-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.
Hubert Cumberdale:
Not true. Some atheists believe this, some atheists simply don’t believe God exists. This is a tactic theists often use to avoid their burden of proof.
What is curious is that anyone could think the blog post resembles that statement.
Mike S.,
“Yes it was written in a response to an unwarranted attack by a Dick who claims he knows everyone and everything. In that sense it was immature of me to have responded and for that I apologize not to Nick, but to the blog.”
No apology necessary, Mike, don’t worry about it. This one’s for you:
gbk,
My favorite Band and one my favorite songs. 🙂 I spend my summers near where Levon Helm lived in Bethel, NY. He died this year and there was a memorial service spreading his ashes over at the site of the Woodstock Festival.
Tony C.,
I am quite comfortable with the unexplainable as it carries the scent of wonder and humility. I don’t try to get a handle on it as I rather enjoy being buffeted about through the creative process that seems to be the inevitable outcome of my own “not-knowing”. Many a time I have walked backstage after a performance quietly whispering to myself, “Now where in the he!! did that come from?”
As I said above:
“Let us remember when discussing the reality of a religious/spiritual experience that everything real must be processed, one way or another, through the brain. Neuroscientific analysis may yet prove that a god is as real as a table.”
Bron, Not many Muslim Universities or Hospitals, are there??
Oro, Thanks, I’ve spent some time w/ Apache but never had any contact w/ Navajo. I hesitate to give this anecdote but I’ve said it previously. I went into a Walmart in Arizona. The clerk, two customers, and other folk around me were all speaking Apache. Pretty cool. Of course they all spoke English as well.
Blouise: There are plenty of unexplained things in my life too, and they will probably never be explained, but I think in principle they are explainable by natural phenomena.
I fail to see how “explaining” one thing by appealing to another thing one freely admits is unexplainable or impossible to fully understand (like “God” or “Magic” or “Karma”) resolves anything in one’s mind.
I already know physics is incomplete, researchers discover new implications of even the existing physics almost weekly. And even though they sound like magic, electrons that tunnel through space, quantum effect microscopy (like two-photon microscopy), quantum computing and other such things are not magical or spiritual but allow new things to take place.
As sophisticated as we might want to pretend to be, we are still primitives in our understanding of how the universe works; there are unanswered questions in physics, in biology, neurology, psychology, chemistry, and the working of everything from atoms to cells to society on a global scale.
I believe in principle all things are explainable, and although I am prepared to accept a fundamentally unexplainable origin (or eternality) of some inanimate “thing” like space or branes or energy, I will not accept an unexplainable eternal intelligence.
And in-between, rather than believe in magic, I have learned to be content with first-order “I don’t know.” There is no value in attributing the cause to something ELSE I can’t explain, especially when people have designed that “other” explicitly to be forever unexplainable (like God). So I don’t know how life began, or the universe began (if it began), but by leaving it at that (first order) I am open to the idea those things can be explained someday, and perhaps I can contribute now to that future understanding.
For a more concrete example, mental illness was attributed to God, and untreated, but by my principles rejecting that premise and looking for explanations, contributions come along that allow treatments of mental illnesses caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, or unresolved emotional trauma, and so on. Whereas a devout insistence that mental illness was God’s plan for an individual would simply waste a life in misery.
To me there is nothing wrong with not knowing, and I see actual grievous harm done by the seeming insistence that there be just ONE unknown and unknowable causative phenomena (like God forcing us to follow God’s unknowable Plan), as if that is somehow better than a plethora of unknown but potentially knowable causative phenomena.
DavidM:
I also find it strange that many of these same people are quick to praise Muslim Scholars for maintaining Greek works but by about 1200 the Muslims were finished with that while the RCC provided the intellectual groundwork for the Enlightenment.
Is that hypocrisy or just ignorance?
DavidM:
Correct me if I am wrong but werent the majority of universities set up in Europe started by the RCC?
Wasnt it those same Universities who produced men like Peter Abellard, Thomas Aquinas, Willam of Okham and many other brilliant minds which led to the Enlightenment?
Or do I have that wrong?
Nick, they are to be greatly admired and somewhat feared. BTW, “Navajo” is an Apache word which means enemy. Here is a sampling of what they have had to put up with
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_of_the_Navajo
^http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Livestock_Reduction
^http://www.democracynow.org/2012/10/11/after_decades_of_uranium_mining_navajo
Oro Lee,
🙂 … out of respect for their culture, nothing more need be said.
Look back:
“I stand on the rock watching the children play in the stream. The sunlight filters through the trees and sparkles on the flowing water as the children splash and dunk. My right foot is clubbed but my spirit is whole and they all trust me to find the path we must travel. I am Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloan but not your enemy.”
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Mesaverde_cliffpalace_20030914.752.jpg
Ute?
At any rate … I was there to study chord structure … music. One cannot get very far in understanding the basis of their music without understanding the spirituality of the people.
There are no gods. Period. The end. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous and those who do are, as they should be, subject to questions about their mental stability. Everything else that happens or is said on the issue is permissible only by the benevolence and tolerance of atheists. I make no apology for the stridency of my message. I am tired of those who have nothing to offer but their over active imagination preaching their nonsense with arrogance and superiority and tired of pretending it isn’t offensive and demeaning to the accomplishments of human endeavors.
Rcampbell wrote: “There are no gods. Period. The end. To suggest otherwise is ridiculous and those who do are, as they should be, subject to questions about their mental stability. Everything else that happens or is said on the issue is permissible only by the benevolence and tolerance of atheists.”
