-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
On a recent show of Soul to Soul, Oprah interviewed Diana Nyad, the long distance swimmer who, at age 64, swam from Havana to Key West. During the interview Oprah mentions that Nyad told the producers that she (Nyad) is “not a God person.” Nyad responds: “I’m an atheist.” Oprah responds incredulously: “But you’re in the awe.” Oprah just can’t believe that an atheist could feel awe. While atheists often use reason to understand reality, they have the same emotions exhibited by non-atheists. Atheists just don’t feel the need to affix the “God” label to their feelings.
Nyad saw no contradiction between her atheism and her ability to experience awe, or as she calls it: “weep with the beauty of this universe and be moved by all of humanity.” Oprah was having none of this when she said “I don’t call you an atheist then. I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, then that is what God is.”
Nyad, maybe sensing Oprah’s uneasiness, offered a concession to the faithful by saying that her “definition of God is humanity and the love of humanity.” That an atheist would make a theist uneasy indicates the theist’s lack of confidence in their worldview. The comfort of theists is not a primary concern for those who advocate reason.
Nyad also went on to explain she’s a “spiritual” person and believes in souls that live on after death. While atheism is not a set of beliefs, it is simply not believing in any god, most atheists don’t accept the other beliefs that accompany God belief. For all the reasons that belief in God unreasonable, belief in the soul is also unreasonable. Nyad’s beliefs freely crisscross the atheist-theist divide.
Oprah’s prejudice against atheists reinforces negative stereotypes. Her viewers will see Oprah’s prejudice as a trait to be imitated and the cancer will spread. For her viewers who already hold anti-atheists biases, those biases have been validated.
Many Christians have characterized Oprah’s beliefs as a form of pantheism, where the universe, or nature, is identical with divinity. While Oprah calls herself a Christian, pantheism is generally not accepted as part of Christian theology. Oprah’s promotion of Eckhart Tolle and his books has done nothing to ingratiate her with Christians.
Overt displays of bigotry against non-believers are tolerated if not encouraged by our society. Studies show that atheists are among the least liked people. This dislike keeps many atheists in the closet. The anonymity of the internet allows atheists to come out on-line while maintaining their disguise at other times. On the internet, people can learn counter-arguments to theological claims and use their own mind to decide which is more compelling.
H/T: Dave Niose, JT Eberhard, Jerry Coyne, Mano Singham, Hemant Mehta, David Edwards.
David,
Jefferson was a Deist, not a theist, and he was adamant that religion had little or no function in government other than the liberation of man (and women). You claim that you want to be like Jefferson and make religion a function of government. Once again, you got all upside down and backwards
David, please. There’s nothin more people here despise than dishonesty. Conversely, everyone respects and admires truthful speaking.
You frequently fall back on biblical allusions. When asked to name someone who became wealthy without exploiting anyone, you cited Abraham and fricking Job, for crissake.
And many times, you’ve energetically insisted that creationism should be taught along with evolution to provide an alternative view. Creationism is a Christian stealth initiative designed to create doubt, however small, in the theory of evolution. Evolutionary theory is scientific, testable and evidence based. So you favor teaching a religious doctrine in counterpoint to science. You and your “background in biology”.
To me, it’s pretty clear that you’re doped up on christianity. It’s in the Kool-Aid
Off topic–but on the subject of religion:
No, America is not a Christian nation
Why is the Right so obsessed with pushing revisionist history?
BY AMANDA MARCOTTE
10/17/13
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/17/no_america_is_not_a_christian_nation_partner/
Excerpt:
It’s common to hear conservatives say things like Paul Ryan did during the campaign: “Our rights come from nature and God, not from government.” Liberals shrug most of the time when they hear such rhetoric. It sounds like an empty platitude, much like praising the troops or waving the flag, that makes audiences feel good but doesn’t actually have any real-world importance. What liberals don’t understand, however, is that what sounds like an empty platitude actually signifies an elaborate, paranoid theory on the right about sneaky liberals trying to destroy America, a theory that is being used to justify all manner of incursions against religious freedom and separation of church and state.
The Christian right theory goes something like this: Once upon a time, a bunch of deeply religious Christian men revolted against the king of England and started a new nation with a Constitution based on the Bible. Being deeply religious fundamentalist Christians, they intended for their new society to reflect Christian values and the idea that rights come from God. But then a bunch of evil liberals with a secularist agenda decided to deny that our country is a Christian nation. Insisting that rights come from the government/the social contract/rational thinking, these secularists set out to dismantle our Christian nation and replace it with an unholy secularist democracy with atheists running amok and women getting abortions and gays getting married and civilization collapse. For some reason, the theory always ends with civilization collapse. The moral of the story is that we better get right with God and agree that he totally gave us our rights before the world ends. Insert dramatic music here.
