Do theological divisions stick in your craw?

Over at the Interpath Conversations group on Facebook, a forum member had a question to ask about the attitude of Richard Dawkins toward believers:

This video was shot in 2007, at around the 55:30 mark he begins a comment in which he ends up saying that it "sticks in his craw" to work with "decent moderate religious people." But in more recent years, I've heard him talk quite happily about working with progressive/liberal religious people and even called them something-like his "comrades in arms against ignorance."  

Earlier in the same comment he talks about belief in a supernatural creator being incompatible with science. But I know that many (if not most!) liberal/progressive religious people are not "supernatural theists" but rather 'pan-en-theists', even if they're unfamiliar with the term. 

So, my question is, does it still stick in his craw? Or, is he now more okay with working with liberal/progressive religious folk who aren't supernatural theists? I'm merely trying to understand his point of view, not looking for an argument. Thanks!

That's a pretty fair question! I thought it deserved to be brought outside of the silo of Facebook and added to the ongoing workings-out here of topics in belief, nonbelief, and interaction across those questions that divide us.

My answer to the forum member was as follows:

Thinking about his books and public comments, I would say that what sticks in Dawkins' craw is not working with such people (the 'softcore theists', we might say), but with the idea that persons committed to making society more welcoming of scientific/skeptical ways of looking at the world should be allying with persons committed to making the work more welcoming of supernaturalistic belief.  

That is to say, it is the organizational "working with" which is problematic -- which leads to issues of conflict over incompatible commitments -- rather than interpersonal "working with."  

You've likely heard the reasoning that by helping to normalize supernaturalistic belief of the sort that Dawkins finds unwarranted, moderate or liberal believers help to create safe conditions in society where more radical or dangerous strains of belief can find an entrance point and eventually flourish. This, too, is an organizational (or societal) dynamic, and not an interpersonal one.  

Compare this attitude to, say, Sam Harris' recommendation that nonbelievers be conversationally intolerant of supernaturalistic belief, when we encounter it in our personal lives. Now, Dawkins may well be impatient with the believers in his personal life; but as I understand it, his public and written comments along the lines of this "sticks in my craw" remark aren't expressions of interpersonal animosity.

Or did I get it backwards? Is Dawkins in his personal life someone who finds theists backward or foolish? Does he go out of his way to avoid dealing with them? On the other hand, does he see the value in forging organizational alliances with theistic groups who are working toward a shared goal? You know what, I don't think it matters, not in the case of Dawkins specifically.

What matters is that we recognize this as a fair question, and an important one. If you're a believer/nonbeliever, how do you feel about interacting with nonbelievers/believers? Do these feelings get in the way of opportunities to work together? Does working together mean we are compromising our principled commitment to endorsing and proliferating a worldview?

There's a conversation we need to have about how to work with people you think are wrong in some aspect of their thinking. It would have to touch on issues of humility, cooperativeness, conviction, civility, and good will. It might even be a conversation to have with folks at a young age, since as part of your interpersonal, social skill too;-kit the ability to work alongside and in productive cooperation with people you think are wrong is indispensable. So add this topic to the syllabus for secular Sunday School. 

Is UU missing the "new" New Atheist boat?

One of the Sunday Assembly Boston committee members shared the October 2013 sermon above, with the advice that we keep in mind we are not just another group, but a new congregation that other leaders of other congregations are still trying to make sense of.

My thoughts.

Kendrick points to institutional insularity as a reason why UU is not connecting effectively with the population of religiously unaffiliated freethinkers coming out of the woodwork in groups like Sunday Assembly and Humanism; I wonder if there isn't another important factor: the language gap.

In his sermon, he uses terms like "transcendental", "faith", and "spiritual hunger". Now, I know what he means, but the register of this vocabulary seems to be a world removed from the science-infatuated, skeptically-inflected, irony-wrought idiolect of the new freethinkers. I can map his meaning onto my own ethical outlook, sure, but I fear I am not the typical case. For many more people among those he would be seeking to tell about UU, the ecclesiastical and vaguely supernaturalistic vocabulary of the UU tradition is likely to evoke a powerful response of suspicion and even disdain.

