Mourning the loss of a great Humanist

by Gary Berg-Cross

As many will know Paul Kurtz, often called the father of modern secular humanism, died Saturday Oct. 20th . There have been many outpourings of grief and sympathy as well as a celebration of his life.  WASH MDC had a panel honoring his thought and contributions earlier in the year and there have been several write-ups on this Blog (e.g. Kurtz by Edd Doerr or one on his thoughts) about Paul’s thoughts.

On his death he Associated Press article lauded him as a secular humanist and religion skeptic :

“A prolific author and organizer, Kurtz also founded the not-for-profit Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and Council for Secular Humanism, as well as the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry and Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which takes on such topics as alien sightings, paranormal claims and homeopathic remedies. Most recently, he formed the Institute for Science and Human Values (ISHV).”  

The New York Times called him a Humanist Publisher noting his founding of Prometheus Books noting that he taught philosophy at the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, from 1965 until his retirement as professor emeritus in 1991. They also noted:

In 1973, as editor of the magazine The Humanist, Professor Kurtz drafted what came to be known as Humanist Manifesto II, in which he updated a 1933 document by addressing issues that the earlier document, which was largely a critique of theism, had failed to touch on, among them nuclear arms, population control, racism and sexism.

John Shook provided a tribute to Paul on the CFI site, which included this:

Paul Kurtz’s philosophizing has never been just about negativity. If the limitations of faith can be charted, it is because the finest achievements of human reason have brought us farther and higher. Kurtz’s living naturalism is a philosophical achievement to stitch together a cohesive worldview from what all of the sciences are telling us, yielding an optimistic outlook for growing meaning and value, and a fulfilling ethical life for every person.

D.J. Grothe of the James Randi Educational Foundtion and a colleague wrote:

Paul Kurtz was not only my dear friend, but an inspiration. His humanity, his passion, his creativity and his organizational skills were the be

bedrock of a number of international organizations, and he worked tirelessly to grow the worldwide skeptics and humanist movements. In this respect, his impact remains unrivaled. His death is deeply felt and he will be sorely missed.”

Nathan Bupp, who was mentored by Paul and worked with him at ISHV, provided this snippet from Paul’s affirmative life that included great intellectual adventures at SUNY Buffalo:

"In 1987, Dr. (Paul) Kurtz was asked by the Chicago Tribune what he would do if he ever encountered God. 'I’d immediately pass out pamphlets, asking God to change the furniture in the universe and reorder it in a more just way,' he said, before adding: 'This is hypothetical, of course.'”

(from The Washington Post, 10/23/12)

Paul will be missed, but like many great people he has given us a legacy to work with if we have the wisdom to build on it.

Photo from NYT Obit article 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/nyregion/paul-kurtz-humanist-and-philosopher-dead-at-86.html?_r=1&

Some Notes from John Shook’s’ Talk - "The Psychology of Religion, the Sociology of Theology, and the Humanist Strategic Response".

by Gary Berg-Cross

John Shook, author of The God Debates has much to say about the
public critics of religion, but at a recent WSH MDC chapter his
topic was “The Psychology of Religion, the Sociology of
Theology, and the Humanist Strategic Response". The talk was
partially inspired by Dan Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and
the new research advances to the scientific study of religion. One
expression of the idea is to: “study religion as a natural
phenomenon, as carefully as you might study the trajectory of a
baseball or the embryology of the mouse”. Recently,
the Center for Inquiry (CFI) held a conference called "Daniel Dennett and the
Scientific Study of Religion: A Celebration of the Fifth
Anniversary of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural
Phenomenon. " Shook interviewed Dennett as part
of this workshop and this talk represented an update to
some the thinking in Dennett’s earlier book. Three type of
scientific studies have emerged those of brain, Behvipr
(cognition) & Belief (e.g.commitment) – as shown in the Picture at the top of this
Blog. Group practices, such as ritual conformity, can be seen as
connecting the Belief and behavior making it “ meaningful
belief” for such things as existential coping.

