Category Archives: Atheism

In my last column, I made another reference to secularism, and it occurs to me this term and concept deserves further consideration. As it happens, a much-needed book has just been published by Routledge titled Secularism: The Basics by Jacques Berlinerblau. The author was also interviewed in the Jan. 25 edition of the Religion News Service online. My remarks here have been suggested by his book and that interview.

I have made use of the phrase steadfast secularism, intending to mean something that could also be called hard secularism or atheistic secularism. Secularism in its original form referred to the principle of striving to conduct human governmental affairs based on secular, naturalistic considerations, maintaining something of a separation between church and state.

However, there is a form of secularism, which took shape through the 20th century, that goes much further and aggressively maintains the reason for such a separation is because religion of any sort is a pernicious relic of the past and needs to be stamped out of all societies for the welfare of humanity. In the late-20th century, the so-called New Atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, et al) were of this ilk. Of course, earlier in the 20th century, Marxism took the same position.

Contrary to the above, the origin of the idea and term secularism in the English language can be traced to the British writer George Holyoake (1817-1906). He wanted a term and idea that was not as harsh as atheism, but would indicate an approach in government and philosophy whereby there could be cooperation with religions and believers of all types this is soft secularism. He did not intend that a government which accepted secularism as a principle, would seek to shut down religions or their influence on cultures. That further step, hard secularism, took place later in 20th-century fascist movements in Europe and in the communist revolutions in Russia and China. Today, some are noticing aspects of hard secularism filtering into many First World societies.

As Berlinerblau is careful to explain in his new book, there is a world of difference between hard and soft secularism in fact, they are pretty much opposites. Hard secularism seeks to destroy religion, whereas soft secularism seeks to accommodate and cooperate with religion, recognizing its value.

Making matters worse here in the United States, many if not most voters dont understand the difference between hard and soft secularism. This leads to the accusation, coming from the religious right, that the left-leaning Democratic Party wants to ram through atheistic secularism and to persecute religions and religious people. This would be absolutely true if the Democratic Party were aiming to align itself with hard secularism, but it isnt. It is only aiming for soft secularism that is to say, aiming for a government that defends religious freedom and does not align itself with any one religion to the exclusion of the others.

But the Democratic Party and politicians are fumbling this message over and over and they do this at their extreme peril. Americans are a very religious people even the ones who have stopped going to church. Voters in the U.S. are way more religious than western Europeans. So the Democratic Party cannot let itself be overly influenced by what flies in Europe with the public. It wont fly here.

We need to remember those famous words of the rabbi Jesus, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, and unto God the things that are Gods. In a divinely inspired aphorism, that is exactly the type of secularism needed in order for religion and government to understand each other. These are two separate realms which, in 2,000 years of Christian social teaching, have been called the two swords and the two realms: the material and the spiritual. We live in both.

I am very much in favor of secularism, the right kind of secularism: the kind of secularism that reflects the meaning which is right there inside the words etymology. Secular comes from the Latin word saecularis (of an age/era) from the root saeculum (age/era). Secular values are values of an era, of an age, of politics). There are plenty of times when those sorts of values need some guidance from values that have stood the test of multiple eras and multiple political fights values that we sense come from a higher plain, a higher level.

I hasten to add that this does not mean they come from a literalist reading of Christian, Jewish or Islamic scripture. It means that there are core life-affirming and life-preserving values held in common by the worlds great monotheisms and their best teachers and we cannot let governments and corporations trample these values. We did not get the ideas of human rights, human flourishing and human charity from corporate bylaws or political party platforms.

The best sort of secularism recognizes its limitations. It must recognize that it cannot take the place of religious and spiritual value systems. Rather, it realizes that our societies must make a place and places for religion and spiritual development in our private and our public lives. There must be a constant dialog between the secular and the spiritual.

As humans, we live in the secular and the spiritual worlds simultaneously. When we forget that, its not pretty. When political parties forget that they either die, if were lucky; or they become tyrannical and that is very unlucky for us, indeed.

John Nassivera is a former professor who retains affiliation with Columbia Universitys Society of Fellows in the Humanities. He lives in Vermont and part-time in Mexico.

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On Faith: Secularism vs. atheism | Perspective | rutlandherald.com - Rutland Herald

In a Feb. 5 appearance on Glenn Beck's talk show which Beck called "probably the most important podcast perhaps that we've ever done" self-proclaimed critical race theory expert James Lindsay issued a dire warning. While discussing dark right-wing theories about "The Great Reset" and Democratic-run reeducation camps for the unvaccinated, Lindsay warned that a severe reckoning was at hand for the world's elites: "It's coming for them. They're going to lose all of their power. They're going to be exposed for crimes the likes of which we've never seen in human history."

Beck, perhaps a close second to Alex Jones as the reigning conspiracy theorist of the right, seemed to glow with enthusiasm as the two agreed that a revolution was coming and "if they don't have us all in cages, they're in a lot of trouble."

The appearance was one of many Lindsay has conducted in recent days, as he promotes his new book, "Race Marxism: The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Practice," published on Tuesday and, as of Wednesday, the top title in Amazon's "philosophy criticism" section. If his digression into fantasies of bloody revolt against a cadre of bankers, media and George Soros what one Lindsay-watcher called "straight-up Hitler talk" seems like an odd detour, it's one of many he's made over the years: an academic turned intentional academic fraud, a "new atheist" who now counsels Christians on heresy, a blue-no-matter-who Obama volunteer turned intellectual leader of the far right. So meet the man behind the man behind the right's most consuming contemporary moral panic.

