I found some fairly interesting taster material for a distance learning degree in Theology and Religious Studies from Oxford Brookes University. I was particularly taken by the material on Religion and Politics, which poses interesting questions for students to answer, and is relevant to both religious, and non-religious people.

As a science-y sort of person, I also read through the notes on Religion and Science. Which is what has set me dead against becoming a theologian, at least outside a strongly secular department.

Note Evolution remains a theory because there are still some problems with a complete explanation of creation; the ‘missing link’–the creature that links human beings with ape-like ancestors–is one.

Can I repeat for the record, in science, the word theory does not mean the same thing as it does in normal usage. In science, theory basically means coherent explanation, not crackpot idea.

Evolution remains a theory, because it hasn’t been replaced yet. When it is it may become known as the discredited theory of evolution. But that doesn’t always happen, we know that Newton’s Theory of Gravity isn’t the best explanation of how the universe is and that there are problems with Einsteins General Theory of Relativity, its replacement. But they are still extremely important and useful scientific theories.

I don’t mind people not understanding what a scientific theory is - not everyone is educated. People have a bigger problem with evolutionary theory than they do with plate tectonic theory or electromagnetic theory or big bang theory but that doesn’t mean that they should be allowed to misinform other people what scientific theory is. If you don’t know, don’t pretend you do.

There are undoubtedly things still to discover in evolution. And it would be great to have more mathematics involved - there should always be more mathematics. But that does not make it a half-baked idea. If you think the modern evolutionary synthesis is not the best explanation for observable facts, study hard, get your PhD in biology, do your own research and come up with a better explanation. If you achieve it you’ll undoubtedly get a Nobel Prize, and I would be delighted to see it. But don’t make stuff up about science that misleads people.

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It reminded me why I still identify with a religion that I no longer believe in. I am a baptised Catholic and was educated as such, although clearly now I’m not exactly a member in good standing. I disagree strongly with many of the pronouncements of the pope, the restrictions of Catholicism and the attitudes of the church hierarchy. I also strongly dislike the politics, opinions and religious views of Ann Widdecombe, a right wing Conservative politician who converted to Catholicism when the Church of England allowed the ordination of women priests.

The reason that I still identify - when Widdecombe converted to Catholicism she received hate mail describing her as a traitor. Similarly when the Queen became the first monarch to visit Westminster Cathedral (RC) members of the crowd cried out that she was a ‘betrayer’. In commemorative events in the West Country, they still burn the Pope in effigy because of something that happened nearly 500 years ago.

I might no longer be a believer, and I have never experienced overt anti-Catholicism, but it would feel like I was somehow condoning the attitudes of people who think that being Catholic and being British are incompatible. Because they aren’t, at all. I’ve always been English and British, and I’ve nearly always been Catholic and I’ve never had a problem. Somehow, being atheist doesn’t give me a free pass.

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Now, on this divided issue I have to declare an interest. As with more than one person in the world, I haven’t always been an atheist. In fact growing up, I went to two different faith schools - primary and secondary. They were both really nice schools. Not perfect, but the kids were generally well-behaved, the staff were caring, the ethos was sound and the exam results were excellent. In short, these are the faith schools that people want to emulate.

If I ever have children, then I would want send them to a school that was like the schools that I went to. Caring, with a good sense of community, and the opportunity for them to reach their potential. As I’ve always had a positive experience with faith schools, before I realised that I was atheist, I assumed that I would want to send them to a church school.

However, these days I think that it’s a mistake to say that faith schools are particularly good. In general, parents have to jump through several hoops (usually of the church attendance variety) to get in. Which means that they are going to attract the sorts of parents willing to invest quite a bit of time and effort into their children’s education. I’m not sure the faith schools create the nice kids as select for them.

Also, more than I used to, I embrace multiculturalism. Whether or not you think, as I do, that it’s truly amazing to get to live in a diverse and vibrant community, the fact is that here in the UK we do. Better then to expose our children to it early on. No matter how much they try to provide a view of life on the outside, most faith schools have a limited population, not just in terms of belief, but in terms of race. The new Hindu Krishna-Avanti school has all Asian pupils. In the same education authority, I suspect that St John Fisher RC School has almost no Asian pupils, nor the Moriah Jewish Day School.

