Jewish Atheist

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection, until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!”

Emile Zola

I just got a pingback that put me on a “how I became godless” stories site. I hope the exposure will bring new people here.

Sherwin Wine once called me “an ideologue.” I told him that I took it as a compliment and hoped I’d done nothing over the years to change his mind. He assured me that I hadn’t, that I was always the ideologue he loved.

Like Sherwin, I saw it as a war between belief systems, a war of words. Articulating the key ideas persuasively was necessary, since the opposition and its BS had held center stage for so long and had amassed a huge steaming pile of hymns, prayers, and cotton-candy-spinning exegeses, midrash, and “theology.” We had to cut through the BS (see below).

And the words, like those of Thomas Paine, lead to action. Like my fellow atheist Leo, the Atheist at Large, I believe religion to be a pernicious threat to humanity’s future. It has powerful self-perpetuating and self-replicating powers. We must develop the same, starting with young humanists and helping religious refugees. It all begins with words, ideas, kindred spirits and…action.

We don’t want to burn religious believers at the stake. Personally, all I ask is that they keep their primitive ideas and rituals to themselves and not try to take over countries, societies, and educational systems.

They keep coming back. We have a lot of organizing to do.

They are aggressive. OF COURSE we are a liberal tolerant country and want to show it by allowing Muslims to build a cultural center two blocks from Ground Zero, especially since the imam is a LIBERAL Muslim.

Oh, yeah? How do we know? “Liberal Muslim” is an oxymoron. All Muslims are empowered to lie to infidels in the interests of Islam. All Muslims are committed to the inerrancy of the Quran, which prescribes death to infidels.

There are other facts to consider. They’ll think it’s conquered land, as if they’re finishing what they started on 9/11. They’ll hold religious services inside, Muslim services. If it’s like the Jewish Commmunity Centers I know, only Muslims will attend. I’d be surprised if non-Muslims weren’t pressured or forced to convert.

A perfect hiding place for the device that blows up half of New Yoirk. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

So the struggle against religion will be a long one. They don’t quit. Hence the blog.

The spammers can find me, but not enough real people — yet.

Just in case there are new visitors, I post the following, to welcome you and let you know what to expect.

Why do I do this letter-in-a-bottle-writing? I am wedded to reality and truth…to finding them myself, to helping others find them, and to actively reversing the relentless progress of religion and other forms of unreason which threaten to destroy humanity.

I am willing to lead wherever these follow. If I have a personal encounter with an alien or Jesus, I’ll let you know.

Barring these…there’s no Jesus, no aliens. Hearsay can be evidence, but if the matter involves reality itself, you’re better off relying on your own experience and reliable documentation. The brain is a wondrous thing, and anybody can imagine anything. We’ve got to keep it true and real.

Here are the four Big Themes:

(1) Meanings of religious words. The first thing I set out to do was to provide rational, humanistic definitions for certain words that will not go away and that are central to any discussion of religion — namely, God, spirituality and the soul.

I confronted, as an academically trained linguist, the empirical question of what these words mean in common usage, given that they do not refer to anything in the physically verifiable world.

I discovered that people use these words very indiscriminately, with a wide variety of meanings, and sometimes the only reason they use them is to include themselves in the group of people who are allowed and encouraged to talk about God, spirituality, and the soul, whenever those words may mean.

Deliberate vagueness is something that a linguist can unravel and – by taking a social perspective – explain. Ihis case, the explanation has to do with the social power of language and the widespread acceptance of religion in the world today.

People really want to believe in God and the soul, really want to think they are spiritual. So yes, in the beginning there is the word, so let’s use it and not worry too much about what it means.

Some of the entries that provide a commonsense, linguistically oriented explanation of these fundamental terms are:

Let’s get spiritual: the many meanings of “Spirituality”
An atheist’s definition of God - and why people still believe
A secular-humanist definition of “the soul”

(2) Truth about the ancient texts.

Another early goal followed from my book, which was intended to take a secular humanist view of the central religious text of the Jews, the Torah, i.e., the first five books of the Bible. I actually read it, cover to cover, in the best available translation.

