Some Things a Humanist is Thankful For

 By Gary Berg-Cross

Once again it is time to turn the thanking function up high in the human brain. Religious groups have their top 10 lists. Faith. Usually makes that list of things to be thankful for:

Knowing that there is a higher power you can turn to when things become to difficult for you to deal with on your own is a blessing. We all have our doubts about this from time to time and most seem to return to the idea that something much more powerful than we are has had a hand in making this all happen. 

Sports fans, comics, foodies & regular folks have their lists too filled with family, friends, food, health and prosperity. In austere times many young people, such as new grads, would be in hot water without the family safety net. Not everyone can start a business borrowing their parent’s money. And tweeting makes for silly lists of things like Justin Bieber, tanning lotion and Funyuns.

But as I asked last year, why not a humanist/nonbeliever list for Thanksgiving? Here’s a small update.

Sure family will be on that list too. My older grandkids celebrated a pilgrammy activity time in run up to turkey day at school filled.  They feasted on seasonal wordfinding along with  harvest and preparation rituals including gathering firewood and folding bedsheets. For my son's new 6 month old I am extremely thankful. He brings everyone happiness.

 Here’s a start on a list of things I’d be happy to happen, that I’m thankful for happening or that people might say or think about on Thanksgiving.

  10. The end of a long political season and I'm still glad that I won’t be bombarded by silly gaffes of politicians on Thanksgiving day. Can we hope to move to effective policies and government? Wait are pols already visiting Iowa. I’d be thankful if we could rein that in a bit and give us a break.

9. More peace efforts and more effective ones…I’m thankful for the modest success we’ve had, but people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine and Israel  are only a short list of folks who, at times, can’t defend themselves from missiles of various kinds. I’m not thankful for the folly that let’s that mess continue.

8. More accurate historical skeptics to properly celebrate, educate and entertain our  dinner guests with some myth busting facts. That Pilgrims' festival?  The Pilgrims and the Indians did not, as the myth has it, sit down at tables, bless their food or pass the serving dishes. Did they really invite the natives or did the natives investigate what all the gun fire was about?. Finding a party they brought there own food and cooked accordingly.  

7. I celebrate Thanksgiving as a multicultural, humanist event rather than a religious one. Greg Epstein Humanist Chaplain @Harvard has a simple 3 item Outline for a Humanist Thanksgiving Dinner Discussion. Yes, food and thankfulness  it has  but it also has some guiding questions about community: For those who are part of a Humanist/secular group: how could our Humanist community be a better resource for ourselves and for others seeking community? How might we get more involved? Should we do dinners like this together more often? For those who aren’t part of a Humanist/secular group: what would you want your own connection to community to look like a year from now?

 6. And while we are on community, I celebrate some of the national humanist and secular organizations like CFI and AHA that move us towards a better society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values. You can find secular grace statements on the AHA celebration site:

A Secular Grace:

For what we are about to receive
let us be truly thankful
…to those who planted the crops
…to those who cultivated the fields
…to those who gathered the harvest.

For what we are about to receive
let us be truly thankful
to those who prepared it and those who served it.

In this festivity let us remember too
those who have no festivity
those who cannot share this plenty
those whose lives are more affected than our own
by war, oppression and exploitation
those who are hungry, sick and cold

In sharing in this meal
let us be truly thankful
for the good things we have
for the warm hospitality 
and for this good company.

  5. Last year we  could celebrate the failure of the not-so-democratically-super, Super Committee. This year we can’t yet celebrate handing a fiscal bump in the road but I still look forward to solving our problems, rationally. Let’s celebrate rationality and balance. Let’s celebrate that type of productive thinking employed across the wider scope of society.  

4. Managing and pulling off a great Thanksgiving feast requires quality planning and critical thinking. We can celebrate people who exemplify this with an affirming balance and a concern humanity and civil society. We lost a leading practitioner this year in Paul Kurtz, but we can still celebrate his life and remember.  

3. Despite our best selfish and self-centered efforts damaging it we still have to be thankful for Nature, its system resilience and mystery. One is reminded of the Albert Einstein  quote in this regard, “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”  I’m not thankful about the former part, but contemplating the latter can sure be oceanically wonderful.

2. I’m still glad that America is an exceptional nation and not yet an oligarchy. True, our stats aren’t what they once were and there is a growing wealth gap that suggests the exceptionalism isn’t trickling down, if that’s where it comes from. I’m glad that Elizabeth Warren is a senator along with people like Bernie Sanders and Angus King.  They are more in the mold of public servants that our founders might celebrate.

