v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

New Atheists

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 - from The National Gallery

From New Statesman, Jim Al-Khalili writes:

As a scientist, I have an unshakeable rationalist conviction that our universe is comprehensible; that mysteries are mysteries only because we have yet to figure them out. There is no need for a supernatural being to occupy the gaps in our understanding, because we will eventually fill them with new knowledge based on objective scientific truths: answers that are not based on mythologies, or cultural/historical whims, or personal biases, but arrived at by examining hypotheses, testing our theories to destruction and being prepared to abandon them if they conflict with empirical data. Scientists are constantly subjecting our world-view to scrutiny. This is the opposite of blind faith.

Such a sweeping statement is a little unfair, given that not all scientists are so prepared to abandon a dogmatic stance when proved wrong, and not everyone with religious faith follows it blindly – to think that they do is naive and insulting to the many people who constantly question their faith. If you hold a strong conviction that there is some deeper significance to the universe or a spiritual meaning to your life that is important to you, who am I to try to convince you otherwise?

Believing in a god is fine by me, if it is important to you. If you firmly believe this as an ontological truth, then it is rather pointless having a theological debate about it. But what I, and many other atheists, take issue with is the arrogant attitude that religious faith is the only means of providing us with a moral compass – that society dissolves without faith into a hedonistic, anarchic, amoral, self-gratifying decadence. This is not only nonsense, but intellectually lazy.

We still have a long way to go if we are to rid the world of the bigoted attitudes held and injustices carried out in the name of religion. But the tide is turning. I would argue that to be an atheist in Britain today is so mainstream that we can afford to become less strident in our criticism and more tolerant of those with a faith. I say this not because I am less committed to my secular views or because I have weaker conviction than others, but because I believe we are winning the argument. We should not have to defend our atheism any longer.

Don’t get the impression that I am arguing for complacency. It is just that here in the west we are now in a stronger position to change attitudes, to correct discriminatory laws and to make for a fairer society in which religion does not give one group an advantage or special privileges.

Our society is no longer predominantly religious. Atheists are the mainstream. This is precisely why we should set out our stall to be more tolerant and inclusive. There are many issues on which we cannot afford to be complacent or conciliatory, such as the evil intent of religious fanatics, the wrong-headedness of creationists or the many injustices carried out against women or minority groups in the name of barbaric medieval laws, but we can often be more effective in getting our message across with a softer approach. The New Atheists have laid the foundations; maybe it is time now for the “New, New Atheists”.

I am well aware that some other atheists would call me an accommodationist. However, this patronising term needs to be replaced, so I have thought long and hard in search of an alternative – a more appropriate one to define my brand of atheism – until I realised it has been under my nose all the time: it is called being a humanist.

25 Points: The Bhagavad Gita

Nicolle Elizabeth writes at HTML Giant:

1. The Gita is a 700-verse scripture which is excerpted from the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the longest Sanskrit epic known to date. The Mahabharata is over 200,000 verse lines, totaling roughly 1.8 million words and is ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.

2. The introduction of this translated version quotes Philip Larkin’s poem “The Explosion.” So cool.

3. I have anxiety and decided I am going to read every religious text published this year. I have never read The Bible. I am going to.

4. This section of the Mahabharata is a conversation between a prince named Arjuna and Krishna. Krishna is God for all intents and purposes. Arjuna has to go into battle but it means fighting people he loves and Krishna is trying to get him to go into battle. It’s a tough break for everybody.

5. Arjuna and Krishna volley back and forth questions from student, answers from teacher. I also wondered if they were volleying back and forth with some tongue-in-cheek humor because they kept calling each other things like, “O Blameless One” and “O Perfect Haired One.” I was nervous though that making this claim would be disrespectful to say, one of the oldest most important religious texts in history. I wrote to one of the translators of this book. He told me that he never thought of it that way and that there have been no studies on this theory but that I quote, “Might be right, might be onto something,” and that, “It is a really interesting theory.” Well that was flattering.

6. I picture Arjuna and Krishna on a basketball court going back and forth in each other’s faces arguing except they’re arguing about the disposition of man.

7. The underlying metaphor is of course the battle for the conscious, the battle for the soul, the battle on how to live one’s life.

8. Gandhi called The Gita “his spiritual dictionary.”

9. I felt better while reading this book.

10. In the book Krishna says the way to change yourself is to focus on breathing in and out. No-matter the situation, just focus on breathing and you will be changing yourself.

11. I tried to go to a yoga class once. My friend and I had been drinking earlier in the day and we were falling over and laughing so hard the entire class was horrified and the yoga teacher asked us to leave the room and never come back.

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Religious Ethics

Some thoughts from Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy about religious ethics from the blog, Letters form a Librarian:

In fact, the logical or structural questions about religious ethics, like many questions about God, are interesting only if you believe in God. If God exists, then arguments about him are arguments about the cosmos and of cosmic importance, but if he does not, they are not about anything. In that case, the important questions must be about human beings, and why, for instance, they ever believed that God existed. The issues about religious ethics are issues about the human impulses that expressed themselves in it, and they should be faced in those terms. For those who do not believe in a religious ethics, there is some evasion in continuing to argue about its structure: it distracts attention from the significant question of what such outlooks tell us about humanity. Nietzsche's saying, God is dead, can be taken to mean that we should now treat God as a dead person: we should allocate his legacies and try to write an honest biography of him.

Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0

Murder American (style)

From The Guardian:

Rennie Gibbs is accused of murder, but the crime she is alleged to have committed does not sound like an ordinary killing. Yet she faces life in prison in Mississippi over the death of her unborn child.

Gibbs became pregnant aged 15, but lost the baby in December 2006 in a stillbirth when she was 36 weeks into the pregnancy. When prosecutors discovered that she had a cocaine habit – though there is no evidence that drug abuse had anything to do with the baby's death – they charged her with the "depraved-heart murder" of her child, which carries a mandatory life sentence.

Gibbs is the first woman in Mississippi to be charged with murder relating to the loss of her unborn baby. But her case is by no means isolated. Across the US more and more prosecutions are being brought that seek to turn pregnant women into criminals.

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Nicholas Vreeland

Movie Poster and Bull

From La Lettre, Vreeland is quoted:

"I began studying Buddhism with a Tibetan lama, Khyongla Rato Rinpoche, in New York in the mid 70’s. After some years – about 32 years ago – I joined his monastery, Rato Dratsang, reestablished in a Tibetan refugee settlement in the south of India. I remained there for 14 years. At first I didn’t have a camera. Eventually I was given one and kept it locked up in a trunk which I thought of as Pandora’s box. The box was sometimes opened, and toward the end of my time in the monastery I was taking a few pictures each day, though usually in my room. I felt I was doing my scales.”

“Twelve years ago, at the request of my teacher, I returned to New York to help run his Center. In 2003 he was invited to visit his birthplace, in Kham, Eastern Tibet. He asked me to accompany him and to photograph the journey. These photographs are the result of that adventure. I have no idea whether they have any merit other than being a document of an extraordinary journey. I witnessed the return of a Tibetan incarnate lama to his birth place, to his nomads, to his monastery. We rode many hours a day to get to these places, and were welcomed by devotees who had for the most part, never seen their lama, as Rinpoche had not been home in fifty years.” Nicholas Vreeland

Nosso Senhor do Bonfim

From Wikepedia on the history of the church:

The veneration of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Our Lord of the Good End, represented by the crucified Jesus in the moment of his death) is an old tradition in Portugal that was imported to Brazil during colonial times. In 1740, in order to fulfill a vow, Portuguese captain Teodósio Rodrigues de Faria brought a statue of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim from Setúbal (Portugal) to Salvador. Some years later a religious brotherhood (irmandade) dedicated to Our Lord of Bonfim was founded and a church to house the statue - the current Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim - began being built on top of Montserrat hill, in the Itapagipe peninsula, in the lower town of Salvador. The church was inaugurated in 1754, with the towers being finished around 1772.

The façade of the church is two-dimensional, with a central body flanked by two towers. The windows and specially the elaborate volutes of the gable on top of the façade follow a Rococo (late Baroque) design. The lower parts of the façade were covered by Portuguese white tiles (azulejos) in 1873.

The veneration of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim (Our Lord of the Good End, represented by the crucified Jesus in the moment of his death) is an old tradition in Portugal that was imported to Brazil during colonial times. In 1740, in order to fulfill a vow, Portuguese captain Teodósio Rodrigues de Faria brought a statue of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim from Setúbal (Portugal) to Salvador. Some years later a religious brotherhood (irmandade) dedicated to Our Lord of Bonfim was founded and a church to house the statue - the current Church of Nosso Senhor do Bonfim - began being built on top of Montserrat hill, in the Itapagipe peninsula, in the lower town of Salvador. The church was inaugurated in 1754, with the towers being finished around 1772.

The façade of the church is two-dimensional, with a central body flanked by two towers. The windows and specially the elaborate volutes of the gable on top of the façade follow a Rococo (late Baroque) design. The lower parts of the façade were covered by Portuguese white tiles (azulejos) in 1873.

Real Christmas

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - Nice

Adopting Liberals

From the Liberty Counsel, this is not a joke:

Liberty Counsel is proud to introduce -- and invite you to participate in -- a vital new prayer program solidly built upon St. Paul's admonition to pray for our national leaders:

Therefore I exhort first of all that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks be made for all men, for kings and all who are in authority, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. For this is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior.

 -- 1 Timothy 2:1-3

Since the landmark 2008 general election, there can be no doubt that a very large percentage of our Nation's leaders have a liberal mindset. The undeniable fact is that the 111th Pelosi-Reid Congress and the Obama Administration demonstrate a far left political philosophy. And since the President nominates federal judges and Justices of the United States Supreme Court, the judicial branch of government could take on a decidedly more liberal bent as the Obama Administration wears on.

Liberty Counsel has therefore named this special new prayer-in-action program Adopt a Liberal. And that's exactly what we invite you to do -- adopt a liberal who is in authority for regular, intense prayer in accord with St. Paul's admonition to his disciple, Timothy. In fact, we expect that many of our friends and supporters will choose to adopt many liberals as subjects of regular prayer!

More Crazy Stuff

The Order of Things

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - the way it is in Bangkok