that the Book of Genesis was referring to longer periods of time.
Today, the theory of evolution is accepted by most Americans — including most religious believers — but still resisted by a significant minority. According to a Pew poll in 2018, 18 percent of American adults deny the theory of evolution. Among white evangelical Protestants (a core part of the Trump base), 38 percent say that humans have always existed in their present form. Having 18 percent of the adult population in the anti-evolution camp might not seem like a lot, but it translates to roughly 37.6 million people — the population of Canada — who reject a core tenet of modern science.
I suspect there is a lot of overlap between anti-evolutionists, anti-maskers and climate deniers. That hostility to science, found far more on the right than the left, makes it much harder to deal with major crises such as global warming or the coronavirus. Ninety-five years after the Scopes trial, the foes of science are more potent politically than ever — and we are all paying the price.
Link to original article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/08/foes-science-faced-ridicule-scopes-trial-were-paying-price-95-years-later/
Opinion by
Max Boot
Washington Post Columnist
July 8, 2020 at 11:01 a.m. PDT
Why is the United States the only wealthy country where novel coronavirus cases are hitting new highs while elsewhere the virus is being contained? A lot of it has to do with the rejection of science by many on the right. A Gallup survey reports that while 98 percent of Democrats reported wearing a mask outside the home, only 66 percent of Republicans did. The same denialism extends to other important issues: A Pew survey reports that 75 percent of Democrats regard climate change as a top policy priority, compared with only 25 percent of Republicans.
President Trump — who rejects his own government’s warnings about global warming and keeps insisting that the coronavirus will “miraculously” disappear on its own — is more a symptom than the cause of the problem. The right’s reign of unreason long predates his presidency.
This week marks the 95th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial — the most famous battle of the early 20th century between science and religious fundamentalism. The story is well told in Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account, “Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion,” which is even more timely now than when it was published in 1997.
On July 10, 1925, high school science teacher John T. Scopes went on trial in Dayton, Tenn., for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. While “Modernist” (liberal) Protestants and most Catholics and Jews had accepted evolution as a manifestation of God’s design, conservative evangelicals known as “fundamentalists” insisted that God had created the earth in six days and denied that mankind is related to monkeys. At the urging of the fundamentalists, Tennessee passed a law forbidding the teaching of evolution. The prosecution of Scopes was a test case contrived by the town fathers of Dayton to put their sleepy burg on the map.
They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Two of the most famous orators in America volunteered to try the case — William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and three-time presidential candidate for the prosecution, and Clarence Darrow, “attorney for the damned,” for the defense. About two hundred reporters flocked to Dayton to cover the carnival-like proceedings, which were broadcast on radio and filmed for newsreels, and later inspired the play and film “Inherit the Wind.”
The culmination of the trial was Darrow’s July 20 cross-examination of Bryan — a populist on economic issues but a conservative on social ones — about whether he took the Bible literally.
“Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?” Darrow asked about a biblical passage that speaks of a miraculously lengthened day.
“I believe what the Bible says. I suppose you mean that the earth stood still?” Bryan replied.
Darrow first feigned innocence (“I don’t know”) and then sprang his trap: “Now, Mr. Bryan, have you ever pondered what would have happened to the earth if it had stood still?”
“No,” Bryan replied. “The God I believe in could have taken care of that.”
Darrow: “Don’t you know it would have been converted into a molten mass of matter?”
The jury found Scopes guilty, and the judge fined him $100. The Tennessee Supreme Court vacated the fine on a technicality but upheld the anti-evolution law, which remained on the books until 1967. But the popular verdict was that the anti-evolution side had been defeated by being made to look ridiculous. As Harper’s Magazine editor Frederick Lewis Allen wrote: “Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really Fundamentalism had lost … and the slow drift from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”
It’s true that fundamentalism became less assertive after the Scopes trial, but it hardly went away. By the 1980s, it had migrated to the Republican Party (Bryan was a Democrat) and had become a political force to be reckoned with. Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority, actually thought that Bryan was a sellout for admitting, under Darrow’s cross-examination, that the world was not created in six 24-hour days. Falwell said that Bryan “lost the respect of Fundamentalists” for conceding that the Book of Genesis was referring to longer periods of time.
Today, the theory of evolution is accepted by most Americans — including most religious believers — but still resisted by a significant minority. According to a Pew poll in 2018, 18 percent of American adults deny the theory of evolution. Among white evangelical Protestants (a core part of the Trump base), 38 percent say that humans have always existed in their present form. Having 18 percent of the adult population in the anti-evolution camp might not seem like a lot, but it translates to roughly 37.6 million people — the population of Canada — who reject a core tenet of modern science.
I suspect there is a lot of overlap between anti-evolutionists, anti-maskers and climate deniers. That hostility to science, found far more on the right than the left, makes it much harder to deal with major crises such as global warming or the coronavirus. Ninety-five years after the Scopes trial, the foes of science are more potent politically than ever — and we are all paying the price.