Just as Richard Dawkins brings his knowledge of biology to the argument for evolution, I bring my understanding of linguistics to the actual production of the Torah and other religious texts.

As a Humanist, I simply do not believe in their divine origin or any impossible events they depict.

With the supernatural aside, we can begin to look at the evidence for the purported events. There is, for example, no way 600,000 Israelites could have trekked across the Sinai and left no trace.

Similar inquiries yield similar results for the rest of the Torah: none of it happened. It’s all a legend, and maybe one of several competing versions, or maybe the latest version of folklore that had been mutating for millennia and happened to get written down. The Torah writers put Moses at center stage because they believed themselves to be his descendants (maybe they were).

It is of little or no interest to modern people. Its morality is primitive; its fables are minimally relevant to modern life, except with a lot of spin, which is quite different from the scientific process of translation.

Yet even Humanistic Jews include it in their services and bar/bat mitzvahs here in the Chicago area, so enthralled are they by the power of Torah nostalgia and by not wanting to seem too different from other Jews.

It’s especially important to put the ancient texts in their place — as ancient texts, and nothing more. During my 12 years in the Birmingham Temple, the Torah was rarely mentioned, the emphasis being on the entire Jewish experience, especially modern times.

No energy was wasted in uncovering “hidden meanings” in the Torah. We have advanced way beyond those primitive shepherds.

There was no self-indulgent Midrash ( = “Let’s see, what kind of fun stories can I make up about what the Torah doesn’t say, or could have said, or might mean?”). I never heard the term till I came to the Chicago area.

Instead, at The Birmingham Temple, there was religion. Rabbi Wine drew a bright, clear line between reality (the actual history of the Jews) and fantasy (the Torah).

So the entry on Clinging to the ancient texts represents my humanistic interpretation of one of the key ancient texts. Similar thought processes apply to them all.

We begin with the premise that there are no holy texts, only holy deeds and holy people. Nothing is immune to honest inquiry. So scholars in many disciplines work to answer the questions “Did it happen?” and “Who wrote it?”

Obviously, supernatural events didn’t happen. But does any of it resemble history? Now there’s even some doubt as to whether such “established” figures as David and Solomon existed.

Also, please, let’s have no more spin about why there are two versions of so many stories (e.g., the whole Lilith thing). There were multiple authors and careless (by our standards) editing. Both versions of a story got included in the final edited/compiled version. Case closed.

I believe that one of the Secular Humanist’s key tasks is to educate people about the reality of the Bible and the Quran. Way too many people regard them as literal and infallible, thus trapping themselves at an infantile and easily controlled level of magical thinking — and not realizing how texts can be modified over time.

In this process, we must be compassionate and must separate the beliefs (mostly infantile and degrading) from the believer (capable of enlightenment)…and in turn separate those from the merchants of belief: the clerics, who often operate from the darkest of motives and incite people to discrimination and violence. Even if innocent of these sins, they perpetuate infantile fantasies and enslave people to the ramblings of primitive ancestors.

(3) Being FOR something.

Another early theme, from Rabbi Wine’s teaching, is that Secular Humanism cannot just be atheism — it must stand for something. That something is virtue: pretty much the same personal virtues as most religions preach, minus prayer, worship, and mythology. Thus I’ve considered the practical aspects of leading a humanistically spiritual life…and how that might be accomplished.

The entry on Believing in something expands on this theme. Above all, Humanists value human dignity, choice, and responsibility.

(4) Change in the wider world.

While it’s great that Humanistic Jews have worked so hard to create a Judaism for modern times, they still represent only a tiny slice of Jews, in turn a tiny slice of the population.

In the non-Jewish world, orthodoxy and fundamentalism claim the world’s attention every day, with far more social approval than they deserve, wreaking havoc and setting human beings upon each other like animals. But animals kill for a reason; they don’t blow themselves up over stories. Only we are smart enough to do that.

Thus a lot of my attention is focused on the outside world and in how we might bring about real change. I even thought up a name for a movement and bought a domain; it’s all spelled out here and at http://thejewishatheist.com/?p=89. It’s the kind of nutty thing you do at this point in life (as opposed to the alternatives: Corvette, trophy wife).

