Secular Perspectives: miracles

Showing posts with label miracles. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 01, 2013

Nones and Spirituals: Update from a College Survey

by Gary Berg-Cross

Trinity’s Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture recently emailed an online survey to about 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country.This is the group that release the the September 2009 report called American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population (based on the American Religious Identification Survey 2008).

They have followed up this with a new survey analysis (drawn from the larger ongoing American Religious Identification Survey, the 2013 National College Student Survey but conducted in conjunction with the Center for Inquiry - Yea!), that had a pretty broad swath questions about spiritual/non-spiritual, political and moral values. These ranged from belief in God and worship attendance, which was an obvious focus, to climate change and same-sex marriage. And as one might expect these allowed a search for some correlated patterns between opinions.

The survey asked some simple what-kind-of-person-are-you-questions such as:

“In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person?

Notice the inclusion between religious and secular of an in-between category of "spiritual". These are not so much church-mosque or temple goers, and may not believe in a personal God, but in a "higher beyond-the-natural power." They might seek a spiritual experience but not in a temple. They are big on homeopathy, faith healing, numerology, astrology, amulets, etc. Only 1% or so of Mormons & Muslims fall into the spiritual group.

The gross result is that interviewees pretty evenly divided between the 3 categories:

About a third, (32%), relied as true religious believers. Another 32% or are spiritual but not religious. And 28% consider themselves secular. Yes, it doesn't add up to 100% so there are as many "none of the above or others" as there are any of the main triad.

This survey provides some update on the rise of what these authors had earlier popularized as the “nones,” or people when asked what religion they belonged to replied 'none'. This is generally expressed negatively as is a-theist so they are described as "unaffiliated" that is lacking in affiliation -alas how these things are framed.

In this survey update more light is shed on the majority (2/3rd) of the nones who fall into the secular grouping (yep the other third say they are "spiritual"). As the authors report:

“This finding is a challenge to the notion that the Nones are just ‘religiously unaffiliated’ or religious searchers who have not yet found a religious home. This survey clearly revealed that today’s students with a Secular worldview, who are mainly Nones, are not traditional theists.”

And the Nones seem to be the growing faction of students they have doubled in recent decades which is even more than self identified atheists.

It is interesting that the authors make much of the in-between category of spiritual. Spirituals are mid-way between Religious and Secular in believing in miracles or the afterlife. It's something like an 80 to 40 to 8% belief from Religious to Spiritual to Secular. They have some leaning on the supernatural - 44% accept the existence of spiritual beings like angels. Outside of the religious category female students are more likely to be spiritual while male students are secular. Well it turns out that they are not a simple middle ground on all things and it gets interesting when we leave typical Christian belief and add ideas from other religions. Take the idea of reincarnation. The students who say they are religious don't much believe in it (9%), but Spirituals are twice as likely to believe in such things (21%). OK, I can imagine this mixed dating of male seculars with female spirituals. It happened in my day too and the relation to political beliefs sounds familiar too:

"Some 44 percent of seculars dubbed themselves as liberal, 20 percent as progressive, and only four percent as conservative. Among spirituals, 11 percent identified as conservative, 17 percent as moderate, and 35 percent as liberal."

So again if a progressive, secular guy has to date outside his traid, a spiritual gal is a bit better fit with a spiritual gal. Overall, the Spirituals are closer to the Religious when it comes to the supernatural, but closer to the Seculars when it comes to some hot button social/political issues like abortion or assisted suicide.

The authors draw out some composite pictures contrasting the points n the triad:

"Religious students go to church, are more likely to believe in creationism or intelligent design, and oppose assisted suicide, adoptions by same-sex couples and gun control. Secular students, of course, do not believe in God, endorse evolution, accept assisted suicide as moral, say gay couples should be able to adopt and want more gun control.,,,

Spirituals are more than twice as likely as the Religious to see religion as a source of conflict, but considerably less so than the Seculars."

It's nice to get this updated view of where college students are and it will be very interesting to use these results as a base from which to judge movement over time. Perhaps the Spirituals will parallel growth in Europe where extra-spiritual beliefs provides an intermediate position from established religion and allows exploratrion of incremental growth to progressive and secular humanism over time.