Link to original article:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/08/foes-science-faced-ridicule-scopes-trial-were-paying-price-95-years-later/
Thursday, September 10, 2015
"All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists" by Lawrence M. Kruss
From The New Yorker.
Thank you, Lawrence!
SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?
I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or—to consider a less extreme case—imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.
The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.
In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?
Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.
I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
Lawrence M. Krauss is the foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His books include “The Physics of Star Trek” and, most recently, “A Universe from Nothing.”
Original article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists
Thank you, Lawrence!
SEPTEMBER 8, 2015
All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists
BY LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
As a physicist, I do a lot of writing and public speaking about the remarkable nature of our cosmos, primarily because I think science is a key part of our cultural heritage and needs to be shared more broadly. Sometimes, I refer to the fact that religion and science are often in conflict; from time to time, I ridicule religious dogma. When I do, I sometimes get accused in public of being a “militant atheist.” Even a surprising number of my colleagues politely ask if it wouldn’t be better to avoid alienating religious people. Shouldn’t we respect religious sensibilities, masking potential conflicts and building common ground with religious groups so as to create a better, more equitable world?
I found myself thinking about those questions this week as I followed the story of Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who directly disobeyed a federal judge’s order to issue marriage licenses to gay couples, and, as a result, was jailed for contempt of court. (She was released earlier today.) Davis’s supporters, including the Kentucky senator and Presidential candidate Rand Paul, are protesting what they believe to be an affront to her religious freedom. It is “absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberties,” Paul said, on CNN.
The Kim Davis story raises a basic question: To what extent should we allow people to break the law if their religious views are in conflict with it? It’s possible to take that question to an extreme that even Senator Paul might find absurd: imagine, for example, a jihadist whose interpretation of the Koran suggested that he should be allowed to behead infidels and apostates. Should he be allowed to break the law? Or—to consider a less extreme case—imagine an Islamic-fundamentalist county clerk who would not let unmarried men and women enter the courthouse together, or grant marriage licenses to unveiled women. For Rand Paul, what separates these cases from Kim Davis’s? The biggest difference, I suspect, is that Senator Paul agrees with Kim Davis’s religious views but disagrees with those of the hypothetical Islamic fundamentalist.
The problem, obviously, is that what is sacred to one person can be meaningless (or repugnant) to another. That’s one of the reasons why a modern secular society generally legislates against actions, not ideas. No idea or belief should be illegal; conversely, no idea should be so sacred that it legally justifies actions that would otherwise be illegal. Davis is free to believe whatever she wants, just as the jihadist is free to believe whatever he wants; in both cases, the law constrains not what they believe but what they do.
In recent years, this territory has grown murkier. Under the banner of religious freedom, individuals, states, and even—in the case of Hobby Lobby—corporations have been arguing that they should be exempt from the law on religious grounds. (The laws from which they wish to claim exemption do not focus on religion; instead, they have to do with social issues, such as abortion and gay marriage.) The government has a compelling interest in insuring that all citizens are treated equally. But “religious freedom” advocates argue that religious ideals should be elevated above all others as a rationale for action. In a secular society, this is inappropriate.
The Kim Davis controversy exists because, as a culture, we have elevated respect for religious sensibilities to an inappropriate level that makes society less free, not more. Religious liberty should mean that no set of religious ideals are treated differently from other ideals. Laws should not be enacted whose sole purpose is to denigrate them, but, by the same token, the law shouldn’t elevate them, either.
In science, of course, the very word “sacred” is profane. No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. “My practice as a scientist is atheistic,” the biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote, in 1934. “That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel, or devil is going to interfere with its course and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career.” It’s ironic, really, that so many people are fixated on the relationship between science and religion: basically, there isn’t one. In my more than thirty years as a practicing physicist, I have never heard the word “God” mentioned in a scientific meeting. Belief or nonbelief in God is irrelevant to our understanding of the workings of nature—just as it’s irrelevant to the question of whether or not citizens are obligated to follow the law.
Because science holds that no idea is sacred, it’s inevitable that it draws people away from religion. The more we learn about the workings of the universe, the more purposeless it seems. Scientists have an obligation not to lie about the natural world. Even so, to avoid offense, they sometimes misleadingly imply that today’s discoveries exist in easy harmony with preëxisting religious doctrines, or remain silent rather than pointing out contradictions between science and religious doctrine. It’s a strange inconsistency, since scientists often happily disagree with other kinds of beliefs. Astronomers have no problem ridiculing the claims of astrologists, even though a significant fraction of the public believes these claims. Doctors have no problem condemning the actions of anti-vaccine activists who endanger children. And yet, for reasons of decorum, many scientists worry that ridiculing certain religious claims alienates the public from science. When they do so, they are being condescending at best and hypocritical at worst.