1. Not sure what is the # one thing to be glad of? One thought is that it’s only a month or so  till Tom Flynn (he of "The Trouble with Christmas") goes to work on Dec. 25^th. That’s a Tuesday so he isn’t off the hook like last year. 
So we have to decide whose turn is it to give him a call while he's in the office?

Celebrate and make your own rituals, even if they are modest and human sized. “When some as small as speaking a simple truth for human values becomes ritual, it finds  a place in the human heart. And as  Muriel Barbery, noted in her The Elegance of the Hedgehog our ability to see greatness in small things is deeply important:

 Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?”

  Happy Thanksgiving.

Sometimes, even good intentions are clueless

Today, PZ Meyer wrote an awesome post.  In it, he said some things about the atheist movement and issues that have cropped up regarding women, minorities and other groups which are often discriminated against such as the LGBT community where many in those groups have felt left out of this movement, to say the least.

Basically, his message is that if those of us who are actively trying to promote a non-theist community really are serious about opposing the deleterious affects of theism and the theocratic movement in this country or indeed, the world, 

we won’t achieve that by telling women and people of color that they need to adopt our priorities to fit in; we need to recognize that social justice, equality, and fighting economic disparities must also be a significant part of our purpose.

He goes on to say,

Using our white male position of power to tell others that they must adapt to us to fit in actually is an example of the logic of white supremacy, offensive as that sounds…even if we mean well, intent does not override the fact of what we do.
…
And the beginning of wisdom is to wake up and notice.
The second step is to try and change it.
And then it’s a long, long march afterwards.

I don’t want to try and steal his thunder here (I couldn’t if I tried) so I won’t belabor what he said except to tell you to go and read his post.  It is a wonderful eye-opening look into how a white male (like me) must begin to see himself as he is and how he is wrong before he can truly begin poking at the other guy’s eye.

So, go!  Read it, now!   I’ve even provided another handy link for you!  But I want his post in your mind before you come back here.  I'll wait.

Finished?  Good, read on.

So here’s my own spin on it.

Like PZ, I am a white male.  I grew up in Texas, where white males have a special place in heaven.  I’ve got a college education, a good, senior government job I’ve worked at for over 38 years and a salary to match that privilege.  In short, like PZ, I’ve got absolutely nothing to kick about.  Well, ok, I’ve got this handicap where I don’t quite fit the “P” part of the WASP thing, but, seriously, it’s never really affected me in a major way.  I live in Maryland, if that helps explain it.

Like PZ, it takes effort to stop, take notice and realize that I’m not being deliberately biased or racist - but I am often acting in that “institutionally” biased way PZ was talking about.  I have to stop and realize that there are issues and problems that I’ve never experienced because I’ve never been exposed to them, so I have no clue that they even exist.

That isn’t easy.  As a matter of fact, until he wrote about it, I’d not seriously even looked at it in quite that way before.  Now that I’ve read his post, it’s damn uncomfortable.

I’ve always thought of myself as an inclusive kind of fella, at least once I married a girl from another country and realized that America wasn’t all there is.  But I now see that it has been a journey, and a long one at that.  It isn’t finished, either.

It has just started.

I genuinely like people.  All sorts.  Tall, short, skinny, fat, black, white, brown and whatever other colors there may be, male, female, transgender or bi.  Living in Maryland has helped there, because I’ve been exposed to a lot of folks I’d never have known if I’d stayed in Texas.  It’s been an interesting experience, and I’ve found that most people are just that - people.

...and that’s my problem.

I have this tendency to see other people as just another person and have tried for so long to think of all sorts of folks as “just another human being”, that I’ve overlooked one of the most important things about those “other” people:  by being different, their experiences are different, giving them a different perspective on life and what the problems a secular, humanist and atheistic community should be worried about.

In other words, “it ain’t just about me.”

So, here’s what I’d like for you, my dear readers, to do for me.  If you are one of “those” folks with a different life experience, and you don’t see me talking about or linking to places that talk about things that you know are important in order to make you want to join our efforts in building a secular, humanist centered community, tell me about it!

Please.  Just tell me.  I am all ears, and really want to learn, because if our community doesn’t talk about and work to correct problems that affect you, we can’t expect you to care about ours.  This has to be a two way street, where all of us care about each other and work for the common good.  Together we can be stronger.  Divided, of course, we remain, well, divided and weak.  

If we want you to join us, we have to be willing to join you.

Final note:

Please, understand that I am not trying to limit the definition of “other”, above.  I mean to include women, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, all ethnic groups, races, nationalities and whatever other definition that helps to separate us into differing segments of humanity, including economic strata.  Every viewpoint is valuable, every opinion counts.

Oh, and if you think this is an important topic, link to it on Facebook or Twitter!

Robert Ahrens

The Cybernetic Atheist