In my conversations with UU and HUU leaders and parishioners, I've encountered confusion, wariness, and even dismissal in regard to Sunday Assembly (and to the older project of re-orienting the Boston Atheists as a congregational group). These are folks who have good reason for wondering if we aren't a bunch of johhny-come-latelys, here to co-opt their place as *the* obvious destination for liberal-minded freethinkers in search of community as a connection to "something greater". I share this opinion because I think it is important that we keep in mind that our work in organizing SA isn't taking place in a vacuum; there are allies out there, that we can work with and learn from, and establish relationships of mutual aid, as long as we know that they are there, and are alert to the potential sensitivities. And I share it with full confidence that Kendrick is a certainly a potential ally.

Relatedly: After taking a few months off while occupied with wedding planning, I'll be restarting the Boston Interpath Workgroup with monthly meetings for discussion and position paper publication, in March 2014. If anyone here on the distro is interested in joining, please let me know.

Humanism, aspiration, and the labels one identifies with

BU theology student Mario Melendez tagged me in a post on Facebook, the content of which I copy here:

To my Humanist brothers and sisters: I found the following definition of Humanism in a Doctor Who related article...yes, I know, I am a geek. Anyway, the author (a humanist himself) said: "The basic idea behind humanism is that humanity can, against all the odds and in the face of overwhelming evidence, be good. In the absence of God or gods, we can achieve greatness. It’s faith for people without faith.

[Aside: on the idea of "faith for people without faith", see this weird article in the Washington Post.] I think the gesture of the quoted definition is laudable. However, I'd offer the term "aspiration" as an alternative to "faith", for the reason that aspiration in its common usage entails ongoing action -- we do aspire, whereas faith is a thing one has and not an action one does. Further, the common usage of "faith" implies several epistemic concessions which I am not convinced a responsible person should be casual about making. Finally, I'd recalibrate the superlatives. E.g.: Are we up against all the odds, or are only some factors stacked against us?

My version would then look like this:

The premise of humanism is that humanity can, against the odds, and in the absence of supernatural powers, achieve greatness. Humanism is the aspiration that takes the place of faith in the lives of nontheists.

There's a lot of cultural work to be done before the word "humanism" (note the lack of capitalization) is widely adopted as the general term describing the various species of aspirational ethical lifestances of nontheists. But it's work worth doing. We aren't losing on the matter of the facts; where we have a lot of catching-up to do is in the generational domain of labels, implied and imputed values, and cultural cachet.

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I came across a quote recently, from a sermon the UCC preacher and pastor William Sloan Coffin, Jr. gave in 1984: "You can act in such a way that people identify you with something greater than yourself." Which led me to wonder under what banner or emblem or label should I be working to associate my actions with. Because I have made a commitment, as an activist and community member and community organizer, to atheism, I have already made it a habit to wear my Friendly Neighborhood Atheist shirt when doing charity, or to make donations (most recently, to a boy in need of tuition to continue attending his grade school in South Africa, and to a no-kill pet shelters) "in support of" the Boston Atheists or the Secular Coalition for Massachusetts. But the entity of "atheism" or even "a [congregational] community of atheists" might be the wrong level of scale to really serve as a rival for "faith". What, really, is the salient distinction between persons of faith and persons without faith -- faith vs. skepticism? Faith vs. aspiration? Naturalism vs. supernaturalism? Here I almost wish to list religion vs. irreligion, but I'm actually inclined to include nontheist forms of community under the heading of "religion"; I justify this by pointing to an anthropological and sociological conception of "religion", in which the defining features are the shared experience and explicit values of a congregation or more widely dispersed identity community.

In light of which, I'd like to reconsider Rev. Coffin's words: "Act in such a way that people identify you with something greater than yourself." What kind of thing is that greater thing? For the Christians I have known, the answer would not be "faith", but Christianity. This suggest that capital-H Humanism would be the appropriately-scaled counterpart, and not the ethical type of humanism, or the epistemic disposition skepticism, or the broad lifestance category atheism. I fear, that the consequences of an identity label *on this scale* will breed sectarianism. Are you a Secular Humanist, or a Humanistic Jew? No, I'm a Boston Humanist. (Or a Positive Humanist, or a Humanist Plus, or a Cantabrigian Humanist, or a Reformed Secular Humanist, or...)