This reticence can have significant consequences. Consider the example of Planned Parenthood. Lawmakers are calling for a government shutdown unless federal funds for Planned Parenthood are stripped from spending bills for the fiscal year starting October 1st. Why? Because Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue samples from abortions to scientific researchers hoping to cure diseases, from Alzheimer’s to cancer. (Storing and safeguarding that tissue requires resources, and Planned Parenthood charges researchers for the costs.) It’s clear that many of the people protesting Planned Parenthood are opposed to abortion on religious grounds and are, to varying degrees, anti-science. Should this cause scientists to clam up at the risk of further offending or alienating them? Or should we speak out loudly to point out that, independent of one’s beliefs about what is sacred, this tissue would otherwise be thrown away, even though it could help improve and save lives?
Ultimately, when we hesitate to openly question beliefs because we don’t want to risk offense, questioning itself becomes taboo. It is here that the imperative for scientists to speak out seems to me to be most urgent. As a result of speaking out on issues of science and religion, I have heard from many young people about the shame and ostracism they experience after merely questioning their family’s faith. Sometimes, they find themselves denied rights and privileges because their actions confront the faith of others. Scientists need to be prepared to demonstrate by example that questioning perceived truth, especially “sacred truth,” is an essential part of living in a free country.
I see a direct link, in short, between the ethics that guide science and those that guide civic life. Cosmology, my specialty, may appear to be far removed from Kim Davis’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to gay couples, but in fact the same values apply in both realms. Whenever scientific claims are presented as unquestionable, they undermine science. Similarly, when religious actions or claims about sanctity can be made with impunity in our society, we undermine the very basis of modern secular democracy. We owe it to ourselves and to our children not to give a free pass to governments—totalitarian, theocratic, or democratic—that endorse, encourage, enforce, or otherwise legitimize the suppression of open questioning in order to protect ideas that are considered “sacred.” Five hundred years of science have liberated humanity from the shackles of enforced ignorance. We should celebrate this openly and enthusiastically, regardless of whom it may offend.
If that is what causes someone to be called a militant atheist, then no scientist should be ashamed of the label.
Lawrence M. Krauss is the foundation professor and director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, and the chair of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. His books include “The Physics of Star Trek” and, most recently, “A Universe from Nothing.”
Original article here:
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/all-scientists-should-be-militant-atheists
Friday, February 28, 2014
How Conservatives Lost The Culture War by Damon Linker
Here is a very lucid, thoughtful, concise, and correct piece about the death throes of the tyranny of conservative culture. The United States, at its core, is not about legislating private morality or private religious beliefs. A court and the government, whether federal, state, or local, cannot inflict a personal belief onto the population. I do not have to believe and behave according to someone else's religious beliefs. It just is not the way we do things here, and when push comes to shove--and we push and shove in courts in this country, not the streets--it is obvious to see.
From The Week, by Damon Linker.
How conservatives lost the culture war
The triumph of gay marriage is rooted in the country's founding
This is a demoralizing moment for combatants on the conservative side of the culture war. Every few days, it seems, a judge strikes down a state statute or constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. (The latest was in Texas.) The Supreme Court (or rather, Justice Anthony Kennedy) seems poised to nationalize gay marriage at any time. And of course there's the defeat of Arizona's anti-gay bill. The desperate effort of Arizona lawmakers to pass such a law in the first place (along with a similar ill-fated attempt in Kansas) recently inspired Andrew Sullivan to remark that we're living through the "death throes of the anti-gay movement."
That may well be right. But what if we're living through something even more significant? A poll released this week by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute reinforces what a series of surveys have shown for years: An incredibly rapid and far-reaching shift toward public acceptance of both homosexuality and gay marriage. Indeed, PRRI's new numbers are so stunning that they inspired conservative culture warrior Rod Dreher to declare in no uncertain terms that "the culture war is over. The other side won."
When it comes to gay issues, I think he's right. (Abortion is another matter altogether.)
How did it happen? As I've argued before, the triumph of gay marriage can ultimately be traced back to the 2,000-year-old Christian ideal of equality. More recently, a shift in the definition of marriage took place after the introduction of the birth-control pill in 1957.
But there's more to it than that. The traditionalist religious position on homosexuality was bound to lose as soon as it stopped shaping American culture as a whole, and became, instead, the outlook of one subculture among many. And that happened in the mid-1960s.
(Much of what follows is adapted from my book The Religious Test.)
Up until that time, Americans, and indeed most men and women in the Western world, considered homosexual desires to be gravely evil and acting on them even worse. This judgment was accepted by nearly everyone, including most homosexuals themselves, many of whom lived lives shot through with shame, denial, and self-loathing.
