Year of Faith

Dear Everyone,

It could very well be possible that in the future we will see bus ads such as these in my fair city of Vancouver:

The Centre for Inquiry are currently awaiting final approval to bring this ad campaign to the Toronto transit system, and if all goes well on that front then they plan to tour the ads across other Canadian cities, including Vancouver.

I wanted to take this opportunity to apologize on behalf of atheists like me who find this kind of shot across the philosophical bow offensive, low brow, and frankly dumb.  First let me just tear apart what Mr. Justin Trottier  of the CFI said about the ads, because that’s the real source of my ire right now.

“I’d love it if everyone saw the ads and knew the point of the campaign is to emphasize, not the kind of knee-jerk debunking to anything suspicious, but that we’re interested in a genuine debate, a conversation about so-called extraordinary claims. We’re not here to mock people who believe in these claims.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a lot of wiggle room here.  You are comparing the cornerstones of the lives of millions of people to Bigfoot, UFOs, psychics and Zeus.  You are implying, openly and unambiguously, that Christians and Muslims are either crazy, archaic, or share the same kind of mental space as the most typical and archetypal paranormal believer that you can think of.

How is this NOT going to create a knee-jerk reaction?

If you weren’t here to mock people who believe these things, you wouldn’t have run that ad.  There are other ways you could have done this.  The “Millions of Americans can be good without God” or “There probably is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life” ads looked like genuine invitations to thought and debate.  You can do this, you have seen that other people have done this, and you decided not to.  But you have outright denied that this is what you wanted to to,  so you are either lying or stupid.  Or both.

The extraordinary claims home page asks:

“Why is belief in Big Foot dismissed as delusional while belief in Allah and Christ is respected and revered? All of these claims are equally extraordinary and demand critical examination.”

Wow, well I guess it’s my turn to apologize.  I had no idea there was such a huge Bigfoot following.  I never noticed the thousands of people in my community wearing the holy symbol, the enlarged foot with five prominent toes.  I was never aware of their daily prayers, wherein they bow their heads and consider their bare feet several times a day.  I was completely unaware of their rich culture, and the way large-footed, hairy members of their religion are venerated and respected for their wisdom and moral uprightness.  I had utterly no idea that major world religions had so much in common with a cryptozoological theory.

I must look terribly ignorant right now.

Religious belief does not boil down to the factual evidence that supports its principal deities or personages.  Sometimes this is how people are convinced, but religions also have rich moral, historical, personal, cultural, aesthetic, existential, philosophical, and theological spheres that help inform believers and enrich their understanding and their lives.

And you just equated that to bigfoot.

You look terribly ignorant right now.

This kind of bullshit does nothing but polarize people, and it’s a dishonest attempt to create press coverage.  I like the idea of religious and philosophical ads, when they are done in a way that encourages thought, discourse, and debate.  And we really do need someone from this side of the aisle to answer stuff like this:

But the proposed ads that may be splattered across Canadian busses don’t answer this kind of ignorance in a well thought-out and intelligent way, it’s just more garbage that makes us look ignorant.

And for that I apologize.

So the latest bit of religious news making it’s way around the web these days is the “fact” that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than religious people do.  This is a weird thing to deal with, especially given the fact that October is my month of atheism, of “non belief”, my default religi0us position.  Given my experiences so far, I’m not surprised with these results.  While the people I’ve met tend to know a lot about their own religions, they often have a skewed or incomplete view of other people’s beliefs.  I don’t mean to sound damning, most of the time it wasn’t a big deal, a misunderstanding, or they just hadn’t thought about it very much.

On the other hand it’s a poll, and I’m loathe to treat as anything more than an interesting tidbit.  That said, we can perhaps begin to gleam a few interesting things from it, other than atheists are a bunch of smarty pants.

First off, it makes it painfully obvious that Blacks and Hispanics are seeing the back end of the American education system, as their responses on average seem to be lower than any other group polled. I’m curious as to why people aren’t making more noise about that.  The poll insists that the numbers remain the same even when “adjusted for levels of education” but then how do we explain their low scores?  Is it a cultural thing, is it because their sample sets were so low?

Second, 45% of Catholics think that the bread and wine that symbolize the blood and body of Christ are just that, symbols, and don’t transmute into the actual blood and flesh of their savior.  This might make a couple of Cardinals red-faced (teehee) but I find it kind of encouraging.  I like to think that most Catholics thought it was just meant to symbolize partaking of the means of salvation, rather than taking it to be the literal blood and body of Christ, as is the Catholic Church’s want.  Honestly it just seems a bit more reasonable.  I try to be a middle of the road atheist, to not stamp my feet up and down when confronted with super naturalism and miracles, but I can’t help feel a little hopeful that most Catholics don’t think they’re partaking in a wee bit of cannibalism every Sunday.

While most people, a startling 89%, know that a teacher cannot lead a public school class in prayer, few people know that the Bible can be used as an example of literature, or that a public school may conduct a course on comparative religions (23% and 36% respectively).  Seeing as prayer in public schools can be a big deal in American politics, this doesn’t surprise me, though it does seem to suggest that because of this lack of school prayer, people may think that schools are completely forbidden to have anything to do with religion, a misunderstanding which may give weight to pro-school prayer crowd in the future.

One commentator on CNN suggested that the reason atheists and agnostics know more about religion is because they are constantly being attacked by religious people, and that they needed to know these things in order to have a basis for arguing their case.  I’ve certainly seen a lot of that, but I don’t think we know more because we’re getting bullied all the time.  If what this poll is saying is true, I would say atheists and agnostics know more about religion because they have a reason to go looking.  We have to search for answers because by and large we didn’t sit through Sunday school or go to a church, synagogue, or mosque.  When we ask questions like ‘what does it all mean’ we don’t have a book or pastor to help us, so we tend to look outwards, and to more than one source, since initially they all tend to have the same weight.

I don’t know whether that means we get better answers, in the end.  It definitely doesn’t mean we turn out to be better people.

Anyway, check out the poll, you can even take it yourself and see how you do.