RELATED:The critics were right: "Critical race theory" panic is just a cover for silencing educators

In 2018, as a math PhD running a business that fused massage therapy with martial arts, and a supporting character in the foundering New Atheism movement, Lindsay became a national name by pulling off a deft hoax that made liberal academics look dumb. Along with two co-conspirators, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, Lindsay drafted 20 fake research papers with outlandish premises to research canine "rape culture" at dog parks, or a proposition that men use dildos on themselves to overcome transphobia and submitted them to a series of often obscure scholarly journals.

Around a third of the papers were accepted, and in 2018, the hoaxers, all of whom then called themselves liberals although Boghossian was closely associated with accused white supremacist and "race realist" Stefan Molyneux, who has argued that Black people are "collectively less intelligent" than other races revealed the experiment as an expos on the terminal wokeness of academia, particularly the identity-oriented fields that the three called "grievance studies."

The stunt received massive attention, including front-page treatment on The New York Times and airtime on Joe Rogan's podcast. When Vox reporter Zack Beauchamp asked Lindsay whether he feared their prank would become a "tool of the right," Lindsay took umbrage, asking, "Have you seen me go on Tucker Carlson yet? Do you think he hasn't asked?"

RELATED:Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right

Lindsay still hasn't done that, but Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute fellow credited with sparking the right's obsession with "critical race theory," absolutely has. In September 2020, Rufo appeared on Carlson's broadcast with a direct challenge to Donald Trump, demanding that the then-president issue an executive order banning CRT from any federal training programs. The following morning, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was on the phone with Rufo to sort the details out.

But while Rufo has been heralded as the little man behind the big war, Rufo himself credits Lindsay. In a joint August appearance with Lindsay on right-wing personality Jack Murphy's podcast, Rufo said that he had relied on Lindsay's theoretical explanations of CRT in order to craft his more populist appeals.

"James is really the theory expert," Rufo said. "I mean, James is an encyclopedia of theory connecting all the dots laying out the casecreating this giant content to guide all of us into this world. And then I think I come in as a complement to what James is doing, really following his lead with the praxis or the practice, which is translating the theory into the realm of practical politics and then translating this kind of esoteric knowledge that school moms and school dads can use at school board meetings and hammer their school boards with."

RELATED:Meet Christopher Rufo leader of the incoherent right-wing attack on "critical race theory"

Sam Hoadley-Brill, a fellow at the progressive think tank African American Policy Forum, which recently launched an initiative to defend the teaching of CRT against right-wing critics, has tracked Lindsay's evolving arguments for the past two years. These began with the anti-racism protests of the summer of 2020, which initially drew support even from numerous conservatives, but quickly prompted a right-wing backlash. And as corporations began responding to the movement by instituting or publicizing new diversity programs, Lindsay was ready.

That August, Lindsay and Pluckrose published a co-authored book, "Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity and Why This Harms Everyone," that was widely-discussed on the right and landed on several bestseller lists.

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By the following spring, after the new Biden administration had reversed Trump's executive ban on CRT, Lindsay was tapped to narrate a Cliff Notes version of the conservative case against CRT for the right-wing media organization Prager U. In it, he argued that CRT "holds that the most important thing about you is your race"; that the theory was "not a continuation of the civil rights movement" but a "repudiation of it"; and that there hadn't been "a social movement so obsessed with race" since the Nazis or South Africa's apartheid regime. "Defend yourself," Lindsay concluded the video. "While you still can."

Around the same time, reported Peter Montgomery at Right Wing Watch, a speech Lindsay gave at the Leadership Institute a longstanding training ground for young conservative activists was turned into an e-book that the Institute used to recruit potential candidates for a right-wing "school board takeover."

And despite his long association with militant movement atheism including co-writing three books about it in the spring of 2021 Lindsay also waded into Christian communities' internal debates around CRT, warning that the best way to "end Christianity" is to "make [it] woke." As Bob Smietana reported in Religion News Service, Lindsay interjected himself into the Southern Baptist Convention's bitter 2021 feud over CRT, appearing in a documentary and a promotional video created by Founders Ministry, a conservative faction within the denomination that seeks to "return Southern Baptists to their roots." Lindsay also appeared on Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Albert Mohler's YouTube show, where Mohler praised "Cynical Theories" as an "intellectual tour de force."

Smietana's investigation also revealed that Lindsay's website, New Discourses, is owned by right-wing activist Michael O'Fallon, president of the Christian nationalist group Sovereign Nations, who believes that George Soros has bought off most Christian leaders and who seeks "to start a new reformation to counter the social justice movement in the church."

This January, Lindsay followed up by calling on the SBC to oust leaders, including Mohler, who had failed to denounce CRT forcefully enough. "[W]e really don't want to see our large religious institutions taken over by a totalitarian ideology that's trying to infect and command everything," Lindsay said in a New Discourses podcast last month. "We want to have something that can stand up against it."

Lindsay went on to call CRT, which a number of Black Southern Baptists have embraced, "an explicit and intentional act of heresy." Christians who incorporate elements of it or intersectionality into their practices, he continued, "can damn well bet, Christians damned well bet, like condemned, like damned, like y'all demons if you're doing this you're falling for a demonic trick."

In 2021, Hoadley-Brill founded a Substack to debunk anti-CRT claims, starting with Lindsay's. In reference to Lindsay's @ConceptualJames handle on Twitter, where he's an exhaustively prolific commenter, Hoadley-Brill named his website "Conceptual Disinformation." In it and elsewhere, he chronicles the sometimes ridiculous aspects of Lindsay's crusade: He described himself in a virtual New Hampshire legislative committee session as a self-taught "world-level expert in critical race theory"; or his frenetic participation in a Dr. Phil roundtable; or his recent confounding remarks to Beck about "Fasho-Communism."