None of this actually went down that way, but there are Christian right revisionist historians who are pushing this claim hard. David Barton is a major advisor to all sorts of Christian right figures and he has long promoted the completely false theory that the Founders wanted something very close to a Christian theocracy. Indeed, in their desperation to make people believe what simply isn’t true, activists on the right have even gone so far as to try to push Barton’s lies about the Founders into public school textbooks. The notion that America’s founders believed rights come “from God” goes straight back to Barton’s making-stuff-up style of “history.”
Despite the fact that liberals rarely engage them on this point, Christian right thinkers are forever ranting on about it. Rick Santorum’s speech at the Values Voter Summit this past weekend is an excellent example of the form. He delivered an inane, inaccurate lecture about the French revolution, describing it as doomed from the get-go because the revolutionaries believed in “equality, liberty, and fraternity,” which he contrasted with the Americans who supposedly believed in “paternity,” i.e. the theory that rights come from God. Rick Santorum debated the long-dead French revolutionaries, assuming that the word “fraternity” was an attempt to avoid admitting there was a God and then blaming everything bad that happened to France since then on its secularist government.
Glenn Beck is forever fired up about the debates he has in his head with imaginary liberals about where rights come from. On a recent rant emphasizing the importance of the “rights come from God” narrative, Beck got so wound up he recommended screaming at and even pushing your kids in order to get them to agree that rights come from God.
Nal, The Good Sisters would give you the ruler for that question!
Here’s a tossup question:
How can a timeless spaceless god finds the time and space to impregnate an underage Palestinian virgin, so that she can give birth to himself, as an eventual human sacrifice to himself, the save us all – you guessed it – from himself?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness
Consciousness is the quality or state of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.[1][2] It has been defined as: sentience,awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.[3]Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe that there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.[4] As Max Velmans and Susan Schneider wrote in The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness: “Anything that we are aware of at a given moment forms part of our consciousness, making conscious experience at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.”[5]
I suggest science research when C-ness began. Are monkeys conscious? Elephants return and pause for their dead, is this conscious mourning.
I have no personal doubt that consciousness developed through evolution. It was not created by “Gods” magic wand.
It is the conscious thought of many that God did create this consciousness. I am an atheist because I think it is human consciousness that created God.
DavidM,
“It is the idea that something mystical happened to place Abraham outside of the path that natural laws had placed all of humanity upon.”
You substituted “natural causation” with “natural law” in your response. Did you even notice? I doubt it.
Oh well, so many paragraphs wasted for so few words. I’m off to stir desire now. Good luck, everyone.
patsy, Read it back when it came out. I do most of my reading before going to sleep. I had to read The Portable Atheist in the morning, when most alert.
DavidM,
“Your quote must be read in context, the context of a response to a very religious person who was using the Bible as authority for a radical view that the father of Jews, Abraham, stepped outside of natural causation when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar.”
To focus more tightly, what does, “stepped outside of natural causation,” mean, David?
Sounds like glossy phrases you hope no one notices, because it will necessitate another multi-paragraph response from you that, in your recursive wont, will never actually produce anything of substance.
gbk wrote: “To focus more tightly, what does, “stepped outside of natural causation,” mean, David?”
It is the idea that something mystical happened to place Abraham outside of the path that natural laws had placed all of humanity upon. The idea is that when Abraham took the step to offer his son, he departed from the normal human being experience… he stepped outside of the causes of nature… outside of the normal path of nature… and instead stepped into a spiritual path and became the father of faith. It would be something that then caused his descendants to be something different… the chosen ones… people of faith. The concept did not resonate with Einstein. He saw Jews as no different than the rest of humanity.
Interestingly, many Christians adopt a similar philosophy, but instead of saying that it was Abraham’s physical descendants, they say it would be those who also practice faith in the way that Abraham did who step outside natural causation and become “born again.” They say that these are the true descendants of Abraham and therefore the chosen ones, the inheritors of the promises God gave to Abraham.
DavidM,
The idea that Abraham stepped out of causation by offering to sacrifice Isaac is counter factual and ahistoric. Not only that but itmisunderstands the story being told. Sacrifice of children to Gods was the norm in Abraham’s time. Read the “Golden Bough”, or “Masks of God “. The point of the story was Yahweh was rejecting “human sacrifice “. That Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son to gain Yahweh’s. favor was not novel.
I’m right here Nick, your doing fine!
