Wall stressed that about 10% of the graduates of one of the major Catholic seminaries in the US have been convicted as pedophiles (sorry, I don’t recall the name of the seminary). 10%! As Wall rightly points out, if Yale had a similar disgusting track record, it would’ve been shut down! Yet, the Catholic church manages to survive. They’ve paid more than a billion dollars in fines and reparation. There are at least 100,000 victims who have come forward – this is an estimated 20% of the real number of victims. Yet, the Catholic church goes on. How can an institution not loose all its credibility when there is such an extent – both in numbers and in time – of a problem that is systematically covered up? Doyle even blames the very essence of the Catholic hierarchy for this. A priest is considered more valuable than a child, so it is logical to cover up for the priest rather than to protect the child. And if all sex is considered bad, as Mary Gail Frawley-O’Dea explains, it is difficult to distinguish child sexual abuse from adult consensual sex because it’s all bad. The Catholic hierarchy had lost their moral compass – that how Frawley-O’Dea puts it. And after that, they still have moral credibility left? That seems more mysterious than the conversion of a cracker into a piece of flesh! How much has to happen before people will stop trusting sexual advice from people who have pledged not to have sex? How much has to happen before people will stop following moral doctrines from a deeply immoral hierarchy? Only if the priests lose their supposedly god-given power will they stop abusing it.

Of course, the best solution would be to do away with all those legal benefits that come with marriage and instead turn marriage into the symbolic institution that many people claim it is and stop discriminating based on marital status (or better yet based on conjugal status).

I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based on the field concept, i.e., on continuous structures. In that case, nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, gravitation theory included, [and of] the rest of modern physics. (Albert Einstein, 1954)

Okay, never mind all that. I knew after the first few minutes that this random string of words would be nice-sounding and soothing nonsense interspersed with some good ideas. I decided to listen to the talk anyways because I figured I might learn something. And I did. What makes religions and their New Age incarnations so attractive became clear in an answer Mamas gave to a question about dealing with chronic pain. He said something along the lines that the first step in dealing with chronic pain is to realize that there is a cure out there somewhere and we just have to find it. Very interesting. The two key ingredients in this answer are: Hope and knowing.

It is frustrating to have chronic pain (or a chronic illness, as I do) and not knowing what you can do about it to cure it. The not knowing can feel very threatening and it is a lot easier to simply think that the answer is out there somewhere if I only look hard enough. Well, that answer might not be out there – accepting that would really be the simplest solution because then we can stop looking and stop focusing on the pain (or the illness). I don’t know what caused my hypothyroidism. Maybe it was the radiation that I was exposed to after Chernobyl. Probably not but it would be so much more satisfying to know what caused it rather than being in limbo. Yet, I have it that’s really all that matters (to me – if I were a scientist studying the thyroid, I’d want to dig into this). As soon as I accept that I just don’t know, I can move on instead of spending countless hours trying to find an answer that’s probably not out there anyways. Granted it might be easier to move on since I don’t have chronic pain reminding me of my condition but acceptance of not knowing what caused it or what can cure it is also important (ironically, despite several commentators’ claims that I didn’t know what I was talking about when I was critiquing the Second Noble Truth, I do agree that we can make our physical ailments worse by remaining attached to being pain-free, having a healthy thyroid, or whatever. That attachment can certainly make the pain worse. But there still is physical pain – it’s not all in our attachments… But I digress). The same is true with emotional or psychological pain. After my divorce, I was torturing myself with the question “why the heck did I marry that guy?” It took me years to realize that it’s okay not to know the answer. Sure, I had some ideas but nothing that felt like The Truth. And that was totally okay. I could simply accept that I didn’t know and move on. Similarly with death: Why did my grandmothers die when they did? Why did my friend die when she did? I have no idea! They just did. End of story. That doesn’t make loosing them any easier but at least I don’t spend time trying to figure out why god allowed it (see Act Two for someone who was desperate for an answer).

I have a hard time understanding why this not knowing is so scary but it must be. Religions and spirituality seems to revolve around answering this by replacing the not knowing with their answers: It’s because it was god’s will; or because we’re all sinners; or because of karma. Now we know. Or at least think we do. Somehow believing a lie is easier than facing the truth of not knowing. Things happen for no reason. Tough. Now move on with your life. (I guess this is why atheists are accused of being cold. But to me, it’s much more honest than to come up with some sort of convoluted answer that – ultimately – is a lie. Lying seems cold to me, especially when that lying is rather profitable).

The other piece is the hope part. Mamas talked about how we can clean the universe by purifying our hearts. Uhm, no, not really. It’s not going to hurt much if we purify our hearts but that’s not going to do anything to pollution. Changing the way we live will but we don’t know exactly how; nor do we know that changes we make really will have an effect, though we have some good reasons to believe they will but no certainty. But in the religion/spirituality world, it is clear: We can save the world if we just pray or meditate properly. Maybe this is just the flip side of the not knowing coin because hope is really a way to push away the not knowing. I could pretend as if recycling makes a difference. I suspect it does but I am not certain. But I can act as if it does.

There were times during Mamas talk when I was wondering why the extra step toward god/consciousness was necessary. We’re all interconnected (through evolution, not through fields, as he seems to be claiming – sorry, I got lost sometimes). That doesn’t require any god or consciousness to be true. But this doesn’t answer the big why: Why did this all happen? Who knows! There are hypotheses out there but ultimately, we really don’t know (at least not yet). So what? Putting a sky daddy on top of it all is only necessary if we have to have answers; if we cannot live with not knowing; if we need certainty.

