Between different communities
I don’t see the benefit of interfaith whatsits. I don’t see why it’s Obama’s job to encourage them.
Since his inauguration, President Obama has emphasized interfaith cooperation and community service – “interfaith service” for short – as an important way to build understanding between different communities and contribute to the common good.
But if you don’t sort people into “different communities” in the first place, then you don’t need to build understanding between different communities, because people won’t be constantly seeing everyone as part of a different community. If you don’t keep insisting on this community-sorting project, you won’t entrench people in their communities and make them all prickly and defensive about their everlasting precious communities. That is, of course, especially true if the “communities” in question are religious, because when they’re religious, people love to get all prickly and defensive and self-righteous if people from other “communities” breathe too heavily on those communities. There’s no offense like religious offense.
Interfaith service involves people from different religious and non-religious backgrounds tackling community challenges together – for example, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews building a Habitat for Humanity house together across religious lines.
Yes but why? Why not just have some people build a Habitat for Humanity house together? Why not just not ask them what “community” they belong to? Why not just not treat them as representatives of a religion?
The press release doesn’t say.
This stuff is really annoying. It presents itself as all progressive and warm and reach-outy, but it’s all about penning people into identity-community boxes instead of just treating them as people and letting it go at that.
I’m not sure I understood this piece. Are you arguing against the use of inter-faith because it pushes people closer to their ‘community’ and away from the ‘outsiders?’
They didn’t say what the non-religious people were doing there. Presumably eating barbecued baby and heckling the virtuous house-builders.
It divides the nation by portraying people as from this community or that community, all in an attempt to break down division between communities. It fights against a problem in such a way that reinforces the problem.
Put another way, it encourages thinking of people as from a particular community in an attempt to discourage thinking of people from a particular community.
All that matters is maintaining the image of progress and inclusion, not actually achieving it.
Obama perhaps wants everyone scratching each others backs? Ha! Ha! You know, it quiet reminds me of Cardinal Sean O’ Malley, (a prelate from Boston, who was sent to Dublin by the Vatican) who recently washed the feet of Christine Buckley from Goldenbridge. God works in mysterious ways! It may just pay Obama to encourage the patriarchal faiths to cozy up together, even if it’s not his job. He’s a very smart man. But will it work, is another question. Methinks not!
Well I do think some people tend to self-sort but the whole silly business is greatly exacerbated by the media which, too lazy to do any real journalism, relentlessly push the idea of “communities”. It’s a parallel to the desire of state and federal governments to categorize everybody for political and economic purposes.
Carse (James P Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief, Penguin 2008) has written of the importance of community in religion and has also noted that there’s no offense like religious offense. “Belief systems thrive in circumstances of collision. They are energized by opposites. For every believer there is a non-believer on whom the believer is focused, whose resistance is carefully delineated. … [The] great advantage [of belief systems] is that they fairly bristle with answers, leaving no ambiguity in their declarations of truth. [But we observe,] truths so provided are targeted at mirrored falsehoods.” Rene Girard suggests that this has played an important role in human evolution (http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2011/02/28/the-scapgoat-rene-girards-anthropology-of-violence-and-religion/ inter alia; cf http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2006/when-the-devil-still-matters/).
Pandering is the essence of politics. Unfortunately, the only thing the secular community asks for is less god-praising, gay-bashing, and anti-abortion crusades from politicians. All of which are issues the faithful are more or less united on, and they are more numerous, so they win. That’s democracy. If we want to change the outcome, we need to change the public mind, not the politician’s mind. To do that, we need to be vocal – maybe we should ask for a Good Without God Day to celebrate all the great atheist Americans who have done so much for this country? :D
Meh, given the “communities” de facto exist and will continue to for the forseeable future, I’m not convinced getting them together for a group hug re-inforces that, rather than at least breaking down the tendency to paint everyone else as Other.
Re Habitat: I once went on a build day with a group from work. Before we picked up tools in the morning, we all stood in a circle while some local clergy guy said a prayer. Then he took off and we commenced doing something useful. No one there was overtly religious; everyone practices the usual quiet Eastern Canadian MYOBism whatever they might do on Saturday or Sunday AM; it just seemed so superfluous to the business at hand. (Yeah, I know: H for H started out religious, so I guess it’s part of the organizational culture).