Nick,
Is it possible for you to stop foaming at the mouth long enough to write a coherent thought? Where’s your new lapel, patsylvania? Is your grip on new lapels slipping?
I’m reading THE PORTABLE ATHEIST, by you know who!
Tea Party is like the Klan. Is that a generalization?
“PI is a sleazy profession.” You mean that’s a “generalization?”
It’s turtles all the way down
There are many versions of the “turtle” story. Here is one of the best known:
“William James, father of American psychology, tells of meeting an old lady who told him the Earth rested on the back of a huge turtle. “But, my dear lady”, Professor James asked, as politely as possible, “what holds up the turtle?” “Ah”, she said, “that’s easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle.” “Oh, I see”, said Professor James, still being polite. “But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?” “It’s no use, Professor”, said the old lady, realizing he was trying to lead her into a logical trap. “It’s turtles-turtles-turtles, all the way!”
— from Wilson, R.A. (1983, 1997) Prometheus Rising. Phoenix, AZ: New Falcon Publishers, 1983.
http://cosmology.carnegiescience.edu/timeline/1610/turtles-all-the-way-down
gbk:
thanks, that was interesting.
DavidM: I guess you think you know better than all these great minds of the past.
I guess I DO know better than all these great minds of the past, because greatness did not END with them, it went on to include many other great thinkers making great arguments and removing the barriers to understanding they could not overcome.
This is what is wrong with theists, they selectively glorify the authorities they agree with and pretend they are infallible and everybody else must be much stupider. You are essentially claiming it is impossible to out-think Newton. But Newton was just a man, a petty and cruel and jealous man, and in my view a credit thief and fraud and corrupt official on top of that, and he died a virgin and proud of it.
Is this what you would tell Einstein before he published, that he was stupid to think he could best Newton? Is this what you would tell Bohr, that he was a stupid 22 year old to think he could revolutionize physics in one summer and actually solve a problem that had stumped the world’s greatest physicists? And be recognized and accepted for that sole accomplishment? That instead of that, he should sit at their knee and absorb their knowledge to eventually become a pale shadow parroting their great discoveries?
Of COURSE we know better than they, they told us what they figured out and now we have absorbed many thousands of facts and experiments of which they were unaware, because they were dead by the time the experiments were conceived and the new facts were learned. To think that their brains were somehow uniquely able to solve such problems is mystical thinking, they were just humans immersed in a discipline, not gods with mystical powers, which is how you implicitly demand we see them.
Plus you engage in a false equivalence; their expertise in mathematics or physics (or any other area) does not mean they are infallible in the rest of their beliefs; Newton is famous for his proofs, but he offers no proofs of the existence of God (and if anything it is Newton’s proofs that suggest God is not required to run a clockwork cosmos).
Tony C wrote: “This is what is wrong with theists, they selectively glorify the authorities they agree with and pretend they are infallible and everybody else must be much stupider. You are essentially claiming it is impossible to out-think Newton.”
You are way overworking this thesis. I was not trying to glorify anybody, nor claiming that it would be impossible to out-think Newton. I just think making dogmatic statements like the one made previously, and following it up with the idea that anybody who disagrees is mentally unstable, well, that is just intellectually lazy. What does he do with all the scientists who would not agree with him? Are all these people mentally unstable? That strains credulity, don’t you think? That’s the only point I was making.
Creation myths have always fascinated me as creation myths provide a base perspective that ultimately define the boundaries of all other beliefs within a culture. All subsequent spiritual teachings and social structure must reconcile themselves with the creation myth, else creation itself can be called into question.
One of the oldest surviving (written) creation myths is from the Rig-Veda, a pre-Vedic perspective from the Indus Valley civilization.
The following is an 1896 translation, by Ralph T. H. Griffith, of chapter 10, hymn 129 of the Rig-Veda:
————————————————–
Darkness was hidden in a deeper darkness;
This All was as a sea without dimensions;
The Void still held unformed what was potential,
Until the power of Warmth produced the sole One.
Then, in that One, Desire stirred into being,
Desire that was the earliest seed of Spirit.
Bestowers of the seed were there; and powers;
Free energy below; above, swift action.
Who truly knows, and who can here declare it?
Whence It was born, and how this world was fashioned?
The gods came later than the earth’s creation;
Who knows then out of what the world has issued?
Whether the world was made or was self-made,
He knows with full assurance, he alone;
Who in the highest heaven guards and watches;
He knows indeed, but then, perhaps, he knows not!
——————————————————–
Considering the date of translation, 1896, by a Victorian Englishman, some of the phrases draw attention as being unique in the pantheon of creation myths:
“The Void still held unformed what was potential.” Potential.
