Humanist Society of Santa Barbara
Newsletter for June 2002

• Social Scene
• Chairman's Column
• Here and There - This and That

• Miscellaneous Notes
• Letters to the Editor

It's simple isn't it? An atheist is just someone who does not believe in god. What more need be said?

The short answer is, "a lot." Different people claiming to be atheists actually may have quite different philosophical viewpoints. Worse, societal connotations associated with the word "atheist" may carry far more weight than the atheist himself may want to associate with the label. And where does "agnosticism" fit into the various atheism definitions? And what is the relationship between "atheism" and "humanism?" And, finally, why are all these questions important?

To motivate this discussion, I'll tackle the last question first. Recently, a survey was conducted to determine US voter willingness to cast a ballot for President of the United States for someone in various categories such as Jew, black, female, homosexual, etc. The absolute lowest category of acceptance was atheist; fewer than half of the US population would even consider voting for an atheist for President of the United States.

As a specific example of this prejudice, Star Jones (a TV personality I have never seen and know nothing about) is reported to have recently said on a nationally syndicated program that she "...would never vote for an atheist." There was no reaction from the media, civil rights groups, the ACLU, or the like. Only atheists launched a protest and it was only noted within the atheist community. But simply change the word "atheist" to "Jew" or "black" or "homosexual" and there would have been a firestorm of protest.

Clearly, atheism has a bad name. It probably has its modern roots in the Cold War which pitted the West against godless communism although nonbelievers have been subject to persecution ever since the notion of religion and god began. Remember that the US Congress gave its highest possible award to Pope John Paul II for his fight against (and I quote the citation itself) "godless communism."

Humanist cannot find any comfort in all of this because I think that the general population does not differentiate between an atheism and a humanism. In fact, I suspect that the situation is even worse. Everybody (speaking figuratively) knows what an atheist is but very few people have even heard of "Humanism" so we are generally lumped together with all those other "bad guys" as being all the same lot.

My own personal experience reinforces this. If I say to someone that I am a Humanist, I get a blank stare. If I say, "Think atheist" they have an immediate understanding even though the two concepts certainly are not synonymous.

Next month, we'll continue by exploring the relationship between atheism and humanism and delve into their implications.

"Stephen Jay Gould was remembered as "paleontology's public intellectual," a scientist with a passion for evolutionary science and a talent for expressing complex theories in creative and accessible ways."

Harvard Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould Dies
By Tim Mclaughlin
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&ncid=753&e=3& u=/nm/20020520/sc_nm/people_gould_dc_3

"Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who unlocked the mysteries of evolution for millions of readers with essays on the panda's extra thumb and helped bring natural history museums to popular audiences, died on Monday at his home in New York after a long battle with cancer."

Item: According to the NY Times: Pope John II has declared that civil lawyers who are Roman Catholic must refuse to take divorce cases. "We cannot surrender to the divorce mentality," said the Pope to the Roman Rota, the tribunal that hears marriage annulment cases. Catholic judges "must find effective means to favor the marriage union..."

A papal spokesperson said that this was an application of a principle of "not allowing us to cooperate with something that is evil." Divorced Catholics who remarry cannot receive communion.

As an example of the Pope's opposition to divorce, in October the Pope met separately with Vincent Fox, the President of Mexico, and the President's wife, Marta Sahagun, because they were both previously divorced before marrying each other.

Comment: Imagine anyone else refusing to meet with a head of state and their wife at the same time because they had previously been married to other persons! If this were anyone but the Pope, no one would be blamed if they said that this concern was perverse. The right thing to do would have been for President Fox to tell the Pope, "Get over it!" Instead, the Pope gets accommodated! Mr. Fox and his wife are known to be devout Catholics, but I suppose they'll be bumming in hell with the Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, attorneys who handle divorce cases, judges who rule on them and of course, atheists. The Pope has NOT announced that he will not meet with those Bishops who have been part of child sexual abuse cover-ups. And there's at least one judge who has some issues with the Pope. Read on...

An English professor wrote these words on the blackboard:

"A woman without her man is nothing"

He then directed the students to correctly punctuate the statement.

A man wrote, "A woman, without her man, is nothing"

A woman wrote "A woman: without her, man is nothing".

Punctuation is everything.

Associated Press: For Immediate Release: March, 2002

French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan to Convince Taliban of Non-Existence of God

Kabul---The clean-up portion of the ground war in Afghanistan heated up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of the remaining Taliban zealots by proving the non-existence of God.

Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or "Black Berets," will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of sidewalk cafes at strategic points near the front lines.

There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will propagate fear, uncertainty and doubt by looking remote and unattainable.

Their leader, Colonel Marc-Ange Belmondo, spoke yesterday of his confidence in the success of their mission. Sorbonne graduate Belmondo, a very intense and unshaven young man in a black pullover, gesticulated wildly and said, "The Taliban are caught in a logical fallacy of the most ridiculous proportions. There is no God and I can prove it." Marc-Ange plans to deliver an impassioned thesis on man's inescapable lack of freedom of action, with special reference to the work of Foucault and the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

However, humanitarian agencies have been quick to condemn the operation as inhumane, pointing out that the effects of passive smoke from the Frenchmens' endless Gauloises and Gitanes could wreak a terrible toll on civilians in the area.

The May 2002 issue of Church and State is concerned with the strategy by the religionists of switching from Creationism to something called Intelligent Design, possibly to distance themselves from such Creationists as one Patricia Fuller, who told the school board in Cobb County, Georgia, that "God created Earth and man in his image. Leave this [evolution] garbage out of the textbooks. I don't want anybody taking care of me in a nursing home some day to think I came from a monkey."

Now that's an interesting thought. Patricia's advance from the monkey stage was so recent that it ranks only a footnote in the story of evolution. We can trace her all the way back to bacteria, creatures with whom she will have to share her nursing home.

The (as yet) unsolved mystery is the one of how bacteria came to be, rather than what they have become. However, humankind's insatiable curiosity (its only truly god-like attribute) will have the answer to that some day.

Of course, it is absolutely incredible that people presumed to be intelligent can ignore all the evidence so laboriously and carefully gathered concerning origins, including that of the universe itself. I think it maybe because they fear to be curious. Certainly when they embrace religion they agree to accept the dogma that all the answers are already known, and that to question them is to court death, either in this world or in some imaginary place beyond.

The Intelligent Designers purport "that life on earth is too complex to have evolved through natural selection, and therefore, must be the product of a 'designer'." I think they might better label their movement Idiot Design. To quote that eminent theologian Woody Allen, "If there is a god, he is an underachiever."

Any designer who managed to dump ninety-nine point nine percent of all species creations into the trash heap certainly has had a long enough trial period to come up with something better than we have been handed. It's remarkable that we do as well as we do with what we have.

Another thought: "faith" to a humanist means trust. To a religionist it means belief in the unbelievable.