Where atheists are concerned I think there’s also a problem of children having sheltered ideas about non-faith. Until I was say 14 or so, I  didn’t know anybody who wasn’t at least nominally connected with a religion. The idea that some people simply didn’t believe in god was completely alien to me. I still sometimes subconsciously confuse faith and being a good person - I automatically assume that someone who has a strong faith is therefore worthy. When I think about it, I can see the basic error I’m making, but I don’t always think about it.

The problem I see is that there isn’t separation of church and state in England. Given that, I can’t see any likelihood of existing C of E schools losing public funding. The Catholic church and the United Synagogue would undoubtedly also be up in arms if there long established schools were no longer in the state sector. And you definitely shouldn’t be promoting one faith above another (despite the established church) which means that you also have to allow state funded Hindu, Sikh and Muslim schools, and some are in existence.

Overall, I’m not sure that I like faith schools any more, although I still retain a soft spot for my own schools. But I don’t think that they’re going to go away. Maybe it would be better to have a semblance of a national, rather than local, curriculum in RE and ensure that all faith positions, and none, are taught in our schools.

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In my off-line life in the exceedingly (and pleasantly) secular United Kingdom this basically never comes up. It’s probably not just because we are secular - so you can’t assume that someone prays at all - but also because it’s unusual to share personal information, except amongst close friends.

However, online where I hang out with lots of lovely Americans, this come up far to often. A friend/acquaintaince will mention in a semi-private webspace that their loved one is sick. In response, nearly everyone posts one or two lines of encouragement and support. These lines invariably include the phrase *I’ll keep you in my prayers* or similar. What should an atheist contribute?

I think it would be disingenuous of me to say that I’ll pray for someone since I don’t pray, don’t think it accomplishes anything in particular, and people know this. On the other hand, *I’m thinking of you* somehow doesn’t quite seem appropriate. I’ve tried offering my best wishes, luck, and support at different times, but it always seems insufficient compared to everyone else’s deity invoking.

As a stereotypical English person, I can be socially awkward at the drop of a hat and if you can’t make a joke about it (preferably with understatement and irony) I’m often totally scuppered. I truly and genuinely care, and want to offer support but I always feel that language fails me at such moments, and that I end up getting it ever so slightly wrong. And of course,there’s often a very fine line between appropriate and offensive which I’m wary of crossing.

What should an atheist offer in lieu of prayers?

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1. any homophobic tendencies whatsoever

One of my younger brothers, who I am naturally very fond of, sort of came out a little while ago. And I say, sort of, because in true Gen Y fashion he actually changed his facebook profile to show that he was in a relationship with a guy, let’s call him James. This is not the biggest surprise ever, as for the last few months, James has been practically the only person that my brother has talked about - they go out to dinner together a lot, my brother stays at his house a lot, they’ve even been on holiday together twice. It’s pretty cute really.

This is the sort of announcement that I have been expecting for years, and I’m not even surprised that way that I discovered it. I expect to find out that one of my other brothers has a girlfriend in exactly the same way, and it’s also likely to be the way that my siblings find out about my next or subsequent boyfriends.

I like to think that I’m a liberal, and I’ve got no hangups about people, in abstract, being gay. I think of it mostly like being left-handed - a little quirk of someone that you know that may or may not have a big implication on their lives, but is nothing spectacular in and of itself. This is mostly abstract because off the top of my head I have only ever known well, three gay people (one man, two women) although I’m acquainted with maybe half a dozen more (all men).

Apparently, I have more of a problem when it’s my brother, because it squicks me out. *sigh*.

These are things that, as a liberal, you shouldn’t admit to, because they shouldn’t be true. I think that mostly, the thing that I have an issue with is actually the statement *my brother is gay*. It even feels really odd to write it down. I think/hope that that’s ok, because I also have an issue with the statement *my sister is straight*, that too feels a little gross and is equally true. I’m guessing and hoping that it’s ok and normal in the sense that people don’t like to think of close relatives actually having a sexual identity. I can live with that.

But at the back of my mind there’s a slight concern that maybe I’m not as liberal as I think I am. I’m not sure what to do about that. I want to be as liberal as I think I am. I’m proud of the progress that’s been made against all forms of unnecessary discrimination. I actually like to think that amongst people I know it’s mostly got to the stage where everyone knows that it’s not ok to be racist or homophobic and so they are ashamed of those opinions. This is, in my eyes, one step behind most people actually not being racist or homophobic (I think more progress has been made against racism in this respect).