The other side of that coin is the one then-Senator Barack Obama discussed in the “Faith” chapter of his second book, The Audacity of Hope (excuse the long excerpt):
There is evident respect and love for Ann Dunham in the passage above, but it seems to me that Obama severely dishonors his late mother by diagnosing her as “ultimately alone” because her secularism rendered her “removed, detached” and “apart.” Dammit, Obama, do you not see the screaming injustice and ugliness of a system of social organization that renders your mother—your principled, kind, loving mother, with all of her idealism and pragmatism—unfit for “community” membership because of her refusal to make an “unequivocal commitment” to a raft of theological nonsense?
I think Ophelia’s point in the OP here is the rebuttal to Obama’s disheartening verdict on his secular mother. It is bad that religion has divided humanity in the way it has, and it’s if anything even worse that public-minded people have bought into that division without even wondering whether it’s just.
Ann deserved better from her son.
I think that is totally correct. Interfaith efforts recognize the already extant communities that are too-often antagonistic toward each other. People are already sorted out into “identity-community boxes”. Interfaith, as far as I understand it, is about building bridges and tearing down walls, encouraging humanization and building mutual respect. It is about achieving pluralism rather than particularism. I get the sense that OB and some other commenters believe that our society is already characterized by humanistic attitudes and pluralist recognition, and that interfaith efforts amounts to encouraging segregation. That seems to me like a wholly backwards understanding of interfaith efforts and of our current circumstances.
Andrew:
But Ophelia, among others, has noted the fundamental un-necessity of all such “boxes” that are built on religion:
Moreover, there is ample demographic basis to recognize that religious “identity-community boxes” are quickly becoming less and less relevant to the industrialized world. Why reinforce them, when (at such long last) they’re dying?
Oddly you ignore all of this, content to yawn about “identity-community boxes” that simply exist, ho hum. I don’t understand why.
And Ophelia pointed out the manner in which such efforts necessarily build walls by reiterating religion’s authority and privilege to pigeonhole all of us. That’s bad, whether you’re interested in actually addressing the points made in the original post or not.
I have no idea why; I see no indication of this from anyone here. (The lack of “humanistic attitudes” in myriad portions of “our society” is arguably, I’d say, the single most common focus of this blog.)
Are you seriously alleging otherwise? My goodness, how could it not “encourage segregation” to organize social efforts around faith? Divisions between religious sects themselves aside, perhaps you’ve heard of these people called “atheists”? And how a whole lot of us don’t think we have (indeed, we are rather adamant that we want nothing to do with) “faith”?
How a purported (correct me if I’m wrong) atheist can read a line like “Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews building a Habitat for Humanity house together across religious lines” and not even conceptualize how that could possibly involve segregation I just can’t understand. Hello? Do nonbelievers even rate a place in your conception of society?
Clearly it does. When I read your work I’m continually struck by how buried you are in religious privilege and how difficult you find it to even conceptualize why anyone would ever dispute the authority of religious figures and “communities” to define and control all of our lives.
Rieux I am sorry but nearly all of what you said seems like twisted reasoning.
Could you or someone elaborate on this? How does encouraging communities to work together build walls and oppress us? It is when communities do not work together that they grow antagonistic and “entrenched”. Interfaith efforts are about expanding the ‘in-group’ and not letting differences in world-view restrict our scope of empathy and respect.
I remain unconvinced that interfaith efforts are counter-productive. I get the impression that because interfaith efforts acknowledge religious groups rather than try to dismantle them, you think those efforts serve to legitimize religious authority and privilege. I think the effect of interfaith efforts is precisely the opposite. When my student group at college during my undergraduate years organized a couple inter-religious dialogues between theists and non-theists, what we experienced is that each group had unfounded stereotypes about the other that was partly due to lack of personal exposure to ‘the other’. However as the dialogues continued and then an off-shoot group named “Believers and Nonbelievers in Dialogue” started meeting monthly afterwards, participants developed friendships amongst each other despite differences in world-view, and that in turn altered their perspective and actions toward ‘the other’ since. ‘The other’ eventually become ‘one of us’ because we concluded that we shared many concerns, aspirations, and values. When religious and non-religious people came together and engaged each other with mutual respect, walls were torn down and perspectives were changed for the better. I suspect that you have not participated in or personally observed interfaith efforts. If that is true, then maybe you would arrive at different conclusions about the effects of said efforts.
I could think of no other way to make sense of the idea that interfaith efforts encourage divisions. What some of you have said makes it sound like those divisions and antagonisms do not already exist, and that interfaith efforts somehow create them out of thin air. The lack of “humanistic attitudes” is most certainly a concern of mine too. That is why I think interfaith is a good thing.
