The 2015 Year in Secular Perspective Blogs

by Gary Berg-Cross

2015 was a diverse year with many issues, some ups and more seemingly downward trends.  In between, as they say there were some learning situations and perhaps some insights. On this Secular Perspective site we had range of topics posted which offers its own perspective.  In case you missed it here are some of the top ones from our volunteer posters. Edd Doerr, president of Americans for Religious Liberty, provided the first 6 or so on some of his favorite issues.

10. Aborting Aristotle  Edd Doerr’s review of a book by  Dave Sterrett had over 200 readers.  He found it an “odd little opus” with an “ anti-abortion screed extruded by an evangelical publisher and concocted by a youngish Southern Evangelical Seminary grad who evidently dwells in a rickety Ivory Tower somewhere in the Twilight Zone beyond Cloud Nine.”

9. Edd Doerr  also had A brief comment on "Zombies of 2016"

Based on Paul Krugman’s column in the April 24 NY Times, that  choped up Chris Christie, Jeb Bush and other Repubs who would like to infest the White House.

8. Edd Doerr also provided a Review of Liberty’s First Crisis: Adams, Jefferson, and the Misfits Who Saved Free Speech

Freedom of speech, press, assembly and petition, like religious freedom  and church-state  separation, were/are intended to be protected by the First Amendment to our Constitution. However, in 1798, less than a decade after the Bill of Rights was adopted, the Federalist controlled Congress and President John Adams enacted the Sedition Act, which was immediately used to prosecute/persecute the slightest printed or spoken utterance that annoyed the Federalist establishment.

7. Edd published several on vouchers including, “The unpopularity of vouchers” which discussed the DC situation with the Congress and the Obama administration on the wrong side of the issue.   “Despite the council’s objections, Congress seems determined to continue D.C. school vouchers”

6. School Choice Works, Privatization Won't noted the importance of knowing  where the candidates stand on important issues like improving public education.

5. Edd’s Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools? Had over 300 readings and give a 5 star rating to a book by Mercedes K. Schneideron the controversial “Common Core State Standards” system.  The “Core” was largely pushed by big-money entrepreneurs and so-called “reformers” with little actual connection to teaching, including such conservative school-voucher-promoting outfits as the Fordham Institute.

4. I authored the next three mostly popular starting with the seasonal Channeling  Robert Ingersoll for Thanksgiving which had over 300 views.  It excerpted Robert Ingersoll’s 1897 , “Thanksgiving Sermon.” Turning from the divine he instead asked who should be thanked.  He found real groups of people - scientists, artists, statesmen, mothers, fathers, poets in contrast to religious organizations and their operatives.. He found plenty of things to be thankful for starting with the long rise from savagery to civilization.  

  

3. The trouble with Hanukkah? Had over 600 views since it was posted in Dec. based on a fact finding article on the Jewish Holiday.  The blog’s title is based on Tom Flynn’s more famous take on that bigger winter holiday in The Trouble with Christmas.

2. Also seasonally popular (>800 views) was my Sustained Seasonal Symbolic Struggles noting various symbolic struggles over words and associated values.
 such as Italian parents who were reportedly furious when a school canceled the "Christmas" concert with a winter recital.

1.  By far our most popular blog was by Matt Goldstein whose recent Can leftism be saved from Jeff Sparrow?  Had over 1000 views since published on Dec. 6^th. Matt notes that the Guardian newspaper’s Jeff Sparrow has been on the attack against New Atheism for some time. Matt rebuts Jeff’s latest salvo We Can Save Atheism From the New Atheists which begins with the question "Why are the New Atheists such jerks?". The provided explanation for the New Atheist's "dickishness" is "anti-Muslim bigotry" and "paranoid, racist shit". Matt sides with Chris Hitchens & Sam Harris’ idea that, "All religions are bad but some religions – especially those in the Middle East, by sheer coincidence! – are worse than others." 

Matt proposes that “What we really need is to save liberalism from bigoted regressive leftist dickish know-it-all jerks like Jeff Sparrow.”

Happy New year all, from one of the editors of Secular Perspectives.

