By Valerie Tarico ~

Catholic, Born-Again, Reformed, Jew, Muslim, Shiite, Sunni, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist . . . . Religions give people labels. The downside can be tribalism, an assumption that insiders are better than outsiders, that they merit more compassion, integrity and generosity or even that violence toward “infidels” is acceptable. But the upside is that religious or spiritual labels offer a way of defining who we are. They remind adherents that our moral sense and quest for meaning are core parts of what it means to be human. They make it easier to convey a subset of our deepest values to other people, and even to ourselves.

For those who have lost their religion or never had one, finding a label can feel important. It can be part of a healing process or, alternately, a way of declaring resistance to a dominant and oppressive paradigm. Finding the right combination of words can be a challenge though. For a label to fit it needs to resonate personally and also communicate what you want to say to the world. Words have definitions, connotations and history, and how people respond to your label will be affected by all three. What does it mean? What emotions does it evoke? Who are you identifying as your intellectual and spiritual forebears and your community? The differences may be subtle but they are important.

If, one way or another, you’ve left religion behind, and if you’ve been unsure what to call yourself, you might try on one of these:

Atheist. The term atheist can be defined literally as lacking a humanoid god concept, but historically it means one of two things. Positive atheism asserts that a personal supreme being does not exist. Negative atheism simply asserts a lack of belief in such a deity. It is possible be a positive atheist about the Christian God, for example, while maintaining a stance of negative atheism or even uncertainty on the question of a more abstract deity like a “prime mover.” In the United States, it is important to know that atheist may be the most reviled label for a godless person. Devout believers use it as a slur and many assume an atheist has no moral core. Until recently calling oneself an atheist was an act of defiance. That appears to be changing. With the rise of the “New Atheists” and the recent atheist visibility movement, the term is losing its edge.

Anti-theist. When atheist consistently evoked images of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, hostility toward religion was assumed. Now that it may evoke a white-haired grandmother at the Unitarian church or the gay kid on Glee, some people want a term that more clearly conveys their opposition to the whole religious enterprise. The term anti-theist says, “I think religion is harmful.” It also implies some form of activism that goes beyond merely advocating church-state separation or science education. Anti-theism challenges the legitimacy of faith as a moral authority or way of knowing. Anti-theists often work to expose harms caused in the name of God like stonings, gay bating, religious child maltreatment, genital mutilation, unwanted childbearing or black-collar crime. The New Atheist writers including Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins might better be described as anti-theists.

Agnostic. Some atheists think of agnostic as a weenie term, because it gets used by people who lack a god-concept but don’t want to offend family members or colleagues. Agnostic doesn’t convey the same sense of confrontation or defiance that atheist can, and so it gets used as a bridge—like “I think I might be bisexual.” But in reality, the term agnostic represents a range of intellectual positions that have important substance in their own right and can be independent of atheism. Strong agnosticism views God’s existence as unknowable, permanently and to all people. Weak agnosticism can mean simply “I don’t know if there is a God,” or “We collectively don’t know if there is a God but we might find out in the future.” Alternately, the term agnosticism can be used to describe an approach to knowledge, somewhat like skepticism (which comes next in this list). Philosopher Thomas Huxley illustrates this position:

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle... Positively the principle may be expressed as ‘in matters of intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.’

These three definitions of agnosticism, though different, all focus on what we do or can know, rather than on whether God exists. This means it is possible to be both atheist and agnostic. Author Phillip Pullman has described himself as both.

The question of what term to use is a difficult one, in strict terms I suppose I'm an agnostic because of course the circle of the things I do know is vastly smaller than the things I don't know about out there in the darkness somewhere maybe there is a God. But among all the things I do know in this world I see no evidence of a God whatsoever and everybody who claims to know there is a God seems to use that as an excuse for exercising power over other people, and historically as we know from looking at the history in Europe alone that's involved persecution, massacre, slaughter on an industrial scale, it's a shocking prospect.

Our labels are largely individual and sometimes experimental. We may try one on for size, live with it for a while, then try on something else.Skeptic. Traditionally, skeptic has been used to describe a person who doubts received religious dogmas. However, while agnostic focuses on God questions in particular, the term skeptic expresses a broader life approach. Someone who calls him- or herself a skeptic has put critical thinking at the heart of the matter. Well known skeptics, like Michael Shermer, Penn and Teller, or James Randi devote a majority of their effort to debunking pseudoscience, alternative medicine, astrology and so forth. They broadly challenge the human tendency to believe things on insufficient evidence. Australian comic Tim Minchin is an outspoken atheist who earns a living in part by poking fun at religion. But his most beloved and hilarious beat poem, Storm, smacks down homeopathy and hippy woo.

Freethinker. Free-thinker is a term that dates to the end of the 17^th Century, when it was first used in England to describe those who opposed the Church and literal belief in the Bible. Freethought is an intellectual stance that says that opinions should be based on logic and evidence rather than authorities and traditions. Well known philosophers including John Locke and Voltaire were called freethinkers in their own time, and a magazine, The Freethinker, has been published in Britain continuously from 1881 to the present. The term has gotten popular recently in part because it is affirmative. Unlike atheism, which defines itself in contrast to religion, freethought identifies with a proactive process for deciding what is real and important.

Humanist. While terms like atheist or anti-theist focus on a lack of god-belief and agnostic, skeptic and freethinker all focus on ways of knowing—humanist centers in on a set of ethical values. Humanism seeks to promote broad wellbeing by advancing compassion, equality, self-determination, and other values that allow individuals to flourish and to live in community with each other. These values drive not from revelation, but from human experience. As can be seen in two manifestos published in 1933 and 1973 respectively, humanist leaders don’t shy away from concepts like joy and inner peace that have spiritual connotations. In fact, some think that religion itself should be reclaimed by those who have moved beyond supernaturalism but recognize the benefits of spiritual community and ritual. Harvard Chaplain Greg Epstein dreams of incubating a thriving network of secular congregations.

Pantheist. As self-described humanists seek to reclaim the ethical and communitarian aspects of religion, pantheists center in on the spiritual heart of faith--the experience of humility, wonder, and transcendence. They see human beings as one small part of a vast natural order, with the Cosmos itself made conscious in us. Pantheists reject the idea of a person- god, but believe that the holy is made manifest in all that exists. Consequently, they often have a strong commitment to protecting the sacred web of life in which and from which we have our existence. The writings of Carl Sagan reflect this sentiment and often are quoted by pantheists, for example in a “Symphony of Science” video series which mixes evocative natural world images, atonal music, and the voices of leading scientists, and has received 30 million views.

If none of these fit . . . . Keep looking. Many of the American founding fathers were deists who didn’t believe in miracles or special revelation through sacred texts but thought that the natural world itself revealed a designer who could be discovered through reason and inquiry. Naturalists assume a philosophical position that the laws operating within the natural realm are the only laws governing the universe and no supernatural realm lies beyond. Secularists argue that moral standards and laws should be based on whether they do good or harm in this world and that religion should be kept out of government. Pastafarians playfully claim to worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and their religion is a good-humored spoof on Abrahamic beliefs and rituals.

Recently there has been steep uptick in people who identify as godless and a parallel uptick in atheist and humanist visibility efforts. Many godless people are newly out of religion (or newly out of the closet). Some find homes in Unitarian Universalist churches, which offer a gathering point for people who like the church tradition but are more interested in spiritual community than shared beliefs. Those congregations often include a variety of theists and nontheists. Ethical Culture Societies offer a supernaturalism-free landing place for a few more. Promising start-ups like the Humanist Community Project and Foundation Beyond Belief emerged recently, and appear to be growing. But most people don't yet have access to a community organized around shared secular values and spiritual practices. That means our labels are largely individual and sometimes experimental. We may try one on for size, live with it for a while, then try on something else.

As a movement, sexual and gender minorities have faced a similar challenge. LGB started replacing the term “gay community” in the 1980s. It then became LGBT, and then LGBTQ (to acknowledge those who were questioning) or LGBTI (to include intersex people). In India, an H got added to the end for the Hijra subculture. For urban teens, the catch-all term queer has now replaced the cumbersome acronym. Queer embraces the idea that sexual and gender identity is biologically and psychologically multifaceted. It includes everyone who doesn’t think of themselves as straight. Secular rights activists may eventually evolve a similar catch all, but in the meantime, organizations that want to be inclusive end up with long lists on their ‘About’ pages: atheist, agnostic, humanist, freethinker, pantheist, skeptic and more. So, join the experiment that picking one that fits and wearing it for a while. Or make up your own. I often call myself a “spiritual nontheist.” It’s a mouthful, but it forces people to ask, what is that? and then, rather than having them make assumptions I get to tell them where I’m at: I don’t have any kind of humanoid god concept, and I think that issues of morality and meaning are at the very heart of what it means to be human. Maybe next year I’ll find something that fits even better.

By Antonio ~

Diary entry (date removed)

Diary (Photo credit: Barnaby)

I have read it somewhere said that a religion that does not recognize science is committing suicide. When Socrates was made to kill himself because he didn’t believe in Greek gods, he humbly accepted his mistake. He was an atheist, and he made a mistake of speaking his mind but no Catholic would ever accept his mistake, not even for jailing Galileo when he said that the world was a sphere.

I was born into my religion and was made to believe that it was true until I knew better. It is a religion laden with hypocrisy based on stories which were not even original. It is a compilation of time tested folk tales that has been known to have worked convincing ignorant people to explain the then unexplainable things in life.

Blame it on history and my readings that turned me into a skeptic. Christianity is the only religion that has the motto “believe or I will hurt you”. I could cite so many instances in history that would explain this, but I don’t want to waste time so just take my word for it. Besides, this is just my opinion and I don’t really care if anyone in this country might want to read it. Writing this and showing it around and I might end up like Socrates in ancient Greece….like spitting into the wind.

Moses presented 10 rules that Christians should follow which everyone breaks everyday in ways they don’t notice. These are supposed to be commandments straight from the mouth of God but people fashion them with “acceptable amendments”. Some simple examples would be idolatry (statues), not using the Lord’s name in vain (God damn you), observing Sabbath (no overtime on Sunday), honoring thy parents (SOB), not coveting other man’s wife (Patrick Henry might have just been following this when he chains his wife in the basement). Thou shall not steal – now that’s not even normal in the Philippines.

How much sin is allowed? When God said thou shall not kill and Pope Gregory VII allowed the Crusades in 1095, how many Muslims could they kill so that they could still enter heaven? Or maybe, the commandments only apply if you kill Christians. There are so many rules that one should follow but they failed to think of a better way to say it. If I could start my own religion, there would be only one commandment. Be nice. But Christianity had to be so hypocritical even in terms of love.
To love someone, there has to be written documents virtually denying a man of freedom. Divorce is not allowed here when other Christian countries do. Does it mean that these countries allowing divorce are lesser Christians? As it is happening now, many children are “bastards” or illegitimate because divorce is illegal. It will only grow worse and people will doubt more and more the virtues and righteousness of staying in the faith because there would be more bastards roaming about. Thou shall not steal – still makes me laugh. That’s something even the Spanish friars did not adhere to when they taught us the religion.
If I could get a chance to burn that marriage contract I signed with my wife 20 years ago, I would and I’d still live with her because of the children and it is the right thing to do. But I don’t want to be tied to that piece of paper that is supposedly notarized by God.

Diary entry (date removed)

Being a teacher puts me in a very difficult situation as I live in a Christian community where I am expected to say only good things about the religion lest parents will lynch me. Perhaps if I adjust it a bit so that I will have a clear conscience of teaching them the right things without offending their parents I could pass it as a better explanation of the unexplainable for younger students.

Ok. Here goes:

Genesis:

“One day the lord created the universe with a huge explosion –The Big Bang. A couple of billion years later, life began on earth from the formation of amino acids that created a simple life form. From that life form God waited for another couple of billion years until He created the dinosaurs. But God was not happy with the dinosaurs and so he sent a giant meteor and blew them all away. He waited again for millions of years (not billions of years this time. Maybe he got impatient) and created monkeys and other animals instead. One of those monkeys with less hair was named Adam which he liked better than the rest.”

There will be questions like: “Why mommy said God created the world in 7 days?”

Possible answer: There were no calendars back then. God created time too. If he says it was 7 days, its ok because he is a God. (good so far?)

“Adam met this girl Eve and they lived in this place called paradise.”

They had children like other monkeys did but they all have grown less hair because God wanted monkeys with lesser hair and no tail. This new breed is now called “man”.

Question: “Mommy said they got kicked out from paradise after they ate the apple. Why is that apple so bad?”

Answer: ”That apple was a symbol. If you eat it you don’t pay taxes but you get free health care”
This sucks.

The Spanish taught us Christianity with 10 commandments but broke all of them when they colonized us for 300 years. I’m a closet atheist even if I have a very Christian name. Our government is married to the church. That is why we remain a poor country. The church does not want contraceptives so we are over-populated. We are not over populated because of immaculate conception. The church (the wife) says one thing and the government follows like a dutiful husband. The government can be corrupt because every sin will be forgiven by God anyway.

I am an atheist but I am unhappy because I am where I am. It is like being the only Jew in the Nazi party.

By Rhonda Denise Johnson ~

I sometimes run into people who try to encourage me to visit a Church. For a few years after diversion (April 2005), I had recurrent dreams of being left in the Rapture. And let’s face it, the music and fellowship the Church offers can be quite enticing, especially in the small town where I live, where if you don’t go to Church there really isn’t too much to do. But the one solid thing that has sustained my resolve to remain free is what I’ve read in the Bible. No matter how sweet folks are, trying to “love me back into Church,” no one can un-write what was written, nor can I un-read what I read. I can honestly go so far as to say that if it weren’t for the Bible, I might still be calling myself a Christian. Alas, the Bible is the foundation of Christianity and although for a while, I thought I could maintain my “relationship” with Jesus despite the problems in the Bible, in time I had to admit this was neither honest nor logical. In a series of articles, I’d like to share with you some of the things I found.