If you watched the video by President Obama that is posted on the page the first link in this article posts to, then you would hear that Obama explicitly acknowledged the non-religious in the US. Chris Stedman greatly participated in interfaith efforts as an atheist. Atheists are not forbidden from participating in these efforts – in fact they seem to be encouraged to. Maybe the term ‘faith’ is unsettling because the non-religious do not value faith as a method of believing. I can sympathize with that concern, and maybe we could come up with a better term to describe people of different world-views coming together in a respectful and constructive manner.
And once again, there’s no need to question my atheism. That is getting old. Just because I’m not anti-religious or anti-theist, does not change the fact that I do not believe in any gods and that I care deeply about non-theists.
I am struck by how you can even perceive what I’ve said and done to mean any of that. Puh-leez.
The term “community” is degraded.
For example, politicians talk about the “real estate development community” when they really mean the “real estate development special interest group.”
Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with special interest groups (of any kind so long as legal) but terming it a “community” seems to me to puff it up and give it some sort of moral stature.
How else do we describe a group of individuals that espouse a shared identity, morality, belief-structure, set of rituals, weekly meetings, perceived significance in the universe, goals, interests, activities/outings/retreats/charity efforts? If that isn’t a community, I’m not sure what would satisfy your standard for one!
Andrew Lovely:
And you suggest that real estate developers “espouse a shared identity…perceived significance in the universe….charity efforts?”
I think not.
David Sucher:I was referring to religious communities. I’m not sure I’d refer to real estate developers as a community, but after all… they share the other half-dozen characteristics of a community that I listed.
Andrew Lovely.
My comment referred specifically to using the term “real estate development community.”
Andrew:
As has been explained to you repeatedly, the very practice of treating religious identity groups as organic “communities” perpetuates and strengthens the power that religion and religious believers hold over the rest of us.
Then, there is the presence of the government as the active party imposing the religious-community structure over this matter (an issue Ophelia emphasized in her post, and you have ignored). Contrary to your pretense, it is not an inevitable reality that America is divided into religious “communities,” much less that it makes sense for the government to give its imprimatur to such divisions.
That’s a far better synopsis of what your opponents are saying than the bizarre “[you guys] believe that our society is already characterized by humanistic attitudes and pluralist recognition” thing you claimed in your previous comment to be seeing. We’re making some headway on getting through to you—which is heartening.
Of course, there’s no obligation (especially on the part of a secular and church-state-separated government) to actively try to dismantle religious communities, but treating people as people rather than as citizens of Christianitaria and Judaismland would at least be a step toward not promoting religious segregation.
I feel the need to point out the massive goalpost shift you just carried out—clearly without even realizing it—within the space of two sentences there. “Interfaith” became “inter-religious” (itself a malapropism, but never mind) “dialogues between theists and non-theists,” and you didn’t notice that you’d just turned an apple into the Orange Bowl. But I’ll have to address that below.
Yes, that’s nice. But then, surely it would have been far better for all of us if the relevant believers had merely considered their religious beliefs irrelevant to social organization, disbanded (or just never founded) their religious group(s), and instead formed community organizations based on things that can actually be established on openly verifiable grounds. (See Dawkins, cited above: “spectacularly unnecessary.”) Your atheist group would then have been unnecessary as well.
But of course religious people have no obligation to see things that way, and they choose to band together (and categorize others, including us) based on religious belief. Given that, fine: it sounds like the “inter-religious [sic]” events you held met the needs of the respective organizations’ members. Swell.
That rather fails to make it an ideal approach to human social organization, and it fails to justify action by the government to reinforce religious division.
Of course we do. That’s precisely why “spectacularly unnecessary” religious pigeonholing is a tragedy in and of itself.
You’re wrong, and by returning to the word “interfaith” you’re piling up the facepalms.
Only if you don’t actually pay attention. Hell, in the space of one comment your paraphrase of your opponents’ position went from the absurd and out-of-left-field “our society is already characterized by humanistic attitudes and pluralist recognition” to “because interfaith efforts acknowledge religious groups rather than try to dismantle them, … those efforts serve to legitimize religious authority and privilege.”
Why you “could[n’t] think of” the latter before my comment I don’t understand. The OP and more than one of the comments above spelled it out rather clearly.
Yes, I was on the National Mall in January 2009 when he mentioned us in his inaugural address (quoting himself from The Audacity of Hope). I’m aware he pays us lip service. That’s somewhat cold comfort in light of faith-based initiatives, and the fundamentalist hegemony within the U.S. military, and “In God We Trust” on money, and “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and atheist parents denied custody of their children in open court because said parents are not religious, and….