The Nature of Consciousness

by Don Wharton

I treasure Sam Harris is a great many ways. However, he recently posted a two part essay on consciousness which demonstrate complete confusion about the subject (link1, link2). I think that we should start with the obvious point that some objects are complex biological machines which are conscious. Humans are the preeminent examples and they can more richly demonstrate their consciousness by verbal reports on the content and nature of what they are conscious of. There are an increasingly well understood array of cognitive function which support that activity.

What does Sam Harris do in response to the fact of human consciousness? He basically assumes that something magical happens that cannot be explained. He has many statements such as the following:

“How is it that unconscious events can give rise to consciousness? Not only do we have no idea, but it seems impossible to imagine what sort of idea could fit in the space provided. Therefore, although science may ultimately show us how to truly maximize human well-being, it may still fail to dispel the fundamental mystery of our mental life.”

It not difficult in the slightest for me to imagine that science will explain this phenomenon. Our universe is profoundly and completely natural with no supernatural elements. Our instrumentation is increasingly sophisticated in deriving data about how the brain works and where various types of emotion and cognition occur. The entirety of our subjective experience is created by these various brain functions combined with the sensory and support mechanisms for the brain supplied by the rest of our bodies. I an not only certain that this is true; I am certain that when we eventually build systems that adequately emulate the entire array of these functions we will have a system that is aware and will be able to demonstrate that subjective awareness as well as any person. If it is built on a computer system (as is most likely) we might have a feeling of incredulity in response to our relationship to the invented system. However, it should be an undeniable fact when it is achieved.

The fact is that nothing is ever proved by incredulity. Sam Harris, simply repeats one layer of incredulity after another with the expectation that we will accept his assertion that there is something that cannot be explained. For example: “Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness.” 

What should we do in the face of such claims. I think it is appropriate to approach these claims with the scorn we express for all unsupported religious claims. That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence. That was a standard line used by Christopher Hitchens and it fully applies here. There simply is no reason to assume that subjective experience is anything other than the well integrated collection of more primitive functions in the system that experiences.

There is the obvious fact that no description of any object, such as a brick, would ever be equal to the brick itself. Reality is different from any of our maps of that reality. This is not rocket science. However somehow very bright people can trip over this very obvious and simple distinction when it comes to consciousness.

Differences of Opinion Among the Freethinking Community

by Gary Berg-Cross

We all get into disagreements and differences of opinion. Its safe to say that no one is right about everything. We don’t have the same experiences or exactly the same tastes and values. People’s knowledge and opinions are like composite structures whose ingredients have been mixed over time from purer substances. Understanding in many areas, including the social world, is limited by the complex nature of subject matters, the boundaries of human rationality, limited time for analysis etc. As a result, to paraphrase Thoreau, it’s important to know what really know and tread more lightly in areas we are less experience with and expert in. Even in the freethinking, secular humanist-atheists may stumble or be on the wrong side of issue. And this can produce some interesting discussions, but also disagreements of opinion that develop into real arguments.

I was thinking about this in the last few weeks perhaps sparked by Penn upcoming talk in the area. He’s one of the atheists stars with his “God, No!,” book, but also of libertarian fame. You can see him talking about is libertarian views on the Glenn Beck show and equating them to the Founder’s philosophy. He’s clearly intelligent and freethinking on a variety of subjects a great deal which he speaks about opening in a humorous way often ending with "I could be wrong.” But he expresses some ideas that I take issue with such as:

“..the fact that the government can't rally everybody to work together. That's to be celebrated. The government being is hamstring and as closed off and as clumsy as possible is exactly what we want. The last thing we want is a government that can get things done. A government that can get things done all they will get done is taking away freedoms. Its been shown over and over again. We want a clunky, sloppy, slow-moving, small, insignificant, weak government there all the time. And that's a government we can love and protect.”

I might have honest disagrees with other notables in the freethinking community. I might agree with Bill Maher most of the time, such as “"The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them," but be uncomfortable with other serious points wrapped up in a mix of provocative humor and scathing criticism that leave little room for nuance.

With freethinkers like Dennett, Jacoby, Doerr and Grayling, it might take a micro analysis to find serious disagreements on important topics. Then there are the core of New Atheists, whose prominent figures include scientist Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and author Christopher Hitchens. There is some disagrement in the secular humantist-atheist community on the New Atheists who claim that believers in 'the god hypothesis' should not be tolerated, but should be actively countered and the 'shoddy' arguments supporting their beliefs should be exposed. While we might disagree on strategic and tactical stances many of us are happy to have some vigorous countering, criticism, and exposure of religious to Belief to rational argument and evidence. As Hos notes in a prior posting religions often escape any criticisms. It's not a policy we should apply to ourselves, but be thoughtful about it.