Haukipudas Church (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Problem with the Fall of Man Story

The story of the Fall of Man is central to Christianity. Without it, the Church could not convince indigenous people that they need Jesus to save them from sin. Beginning with Paul, missionaries often encounter people whose moral code is obviously superior to that of many Christians. The idea that all humans somehow inherited a sin nature from Adam and therefore deserve hell, was a masterful stroke. Yet, there are not one, but two fundamental problems inherent to the whole idea of the Fall of Man. I won’t make the argument people usually make here. The idea that all of mankind should pay hellfire for the crime of being born, is bad enough, but that’s not what we will discuss here. The two problems I will mention are: 1. Adam had no way to know that what he was doing was wrong, 2. Paul is the only biblical writer who holds all humanity accountable for Adams’s sin.

Let’s visit Adam in the Garden of Eden. Jehovah creates this guy but does not give him the faculty to know good and evil. It doesn’t even say that Adam did not know how to distinguish good from evil. He simply had no concept that some things were good and some evil. Jehovah puts that knowledge in the fruit of a tree then tells the man not to eat the fruit. Adam had no way to know that it was evil to disobey God. In fact, he obeyed everybody. Like a child, Adam did what God told him to do until somebody else came along and told him to do something else. There was no wrestling with his conscience—no acting against his better judgment. He had none.

Eve tells the serpent, “That‘s the forbidden fruit, which if we eat we die.” Apparently, it occurred to her that dying was perhaps something she did not want to do. But nothing had ever died in her world, so she had no real concept of death; otherwise, she would not have thought the fruit was useful for food and wisdom. If someone gave you a plate of carrots and told you it was poison, would you eat it? Would you say, “Well, poison or not, it’s still full of vitamins?” Only if you‘re a baby who doesn‘t really know what poison is.

I have looked and from Genesis to the Book of Acts, I could not find one reference linking us to Adam’s sin. Something so cataclysmic that it affected the entire human race and yet not one biblical writer thought it worth writing about?Toddlers often don’t do what we tell them to do. They have to learn that obedience will keep them out of trouble and disobedience will land them into trouble. No parent would put a child in the electric chair the first time it disobeys. No one would treat their dog that way, much less a child. Yet, that’s all Adam was, a child with no life experience. He could have been taught. Life’s experiences could have developed his conscience. Instead, God renders the ultimate punishment the first time Adam disobeys. And this ultimate punishment was not on Adam himself. For none of the punishments outlined for Adam were eternal. According to the Church, the ultimate payment for Adam’s sin was levied on his descendents. Where is the justice in this?

I have looked and from Genesis to the Book of Acts, I could not find one reference linking us to Adam’s sin. Something so cataclysmic that it affected the entire human race and yet not one biblical writer thought it worth writing about? How odd? Actually, the whole concept could be called “Paulianity.” After all, he calls it his gospel (2 Timothy 2:8). Indeed, the concept of inherited sin is his gospel and does not exist anywhere else in the Bible outside his writings. The concept is not in the Old Testament. Moses decrees that “the fathers shall not be put to death for the sins of the sons, nor shall the sons be put to death for the sins of the fathers, but every man shall be put to death for his own sins.” (Deuteronomy 24:16) Obviously, Paul was not present when Jesus stood in the temple with the Old Testament scriptures and said that not one jot of it would be changed ‘til heaven and Earth pass away. Neither can I find the concept in any of the Gospels or the non-Pauline letters of the New Testament.

Preachers tell us we can’t pick and choose what we want to believe in the Bible. With this kind of contradiction, we have no other alternative. How does one agree with a book that does not agree with itself? How can Christians tell me that God never changes, and then when I see discrepancies in the Bible, they tell me that God did change? They tell us we are in a different dispensation now. Change by any other name…. So under the dispensation of law I only had to worry about paying for my own sin, but under the dispensation of grace I suddenly need a savior to save me from someone else’s sin, which I would not be held accountable for if Paul weren’t trying to find an excuse to save me. This makes no sense.

By Erick Saikeo ~

Before I ever had the opportunity to even understand Christianity as a whole I was scared into believing in it. Fear can be a very powerful tool to manipulate a young mind I guess we can say in this case. In 1995 I was with my mother at a bible study group and we watched a hell movie which was very graphic full of demons and torment! To this very day i have yet to find a film that can bring back the feeling of complete terror like the film I had watched. Since that very night I had accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior understanding that hell was a real place and I knew I would do whatever it took to not go there. For a five-year-old mind having adults confirm that HELL exists is something that makes it so real you have nightmares about it for many years on end.

I was getting physically abused at that time for about two years, and I'm still wondering how that fits into God's divine plan.

I did poorly in school playing catchup with my classmates all the way through high school. It's kind of hard to focus when you think half your family is going to hell for being in the wrong faith or what God thinks of you. Every opportunity to get laid i turned it down thinking I was doing the right thing. I was very lonely and withdrawn trying to be a Christian and at the same time to still have a life. Life was full of fear and confusion. I was a delusional person that lived in denial that there might be something wrong with what I was taught at a young age. Half my family is Asian and the other half is Latino.

My father believes in Buddhism, and my mother's family is Christian. I felt like i was born to witness the Faith of Christianity to the Asian community so they could have eternal life... it wasn't until people started dying and life got more complicated my faith started to fade away....the only thing that keeps me believing in God and praying at night is the New World Order and the Global elites and their evil rituals... If there's no God why do these satanic Families and rites control the Globe..but it does make me wonder if Christianity is just another form of control....All I want is to find truth so that my mind can finally be at ease and live....it's getting to the point where i don't smile anymore. I have a girlfriend a loving family but this really took a toll on me... if anyone on here has experienced a similar journey in Christianity please email me at mrsaikeo89 AT live DOT com

By the Religious Antagonist ~

By Incongruous Circumspection ~

A good friend of mine leaned back in his chair and said the following profound statement:

"[God] made an appearance for 'Doubting Thomas', why not me?"

Francesco de' Rossi's painting 'The Doubting of St. Thomas' (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently, I have been engaging friends and strangers in conversations about proof of the existence of the god of the Bible. Of course, nobody I have spoken to has ever seen him and thus have to resort to axiomatic arguments.

"The Bible proves that God exists because he said he wrote it and thus, he did."

My counter to that is simple. Many holy books and religious leaders say the exact same thing. They state that their religion is true, even exclusive to other religions. Sometimes, they even go as far as the writers of the Bible and say that you're a fool if you don't agree with them. I find these written statements to be quite presumptuous on the writer's part and actually quite intellectually lazy.

If you cannot prove what you are writing, don't patronize the reader. Any other book that tries to play that game will be laughed off of a book store's bookshelf. Some may try it, but we apply academic rigor and reasonable logic to thwart the slaps of the author. Nobody that writes a statement like that can or should be taken seriously.

Or, they say something like this:

"The Holy Spirit has done a great work in me, so I know he exists."

If you cannot prove what you are writing, don't patronize the reader. Any other book that tries to play that game will be laughed off of a book store's bookshelf. How can a person say that? Couldn't it be their mind that taught them how to live? Experiential growth and maturity in life? I would consider that more likely than an imaginary existence of a being inside of you. (Disclaimer: This response is one that I respect. It removes the need to treat the Bible as an inerrant and infallible guide book and allows the person of faith to live a life of caring and love. Even so, I still must engage with a question of "prove it, I want video".)

But, there are two other responses I get (other than the intellectually lazy responses that say that the world around us makes it obvious that God made it and my personal favorite, there were thousands of witnesses in Jesus' time and they all corroborated his existence - not even remotely factually accurate) raise my eyebrows so high that my forehead looks like a hound dog's cheeks.

"JESUS IS LORD!" Or, "PRAISE JESUS!"

Any other variant of those two phrases is pretty comical. If I ask more questions, I get the same answer shouted back at me. It's almost like the person doing the yelling believes that his words will somehow shock me into the obvious realization that they are right and I am wrong. But all I am doing is asking questions to make them think. Why bother yelling?

And the second - and really, the point of this post - statement:

"You have to have faith. God does not have to show himself to you. If you don't believe, you'll just go to hell. Stop being a doubting Thomas."

I don't blame the bearer of this news at all. I'll explain in a bit why they have the story of Didymus (Thomas) all wrong, but first, let's see why it's expected that a Christian believes this.

The writer of 1 Corinthians 1:18 scratches the backs of those who believe what he is writing by telling them that all who reject his words are going to hell anyway, so it's to be expected. So you see, a Christian who swallows this teaching is obligated to treat the Bible, if they believe that is in fact God's word, as factual, because it says it is, even if the logic is against them.

There is a problem though. That teaching is in stark contrast to the alleged words of Jesus in the book of John. Jesus didn't refuse to allay Thomas' doubts by quoting 1 Corinthians 1:18 at him. No. He actually said, "You have seen, so now you believe." And he didn't follow it up with, "so you're going to hell." Or, "you're the only lucky bloke that got to see me but everyone else has to just believe or they go to hell."

That last statement is not Jesus' alleged words. And yet, it is exactly the sort of attitude that oozes from fundamentalist Christianity or any branch of Christianity that purports itself to be the exclusive path to heaven.

But, I stand with Thomas and my friend, and, by default, Jesus himself. If God really does exist, if Jesus is really God's son and can walk through walls to show himself to Thomas, he sure as bloody nails can do the same to any doubter in the entire universe.

I'm waiting. But I won't hold my breath.

By Paul So ~

This may sound surprising to most of you but from my experience I came to the conclusion that Christianity, including many Christians, really do not care about the truth: what they do care about is that their beliefs are true. There is a difference between caring about the truth and caring that your personal beliefs are true. Caring about the truth involves practices and qualities that helps people uphold intellectual integrity and honesty to the standard or procedure of finding out the truth. When I say “finding out the truth” I am not saying we should reach absolute certainty or absolute knowledge, what I am trying to say is that we come to the produce reliable beliefs about the world as best as we can. We use logic, evidence, argumentation, mathematics, and other methods because they have played an indispensable role in helping us to produce reliable beliefs about the world. We know that “reliable” does not mean “absolutely true”, we just know that reliable means “most likely to be true” or “approximately true” based on the best considered evidences, arguments, reasons, and information. These beliefs are provisional and defeasible, meaning they can change so that we improve proximity of true beliefs as much as we can. We do this not because it has any practical benefits but rather there is something noble and intrinsic worth in doing so.

Truth (Photo credit: d4vidbruce)

As far as I described the “pursuit to truth” does this sound like Christianity to you? I hope not because from what I am seeing I came to the conclusion Christians do not care about the truth, they only care that their beliefs are true. Consequently, they focus more about faith which simply believes that their beliefs are true rather than examining their beliefs to come to a conclusion on whether those beliefs are true. But furthermore I came to the conclusion that how Christianity pursues the truth is very similar to how people value their identity and culture almost to the point that Christianity treats truth politically and socially. However I want to clarify what I mean by “politically” and “socially’ in the following manner:

By “treating truth politically” I simply mean that people justify a statement as true simply by appealing to the authority and tradition which the statement resonates with. In other words, they seek solid approval from tradition and authority in order to decide whether the statement is true rather than finding the evidences and reasons to support those statements. Approval is not evidence, but approval can be substantive because of evidence and arguments but many times people approve something for reasons other than good arguments and evidence; doesn’t that sound like politics? For example, hard-core Communists won’t accept that some degree of free-marketing is good since it produces more resources because it goes against what they approve to be good rather than evidences that supports what is beneficial for human beings. It’s like Catholics disapproving condoms because for them condoms goes against what they approve of which is procreation. In other words, it goes against the authority rather than against the evidence and cogent arguments that supports those things. Because people see authority and tradition as the legitimate figures that sustains their way of life they tend to rely on the approval of authority and tradition on what to believe in.

Additionally, by “treating truth politically” I also mean that people identify accepting the truth as pledging allegiance or loyalty to the community and authority. You guys know that accepting the truth is not the same as pledging allegiance or loyalty, they are very different from each other but from your experience you guys know that if you accept Christianity as the true religion then you are pledging loyalty to the community and authority; Christians do not separate these things, they unconsciously see them as the same thing but this is simply wrong: you can accept that the earth rotates around the sun without pledging any loyalty to anyone even to scientists. However, if you reject Christinity then now you are not loyal to the community but in a sense you are against the community. Instead of “Oh, I just disagree with your belies because I don’t think they are true” it is interpreted as “I am against you”. It is not taken lightly because they think that you ought to be loyal to their community, you ought to accept their beliefs.

By treating truth “socially”, first I mean to say that accepting the truth is the same thing as participating in the community as a member; In order to be a social member of a religion you have to accept what they believe; Christianity does not see the difference between accepting their truth and participating in the community as a member, they see it as the same. But if you reject their beliefs even with good intentions you are no longer part of their community, simple as that. Second, instead of appealing to evidence and facts to support statements Christianity focuses more on personal identity, values, and personal experiences that they think needs to be protected from anything that is contrary to those identities and values. It is not enough that you accept that there is a God and that Jesus resurrected but rather you have to become a Christian by taking those beliefs to be part of who you are in terms of what you do and what your attitude is. Because of this they do not think logically, they think mythically. Myths are important to many cultures and religions because it is so much part of their identity and values; when parents tell stories to their children they do more than just tell the stories they also mold their children’s values and identity; these myths aren’t just stories but rather they are potent stories with the power to mold people’s sense of self in terms of how they see themselves in relation to society and the world. But myths do not focus on how to determine whether the beliefs are true but rather assuming that the beliefs are true in order to initiate the formation of values which in turn helps develop the person’s identity to make them fit into a given society. So Christians do not think of the beliefs in terms of “true” or “false” but rather they assume that the beliefs are true and focus on the values and identity as well as appealing to them to support their beliefs.

