Voice of Reason -History & More

by Edd Doerr

The Voice of Reason, published by Americans for Religious Liberty (ARL). In the event that you are not familiar with ARL, it was founded in 1982 by Humanist leaders Ed Ericson and Sherwin Wine. It has been headed since 1982 by me (Edd Doerr), a past president and vice-president of the American Humanist Association and currently a columnist and senior editor of  Free Inquiry, the journal founded by Humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz.

ARL has been involved in over 60 major church-state lawsuits. In one of them, Lamont v Wood (in which Corliss Lamont and Isaac Asimov were the lead plaintiffs), the US Court of Appeals in New York struck down US tax aid for religious schools overseas. ARL has published over two dozen books and reached millions through TV, radio and print media.

Voice of Reason (VOR) provides the most comprehensive coverage of church-state separation issues, in line with the principles of Humanist Manifesto II of 1973. VOR has published over 850 reviews of the most important books in this field. All 34 years of Voice of Reason are accessible on our website – arlinc.org.

Here are a few other facts about ARL.

• ARL’s very small staff has over 80 years of experience in this field and has published over 80 books.
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• ARL is solely dependent on individual donations and receives no support from  foundations.

Leading Humanists, scientists and philosophers like Isaac Asimov, Carl  Sagan, Corliss Lamont, Paul Kurtz, Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould have endorsed and supported ARL. 

You are invited to join them. 

It’s just $25 per year and you get the Voice of Reason journal quarterly, either by email or regular mail.

ARL, Box 6656, Silver Spring, MD 20916

Also, for a free copy of the Fall VOR issue contact, WASH MDC coordinator, Gary Berg-Cross, gberbcross@gmail.com

John Sexton's Religious View of Baseball

By Gary Berg-Cross

John Sexton is making the rounds on talk shows promoting his book Baseball As A Road To God: Seeing Beyond The Game. Sexton, a former debate champion expresses himself well and apparently won an impromptu installment of The Bachelor when he guest starred on The Colbert Report to discuss his book. The book is based on a class he teaches which attempts to reveal what he calls “the basic building blocks of a spiritual or religious life.” Wrapping up ideas like miracles and mythic  belief in an extended baseball model is perhaps yet another way argue for the centrality of  religion.

Efforts to connect religious feeling to the “secular” game of baseball is not new. Thomas Boswell ("How Time Imitates the World Series"), W.P. Kinsella ("Shoeless Joe"), Robert Coover ("The Universal Baseball Association") along

with several others going back to the classic period have rifted on how sport brings people together. Sexton attributes this to what he calls the “ineffable” qualities of baseball shares – faith and doubt , experience of the contemplative/meditative, faith (will the Nationals win it all?), an out of the normal experience of time, conversion, blessings and curses, miracles, etc.. Sexton makes much of a focus on small “signs” that take on special meaning:

 “it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”

Sexton gives credit for the core idea to religion historian Mircea Eliade whose

“The Sacred and the Profane,” has been central to the & book. Eliade’s essential concept leveraged by Sexton is what he called “hierophany” or the manifestation of the sacred in the world. Certainly places like Stonehenge or St. Peter’s Basilica fit this labeling. Sexton just appropriates it for baseball while denying that is the stadium aspect of B-ball that he is thinking about rather than contemplating, faith, conversion and the like.

Sure these things are experienced in the phenomena in baseball and religion, but also politics, philosophy, etc. Doesn’t philosophy look for the deeper meanings to life? Secular humanist philosophers, like Paul Kurtz certainly provide views into these concepts. If we allow broad interpretations of concepts like “wishing things to come out well – aka “blessings.”  Taking advantage of a contemplative and philosophical moment or two these things seem a bit forced into religion and a path to God as opposed to a path to a place you chose to label as you will.

OK what to make of this?  In part it’s the labeling of complex human experience and shoehorning it into pre-set cultural categories such as “sacred.”  What does sacred mean to a person like Eliade?  His description ‘the intentional object of human experience that is apprehended as the real’ doesn’t really help me at all.

This is less a committed search for understanding than an opportunity to gracefully stamp things with a religious interpretation.

Sexton disarms criticism by saying we can dismiss “superficial similarities” between baseball and religion such as " a ballpark is a church and a ball game is a mass; there are three strikes to an out and three outs to an inning, another set of holy trinities." Of course.  But to then argue for deeper similarity & that baseball really is a road to God needs scrutiny too.

Actually Stephan Colbert did just a bit of this in his interview:

Colbert: “Jesus said that ‘no one gets to the Father but through me,’ are you saying that Jesus is baseball?”

Sexton: “Baseball is a road to God, just as our religion is a road to God, just as Buddhism is a road to God… The important thing is we must all get used to finding God in this world… God, like baseball, is timeless.”

Colbert: “Baseball feels timeless…”

Yes, one may label these as you wish. Sexton got a bit mystical too without mentioning metaphysics.

“There is the known… There’s the knowable… Then there’s the unknowable. We appreciate that which cannot be put into words, like love, which we know through experience. [Yet] we tend to confuse the unknowable from that which we simply do not know yet.”

“What I don’t know is what you just said,” Colbert says to audience—and our—amusement, “but I’m sure there are people out there who go to NYU who do know what you said.” (Anyone?)

