To Believe or Not to Believe

On cable last night we watched a documentary on atheism, which turned out to be mostly about Madelyn Murray O’hair, who in 1963 successfully petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that prayer and bible reading in public schools violated the separation of church and state clause in the Constitution. While I applauded her legal effort at the time, I felt little connection with her theatrical protests against the domination of our society by certain religious beliefs.

The controversy about church and state remains to this day; yet I have never felt coerced to observe any particular religious beliefs. I grew up in a family that considered itself Christian, and was baptized when I was thirteen. Later, I began to question some of those beliefs, and eventually decided that I no longer fit my own definition of “Christian.” My spiritual journey continues. The label “atheist” has never been comfortable for me, even when I rejected all the images conjured up by the religious institutions I knew about. I joined the American Humanist Association in my twenties, and a Unitarian-Universalist fellowship in my forties, but otherwise have pursued my own way in search of Ultimate Meaning. I have no quarrel with those who choose a different path, as long as theirs does not require my conformity.

O’hair and her associates in the American Atheists organization made a big issue of proclaiming that “there is no God.” To believe that there is no God is not the same, in my mind, as not believing that there is a God. Neither do I insist that it is unknowable. For me, at this time, it’s an unanswered question—or, rather, I think that the question itself is perhaps naïve. Maybe we don’t know enough yet to frame the question properly.

Will I live beyond death? Not to my knowledge, and I’m comfortable with not knowing as well as with the possibility that I will not. Do I have a soul? That’s more difficult, because it depends upon what a soul is. Perhaps when (and, yes, if) scientists manage to demonstrate just what we refer to when we talk about consciousness and self. These seem to be more manageable—if not yet answered—questions. We still know so little about the human mind that to speculate beyond that involves great leaps of faith.

Sam Harris, in a couple of recent books, insists that religious beliefs are causing humanity a lot of suffering. He recommends that we eliminate them. Another naïve notion, in my mind. We all have beliefs of one kind or another. His is that we must look to science to answer all questions. I’ll lean on my own belief that American-style democracy provides me with the freedom to make up my own mind, in my own time, about such big questions.

I choose to keep looking around, and to keep asking the questions that occur to me.

Water? What Water?

“Wen I was yer age, we didn’t have running water. I hadta lug a couple a old gallon jugs up to the spring to get water for Mom to cook.”

We’ve all heard these old stories of how life was “in the old days.” I’ve even told a few, myself. Life was different, in some ways, sixty years ago—in ways the young people of today can’t even imagine.

Before cell phones? If you were away from home or work and needed to call somebody, you looked around for a phone booth. And they had to be home to answer. If your mom wanted you home for dinner, she stuck her head out the door and yelled your name. (If it was around that time, you’d better be close enough to hear her.) Before iPods? You could, if you wanted to be conspicuous, carry a battery-operated radio around, a box the size of a small suitcase, weighing five pounds or more. If you wanted to listen in private, your headphones would have made you even more conspicuous. (Yeah, I did it. I know.)

A couple of middle-aged friends of mine were marveling the other day how much daily life has changed in the past five or ten years, and wondering what it would look like in another five or ten years. They were talking about the ubiquity of cell phones and text messaging, features of life among the twenty-somethings that are taken totally for granted. About the only thing that is certain about the next decade is that there will be middle-aged people marveling at how much life has changed since 2007 and wondering what it would look like in 2027. I’m not even going to guess.

I’ve been intrigued by computers for thirty years, and I put up my own web site about ten years ago. But the phenomenon of blogs (short for weblogs) seems another country to me. I read nearly every day in my favorite print media about the influence of ordinary people on politics and business through these Internet outlets (and inlets), how broadcast and mass-printed media are losing not only consumers but their traditional authority in our culture.

Time magazine, in its January 1, 2007 issue, named “YOU” its person of the year. In his editorial, Richard Stengel explained that “the creators and consumers of user-generated content [of the World Wide Web] are transforming art and politics and commerce, that they are the engaged citizens of a new digital democracy.” (A newspaper columnist accused Time of “pandering” to its readers in order to boost sales.)

What strikes me is how unconscious we are of the environment we’re in. In 1965, Marshall McLuhan, a professor from Canada, reminded us that water is something that fish, of all people, know nothing about. (The joke was repeated in a slightly modified form by David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College a couple of years ago.)

McLuhan also pointed out, forty years ago, that we tend to see the world in a kind of mental rear-view mirror, that “reality” is just the context through which we interpret our experiences, and for most of us that context is the past. The young people, especially, absorb the current milieu without consciously relating it to the past because they don’t have much past. The current world just is; the apples are ripe and why not pick them and eat them?—just because I’m hungry. Notions of property and propriety have to be learned, force-fed by our elders who see the world in that rear-view mirror.

It’s the flip side of that coin that tells us that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. The Machine Age of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revolutionized the world, and the results weren’t all pretty. The Information Age may not make a world that some of us would prefer. But I suspect that it will have its way with us, both those of us who are ready and those who keep glancing over our shoulders at the predictable past.

Water? What water?

A Long, Drawn-Out Solstice

The winter solstice this year came on about December 22. It was the shortest day of the year, but not by much. There’s a ten-day stretch in which the earliest sunsets and latest sunrises of the year are within a minute of each other.

What I find interesting is that, while these time markers are nearly stationary at the solstice, they are both actually going in the same direction--later. In Southeast Michigan we had our earliest sunset around December 10, at 5:02 PM. At the solstice, the sun has begun its upward journey, and sets at 5:05 PM. Our latest sunrise, however, will be on January 4, at 8:04 AM. At the solstice, it is still getting later, at 8:01 AM. Midway between those two dates falls the solstice.

At the other solstice in June, the same phenomenon occurs: earliest sunrise and latest sunset are both getting earlier. June 15 gives us our earliest sunrise, at 4:57 AM, and the latest sunset comes on June 27, at 8:16 PM. Midway between these dates is the longest day of the year, on June 21.

It all has to do with the curvature of the earth and how the sun’s rays reach around the horizon. I don’t know enough geometry to figure it out for myself, so I depend upon the U.S. Navel Observatory to provide me with a chart of sun times. If you want to find out what these times are for your location, go to their web site:

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.html

Getting my feet wet

I don't know why this makes me nervous. I write all the time, and much of what I write is published on my web site. My intention here is to be more spontaneous--maybe that's what makes me nervous. Spontaneity is not my strongest attribute. But nevertheless, here goes.

Obviously, I'll be back. Soon