Which is another way of saying that on matters of sexuality, Americans assumed a morality of ends, presuming that certain ways of living and acting are right or wrong in themselves, intrinsically, with their rightness or wrongness determined by the extent to which they conform to an ideal vision of humanity.
One version of a morality of ends is taught today by the Roman Catholic Church, in an idiom derived from the natural-law writings of Thomas Aquinas. Human sexuality, the church claims, is ordered by God toward the end of procreation, and sexual desires and activities that aim primarily toward other ends (such as pleasure or intimacy) are essentially disordered and offensive to God — in a word, evil. Traditionalists from other religious groups, now and in the past, may describe their beliefs in less philosophically rigorous ways, but when they denounce homosexuality or any other form of extramarital and/or non-procreative sex, they inevitably do so in terms of some stated or implied morality of ends.
But here's the thing: Our form of government isn't based on a morality of ends — and it isn't empowered to enforce one. It is based on and enforces a much more minimal morality of rights. Writing in the wake of Europe's religious civil wars, the liberal thinkers who most influenced the American constitutional framers (John Locke and Montesquieu) treated disagreement about ultimate ends as the normal condition of social life, and then sought to find common moral ground shared by every faction within society, regardless of the ends they pursued.
That common ground turned out to be a belief in individual dignity and rights to life and liberty that flow from it. Most liberals have also added rights to private property and the pursuit of whatever ends (including happiness, however defined) the individual affirms, provided that those ends do not infringe on the equal rights of anyone else to do the same.
But that leaves us with a puzzle: If liberal government is supposed to limit itself to upholding a morality of rights, how is it that the United States ended up with laws that forbade sodomy and policed other forms of sexual behavior when such laws are obviously expressions of a morality of ends?
Here's how:
The social and cultural consensus in favor of a morality of ends in sexual matters was so strong and so universally held that the government enforced it, despite its illiberalism. The consensus fundamentally shaped public opinion, which was echoed by elected public officials who wrote and enforced those restrictive laws. Meanwhile, no one thought to challenge those laws in the judicial branch of government; and even if someone did, judges (whose views are also shaped by public opinion) would have rejected it.
As long as the morality of ends regarding sexual traditionalism held as a near-universal consensus, illiberal laws policing sex were safe. But as soon as that consensus started to break down — as soon as significant numbers of citizens started to make the case for sexual freedom — the liberal state was poised to begin withdrawing from enforcement of the newly contentious morality of ends and substituting a more minimal morality of rights. Short of overwhelming cultural and social consensus in favor of a morality of ends, this will always be the default position of the liberal state.
From that point on, traditionalists would be perfectly free to continue adhering to their beliefs, but those beliefs would no longer have the force of law behind them because they now merely expressed the will of a part of society rather than the whole of society. What was once The Culture was now merely a subculture. (It remains an open question whether in the wake of the sexual revolution the U.S. has any unified culture at all — or if, instead, American "culture" is nothing more than the sum total of its subcultures.)
That's how the liberal state began its inexorable retreat from enforcing a morality of ultimate ends in sexual matters — a retreat still underway but lurching closer to completion every day (with efforts to reverse it doomed to failure).
It might sound obvious, but it's nonetheless true and too infrequently acknowledged: Conservatives lost the culture war in the 2010s because they lost the culture in the 1960s.
Link to original article at The Week:
http://theweek.com/article/index/257126/how-conservatives-lost-the-culture-war
From The Week, by Damon Linker.
How conservatives lost the culture war
The triumph of gay marriage is rooted in the country's founding
This is a demoralizing moment for combatants on the conservative side of the culture war. Every few days, it seems, a judge strikes down a state statute or constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. (The latest was in Texas.) The Supreme Court (or rather, Justice Anthony Kennedy) seems poised to nationalize gay marriage at any time. And of course there's the defeat of Arizona's anti-gay bill. The desperate effort of Arizona lawmakers to pass such a law in the first place (along with a similar ill-fated attempt in Kansas) recently inspired Andrew Sullivan to remark that we're living through the "death throes of the anti-gay movement."
That may well be right. But what if we're living through something even more significant? A poll released this week by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute reinforces what a series of surveys have shown for years: An incredibly rapid and far-reaching shift toward public acceptance of both homosexuality and gay marriage. Indeed, PRRI's new numbers are so stunning that they inspired conservative culture warrior Rod Dreher to declare in no uncertain terms that "the culture war is over. The other side won."
When it comes to gay issues, I think he's right. (Abortion is another matter altogether.)
How did it happen? As I've argued before, the triumph of gay marriage can ultimately be traced back to the 2,000-year-old Christian ideal of equality. More recently, a shift in the definition of marriage took place after the introduction of the birth-control pill in 1957.