But Hoadley-Brill is motivated by a deeper concern: that as in the "grievance studies" hoax whose success largely rested on intentionally and grotesquely misrepresenting nuanced academic arguments, even those that deserved legitimate criticism the current anti-CRT movement relies on misrepresentations that most people outside the academic world will never even perceive.

"That hoax was so successful is because the entire point was, 'Look, we'll do the reading for you. People aren't qualified to go in and parse all the stuff in these fields, so we went and immersed ourselves in it, and it's all a bunch of bullshit,'" said Hoadley-Brill. "That's what led me into pushing back against these people: because the attention and credulity that people were giving them is now fueling this right-wing backlash, and people are being manipulated."

But since he started tracking the movement, Hoadley-Brill says Lindsay has continued to move rightward. "It was my perception that Lindsay was jealous of Rufo getting all this attention, and in response, he started to get more radical with his propaganda," he said. "With his messaging, the only further audience to capture is further to the right. So you start seeing him saying things like, 'CRT is just the tip of a 100-year long spear to infiltrate the United States with Marxist ideology,'" which Hoadley-Brill describesas "straight up neo-Nazi conspiracy theorizing."

While Lindsay used to acknowledge on his website that "Cultural Marxism," a term embraced a few years ago by the alt-right, was associated with antisemitism and white supremacy, and warned people against using it, nowadays such caution has been thrown to the wind. In Lindsay's new book, Hoadley-Brill notes, he argues that "neo-Marxists" have successfully redefined Cultural Marxism to smear it by association with antisemitism. Last fall, Lindsay published an episode of his podcast entitled "Groomer Schools 1: The Long Cultural Marxist History of Sex Education," which argues that sex-ed classes aren't "just a fluke of our weird and increasingly degenerate times" but "a long-purposed Marxist project reaching back into the early 20th century." On Twitter, he responds to people concerned about the spread of "Don't Say Gay" bills with the pithy, "Ok groomer," effectively accusing anyone who believes children should learn that LGBTQ people are part of the human community of being a pedophile.

RELATED:A user's guide to "Cultural Marxism": Antisemitic conspiracy theory, reloaded

And in a Tuesday pub-day appearance on far-right commentator and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka's livestream show on Rumble, amid ads for gold, silver or Mike Lindell's pillows, Lindsay argued that queer theory which he sees as part of a grander suite of fields, alongside CRT, that comprise "woke Marxism" was one aspect of a decades-old Cultural Marxist plot to wage "a war on objective reality" and "separate one generation from the previous."

"This goes back to the first Cultural Marxist, Georg Lukcs," he said, referencing the Hungarian Marxist intellectual, "who became deputy commissar for education, and what did he implement? Comprehensive sex education. Exactly the stuff we see with the gender theory, the queer theory, these very perverted books in the school library teaching children to become sexually active and sexually aware. Why? Because what are they going to do? They're going to become, frankly, little perverts and they're going to go home, and their parents are going to say no, and they're going to use the rebelliousness of the teenage years of the youth to say you don't understand me." If you can thus "separate a new generation away from its parents," family, religion and culture, he concluded, they can be led wherever you want.

(It's true that Lukcs, who is farbetter known as the author of dense works of Marxist philosophy and literary criticism, was deputy commissar of education and culture in the Hungarian Soviet Republic an embattled Communist state that existed for about four months in 1919. It seems unlikely he had time to enact ambitious educational reforms, but a century later, he's become the face of right-wing narratives about "The Communist Sexual Agenda.")

Lindsay's conversation with Gorka wound up in similarly ominous territory as his talk with Beck, complete with insinuations of violence.

"I've been screaming about this for years. It's like screaming into a hurricane," said Lindsay. "And now all of a sudden, the wind has changed. The wind's at my back now." As parents and the working class wake up to the "nonsense" of CRT, he said, and also to what he called "this radical agenda, especially with the gender and sexuality stuff and the pedophilia, that your children are genuinely in danger of groomers that the Marxists have brought in," said parents were reaching the point where they'd "die for [their] kids."

Lindsay claimed a political scientist had imparted this wisdom: "There are just a couple ways a cultural revolution gets stopped. One is you have a character like Putin come in and start killing journalists and take authoritarian power and stamp it out. The other is that parents wake up." In Lindsay's telling, those things sound eerily similar.

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Meet James Lindsay, the far right's "world-level expert" on CRT and "Race Marxism" - Salon

The Revolution happened five years ago, but this was the first year when Soviet power was established in the whole country. How did it change the scenery?

After the 1917 Revolution instigated by the Bolsheviks, the massive Civil War between the red socialists and white monarchists began. The year 1922 officially marked the last year of the Civil War and the final operations undertaken by the Red Army in the Far East.

After the battle.

Red Army soldiers in Vladivostok. Their poster reads: Peace, order and tranquility are brought by the Peoples Revolutionary Army.

The protracted war affected the country a lot, caused many deaths and a huge hunger which children suffered the most. Pictured are children preparing for evacuation from the starving Chelyabinsk Province to Bashkiria.

A group of communists aboard the Trasbalt vessel. The poster reads: Workers of the world, unite!

Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Mikhail Kalinin, making a speech in Petrozavodsk.

The Red Square parade celebrating the 5th anniversary of the 1917 Revolution.

Celebrations on the Palace Square in Petrograd.

A giant budenovka hat named after Red Army cavalry commander Semyon Budyonny.