“Desire was the earliest seed of spirit.” Desire.
“Bestowers,” of the seed.
“Free energy below; above, swift action.” Sounds chaotic to me, yet chaos with purpose. Also, the word “energy,” in 1896, did not mean what we think of today. I wish I could read the original for myself.
The male assumption of “he” being so key to creation is already there; so early in the historical record.
No real point to make. I just thought it might be interesting to throw out another historical record of creation that has many parallels with current monotheistic creation myths and yet provides very obvious differences.
Hubert Cumberdale:
A theist believes God does exist. Period. End of discussion. That leaves no room for any kind of debate (lest you be biased against theism). This is not being reasonable.
Nal wrote: “A theist believes God does exist. Period. End of discussion.”
No, it is not the end of discussion. Haven’t you ever cracked a theology book? Lots of discussion! Visit a Yeshiva and watch them argue.
Also, many have written books addressing the agnostic or atheist. More discussion. They do not just say that they are all mentally unstable. They use reason and logic in an attempt to convince the atheist.
davidm2575:
Speaking of logic, we have the Appeal to Authority fallacy.
Speaking of Albert Einstein:
The word ‘God’ is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, and religious scripture a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
Using Albert Einstein to support your theistic beliefs is a two fold fallacy.
Nal wrote: “Quoting Albert Einstein to support your theist beliefs is a two fold fallacy.”
I certainly am not mentioning Einstein to support MY beliefs, and your imagined “appeal to authority” has nothing to do with me adding him to the list. He was added to the list in reaction to the allegation that anybody who is not an atheist is mentally unstable. I do not find Einstein to be mentally unstable, and he could not stand it when atheists tried to claim he was an atheist and use him to castigate theists.
Einstein rejected the label atheist. To be specific, he embraced Spinoza’s concept of God. Einstein was a staunch determinist whose response to quantum physics was that God doesn’t play dice with the world. There are several quotes from him along these lines. He could not bring himself to believe that the natural laws that exist were left to chance. He preferred the path of humility, that he could not know much about the totality of the universe and the so-called afterlife. He was rightly skeptical of those who claimed they did.
Here is another quote from Einstein:
“The scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.”
and another quote:
“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”
Your quote must be read in context, the context of a response to a very religious person who was using the Bible as authority for a radical view that the father of Jews, Abraham, stepped outside of natural causation when he offered his son Isaac upon the altar. Einstein did not agree with that premise that the Jews were God’s chosen people, and so in that letter he castigated the man for two walls of pride.
davidm2575:
Oprah’s refusal to accept atheists as capable of possessing the same human characteristics as she sees in theists is what makes Oprah a bigot. If pointing out the truth is castigation, so be it.
“What makes Oprah a bigot in the mind of the atheist, but somehow they are exempt from bigotry in the way they castigate her?”
DavidM,
The way you frame that question shows your feeble grasp of the concept, because in asking the question you are expressing bigotry. There is no doctrinal tenet that I know of coming from liberals/progressives/moderates that says one is not allowed to speak badly of a particular person of color. Herman Cain is a buffoon for instance. Bigotry is when one makes generalizations about a person based upon generalizations about a group that person belongs to. Nobody here has said Oprah is acting in a bigoted manner because she is Black, yet you infer it. My surmise regarding your inference, is your own bigotry, as it has been expressed here regarding homosexuals for instance and about women’s place in the world. Now the “Tea” types which you have said you’ve joined have criticized President Obama incessantly. If that criticism had remained focused on political issues than one wouldn’t assume they are the bigots they are. However, the criticism of the President has gone far beyond that and the virulence of it, if not many of the statements, have been in line with the type expressed by Klan members. Now, please….for my edification, whine about how “they” did it to us.
Mike Spindell wrote: “Nobody here has said Oprah is acting in a bigoted manner because she is Black, yet you infer it.”
No, I did not infer that. The topic is religious bigotry, not racial bigotry. The statement was made that Oprah could not imagine an atheist experiencing awe over nature, which apparently is the subjective thing that leads Oprah to her acknowledgment of God. When the woman confessed similar feelings, then from Oprah’s knowledge, she was not really an atheist. She was trying to find common ground with her, despite the different labels used.
I simply ask why she might be branded a bigot when it appears that there is a similar religious bigotry from atheists towards religionists like Oprah. She is marginalized and held in contempt for not going along with the intellectual system of the atheist. All a person has to do is use the word God and atheists immediately brand them the intellectually inferior enemy of the atheist, someone who is mentally disturbed and unable to be a rational freethinker. If that is not bigotry, what is it?