But there's more to it than that. The traditionalist religious position on homosexuality was bound to lose as soon as it stopped shaping American culture as a whole, and became, instead, the outlook of one subculture among many. And that happened in the mid-1960s.
(Much of what follows is adapted from my book The Religious Test.)
Up until that time, Americans, and indeed most men and women in the Western world, considered homosexual desires to be gravely evil and acting on them even worse. This judgment was accepted by nearly everyone, including most homosexuals themselves, many of whom lived lives shot through with shame, denial, and self-loathing.
Which is another way of saying that on matters of sexuality, Americans assumed a morality of ends, presuming that certain ways of living and acting are right or wrong in themselves, intrinsically, with their rightness or wrongness determined by the extent to which they conform to an ideal vision of humanity.
One version of a morality of ends is taught today by the Roman Catholic Church, in an idiom derived from the natural-law writings of Thomas Aquinas. Human sexuality, the church claims, is ordered by God toward the end of procreation, and sexual desires and activities that aim primarily toward other ends (such as pleasure or intimacy) are essentially disordered and offensive to God — in a word, evil. Traditionalists from other religious groups, now and in the past, may describe their beliefs in less philosophically rigorous ways, but when they denounce homosexuality or any other form of extramarital and/or non-procreative sex, they inevitably do so in terms of some stated or implied morality of ends.
But here's the thing: Our form of government isn't based on a morality of ends — and it isn't empowered to enforce one. It is based on and enforces a much more minimal morality of rights. Writing in the wake of Europe's religious civil wars, the liberal thinkers who most influenced the American constitutional framers (John Locke and Montesquieu) treated disagreement about ultimate ends as the normal condition of social life, and then sought to find common moral ground shared by every faction within society, regardless of the ends they pursued.
That common ground turned out to be a belief in individual dignity and rights to life and liberty that flow from it. Most liberals have also added rights to private property and the pursuit of whatever ends (including happiness, however defined) the individual affirms, provided that those ends do not infringe on the equal rights of anyone else to do the same.
But that leaves us with a puzzle: If liberal government is supposed to limit itself to upholding a morality of rights, how is it that the United States ended up with laws that forbade sodomy and policed other forms of sexual behavior when such laws are obviously expressions of a morality of ends?
Here's how:
The social and cultural consensus in favor of a morality of ends in sexual matters was so strong and so universally held that the government enforced it, despite its illiberalism. The consensus fundamentally shaped public opinion, which was echoed by elected public officials who wrote and enforced those restrictive laws. Meanwhile, no one thought to challenge those laws in the judicial branch of government; and even if someone did, judges (whose views are also shaped by public opinion) would have rejected it.
As long as the morality of ends regarding sexual traditionalism held as a near-universal consensus, illiberal laws policing sex were safe. But as soon as that consensus started to break down — as soon as significant numbers of citizens started to make the case for sexual freedom — the liberal state was poised to begin withdrawing from enforcement of the newly contentious morality of ends and substituting a more minimal morality of rights. Short of overwhelming cultural and social consensus in favor of a morality of ends, this will always be the default position of the liberal state.
From that point on, traditionalists would be perfectly free to continue adhering to their beliefs, but those beliefs would no longer have the force of law behind them because they now merely expressed the will of a part of society rather than the whole of society. What was once The Culture was now merely a subculture. (It remains an open question whether in the wake of the sexual revolution the U.S. has any unified culture at all — or if, instead, American "culture" is nothing more than the sum total of its subcultures.)
That's how the liberal state began its inexorable retreat from enforcing a morality of ultimate ends in sexual matters — a retreat still underway but lurching closer to completion every day (with efforts to reverse it doomed to failure).
It might sound obvious, but it's nonetheless true and too infrequently acknowledged: Conservatives lost the culture war in the 2010s because they lost the culture in the 1960s.
Link to original article at The Week:
http://theweek.com/article/index/257126/how-conservatives-lost-the-culture-war
Friday, August 19, 2011
Just watched...
...John Patrick Shanley's "Doubt" starring Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, and Viola Davis.
Adapted from his 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning [2005] play of the same name, playwright John Patrick Shanley wrote the script for this film adaptation as well as directing it himself. What director would know the material and intention better than the playwright and screenwriter?
In New York in 1964, Sister Aloysius, a bitter, rigid nun accuses Father Flynn, her parish priest, of having had sexual contact with a student at a Catholic school. The catch: she has absolutely no proof, just circumstantial evidence and hearsay that she has stitched together into an inflammatory narrative. Like a pit bull, Sister Aloysius’ jaws lock onto Father Flynn’s leg and she vows not to let go until she brings him down.