But seriously, I’m losing patience and getting really worried. It is appalling, for example, that no one can be elected to national office in the United States who does not profess some sort of theistic religious belief.

A skeptical Secular Humanist, I have argued, would make the best President. A religious believer, one who can believe Christian or Mormon fantasies, is more apt to take a false political story as true, without adequate evidence or penetrating analysis. It’s easy for a President to go to war for quasi-religious reasons.

A president who is a religious believer can easily internalize some insane reason for starting a war, whereas the President committed to analysis and reason would almost certainly not have followed the same path. There was just NO CREDIBLE EVIDENCE for the war in Iraq, except in Bush/Cheney’s fevered symbiotic brain.

It is equally upsetting that there is absolutely no representation for Secular Humanism in the serious media. Comedy Central, Penn and Teller, that’s about it. Religious stories are regularly reported with no dissenting view — e.g., that the rebuilding of their stupid church is not evidence of God’s power but of misguided HUMAN power. Or how about a well-worded press release, from a secular organization, patiently pointing out that whatever holiday is being celebrated and written about is based on events that did not happen, and we’d all be better off if we let Biblical bygones be bygones?

News stories of the celebration of religious rituals and superstitions are soberly reported as deserving of time and attention, without quoting any prominent philosophers or Secular Humanists to the effect that nothing that is being celebrated in that particular holiday, whether the Torah being given at Sinai, or Jesus rising from the dead, actually happened.

Thus, one of the themes is change in the real world…the kind of acceptance for the articulate, persuasive Humanism that we see on the Net. The asymmetry is painful.

We have a tremendous amount of well-thought-out atheism and secular humanism on the Net. How can we bring it into the real world? Possible answers: Cash, celebrity, and maybe even a crisis — those are the only things people notice nowadays.

The answer to this question is more urgent than ever. In the United States and in the Middle East – in the most powerful nation in the world and the most volatile region in the world – religion has united with politics in a vile conflict of competing fantasies.

Are we, as Norman Podhoretz contends, already engaged in World War IV? Or, as Tribune columnist Steve Chapman says, perhaps we should chill out, because there are so many peaceful, democratic Muslim societies in the world.

I usually agree with Chapman, but here I think he is a bit too sanguine. I spell out the special dangers of Islam at http://thejewishatheist.com/?p=89.

There may be Muslim countries, even countries with oil, that are not prone to the autocracy and tribal warfare of the Middle East. But even these countries are in danger of Islamic terrorism, because fanatics live among them, and as long as there is an Islam that takes the Quran seriously and literally, there will be fanatics — unless somehow the broad mass of people can be reached by the light of reason, impossible as that sounds.

The reason there will always be fanatics is that everyone, from childhood on, is indoctrinated with a rigid, phantasmagoric ideology, which calls for world conversion to Islam.

There are 1.5 billion Muslims, and while many are content to live in peace, there will always be enough desperate, easily–molded people, especially if the imams get them while they’re young, to act out the Quran’s destructive fantasies, every day. Until this document ceases to be regarded as infallible and literally true, the world is in danger.

Secular and moderate Muslims must do more.

Muslim madrassas (religious schools) must be exposed as (at best) merchants of fantasy and (at worst) the perpetrators of the cult of terror and martyrdom (new low: early in ‘09, at a reconciliation meeting of Sunnis and Shiites, a suicide bomber blew himself up!!).

The vile anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-Western slanders of the Muslim clerics and media must stop. As many have pointed out, Muslims don’t tolerate the slightest slight.

Muslims pose a special danger because of the degree to which they regard their sacred text, which is highly aggressive and violently intolerant, as literally true and infallible. Plus, I repeat: There are over a billion of them, and they have a very high birth rate.

I really believe that religious orthodoxy, especially Islam, threatens our very existence on earth. Of course, it doesn’t help that continued Western invasions cause havoc, turn Muslims against us, and bring out their most radical violent elements. It’s a dance of death.

It would be a pity for humanity to have come so far, just to be done in by our inability to abandon our primitive stories.

So the four themes:

SUMMARY IDEAS: Secular Humanism, not atheism. Being FOR something. The dangerous mix of religion and politics. Actually reversing the progress of religious superstition, especially Islam, in the real world.