On April 3, 1922, Joseph Stalin was elected General Secretary of the Bolsheviks party Central Committee, an important position that in the future would actually mean the leader of the country. Pictured with Vladimir Lenin.

Its still two years before Vladimir Lenins death. He is still a leader of the country and head of government. However, in 1922, he was already ill. Pictured below with his life and revolutionary comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya. Read more about the Soviet first First Lady here.

At the same time, in 1922, Cheka (The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission), which was in charge of all the red revolutionary terror, became part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (NKVD) - and kept its purges under the head of an unchangeable leader, The Iron Felix (Dzerzhinsky).

In 1922, one of the countrys most popular soccer clubs, Spartak, was established. Read more about the turbulent fate of its founders here.

A mother and daughter posing for a photo.

A sewing factory (now the Bolshevichka factory) in Moscow.

Workers of a Moscow shoe factory installing sewing machines.

In 1922, the first pioneer organization was formed in the USSR - the future All-Union Pioneer Organization named after V. I. Lenin.

On a Moscow street.

Former Imperial institutions were either abolished or nationalized. The Petersburg theater of opera and ballet became the state-owned one. Pictured below is Russian ballet dancer Olga Spesivtseva performing Aurora in the Pyotr Tchaikovsky ballet Sleeping Beauty.

Famous poet Sergei Yesenin married an American dancer Isidora Duncan, who came to Russia to set up a dancing school.

The Bolsheviks, busy with political and war issues, hadnt managed yet to take care of arts (and basically censorship), so the 1920s was a heyday for arts, including the famous avant-garde art, which took fine arts, films, theater and literature by storm. Pictured below: poet Vladimir Mayakovsky and his beloved Lilya Brik.

Avant-garde artist and designer Varvara Stepanova preparing her innovative scenography for a theater performance Death of Tarelkin, staged by Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Varvara Stepanova and her husband, famous avant-garde photographer Alexander Rodchenko.

Anna Akhmatova was a great poet who suffered the most from the Soviet power. A year before, her husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, was killed - and in the 1930s, her second husband and son would be sent to Stalins jails.

At the same time, the Soviet authorities launched the anti-religious campaign, pursuing the priests and assuming the church property: church items, precious metals and icons decorated with jewels. Pictured below is the interrogation of Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd, who was later executed.

The commission in charge of the 1922 confiscation of jewelry from churches.

Muscovites crowded near St. George Church (later demolished) during the seizure of church valuables.

Members of the Petrograd council opening Alexander Nevskys shrine. The remains of the Russian saint were moved from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra to the new Museum of religion and atheism.

READ MORE: How the Bolsheviks sold off Romanov treasures to the West

Bus traffic started in earnest in Moscow in 1922. Pictured below is one of the first buses of the Moscow Automobile Plant.

Leon Trotskys innovative automobile sleigh.

A group photo of rabbit breeders.

A Moscow family portrait.

The Bolsheviks launched the Likbez campaign of eradication of illiteracy. Pictured are Caucasian women during literacy class.

On December 30, the First All-Union Congress of Soviets took place in Moscow, which approved the Treaty on the Formation of the USSR.

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As an ex-Muslim woman, I once sought refuge in a vocal online atheist movement that began developing in the early 2000s, but after a few years in what became known as the New Atheist scene, I realized that many of the people I had thought were dedicated to values like enlightenment and tolerance had a lot more in common with the religious bigots they claimed to oppose.

Online vocal atheist communities seemed like a great fit for me, at first. As someone who grew up in a theocracy, it was cathartic to find a place to vent my frustrations on the topic of religion. Finding community is certainly not easy as an ex-Muslim; and when youre an immigrant and a minority like I am in Canada, where I live now, that adds a few more obstacles.

Religion was never something I was fond of, even as a child. I questioned everything and the stories in scripture didnt make sense to me. You can imagine the challenges that posed while living in a theocracy. As a result, I never really fit in and always felt like an outsiderespecially growing up as a Third Culture Kid, a Pakistani expat in Saudi Arabia.

Over time, Ive come to realize that there were several reasons I felt that way, not just my lack of belief. Identity and being an immigrant in a place where you cant even call yourself an immigrant even if you are born there (Saudi Arabia) had a lot to do with it, too.

Both countries were still very affected by problems stemming from religion, however. Especially religion interfering in government. There were so many things that ran counter to my own progressive values. Dissent was not tolerated, women were treated like second-class citizens, minorities were treated unfairly, and anti-LGBTQ bigotry was commonplace. Encountering New Atheism seemed like a release of so much pent up anger about these things. It was wonderful to be involved with a community that seemed to be actively concerned with the same issues that I was.

I jumped right in with my newfound friends, most of whom seemed to be huge fans of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; Christopher Hitchens, the late Vanity Fair columnist; and Sam Harris, author of the book The End of Faith. Their in-your-face godlessness seemed to be just what I was looking for. It was unapologetic, caustic, and most important of all, concerned with spreading the good word. It was a welcome contrast to holding your tongue, as one must in theocracy for self-preservation.

These NewAtheists wanted to spread the gospel of secularism, unlike their predecessors whose atheism was more incidental to their identities. It wasnt an overnight change, but once I became involved in the online atheist scene, I too, posted frequently on the internet about religion and my dislike for it.

My online content generating days began In 2010 after I had recently returned to Canada after living in Pakistan for a few years. I decided to start a blog called Nice Mangos based on my observations and some interviews I did while I was there. I primarily wrote about sexuality in Pakistan back thenthe site was the first and only blog of its kind at the time. Of course, it was hard to completely disentangle religion from sexuality and societal restrictions around it in Pakistan, so I did touch upon it occasionally.

