Green Oasis

Judging from my own experience, it regrettably looks like the amount of free time in a person’s life (T_f ) seems to follow the following equation.

I can only hope for a discontinuity at t = t_retirement (or maybe t = t_unemployment).

I took the rather momentous step today of unsubscribing from Meridian Magazine. OK, so maybe it’s not so momentous given that I disagree with almost everything they publish (with an exception here and there), but it represents something larger.

Do I want my life to be about being an ex-Mormon?

I don’t think so. For the next month, I’m going to abstain from all extraneous things Mormon (or ex-Mormon or atheist) and return and report.

Here’s another way to look at my infidelity (in the religious sense of the word): of all the things in my collected experience, I feel no need to label anything God and worship it in the traditional way; nothing that I know about compels me to worship it as God.

Christopher Hitchens debates Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a creationist:

The Rabbi comes off as scientifically illiterate. He seems to misunderstand the theory of evolution that he claims to have studied so much, though he admits to not being a good scientist. He makes much of the renown of the people he has debated. He’s clearly out of his depth in this debate, so I can only imagine how those other debates went.

(via kottke.org)

We have been provided an example of how the faithful deal with cognitive dissonance. The author of the post has hit on spiritual hard times after becoming accustomed to frequent experiences of a spiritual appearance. She hasn’t felt an experience which she would interpret as the Holy Spirit in a year. The last time she had such an experience (if I understand the sequence of her story correctly), she interpreted the experience as God telling her that her sister would be healed of leukemia. Her sister died shortly thereafter.

Now she has begun to doubt God. She prays for his reassurance and receives silence in return. She believed God loved her, yet he leaves her alone in her time of need. The longer she goes without receiving reassurance, the more she doubts. Surely, she reasons, God wouldn’t want her to lose her faith. So why doesn’t he help her?

It fascinates and pains me to read the tortured rationalizations offered to comfort this woman. It’s hard to avoid seeing a parallel to Mother Theresa who went decades without feeling a connection to God. Some of the rationalizations offered to the woman are also paralleled by those offered to Mother Theresa. I used many of these rationalizations to maintain my own faith.

• Just hold on. God will answer you, someday.
• God is testing you.
• Don’t question your earlier spiritual experiences.
• Believe me. I know that God loves you.
• Perhaps you misinterpreted God’s message. Perhaps it was a spiritual healing rather than a physical one. Perhaps this healing will take place after death.
• Satan is trying to deceive you.
• People grow the most when they have no evidence to base their beliefs on yet continue to believe.
• We shouldn’t expect God to always communicate with us. He gives us just enough to get us through.
• Silence means that God trusts in your judgment.
• Even Jesus felt alone on the cross. [Not according to the scriptural account he didn't. He was quoting Psalm 22 when he said "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He was teaching a lesson through the message of that Psalm, not expressing personal bereavement.]
• You’ve probably withdrawn from God in some way, perhaps by sinning or not doing all that you can.
• You’re probably feeling the Spirit, just not recognizing it.
• Don’t question God. We don’t understand his way of doing things or his purposes.

This may be just what this woman needs to get beyond her doubts, but is it honest? Couldn’t the same methods be used to maintain a person’s belief in any false thing? Using this scheme, there is no way to find your way out of a false belief. If you feel good about it, that means it’s true. If you feel bad about it, take your pick from the above reasons why it’s still true.

All of those rationalizations serve to avoid the obvious, if painful, conclusion: the loving God she believed in was a product of her imagination. That’s not a comforting thought, and I’m not about to go for the exposed jugular like that. I doubt I have the tact necessary to put it gently. But it is the one answer that makes real sense out of what she is experiencing.

How desperately we cling to our comforts against the dark night!

I pass a group of magazine stands on my walk to the office every morning, the kind that dispenses free classified ads and similar local publications. One magazine usually captures my attention with covers of slinky sirens or similar eye-catching material. Until this morning, that never translated into me actually picking up a copy. This week’s cover story changed that: O, Come All Ye (Un)Faithful by Greg Beato with the caption “Atheists have been on a roll lately but the God squad still has better stuff”. Ever the consummate journalist, I decided to pick up a copy for the benefit of my loyal readers.

Thumbing through to find the article, I found the magazine to be exactly what I had always expected: pages and pages of augmented women pimping for night clubs, interspersed with one-page articles. The article (once I found it through the forest of silicone) surprised me with its content. It wasn’t one of the same stereotyped critiques that I’ve read too many times. Its basic premise is that while atheism makes the most sense, it has yet to catch up to Christianity on what people really want: kitsch.

No doubt the thought of atheist lip balm and atheist jelly beans is hard to reconcile for many freethinkers—one of the virtues of atheism is that not every aspect of one’s life has to be yoked to some clingy deity who feels totally left out if you don’t include Him in everything you do. Plus, there’s simply the logical disconnect: What do jelly beans have to do with atheism? Why not stick with books, rational arguments, reason?

If proponents of atheism want to make it more popular, Mr. Beato says they should follow the example of Christian entrepreneurs:

At last year’s International Christian Retail Show in Atlanta, Georgia, hundreds of vendors displayed a rich, vast Eden of Christian pop-culture products that were just as slickly produced, just as fashionable and entertaining as anything secular pop culture has to offer. Atheists, meanwhile, are still in the pop-culture Dark Ages—their T-shirts aren’t as visually appealing, their tchotchkes aren’t as diverse, their rock bands are not spreading their 110-decibel message of rational humanism. It’s time to evolve past the Darwin Fish and fill up the stockings of nonbelievers with atheist junk that is just as gloriously profane as the junk blessed by Jesus.

It makes an odd kind of sense to me. But perhaps atheists are catching up after all.