What follows is a fascinating and tense journey through innuendo, possibility, gossip, assumption, and accusation. Sister James, a younger nun under Sister Aloysius’ wing, doubts that Flynn is guilty. Aloysius doubts that Flynn is telling the truth when he proclaims his innocence. Flynn doubts he can survive Aloysius’ vicious personal attack. Did he actually sexually abuse a young man? He denies it, but he does not act like an innocent man. His facial expressions, his body language, point to something deeper. He may not have molested the boy, but that doesn’t mean that the thought did not cross his mind. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a gorgeous, layered and complex performance brimming with subtext. Of course Streep is her usual masterful self, expertly inhabiting a soul other than her own. Amy Adams is sweet, and Viola Davis measures out a stunning performance in a single scene.
Much like the Coen Borthers’ film “A Serious Man” which I just saw and reviewed a few posts down, “Doubt” is about living without answers or in this case, proof. There is no proof that Father Flynn did anything untoward and barring an actual witness, it is likely that there will be no proof. But Aloysius is not bothered by a lack of answers—until the end of the film. It catches up to her, and one assumes it eats at her like a cancer. We, the viewers are not given any answers either. Perhaps an answer is not needed in this particular story. Shanley hopes to leave us in a state of doubt which is a state of flux, a state that can give birth to change.
And much like the Coen Brothers’ film “A Serious Man,” the religious component to this story is more than just a setting, it is part of its machinations. Whereas our hero in “A Serious Man” yearns for guidance but only gets unhelpful religious parables and stories, Sister Aloysius has taken the parables and stories of her religion as reality, cocooning herself in an illusion. Like I said in my review for “A Serious Man,” religion is only good for a few things like a sense of community and some pretty thoughts. When relied upon for immediate, practical, real-world issues, religion is seen for the empty, man-made, controlling cult it is. Aloysius is a dangerous zealot, convinced of her supreme knowledge. And this is the inherent menace in religion: absolute faith naturally gives birth to zealotry, and zealotry gives birth to righteousness, intolerance, and a vicious conviction that the religious way is the only way.
Sister Aloysius is not happy in her heart, and I can only think of the ancient French motto (which happens to appear on the shield of the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom), “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” which loosely translated means, “Evil be to him who thinks evil thoughts,” or more aptly, "Shame on you for seeing something bad where there wasn't." If you come from a tradition full of guilt, a tradition that teaches that sin is everywhere, and a tradition that elevates punishment as a core principle, then your sickness will be to see guilt and sin everywhere, even where it is not, even when there is no such thing as sin, and to mete out punishment since everyone is guilty.
Honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil thoughts and assumptions are their own punishment. Ask Sister Aloysius.
Recommend? Yes.
Adapted from his 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning [2005] play of the same name, playwright John Patrick Shanley wrote the script for this film adaptation as well as directing it himself. What director would know the material and intention better than the playwright and screenwriter?
In New York in 1964, Sister Aloysius, a bitter, rigid nun accuses Father Flynn, her parish priest, of having had sexual contact with a student at a Catholic school. The catch: she has absolutely no proof, just circumstantial evidence and hearsay that she has stitched together into an inflammatory narrative. Like a pit bull, Sister Aloysius’ jaws lock onto Father Flynn’s leg and she vows not to let go until she brings him down.
What follows is a fascinating and tense journey through innuendo, possibility, gossip, assumption, and accusation. Sister James, a younger nun under Sister Aloysius’ wing, doubts that Flynn is guilty. Aloysius doubts that Flynn is telling the truth when he proclaims his innocence. Flynn doubts he can survive Aloysius’ vicious personal attack. Did he actually sexually abuse a young man? He denies it, but he does not act like an innocent man. His facial expressions, his body language, point to something deeper. He may not have molested the boy, but that doesn’t mean that the thought did not cross his mind. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a gorgeous, layered and complex performance brimming with subtext. Of course Streep is her usual masterful self, expertly inhabiting a soul other than her own. Amy Adams is sweet, and Viola Davis measures out a stunning performance in a single scene.
Much like the Coen Borthers’ film “A Serious Man” which I just saw and reviewed a few posts down, “Doubt” is about living without answers or in this case, proof. There is no proof that Father Flynn did anything untoward and barring an actual witness, it is likely that there will be no proof. But Aloysius is not bothered by a lack of answers—until the end of the film. It catches up to her, and one assumes it eats at her like a cancer. We, the viewers are not given any answers either. Perhaps an answer is not needed in this particular story. Shanley hopes to leave us in a state of doubt which is a state of flux, a state that can give birth to change.
And much like the Coen Brothers’ film “A Serious Man,” the religious component to this story is more than just a setting, it is part of its machinations. Whereas our hero in “A Serious Man” yearns for guidance but only gets unhelpful religious parables and stories, Sister Aloysius has taken the parables and stories of her religion as reality, cocooning herself in an illusion. Like I said in my review for “A Serious Man,” religion is only good for a few things like a sense of community and some pretty thoughts. When relied upon for immediate, practical, real-world issues, religion is seen for the empty, man-made, controlling cult it is. Aloysius is a dangerous zealot, convinced of her supreme knowledge. And this is the inherent menace in religion: absolute faith naturally gives birth to zealotry, and zealotry gives birth to righteousness, intolerance, and a vicious conviction that the religious way is the only way.