In most of the abstract discussions I’ve had with people before, we’ve more or less come to the conclusion that it’s not really possible to stop being prejudiced, you can only learn to hide, and not act upon your wrong prejudices. I don’t want that to be true. I want to be cool and accepting and for this to be normal, and I think it nearly is. But nearly isn’t good enough for me.

I’m not sure what to do next, because liberals shouldn’t be admitting to any homophobia whatsoever. And I want to call myself a liberal.

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The service itself was quite nice and was somewhat unusual for my family in that it all took place in the crematorium (rather than in a church) and was what one would describe as a modern service. There were a couple of poems, a slideshow of photos and tributes from his Facebook message board, a eulogy given by his mother and younger brother and a short address.

As these things go, it was perfectly ok. Later on as I was mingling at the post-funeral reception (?) I found out that the guy leading the service was a local free church minister whose sons had been to primary school with my cousins. And, that didn’t surprise me at all, because although my dad seemed to think it wasn’t very religious, it had several prayers, the coffin was brought in to the chapel to the words “I am the way, the truth and the light”, we all recited the Lord’s Prayer and the address was about God being a rock to those who are suffering. Short of a full requiem mass, I’m not sure how much more religious you could make it.

Which got me thinking. The minister who lead the service was pretty good. It was clear that he knew the family reasonably well, and he had made an effort to cater to their beliefs rather than adhering strictly to his own. Most of my extended family are quite religious - especially the older generation - and all (including me) were brought up going to church every week, so I bet lots of people in attendance wanted and appreciated the sentiment of the thing - God will comfort you in your grief, we hope to meet again in the after life.

Unsurprisingly it didn’t really appeal to me. My cousin was much loved and had obviously had a positive impact on people that he had come into contact with, that will be comfort enough for me without invoking the supernatural. But, what about my funeral?

I don’t really like the idea of some priest or minister putting words into my mouth that I haven’t held in life. I wouldn’t like God to be invoked as I think that God is not real. I don’t like things being involuntarily being blessed in Jesus’ name, and that includes me.

On the other hand, if it’s my funeral, I’ll be dead. Meaning that I don’t get a say for a reason. Funerals aren’t really about the dead who, let’s face it, are going to be just as dead if no funeral ever takes place. Funerals are about the living. If it would make my family more comfortable to give me a Christian burial, why should I complain?

For me personally, it’s complicated by the fact that my parents are my next of kin only because there isn’t anyone else better placed. We get on fine, but I’m just not that close to either of them. And they aren’t exactly on great speaking terms with each other. They’d be the ones deciding on a funeral, and my dad doesn’t know that I’m an atheist, and my mum and one of my brothers think that it’s a phase (the other brother is also an atheist).

Should a funeral be a reflection of the person that has died, or something to comfort the bereaved? And what if those two things collide rather than complement? How much say should you get in your own funeral?

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It covers atheist history, arguments for atheism, atheist views on morality, meaning, violence and science and has a particular focus on the ‘new atheism’ of Dawkins, Hitchens et al. If you check it out, let me know what you think.

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One of the criticisms often levelled at atheists is that without a god hanging round, there’s no purpose to life. There are various responses to this, one is that we don’t need purpose in a pre-defined sense, another is that it leaves us free to find our own purpose. A third excellent reply, is that it doesn’t much matter whether or not it would be nicer for god to exist and for life to have intrinsic meaning, because that doesn’t alter reality. Which is that there’s no satisfactory evidence for god or gods.

Most atheists are happy to either self-define the meaning of their life, or live without it. But not all.

A friend of mine was telling me about her depression, and how difficult she finds her understanding of reality to be at her lowest moments. For her, as for me, there is no happy ending, no supernatural watching over us, just regular day to day life. She actually does find it depressing that there is no meaning to life.

Now, I guess that this is primarily a function of her depression, and that whatever world view she held wouldn’t provide enough comfort to lift her mood. Because I think that’s kind of how depression works.

There’s nothing I can really say to her. We all love her and she means a great deal to us. Despite her opinions to the contrary she is a vital, important, much needed and wanted person. And sometimes I tell her so (don’t know whether that’s a good idea or not).

The thing about being atheist is that it only means lacking belief in god(s). Nothing else. It’s not a religion, a set of beliefs, and doesn’t have any ethical position. I get the impression that most atheists are, like me, fundamentally happy with their non-belief. But we aren’t all the same - some of us find being an atheist challenging.