But sure, the President gave us some lip service, and he has met with representatives of atheist organizations. That’s a small step above previous Presidents, but it’s hardly a recognition of our full membership in the American community.
More to the point here, when such statements represent a prescriptive means of categorization rather than a demographic description of Americans’ religious outlooks, they are not self-evidently benign.
Oy.
Um, never mind sympathy. I think a more natural expectation on our part is that you recognize the brutally obvious objection that the adjective “interfaith” can’t possibly apply to dialogue with atheists. Recognize it, that is, some time before several hundred words into your nth comment on the thread.
This is the kind of issue—certainly the most prominent one that’s come up in this exchange—that renders me entirely befuddled about the thought process that’s going on in your head, the manner in which you conceptualize this entire arena. In this thread you have repeatedly referred to interfaith efforts in which atheists have taken part. Atheists… interfaith. Atheists… interfaith. Again and again. How in the world did you miss the fundamental contradiction in the linguistic construction you were using? Thousands, if not millions, of atheists—for reasons that are all but self-evident—are never going to accept that our lives, ideas, organizations, or “communities” can, on simple logical grounds, ever be a part of anything “interfaith.”
I just can’t imagine why that simple and overwhelmingly predictable problem wasn’t immediately—as in within a second or two of initially formulating the thought—obvious to you. I have a very difficult time understanding why that didn’t happen, why it took you multiple comments and hundreds of words to even mention it.
When you come at these issues, you continually ignore issues that are simply obvious to huge numbers of atheists—even, in some cases, when they’ve been explained in some detail. All of that prompts questions as to what’s going on, why you have overlooked such blatant elements of the discussion.
Oh, please. I did not “question” your atheism. I just was careful not to put words in your mouth. You’re an atheist. Fine.
I can easily accept that you do not believe in any gods. I am far from convinced that you care to a meaningful extent about the welfare of non-theists.
Please, indeed. When you repeatedly trot out mind-blowing howlers like declaring atheists part of “interfaith” efforts, what exactly do you expect your fellow nonbelievers to think about you? I have a hard time seeing that (and then, of course, the infamous concern-trolling you directed at Gnus a handful of weeks ago) as anything but a symptom of being fairly strangled by religious privilege. Atheism as “interfaith”—what is that but an utter surrender to religious hegemony, an acceptance that religion has the power and authority to impose its ideas and structures on us?
When you so frequently communicate an abiding love for Big Brother, it’s hard to accept that you really care about us Winstons and Julias at all.
We do interfaith work all the time without having a need to call it interfaith work. There are people from different backgrounds at our workplaces, schools and clubs and there’s just no reason to make a big deal out of the things we do not have in common. I have no idea what the religious affiliations of most of the people I work with are. I don’t know of most of my friends or even my family members if they believe in God or not.
It’s only the very religious for whom keeping their religious views private seems impossible and having big interfaith cooperation efforts to accommodate for their beliefs is unnecessary and really sends the wrong message. Nobody should expect the rest of the world to adjust to their personal religious beliefs.
That there would even be a need for interfaith anything reveals the divisive nature of religions.
It’s “communities” versus “community”. Communities are definitions, identities, and people see these as more important than common humanity. So we get “representatives” and “reaching out”, which merely confirm the separateness. I think Obama does not dishonour his mother by recognising that she is alone: he dishonours her by refusing the burden of that aloneness and allowing himself to be defined as belonging to some “community”, thus identifying himself as different from “outsiders”. Is this the point where he becomes a mere politician, selling his integrity for power?
I think this brings out something that was bugging me about the accommodationism issue- I couldn’t quite put my finger on it before.
People have been saying that if atheists want to work alongside religious people on shared interests, for example conservation or hosuebuilding, then apparently atheists must not object if religious people bring God into it; if they start talking about divine purpose and so on, it would be rude and divisive for atheists to disagree. We should seek common ground.
But the common ground here is the issue that we’re supposed to be working on together- conservation, or (in the OP here) building houses together. The divisive part is when people bring gods and religions into it.
IOW, if you’re religious and you’re working on a community or “interfaith” project, work on the project already!
No atheist ever kicked off a housebuilding project by saying “Let’s take a moment to not give thanks to the absence of gods”. Mooney and his ilk have been telling the wrong people to accommodate others’ views.
