Play mystery for me

**About a month ago we moved into our present home. A couple days later I met our next door neighbors. It was a very brief wave and just a few words from my porch to their driveway. Their names are Scott and Misty.

Yesterday I was putting the recycling on the curb when Scott and Misty passed by walking their son to the bus stop a block away. We exchanged a few more words about the travails of moving, etc.

Early this morning I awoke to the lyrics of the song “Misty” drifting through my consciousness. I have heard the song before. It’s a good song but I don't recall fixating on it as portrayed in the movie “Play Misty for Me.” But the lyrics kept coming to me as though I had deliberately memorized it. Well, I actually had memorized it — without intending to. 

The brain is a mysterious place. Even slight experiences are stored for a long time and can come bubbling up with no conscious intention. That’s just the nature of memory and brain functioning.

It’s also the nature of human consciousness to fabricate rationales for why these things happen. What is the MEANING of this mysterious appearance of lyrics to a song heard long ago? Am I being clairvoyant? Is someone trying to communicate with me mentally? Am I getting premonitions of future events? What about the words themselves, are they trying to tell me something? I barely remember them, but in these episodes they come streaming back as though I’m actually thinking or saying them for some reason.

The brain works in mysterious ways. Some even call those workings “god.”

Harry Cook is a writer I much admire. He’s an Episcopal priest who realizes that much of religious theory is bullshit, and that people foolishly believe and do things based on theology or religion that don’t make sense, or worse. He calls himself an agnostic, and seems critical of avowed atheists. Much as I generally agree with him I take exception to parts of his latest essay: “Invention of the Gods.” He claims that the “god idea” has always been part of human nature,

“It seems to be hard-wired in Homo sapiens,” he says.

He then goes on to assume that there is such a thing as “god” simply because people have always thought of it. Many would argue that it is a natural response to mystery. “Anthropologists try to help us with that kind of inquiry, but I suspect they might have a hard time distinguishing fear and superstition from a human-divine encounter.” The “human-divine ENCOUNTER”? Does he really mean there's something to "encounter" outside the influence of fear and superstition?

A mystery doesn’t prove anything other than its own existence. Not the existence of another world, another dimension or some kind of supreme being. Fear and ignorance go together like … fear and ignorance and religion. It’s easy to want to counter an overwhelming question with an overwhelming answer, i.e. god. But easy isn't the same as true.

And while such delusions offer comfort there’s also no doubt about the brain’s susceptibility to jiggering. Move a few chemicals around and one feels happy. Move them another way and one feels sad. Any emotion that can happen can be induced without an objective stimulus. It’s what brains do. And anything one can imagine can feel real, even to the point of persuading others to believe the same thing. Religions come from that.

We are not complete captives of our brains. We also have the ability to supersede the dramas that brains produce. Science, facts, reality are discernible by our brains, But it takes education, a dedication to reason and a willingness to dispense with some synthetic “convictions.” It took me a long time, and much pain, to finally dispense with the comforts of religious belief. As I’ve said many times, this has not made me happier, Indeed, it has made me more unhappy. It’s the “bone on bone” of the reality that we are alone and without external assistance. We can strive to be humanists, with the hope that progress can be made toward freedom from delusion, and perhaps toward some kind of durable happiness in spite of the facts. 

What friends they have in Jesuses

** As I'm about to read Reza Aslan's latest book, "Zealot," I go in armed with Harry T. Cook's latest essay in which he says:

Aslan may be right about a Jesus having been a zealous revolutionary. Crossan is almost surely right about a Jesus being, as he put it, a "Mediterranean Jewish peasant" who may have been at the same time an "itinerant sage." The liberation theology people may be right in saying that a Jesus was a socialist at heart. And I may be right in saying that the Jesus may be a composite of all of them.

I normally would not have looked into Aslan's book but for a positive review by BW, my atheist friend,  and the rotten treatment he got on Fox "news" by a twit who couldn't get off the subject of a Muslim writing a book about Jesus. His detailed explanation on MSNBC that it was his job as a scholar to write about it didn't faze her but gave him more credibility in my eyes as someone who was not entering into a merely partisan argument.

I don't doubt that someone (probably Paul of Tarsus) cobbled together a mishmash of myths and claims about several guys to form an actual religion out of one guy. It served to construct an empire that continues to this day. Again, the story (true or not) has power.

The New Atheists are, for the most part, illustrating that one needn't believe in fantasies to live a good and useful life. this is a hopeful sign that humanity is evolving out of the need for infantile parental figures to give meaning to this accident of human life.

Religion poisons the world

**Despite some of his political positions, I still agree with Christopher Hitchens that "religion poisons everything." That's not to deny that some religious organizations and some religious people are antidotes to various poisons. But in general, the higher religion is esteemed in a society the worse it is for that society.

Much of the current oppression of women and minorities is impelled by religious dictates based on ancient texts written when cultures were uninformed, paternalistic and misogynistic. That these survive with a segment of the population in 2013 testifies to the tenacity of the irrational side of human nature.