Let me give you examples: Haven’t you guys noticed how Christians would call you arrogant for disagreeing with them? Why is that? It is not because you are disagreeing with them but rather because you are disagreeing with God, the king of all kings. You are disagreeing with an authority figure which to many Christian is wrong because the authority figure is perfect, to disagree with the authority figure is to suggest that you are better than the authority figure. This is also another reason why they call you blasphemous. But think about it: What does authority have to do with truth? Unless the authority has intellectual merits it has nothing to do with truth, but so far it isn’t even established if there is a God: it is presumed by the believers that there is a God but far from being established. But remember, Christians assume that God exists but they focus more on God’s authority rather than whether or not God exists. They ignore whether their fundamental assumptions are correct, but rather they focus on what values those assumptions give to them.

The main reason why I continue to reject Christianity is not because I’m an atheist but rather because I see that Christianity does not care about the truth: it only cares about values and identity transmitted through myths. Speaking of values, I’m sure you are familiar with creationism vs. evolution debate right? Well, in Jerry Coyne’s book “Why Evolution Is True” in the last chapter Coyne told a story on how he gave a presentation on the evidences supporting evolution. After the presentation one of the members of the audience said “You presented very strong evidence Professor Coyne but I do not believe in it” Coyne was puzzled and asked why, and the man suggested that evolution as emotional consequences that he cannot accept, namely that evolution does not explain where our values come from and how it justifies the Christian way of life (all this is paraphrased). Coyne then found out that most Christians aren’t concerned about evidence they are mostly concerned about the culture war that involves abortion, homosexuality, sex education, and other political issues that conflicts with their values. Think about it: For Christians creationism is more than just a true belief, it is a true belief intrinsically linked to their values that is the building block of their way of life; They accept creationism because it represents their values, but they cannot bring themselves to accept evolution because evolution does not represent values but rather it is very impersonal facts that is contrary to their values. What Christians get confused over is this: that being contrary to what they believe in is the same thing as being of an opposite value. For example, many Christians think that Evolution endorses homosexuality, abortion, pre-marital sex, eugenics, and other things. What do these things have in common? They go against Christian values but that’s the problem: Evolution says nothing about whether abortion, homosexuality, and pre-marital sex is right, it just simply states facts on how nature works, nothing more.

You also recognize how if you say anything about the big bang theory, evolution, pro-choice, or anything of that sort the person immediately says “sorry, I don’t believe in those stuff because I am a Christian”. If you carefully analyze that statement you realize that he was not making an argument or appealing to any evidence, he (or she) was appealing to his identity and values. But this appeal has nothing to do with what whether the belief is well-supported and reliable, but the Christian does not care: what the Christian mostly cares about is that he or she has the identity and values that he or she wants to protect. You can start asking the person “What does being a Christian have anything to do with those positions or facts I presented being false?”, and the person will reply “They are wrong because they go against what I believe and what I value” but again, the person is appealing to his or her personal beliefs and values which again has nothing to do with arguments and evidence.

When you start demanding that person to give arguments or evidence he or she feels offended? Want to know why? That person does not feel comfortable with the idea that you are trying to attack or question their identity and values; but once again, that has nothing to do with what whether the beliefs are reliable and well-supported. They can appeal to the bible and pretend that it supports the beliefs, but then again they appeal to it because it is seen as the source of their values. If you demand more, they think you are being unreasonable when in fact you are being reasonable since you are sticking to the intellectual standards, methods, and integrity that are required to come to sound conclusions. You will often see that they will attack you and ask “how do you know my beliefs are false? How do you know that you are right? Hmm? Aren’t you being arrogant?” which shifts the subject altogether: the reason why they are being questioned is that their beliefs are untenable so they have the burden of proof to support it. That has nothing to do with being arrogant and it has nothing to do with knowing that you are right. Sometimes they like to show that you are just as ignorant as them just to make themselves feel like their identity and values are safe from attack. But you see here, they care about the status quo: they care that their tradition and values are protected and secured from changes that comes from changes in the political landscape to the arguments against them. They see it as protecting their territory. Doesn’t that sound political?

I am very much convinced that most Christians do not care about the truth; they say that they are but I won’t believe it given what I observed about them. They claim that they care about the truth but they refuse to honestly confront the theological problems of their beliefs: they refuse to admit that there is scant of evidence supporting their beliefs (or they admit it but they don’t care because all they care is their values and identity), they refuse to believe that suffering in this world is ultimately problematic to their faith (they say that they’ll find out in heaven), and they refuse to see that the bible is full of contradictions.

The main reason why I continue to reject Christianity is not because I’m an atheist but rather because I see that Christianity does not care about the truth: it only cares about values and identity transmitted through myths. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with identity and values, they are very important but they have nothing to do with what is true or what is false, likely or unlikely. We need to learn how to separate our identity and values from facts, otherwise when we mix them together we become biased. I hope you guys find this to be an insightful essay because for quite a while after observing how Christians respond to criticisms I came to an insight that convinced me that they do not care about the truth; I do know some who do care about the truth, but from my impression many of them became non-Christians in the long run.

By Klym ~

Regular readers on this site probably know that I attend a Unitarian Universalist "church" where I fellowship with atheists, agnostics, humanists, deists, former Jews and Christians, Buddhists, and other interesting people. I love this place and the people there. It has been so liberating to me to gather with others who don't claim to have all the answers to the questions in life and who encourage me to pursue my own individual path to truth and knowledge. I came to this church late in life, still a recovering fundamentalist and it has been a long, hard road away from the cross of Christianity.

Buddhism (Photo credit: shapour bahrami)

Our minister is on a six month sabbatical so we are having all kinds of interesting guests in the pulpit--rabbis, Muslims, Buddhists---you get the picture. This past Sunday we had a retired minister who, in his youth, was a Catholic; in early adulthood he was a Baptist minister, and is now an agnostic\atheist. Anyway, he told us his own personal beliefs now and then challenged us to write down our own beliefs, or "credo", before the end of the week.

So, I have written mine and would like to share them with my ex-christian online buddies. Here they are:

My Credo--or What I Believe Today

1. I believe in the power of kindness.
2. I believe in the power of relationship---to heal and to encourage and to make life worth living.
3. I believe that this life is all we have and therefore it is imperative that I treasure each moment and that I become part of the solution and not part of the problem.
4. I believe that life is a gift for which I am very grateful.
5. I believe that there are no satisfactory or easy answers to explain the suffering in the world and that it is my personal responsibility to relieve suffering in the world around me as much as I possibly can.
6. I believe we are the masters of our own destiny and that we cannot depend on supernatural, mythical forces or beings to protect us or plan for us.
7. I believe we create our own purpose in the world.
8. I believe that our words are powerful and that we should choose them very carefully.
9. I believe that many things in this life are impossible to explain in any satisfactory way.
10. I embrace the mystery of life and am no longer frightened by my doubts and skepticism.
11. I believe that we should use only kindness and love to influence others and that fear and guilt should never be used to control other human beings.

What I No Longer Believe

1. I don’t believe that we need to be saved by the blood sacrifice of another human being or "god".
2. I don’t believe in a heaven or a hell or any kind of afterlife or reincarnation.
3. I don’t believe that we are rewarded for being good or punished for being bad in an afterlife.
4. I don’t believe we can comfort ourselves or others with trite phrases and meaningless platitudes.

So, there you have it. That's what I believe today. Tomorrow may be another story....but for now, it is very liberating to put it in black and white and let it fly through cyberspace. Peace out!

By Valerie Tarico ~

Did the Catholic Bishops wince last week when their leader, anti-contraception Cardinal Timothy Dolan, was exposed for paying pedophiles to disappear? One can only hope. After all, these are men who claim to speak for God. They have direct access to the White House, where they regularly weigh in on issues ranging from military policy to bioethics, and they expect us all to listen – not because of relevant expertise or elected standing or even money, but because of their moral authority.

Ahem.

If pedophile payouts weren’t enough to convince you that this “moral” authority is anything but moral, take a look at some of their other sins against compassion and basic decency.

Punishing doctors and nuns for saving lives. In 2009, a 27-year-old mom, pregnant with her fifth child, was rushed to a Phoenix hospital, St. Josephs, where her doctors said she would almost certainly die unless her pregnancy was aborted immediately. The nun in charge approved the emergency procedure, and the woman survived. The local bishop promptly excommunicated her. ‘There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But — and this is the Catholic perspective — you can't do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means." said Rev. John Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix. How far are the Church authorities willing to take this “moral” logic? In Brazil last year, with Vatican backing, the Church excommunicated a mother and doctor for saving the life of a nine-year-old rape victim who was pregnant with twins. (At four months pregnant, the girl weighed eighty pounds.) Cardinal Giovanni Batista Re, who heads the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, said “life must always be protected.” Perhaps Mr. Batista Re can explain to the Vatican’s 1500-year tradition of “just war.”

Protecting sex-offenders (even non-Catholics) against child victims. As we have seen, the moral priorities of the bishops are laid naked when they decide who to excommunicate and who not. The doctor and mother of the pregnant 9-year-old got the boot for approving an abortion but not the stepfather who had sexually assaulted the child, probably over a period of years. A similar contrast can be seen between the case of the Phoenix nun and hundreds of pedophile priests who were allowed to remain Catholic even after they finally were identified and removed from the Church payrolls. It gets worse. In New York, a bill that would give child molestation victims more time to file charges has been blocked seven times by the Catholic hierarchy lead by none other than Cardinal Dolan. Why? "We feel this is terribly unjust, we feel it is singles out the church, and it would be devastating for the life of the church.” In other words, regardless of whether the abuse really happened or what the consequences were for victims, what matters is how much additional lawsuits might cost the Church. Isn’t that the ends justifying the means?

Using churches to organize gay haters. When the Washington State legislature approved marriage equality this spring, fundamentalist Christians across the state organized to reverse the legislation. Even though three quarters of American Catholics think that gay marriage should be legal, Archbishop Peter Sartain jumped to the front of the pack, decreeing that Western Washington parishes under his –moral authority--should gather signatures for an anti-equality initiative. To their credit, a number of priests refused, and a group called Catholics for Marriage Equality is raising money for ads. In contrast to the Catholic League, which has made the degrading argument that sex between priests and adolescent boys is consensual homosexuality, lay Catholics appear to know the difference.

Lying about contraceptives to poor Africans. Of the mortal sins committed by the men of the cloth, the most devastatingly lethal in the last 30 years has been the Catholic hierarchy’s outspoken opposition to condom use in Africa. In 2003, the president of the Vatican's Pontifical Council for the Family publically lied about the efficacy of condoms in preventing both pregnancy and HIV: “The Aids virus is roughly 450 times smaller than the spermatozoon. The spermatozoon can easily pass through the 'net' that is formed by the condom.” The archbishop of Nairobi told people that condoms were spreading HIV. Some priests told parishioners that condoms were impregnated with the virus.

The motivation for such flagrant falsehoods? The Church has practiced competitive pro-natalism for centuries, but lately anti-contraceptive edicts have been ignored by most educated European and American Catholics, and Italy has the second lowest birthrate in the Western World, at 1.3 per woman. The bishops see this as a “catastrophe” and are looking to Africa as “a reservoir of life for the Church.” They wrap their opposition to contraception in lofty moral language such as that offered by Pope John Paul II: It seems profoundly damaging to the dignity of the human being, and for this reason morally illicit, to support a prevention of AIDS that is based on a recourse to means and remedies that violate an authentically human sense of sexuality. As late as 2009 John Paul’s successor, Benedict, continued to tell poor African Catholics that condoms were “wrong” and even to suggest that they were making the epidemic worse. With god-knows –how-many lives lost and children orphaned, it he finally softened his stance in 2010.

In addition to lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth and envy, the traditional seven include pride and greed, which, to my mind, drive much of the appalling behavior in this list.Obstructing patient access to accurate information and services in secular hospitals. In rural Arizona near the Mexican border, women delivering babies by cesarean section were refused tubal ligations because their independent hospital was negotiating a merger with a health care network run by Catholics. Worse, when a woman arrived at the same hospital in the middle of a miscarriage and need a surgical abortion to complete the process, she was forced to travel by ambulance to Tucson, eighty miles away, risking that she would hemorrhage on the way. All over the U.S. secular and Catholic-run health systems are merging, and patients are quietly losing the right to make medical decisions based on the best scientific information available and the dictates of their own conscience.

Even when the Catholic-owned hospital is a small part of the merger, administrators insist that Catholic directives apply to the system as a whole. These directives P prohibit not only abortions but also contraceptives, vasectomies and tubal ligations, some kinds of fertility treatment, and compliance with patient directives at the end of life. Ectopic pregnancies cannot be handled in keeping with the medical standard of care. As biotechnologies and treatments relevant to the beginning and end of life advance, we can expect the list to grow longer. Patients cannot trust that they will be told that other options are available elsewhere.

One of the bitter ironies here is that even wholly “Catholic” hospitals and charities are staffed primarily by non-Catholics and largely provide services to people of other faiths or of none, paid for with tax dollars. In health care much of the money flows from Medicare and Medicaid. In 2010, non-medical affiliates of Catholic Charities received 62 percent of annual revenue from the taxpayers – nearly 2.9 billion dollars. Only three percent came from church donations, with the remainder coming from investments, program fees, community donations and in-kind contributions. And yet all of those dollars get directed according to the dictates of bishop conscience rather than individual conscience.

Slapping down uppity nuns. Catholic charities and hospitals are at some competitive advantage in part because of hard working nuns, many of whom have skills and responsibilities that exceed their compensation. The bishops are the Catholic Church’s 1%; the nuns are managers and service workers --and many have taken the kind of poverty vows that America’s 1% is trying to impose on the rest. Because the nuns live in the real world, where suffering and morality are complex, they often make care-based decisions and take nuanced positions on moral questions that the Council of Bishops resolves by appealing to dogma and authority.