Why divide people into communities? Get with the program, Ophelia — People have been conceiving of society as an association of communities rather than of individuals for a long time. A Conservative prime minister of Canada has defined Canada as a community of communities. In this use, of course, “community” is meaningless. If it means a community of interest it’s clearly wrong, for example. The prime minister in question, though, led his party to the scrap heap of history. Still, the current Conservative Party of Canada seems to hold on to other ideas of the same type, such as the idea that Canada has tw founding peoples — English and French. Easily disproved by history, but they cling. The current prime minoster even passed a bill recognizing Quebec as a distinct nation.
Of course, this simlifies life for politicians. If Canada is an association of two founding peoples, the federal government need only deal with the government of Quebec. In Canada most governments represent minorities of the population, but if Quebec is a community then its government is an expression of the community.
And I’ll add that the party structure in the US is founded in part on racial lines, which explains all these people whining that the US is no longer “the America I grew up in.” Maybe Obama is trying to get faith communities to substitute for the racial ones.
Maybe that’s our problem.
The only ‘major’ section of the religious that have a problem with this public prayer issue is the the extremist liberal wings of various denominations. The moderates think its fine. Compare this with atheists. There is simply no comparable grouping of atheists that would advocate such a non-religious ‘prayer’ like the one suggested by SAWells, neither the accomodationists nor the gnus.
In political terms this may be a bad strategic policy. What I mean here is that practical measures to remove government endorsement of religion seem to be easier to achieve when it is done for negative reasons rather than positive. In other words the quickest way to achieve the removal of government endorsed prayer would be to force the government to endorse prayers from every religion.
Being forced to endure prayers for hundreds of differing Gods, Lucifer and the Flying Spaghetti Monster would most likely result in prayers as a whole being abandoned. This is what seems to be happening in the various ‘War against Christmas’ skirmishes whenever non Christians gain the right to a display and in some areas where the appearance of an atheist bus slogan leads to the banning of all religious advertisements (although I don’t think there is much of a push from atheists to ban private religious advertisements – that is a free speech issue.)
It is simple to discriminate against atheist points of view on the prayer issue since that is the current societal norm in the US. It is not so simple when other, non Christian, religions are involved. Perhaps atheists should get involved in interfaith discussions but only in the guise of followers of the FSM.
Gordon: I think your “communities”-versus-“community” distinction is catchy and describes the problem at issue in this thread rather well.
That’s a fair point; in my initial comment I may not have done a great job of putting a fine point on the dishonor. I still think, though, that noting Dunham’s aloneness without giving slightest hint that he realizes (or cares) how unjust and stupid the whole organizational method is is at the core of where he goes wrong in that passage.
Maybe. He sure didn’t cover himself in glory by converting to Christianity precisely when it was most convenient and useful for his political career. All other things aside, either political expediency or trying to avoid “be[ing] consigned at some level to always remain apart” is an extremely dubious reason to conclude that Christ has died for your sins.
Thanks for # 9, Rieux. I agree about the dishonor. The whole passage is shot through with it, albeit subtly.
She was “alone” in the sense of not having a substantial portion of the US electorate prepared to vote for her.
I tried to comment on #9 this morning. I think this is particularly powerful.
Thank you Rieux. This is something, after reading what he says about his mother, that he should have taken to heart. I sometimes wonder whether Obama is as religious as he sounds, or whether this is just a pose that is required of him by the electorate? But, certainly, having written the words that Rieux quotes, Obama should sit a bit more loosely to religious beliefs than he appears to do. Would he have been left out in the cold but for his attachment to a church community? What a sad comment on the power of religion in today’s America.
(If this comes out with the html showing, it’s because there is no way for me to switch from visual to html. Still having big problems with Butterflies and Wheels.)
Sorry about problems Eric. No html showing.
There’s a lot in that passage that Rieux quoted that I want to pick at. It’s subtly horrible.
About this “interfaith” thing – as Andrew sagely but belatedly admitted, “interfaith” might be a word that atheists don’t want to sign up to. Well spotted! As Rieux eloquently pointed out.
The funny thing is, the Harvard humanists are aware of this. We had a little chat about it last week on Facebook – John Figdor I think it was: he told me the HHs realize that might be a tricky word and perhaps they should find another one. Well yes. Meanwhile…it would be nice if they would stop leaning on everyone to jump on the “interfaith” bandwagon. Really, guys – we don’t want your “interfaith.”
If you don’t keep insisting on this community-sorting project, you won’t entrench people in their communities and make them all prickly and defensive about their everlasting precious communities.