For more go to: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/26/first-the-nones-now-the-spirituals/#sthash.kN1jYEDe.dpuf

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

The Blog for WhyWontGodHealAmputees.com offers Evidence that God is Imaginary

It is This idea from http://www.godisimaginary.com/index.htm
It's easy to prove to yourself that God is imaginary. The evidence is all around you. Here are 50 simple proofs:

Watch the video

Proof #22 - Count all the people God wants to murder

If you look in the Torah/Old Testament, there are an amazing number of people that God wants his followers to murder. For example, in Exodus 35:2 God lays down this commandment:

For six days, work is to be done, but the seventh day shall be your holy day, a Sabbath of rest to the LORD. Whoever does any work on it must be put to death. Think about that how many people work on the Sabbath -- all the employees of Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, Linnens & things, grocery stores, convenience stores, power plants, airlines, hospitals, emergency services and on and on and on. Don't rabbis, priests and preachers work on the Sabbath? God wants all of them dead.

Then look at Deut 21:18-21. It says:

If someone has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them when they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town at the gate of that place. They shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid. That is a whole lot of teenagers that we need to kill.

Then there is Leviticus 20:13:

If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them. All homosexuals need to be killed. What about this:

If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. That's a lot of people who need to be killed.

In other words, if we actually listened to what God says, we would need to kill at least half of the people in America tomorrow. After all, Isaiah 40:8 says, "The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand for ever." The word of the Lord tells us to kill half of the U.S. population.

There are two things in this that show you that God is imaginary. First there is the utter stupidity of these verses. Second, there is this fact: If God is an all-powerful being, he would kill them himself. There would be no need for people to do the murdering. These people would already be dead, and Wal-Mart would be closed on the Sabbath through lack of employees.

Notice that believers completely ignore these parts of the Bible. That is because they know that the verses are insane. By acknowledging that their God is insane, they prove that their God is imaginary.

From http://www.godisimaginary.com/index.htm

Friday, October 28, 2011

An Opportunity to Visit and Understand the Jefferson Bible

By Gary Berg-Cross

At a recent secular humanist meeting I heard from Steve Lowe, he of the great DC Ingersoll tour, that Thomas Jefferson’s Bible, aka “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” is set to return to public display. It will be unveiled in an exhibition (November 11-May 28, 2012) at NMAH’s Albert H. Small Documents Gallery. In 2009 a preservation team led by Janice Stagnitto Ellis, paper conservator at the National Museum of American History (NMAH), discovered that the book’s binding was damaging its fragile pages. To save them she temporarily removed it and in March started a conservation treatment of the text to ensure its preservation.

The exhibition will tell the story of the Jefferson Bible and explain how it offers insights into Jefferson’s ever-enigmatic mind. Visitors will see the newly conserved volume, two of the New Testament volumes from which Jefferson cut passages and a copy of the 1904 edition of the Jefferson Bible requested by Congress. Visitors to the exhibit will also be able to view each page, as well as videos about the Bible’s meticulous conservation. Others may want to see a very small video snippet of Chris Hitchens citing the TJ Bible in a debate on Religion.

This is an event many of us will enjoy and indeed Steve in looking into arranging special docent tours for members of the WASH community.

Smithsonian Books will also release the first full-color facsimile of the Jefferson Bible on November 1, and the Smithsonian Channel will air a documentary, “Jefferson’s Secret Bible,” in February 2012. You can to purchase a copy of the facsimile.

I had heard a little about Jefferson’s cut-down and de-miricalized version on the Good Book, but the anticipated resurfacing has sparked a number of articles that updated my knowledge base in the topic. The Wikipedia and other sources have articles on the history, from which I learned the following.

When he was in his 70s, ex-President Thomas Jefferson had time to complete a project that had occupied to him some two decades. We know a little a bit about his early thoughts from an 1803 letter sent to Joseph Priestley, dissenting clergyman and natural philosopher, who believed that a proper understanding of the natural world would promote human progress.