A few years later, I wrote and illustrated a childrens picture book called My Chacha is Gay which used simple illustrations to address the subject of homophobia in a specifically Pakistani context.

Most of the money I raised via crowd-funding for the book came from fellow Pakistanis, which was such a pleasant surprise and in stark contrast to the attitudes I had generally experienced in Pakistan. The homophobia in Pakistan always struck me as very odd & hypocritical considering that same-sex experimentation was not uncommon among men who lacked access to women because of gender segregation. Pakistan is a place where two men walking down the street holding hands would be perfectly acceptable and commonplace, but any mention of gay rights elicits howls of anger. My childrens book was the target of such anger, and I continue to receive death threats about it to this day.

I wrote my blog and childrens book under my current pseudonymand Im glad I did! Being a woman who discusses sexuality, religion and apostasy from Islam specifically put me in real danger and made me a target of intolerant religious extremists. I received all kinds of hate mail, rape, and death threats too.

I still get plenty of threatening messages nowadays, but the hate mail I currently receive comes mostly from Western far-right types who say Islam is barbaric, and call me a dirty immigrant. Having been the target of abuse from extremist Christians, Muslims, and atheists, its easy to see that they have a lot in common.

Sadly, the abuse Ive faced is part of a larger dilemma that Muslim and ex-Muslim women face. At home, we deal with constant oppression from Islamic authoritarians; in the West, were beset by bigotry and tokenism from people who want to exploit our struggles in the service of their own narratives.

After several years as a blogger, I decided to expand my online voice in February of 2016 by starting a podcast called Polite Conversations. The show started off with a bang by getting banned from YouTube twice for posting our first episode, an interview with Iranian-British atheist Maryam Namazie. Since then, Ive done scores of shows and met many wonderful people.

But as I got further into New Atheism, I began seeing troubling indications that many of the people in the movement seemed to be motivated by anti-Muslim bigotry rather than a desire to oppose intolerance and superstition. This wasnt a realization I came to easily or quickly since I too had personally had been falsely accused of Islamophobia because of my criticism of religion, so that obscured things for me for a while.

At the time, it was harder to see who was criticizing in good faith (no pun intended) and who was motivated by anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant views. But after Donald Trump emerged as a political figure in the United States, the truth became much easier to spot, as bigots were emboldened and dog whistles turned into blaring sirens.

My concerns about movement atheism really escalated in 2015, when the reactions to the European migrant crisis I saw around me were more in line with the far-right than the compassionate, secular humanism I had been expecting. I was appalled as I saw prominent New Atheist figures sharing anti-migrant propaganda. One popular atheist publication even began publishing articles from notorious bigots like Katie Hopkins and supposedly satirical covers that depicted migrants in dehumanizing ways as insects or through racist caricatures. I was disturbed when I saw people like Sam Harris sharing and endorsing anti-migrant interviews with far-right figures like Anne Marie Waterswho was too extreme for UKIP (a far-right party in the United Kingdom).

Instead of welcoming refugees fleeing Islamic fundamentalism, many within New Atheism were joining the reactionary effort to close Europes doors. This moment was what really began to open my eyes to the hollowness and hypocrisy of this movement.

Despite my worries, however, I still had some hope that perhaps the disgusting behavior I was observing was merely the product of misunderstanding, rather than a turn by some atheists toward the far right.

In pursuit of that thesis, I decided to voice my concerns publicly through an open letter to Harris about a podcast discussion (horrendously titled On the Maintenance of Civilization) hed had with Douglas Murray, a far-right anti-immigrant English commentator who had once lamented the declining levels of whiteness in London, had a friendly conversation with a white nationalist like Stefan Molyneux, and had generally allied with many extreme figures on the right in their advocacy against refugees.

I expressed concern to Harris that, during his Murray interview, he had proclaimed that he would rather vote for Ben Carson, a man he proclaimed to be a dangerously deluded religious imbecile, over the atheist socialist Noam Chomsky because at least Carson knew that the real enemy of American society was jihadists.

At the end of my letter, I invited Harris to come onto my own podcast to discuss the topic further. Several months later, I was delighted that Harris accepted my offer to appear on Polite Conversations. Our interview took place in November of 2016, just before Donald Trump was elected as president of the United States.

Ahead of my discussion with Harris, I hoped that he would be able to address my concerns. But as our conversation progressed, it became increasingly evident that he was unwilling to budge in his positions, regardless of the amount of evidence and examples I provided. Instead of responding to the specific points I made, Harris responded with generalities and hand-waving as he doubled- and tripled-down in his support for people like Douglas Murray and YouTuber Dave Rubin, whose supposedly deeply journalistic agenda I was unable to perceive.

While I appreciated his courtesy in appearing on my show, the more I thought about our exchanges afterward, the more I realized how evasive Harris had beenand eventually through this exchange and other observations, I came to the conclusion that my concerns about New Atheism merging with the far-right were true. I now do a miniseries documenting my journey into and out of New Atheism called Woking Up. Im still very much an atheist, but not that kind of atheist.

Once Trump took office in 2017, the trends I had noticed before became glaringly obvious. Rubin, who had risen to prominence thanks to Harriss help (he not only appeared on his first episode to assist in launching Rubins show, he also regularly promoted his episodes and funded him on Patreon) began making paid videos for PragerU, a propaganda network started by Dan and Farris Wilks, Christian supremacist brothers who are big donors to Texas Republican Ted Cruz and many other extremist causes.