If you look only at the religiously unaffiliated, the percentage of warming by human activity folks increase to 58%, or 77% of those who think there’s global warming. Looking at the chart, clearly religion has an influence on temperature perception and attributed cause. The more religiously conservative, the less likely a person is to notice the warming and attribute it to human activity. Religious influence is endangering our life support system in (at least) two ways: Ignoring the problem of climate disruption (if you think that it’s either not happening or we’re not the biggest contributor, you’re not going to do anything about it) and multiplying fruitfully without regard to overpopulation (the more people there are on the planet, the more consumption happens, contributing more CO2 to the atmosphere).

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.

While we could quibble that non-believers shouldn’t really be listed with believers, mentioning us is a big step forward!

And did you hear that the Inaugural Poet, Elizabeth Alexander, called for us to move beyond equating martial status with love? She said:

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

Maybe I am making too much out of this. But maybe both are signs of a new era where nonbelievers are not invisible and love is celebrated as much broader than marriage.

D.J. Grothe and Tom Flynn also commented on Obama’s inclusion of non-believers. Flynn, though, also expresses his disappointment, which I share, about the number of times Obama invoked God.

And someone at the Alternatives to Marriage Project also noticed the line in the poem. AtMP is the only organization that is truly fighting for equality for all by advocating for the removal of the dividing line between married and unmarried people, rather than just moving it.

I had argued that Christmas is religious because its essence is religious. AR Cline, the Atheism Guide, makes the following claim:

Christmas, like any holiday has absolutely no “essence” aside from what we assign it. Christmas means exactly what meaning we impart to it — no more, no less.

I think this shows nicely how we end up with the claim that Christmas is a secular holiday: It’s the influence of relativism. There’s no “essence” to anything beyond the meaning I give it. Everything is the way I define it. If I claim that Christmas is secular, it is so. It doesn’t matter what the origin of the holiday is, nor what the majority of people think it is.

AR referred me to a couple of his articles. The key arguments seem to be presented here. The argument seems to go somewhat like this: Because the US has the separation of church and state, because Christmas is a government sponsored holiday, Christmas must be either violating that separation (as I argue) or Christmas must be a secular holiday (as AR argues). He proposes that the Supreme Court should simply declare Christmas to be a secular holiday. Surely that would make it so, right? Just like “In God We Trust” is clearly a secular statement since it is on our coins and the Supreme Court has said this doesn’t violate the separation of religion and state. Sure. Right. Just because we’d like Christmas to be secular, so that we can claim it, doesn’t make it secular. I love Bach’s music. But I can listen to it without pretending that it has nothing to do with religion. I don’t need to claim that Bach’s music is secular to enjoy it; I simply ignore references to God. Why do atheists feel this desperate need to claim that Christmas is a secular holiday in order to celebrate it? If you want to celebrate, do so! There are atheists who go to church or synagogue because they enjoy it. They don’t claim that the services are secular because they attend them (although, I am sure, people on the forum would).

The whole claim that Christmas is secular seems to stem from the need of some atheists to continue to celebrate Christmas. Most of us grew up with Christmas. The religious overtones have become meaningless to us. So for us, it is a secular holiday. But to claim that this makes it so for the 80% of USAmerican who are Christian is dangerous because it waters down the separation of religion and state. I have not heard anything in the arguments for viewing Christmas as a secular holiday other than: I say so and therefore it is. Fine, that makes it secular for you. But that’s a long way from redefining it as secular, which I would argue is not possible. Maybe, we will be able to replace Christmas with a secular holiday, just like Christmas replaced holidays from other religions. Notice, though, that Christians were largely successful in doing that because they created a new basis for it, a new story around the holiday. They didn’t simply say that Winter Solstice is a Christian holiday because Christians celebrate it. Christmas will not become a secular holiday simply because atheists and other secularist celebrate it. If we want to hijack the holiday, we’ll need to come up with something else to celebrate around this time of year. Something other than the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

Aside from the absurd claim that we can change something religious to something secular simply by declaring it so, I also find it dangerous. Christians have imposed their value-systems onto the US and many other countries. Granted, the US is not a Christian nation in the sense that Christianity is not the official national religion but if we ignore that “the status quo has traditionally been one of privileging Christians at the expense of other religions,” as AR puts it, is not a thing of the past, we will not be able to truly establish a secular society. Rather than ignoring this influence, we need to question it. Why should Christmas be a day off? Why should “In God We Trust” be imprinted on our money? Why should marriage be a more valued form of relationship than anything else? All of this stems from the Christian influence on this country. If we can find secular reasons, I think it would be valid to continue these traditions. If not, separation of religion and state requires that we come up with new traditions.

It is difficult to not do what “everybody else does.” When just about everyone around me celebrates Christmas, I wonder what’s wrong with me. When just about everyone around me is married or at least coupled, I wonder what’s wrong with me. But just because everybody else does it doesn’t mean I have to do it. Nor do I claim that Christmas is meaningless to everybody because it’s meaningless to me.

(Note: I am proud to say that at least one prominent secular humanist agrees with me. Tom Flynn suggests that we should sit out Christmas in a dialogue with Ron Lindsay. Flynn also wrote about our bedfellows explaining the “paradox of Christmas” further.)