Only a small portion of these from Shook’s talk are covered in
these notes (and non of Lee's great food/snacks is available, for that you have
to come to the meetings), but an important point of departure concerns the
question of why religious belief phenomena happens. Why are
there religions? <As many have suggested there are
many explanations of why religion exists: as an

• explanation for what we don’t understand;


• psychological reaction to our lives and surroundings; as an expression of social needs;


• tool of the status quo to keep some people in power and others out;
  


• focus upon supernatural and “sacred” aspects of our lives; and


• evolutionary strategy for survival.

The old story is that such belief is based on some mixture of
fear, ignorance and mistake. The new view is a bit
different and argues that religious belief naturally
develops as part of human cognition. This makes sense when
we consider human curiosity mixed with such things as
reaction to tragedy within small group. Groups must
develop habits of correct conduct so we see the eventual
purposes of churches for group support. Deep
evolution of communication in human species from 1-2
million years ago, which allowed simple rituals which
religion evolved from and builds on. We’re not
sure when more organized beliefs to support group
dynamics arose as what we now think of as religion, but
a working guess is between 50 -100,000 yrs ago when
biological anthropologists and others speculate that a
superior narrative ability arose as a systematization of
earlier animism & magic into one with priests and
other baggage - a position of early researchers E.B. Tylor & James
Frazer. The good news is that religious evolution and
transformation is a step towards more intellectual
discovery. But this means more than disproving older theories that are
wrong if it is to lead to secularism. Among the points made and
argued in John’s talk were:

Brain Studies:

There is no religion brain or modules but religious thinking uses existing modules..
No amount of research helps provide evidence forsupernasturalism.But believers like that we see differences in brain activity during meditation and other quasi-religious
activities. It is really not surprising that we get brain activity responses that correlate with a
variety of unusual experiences.

Some will appeal to the brain as a direct cause of religion. But there are no pure brains. Brains are connected and encultured. It co-changes with culture.

And brains won't do everything, there are limits to what it does in isolation

But to do this the beliefs must conform to older universalmoral intuitions and must be able to explain some things in Why are the Gods of this era like us? Human-like error helps

Belief commitment:
There are consistencies between belief systems.

But belief correlates with error, sacrifice and risk are
problematic for believers and their supporters. How do such
systems survive?

The idea is that there are benefits/yields to consistent social benefits that
outweigh the downsides. So religions get social payoffs for
trust in some beliefs and committed behavior. They can get
away with false positive because we are not killed for false
belief like believing in spirits as we would about a belief
of wolves being in the woods.

Such beliefs helps groups get though hard times when there
are no rational solution.

But to do this the beliefs must conform to older universal moral intuitions and must be able to explain some things in some fashion.

So religions tend to use slightly, but only slightly, unnatural beings, usually anthropomorphic, like Gods that have human like qualities.

Stewart Elliot Guthrie argues that “Religion is Anthropomorphization Gone Awry”

They may employ naive psychology that most people have like the idea of
a mind without body. These are simple narratives and as
noted before seem to part of the human makeup.

Cultural anthropology is making progress on real roots of religion in terms of social
functions, animism, totenismm, ancestor worship (assuming
common ancestors), and magic to deal with problems. These
older ideas seem to have been systematized several thousand
years ago especially as part of “urbanization”.

As the river valley civilizations arose religion evolved like language.

Cities required shared duties and religion helped pass through the crisis of having
unrelated people living there by increased inclusiveness and
commonality. A group of people from diverse previously small
tribes are brought together as part if early city life. They
may then learn new skills - they may now be easily replaced
so they must learn skills. To conform they must converge
dialects and start to dress alike. They start to eat the
same foods from the same sources and they endure the same
hardships of living in close quarters (meeting many new
people each day), drought, shortages, prevent cheating etc
(See picture below). It takes quite a bit of work
to indoctrinate kids into all of this.

So early cities became
religious to handle high density and its problems. The Gods of religion had to evolve. People had
moved so were gods far away of not? Now they became gods for all people to relate people of different kinship.