Sister Aloysius is not happy in her heart, and I can only think of the ancient French motto (which happens to appear on the shield of the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom), “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” which loosely translated means, “Evil be to him who thinks evil thoughts,” or more aptly, "Shame on you for seeing something bad where there wasn't." If you come from a tradition full of guilt, a tradition that teaches that sin is everywhere, and a tradition that elevates punishment as a core principle, then your sickness will be to see guilt and sin everywhere, even where it is not, even when there is no such thing as sin, and to mete out punishment since everyone is guilty.
Honi soit qui mal y pense. Evil thoughts and assumptions are their own punishment. Ask Sister Aloysius.
Recommend? Yes.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Just watched...
...The Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man."
This 2009 Coen Brothers release is an amazing, overlooked gem of a film. Joel and Ethan Coen have made some classic films in their careers, solidifying themselves as purveyors of a certain kind of bleak narrative, rooted in existentialism but laced with black humor. And “A Serious Man” ranks among the best in their established genre.
The film opens with a tiny parable that seems like it comes straight out of Jewish folklore—but in truth, it was written by the Coens for the film since they could not find anything suitable in actual Jewish folklore. In a European shtetl in the early part of the 20th century, a couple are visited by a neighbor who may or may not be a dybbuck (a sort of Jewish zombie). The wife insists that the neighbor recently died of typhus, but the husband sees the proof of the living man right in front of him. Eventually the wife, with quite a sense of sang-froid, plunges an ice pick into the chest of the neighbor who laughs, and wanders off bleeding into the night. The wife feels that she has proved her point, but the husband is devastated, predicting that they will be punished for killing the neighbor.
What could that short introduction possibly have to do with the rest of the film that takes place in St. Louis Park, Minnesota (where, not coincidentally, the Coens grew up) in the late 1960s? Although the Coen Brothers have stated that there is no thematic through line, there is definitely a sense that links the prelude with the rest of the film. And that sense is the sense of the unknown.
In a general way, “A Serious Man” is a film about not having answers, and beyond that, it is about the fact that there is no possibility of getting answers. In this film, we follow Larry Gopnick, a physics professor and put-upon everyman. The Coens like to use the everyman device to illustrate a world that does not makes sense. The poor everyman becomes confused and paralyzed in the face of ever-increasing insanity (watch “Barton Fink”) and bizarre twists of fate (watch “Burn After Reading”). In 2000, the Coens made a brilliant film called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” which was based on Homer’s ODYYSEY, so with that in mind, it makes sense that, given the motif of the everyman, “A Serious Man” is loosely based on The Book of Job. Our hero, Larry Gopnick, suffers one unraveling string, one indignity, one calamitous misunderstanding after another. Larry is blindsided—he doesn’t see any of this coming at him, and indeed, there’s no way anyone could. Out of nowhere, metaphorical bowling balls are dropped on his foot at every turn. As his life spins more and more out of control, he reaches out for help, for answers about what he should do and how he should respond to these mounting, insufferable situations. He goes to speak to two different rabbis, hoping to glean some practical advice about a course of action but all he gets is rambling, smiling nonsense about parking lots and dental molds. (Later in the film, a third rabbi even quotes a Jefferson Airplane song.) But he is still at a loss as to what to do in the face of so many dilemmas. Larry has no answers, we have no answers, and the film even ends before it really ends, clipped off moments before the ultimate disaster hits.
So if this film is generally about not having answers, it is specifically about the uselessness of religion as a source of answers. Poor Larry practically begs, “What does HaShem [Jewish name for God] want from me? What does HaShem want me to do?” But no one can tell him. Religion is good at certain things—a sense of community, pretty inspiring thoughts—but when one needs real world, actual advice, parables and stories and metaphors are not going to cut it. We don’t know what to do or how to do it. We do not have answers. No one does. Is the old neighbor a dybbuck? Who knows? What is going to happen to Larry and his family? Who knows? All you can do is make decisions for yourself based on what you have in front of you at that moment. Larry is paralyzed and unable to make any kind of decision. Life steamrolls over him. But if he were able to say “No” or “Stop,” some of his problems would be either gone or mitigated. Really, the film is about taking control and responsibility for your own life instead of waiting for something else (religion) or someone else (a rabbi) to do that for you. The film arrives at this place in a fairly dark, murky, and complicated way.