Sometimes it’s a pity that you can’t really do anything about belief, or lack of it.

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Anyway, my friend Pinyo who is a personal finance blogger, wrote a post about the Iowa floods and how you should probably check that you have flood insurance. Obviously, that’s a natural target for a comment about how God must be punishing America for having gays.

Curt thinks that it couldn’t be a coincidence that California legalised same sex marriage at about the same time as Iowa flooded. I’m not entirely sure what rationale he’s basing that reasoning on, but I’m fairly happy that it’s a load of nonsense.

What is it with people postulating that God is a mean and vengeful being, and that that’s ok? Who would want to bow down and worship someone who thought that two men or two women committing their lives to each other is a crime worse than torture, rape or murder? Or that as a result of some people doing something in a completely different place, random Iowans (as far as I know, not known for their immense liberalism) should be punished.

Of course, looking at it from the worldview that God is a figment of some/many people’s imaginations, it’s easy to see where they’ve gone wrong. And Curt, is clearly a bit odd - I’m sure there are plenty of theists who don’t think the way that he does.

As with many slightly deluded Christian types, he suggests that it’s nearly the end of the world. Giving me the opportunity to say “Come the rapture, can I have your car?” although I resisted, as it’s not really fair to Pinyo. Even better than that is his Curt’s follow up comment:

It’s not the gays that are causing natural disasters. The gays are not controlling the universe.

This is just so funny. It makes me wonder whether there are people who think that *the gays* are controlling the universe - and of course, that those people must never, ever gain power.

Random, off-topic, zealots making themselves look stupid without any help from anyone else. That kind of thing makes my day.

[Edited to make it clearer that Pinyo is not weird and it’s Curt that I’m laughing at]

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To that end, I recently bought and read Karen Armstrong’s book The History of God. Armstrong, describes the history of the monotheism of the Abrahamic traditions through the various different types of god that they have described.

It begins with a description of how monotheism came about, based mainly on a critical reading of the bible and how a middle eastern tribe moved from the belief that their god wanted no other gods before him to the belief that there were no other gods. Once this monotheism is set up, the action moves to the god of early Christianity, and then to the god of Muhammed and early Islam, before continuing to the present day comparing and contrasting beliefs about god in all three traditions.

The over-riding principle of Armstrong seems to be that there are essentially three main views that the Abrahamic religions have held about god - the personal god, the philosophers’ god and the mystics’ god. Towards the end of the book she argues that the reason that western Christianity has problems is that it has been too heavily focussed on the personal god, at the expense of the other views (she suggests that the problems existing in Islam and Judaism are linked to external causes rather than theological ones).

The personal god, Armstrong suggests, is the god that atheists reject (and with good reason) as contradictory. This is the sky daddy god, the god of the Simpsons, and I think the one that Dawkins attacks the most in The God Delusion. It’s the first conception of god that the Israelites had and it remains popular.

The philosophers view of god, is the argued, rational logical one. In Armstrong’s view this is the god of Newton and the enlightenment, Aristotle and the Greeks, Pascal’s wager and the Deists. Unfortunately for people who might think that proving that god exists using logic and reason is a good idea, the more thought that goes into this Armstrong contends, the more it becomes unworkable. The rational god is the one that Nietzsche proclaimed is dead.

Armstrong feels on stronger ground with the god of the mystics. This is the god that has been most commonly described or experienced in Orthodox Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. This is the god of Buddha, the Kabbalah, Sufi and Hasidic thought. Contemplation of the paradoxes in creation and hard spiritual work lead to glimpses of the divine. Armstrong is keen to stress that the mystical god is not the emotional outburst of the conversion experience, but requires study and brings calm and peace, saying:

A sense of peace, serenity and loving-kindness are the hallmarks of all true religious insight.

The implication in the book is that the god of the mystics may be the god that modern society creates for itself and that is certainly plausible. But this is clearly the god that Armstrong herself believes in, of course she thinks it’s right but it doesn’t make it any more real as far as I’m concerned - mystical experiences can be real without being supernatural.

A History of God is a good book if you are interested in religious thought. The beginning of the book is an excellent introduction to what modern scholars think is most likely to be the origin of the bible and Judaism. It also contains an introduction to Islam which is equally as fascinating. On the other hand, it is long and I often got the sense that these theists were all equally deluded but in their own unique ways, which was slightly frustrating.

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