This phenomena was seen early in Egypt & Dowism, but was an obvious solution
happened all around the world and was not a unique idea as was later claimed as part of Jewish
tradition. It had apath and polytheism was intermediate stage explaining how gods are related. The trend is seen from 3000 - 1000 BC where monotheism wipe out polytheism as an aid to managing
great empires.

During this time politics controls religion getting a lid on all them to help
perpetuate empire. Theology evolves to try to enhance
devotion with higher values that serve empire and religion.



With a common god the new urban masses have to becomes
‘fictitious kin’ to get along and make city life work.
Organized religion arose in these circumstances to serve
these needs. One of the new ideas is of a commonality to
humans, We are more than individual but we are also unique. A soul idea helps
explain that so religions start selling the idea of immortal
soul. It makes us we feel good as we are more than a small cog in big wheel of
city and empire, but there is always a tension, Do we have a soul capable of being punished?

John mentioned the work
of Scott Atran [Anthropologist, University of Michigan; Author of In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and Pascal Boyer as people who help us understand some of the transition.

One of the important contemporary lessons that John argued is that religious
belief collapses when given social support. Evidence of this
is Western Europe is one phenomena that worries American
fundamentalists and explains some of their urgent efforts to
gain cultural influence and diminish secular influence.

Sociology can't say what theological religions are adaptive
or natural. It may have been in long past, but with cultural
change has forced a theological position.

John finished on some lessons for Ethical Secularist and these are shown in the
picture below. Lessons for humanists include the idea that
naturalism by itself can't handle ethics and that we need a
philosophy for modern morality and secular social justice to
relieve stress.

There was a spirited Q and A that followed including:

• Can science prove religion wrong?

• Sam Harris argument that science can provide morality.

• Harris bridges it with normative principles.


• Naturalism can serve, but not prove an ethics.

• How enlightened self interest serves group interest in a consequentialist
  stance

• How control by
  narratives comes in and precedes powerful rational thought

• Anthropomorphism
  of god vs animals.
  

A Philosopher for our Times - John Dewey

By Gary Berg-Cross

John Shook will be talking Saturday Dec. 7^th at the WASH MDC chapter about "The Psychology of Religion, the Sociology of Theology, and the Humanist Strategic Response." As part of this we are likely to hear a bit about John Dewey and Pragmatism as evidenced by his recent book, John Dewey's Philosophy of Spirit by John R. Shook and James A. Good, published by Fordham University Press, in 2010.

John has woven together the threads of some of Dewey philosophical concepts and values into a poem.

A Philosopher's Faith
Inspired by John Dewey

My person returns to unwind all its threads,
Woven by language into the habits of heads;
An old wearied head must bow down one final eve,
But my lively thought shines in cloth I helped to weave.

Your gift by my leave is but some seeds yet to grow,
Whose value was found in times of need long ago;
Sow all of these seeds in our vast garden with care,
Protect and defend the greater harvest to share.

To view such swift change, see truths melt under new suns,
To watch how scared souls kept on refining their guns;
My nation was home despite such strife with no cease,
My freedom was here while humbly searching for peace.

By trial did I live, by more trial find my thought’s worth,
My death you will get if you conceive no new birth;
No life without doubt, for the best fail now and then,
No rest for my faith, that each new day tests again.

--John Shook

It’s fair to say that I’m a fan or John Dewey’s life and thoughts. I was dimly aware of him as one of America's premier "public intellectuals,". I had run into philosophic and pragmatic influence on progressive education, which served as a testing ground for some of his psychological-philosophical thinking.Some of that was readily available

“It was no accident”, he observed in Philosophy of education (see Middle works of John Dewey 1912-13, “that like himself many great philosophers had taken a keen interest in the problems of education because there was ‘an intimate and vital relation between the need for philosophy and the necessity for education.’ If philosophy was wisdom, a vision of ‘the better kind of life to be led’, then consciously guided education was the praxis of the philosopher. ‘If philosophy is to be other than an idle and unverifiable speculation, it must be animated by the conviction that its theory of experience is a hypothesis that is realized only as experience is actually shaped in accord with it. And this realization demands that man’s dispositions be made such as to desire and strive for that kind of experience.’ The shaping of dispositions might take place in various institutions, but in modern societies the school was the most crucial, and as such it was an indispensable arena for the shaping of a philosophy into a ‘living fact’ “(Dewey, 1912-13, p. 298, 306-7 quoted in JOHN DEWEY (1859-1952) by Robert B. Westbrook).