In the letter Jefferson states that the idea of writing his own view of the "Christian System" grew out of a conversation with Dr. Benjamin Rush just before he became President, sometime around 1798–99. Jefferson had long been convinced that the original words of Jesus written into the New Testament had been contaminated over time to serve pressing needs. Early Christians, he reasoned were motivated to sell their religion. They needed to make it appealing to the any pagans” such as the Romans, Gauls etc. But in doing this they may have conflated the words of Jesus with the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Plato that were a basis for Roman and European thinking. These "Platonists" he believed had thoroughly muddled Jesus' original message. Jefferson assured his friend and rival, John Adams, that the authentic words of Jesus were still there and could be unmuddled. The task, as he put it to Adams, was one of “abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dung hill.” For more see: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.html#ixzz1c72fDPcj and also the Jefferson Bible

For the 1803 project Jefferson proposed reviewing the morals of the ancient philosophers, and then moving on to what he called the "deism and ethics of the Jews. " From there he would conclude with what he called Jesus’ "principles of a pure deism. This would be the unmuddled message. We see a bit into Jefferson’s mind when he added a note on "omitting the question of his deity." With the project laid out Jefferson explains that he really doesn't have the time to do a proper job and urged Priestley to take on the task as the person best equipped to accomplish the task. But Priestley didn’t take up the task so Jefferson scaled back to a more limited goal. Around the time of his 2^nd term in 1804 he finished "The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth". This was the predecessor to Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Alas no copies of this 46 page Octavo are known to exist.

What we do have is the later construction of a book he entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. That is what the Smithsonian has a copy of and which is now known as the Jefferson Bible. In it moral lessons are drawn from the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, Mark and John. With his usual precision Jefferson cut verses from editions of the New Testament in English, French, Greek and Latin. He then pasted these onto loose blank pages, which were then to be bound into a book. In his 70s Jefferson apparently found this project fulfilling saying to a few friends that he read a bound version before retiring at night. But he realized that this was a project that might stir emotional responses in traditional religions, so he kept the work private.

Jefferson’s views on religion were private and complex. He was clearly reluctant to express them publicly and said to a friend:

“I not only write nothing on religion, but rarely permit myself to speak on it.”

He also provided this Source: "Jefferson's Religious Beliefs", by Rebecca Bowman:

"I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."

For all of these reasons he kept the book a secret & only mentioned the book to a few friends. He never allowed it to be published during his lifetime. How did we find it?

Back in 1895, a Smithsonian librarian purchased the original Jefferson Bible, a collection of these clipped documents which now are assembled as the text, from Jefferson's great-granddaughter Carolina Randolph for $400. They were preserved and collated by Cyrus Adler. By 1904 we had assembled what we call the Jefferson bible. which was put on display in the United States National Museum. Congress was able to buy the rights to it. In the Progressive era of 1904 the Government Printing Office printed 9,000 copies for the Congress (3,000 for the Senate and 6,000 for the House). This began a nearly 50-year tradition of giving copies to new senators. This is perhaps not so popular a thing for Pols now, but the book remains in the public domain and you can access a copy in bookstores, museums and libraries. The Jefferson Bible is available through SmithsonianStore.com.

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Touring Architecture, Historical Miracles and Secular Culture

by Gary Berg-Cross

I recently had a chance to visit Prague in the Czech Republic and joined a walking tour of its Old Town. I knew little of the Czech history that goes with this Bohemian city, so it was a good way to fill in cultural gaps while seeing the main sights. From the number of stunning churches visible, such the Baroque St. Nicholas, part of that history was obviously religious in nature. Actually the city area's history goes b

ack to 880, when the Moravian Premyslid dynasty started Prague with their construction of Prague Castle on the overlooking hill. That dynasty also imported the idea of Christianity to the area and started the long development of Catholic culture and traditions by suppressing the older Celtic culture and traditions. This older culture was the Boii, a Celtic tribe that inhabited the region from around the 4th century BC and gave Bohemia its name. You can't see any remnants in Old Town, but could learn about them by visiting the main building of the secular National Museum complex. Together they house almost 14 million items. The original building from the late 19th century covers natural history and regional history in a magnificent setting like our Jefferson building of the Library of Congress. Other buildings cover culture, arts, music and librarianship. In contrast to older attractions in the city these are some great secular monuments.

My Old Town tour started in the large, central square whose own origin grows out of a late 12th century market. The next 200 odd years added surrounding buildings of Gothic, Romanesque, Baroque and styles

. These now enclose a tourist active square which includes restaurants and galleries. Most tours include a standard set of stories explaining how wealthy merchants built some of the house around the Square. Private constructions were followed by bigger public or religious projects. These include the Town Hall Tower & Astronomical Clock, which gives the square its current name (Staromestske). The story is that the jealous town leaders blinded the clock's designer so he couldn't duplicate the clock in other towns. Sort of dumb like voting for people who have a narrow view of progress.