After building a career as a professional atheist, Rubin told a Religious Right YouTube channel that he now believed in a god, thanks to the ministrations of Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist whose first claim to fame was his transphobia and deliberate misinterpretations of Canadas Gender Identity Rights Bill C-16.

Since his emergence in 2016, Peterson has worked diligently to flatter his far-right Christian audience with interminable lectures that mostly amount to justifying Bronze Age theological pronouncements. Ditto for Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor who presents himself as a sciencey secular type while frequently shilling forivermectin, the anti-parasitic drug beloved by the Christian right that Weinsteinfalsely insiststo be a miracle cure for Covid-19. He has now openly embraced the anti-vaccine movement as well.

Harris himself has also carefully cultivated a right-wing audience, endlessly ranting against wokeness, critical race theory and leftist identity politics. While the coronavirus pandemic has pushed his obsession about Islam out of the news cycle, he still sometimes goes out of his way to throw a little jihadism-fearmongering into other subjects. Just recently on an Ask Me Anything episode he warned, given how disruptive Covid has been, I would bet that the threat of bio-terrorism has increased significantly and if youre a nihilist, or youre insane, or youre a jihadist, or youre a fanatic of some other stripe, well then, bio-terrorism just got its Super Bowl commercial.

Even as far-right movements around the globe have come to power thanks to inspiration from Trump, Harris has continued to use his platform to focus on petty grievances with college students, anti-racists, Black Lives Matter, and the political left in general. Instead of highlighting the alarming growth of right-wing extremism, Harris has downplayed it as irrelevant, a mere fringe of the fringe.

Despite his reputation as an advocate for atheism, Harriss content has barely examined the violence-glorifying Christian supremacism that metastasized into the murderous chaos of the Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.Within the year after the attack took place, Harris published only two podcast episodes about itaccording to his website search. Even then, the event was portrayed as some sort of response to wokeness.

A few days after the first anniversary of Jan. 6, Harris did mention Trump and the Capitol putsch, but instead of putting the attack in its proper theocratic context, he framed the ex-president being a mere cult leader. While Trump certainly does inspire adoration in some supporters, its an incomplete picture, like most of Harriss Trump criticism. Thats becauseTrump alone did not create the manic hatred we all saw on Jan. 6, he merely took advantage of it. According to his website and Google, Harris has never even used the term Christian nationalism on his site, even as numerous journalists and scholars have published hundreds of articles, research papers, and books on the subject.

Everyone has their own priorities, but its certainly interesting to see that one of the original four horsemen of New Atheism evinces little to no concern about a growing and malignant Christian supremacist movement in his own country which was nourished by one of its major political parties to conduct the first violent invasion of the American Capitol since the War of 1812.

A key part of the far rights strategy to radicalize theologically conservative Christians has been the spreading of lurid and often false tales about Muslim immigrants and migrants. Unfortunately, Harris and many others in the former New Atheist movement have been more than happy to oblige. But in promoting and defending hatred against Islam, right-wing atheists are doing more than just enabling their fellow ideologues, however. They are also undermining the position of atheism in society. Trump and his underlings have been crystal-clear that their goal is Christian supremacyhaving government explicitly promote Christianity while giving non-Christians fewer rights and forcing them to be silent in public.

Christianity is under tremendous siege, Trump said in a 2016 campaign speech to an extremist evangelical group. We dont exert the power that we should have.

Christianity will have power, he promised. If Im there, youre going to have plenty of power, you dont need anybody else. Youre going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.

Unlike so many of the promises hes made over the decades, this was one that Trump actually kept. He appointed hundreds of Christian nationalist judges intent on throwing out abortion rights rulings, he gave them unparalleled access to his staff, he appointed many of them to the highest echelons of power. He catered obsessively to their authoritarian policy demands. And after four disastrous years, Trumps strategy of unlawfully clinging to power was conceived and executed by Christian Right activists.

Despite everything Trump and his fellow Republicans have done to promote and enforce Christian supremacism, right-wing atheists are still continuing their quixotic obsessions with random left-wing activists and college students, while also cozying up to theocrats. Figures like James Lindsay who emerged from the New Atheist scene are now prominent allies of the Religious Right with close ties to Christian nationalist organizations like Sovereign Nations. Richard Dawkins, meanwhile, is praising church bells and denouncing the aggressive-sounding Allahu Akbar, and Douglas Murray is making videos about the supposed god-shaped hole in the human psyche.

You simply cant make this stuff up. It is beyond parody.

Nowadays, no one wants to be called a New Atheist anymore, because of the baggage and connotations the term carries, but the evangelical right-wing atheists still continue doing the same things. Whether they call themselves the Intellectual Dark Web or heterodox, their anti-left sentiment remains. Its very different from the vast majority of atheistswho actually do embrace pluralism, science, and human rights.

I left Islam because my skepticism was prompted by progressive values. I did not expect to see the same bigotries and conservative biases in the atheist scene that claimed to oppose these things. I learned the hard way, however, that bigotry and discrimination were not what my former associates opposed, it was Islam, it was minorities, immigrants and brown people.

Joining hands with Christian nationalists to own the libs makes a certain kind of sense by this twisted logic. But its definitely not atheist activism.

Original post:
I never thought 'New Atheism' would become a tool of the Christian Right - Flux.community

Feb. 6Christian organizations and affiliated churches operate Colorado Springs' primary emergency shelters, soup kitchens and support programs for people who are homeless or otherwise in need.

Some clients say they appreciate the opportunity to pray or seek spiritual guidance. Others say they'd prefer to encounter no religious overtones while accepting a free meal or an overnight cot.