Being a human still means being a part of some kind of “tribe” which we today call “communities” (and many are religious groups). We can’t erase that reality in one fell swoop. Focusing these communities on something productive and cooperative is a positive thing. Having non-believers involved gives us the very opening we desire to teach about non-theism and secular humanism. That’s not necessarily a bad thing!
That said, calling it “inter-faith,” however, is really unproductive. Why can’t it just be “community-wide?”
Jeff, I don’t buy it, at least not in that form. Yes humans like to join tribes, but in complicated societies we have the ability to join multiple tribes and thus dilute the xenophobia of all of them. I think it’s far more reasonable to emphasize that fact than it is to keep insisting that religions are not only communites but THE communities. There’s no need to keep telling people to think of themselves as religious first of all. On the contrary, there’s need to stop doing that. I think the Harvard Humanists have all this backward.
If the only way that “faith communities” can be induced to cooperate is through the mediating efforts of an outside, nominally secular, body, then that by itself says something about how dangerous and destructive “faith communities” can be, if left to themselves.
For example, the problems caused by the sectarianism inherent in religion.
It’s like a stimulus program for religion.
I agree with the comments saying nearly everything I’ve ever done has been ‘inter-faith’. Work, school, sports, etc. I’ve worked and played alongside of people from many walks of life and faith traditions, but it was never thought necessary to point out these differences. They were irrelevant to the activities at hand.
And yes, if they started making a big deal out of the ‘inter-faith’ nature of, say, the humane society where I volunteer, I would feel a lot less comfortable. How can someone without faith be part of anything between faiths?
Imagine an ‘inter-fan’ program to build houses. Fans of any and all cricket teams are welcome to participate, even folks like me who don’t really watch cricket. But why would I want to? The organizing principle for such an activity has no bearing on the project, and only serves to make an a-cricketer like me feel like an afterthought.
It may be the case that these sort of efforts are needed to keep the fans from one team from trying to murder opposing fans (or is that just soccer fans?), but I don’t see what a non fan gains. Build your bridges between faiths if you think it will help somehow, but for folks like me, without a faith to build a bridge to, I just don’t see the point in another bridge to nowhere.
Drop the faith angle and focus on shared values and I’ll be more likely to lend a hand. Keep focusing on the irrelevant aspects that divide some and exclude others and I’ll sit this one out.
Is this another aspect of Dennett’s ‘belief in belief’ idea? If faith is good, then many faiths together must be double plus good? Inter-faith is good, regardless of the content of the faiths? Don’t even address the content of the faiths, just pat yourselves on the back and say ‘look what the faithful can do!”
These are some condescending bridges you folks want to build.
Did you ever have one of those family gatherings where no one in the family particularly gets along with one another, and it’s all tight smiles and narrowed eyes at each other for the whole day?
That’s what I imagine “interfaith” outreach efforts must be like among high religious mucky-mucks. They’re putting on a strained face for anyone who’s watching, but really they just can’t wait to be at each others’ throats again.
To the extent they address their faiths it would have to be strained. And if all they do is address their shared values, values which we are also assumed to share, then their faith is an irrelevant distraction.
Heh. Yes, and yes.
[…] wanted to say a bit more about that passage from Obama’s Audacity of Hope that Rieux quoted yesterday. And yet for all her professed secularism, my mother was in many ways the most spiritually awakened […]
Hey Ophelia. I’m sorry if you took Greg and I advocating that atheists engage in Interfaith (I prefer “Inter-World-View” or just “Service” personally…) to mean that we are demanding that YOU have to engage in service. Nothing could be further from our intention. Let’s be honest, there are different kinds of atheist activists. Some of us are really good at writing incisive, witty articles on the internet (you, PZ). But others of us prefer to advocate for atheism by directly confronting religious people not on the internet, but in person. This is no slight to what you do. Both kinds of activism are necessary. All that Greg and I are saying is if you feel a drive to help your fellow human beings, and you want to make your atheist activism a part of that drive, consider working with a local atheist group that does BOTH atheist/Humanist Service and Inter-World-View Service.
Keep on fighting the good fight, Ophelia. Love the blog.
Hey John, no, I don’t think that, and I agree about the division of labor. I do think Obama, being the president and all, should not be doing official faith-based stuff, but that’s a different matter. We agree on most things. I think some of the “we’re not the anti-religion type atheists” language risks adding to the opprobrium that explicit atheists get, but I also think that’s not what you (plural) intend by it.