Oh.  One more thing about the NYU connection. In March the faculty of New York University’s largest college this week approved a non-binding     vote of “no confidence” for John Sexton, handing him as the NYTs said,

” an embarrassing setback at a time when he is aggressively selling the university’s expansion plans at home and abroad…..Since taking office in 2001, Dr. Sexton has greatly raised the university’s profile, attracting a vast array of celebrated thinkers, raising more than $3 billion, winning approval for a huge expansion in Greenwich Village and assembling a Global Network University of campuses and study centers around the world.

But during the same period tuition rose and faculty salaries stagnated. His opponents said his emphasis on growth, along with the salaries and perks for a few top employees, were more appropriate to a corporation than a nonprofit institution."

Images

Cubs: http://www.chicagonow.com/daily-miracle/2012/05/the-miracle-of-a-modern-day-cubs-fan-introducing-jimmy-greenfield/

 

Sexton in Class : from NYT cited article

Sacred & Profound: http://eclecticbreakfast.blogspot.com/2012/02/book-on-unread-bookshelf-for-2012.html

 

 

Arguing vs. Discussing - The Challenge of Talking to True Believers

By Gary Berg-Cross

Annual CPAC meetings generate quite a bit of talk around the Beltway where politics, policy and lobbying are popular sports. You or I may even be that eager person who often slides into these easy conversations. They may start out on sound grounds say gun safety policy or the boundaries of religion and politics and slide into surprisingly murky concepts.  One often finds emotions rising and sound reasoning banned from the area.

 

CPAC seems to have more of this than some other meetings and it does attract media attention.

Did an audience member at the Conservative Political Action Committee panel on Republican minority outreach really defend slavery as good for African-Americans?  Something like argument arose when Frederick Douglas was noted as forgiving his slave masters. Forgive them for what?

 

“Shelter, clothing, and food?”

Boy, is this an ahistorical summary of slavery, but perhaps civics classes aren't what they once were.  It was reported that several people in the audience cheered and applauded the comment. Well, what does one say to such seemingly affirmatory bias thinking that tramples on reasonable understanding?

There have any number of practical guides generated by people of experience to better handle these situations where entrenched interests, affiliations, identity, ego, debating habits and ideology all play a role. 

One I saw recently was called “How to Talk to A Conservative” by Courtney Horne.  Her topic was “drug testing welfare recipients” but the points are a bit more general than the examples used. To be sure there are entrenched interests like the lobbying of drug testing groups, but they have analogs elsewhere such as the NRA for gun safety discussions.

In either case grounding a discussion in facts rather than arguing abstract points may be useful. In Courtney’s case she went to the cost of the policy, evidence that it wasn’t effective and implications for the idea of “welfare” and what we know about the working poor. I’m not sure that any of this would actually have worked with the CPAC audience member who may have opinions set in cement. Asked by a women about his claimed Republican Party’s roots and his demographic claims, he is reported to have responded:

 “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

Arg!   Well what does one say besides some people are ready to argue, but not to discuss? At least exposing such things to the light provides some perspective of the challenges we face.

This is free opinions without what Paul Kurtz described as the new paradigm of free inquiry here beliefs are treated as hypotheses to test.

We are increasingly in a fact-free zones where any opinion is equal to any other opinion and facts and skeptical stances are given the day off along with critical thinking & reasoned argument.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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True Believer: http://powerpopoverdose.blogspot.com/2011/10/true-believers-true-believers-1986.html

 

CPAC from CPAC site

Personally engineering happiness for the new year

by Gary Berg-Cross

My  friend Michael emailed me a link to a site (Action For Happiness) discussing activities that can promote happiness. Seems like  some good things to consider for the new year, especially as it starts out with gratitude and optimism which are useful, if challenging to feel at this point in History..

For Rational, Secular Humanists I would supplement these with the directed suggestions in Paul Kurtz's Affirmations of Humanism and joyful exuberance such as:

• We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.
• We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

According to my friend Michael his list is based on research that suggests the 12 activities below are among the most effective for boosting personal Happiness. 

So here is to building some individual and perhaps collective skill in happiness promoting practices: 
 

1 Expressing Gratitude
2 Cultivating Optimism
3. Avoiding Overthinking and Social Comparison
4 Practicing Acts of Kindness
5 Nurturing Social Relationships
6 Developing Strategies for Coping
7 Learning to Forgive
8 Increasing Flow Experiences
9 Savoring Life's Joys
10: Committing to Your Goals
11 Taking Care of Your Body (via Meditation)
                                                              12 Taking Care of Your Body (Physical Activity)

Now I don't expect to see these practiced in some important circles, like Congress, still it is important to give us all a chance to reset our lives and it may work for the rest of us.

Picture Credits

Wonder and gratitude:http://blog.zerodean.com/2011/quotes/gratitude-is-happiness-doubled-by-wonder/

Gratitude:http://www.ingeniosus.net/archives/category/social-emotional

Life Reset List:http://inspacesbetween.com/insights-inspiration/100-reasons-your-life-rocks-right-now/

Social and Emotional Learning: http://www.sanford.org/index.asp?Type=B_BASIC&SEC={3D98CCEE-65D8-469E-9A87-356B2316AD42}