In April, the Vatican decided to remind the nuns who’s on top. Rome issued an 8-page assessment accusing the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of disagreeing with the bishops and of “radical feminism.” It appears that their labors on behalf of poor, vulnerable people had distracted them from a more Christian priority: controlling other people’s sex lives—oh, and standing up against the ordination of women. The Archbishop assigned by the Vatican to reign in unruly American nuns is –none other than Peter Sartain of Seattle, the same moral authority who has declared a holy crusade against gay marriage.

Bullying girl scouts. Unlike the Boy Scouts, who recently earned media and public attention by booting out a gay den-mother, the Girl Scouts have been stubbornly inclusive and focused on preparing girls for leadership. For example, last year a Colorado troop included a trans-gender seven year old. That’s a problem for the Bishops, and since up to a quarter of American Girl Scouts are Catholic kids with troops housed in churches, they see it as their problem. To make matters worse, the American Girl Scouts refuse to leave their international umbrella, the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, which has stated that young women "need an environment where they can freely and openly discuss issues of sex and sexuality." The World Association would appear to believe the data that girls who can’t manage their sexuality and fertility are more likely to end up in poverty than leadership positions.

Then again, maybe that’s what the church hierarchy is after. According to an article last month at the Huffington Post, “The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts' "possible problematic relationships with other organizations" and various "problematic" program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops.” (Italics mine.) We’re talking about an organization run by women for girls faced with an all male inquisition. In today’s Catholic church, leadership still requires a y chromosome.

Purging interfaith bridge builders. Lest some reader assert that the sins of the Bishops all are a consequence of sexual repression – some contorted pursuit of sexual purity that degrades both sex and compassion—it is important to note that the current cohort of Church authorities are as obsessed with doctrinal purity as sexual purity. It would take me many paragraphs to describe their tireless pursuit of purity as well as retired Anglican bishop, John Shelby Spong, does in one:

Hans Kung, probably the best read theologian of the 20th century, was removed from his position as a Catholic theologian at Tubingen because his mind could not be twisted into the medieval concepts required by his church. This action was carried out by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who at that time under Pope John Paul II held the office that in another time gave us the Inquisition. Matthew Fox, one of the most popular retreat and meditation leaders and an environmental activist, was then silenced by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Professor Charles Curran, one of America’s best known ethicists, was removed from his tenured professorship at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., also by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Father Leonardo Boff, the best known Latin American liberation theologian, was forced to renounce his ordination in order to continue his work for justice among the poor of Latin America by the same Cardinal Ratzinger. Next we learn that the Vatican, now headed by Cardinal Ratzinger under his new name Pope Benedict XVI, has ordered the removal of a book from all Catholic schools and universities written by a popular female theologian at Fordham University, Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson. Now the nuns are to be investigated. Conformity trumps truth in every direction.

The Catholic tradition defines deadly or “cardinal” sins are those from which all other sins derive. In addition to lust, gluttony, wrath, sloth and envy, the traditional seven include pride and greed, which, to my mind, drive much of the appalling behavior in this list. If an attempt to assert autocratic control over the spiritual and physical lives of lay people isn’t pride, I don’t know what pride is. And if a willingness to silence child victims to protect church assets isn’t greed, I don’t know what greed is. The BBC’s revelation last month of money laundering in the Vatican Bank pales by comparison. To me, ultimately, the sins of the Catholic bishops are “deadly sins” because they kill people, whether pregnant mothers or depressed gay teens or African families, or simply desperate people who are forced into greater desperation by “moral” priorities that distract from real questions of wellbeing and harm.

What the Bishops will have to account for when they meet their maker, none of us can say. For some American Catholics, the process of holding them to account has already started. The Women Religious have pushed back against the condescending “assessment” issued by the Vatican. Small groups of lay Catholics have rallied to their support. Picketers meet monthly outside Sartain’s cathedral to protest his stance against equality. The Franciscan brothers issued a statement of solidarity with the nuns, many of whom have remained solidly focused on economic justice instead of sexual transgressions.

Given the arrogant cruelty of Church leaders, criticism to date has been remarkably tempered. As the Bishops flash their moral authority in the White House and media and pulpit, clothed in pure white robes and draped in crimson, they should be glad they aren’t eyeball to eyeball with Jesus himself. As the writer of Matthew tells it, he called out the corrupt religious leaders of his day in no uncertain terms: Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean.

By Cestlavie ~

I am thrilled to have stumbled upon this website! I've been looking for a community like this, and it is wonderful to read all of your stories.

So, here is mine...

My mother converted to Christianity when I was a baby. My father had returned from his army tour in Okinawa and they moved far away from her very large family. Things changed in their relationship and she was alone much of the time. She found a Southern Baptist church and a new extended family to fill the void. Consequently, the church was our second home and we were there whenever the doors were open.

I remember getting "saved" when I was about 12. It was Easter Sunday and the preacher gave a heart-rending sermon about what horrible sinners we were and how God sacrificed his son, Jesus for our sins, and what a horrible, painful death it was and it was all my fault for being such a miserable sinner. I cried with the horror and shame of it and ran to the front of the church begging forgiveness. I was no stranger to shame, having been molested at the age of 6. And I'm certain that a large part of the guilt and shame I felt growing up had more to do with the despicable act of an adult, but I perceived it to be my own failing as a human and spent my teenage years cowered in guilt and shame for all the normal feelings and reactions of a maturing young woman.

At the age of 17 I had enough, and when I left for college, I also left the church for good with the realization that a God of love would not give us the ability to feel the things we felt and then condemn us simply for feeling them! That is simplifying it a bit, but that's basically what I thought. Thus began my lifelong journey to sort out the brainwashing of my youth from the truth. I can tell you that I am still involved in that process; the training was insidious and turns up when I least expect it. One of the biggest things I deal with today is the concept of punishment. Having been through two bouts of breast cancer, I'm sure I don't have to tell you that there is still a part of my brain that thinks a god somewhere, whom I have forsaken, is punishing me. And that everything bad that has happened in my life is punishment for being such a wild child of the 70's. I know my mother believes it is!

The whole idea of god fascinates me, I have to admit. As I see it, God is a concept that we have developed to explain the mysteries of life (that science can't yet explain), to symbolize all that is "good" and just and fair, and whatever else we personally need a god to symbolize. Satan is also a concept that explains all that is "evil" and unfair in the world. Just as Santa Claus is very real to young children, so are God and the Devil. But somehow, unlike Santa and the Tooth Fairy, humans remain children when it comes to the concept of gods. They are very real beings to most believers. (This would be considered a mental health problem by most psychiatrists.)

Somewhere along the way, humans took the concept literally and their god evolved into a self reflection, for lack of imagination I suppose. He became jealous, judgmental, angry, vengeful (in fact, a lot of the things that Satan was supposed to symbolize). What we have is a very real and
dangerous god embodied by thousands of believers who need a real life devil to hate. This is the god that has swept across the world, destroying countless lives in his name, time after time. It is not a benign belief system that does no harm, and in this sense god is horribly, frighteningly real. I can no longer sit back and say nothing. Their god has become my devil.

By Michael Sherlock ~

The worship of the Egyptian goddess Isis spanned thousands of years, both in Egypt and abroad, travelling as far as Britain.(1) Throughout the vast expanse of both time and space, Isis collected and shed many qualities and attributes. Along the way, prior to the Common Era, Isis was given the title virgin on several occasions, and this article, which will present the works of both ancient and modern scholars, is an attempt to demonstrate this fact.

The main reason Isis’ virginity has become a contended issue in relatively recent times, is largely due to the fact that, mythicists have used the virginity of Isis, to present arguments from similarity, against the historical Jesus Christ. They argue that, since Isis was depicted as the great virgin-mother of Horus, whose father was the Sun-god, Osiris, (the first recorded god to die and be resurrected), prior to the Christian era, then the similarity between these two myths, indicates that the later myth (Jesus Christ) was copied from the earlier (Isis, Horus and Osiris).

At this point, I should make a brief distinction between two separate, yet related issues. Those issues being; the arguments against an historical person named Jesus, known to mythicists as, the “Jesus Myth” and those concerned with undercutting the alleged truth of the “Christ myth,” which pertains to the mythological components found in the Gospel’s, Jesus Christ. As mentioned, these issues are related, but in my humble opinion, need to be addressed upon separate grounds. The Jesus myth, although containing some overlap with the Christ myth, for the primary historical sources we have for an historical Jesus, contain mythological components, needs to be addressed using historical methods. The Christ myth on the other hand, is exclusively a matter to be assessed and examined from the point of view of comparative mythology.

The virginity of Isis predominantly concerns the Christ myth, and is the focus of this article.

Now that we have a little context, we need only establish one thing. Was Isis considered a virgin prior to the Christian era? If so, then it makes no difference by whom, or in which country (so long as that country was proximate with the fomenters of Christianity), she was given this epithet, as we will have ascertained that this virgin-mother motif existed prior to its Christian reworking, thereby establishing the probability that the earlier version was the original. To put it simply, if this motif existed prior to the Christian era, and in a place that was connected to the initial regions in which Christianity was grown, then the probability of the Christians having adopted this mythology from the true originators, is high; as virgin mothers do not grow on trees, although in the ancient, especially Hellenistic world, they did seem to!

Ancient Mythology is not a Cheeseburger!

Ancient Mythology is not a Cheeseburger, may, at first glance, seem like an odd statement to make. So, please allow me to explain. Mythology involves the careful selection of living, or fresh ingredients, which are carefully and thoughtfully woven together, folded over and over, so as to create a series of intricate and delicate layers. Finally, it is cooked slowly and tentatively over a long period of time. The result is a beautiful tapestry of symbols, ideas, philosophies and concepts that can be interpreted both subjectively and objectively, and on many different levels. Sadly, it is its complexity, which leaves many symbolically illiterate scholars, bewildered, yet belligerent in their resolve to endorse in exclusivity from the broader context, a minor literal aspect of the myth. Joseph Campbell enunciated this problem in the words of the old Buddhist parable, ‘The blind men and the elephant,’ saying:

The blind men feeling the animal's head declared, "An elephant is like a water pot"; but those at his ears, "He is like a winnowing basket;" those at his tusks, "No, indeed, he is like a plowshare;" and those at his trunk, "He is like a plow pole." There were a number feeling his belly. "Why," they cried, "he is like a storage bin!" Those feeling his legs argued that he was like pillars; those at his rectum, that he was like a mortar; those at his member, that he was like a pestle; while the remainder, at his tail, were shouting, "An elephant is like a fan." And they fought furiously among themselves with their fists, shouting and crying, "This is what an elephant is like, that is not what an elephant is like"; "This is not what an elephant is like; that is what an elephant is like." "And precisely so," then runs the moral of the Buddha,…knowing not good, knowing not evil, knowing not right, knowing not wrong, they quarrel and brawl and wrangle and strike one another with the daggers of their tongues, saying, 'This is right, that is not right'; 'This is not right, that is right.'(2)

We may contrast this complexity, to a degree at least, with theology. Theology is more like a Cheeseburger in that, it is uncreatively formed in haste, by hacking and slashing away at pieces of mythology that serve its purpose. Now, I am not saying that it doesn’t develop and change over time, but that its foundations are established uncreatively, by way of plagiarism and intellectual dishonesty. Once it has frantically slaughtered its chosen mythology, or mythologies, it smashes the goodness out of the original ingredients, grounding them into a kind of psychological mince, rendering them unrecognisable. Following this, the theology adds artificial preservatives and poisons, like doctrine, dogma and faith, to ensure that it will maintain its structural integrity (emotional appeal), over an elongated period of time. Finally, it wraps this once beautiful creature, in a shiny paper packet, sets up neon lit franchises wherever it is able, and goes into the belief-selling business!

Has this rant been merely the result of my missing breakfast this morning, or do I have a point to make!? Oh yeh, that’s right! When we analyse the mythology surrounding the goddess Isis, or Ast, as she was known to the Egyptians, we cannot gain an adequate understanding by hastily unwrapping the first version of the myth we encounter, and wolfing it down, only to spit it out all over the place, in the guise of understanding, or McUnderstanding, as it should properly be called. We need to go into it, examine the symbolism, the various epithets and their meanings, the roots of their meanings, which are quite often astronomical/astrological in nature, as well as physiological, and psychological, not forgetting that famous old Hermetic philosophy; ‘As above, so below.’ Moreover, we must not only examine the heart of the myth itself, but the entire corpus of surrounding myths, the myths which clothe the subject of the investigation. Only by doing so, may we gain an adequate understanding of the entire physiology of not only the myth itself, but the various interplays between the myth in question and its surroundings. Only then, can we begin to unlock some of the keys to understanding, just what and how a given myth was intended to be interpreted and conveyed.

Speaking on the deficiency of modern understanding as it relates to the myth, Professor Alvin Boyd Kuhn, once remarked:

That the sublime wisdom embodied in Greek myth and Bible allegory is still uninterpreted by the mind of the West to this day will prove to be the weightiest indictment of ignorance that history will present against the Christian civilization of this age. Hardly less than laughable will appear to later times the spectacle of an age morally and spiritually dominated by the precepts of a Book the meaning of which was all the while uninterpreted and unknown. The Bible and theology hold the truth of life, yet even their exponents do not themselves know what that truth is. Ecclesiasticism has the body of true wisdom, but cannot even be persuaded that the body has a soul. It possesses the rich and mighty statements of truth, but surely has not the substance of it. In other words, the Bible and theology, as well as mythology, were formulated to preserve a covert meaning, which was once the essence of all religious and philosophical endeavour, but which slipped through the hands of ignorance at an early century and has been lost to common knowledge. The modern world is thus left in the ridiculous position of clasping to its heart a traditional treasure which it prizes for its outward appearance, but has not the slightest idea of its true worth. Having received the shell of truth without its living kernel, the present age is trying to feed itself on husks, in which no intrinsic nourishment is found.(3)

So let us continue an investigation into the question of Isis’ virginity, with the above in mind.

