Our Religions: Are they the Religions of Humanity Itself? by By Daniel Quinn author of Ishmael

by Gary Berg-Cross

Author Dan Quinn takes the animist point of view as being our real roots in a reverent way of looking at the world. We humans belong in our places (wherever our early tribes were)  because they  are special niches which we call "sacred". 

"Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else--as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers."

As a run up to Big Religions sweeping this early idea away Quinn provides and interesting interpretation of a range of stories from Genesis.

See http://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/our-religions-are-they-the-religions-of-humanity-itself/ for the full story which includes the fall from Innocence.

What knowledge tempted Man?  Was it the discovery of agriculture? 
Quinn explores the conventional Cain and Abel story to find - "the elder, Cain, a tiller of the soil, and the younger, Abel, a herder. The improbability that two members of the same family would embrace antithetical lifestyles should tip us off to the fact that these were not individuals but emblematic figures, just as Adam was (Adam merely being the Hebrew word for Man).

If we understand these as emblematic figures, then the story begins to make sense. The firstborn of agriculture was indeed the tiller of the soil, as Cain was said to be the firstborn of Adam. This is an undoubted historical fact. The domestication of plants is a process that begins the day you plant your first seed, but the domestication of animals takes generations. So the herder Abel was indeed the second-born--by centuries, if not millennia....Another piece of background that needs to be understood is that in very ancient times farmers and herders had radically different lifestyles. Farmers were by the very nature of their work settled villagers; but herders (by the very nature of their work) were nomads, just as many present-day herding peoples are. The herding lifestyle was in fact closer to the hunting-gathering lifestyle than it was to the farming lifestyle.

As the farming peoples of the north expanded, it was inevitable that they would confront their Semitic herding neighbors to the south, perhaps below what is now Iraq--with the predictable result. As they have done from the beginning to the present moment, the tillers of the soil needed more land to put to the plow, and as they've done from the beginning to the present moment, they took it.

As the Semites saw it (and it is of course their version of the story that we have), the tiller of the soil Cain was watering his fields with the blood of Abel the herder."

As we know farmers need land and so the conquest is on and tribal mores are swept aside.

Quinn Delivered October this talk 18, 2000, as a Fleming Lecture in Religion, Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas

Personal and Social Knowledge

by Gary Berg-Cross

The topic of personal versus social knowledge came up the other day in a group conversation that I was more or less part of.  The particular spark was a Pew poll that suggested the American public is becoming less religious.  As one can see from the lead paragraph the actual results are a bit nuanced:

..the Pew Research Center study also finds a great deal of stability in the U.S. religious landscape. The recent decrease in religious beliefs and behaviors is largely attributable to the “nones” – the growing minority of Americans, particularly in the Millennial generation, who say they do not belong to any organized faith. Among the roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults who do claim a religion, there has been no discernible drop in most measures of religious commitment. ....

The share of U.S. adults who say they believe in God, while still remarkably high by comparison with other advanced industrial countries, has declined modestly, from approximately 92% to 89%, since Pew Research Center conducted its first Landscape Study in 2007 “

But the way the group conversation went was a bit skeptical of the trend and wondered if Pew survey methods (as compared to Gallup for example), say just using landline phones as some claimed might be a reason to doubt the results. 

I did a quick search during the discussion to find that Pew uses a variety of methods but just point out that in general only 1 in 10 people contacted responds to their surveys.  

The group’s skepticism is not isolated.  RELIGION DISPATCHES, for example, argued that there are serious differences the way questions are argued that the religion-science conflict question (“Generally, do you think science and religion are often in conflict?”) locked respondents into:

“ a specific formulation of concepts. “Religion” and “science,” as we mentioned earlier, can point to a very wide range of traditions, activities, and groups of people. ‘Conflict’ here could refer to a fundamental epistemological incompatibility between religion and science, or to secondary social tensions between dogmatists on one or both sides. Or it could refer to some combination of both. Asked whether science and religion are, “often in conflict” or, “mostly compatible,” the poll participant has to collapse any such nuances and pigeonhole their beliefs into one side of a binary.”

It is true that surveys are based on respondent’s individual interpretations and the phrasing in different surveys is important to understand, but for many important topics group or social surveys provide important insights into topics that individual may not have due to a lack of one’s own knowledge, experience or existing biases.