The old model of preaching to people who are down on their luck but not necessarily looking for proselytizing has given way to optional and voluntary choice for clients to hear Christian messages, say leaders of the city's largest homeless providers.

Though their locations may display crosses, have chaplains or clergy on site and offer worship services and Bible studies, Springs Rescue Mission, the Salvation Army of El Paso County and Catholic Charities of Central Colorado do not require participation in religious activities to receive meals, secure a place to sleep and get help with housing, employment, health care and addiction.

"We are a come-as-you-are, low-barrier shelter and meet everybody at their point of need," said Travis Williams, chief development officer.

The organization runs Colorado Springs' largest homeless campus, with 450 shelter beds, three free meals served daily, a 65-unit apartment building with support staff, employment programs and others.

"There's no witness test for anybody on what their beliefs are," Williams said. "We see in the Bible how Jesus consistently met people where they were at, regardless of their circumstances ... and that's the same philosophy we take."

But a common misperception prevails, he said, that clients are required to profess their faith, attend chapel or listen to sermons.

That was the format when Christians began outreach to the poor centuries ago. "A message and a meal" had been the standard for rescue missions since their inception in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1826, with Pentecostal leanings.

Springs Rescue Mission had used that format, said former President and CEO Larry Yonker, until he took over in 2013.

"I didn't feel like that was the best model for showing compassion for the guests, so I eliminated that," he said.

Yonker retired in 2020, after leading the organization through a $22 million renovation and expansion to build a 14-acre campus. The project started with securing a Community Development Block Grant from the city. Using federal money for a capital project was a relatively new move for a religious organization in Colorado Springs, he said, although such arrangements are becoming more prevalent.

"The state and the city are looking for people with vision to solve major social problems, and it takes a pretty good-sized organization to be able to sustain something like that," Yonker said.

Yonker said he strived to counterbalance city leaders' changing direction to manage the homeless by enacting municipal ordinances on camping, loitering and panhandling. Yonker wanted the city's approach to be tempered with a profusion of services to not warehouse the homeless but help them get off the streets.

"I am in favor of breaking up encampments around waterways because they're dangerous," he said, "but ordinances are just a tool to manage your city."

After visiting a rescue mission in San Antonio, Yonker said eliminating barriers of any kind, such as making room for pets, adding lockers to store belongings, and providing showers and laundry facilities, became a local focus to help the chronically homeless, who often have mental illnesses or substance issues, get re-housed.

Now, 20 to 25 chronically homeless clients of Springs Rescue Mission step up into housing each month, Williams, the chief development officer, said.

"In the past, we'd have 20 to 25 a year," he said.

One program at Springs Rescue Mission is Christian-based, a one-year residential addiction recovery course.

But planting seeds of the Christian faith is more likely to look like a volunteer sitting down at a table and eating a meal with diners, Williams said.

"If we're going to share our faith it's not typically from any pulpit," he said. "It's by doing the work, forming relationships and getting to know the people."

'We serve anyone'

The Salvation Army in El Paso County, which runs a 232-bed shelter for men, women and families and provides meals, senior housing, afterschool care and other programs, also has dealt with inaccurate perceptions, said Capt. Doug Hanson, who oversees local operations.

"Rumors have shrouded us the last handful of years that we don't serve everyone, and that's not true," he said. "We serve anyone and everyone that's the heart of why faith-based groups do this work."

Since the first day the Salvation Army opened soup kitchens in London, England in 1865, Hanson said the organization has been serving the poor, needy and destitute.

"While they ate, they heard the Gospel message," Hanson said.

Early organizers had "no intention of being a church, but rather a Christian movement that organized many churches to serve the homeless," he said. The Salvation Army church grew out of that.

Catholics also have a long history of responding to the Christian call to serve the common good by founding hospitals, schools, soup kitchens and social justice programs, said Rochelle Schlortt, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities of Central Colorado.

The organization is part of a nationwide network founded in 1910 and runs Colorado Springs' oldest soup kitchen, the Marian House, as well as homeless outreach, employment aid, immigration services, and assistance to pregnant moms and babies.

A priest, a spiritual care group and a nurse from Penrose-St. Francis Health Services are available at the Marian House for anyone desiring to pray, talk or have questions answered, she said.

"If people want spiritual guidance, we are more than happy to partner with them to help fulfill that spiritual need," Schlortt said. "But we don't force that on anybody or proselytize or require anybody to do anything to get help."

Seth Martin, a Colorado Springs native who has worked at a carnival, as a truck driver and at fast-food restaurants and has been homeless off and on for 21 years, has used homeless services at all three organizations.

"They don't push religion on you," he said.

Although Martin identifies as a lifelong Christian, he said he likes that there's no hard sell about Jesus when getting help.

The approach is more covert than overt, said Kristen Viers, who lives in the Greenway Flats supportive apartment complex on Springs Rescue Mission's campus.

"They imply just as many people who try to force their will in our society do what makes a good Christian to them and how I don't fit the bill," she said.

"My sentiment is, 'I'm sorry. There are plenty of people on this planet. Go and find one that will play with you then.'"

Compassion to fellow human beings

Working with the homeless population falls under the guiding Christian light that every person is a child of God who has value and should not be discriminated against, said Yonker.

Christians supply the majority of nongovernmental assistance for the homeless nationwide, according to a Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion survey released in February 2017.

Faith-based organizations provided 58% of emergency shelter beds in 11 sample cities surveyed, including Denver, in addition to related services such as education, job training, health care, education and addiction recovery, according to the study.

As a result, the study estimates faith-based organizations create $9.42 in taxpayer savings for every $1 of government funding for homeless services.