What is now the United States was formed in order to rein in the extremes of religion. Harry T. Cook, still one of my favorite commentators from the "religious" field (because he's not very religious). His most recent essay (available via email subscription) is "An Argument for the Secular State," in which he reviews the inception of American democracy. He cites a response from Jefferson to an inquiry about religious freedom:

Jefferson answered the question thus: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

And yet he notes that the "present Congress is known for the overtly religious enthusiasms of some of its members." Since these legislators have awesome power to affect vast millons of citizens it's frightening to think of what we might have to live with (and through) if these fanatics hold sway.

Climate-change deniers eagerly support the coal and oil lobbies against the known fact that carbon emissions are poisoning Earth's atmosphere to the point of no return. Why? Because they believe (or say they believe) Yahweh's après-flood promise depicted in Genesis 8:22: While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. That pious hope is coupled with the earlier Genesis passage -- which those honorable members of Congress take literally -- to the effect that God gave dominion of the Earth to His human creatures, so drill, baby, drill.

Among the other poisons he cites are efforts to pass laws suppressing reproductive rights, and creationism/intelligent design advocates who insist that "the biblical story of creation is fact and therefore 'in all fairness' must be taught in the nation's public schools as long as modern science is taught."

It's not "fair" to ingest a certain amount of poison when you have the opportunity to exclude it. And using the dictates of an invisible and unproven deity to force it on the public mind and body is suicidal for any society, especially one built on the premise that such tyranny should not be allowed.

He concludes with a restatement of that wise maxim: "freedom of religion must logically include freedom from religion."

Fortunately (unless it's too late) the rising generation of millennials is not so dogmatic and seems less susceptible to the arguments for a religious state.

Unbelievable

***One of my favorite bloggers is Harry T. Cook. I've been receiving his essays by email for several years now, on the recommendation of a friend of mine who is also a former religionist. What I like about Harry is that despite decades of education and faithful practice as an Episcopalian priest he eventually came to the realization that religion as mostly BS. I don't agree with him completely in that I would go further and call it poison.

In a recent essay, "Believing, We Do Not Believe, he begins with

    "Among the many readers of these essays are a number of older, mostly retired members of the clergy. They are Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, several rabbis [former Christian Scientists like me] and others who can no longer identify fully -- if at all -- with their religious pasts."

 ...
    A few of them have become convinced that, for example, most of the Bible is pure myth. I think they are wrong about that, but the point is that they had to deal with biblical passages for their whole ordained ministry and evidently felt constrained to treat many of them more or less as historical reportage. Some of them express relief at no longer having to put on such an act week after week.

Speaking from experience I can say that the acting doesn't come on suddenly. It accrues over many years, and for too many years before the spell is broken life is more or less an agony as the disparity between profession and understanding becomes wider.

I'm one of those who have concluded that the Bible is mostly a pack of myths, propaganda and outright lies. What isn't in those categories is pretty good, but doesn't need the Bible or theistic agencies to give them credibility. They are constituents of what might be called secular humanism in drag. As the billboards say: we don't need a god in order to be good.

Harry goes on to recommend a book by Elaine Pagels, which I have read, where she cites an experience she had walking into a church during the depths of her faith crisis. Even though she had known that church doctrines were unsupported by science or reason, she "fell in love" with that church. I think the import of his statement is that the church provided something essential to her as a human being, a kind of comfort that helps some people bear up under their disillusionments. I have heard this also from many others who claim that the true value of religion, and its churches, is to provide that comfort regardless of the challenges life presents them.

Just as most drugs have various degrees of negative side effects, the drug of religious comfort has costs to the believer. Those costs are too high for some of us, while others struggle to bear up. Regardless, the problem is that religion always wants to point to a deific source for that comfort instead of recognizing that human nature is complex and susceptible to many influences. So many of the recent studies on the brain illustrate that susceptibility and the wide range of influences —  none of them deific. To some of us, the blatant unreasonableness of spiritual concepts is untenable, to the point of causing extreme anxiety and bizarre behavior. Maybe stalwarts like Cook can stand being in the same room with believers and their proclamations. I can't.

As I've stated before, it's not that I have found an exact replacement for the drug-induced comfort of religion. Indeed, I would have to say that the pains of living without that drug are sometimes overwhelming.

Recently I attended a funeral for a dear friend of mine. The service was held in the Unitarian church that for decades I would see from the parking lot of my Christian Science church directly across the street. Sometimes I'd deride that sect for being wishy-washy for having no real god to believe in. And yet, my recent experience at that church, and my contact with the pastor, were so comforting that I said to her: In another context this would be the church I would attend because it provides comfort without exacting a profession of faith in an unreal supernatural being.

As a person of reason I can't bear the hypocrisy of eloquence in defense of bullshit, which I think was one of my special talents during those personal Dark Ages. These days, this blog is my main antidote to the poison I spread for 30+ years as a Christian Scientist. I really don't want another platform from which to rail against religion. I don't have time for it at my age. And besides, religion is doing a very good job of poisoning itself.

I like Harry and recommend him to real thinkers both within and without the ranks of religion, spirituality or whatever label applies to belief in things that are unbelievable by nature. But unlike Harry, I would claim to be Unbelieving, We Still Do Not Believe.