LOL. This is what I call bigotry against theism. It is a viewpoint arrived at by emotion rather than logic. Some of the greatest minds in science were theists, such as Isaac Newton and even Albert Einstein. Copernicus and Galileo were both given trouble by the church, but we should not overlook the fact that they both remained theists. Joseph Priestley, Louis Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Carolus Linnaeus… all theists. The rise of atheism is a modern phenomena caused by an overemphasis of secularism in government and public education.
I guess you think you know better than all these great minds of the past. According to you, atheism is the ONLY reasonable worldview. I disagree. While I can have respect for the skeptical mind that might question theism, I do not have respect for someone who thinks theism indicates mental instability. My studies have led me to conclude that the only reasonable worldview is theism, but even I would not call an atheist mentally unstable. From my perspective, he just hasn’t studied enough. Every rational mind will be led to theism eventually. It is inevitable.
P Smith wrote: “Without the FUD factor (fear, uncertainty, doubt) religion couldn’t exist, it’s why religion opposes education.”
What specific religion opposes education?
Aren’t you ignoring history? As much as I dislike modern religious institutions, we must acknowledge that religion established many of our modern educational institutions. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Rutgers, Dartmouth… all began from religious institutions. There is an entire theology built up within the Christian religion about the importance of education, even teaching that the name given to Christ in Greek by John, the most beloved follower of Christ, is the Logos, meaning, the word, or the principle of reason. Logos is the word from which we get our word “Logic” from, and many of our words end in “-ology” meaning “study of” or “understanding of” comes from this same word, such as bioLOGY or theoLOGY. So the Christians in their theology refer to their God as Logic and Reason, the beginning of all that ever was, the source of all creation being Logos, and you claim they are opposed to education? Such makes no sense.
The embracement of religion led not only to establishing schools, but even churches adopting the concept of “Sunday School” which was forged with the idea of education. Granted, in modern times such has become somewhat of a snafu, but from a historical perspective, it was grounded with the goal of free education. Even today, many private schools are religious in nature. Such is indicative of religion heartedly embracing education rather than opposing education.
TC: thank you for your comments, both in substance, clarity of presentation, and charity of spirit. While I am a member of a SBC congregation I try not to be a BSC member — yet in my old age I am sorely tempted to chunk the whole thing — i just don’t want to dump any baby that might yet remain in the bath water.
I don’t I think I romanticize “primitive” beliefs to an unwarranted extent. I don’t think that i romanticize them at all given the comparisons to a scaled down Buddhism and Platonic metaphysics.
And I beg to differ between “primitive,” a word i would be ashamed to use about the people of the Southwest, and the word “pimal.” The latter i use as foundational, indivisible as in prime numbers; as best or high quality as in prime interest rate or prime realty, and to connote something along the lines suggested by “primed and ready for action.”
The examples of the Mayans and the Aztecs do not meet my understanding understanding of primal any more than the religion of the Egyptians when they were building pyramids.
I’m talking the religion of a people who had to be exceptionally attuned to their environment and the changing of the seasons or else they die — a subsistence people at the dawn of the Neolithic. This emphasis harkens back to your description of the solar stories
Oro, Tell me a bit about the Navajo.
Blousie, in that I am intimately associated with Pueblo people your remark re the Navajo is well appreciated
Oro Lee: I have been fortunate to work with the primal people and societies in the Southwest USA — their religion is not far removed from that first formed by a subsistence people at the dawn of the Neolithic. […] I believe those type of religions — the primal ones — still have much to offer mankind.
I think you romanticize “primitive” beliefs to an unwarranted extent. The Mayan, and many cultures like them, engaged in human sacrifice, virgin sacrifice, animal sacrifice, and even cannibalism in the name of religion and currying favor with the gods.
Read the Old Testament; Moses sacrifices (human) female virgins to God to thank him for his victory in battle. I think the Bible is fictional, but the people that wrote that fiction apparently admired and practices live blood sacrifice on the alter of animals, and were not averse to at least imagining the live blood sacrifice of children and a God that would enjoy that — and they may indeed have practiced human sacrifice, as portrayed in the Old Testament. Or, as the Bible commanded them, killed their disobedient children, or summarily murdered strangers they found working on the Sabbath (gathering fire wood I believe, for the specific story), or selling their daughters into slavery.
He is fluent in all languages, including three that he only speaks.
P Smith:
Point well taken. What I was trying to say is that I don’t like to have my view coined in terms of without “god.” If nobody believed in god, there would not be the need for the word “a-the-ist.” I prefer a word with no “theo” root in it, hence “freethinker.” Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, and have had it “up to here” with a lifetime of hearing “women” defined in terms of “men” as the standard bearer of what is optimal. The good news, though, is that your reply sent me scurrying to a dictionary! I don’t claim to be a wordsmith such as yourself, so thank you for the educational moment.
Vague accusations of snooping from a paranoid, longwinded, pompous man ashamed he lives on a golf course. He doesn’t see the irony that I HAD NO IDEA he lived on a golf course until his paranoia caused him to divulge that. Why in the hell would I care? Why the hell would anyone care? Why would I “snoop” on you?. Finally, The Van Buren Boys was a NYC gang harassing George in Seinfeld. There are some similarities there! Let this rant go, and act like a guest blogger worthy of Mr. Turley’s name. Does mespo take football season off?
nick spinelli 1, October 20, 2013 at 12:17 pm
There was a car baked into the loaf of bread.
…
Along w/ some cinnamon and raisins.
=========================
Just to make the little people happy.
I like Opera.