Now that we have that out of the way, I will say that the production values are outstanding as well. Of course the direction is amazing and paced perfectly, every actor is spot on with what he or she has been given to do, and the art direction is excellent and captured the feel of 1967 in every little detail of homes, clothing, and cars. There is a certain kind of clarity to the photography, a sense of hyper-reality that adds to the unsettling nature of the story. The film is thoroughly realized and so totally itself, that it is easy to simply take it for granted and assume that we are watching a slice of life. But this slice has been carefully and expertly planned, created, and executed. It exists in its own complete world. Take a peek into it and you'll see parts of our world there as well…
Recommend? Yes.
http://www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/a_serious_man/
This 2009 Coen Brothers release is an amazing, overlooked gem of a film. Joel and Ethan Coen have made some classic films in their careers, solidifying themselves as purveyors of a certain kind of bleak narrative, rooted in existentialism but laced with black humor. And “A Serious Man” ranks among the best in their established genre.
The film opens with a tiny parable that seems like it comes straight out of Jewish folklore—but in truth, it was written by the Coens for the film since they could not find anything suitable in actual Jewish folklore. In a European shtetl in the early part of the 20th century, a couple are visited by a neighbor who may or may not be a dybbuck (a sort of Jewish zombie). The wife insists that the neighbor recently died of typhus, but the husband sees the proof of the living man right in front of him. Eventually the wife, with quite a sense of sang-froid, plunges an ice pick into the chest of the neighbor who laughs, and wanders off bleeding into the night. The wife feels that she has proved her point, but the husband is devastated, predicting that they will be punished for killing the neighbor.
What could that short introduction possibly have to do with the rest of the film that takes place in St. Louis Park, Minnesota (where, not coincidentally, the Coens grew up) in the late 1960s? Although the Coen Brothers have stated that there is no thematic through line, there is definitely a sense that links the prelude with the rest of the film. And that sense is the sense of the unknown.
In a general way, “A Serious Man” is a film about not having answers, and beyond that, it is about the fact that there is no possibility of getting answers. In this film, we follow Larry Gopnick, a physics professor and put-upon everyman. The Coens like to use the everyman device to illustrate a world that does not makes sense. The poor everyman becomes confused and paralyzed in the face of ever-increasing insanity (watch “Barton Fink”) and bizarre twists of fate (watch “Burn After Reading”). In 2000, the Coens made a brilliant film called “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” which was based on Homer’s ODYYSEY, so with that in mind, it makes sense that, given the motif of the everyman, “A Serious Man” is loosely based on The Book of Job. Our hero, Larry Gopnick, suffers one unraveling string, one indignity, one calamitous misunderstanding after another. Larry is blindsided—he doesn’t see any of this coming at him, and indeed, there’s no way anyone could. Out of nowhere, metaphorical bowling balls are dropped on his foot at every turn. As his life spins more and more out of control, he reaches out for help, for answers about what he should do and how he should respond to these mounting, insufferable situations. He goes to speak to two different rabbis, hoping to glean some practical advice about a course of action but all he gets is rambling, smiling nonsense about parking lots and dental molds. (Later in the film, a third rabbi even quotes a Jefferson Airplane song.) But he is still at a loss as to what to do in the face of so many dilemmas. Larry has no answers, we have no answers, and the film even ends before it really ends, clipped off moments before the ultimate disaster hits.
So if this film is generally about not having answers, it is specifically about the uselessness of religion as a source of answers. Poor Larry practically begs, “What does HaShem [Jewish name for God] want from me? What does HaShem want me to do?” But no one can tell him. Religion is good at certain things—a sense of community, pretty inspiring thoughts—but when one needs real world, actual advice, parables and stories and metaphors are not going to cut it. We don’t know what to do or how to do it. We do not have answers. No one does. Is the old neighbor a dybbuck? Who knows? What is going to happen to Larry and his family? Who knows? All you can do is make decisions for yourself based on what you have in front of you at that moment. Larry is paralyzed and unable to make any kind of decision. Life steamrolls over him. But if he were able to say “No” or “Stop,” some of his problems would be either gone or mitigated. Really, the film is about taking control and responsibility for your own life instead of waiting for something else (religion) or someone else (a rabbi) to do that for you. The film arrives at this place in a fairly dark, murky, and complicated way.
Now that we have that out of the way, I will say that the production values are outstanding as well. Of course the direction is amazing and paced perfectly, every actor is spot on with what he or she has been given to do, and the art direction is excellent and captured the feel of 1967 in every little detail of homes, clothing, and cars. There is a certain kind of clarity to the photography, a sense of hyper-reality that adds to the unsettling nature of the story. The film is thoroughly realized and so totally itself, that it is easy to simply take it for granted and assume that we are watching a slice of life. But this slice has been carefully and expertly planned, created, and executed. It exists in its own complete world. Take a peek into it and you'll see parts of our world there as well…
Recommend? Yes.
http://www.filminfocus.com/focusfeatures/film/a_serious_man/
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