The religious history of the town and area is also evident from the prominent statue

of religious reformer Jan Hus on the Square. This was erected on the 6th July 1915 to mark the 500th anniversary of his execution as a heretic. Hus was a predecessor to the Protestant movement, a dangerous thing in a Catholic era. His death eventually led to many a long inconclusive struggles between his followers and Catholics in what were called the Hussite wars.

The tour guided us through narrow, medieval streets that take you back to a time when walking was a slower, curvy, cobblestoney activity. Half way through we stopped at a large Baroque church called St James. Like other churches it is filled with religious details and decorations. But there were a few special, religious stories that our Prague guide threw in. She started by pointing to what was described as a 400 year old mummified/desiccated forearm hanging just inside the entrance. The story is that it belonged to a thief who had tried to steel some jewels from a statue of Madonna sitting on the high altar. As the story goes, the Madonna grabbed his hand with a marble grip that he couldn't break. There he remained till morning when the monks came to Church. The story goes that they had to cut his arm off to release it from the statue's grip. To celebrate the miracle, and as a message to other thieves, the monks hung the arm by the door.

Our guide also added some analysis about the cultural messages evoked by unified architecture and art in the church. It was built over a long time but was being finished in the period we call Baroque. This is the period after Renaissance architecture when various architects got bored repeating 200 year old idea using simple symmetry and forms. The Baroque innovation was a more complex, radiating design form with odd additions. They began combining curving facades with large-scale ceiling frescoes, more dramatic light & opulent ornaments made of plaster or stucco, marble or faux finishing. All interesting features, but the guide's analysis went deeper. The analysis explained why Prague religious groups

began adopting the architecture. The guide suggested that various churches starting using this to counter the humanist message of the Renaissance and reformers like Hus. The Renaissance had placed religion on the defensive but the church fought back with art, and displaced some of the focus on the natural world. The extravagant and mystical style we call Baroque was also part of the Catholic revolt against the realism of the Reformation painters.

As an example, St. James church was designed to impress, dwarf and overwhelm the populace in a space that pulls attention upward and away from the everyday world. This was accomplished through the massive size of the structures, all of them reaching towards the heavens. I'd seen great stained glass windows before with pictures depicted biblical figures and stories. Now I heard how their changing pallet of color through the day was designed to connect viewers to the "light of God." The idea was that: "every feature in the construction helped to remind the viewer that all life was connected by the mystery of God."

There was perhaps another message behind the dynamic architecture. Lines of sight lead from a center to different, surprising and sometimes upsetting images - so the severed hand fit right in. The disharmony in Baroque architecture and art was another tool. It could be used to make people a bit uncomfortable. This is enhanced by church images that suggest the idea of struggle in a hostile world. One speculation is that this was an effective subliminal message to remind people of the Hussite invasion which had earlier destroyed the city and damaged nearby Prague Castle.

On thing that this architectural-historical analysis did make me think of is more modern architecture and the ideas they express. I love the architecture of some of our progressive era, public institutions. A great local example is the unified architecture painting, sculpture, and glass of the Jefferson Building of Library of Congress, which I've blogged about before In Praise of Libraries. It, and other decorative buildings of that era, celebrate a high-minded idea of culture that contrasts with a purely religious one. They express a secular mix of optimism and humanism. There's no miracle arm on display, and it's full of more comforting and down to earth cultural wonders. And at the Jefferson Building you can be you own guide and find wonderful messages about access to knowledge, creativity, celebrating achievement, government and of course the evolution of the book. See http://myloc.gov/Education/OnlineActivities/Pages/onlineactivities/jeffersonsecrets/index.html. See also a Guide to the culture in the LoC's Jefferson Building.

Alas, the Progressive Era is long over and grand public structures seem a thing of a more daring past. Consider the difference in vision between the Jefferson Building and the more recent, vanilla LoC additions, such as the Madison Building. We are not likely to see such unified, cultural celebrations as the Jefferson building again. This side of Las Vegas I worry that our grandchildren (and their grandchildren) will have fewer public, secular monuments representing the current decades to inspire and grab their imagination in their time. Still in DC we may have more than in other places. We do have some Smithsonian additions and the MLK monument as representatives of the decades around he turn of our century.