Stay Positive: Embracing Agnosticism & Atheism

I read an opinion piece in The Washington Post today that I had to share.  

It's titled "America Doesn't Need More God. It Needs More Atheists" (gifted article) It's an article reformulated from Kate Cohen's book We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too). 

The article speaks to me in many ways. 

If I had to describe myself from a faith-based standpoint, I'd call myself a skeptical agnostic or, if you go by the bar Cohen has in the article, I'm basically an atheist. 

I guess it's possible that there's something going on with the "thousand faces of the hero" (Joseph Campbell's work) and the similarities of many different religions, but the likelihood of there being some divine being or set of beings who created the universe and have a hand in what people do in their lives is highly improbable. 

Slim chance. 

If anything, if we consider Jung's archetypes and Freud's idea of wish-fulfillment, perhaps myths/religions are simply a manifestation of some massive human wish-fulfillment that there's something after we die and that there is some kind of higher meaning to everything. 

I doubt it. 

Cohen has some great points for her thesis that the world needs more atheism and less religion. 

Here are some good points to be positive about being an agnostic or atheist:

• "My children know how to distinguish between fact and fiction - which is harder for children raised religious. They don't assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expected arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens." 
• "We need American who demand - as atheists do - that truth claims be tethered to fact." 
• Researchers have done the appropriate data crunching, and it seems the percentage of atheists is around 26%. 
• "In some ways, this [being atheist] makes life easier. You don't have to work out why God might cause or ignore suffering, which parts of this broken world are God's plan, or what work is his to do or what is yours." 
• "But you also don't get to leave things up to God.... Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better." 
• Apparently atheists are "more politically active" and "about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated voters." 
• Basically, instead of relying on a divine being, atheists think people need to do good in the world. 

Cohen does an excellent job of providing the perspective that many atheists are unlikely to share their dispositions because they are a minority in a world where lots of people want to share their religious ideas and force their religious/political viewpoints on others. 

As a result, we need to rebuild the "wall of separation between church and state" that Jefferson talked about and Cohen references.  

And like Cohen relates, people should embrace their agnosticism/atheism because there are a lot of us out there. 

Random Notes from a Crank

There are a number of reasons why I would not want to live in the Southwest, but the brutal heat is one of them. Check out the AP article "'Urban Island' heat tests Phoenix, Other Large Cities." As the article states, "Phoenix is warming at three times the rate of the planet as a whole." 

In somewhat more positive news, the citizens of Puerto Rico are turning to solar and wind power because of their storm-ravaged and inconsistent power grid: "Tesla, Others Help Puerto Ricans Go Solar Amid Power Turmoil."

Having seen the movie, I was interested to read the book Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. I really enjoyed the novel, and I have to say the screenplay adaption was pretty true to the original. There are some significant differences in plot of course, but there hasn't been a novel I've enjoyed as much as Choke as far back as I don't know when. 

I'll be reading more of Palahniuk's work. 

Now I'm on to rereading Gaiman's American Gods. I just got done teaching a one-week course in world mythology, and I want to see the old Gods in action. 

 I wonder if there are any graphic novels based on Native American coyote myths? I know the graphic novel I bought based on Beowulf is pretty kick-ass. I wager some written about Coyote would be even better. 

The aspect of the coyote/trickster myths I enjoy he can be good, lewd, dumb, smart as hell, wonderful, vindictive, slightly evil, or magnanimous depending on the myth you read. Or a combo of some of the above. Coyote reveals the frailty and potential of human character. 

Coyote is us. 

We are Coyote.

Random Notes from a Crank

With college football on Saturday and us doing stuff on Sunday, I forgot that Luke Cage was available on Netflix this past Friday. I'm only a few episodes in, but I like it a lot. 

One of my favorite classes I had as an undergrad was Mythology. I stumbled across this article via Scientific American the other day: "Scientists Trace Society's Myths to Primordial Origins." I like the research this person is doing, but you can see these patterns just by studying world mythologies. There are four types of creation myths and two types of fertility myths. Reading Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Frazier's The Golden Bough, and Mencken's Treatise on the Gods can do everyone a lot of good. Reading those could certainly help people from saying their religion/mythology is the "right" one. 

One of my dad's stories that he has related over the years is that when he was in Iowa and went to bar and asked the waitress for a Griesedieck, he got slapped. The company is apparently going to open a brewery sometime soon. 

I read recently that ABC is reviving The Gong Show. I look forward to that. In that same article, the author relates that both the 20,000 Pyramid and The Match Game were aired this summer, and they'll be back. How the hell did I miss those? 

A listicle about the "20 Saddest Cities" came across my FB feed, so I figured to click away. Some of my quick takeaways are the following:

• Don't move to Ohio.
• I'm surprised St. Louis and Indy are on it.
• Knoxville is supposed to be great, I'm told.
• Detroit and Buffalo are not surprising.
• Same goes for Birmingham.
• I like Louisville, and how can it be sad with easy access to such a diversity of bourbon?  
• Memphis has the second-highest violent crime rate in the nation? Wow.

Random Notes from a Crank

I'm happy to relate I'm not part of organized religion anymore. That change happened decades ago. I'm more a believer in disorganized spirituality. One of the bonuses of that stance is that I don't have any kind of religious-based rationale to hate gay people. 

My daughter, on the other hand, has been going to this youth group for over a year now. I have misgivings about it for various reasons. I know exactly how the main characters of The Americans feel about their daughter Paige getting involved with a church. 

In The Atlantic online, the magazine solicited readers' replies to this question: "What is the greatest prank of all time?" The one I liked the best was from Frank Tokarsky: "To paraphrase George Carlin, the greatest prank of all time must be what organized religion is trying to peddle: 'There's this man who lives in the sky; he knows everything, and he sees everything ... and he needs your money." 

Here's an extended version of those sentiments: "The greatest bullshit story every told." 




I started out my resurrected softball career with a groundout (5-3) in my first at bat, a mildly pulled groin, a misplay in right field, a much needed walk for my second at bat, and a run scored. That certainly checks off the boxes for middle-aged man. The last time I played softball was when I severely dislocated my left thumb (the bone was sticking out) back in the mid-90s. I'm a bit rusty. 

Check out Robert H. Frank's "Why Luck Matters More Than You Think." That article spurred me buy his book, Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy. Frank is an economist, a profession stereotyped as being abstruse writers. However, the book is very readable and thought provoking.