The McIsis-$1.99: Deep Fried and Ready for Apologetics!

The following represents one of the most popular versions of the Isis myth, one which apologists love to cough up on anyone, who might ask the question; was Isis a virgin? Now, I am in no way saying that this version of the myth is erroneous, cheap, or shallow. It is a beautiful myth, rich in symbolism and metaphor, and one which certainly fits the description of mythology, furnished above. Instead, it is the manner in which it is quickly unwrapped, chewed, digested and regurgitated in exclusivity from the wealth of surrounding ingredients, which I aim to address.

In this version of the myth, Horus’ evil uncle, Set, hosts a banquet for his good brother, Osiris. At this ‘Last Supper,’ Set, possessing an intention to betray his brother, produces a beautiful wooden box, in which he convinces Osiris to lay. Thereupon, Set quickly nails the box shut, trapping Osiris inside. In a plan to ensure that his brother disappears forever, so that he might usurp his brother’s throne, Set castes the coffin into the Nile and it floats away. Ignoring for now, the interplay of both the ‘sibling rivalry’ and ‘betrayal at the last supper’ motifs, present in many later mythologies, we now move onto the next part of the story.

As a result, Isis was incorporated into the mythologies of many different peoples. She meant many different things, to many different people, and was understood to represent varying qualities, depending on who was describing her. Subsequently, Isis became known by many names.Isis, the sister-wife of Osiris, is dismayed to discover what has happened and just as in the saga of the Babylonian Ishtar and Tammuz (Dhumzi), Isis goes in search for her love one. She finds him, brings him back to life with her powerful magic, and all seems to be well. That is of course, until Set learns that his brother is alive and well. Set then begins a quest of his own, a quest to seek out Osiris and finish him once and for all. He succeeds in his fiendish endeavour, finds Osiris, cuts him into many pieces (14, 16, 42, etc.) and scatters the pieces of his dismembered corpse across Egypt. Surely, this is enough to deter Isis, Set would have thought! But blood is thicker than water, especially when it is mixed with incestuous passion, we may assume from the facts of this story! Isis then collects all the pieces of her dead husband-brother, bar her favourite piece, the phallus, and re-assembles him in a Frankensteinish experiment. Not being content to be married to a eunuch, Isis fashions a new phallus for her husband and then, whilst Osiris is still cold, makes passionate, incestuous and necromantic love with him, producing Horus.

There you go! She had sex with Osiris and was not a virgin! This was not an immaculate conception, and she was no virgin, says the belief-induced apologist, seeking to resolve their dissonance, in a bid to comfort both the fragile ego, and the belief that resides therein. Unfortunately for the apologist however, this is not the end of the story, with regards to the mythology and epithets applied to Isis prior to the Christian era.

A Goddess with Many Names- Isis: A Social Security Nightmare!

In the centuries leading up to the alleged advent of Christ, the cult of Isis had already spread far and wide.

In the words of Egyptologist, Dr Rosalie David:

Isis, Egypt’s great mother goddess, received widespread acclaim when the Isis-Osiris Mysteries were celebrated in Rome and Corinth, and she was worshiped as far north as the Danube region, Germania, and Britain. She not only preserved her original role as the devoted wife of Osiris and protective mother of Horus but acquired new aspects…(4)

As a result, Isis was incorporated into the mythologies of many different peoples. She meant many different things, to many different people, and was understood to represent varying qualities, depending on who was describing her. Subsequently, Isis became known by many names.

Discussing how Isis came to be adopted within the Greek Pantheon of gods, the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus (5th century BCE) tells us:

The relation between the Egyptian Isis and the Greek Io was probably this, that Phoenicians in early times had carried to Argos the worship of the moon, under the symbol of a heifer, or a woman with heifer's horns. The symbol itself and the name of lo, which is Coptic for the moon…the origin of it was forgotten, and the invention of the Greek mythologists supplied its place by the legend of an Argive princess, beloved by Jupiter, turned by him into a heifer, and driven through Phoenicia into Egypt, where she became the goddess Isis.(5)

So Herodotus is informing us that there was a connection between the Egyptian, Isis and the Greek, Io, and that both these forms, symbolically represent the moon. What we may also take away from Herodotus’ statement is that, the source of the Io/Isis connection predates Herodotus’ own time by many years, as the origin of this amalgamation seems to have been lost in the wastes of time.

In their examination of the complex nature of the goddess Io, who we now know was Isis under another name, the two Oxford Emeritus Professors, Mark Morford and Robert Lenardon, say:

Io was originally a goddess; she may have been a form of Hera herself. Herodotus, who himself visited Egypt, said that Isis was identified there with Demeter, whose image Io had first brought there, and that Isis was always represented as a woman with cow's horns (in this being similar to the great Phoenician moon goddess, Astarte).(6)

Dr Jenny March, in her award winning, ‘Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology’ elaborates upon Morford and Lenardon’s description of Io, reporting:

She was the virgin-priestess of HERA at Argos, and was so beautiful that ZEUS himself desired her.(7)

Further, reading from the ancient Greek tragedy, ‘Prometheus Bound,’ written in the 7th century BCE, by Aeschylus, we learn that Io was noted for her somewhat stubborn adherence to virginity:

Again and again in the night, visions would appear to me (Io) in my room and entice me with seductive words: "O blessed maiden, why do you remain a virgin for so long when it is possible for you to achieve the greatest of marriages?(8)

So we see that not only was the older Egyptian Isis, transformed into the Greek Io, but that she was certainly worshipped as a virgin.

In the ancient novel, ‘The Golden Ass,’ or ‘Metamorphoses,’ as it was often called, Apuleius (2nd century CE), furnishes us with the following description of Isis:

…my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customs and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians, Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, others Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the Ethiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the Egyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustom to worship me, do call me Queen Isis.(9)

Morford and Lenardon, commenting on Apuleius’ work, say:

Cybele, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Hera—the ancient Queens of Heaven and Earth—are here, through the process of syncretism, included in the great Egyptian goddess, Isis. Apuleius, whose evidence is almost certainly reliable, shows us how in the second century (he was born about A.D. 120) the figures of Greek and Roman mythology had given way to the idea of a single divine power.(10)

Isis became Demeter, the mother of the virgin, both Persephone and Io, the unfortunate virgins, Athena-Parthenos, Parthenos being a Greek epithet we will come to in just a moment, Artemis (a symbol of virginity), Hera, the goddess who renewed her virginity once a year by bathing,(11) along with many other goddesses. Now, even though Apuleius wrote this work around 120 CE, we may safely conclude from the earlier sources, like Herodotus and others, that these goddesses, whose origins span many centuries into the past, were already associated with the chief of all the goddesses, the Mother-Superior, Isis/Ast.

To show that Isis was associated with the virgin goddess Persephone, prior to Apuleius’ time, we have the testimony of the first century Greek historian Plutarch, who tells us:

For Serapis they say is no other than Pluto, and Isis the same with Proserpine; as Archemaclius of Euboea informs us, as also Heraclides of Pontus, delivers it as his opinion that the oracle at Canopus appertains to Pluto.(12)

In quoting Heraclides of Pontus, Plutarch, although living and writing in the first century CE, was relaying an opinion of Isis, which dates back to the fourth century BCE, at least.(13) But Proserpine, or Persephone, as she was known to the Greeks, was not a virgin, she was raped by Hades!(14) Here is where we need to explore the more subtle undertones and broader characteristics of the landscape of classical mythology, so as not to forsake the overall context with regards to how the ancients viewed their gods and goddesses. Remember, we are not dealing with a cheeseburger! Notwithstanding Persephone’s unfortunate encounter with Hades, she was still regarded and worshipped as a virgin goddess, and as a tragic symbol of innocence lost, of flowers caste to the ground.

Furthermore, many of these ancient Hellenistic gods and goddesses were considered “parthenos,” meaning, “virgin.”(15) This was not so much a literal epithet, although it was used as such, but a symbolic one, describing the purity of the gods, whether they were technically virgins, or not.

There were more Hellenistic manifestations of Isis that received the parthenos epithet, like Athena, whose name in full was usually, Athena-Parthenos. A second century Roman coin, currently held at the British museum, testifies to the amalgamation of Isis and Athena-Parthenos, as it reads: “Isis-Athena.”(16)

The virgin-goddess, Artemis also became amalgamated with Isis prior to the Christian era and it would benefit us here, to conduct a brief examination into this Hellenistic goddess and her amalgamation with Isis, in order to develop an understanding of how a given goddess, could be both mother and virgin.

Artemis was worshiped as both a virgin and a mother, in similitude to Isis. To fully appreciate just how this could be, we need to dive a little deeper into the rich waters of the psyche of the mythologists of the ancient world. If we examine and compare other Hellenistic myths which involve a similar interplay of the motifs of virgin and motherhood, we strike upon the very core (Kore) of just how these gods and goddesses were understood. A good example to draw upon here would be Demeter and Persephone, who was also called, ‘Kore,’ meaning, ‘young girl,’ and it is in this form that she was worshipped as the innocent virgin. Demeter is the mother and Kore/Persephone is the virgin. This seems simple enough, yet this is only a ‘cheeseburger analysis,’ of the mythology surrounding this daughter and child duo.

Looking further into the matter, we discover that Demeter and Kore/Persephone were not seen as entirely separate goddesses, but rather, they described a single principle, in two parts. Such a situation can be likened to Jesus being described as one aspect of the holy trinity. He is merely one aspect, or quality of a triune principle. We see the same with Horus and Osiris, both are one, and Horus would have been well within his mythological rights to declare, “I and my father are one!”

In his attempt to reveal the secret of the complexity of the symbolism, surrounding both Artemis and Isis, following a description of Artemis as a fertility goddess, associated with sex and motherhood, Dr Reginald E. Witt, explained:

The secret seems to lie in the thinking of the religious thinking of the Mediterranean world as early as the Mycenaean age. The Great Goddess was revered both as virgin and as mother. Kore the daughter and Demeter the mother were one person looked at under two aspects. Of the goddesses of the Greek Pantheon none is more obviously both virginal and maternal than Artemis. As the patroness of the woodlands she sets herself implacably against wedlock, though she is ready to help married women in childbirth and considered in this guise upholds the ideals of chastity and virginity. Artemis Agrotera symbolized the belief that for women there was a nobler state than being mated with a husband.(17)

Morford and Lenardon support Witt’s analysis of the duality associated with Artemis, seeing the root of this duality, as best explained by the lunar attributes of both Artemis and Isis, commenting:

As in the case of other goddesses worshiped by women (e.g., Hera), this link with the moon may be associated with the lunar cycle and women's menstrual period. Thus the evident duality in Artemis' character and interests definitely links her with the archetypal concept of the virgin/mother.(18)

Finally, Dr Witt sums up the relationship between Isis and Artemis, saying:

How soon Artemis and Isis became amalgamated cannot be known with certainty. The ‘Oxyrhynchus Litany’ shows us that Isis was invoked as Artemis both in Crete at Dicte and in the Cyclades as the goddess ‘of threefold nature’. We may think at first of an apparent stumbling-block, the declared resolve of Artemis to remain a virgin. But this virginal aspect, as we have seen, is but one of two, for at Ephesus she personifies female fruitfulness. Nor is Isis without another guise in her Egyptian setting. She and her sister Nephthys can be mimed in a piece of religious pageantry by two women, brought on to the scene ‘with pure body’ and each of them virgo intacta.(19)

But promoting virginity as a virtue was a Greek custom, not an Egyptian one, as the Egyptians did not see virginity and chastity, as a divine mandate!(20) Whilst this may have been the case at some points throughout Egyptian history, contrary to popular and unscholarly opinion, the Egyptians did have a word for virgin in their language,(21) and they did not hesitate to apply it to Isis, if only symbolically.

Isis in Egypt: “The Great Virgin!”

Many apologists and unread commentators on Egypt are of the mistaken opinion that, the ancient Egyptians did not, at any stage of their existence, have a word in their language for virginity, which is transliterated as hwt.n, by the way! These ill-informed “experts” are of the opinion that there were no tales of virgins, for how could you have a story about a concept which did not exist in your language? Yet, according to both primary sources and scholarly appraisals of those sources, the concept of not only virginity, but the virgin-born god, was known and represented by the ancient Egyptians.

From Egyptian records, we know not only that Ramesses VI daughter (12th Century BCE), was one of the first known “virgin princesses” to hold that particular office,(22) but also, Herodotus tells us in the fifth century BCE, that only virgins were allowed to act as priestesses at the temples of Isis.(23)

It would be remiss of me at this point, not to refer to a second century BCE papyrus, held in the British museum, which reads:

…in the representation of the religious mysteries, two young women played the role of the goddesses Isis and Nephthys: 'Let there be brought forth two young women pure of body, virgins, plucked of all hair, head ornamented with a wig, a tambourine in hand, with their name written on their shoulder: Isis, Nephthys; and let them sing the verses of this booklet before the god.' [Papyrus Brit. Mus., 10, 188.](24)

Further, the late Professor of Mythology, Joseph Campbell, in his brilliant series, ‘The Masks of God,’ tells us:

There is, however, a legend of the virgin birth of the first three pharaohs of the reign, where they are represented as sons of the god Re; and. although preserved in a late papyrus of c. 1600 B.C., it is almost certainly the basic origin myth of the dynasty itself.(25)

I could go on listing other primary sourced scholarship on this issue ad infinitum, but let us move along, as for some reason, I’m starting to develop a craving for a cheeseburger!