Whatever you think of the strategy the 3 central stars, the new atheist giants have fallen afoul of non-religious issues where they may be less certain of the facts and complexities. Christopher Hitchens, a literary powerhouse with a clear prose and scathing style, applied the same rather famously as an aggressive critic of God and his followers. This comes after bringing Mother Teresa to earth in an earlier scree that exposed Mother Teresa's ties to various despots and thieves, and questioned the wisdom of handing out the Nobel Peace Prize to a woman whose famous clinic for the poor had repeatedly been found unsanitary and badly run, refusing, for example, to give painkillers to the dying—maybe because she really did believe, as she once said, that "[t]he suffering of the poor is something very beautiful."

Clearly a freethinker, but he seemingly embraced (believed in?) neoconservative ideology after Sept. 11. In effect he provided a freethinking champion for George W. Bush Iraq war. Always one to paint a vivid image he said that the mere thought of preemptive action gave him an erection. As usual Hitchens comes across as supremely confident of his position. In his new book he says he knows more about the Middle East than simple liberal bumpkins who "weren't there", meaning:

• he has traveled in and reported extensively on the Middle East,
• he has access to knowledge denied most of the rest of the world;
  
• he knows for sure that those Islamofascists are Evil (shades or religious categories) and need to be pummeled and taught a lesson.

The fact that there were significant others with equally immediate and/or specialized knowledge, Brent Scowcroft comes to mind plus an assortment of generals and diplomats who were also "there," who had adequate security clearances and still opposed the war, goes unvoiced by Hitch. Taken as a whole liberals like Chris Hedges are uncomfortable with a slippery slope for secularists, who ally themselves with unethical people seeking pretexts to bombing "religious" countries. I'm uncomfortable with Hitchen's admiration of Paul Wolfowitz who in one interview he described as a bleeding heart and described neo-conservatism as a:

“distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy.”

Hedges also crosses some lines with amateur evolutionary psychology and proactive hypotheses about men and women. In a Vanity Fair bit called “Why Women Aren’t Funny,” he argued that men are funnier than women for Darwinian reasons: hapless males need the gift of humor to persuade women to mate with them. Reproduced in his new book (Arguable Essays) we hear that women are not tough enough to master comedy. Because such engineered wit requires a strong stomach and a stoic acceptance of the futility of life. “Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.”

One of my favorite thinkers Richard Dawkins recently got on an uneasy side of the discussion about sexual harassment. During the informal after-hours socializing time at an atheist conference Feminist Rebecca Watson was talking with colleagues about her presentation and other issues. At 4 AM, she said she was tired & left the bar heading back to her room to sleep. But in the elevator ride to her floor, she was with a male only identified now as the “Elevator Guy.”

Rebeca was aghast at being asked by the “Elevator Guy to continue discussion in his room. She expressed her later ideas to the atheist community this way:

"Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don't do that. You know, I don't really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I'll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and—don't invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner."

Richard Dawkins got himself into hot water by commenting that she was overreacting by comparing her situation with more serious ones. Using the dangerous form of a sarcastic letter to a Muslim woman, he suggested that Watson's experience in the elevator was trivial compared to the abuses that Muslim women deal with daily:

"Stop whining will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and...yawn...don't tell
me again,.."

The exchange escalated with postings on PZ Myers Pharyngula website where he noted that, "Richard did make the valid point that there are much more serious abuses of women's rights around the world, and the Islam is a particularly horrendous offender."

But he went on to argue that:

"the existence of greater crimes does not excuse lesser crimes, and no one has even tried to equate this incident to any of the horrors above. What these situations demand is an appropriate level of response: a man who beats a woman to death has clearly committed an immensely greater crime than a man who harasses a woman in an elevator; let us fit the punishment to the crime."

