The Rapture Edition

As you may know by now, there's a group of mostly American Christians who expect to go to heaven tomorrow (Saturday, May 21, 2011). Left behind to suffer for about five months of floods, earthquakes, fires, and pestilence will be everyone else, including but not limited to the Humanists, the Muslims, the Jews, the Hindus, the Rastafarians, and the Scientologists. Then we'll go to hell and the world will come to an end.

Such a nice theology. 

Rapture cults exhibit the epitome of the exclusionary thinking by which established religious groups grow their mystique. You have to be just so, or you can't have the good stuff that we control. Maybe your mother needs to be of a certain ethnic heritage, or your parents have to baptize you in the correct liquid, or you have to be publicly penitent about something bad that you pretend that you did, or you need to wear a tent in public. Whatever. It's all meant to exert control over your mind, over your behavior, and most of all over your community and culture. The requirements for religious membership become ingrained in community norms, and their obvious foolishness eventually disappears. Everybody drinks the Koolaid.

Why is the Rapture fetish considered so particularly weird? How is it really different from believing that we fly up to heaven after we die, or are reborn in the bodies of others, or can be martyred if we kill someone who doesn't share our religious convictions? 

Come on, people, let's find drama in other places and drop this ridiculous exclusionary cult stuff. My tribe is the human tribe. What's yours?

Marketing God to the Heathens

Hey, have you noticed that my blog about humanism attracts a lot of interesting advertisements from faith-based organizations? Google has an unusual algorithm in place. Today, there are ads for no fewer than three online theology courses, five churches, a pitch for the Lutheran financial planning firm Thrivent (great name, huh?), and my favorite, an ad for a "Christian alternative to bankruptcy." The terms of service don't allow me to click on my own ads, but I'm dying to find out what the Christian alternative to bankruptcy actually is. Someone please let me know!

Secular Studies Hits Higher Ed

The New York Times recently reported on Pitzer College's new department of secular studies. This is terrific news. It's baffling that legitimate places of higher education include theology departments along with science-based programs. That's like offering a major in astronomy with a concentration in astrology. At least the medical school programs that are dipping their toes in non-traditional therapies are making efforts to study their effectiveness, or lack thereof. How can any university--other than a religious one--proudly offer religious studies outside of their sociology or cultural anthropology or history or literature or music programs? Because religion is definitely worth looking at as an historic and cultural phenomenon (I would have said oddity, but it's obviously the secularists who are the odd people out, numbers-wise). But please, let's not offer theological courses as part of a fact-based field of inquiry. Thank you, wise people of Pitzer!

Good News! A.C. Grayling writes the Good Book

Here's a book that looks interesting, by philosopher A.C. Grayling.

From an article in the Guardian:

Atheists, according to Grayling, divide into three broad categories. There are those for whom this secular objection to the privileged status of religion in public life is the driving force of their concern. Then there are those, "like my chum Richard Dawkins", who are principally concerned with the metaphysical question of God's existence. "And I would certainly say there is an intrinsic problem about belief in falsehood." In other words, even if a person's faith did no harm to anybody, Grayling still wouldn't like it. "But the third point is about our ethics – how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that really concerns me the most."

The Brainwashing of Babies

One sunny afternoon when my son was barely four years old, I was behind the wheel of the preschool carpool with a load of kids. A little girl in the back seat started talking about God. My ears perked up and I listened to her self-assured mini-sermon about the importance of going to church and believing in Jesus. I silently hoped that she'd stop while still on the basics, but no: she dropped the nuclear option: believe in God or go to hell.  My son, for whom most talk of the supernatural was simply premature, was completely silent. Dear Lord, I thought, how much damage control will I have to do to reassure my son that his friend was not full-on crazy?

Not much later our family started talking in earnest about creation. We kept our discussions to what we could observe--which, when dealing with a preschooler is a pretty awesome talk. Why did he think that the bugs behaved the way they did? Where did the moon come from? Did he remember where he was before he was born? Ever think about how, when everything living dies, it becomes food for another living thing?

It was cool. It was the start of creating a personal theology, based on experience and observation. We left the lies out. (Except, as you know by now, we left Santa in, because Santa rocks.)

You wonder how your kids will turn out if you leave their spiritual education up to them. Will they end up as putty in faith-mongers' hands? Will they become morally-bereft sociopaths? What are they going to miss?

Just last week my now-grown son and I were taking a walk during winter break. As we passed a rather magnificent local church, I proposed that maybe we'd missed out on some friends and an important support network by avoiding organized faith. He laughed, responding, "I get what you're saying, but I would never be able to live with myself if I set aside my self-respect and all reason just for that."

Amen.

Make-believe beliefs stop earlier for some than others. Here's English comedian Ricky Gervais discussing atheism.

Readers: Thanks for your comments and keep the great links coming!