Ok! Summing up what we have discovered thus far, Isis was considered a virgin in her various cross-cultural manifestations, well before the Christian era and that, the virgin birth, as a mythological motif, was represented amongst ancient Egyptian sources as well. So, now all there is left to demonstrate is that Isis was, in Egypt, expressly described as a virgin. If we can accomplish this, which I think we can, then, the issue of Isis as one of the oldest virgin mothers, one whom later Syrian, Phoenician, Greek, Roman and other Near Eastern mythologists incorporated into their mythologies, which ultimately led to the birth of the Virgin Mary, will be put to bed, once and for all (pun intended).

Before moving into the final part of this discussion, I must re-emphasize the complex nature of the mythology surrounding Isis. Yes, she was the wife of Osiris and the protective mother of Horus, but she was also considered to be the mother of Osiris and creation itself.

From a fourth century BCE inscription in the temple of Isis, in Philae Egypt, we read that Isis was the:

‘Mighty one, foremost of the goddesses
Ruler in heaven, Queen on earth…
All the gods are under her command.’(26)

In some regards, she may be likened to the goddess, Tiamat of the ancient Babylonians, in that she was described as the first cause of all creation, notwithstanding the fact that ancient records also refer to Isis as the daughter of Nut and Geb. In the words of Dr Reginald E. Witt:

The Egyptian goddess who was equally ¯the Great Virgin (hwnt) and ¯Mother of the God was the object of the very same praise bestowed upon her successor [Mary, Virgin Mother of Jesus].(27)

Further, Witt tells us that:

She (Isis) was indeed herself concerned with the resurrection of the dead. One of the most sublime deifications of Motherhood, and yet in the Osiris Hymn called; ‘the Great Virgin,’ she was…the female embodiment of the Nile’s annual reawakening.(28)

Keeping in mind the symbolic duality of opposites which Isis represented, we refer once again to the work of Dr Rosalie David, learning that Isis was considered the supreme mother-goddess:

Osiris and Horus were also directly associated with the concept of kingship, and Isis became the supreme mother goddess.(29)

Being that she was considered the supreme mother-goddess, coupled with the fact that both Horus and Osiris were interchangeable, Horus symbolically becoming Osiris in death, and Osiris becoming Horus in rebirth, Isis was both Osiris’ wife and sister, as well as being his mother, the mother of Horus, and the Great Virgin.

Commenting on an ancient Egyptian text, Dr Maulana Karenga observes:

She (Isis) is defined as mother of the divinities and of humanity, protector and resurrector of Osiris, mother and protector of the king and warrior "who is more effective than a million soldiers" (iabkar 1988, 61). But most striking and instructive is her definition as the Creator, herself. And although similar conceptions of the Creator as female exist in other African cultures (Mbiti 1970), this is clearly not the case in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The text defines Isis in the following terms:

She is mistress of Heaven. earth and the otherworld.
Having brought them into being by what her heart/mind conceived And her hands created (Zabkar 1988, 51 .no.IV).(30)

Having established Isis’ complex nature, let us now look at a 13th century BCE text, from the temple dedicated to Isis, at Abydos in Egypt. The text, although not specifying Isis, as the enunciator, contains a statement we may rightfully conclude, was ascribed to Isis. The relevant portion of the text reads as follows:
“I am the Great Virgin” (31)

The late Theologian, Old Testament scholar and Dean of the Theological Faculty at the University at Bonn, Dr G. Johannes Botterweck, in the 2nd volume of his 15 volume series, ‘Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament,’ although not wishing to expressly reveal Isis as the subject of a text found in this same 13th century BCE temple, said:

...The Pyramid Texts speak of "the great virgin" (hwn.t wr.t) three times (682c, 728a, 2002a...); she is anonymous, appears as the protectress of the king, and is explicitly called his mother once (809c). It is interesting that Isis is addressed as hwn.t in a sarcophagus oracle that deals with her mysterious pregnancy.(32)

We have the ancient testimony of the Pyramid Texts, which speak of the “great virgin,” who is described as the “protector” and “mother of the king,” both of which were almost exclusively applied to Isis, found in the temple dedicated to Isis. This is almost certainly Isis, the virgin mother of Horus/Osiris.

Conclusion

Isis was considered a virgin, both in and outside of Egypt, prior to the Christian era. A wealth of evidence exists to demonstrate this, if one has the eyes and the mind to seek. Sadly, those whose beliefs impede their ability to seek the truth, beyond the constrictive and restrictive boundaries of their ego inhabiting beliefs, go looking for, and ultimately find, a Cheeseburger!

Unfortunately, due to constraints of both time and space, I have been unable to discuss the broad range of issues surrounding Isis’ status, as the virgin mother of god. I have forgone discussions on her manifestation as Cybele, the virgin mother of the Phrygian Attis, her transformation into Minerva, Juno and many others, and I have had to subtract the bulk of Archaeological artefacts and features that further support the well documented fact of her virginity. I have left off discussions which describe the more symbolic subtleties of her/his character and in so doing, have, to some degree, sought to fight Cheeseburger with Cheeseburger. Having said this, I thought it sufficient to run briefly over the more obvious scholarship on this Great Queen of Heaven, and leave the rest for the reader to investigate. As Galileo once remarked: It is easier to let people discover things for themselves, than to teach them, or words to that effect!

I would like to conclude this little article with the wise words of the brilliant professor of Mythology, Joseph Campbell:

No good Catholic would kneel before an image of Isis if he knew that it was she. Yet every one of the mythic motifs now dogmatically attributed to Mary as a historic human being belongs also-and belonged in the period and place of the development of her cult-to that goddess mother of all things, of whom both Mary and Isis were local manifestations: the mother-bride of the dead and resurrected god, whose earliest known representations now must be assigned to a date as early, at least, as c. 5500 B.C.• It is often customary in devotional cults to limit the view of the devotee to a single local manifestation, which then is honored either as unique or as the primary, "truest," form of the divinity represented.(33)

---

References


1. Rosalie A. David. Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt. University of Manchester. Facts on File Inc. (2003). p. 178


2. Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God – Primitive Mythology. Secker & Warburg. (1960). p. 8.


3. Alvin Boyd Kuhn. The Root of All Religion. The Theosophical Press. (1936).


4. Rosalie A. David. Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt. University of Manchester. Facts on File Inc. (2003). p. 178.


5. John Kenrick. The Egypt of Herodotus. B. Fellowes (1841) p. 64.


6. Mark P.O. Morford & Robert J. Lenardon. Classical Mythology. Oxford University Press (2003). p. 516-517.


7. Jenny March. Cassell’s Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Cassell & Co. (1998). p. 422.


8. Mark P.O. Morford & Robert J. Lenardon. Classical Mythology. Oxford University Press (2003) p. 92.


9. Apuleius. The Golden Ass of Apuleius. (trans. William Adlington). David Nutt. Pub. (1893). p. 233.


10. Mark P.O. Morford & Robert J. Lenardon. Classical Mythology. Oxford University Press (2003) p. 366.

11. Price, Theodora Hadzisteliou. Kourotrophos: Cults and Representations of the Greek Nursing Deities. Leiden: E.J. Brill. (1978). p. 203.


12. Dr William W. Goodwin. Plutarch’s Morals. Little Brown and Company. (1878). p. 88.


13. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoreanism/


14. Mark P.O. Morford & Robert J. Lenardon. Classical Mythology. Oxford University Press (2003). p. 20.


15. Ibid. p. 158.


16. http://www.forumancientcoins.com/moonmoth/noncoins/athisistyche_bm_001.html.


17. Reginald E. Witt. Isis in the Ancient World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. (1997). P. 141.


18. Mark P.O. Morford & Robert J. Lenardon. Classical Mythology. Oxford University Press (2003). p. 208.


19. Reginald E. Witt. Isis in the Ancient World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. (1997). p. 143.


20. Konrad H. Kinzl. A Companion to the Ancient Greek World. Blackwell Publishing (2006). p. 353.


21. Sir E. A. Wallis Budge. An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary: Vol. 2. John Murray Pub. (1920) p. 1247.


22. Morris L. Bierbrier. Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt. Scarecrow Press. (2008) p. 195.

23. Edward I. Bleiberg. World Eras, Vol. 5: Ancient Egypt 2615-332 BCE. Gale Group. (2002) p. 202.


24. Serge Sauneron. The Priests of Ancient Egypt. Evergreen Books Ltd. (1960). p. 69.


25. Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God, Vol. 2: Oriental Mythology. Secker & Warburg. (1962) p. 98.


26. Richard H. Wilkinson. The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. Thames and Hudson. (2003). p. 146.


27. Reginald E. Witt. Isis in the Ancient World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. (1997). p. 273.


28. Ibid. p. 15.


29. Rosalie A. David. Handbook to Life in Ancient Egypt. University of Manchester. Facts on File Inc. (2003).p. 152.


30. Maulana Karenga. Maat: The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt - A Study in Classical African Ethics. Routledge. (2004).


31. G. Johannes Botterweck. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Vol. 2. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1975). p. 339.


32. Ibid. pp. 338-339.


33. Joseph Campbell. Masks of God: Vol. 3 – Occidental Mythology. Penguin Books. (1976). p. 43.

By Astreja

There's a lot of black-and-white thinking in the world of the believer.  It's unfortunately quite rare to find nuanced argument; all too often, we're treated to binary ranting and raving.  Don't worship God?  You must be a Devil-worshipper, then.  Not saved?  Then you're condemned.

Things get a little more interesting when one challenges a believer on the morality of their demonstrably immoral god.  Yes, Biblegod destroyed the
________  people, but they must have somehow deserved it. Christian apologists, professionals and amateurs alike, never seem to offer any good historical evidence as to what the
________  people actually did to merit genocide and the express elevator to Hell, but it couldn't possibly have been Biblegod's fault because Biblegod comes predefined as Infinitely Good and Infinitely Just.
We're told that coveting a friend's candy bar is morally exactly equivalent to committing mass murder.This is interesting, because believers of this mindset seem to have a very odd idea as to what "good" and "evil" and "just" and "unjust" actually mean in the real world.

Take, for example, the lunatics-running-the-asylum concept of a mortal giving infinite offense to an omnipotent deity.  How can a mortal harm an immortal?  More to the point, why is said immortal getting upset about something it allegedly knew would happen?  (Or something which it deliberately willed to happen, as the inmates in the Calvinist wing of the asylum would have us believe.)
Even worse, we're told that coveting a friend's candy bar is morally exactly equivalent to committing mass murder.  There's a good reason we don't believe such a thing:  It's hogwash and hand-waving.  Are you, Mr. or Ms. True Believer, really that stupid when you tell us that all "sins" are equally bad in the eyes of your imaginary friend?  (I do grant that this might offer some clues to some of the horrific atrocities committed by Biblegod in the pages of Scripture -- Apparently it doesn't have any more compassion or common sense than does its cheerleading section.)
Finally, there's the carrot and stick of Heaven and Hell.  These are nasty little caricatures, promising solace or satisfaction when life isn't good enough or death isn't bad enough.  They promote an extremely unsophisticated, infantile, even primitivistic worldview where everything can be sorted into two non-intersecting sets and pawned off as "The Truth."
The universe, and our own lives, are delightfully messy, full of ambiguity and uncertainty and breathtaking surprises.  If you want to paint an accurate picture of your life, don't settle for a box with only two grimy crayons.

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

The ship of fools is an allegory which depicts a vessel populated by humans who are confused, frivolous, or deluded, and often ignorant of their own course or destination. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the ship of fools concept also served to parody the 'ark of salvation' as the Catholic Church was sometimes called.

Ship of Fools (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In some ways, the Titanic could be seen as a “ship of fools.” The designers of the ship, its owners, and its captain and crew were all fools in one way or another, leading the doomed ship to a watery grave. Following the disaster, two official inquiries, US and British, reached similar conclusions; the number of lifeboats aboard was inadequate, the Captain failed to take proper heed of ice warnings, many of the lifeboats were only partially loaded when launched (due to inadequate crew training), and the ship was steaming through a dangerous area at too high a speed. The whole enterprise appears to be a matter of leadership by fools.

The Christian religion is similar in many respects. Many of its primary movers and shakers, the architects of much Christian dogma, were – if not downright fools – decidedly odd individuals. Below, I offer, in their own words, some of their own foolishness. I give extra space to Paul because he is widely considered the chief architect of Christianity - and because he said so darned many foolish things.

Paul of Tarsus:

"Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.“ - Letter to the Romans 13:1.

This is the principal of the “Divine Right of Kings.” Here, Paul is saying that one should always agree with one’s political leader, even a Hitler or Stalin.

In 1 Corinthians 1: 17, Paul claimed that God was anti-intellectual:

“Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.”

So, to be wise in the ways of the world is foolish? And, science, the process by which we learn how the world works, is a foolish undertaking? My life was saved several years go by colon surgery. I’m sure glad that surgeon ignored the “wisdom” of Paul.

“All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect (complete, adequate, competent), equipped for every good work.” - 2 Tim. 3:16-17.

So, if all scripture is inspired by god, then we can be sure that god really wants us to stop eating shellfish, wearing mixed fabrics, and to kill homosexuals, adulterers, and people who work on Sunday? Could it be that Paul didn’t know what was in scripture quite as well as he thought he did?

"Tell slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to talk back, not to pilfer, but to show complete and perfect fidelity, so that in everything they may be an ornament to the doctrine of God our Savior." - Titus 2:9-10.

Apparently, if you’re a slave then that is god’s will, so you should just shut up and enjoy it; easy to say, if you’ve never been a slave.

“I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” - 1 Tim. 2: 9-15.

Thus, women are inferior because Eve was scammed by a talking snake. Is that a good enough reason for you?