A final, arguable mis-step is Sam Harris who I agree with on a vast swath of topics. I'm more than a little uncomfortable with his critical words on Islam appearing in his “The End of Faith,” (pages 128-129). Normally a cool, clear thinker Harris seems here to be considering if seriously not advocated a future pre-emptive nuclear strike against a nation based on its religious views. Part of what Harris said to give this impression is:


"It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe."
from sam_harris_responds_to_chris_hedges_fundamentalism_kills_column_20110726/

Liberal thinker Chris Hedges was astonished by Sam Harris hubris to advocate taking millions of innocent lives - since nuclear weapons don’t only kill the bad people). Hedges is very familiar with terrorist and totalitarian regimes, having spent two decades covering Central America, the Balkans, the Middle East, & Africa and is concerned with our reaction to it and vulnerability to intolerance on all sides. There has been a great running debate by Hedges and Harris on this which your can read on Truthdig. It's too rich a discussion to do justice here but the core point is that Harris' position seems to some a dangerous idea related to beliefs on the part of Harris. One must consider carefully claims of whether or not whole populations are dangerous. Who has the right to determine which people get to live and which to die? Like Hitchens and the idea of pre-emptive attack, it is not something that can mitigate by using apologetic language and saying you were just weighing the options.



It's always a humbling experience to realize that 3 pioneering thinkers and personal heroes may get into tricky situations. In some cases the disagreement might be modest on topics of limited importance. But in other cases it may be important. Fallibility remains a core part of the human experience. Something that freethinkers know and appreciate more than most and we can be proud of being able to discuss the phenomena is constructive ways.

Words, Things and Simplifying Explanations like Free Will

By Gary Berg-Cross

Language is a wonderful, adaptive, social tool. We use it to communicate to others, and thus it has evolved in part to serve social purposes. Putting a name to things helps bring some simplification to complex phenomena. But words can also be Procrustean beds that dice up real, roundish objects to fit into our square conceptual holes. For example, we can say that that a clock is happy or in pain, but to our best knowledge these are social rectifications of some concept that may not correspond to reality. They are borrowed from our social realm and used to explain things there. To some degree they reflect the fact we thinking and linguistically express things anthropomorphically as objects. We see and name the world in terms that make sense to us.Science is a discipline sitting on top of our social world with a specialized language. But the Sciences are also social so Scientists create causal hypothetical concepts such as the Ether or phlogiston to explain things.  If these fail to be validated by observation they come to be seen as artificial creations. 

Philosophy probably has had an equal number of word creations if not more. Among them are concepts like consciousness, self, spirit, will and free will. Is there a reality to them? Some like spirit, that have been pulled into religion and laden down with dogma, no longer seem viable as causal philosophical concepts. Others like consciousness seem fair game for a joint cognitive science-philosophy effort.

The Free-Will versus Determinism argument has been raging for quite a while and very now and then every now and then some thinker takes a whack at it. This usually stirs the pot anew. Philosophers with a good grounding in modern science have provided some new perspective on the topic using neuroscience and an evolutionary perspective. For example Daniel Dennett’s in his Consciousness Explained (1991) approached the issue something like an update to David Hume’s ideas in the light of our neo-synthesis of Darwin's theory of evolution. Dennett calls the idea that we live in the here and now, moving steadily into the future an illusion. Instead cognitive "real time" is a spider web process of zigzagging through memories as we assess our progress on goals, hopes, plans and regrets! Indeed,in his view the Self like Consciousness is a type of internal reification. It is a constructed web of tales spun by us to make sense of experience. To Dennett our human consciousness, along with our narrative self-hood, is a product of experience not their source. This makes sense for several reasons including the fact that as children are learning language they see others as objects and so it is easy to identify oneself as a similar object. This concept of a conscious self serves a role of a unified agent who we can speak about in simple words. During this period we may pick up a term like "soul" and make a simple connection to a concrete concept so that the term comes becomes part of an unverified system of belief.

More recently Dennett took on the issue of whether there can be freedom and free will in a deterministic world in his Freedom Evolves. Surprisingly he frames his conclusion in the other direction considering the idea that as cognitive agents we can avoid some things we foresee. Our ability to understand some things mitigates the idea of inevitability.  
"Some things we can avoid. We are free to avoid some things such as ducking to avoid a tree branch. Very useful, but it doesn’t work so easily with a Tsunami. So some parts of the future is inevitable and others not within a deterministic world. So some concept of freedom is not an illusion but an adaptive, objective phenomenon that is distinct from other biological conditions and found in only humans through evolution. We are less instinctual, automated creatures and can even chose to be non-adaptive to prove a point."