There’s something to be said and maybe much to be said for personal knowledge via experience of something the witness actually saw or heard.  There is something attractive in the strong individual sense that appeals to conservative thinking of self sufficiency. It may be especially valuable if it is reflected experience and tested over time.  

Personal knowledge looked upon this way can be distinguished from what we learn from some other person or source.  In a way this was part of the experience of the Renaissance and more so the Enlightenment.  But only part, because the social aspect of knowledge is extreme important. Science is a social activity carried out by the community of scientists using methods agreed upon by that community’s cumulative experience over time. In Science the acceptance or rejection of the evidence submitted to must be carefully weighed.

Knowledge in the personal sense has to do with being familiar with something.  You can argue that  in order to know the color blue, one must have experienced blue; in order to know fear, one must have experienced it. And gather knowledge by acquaintance.

But much of the world reality is beyond my ability to directly experience it.  What do people believe about the existence of God, or the wealth needed to make one in the top 1% of people in the US?  These are social facts that I don’t experience directly but rely on faithful methods to produce a sharable “fact.” To the extent that I believe in the method by which such facts are gathered I may accept the sharing of them.  It’s an example of social knowledge and when you think of it, much of what we think of as our personal knowledge was been acquired in this social, shared way.

The distinction between personal knowledge and shared knowledge can be summarized by the difference between talking about what ‘I know’ and what ‘we know’. What we as a group know builds a sense of community and makes our relationships last.

In a democracy what we know together is important as are conversations about what we know and believe. And real conversations in political times can be challenging. The prejudices that surround them are so inveterate, that it is impossible to do them justice without entering into considerable detail and nuance, as was touched on in the Pew Survey results. And hearing 2 or more sides of an issue is hard enough in normal circumstances but becomes more difficult has emotional investment rises along with competing facts and interpretations.  You can get on fact checker sites to help but that doesn’t work with all issues and one thing I’ve heard from time to time is argument from “personal experience” that backhands away supposed facts such as from survey and statistical analysis.  I think that it is a mistake and would rob us of a variety of shared knowledge such as historical facts together with historical interpretations that comprise community knowledge over time.

It is also true of economic facts, such as unemployment rates.  Sure I and my neighbors may be employed but what is happening in Baltimore.  I rely on others to understand and report this. Economic topics are varied and vast so the evidence concerning them is varied, but just relying on direct, personal experience doesn’t get us through the problems of knowing.

Historical Context for Putting Humanism to Work on Social Issues

by Fred Edwords

The following is a portion of the talk:
Putting Humanism to Work on Social Issues  
presented by Fred Edwords to the WASH MDC group on March 28th, 2015.  This material provided context for small group sessions to develop ideas on how to make society "more humane, fair and inclusive."
This is copyrighted material is posted here with Fred's permission. 

Hisotrical context for group discussion:

".. reactionary faith systems aren’t just personal. They’re political. People with theocratic ideas are hard at work in our government, finding ways to spend our tax dollars to defeat our values. And it has often been we humanists who have served as the early warning system for others—alerting our liberal and moderate religious friends that the extremists are going to get a piece of them after they finish with us.

Nonetheless, not all social issues are dominated by a reactionary religious component. So as humanists we’ve tried to think in a larger way about the sort of society we want to live in. This has caused us to examine such conditions as the military-industrial complex, our loss of freedom through government censorship or spying, racial profiling, climate change, and so on. It has also induced us to propose ideas for a better world through improvements in education, the enfranchisement of the disenfranchised, and the spread of democratic institutions.

Humanism has a long history of this. Indeed, it is foundational to Ethical Culture. In 1877, Ethical Culturists established the first free kindergarten in New York and San Francisco. That same year, Ethical Culturists established the Visiting Nurse Service, the first of its type that did NOT do missionary work for organized religion but focused exclusively on the physical care of those in need.

In the 1880s, the Ethical Culture movement established schools for the children of the working class, engaged in relief work, founded the City Club to fight political corruption in New York City, established the first settlement house in the United States to address the social needs of urban slum communities, founded the Child Study Association to develop knowledge about the human nature of children, and launched the Legal Aid Society. To the end of the 19th century, the Ethical Culture movement helped the disabled, built schools, campaigned against child labor, worked for slum clearance and improved public health, and developed food cooperatives. In the twentieth century, the movement advanced moral education for children, helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, engaged in union arbitration, launched the American Civil Liberties Union, aided refugees, developed adult education programs, and developed progressive summer camps for youth.