“I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none. . . For the present form of this world is passing away. - I Corinthians 7: 29.

Here, Paul is suggesting that men abandon their wives because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. His timing was off by over 2,000 years. Was he a tad deluded, do ya think?


Tertullian (c.160-c.225 - has been called "the father of Latin Christianity" and "the founder of Western theology."):


Speaking of the Resurrection of Christ, Tertullian wrote:

“I  believe because it is absurd.”

So, according to this great thinker, if something, anything, is utterly preposterous, then it must be true? Maybe I just lack imagination, but I can’t think of a dumber reason to believe in something.


Augustine (354-430 C.E. - was a Latin philosopher and theologian from whose writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.):

“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

This reminds me of that other fairy tale where Peter Pan says that if you really believe, then you can fly. I particularly like Dan Barker’s take on this: “Faith is a cop-out. . . With faith, you don't have to put any work into proving your case. You can ‘just believe.’ “


Augustine also wrote, “There is no possible source of evil except good.” And I’m sure you all know exactly what he meant by that.


Like many Christian writers, Augustine had a talent for confounding the Bible’s teaching. In one place he wrote, “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” And in another place he wrote, “He that is jealous is not in love.” Now, one of these statements MUST be false, for Bible-god admits to being jealous.


Anselm (1033-1109 - is most famous in philosophy for the so-called “ontological argument,” and in theology for his doctrine of the atonement):


In the ontological argument, Anselm defined God as the greatest possible being we can conceive and argued that this being could exist in the mind. He suggested that, if the greatest possible being exists in the mind, it must also exist in reality. Numerous writers since Anselm have shown that the ontological could be used to prove the existence of anything, thus the argument has absurd consequences. After all, Anselm is basically saying that if you can think it, then it must exist, which is silly. Anselm seems to have confused imagination with reality.

“I have written the little work that follows . . . in the role of one who strives to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and one who seeks to understand what he believes.”

We could paraphrase thus: “There’s stuff here I don’t understand, but I believe it anyway.” Hardly the mark of a deep thinker, I’d say.


Aquinas (1225-1274 – considered by some to be the Catholic Church's greatest theologian and philosopher):

“If forgers and malefactors are put to death by the secular power, there is much more reason for excommunicating and even putting to death one convicted of heresy.”

So, if one doesn’t believe as Aquinas believes, then he should be put to death. Clearly he was a man of great morality and compassion. Don’t believe me? Well, Aquinas also said, “That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell.” Who would have guessed that hell was a spectator sport? And how do you suppose Aquinas knew this, anyway?

“It is necessary to posit something which is necessary of itself, and has no cause of its necessity outside of itself but is the cause of necessity in other things. And all people call this thing God.”

Aquinas is speaking here of what is usually termed a first cause: i.e., the only cause which is not also an effect of a prior cause. But, even if we granted that a first cause must exist, why must it be a god and not just a property or law of nature? Further, even if we granted that a first cause must be a god, why must it be Aquinas’ god and not some other god? Aquinas’ conclusion here appears to be nothing but hand waving.

“We can't have full knowledge all at once. We must start by believing; then afterwards we may be led on to master the evidence for ourselves.”

Again, he wants us to just believe, regardless of evidence. Interestingly, the Buddhist, the Muslim, and the Hindu all say pretty much the same thing. They all want us to just believe. Most people take their advice and this is why we have hundreds of religions with millions of followers and none of them can prove a damned thing. And none of them thinks that matters. If science worked that way, we would still be living in caves dreaming of creating fire.


Martin Luther (1483-1546 - was a German monk, priest, professor of theology and iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation.):

“Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding. “

Should we ever follow one who defames reason? Could that ever be reasonable? Luther is also credited with saying, “Reason is the enemy of faith.”

“I feel much freer now that I am certain the pope is the Antichrist.”

Did you get that? He is “certain!”

“You should not believe your conscience and your feelings more than the word which the Lord who receives sinners preaches to you.”

So, if the “word” the Lord preaches to me says homosexuals should be killed (Leviticus 20:13), then I should just ignore my conscience? If I “feel” that killing people who work on the Sabbath is wrong, then I am in error because the “word” of the Bible preaches otherwise? This sounds like the philosophy of a guy who thinks reason is the enemy of faith.


John Calvin (1509-1564 - was the leading French Protestant Reformer and the most important figure in the second generation of the Protestant Reformation.):

“Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from the heavenly science of Christ.”

Right. And Jesus thought disease was caused by demons. Curiously, the Harvard Medical School course catalogue no longer lists a course on demon possession.

“Yet consider now, whether women are not quite past sense and reason, when they want to rule over men.”

So, Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Queens Elizabeth I and Victoria, and thousand of other women leaders all lacked sense and reason? Calvin certainly gives Paul of Tarsus a run for his money when it comes to misogyny.


These men are all widely considered by Christians to be great thinkers. They are in large measure those who made the Christian religion what it is today. But isn’t it obvious, from their own words, that each of them was foolish in one way or another?


Ah, you say, but what matters most are the teachings of Jesus Christ. Surely Christ never said anything foolish? Think again.

“But I tell you, do not resist an evil person.”

The people of Europe should not have resisted Hitler?

“If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away.”

This is where the profane is mistaken for the profound. Isn’t this the kind of advice you hope no one takes? If people really believed this nonsense, wouldn’t there be a whole lot more one-eyed, one-armed people in this world?

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink . . . Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”

Jesus says, don’t plan ahead, god will provide. Even squirrels know this is foolish advice! And so does everyone else who seeks a good education, buys insurance, or has a retirement plan.

“For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother's womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it”

Well, there you go men, if you can handle it, just cut ‘em off. This is clearly sick, dangerous, nonsense advice which no one in his right mind would take, and deserves no further comment.


And here’s the bottom line, Jesus sometimes didn’t even take his own advice. He said, “But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.” Then he proceeds to call people fools. “Ye fools and blind.” (Matthew 23:17). Was he confused, or what?


Now, here is the elephant in the living room that Christians try their best to ignore: even a casual reading of the New Testament proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that neither Jesus Christ nor Paul had any god-given inside knowledge of how the world works. Both stated over and over that the “Kingdom of Heaven” was coming SOON, but, 2,000 years later it has still not arrived. That is not “soon.” Clearly, they were not relaying the wisdom of a god – so they had to be making it up! Reverend Harold Camping twice predicted the end of the world in 2011, would you follow him and his teachings? No? Then how does it make any sense to follow Jesus or Paul, who made the same mistake multiple times?


Why book passage on a ship (or religion) designed by the deluded and steered by the confused? I can think of no better real life example of the ship of fools motif than the Christian religion.

By Older1 ~

RUTH BERNHARD (b. 1905) Perspective II, 1967

We lost our daughter to fundamentalism when she was a teenager, some 20 years ago. Since then we have had an understanding that we will agree to disagree, and we just don’t discuss religion. We have a strong relationship in spite of it, and we get together frequently. There is none of the strife that inflicts so many other families that are split by differing religious outlooks. My wife and I have recently provided significant financial and physical support to the family as they have adopted three disabled children all under the age of five, and we continue to visit regularly to baby sit and taxi the older children about town.

Our home is in a rural area and is way out of the way in respect to the daily travels of our daughter and her family so we didn’t really take much notice that her visits to us have diminished and that there always seemed to be a reason her children, our grandchildren, couldn’t come over.

But in a recent phone conversation with my wife, it has come out that our daughter and her husband object to two photographs on the walls of our home, and that they do not want their children to see them. Our daughter has asked that we take them down when they visit.

In the grand scheme of life, the issue is probably small potatoes. But I am nevertheless upset. If the images were bawdy, I would not object, but these are two important images in the world of photography. And they are not small prints on the mantle; one is the keystone image in the collection in our living room, a 16x20-inch print in a 24x30-inch frame. The other, at about 18x24 overall, is prominently displayed in our dining room. While the specific photos are irrelevant to the core issues, you may want to look them up to better understand the context. They are “Girl on Beach” by Wynn Bullock, and “Perspective II, 1967” by Ruth Bernhard. Any search engine will turn them up in an instant. The Bullock photo has been on our wall for about 15 years; the Bernhard for perhaps five.

Compounding this is that I spent my career in photography and these photographs are ones I am particularly fond of.

I have not yet responded to my daughter. My wife did, and while expressing her anger, agreed to remove the images. If I was the only one involved I would not have agreed to take them down, but the dynamics here are such that this is the way it will be. The Bullock print will come down and the other will be covered with a black drape.

So I am conflicted as to whether I should make a separate response or not say anything at all. There really is nothing I could say that would change the outcome. I know my daughter and they will not come over if the pictures are on the wall. She is not open to discussion or debate. Her mind is made up and that is the end of it.

But another part of me does not want to remain silent. I have drafted a response, which is below. Your thoughts are welcome.

Note: The boys I refer to below are her sons, ages 11 and 13. Also, you will note that my concluding paragraph uses a Christian context for argument. I’ve learned that the only real way to connect with Christians is to use language they understand.

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I have waited a while to respond to your request about the photographs on display in our home, because I wanted to give my thoughts a time to coalesce. And now that I have done that I have decided to respond to you in this way so that I can craft my thoughts carefully and to be sure that this is said the way I want it said.

You already know that your request was not well received. For you to understand how we feel, I ask you to imagine how you would feel if we were to ask you to please remove the Bibles and religious icons from your living room when we visit your home. Many years ago I told you that your beliefs were not an issue for me unless you tried to put them onto me. By asking us to modify our home to accommodate your religious beliefs, you have crossed that line.

But that is not the point I wish to make. I have several reactions and they are below, not in any priority order.

First, we see your request as a grievous insult to our values. While there are differences between your philosophy and ours, we believe we all share the same core values: peace, love, and a desire to leave the world a better place than it was when we entered it. It is to these ends that your mother and I have lived our lives.

I also see it as a personal repudiation of me and my 30 year career in photography. I have always stood for a moral and just use of the camera to advance the human condition, and have always stood against it when used opposite those goals. The photographs I showed in my classroom always supported the ideals of truth and justice and were in support of the fight against the evils of our world.

Further, the images on our walls are not ribald images by any measure. If they were, there would be no discussion. They are important works from significant photographers. The figure in one is such a small percentage of the whole that its details are invisible at normal viewing distance, and the other shows far less than what can be seen at a public swimming pool or the beach.

Second, your request is also an insult to your own sons. For you are suggesting that their character is so weak that they would somehow be corrupted by these images and that the sight of them would somehow pull your children down into a sea of bad behavior. It also suggests that they cannot be trusted to deal with such things in an intelligent manner. I know that those boys are more intelligent and stronger than that.

[Ex-C members: My daughter and I share a love for the musical "The Music Man" and have seen it a number of times on screen and on stage as a father/daughter thing — we can both quote dialog extensively; thus it’s use here is particularly relevant.]

Remember the Music Man, who comes into town as a pool table is being delivered to the billiard parlor. Nobody in the street is taking any notice. But Prof. Harold Hill decides to make it an issue, and points everyone to something that otherwise would have been ignored. Nobody would have noticed if he hadn't said anything about it. But he whips the citizenry into a frenzy by claiming that the presence of a pool table in the community will immediately lead their youth to “Ragtime, shameless music, that will grab your son, your daughter, into the arms of the animal instinct....” Of course, by the end of the movie, the pool table is still in the billiard parlor, and everyone is doing just fine.

The lesson from that is that it isn't an issue until someone makes an issue. I would suggest to you that none of your children have looked for one microsecond at what's on the walls of our home. I also suggest that in the unlikely event that your sons should notice and have any reaction at all, that you would use it as an opportunity to teach them two things: First, how to intelligently and maturely deal with something that they are not otherwise used to and, second, that the human body is in the image of God and is nothing to be ashamed of.

I would also suggest that you ask yourself why something that is universally regarded as God's greatest creation would somehow be a problem. We know that the Bible says that man was created in God's image. And we consider the human being to be God's greatest achievement. So what you are doing is repudiating the image of God and the greatest manifestation of it.

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So there it is. I do not know if I will respond or not, and I may have to decide before this is published on this site. It is, for me, a difficult decision.

By Paul So ~

One of the most common assumptions among Christians is that there is only one kind of authentic purpose which is something that is built into human beings when God designs them. If you remember the doctrine of Deus Imagio (Image of God), propounded by the theologian Irenicus, Christians believe that we all posses the image of God which means we all have the potential to be like God and the entire purpose from this image is the fact that we are meant to go to heaven. Admittedly it sounds like a nice idea but there seems to be an implicit double standard in this way of thinking: Whatever purpose God creates is meaningful, but whatever purpose human creates cannot be meaningful.

Image by Bill Gracey via Flickr

Why is this? Well, perhaps one plausible explanation is that Christians emphasize a lot on God’s sovereignty which involves creating authentic purposes that human beings are incapable of building. Whatever purpose that we create just isn’t good enough as that of God’s. Our created purpose will always fade into the shadows along with our existence due to its impermanence. But there seems to be another troubling assumption there: Purpose is authentic only if it is eternal, and eternal things can only be created by God but not by human beings. By eternal, I mean that when the end-goal is achieved the sense of happiness and fulfillment of it is everlasting since whatever is achieved is also everlasting. So far there seems to be two main reasons why Christians think only God can create purpose: First, because God is the sovereign creator who are legitimately in charge of what purpose things have. Second, because nobody can create a purpose that is eternal except God.

There is a specific problem related to this subject that I want to focus on: the fact that there are plenty (but not every) ex-Christian who unconsciously accept these assumptions. Because they accept it they also believe that rejecting Christianity amounts to nihilism which is that life has no purpose. They agree with Christians that the only authentic purpose is the one’s that can be created by a creator and the ones that are eternal. However, I want to make an argument against the common assumption that whatever purpose humans create cannot be meaningful.