If this kind of label proliferation (or though of in other terms: this kind of community sub-division) is inevitable, it would be prudent to pull back and reconsider the rationality of Coffin's exhortation to affiliate one's actions with something greater than oneself. Jack Miles, in his book God: A Biography, writes:

Philosophers of religion have sometimes claimed that all gods are projections of the human personality, and it may be so. But if so, we must at least recognize the empirical fact that many human beings, rather than project their own personalities upon gods wholly of their own creation, have chosen to introject—take into themselves—the religious projections of other human personalities.

This suggests a great definition for (lower-case, generic) humanism. Rather than projecting the best qualities of humanity onto an unknowable (and, in my view, fictitious) being outside of ourselves, humanists take these qualities into ourselves. Humans give the credit for human goodness to humans. We claim as our own, the highest values common to human experience and culture across all ages and nations; and we accept as our responsibility the need to come to terms with a universe in which all phenomena are natural, and all life is a rare and precious occurrence.

The greater something a humanist identifies her actions with is... humanity. Or more precisely, human potential. This is probably too tautological to serve an an effective rallying cry, but is nonetheless where this casual analysis brings me. This circularity does suggest that humanists (and nontheists of all persuasions) are at a distinct rhetorical disadvantage. It isn't "their" divine mascot against "our" other-than-divine mascot; it's their mascot, God, against our nothing. And this will be the rhetorical terms of interfaith engagement and all forms of intersectional contact, until open-minded persons of good will are successful in challenging the rhetorical status quo.

Let this be another place where I vote for the general adoption of the term "interpath" (a term that I credit to theology student Derek Lewis Knox). Here is Coffin's slogan, now filtered through the interpath lens and thereby greatly altered:

Let your actions be testimony to the value of humanism as an aspirational path.

Good advice. And, potentially, a banner for secular-minded people to wave in response and kindred spirit to theists waving the faith flag.

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NB: It isn't just the secular community that has to find a way through these knotty questions of terminology. The modern obsessive personality known variously as "nerd" and "geek" suffers a similar identity crisis. Not to worry; science will sort it all out.

Belief: Important, though grossly over-emphasized

I often remind people (theists, atheists, allies, assholes, anyone who needs reminding really): You know I'm an atheist. But, now that you know that, how much do you know about me? Exceedingly little.

Anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann, author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, musters the same point in her guest column for The New York Times titled "Belief Is the Least Part of Faith":

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

Luhrmann calls it the problem of belief, and I agree that belief is a problem, though not just because it represents a barrier toward a feeling of community or unity among persons of different ethical and doctrinal commitments -- as a believer in materialism and rationalism, I think it is ethically urgent that we cultivate as widely as possible the practices of skepticism, irony, and empiricism, so as to fortify our culture and body politic against attractive but untrue and dangerous memes.

However: Luhrmann's purpose in his column is not to problematize belief, but to problematize the emphasis on belief as a sticking point of contention between believers and secularists. I agree fully with her perspective in this regard, and would offer this as a take-away:

The epistemic position any person stakes out on the question of theism (or any question of doctrine) is a small aspect of the much larger and manifold state of identifying with a particular worldview tradition. Far more important than what is believed, is how the belief is arrived at (a measure of warrant); whether the belief is consistent with other beliefs held by the believer (a measure of rationality); and which behaviors are engendered by that belief (a measure of moral merit). There are a great number of beliefs I as a staunch atheist hold, which are utterly unrelated to my view on existence of divinities.

My ethical commitments, in other words, like those of believers and nonbelievers of all sorts, have a relationship TO my faith outlook... but cannot, and should not, be reduced TO the fact of my belief or nonbelief. The human epistemic machine, with all its moral and philosophical sub-systems, is far too complex to be so reduced.

These facts should be known widely, since they have direct bearing on the way we interact with persons who identify with faith or philosophical traditions other than our own.

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NB: Luhrmann notes "As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, 'to believe' meant something like 'to hold dear.'" Quite so. Etymologically, the Germanic verb "to believe" can be thought of as "to be-love": "to love so as to live by." This word-fact should douse the torches of all those atheists who decry "belief" as an act of intellectual weakness. (Though the worst of the rhetoric is focused tightly on the intellectual treason of "faith"). Let the warning be: Semantic arguments may by semantic means debunked.