See http://dontdontoperate.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/free-will-religion-without-god-dennetts-compatibilism/ for Dilbert's view on Free Will.

Even more recently Sam Harris has had a go at the issue in his The Moral Landscape (pp. 102-110), which has further stirred the pot. To Harris, unlike Dennett, the problem with free will is that no account of causality leaves room for it. All our internal life of thoughts, moods, and emotions effect of us in ways that are: “from a subjective point of view, perfectly inscrutable.”

Harris asks why he might have used the term “inscrutable” in the above sentence and answers for us that he has no idea. It is not clear that he was free or constrained to do this and even the meaning of the claim is inscrutable or opaque. 

Harris’ stance mixes philosophy and cognitive-neuroscience observing that only a small fraction of momentary information that our brains process becomes conscious. This requires attention which we have in small amount. You can actually experience how limited this is in the selective attention video on YouTube. 

The essential message is that human evolution has given us a cognitive system that allows us to note only important changes in our environment. It has not produced an all knowing or even totally rational system. We use simplifying models to helps us make sense of a complex world. While we are aware of some our inner life of thoughts and emotions, we are personally unaware of the neural events that produce these changes. Thus we generate models of the world of ourselves and of other people explain why things happen. These such as concepts of a unified self are simplifications, but pretty good ones to start with. It’s just that Science has moved us along and is helping us un-muddle the words used for concepts that are not simple “things” but processes.

Perhaps somewhere between Dennett and Harris’ views is Schopenhauer's summary statement pushing the issue a bit farther back to cognitive primitives:

'Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot want what he wants'.

It seems to capture an important aspect of the argument.

Could modern Spiritualism be the death of Religion?

On December 29th, 2010, Sam Harris was interviewed on ABC’s Nightline, which aired a pretty fair segment on Sam, and gave an outline of his book The Moral Landscape. The interview was, as main stream media usually treats leading atheist authors and speakers, actually interesting, and didn’t seem to include much of the tongue in cheek skepticism usually displayed. It outlined the premise of his book accurately, and again, didn’t seem to try to denigrate it with the faint praise usually reserved for content reporters feel is - distasteful - but can’t directly accuse if of being on air.

All well and good, but what caught me immediately was the comment they made at the end of the interview in a single almost throwaway line, noting that Sam has a new book in the works on the subject of spiritualism - but with a twist. That twist is the suggestion that spiritualism can be practiced and studied without religious mumbo jumbo. I believe the words they used were similar to the phrase “mythology of religion”.

Remarkable! Both the use of “mythology” and “religion” in the same sentence, and the serious idea that one can actually practice something usually associated with religion, but ignoring the myths.

Wikipedia defines spiritualism as a religion, monotheistic, believing in spirit communication and an anthropomorphic deity, but not a biblical one. This seems a bit different from how I have heard Sam speak of it in the past.

In an essay entitled, “Selfless Consciousness without Faith” back in 2007, Sam said:

There is no question that people have “spiritual” experiences (I use words like “spiritual” and “mystical” in scare quotes, because they come to us trailing a long tail of metaphysical debris). Every culture has produced people who have gone off into caves for months or years and discovered that certain deliberate uses of attention—introspection, meditation, prayer—can radically transform a person’s moment to moment perception of the world. I believe contemplative efforts of this sort have a lot to tell us about the nature of the mind.

(http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/panelists/sam_harris/2007/01/consciousness_without_faith_1.html)

That essay is a very good preview of how Sam thought about this subject three years ago. I recommend reading it in its entirety, as it undoubtedly outlines his thinking as he prepares to begin his next book.

It also provides a look at what could be the future of American religious life.