First, what does it mean to say that the purpose we have is “meaningful”? The term “meaningful” is very ambiguous because it can mean semantic meaning which simply understands what the word means or it could mean seeing the actual existing patterns. But the kind of meaning that we are talking about here has little to do with semantics and patterns, rather the kind of meaning that we are talking about is living a flourishing life with a high quality of happiness. I don’t think believers will deny this definition of “meaning of life” because it seems to fit in with their notion of what the purpose of their life is. But if they accept this definition why is it restricted to their beliefs? Why can’t meaning be more open and broad for everyone who is either a believer or non-believer?

If meaningful life is defined as a flourishing life with a high quality of happiness then it’s pointless to ask “Is there a meaning of life” because it sounds like saying “Is there a possible flourishing of life with a high quality of happiness” which most of us agree is true. What the question should be is “meaningful to whom?” because meaning is dependent on our overall well-being. Is this is the definition of meaning that we can accept then it is possible to see how meaning of life is possible without God. Evolution has already provided us with capacities and capabilities to use them for non-evolutionary purposes: to create art, do science, do philosophy, play sports, etc.

This brings to me next point: Why can’t we construct a meaningful purpose for ourselves? All it really amounts to is creating conventions, rules, and technologies with the design to help us achieve a meaningful life. This isn’t at all unusual or totally artificial because if you study human history we do this all the time: We create cultures, civilizations, art, music, philosophy, religions, laws, science, and other things with the purpose to achieve a meaningful life. We build houses with roofs with the purpose to keep us warm and prevent the rain drops from getting us wet. We create economies so we can create jobs with purpose to help other people through services and produce enough wages to use it buy commodities. We have sports with rules, conventions, and goals and so far most of us seem to love sports even though it is created by us. Go to the sports fan (let’s say the red skins fan) and tell them that their enthusiasm for sports is meaningless because it is created by man but not by God; what would their reaction be? It would probably range from annoyance to anger, and the reason for this is because even though it was created by human beings it doesn’t mean that it cannot make us sufficiently happy. The point I’m trying to make is that just because we construct things with purposes for our welfare and happiness it doesn’t mean that they are any less “real” or “authentic” to us. The sports fan example I just gave clearly demonstrates that sports, in spite of being artificially made, is real and authentic to the sports fan. The houses we create is real to us, it holds a lot of meaning for us; when we move away from the house we live for a while don’t we feel a bit nostalgic? Is this feeling “unreal” simply because it was man-made? I don’t think so, and I think most of you would agree. We also create families through marriages, and despite the fact that there is increasing amount of divorce rates there is still plenty of successful marriages left in which couples remain content and happy. Marriages are created, but that doesn’t mean that the relationship between couples are any less meaningful; friendships are also created but they aren’t any less meaningful either.

Books and ideas are created for variety of purposes, yet many of us who love to read books (including myself) do not find these books to be any less “authentic”, “real”, or “meaningful”. These books feel very “real”, “authentic” and “meaningful” (especially fiction books!) to many readers. Even religious books give those similar feelings to religious believers and scholars alike.

But what about the fact that these purposes we created are not eternal in the sense that they do not give us everlasting happiness? The answer to that question is with another question “Is there such thing as everlasting happiness?” Like the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, I do not think that there is such thing as “everlasting happiness” because our brains are hardwired to desire more things. This may sound troubling to both believers and non-believers alike, but the only way out of this “dilemma” is that we should focus our ongoing desires on things that are most important to us. For most of us it’s going to be about our relationships with people since we are social creatures, but for some of us it will be about the pursue towards knowledge among other human activities. There are certain things in this world that we are so deeply attached to that much of what we desire is already focused on those things.

We all have different desires, plans, interests, and values so why try to fit everyone into one thing call “purpose” instead of allowing people to construct variety of purposes that fit with their context of life? It’s true that these things do not last forever, but perhaps that’s the problem: perhaps when we think about meaningful life or happiness we think too much about external goods. Perhaps we can focus on happiness from “within” by trying to interpret impermanent events a bit differently, which is a way to keep us happy. I don’t know, but I still maintain the position that overall we can construct purposes for ourselves.

Perhaps a believer may complain that creation of purpose among human beings can be abusive and not universal. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean that overall humanly constructed purpose are any less meaningful. There are many kinds of constructed purposes in variety of forms and many of them keep different people happy; why can’t purpose be like that? Why can’t we accept the plurality of purpose rather than the homogeneity of purpose? We all have different desires, plans, interests, and values so why try to fit everyone into one thing call “purpose” instead of allowing people to construct variety of purposes that fit with their context of life?

Perhaps it’s because in Christianity people are use to the idea that there is this universal purpose that everyone must partake in, otherwise they will all be doomed. It isn’t entirely clear why God prefers universal purpose over plurality of purposes, but it’s clear that even though we are all the same kind of human beings we are still different from each other because we experience life different from different perspectives. That fact alone, I think, can determine what kind of purpose we want to create which is why if you travel around the world you see that people have different purposes.

Nonetheless we all have a common reason why we create these purposes: to enjoy and secure life. So to come to a conclusion I want to point out that constructed purpose is does not mean that it is unreal or less meaningful than the kind of purpose God would create if such a being does exist. We construct purposes all the time (whether we are aware of this or not) from the most trivial to the most significant, and many times it captivates us enough to enjoy life alone. I just don’t get why there needs to be this “single formula of purpose” that makes people happy; happiness is already a complicated and varied psychological affair that varies because of culture, politics, economy, and especially religions. We are only starting to understand ourselves better through neuroscience, psychology, sociology, and political science (among other things), so it’s a bit unfair to come to some sweeping generalization on what human nature is in order to determine what single formula of purpose we all need.

By Brian Kellogg ~

I believe the title of this post really strikes at the core of religious belief. Humans, in general, so desperately want to believe that they either personally have magical power over a chaotic world or they have a god that can exercise such power for their benefit. It is a very traumatic event in one's life to honestly confront the fact that the Universe is wholly indifferent to us and is in fact quite chaotic and out of our control. The religious find comfort through the illusion of control and power afforded by their religion in much the same way superstitious fisherman or baseball players do with their good luck charms and other good luck rituals. I can understand and sympathize with this to a point.

We see such thinking often played out in disasters where one church is destroyed but another survives seemingly miraculously. The parishioners of the surviving building thank god for his goodness, but what of god's goodness for the parishioners of the other church? Well they say god works in mysterious ways and so on and so forth. We see the same circular reasoning employed in many other instances; sickness, job loss, ... . There is no rebuttal to this fallacious logic because those who employ it are not as concerned with truth as much as they are with emotional succor.

It is my sincere hope that humans can move beyond religion and especially messianic religions as these are terribly and intentionally divisive and contentious.It is my sincere hope that humans can move beyond religion and especially messianic religions as these are terribly and intentionally divisive and contentious. This will take considerable time and good fortune as this Universe is indifferent to our plight. I doubt I will be alive to see it. I don't expect a humanistic utopia to take hold some day where everyone always gets along, but I think we would be much better off without messianic religions especially.

When reviewing history I would be hard pressed to recognize anything else other than science and democracy that have contributed more to the betterment of the human species. Religion is not even close on this list. Now some would argue Christianity provided the fertile soil by which science and democracy have been nourished. This is not true and it is a very myopic view to hold especially when considering Chinese, Indian, and Muslim advances throughout the centuries among others. This gets into the whole untruth of the US being founded a christian nation. All I have to say to this is Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine; argument over. In fact I would argue religion, Christianity especially (dark ages through to now), has stunted our advancement considerably.

We need to get off this fragile blue spinning ball onto other fragile spinning balls to hedge our bets. Religion, for the most part, is an impediment to this most important of humanistic goals.

By Carl S ~

Here's the "reality" most people are taught: There's a creator who made everything that exists, as it is. Out of all the billions of galaxies, this creator chose this particular planet to be God's own planet. He made it, pronounced it "good," and has been finding fault with its human inhabitants ever since. Now, the human inhabitants are to serve this god on earth, obediently do his will, and get a reward in an eternal blissful afterlife, or go to eternal torment. Anything this god does, or allows, is good. Anything his chosen people do in his name, for his glory, is virtuous and a.o.k. It's called justification. But, just how the will, wishes, or work of god is defined, is never questioned, just obeyed.

This is quite interesting. For a Mormon, not imbibing in alcoholic beverages or coffee is the will of god, and proselytizing is the work of god. For the Moslem, pork is forbidden, likewise the Jew. God permits one wife only, or many wives, creates homosexuals but forbids gay intercourse. God tells both the Christians and the Moslems the same thing: Kill the infidel. God approves/does not approve, of many things, all over the moral landscape, and things that have nothing at all to do with morality; tells some humans he is three persons, while telling others that he is but one god. He has worshippers bowing toward Mecca and others kissing statues. He has tens of thousands of spokesmen telling their followers just what he expects of them, what his will is, what work they are called to do in his name and stead. He's always coming up with new ways to put people at odds with each other, to make some people feel much more superior to others, telling for example, one group that it's "true" to him whereas another isn't, and that means that every one of them is a "heretic" to the other.

Deprivation is god's game: sex, booze, delicious meats, sleeping in on Sunday mornings (or Friday, if you're Jewish or Moslem), etc. Deprive your senses, mind, and reasoning. Just obey, that's all. This is the formula god lays out for success in spirituality - the society that he reigned over for more than a thousand years, and longs to repeat: just believe, obey, don't ever question. (I wish this were sarcastic, but it's theologically correct.) Interestingly, the will of god is contingent on geography, culture, and the pressure cooker indoctrination of children.

If you want to know what "God wants," what his will is, you'll have to check out all the religions which speak for "him;" and don't stop there, check each congregation, each spokesman, each cult, because they will tell you. And the smaller the unit, the more specific and "certain" are god's rules, will, wishes, doctrines, for god is very adaptable, capable of morphing, while giving contradictory commands from one place to another. In fact, because the will of god is so ambiguous, as well fits the hiddenness of god, just about anything can be said to be the will of, the raison d'ętre for the work of god, and is. Whether you are told to believe Mohammed or Elias or Jesus (and his mom floated up through the clouds), that god is one or three, that Islam or Christianity is the one true religion, god has said all of this is true, so shut your mind and be quiet and obey. Oh, and by the way, pick whatever truths you choose to accept, for crissakes. God will lead you on.

Reality check: There's no such thing as "God's will", or "God's laws". There are the laws of man and the fabricating what is the will/wishes/commands of an invisible, imaginary power, and buffoons speaking in its name simply because they've done so for centuries. Get real. If they were truly honest, they would say, "We don't know."

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And those who are given power to impose absolute values of an absolutely powerful invisibility, are the most corrupt of all. It's all about power: over thoughts, sexuality, appetites, freedom, children's minds. It's about the lowest, sneakiest reality hiding under the camouflage of goodness. That's getting real, when you realize this.

By Danimal ~

Would you like to be a Methodist? As a former United Methodist, I am here to tell you how. As the movie "A River Runs Through It" says, Methodists are Baptists who can read. If you can follow these simple steps, you can become a member of the United Methodist Church:

1. Be sure you know nothing about the denomination. Don't know who John Wesley is or the Book of Discipline. Be ignorant of the itinerant ministry and don't know who your bishop is.

2. Participate in the church prayer chain. Remember, the only prayers allowed are for the sick, injured or dead. Anything personal is off-limits. If someone recovers, make sure the prayers get the credit, not the doctors or nurses.

3. If you like to debate or argue, be sure you only argue over insignificant things such as musical styles, worship styles, or how good the sermons are.

4. Avoid controversial topics such as homosexuality and abortion.

5. Possess multiple personalities. You need the minimum of a church personality, a private personality, and a public personality. Never be the same person wherever you may be.

6. Never remember sermons. You must not remember the Sunday sermon any longer than 24 hours. But, do let the pastor know how effective his sermon was and how it "spoke to your heart".

7. Overuse words such as "grace", "heart", and "mercy" so that these words lose their meaning.

8. Learn to make great casseroles and salads so you can bring them to potlucks.

9. Learn to love boring committees.

10. Never question the spirituality of any other church member. If they like to handle rattlesnakes or use profanity in church, you must never "judge".

11. Learn some common church slang and stock phrases. You will sound really smart and "spiritually mature".

12. Learn to be a sheep. Methodists really love sheep.

13. Learn to love K-Love radio and its sappy worship music.

14. Don't make friends with anyone. Methodists are into fellowship, not friends.

If you can do most of these things, you too can become eligible for membership in any Methodist church. But, it's just a lot easier not to be one,not to mention more logical.

By Ex Baptist Pastor ~

I suppose this would be a rant. I want to come back and properly introduce myself, but this has been running through my head and I just want to get it out there.

I'm a former Baptist pastor of the neo-Calvinist strain. Not to long ago my former co-pastor and I were emailing back and forth as he tried to keep me from leaving the faith.

Image by Jack Batchelor via Flickr

One of the things we talked about was how I'd only recently learned that my step-daughter had been molested by her biological father six years ago during her last visit with him. This happened at the same time as my wife and I were being baptized and joining the church.

I asked him why God, who is supposedly sovereign, ordained this to happen and then kept it from us for so many years?

He said he didn't know, but that he was thankful that God had stopped it before her father went any further.

I asked him if I should thank God that he'd only let her be molested a little? Is that what he was saying?

He then told me only Jesus had the hope my daughter needed.

I asked him again: You mean the Jesus who let her, or even decreed that she be, molested in the first place? What kind of twisted thinking was that?

How could she ever trust a God who let it happen in the first place?

How could I? Or my wife? At the same time we were "getting right" with God he goes ahead and does this? And then for six years we pray for the safety of our kids and all the time damage has already been done - but it's kept from us? And we should trust him why?

At one point I believed just like that. Scary.