With the American Humanist Association, activist involvements became known almost from its founding in 1941. Throughout the 1940s and 50s, AHA humanists were involved in civil liberties, birth control, and environmental protection cases tried in court. One of the most prominent of these humanists was Corliss Lamont, a philosopher who successfully stood up to the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy.  Another was Vashti McCollum; her U.S. Supreme Court victory in McCollum v. Board of Education established that American public schools must be religiously neutral. On the environmental front, a frequent issue was the value of restraint and how the environment is damaged by runaway population growth—matters which are still not adequately acted upon around the world.

Early in the decade of the 1960s, the AHA became the first national membership organization to endorse elective abortion. The AHA and the American Ethical Union worked together to establish the rights of nontheistic conscientious objectors to military service.  

AHA leaders also actively worked to establish memorial societies which offered alternatives to the traditional mortuary-controlled burial arrangements dominant at the time. Because of this humanist advance, cremation and humanistic memorial services became more widely available and less costly.

In 1974 the National Commission for Beneficent Euthanasia was established as an AHA program. It issued the groundbreaking statement, “A Plea for Beneficent Euthanasia,” a position paper signed by medical, legal, and religious leaders.  It called for “a more enlightened public opinion to transcend traditional taboos and move in the direction of a compassionate view toward needless suffering in dying.” All of this was long before the activism of the Hemlock Society, Jack Kevorkian, and current right-to-die legislation.

In 1976, the AHA issued its “New Bill of Sexual Rights and Responsibilities,” prompting Time magazine to remark that humanists celebrate responsible sexual freedom after centuries of bondage to church and state. The issues presented in this statement are still considered controversial, as evidenced by the continuing debates over them in mainline Christian and Jewish denominations.

In 1977, the AHA took a stand against age discrimination in matters of employment and retirement. "A Declaration for Older Persons" was signed by members of Congress, labor leaders, business executives, and religious leaders, earning it national attention. Many of the principles expressed in this statement have since become codified into law.

In the 1980s various humanist organizations developed substance-abuse recovery programs, such as Secular Sobriety and SMART Recovery, which offer a workable secular alternative to the more traditional-religion based Alcoholics Anonymous. Because of this work, in many communities today the courts allow alcoholics and drug addicts more choices in the selection of a substance-abuse recovery program.

Today, on the charitable front, there is the AHA’s Humanist Charities, which now has become a program of the larger and more influential humanist relief organization, the Foundation Beyond Belief. It has occasionally raised more money for particular projects than the churches have.

Humanists, individually and collectively, have also made their presence felt on the international scene. Following World War II, three prominent humanists became first directors of major divisions of the United Nations: Julian Huxley of UNESCO, Brock Chisholm of the World Health Organization, and John Boyd Orr of the Food and Agricultural Organization.

Then, in 1952, at the Municipal University of Amsterdam, Julian Huxley chaired the first international humanist gathering. Over 200 humanist leaders from around the world, met and formed the International Humanist and Ethical Union. Today this organization, representing over 3 million humanists worldwide, is involved in social action projects in various parts of the developing world and is active in the Council of Europe and the United Nations.

So we are part of a grand social-activist tradition that is viewed as an important expression of our philosophy. The underlying premise of it all is that we human beings can make the world over in any way that we will.  If we can agree on it and work toward it, we can eventually have it. That’s how we’ve rendered a number of diseases extinct, or nearly so. That's how we have created international law.

This was part of the reason why, when I was editor of the Humanist magazine, I focused on social issues: particularly the hard questions, the sometimes unpopular questions. I wanted to discover and develop what humanists should say about the central issues of our time.

These, of course, are harder issues to tackle. The facts aren't always as easy to find and the mistaken beliefs not always as easy to identify. Religion and popular superstition are much

easier targets. So we always run the risk of making mistakes, of aligning ourselves with the wrong side, or of not agreeing with each other. But to exclusively take the easier path would not only reduce the invigorating challenge, it would leave us humanists with little to say on leading concerns in our changing world. It would marginalize us as irrelevant.

Therefore, if we agree that the dual humanist values of reason and compassion are among the best tools for building a better world, then it is we humanists who should put those tools to work.... "

© Copyright 2015 by Fred Edwords.  

Posted by Gary Berg-Cross, WASH MDC coordinator