My formal education didn’t include much of Dewey’s thinking but his unifying concept critiquing the simple Reflex Arc concept. In his "Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology" (1896) paper, Dewey advanced a Functional School of Psychology by integrating his early Hegelianism with William James' recent take on evolutionary naturalism. Dewey's critique argues made the point that the idea of a stimulus based reflex arc account of human action fails because it contains an apparent logical paradox based on physical-mental dualism. What really is needed is an intentional level of analysis including feedback as the R of response affects the environment and changes the stimulus situation - see Figure on the left).

An "explanatory" account of animal or human action, he argues, needs to include this larger, intentional unit of analysis, which reconceptualized sensori-motor coordination.

Thus he added a cognitive, coordinating aspect that transcended and reformed old dualistic theories. A more thoughtful reflex arc provided the space and structure to reconceptualize stimulus-response behavior into a cognitive theory of habit. It emphasized active conceptualization and adaptive reconstruction as part of learning, an idea pursued in his experimental educational endeavors.

As a graduate student dating a Teacher’s College student at Columbia I got a bit closer to Dewey, whose name I could see along with other famous educators on engraved on the building. I had time later in life to select one of Dewey’s works as vacation reading and there I discovered that Dewey’s middle and later books were all on topics of interest to me (How we think ,1910, Democracy and education, 1916, Experience and Nature, 1925 etc.).

It was only more recently that I learned enough to see Dewey life and progression as a whole and understand how his early work and teaching in Psychology (e.g. pushing social theory beyond an instincts explanation) became an adjunct to his philosophy and work on broader public problems. His reconstruction idea for philosophy reflected his own life’s journey. When asked if he would update a book for a 2^nd edition he was known it say, “it will be a different book.” His ideas were always evolving.

Coming from an idealist background of Kant and Hegel, Dewey intellectual life was tempered by the pragmatist influence of Charles Peirce and William James. Trained in emerging experimental psychology Dewey constructed a natural philosophy in which vague concepts of mind were forged into more defined cognitive models. In these human thought was understood as instrumental practical problem-solving, which advances incrementally by testing rival hypotheses against experience in order to achieve the "warranted assertability" that grounds coherent action.

Dewey continually updated to his ideas in a search for truth and progress. The process of inquiry was central to his stance addressing the problems of society that consumed him. We can also say that he provided many good ideas to the modern Secular Humanism movement along with scientific/pan-objectiveness. In the 50s his voice could still be heard on cultural controversies and Dewey still provides a good model for the combined role of philosophy and philosophy to address the larger problems of society. Updated psychological models of human bias are one type of experimental result that Dewey might have appreciated and used to guide coherent action to make us a better society.

Accommodation and Openness: Thoughts on Religion & Non-Belief Cooperation at the Occupy Movement

By Gary Berg-Cross

There are many voices that can be heard in the Occupy movement, but coverage sometimes simplifies it down to familiar categories often framed in false dichotomies. So it is described by Fox and right wing outlets in what seem like hot button labels such as anti-bank or anti-capitalism. Or it characterized as made up of (or controlled by) a new brand of amoral, dirty hippies. For good measure the label of atheist & secular humanist are smeared on with rigor by right wing outlets in an effort to get an emotional response from their base.