Lies, damn lies, and polls

For going on 60 years now, the Gallup organization has polled Americans, reporting pretty consistently that about 85 - 86 % of Americans are Christian through self-identification. Some others have reported in the last ten years that number may have dropped by as much as 10 - 11 % to around 75%. ("American Religious Identification Survey," by The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, at: http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_studies/aris.pdf )

But there have been various studies that suggest otherwise, that those numbers may have been inflated by a combination of polling techniques, skewed interpretations and the tendency of Americans to actually lie to pollsters. These studies, outlined on a web site called Religious Tolerance (http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_prac2a.htm), clearly show that the inflation could be as much as 100%, or literally twice the actual figures. Some polls have been taken that counted church attendance through actual physical counting of members present on a series of Sunday services, and showed that actual attendance was only about half of the numbers reported in public opinion surveys: 20% vs. 40% for Protestants, and 28% vs. 50% for Roman Catholics.

Others have suggested that the numbers of actual attending Christians are decreasing by as much as 2% per year in percentage of population. Combined by recent polls suggesting that atheists/agnostics in this country may be self-identifying in numbers approaching 15% of the population, it is becoming obvious that the actual numbers of practicing Christians is much lower than traditionally touted by religious leaders.

Other recent polls have suggested that the numbers of people that are “unaffiliated” comes pretty close to filling out that 86% figure. That designation includes not only unaffiliated christians, but people that are, in essence, deists, naturalists or - spiritualists. People that claim to believe in some kind of higher power, but shun religious organizations and decline to characterize their “gods” as anything approaching a biblical stereotype. Apparently, those numbers appear to be on the increase, along with non-theists.

The problem with non-theism

One of the reasons that the secular community has been so drastically under-represented politically is, in part, due to the above polls hyped consistently by the mainstream media over the last 60 years, leading our politicians to pander exclusively to those religious groups thus shown to be in the “majority”.

Of course, since non-theists tend to have only one belief in common - a lack of belief in a biblical god - it has been difficult to get these disparate folks to band together politically. There just isn’t enough they’ve got in common to get them to stay in one room long enough to agree on the size and shape of the table - much less any common ground!

Combine this lack with the very common criticism of atheism/agnosticism by theists that we have no moral compass or teaching, and what sane American would even think of having anything in common with us, much less agreeing to become part of the group?

Thus, an expansion of the numbers of the secularists is, at least publicly, problematic. One can claim that due to traditional hostility of Christians towards atheists/agnostics there is a larger secular community than is known or admitted to, but until those in the closet begin to make their presence known, that is only so much speculation.

So, what do we do about it? What is missing in the secular community that the religious have that fulfills the social needs of those that remain in that community, but in reality, don’t believe?

Is it only community?

The obvious answer is - a community that meets regularly and has a set of beliefs in common, providing support for families and individuals alike in times of need and crisis.

The secular “community” is missing, in most places, the meetings, which mean a lack of a support system, at the very least. Since, as mentioned above, there is only a lack of belief in religion in common, most people assume there is a lack of common belief and morality as well. This seems to be a reasonable position, since secularists often span the political spectrum, as well as the cultural one as well.

What can the secular community do? How do we become a larger community that can displace the religious organizations that loom so large on the American political scene?

I think that Sam Harris is onto something. Many Americans now claim to be more spiritual and less religious in the traditional sense. Less of a belief in traditional theism and more thinking that people have a spiritual side that is somehow lacking in modern technological life.

But Americans are also very committed to what is a decidedly materialistic way of life. Consumerism is rampant. Credit cards enable many to live beyond their means, driven by advertising that entices them to want, and buy, more and more material goods.

This sets up many for a serious case of cognitive dissonance, unable to reconcile the materialism with the religious teachings that they were raised with.

Solutions?

I cannot claim to have a single, unifying idea that combines all of this in some simple, sound-bite-easy new theology or philosophy. Perhaps somebody will do that, maybe Sam can.

But I suggest that his idea of a simple spiritualism that needs no religion can bring large numbers of people, both in the secular community and the unaffiliated community, together with a common goal of taking the disparate ideals of the American culture and making some sense of how it can all work together. Obviously, people from other cultures bring their own ideas, which will inevitably be brought into the mix somewhere.

People naturally gather together into groups, and people like to associate with others of similar thinking. All it takes is some spark, some idea coalescing into the public mind, percolating to the top like a good expresso.

The future of American religious life may not be secular in a strict sense of atheism or agnosticism, although I believe that it will contain a much more numerous such community than it seems to today.

What I think it won’t have is a strong Christian community.

Sam, bring on your book! We need more grist for our mills of discussion!