But clearly religious moments, and even events, have become part of many Occupy camps. Indeed, while a minority of what is shown, religious imagery have been common since the protests began. In New York, activist clergy carried an Old Testament-style golden calf in the shape of the Wall Street bull to decry the false idol of greed. In contrast fundamentalist & some establishment religious leaders are cautious about involvement and less visible. They seem uncomfortable with the focus on what they see as “liberal issues” and are natural allies of the powers that be. An example of this tool place in Atlanta on 10/25 when a mix of clergy stood behind Mayor Kasim Reed as he walked into Occupy Atlanta to hold a press conference. It was then not surprising that later these clergy were rebuffed when they tired to serve as intermediaries between the movement and the mayor.

What we think of as liberal and interfaith groups seem more comfortable with the movement and see it as a fight for social justice and participatory democracy. As a result these segments of the religious community have secured some role in various Occupy events and the movement itself has made room for them as part of acceptance of the 99%.

One example of this spirit was the Chicago group, Interfaith Worker Justice, publishing an interfaith prayer service guide for occupation protests nationwide. Another example is downtown Dewey Square in Boston with its fill of tents, tarps and cold weather garb. But early on organizers ensured that encampment provided room for what was called a "Sacred Space" tent. It was made clear that it accepts all faiths & spiritual traditions. That welcome was evidenced by the presence of a Buddha statue abutting a picture of Jesus, and a hand-lettered sign pointing toward Mecca. Boston reporters also noted a mix of chakras, "compassion meditation" and discussion of biblical passages.

Religion might not fit into the movement seamlessly everywhere, but back in NYC, activist Dan Sieradski has helped organize a Jewish Yom Kippur service arguing that the movement must find space for religious faith somewhere:

"We're a country full of religious people….Faith communities do need to be present and need to be welcomed in order for this to be an all-encompassing movement that embraces all sectors of society."

That all encompassing movement includes a mix of believers and non-believers and we need to avoide a superficial response, to the legitimate question, “Is Occupy largely is a predominantly secular, atheist or Humanist undertaking or is religious?” This seems hard to answer, and perhaps is too simple a formulation. Some self proclaimed atheists have written of involvement, but often in cooperation with “left-leaning”/progressive religious groups. Secular and progressive religious groups may be similar minds on some issues that OWS is stressing and tactical cooperation among many parts of the 99% may be needed to move society forward. Indeed the Occupy efforts seem to be energizing progressive, religious activism. This may allow for some convergence of secular and religious activism over humanistic values and ideals such as fairness. It is perhaps good that secularists and religions can get together focus on something larger than their movements and rally about common values. This raises some accommodationist issues, but what is clear is that there have been roaring responses when some commonality has been raised, such as when Cornell West gave a shout out to:

"the progressive agnostic and atheistic brothers and sisters"

To some this suggests that the movement might serve to point out “not just the gulf between haves and have-nots in modern America, but between the religious right and not-so-religious left.”

In earlier times some religious groups and their leaders like MLK have been at the forefront of progressive social movements. Ministers like MLK could raise the nation's conscience on some of the issues OWS represents – inequality, poverty and injustice, languishing civil and ending wars. Improved national conversations represent one target for such movements and greater social consciousness. But since the 70s the main activism has been on the fundamentalist side, whose right-wing political activism has, among other things, eroded the separation of state and church. More liberal religious denominations, like unions have lost membership, and now seem less a part of the national conversation.

The Occupy movement may be a vehicle to get a succinct, social justice message out. A chicken and egg factor is the forging of an alliance between interfaith groups, atheists and secularist humanists of like mind. It might be needed for the greater good, but would require accommodation on both sides. Religious groups might have to accept the pragmatics of having non-belivers as partners, whose moral values are as valid & acceptable as those from the faith community. The responsibility of nonbelievers towards religious believers, as expressed by John Shook, is to help the religious “accommodate themselves to the cold hard truths about naturalism and the firm political structures of secularism. “

This togetherness & accommodation idea may not play well with some religious groups nor with many new atheist/secularists, but it may be something nonbelievers may accept as part of a broader, humanist, evolutionary path for both.