More than 200 churches donate money to Springs Rescue Mission, and also clothing, food and volunteer hours, Williams said.

However, churches contribute less than 5% of the organization's $12 million annual revenue stream, he said. The majority is from individual donations and foundations, with less than 10% from local, state and federal funding.

While churches and faith-based organizations have tenets of belief and proven records of service to the poor behind them, they don't corner the market on charitable acts.

"There's a negative connotation that all these people who help are Christian, but Christians don't have a monopoly on serving and helping people," Schlortt of Catholic Charities said. "People of all backgrounds are compassionate to fellow human beings."

That's why Michelle Popejoy, a member of the Atheist Community of Colorado Springs, is a regular presence in a collective monthly effort to hand out food, clothes and other goods at Dorchester Park, where homeless people congregate.

"I didn't want to do it in a proselytizing environment," she said.

Popejoy started helping the homeless about 30 years ago in Phoenix, when her daughter asked her about volunteering. Popejoy has been connected to the local atheists' group, one of several in town, since she moved to Colorado Springs in 2013.

Popejoy usually wears an atheist T-shirt while manning one of many tables that stretch in a long line in Dorchester Park during the "Spreading Smiles and Sandwiches" event.

Lugging her table with water and food that goes on top, Popejoy joins other event organizers, who are from local churches and other organizations.

"I like being here to represent the non-Christians and destigmatize and normalize atheism," she said at a recent distribution. "We're a community of and for atheists, trying to serve the community."

Homeless people said they appreciate the effort.

"It takes everybody Christians, Jews, Catholics and many organizations," said Tim Davis, a reformed heroin addict who's known on the streets as "Bama."

"There are far more people that have mental issues and don't have the ability to turn their lives around than people who do," he said. "Some have been kicked out of the shelter because they have personality disorders or Tourette's or extra food."

For years, Popejoy has fashioned sleeping mats out of plastic bags for the homeless, participated in parks cleanups, sewn warm hats and scarves, and more recently part of the giveaway.

"I don't like it to be assumed that only Christians do this," said Popejoy, describing herself as never having been religious. "No, not only Christians do this.

"I've just always enjoyed doing stuff like this, and I'm obviously not doing it to fill pews."

'A church with working gloves'

That's not the goal of Christian organizations, either, their leaders say.

In the month of December, Springs Rescue Mission logged 53 attendees at chaplain meetings, 77 people at four weekly chapel services, 246 people at15 Bible studies and 667 people at 44 Bible classes, the agency's statistics show.

Such attendance represents a small percentage of clients; the shelter averages around 325 to 350 people a night in the winter.

Chapel services are provided by an outside church, Williams said, not rescue mission itself.

Christian organizations are more visible than other groups involved in homeless services, said Kayla Farris, co-founder of Because We Choose To, a nonprofit organization she and a friend started in 2015 to give away donated clothing to needy folks.

"Christian-based organizations get a lot of the recognition because they tend to get more funding from churches and government funds, so they're able to help on a larger scale," she said.

"But if you really get out on the streets, you'll you see there are other a lot of groups, too, that do meals and whatever they can every week."

Hanson said big organizations are needed to handle today's demands for the homeless population.

"We need large institutions that can be of one mind when it comes to making decisions, sheltering and taking care of people's needs on a large scale," he said. "In response to pushback on faith communities and the way we serve, I say, 'If Jesus did not walk the earth more than 2,000 years ago, we would not be here serving.'"

The Salvation Army shelter's on-site chapel offers a 20-minute morning devotional, full church services on Wednesdays and Sundays, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and a house chaplain.

Of the 220 or so homeless people who spend the night each evening, an average of 30 attend a religious gathering, Hanson said.

"We do this not to make a profit because we don't but it's clearly a faith component," he said. "We believe that everybody has value, and therefore we must take care of other people."

Some homeless people say they don't see workers at organizations subscribing to the Christian principles that leadership says employees and volunteers follow.

A homeless man who gave his name as Michael said staff target disabled people, those with criminal records or homeless who have medically implanted devices with seemingly unfair practices.

"What they do doesn't jive with their Christian morals," he said.

Organizations have rules to "minimize the risks" in an environment that brings together hundreds of people, many of whom might be high on drugs, are known to steal from others or display other negative behavior, Yonker said.

"Most of the complaints are because people generally don't understand the chaos and how quickly things can get out of control if you don't have simple rules," he said.

Having said that, Yonker said he understands how some clients "don't feel like they're quickly given enough grace."

People can be permanently banned from Springs Rescue Mission, primarily for violent acts, which Yonker said was one of his hardest challenges in leading the organization because "there's no safety net below the rescue mission."

The Salvation Army's R.J. Montgomery Center also enforces rules pertaining to behavior but doesn't ban people permanently, Hanson said. People can be kicked out for a day, a week or a month but then can return, he said, even if they've been turned away from other places.

"There has to be recourse and accountability to poor actions," Hanson said. "But we don't want them to die on the streets just because they made a bad life decision that day.

"We're a church with its working gloves on," he said. "It's the role we play in Christendom."

(c)2022 The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.)

Visit The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.) at http://www.gazette.com

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Serving the homeless a Christian ethos, but others involved, too - Denver Gazette

by Peng Huiling

A new textbook promoting atheism is being promoted in colleges and to CCP cadres as part of the campaign implementing the decisions of the National Conference on Work Related to Religious Affairs of December 2021, where the book was first introduced. The textbook is promoted as an answer to Xi Jinpings instructions at that conference that Marxs views on religion should be more thoroughly studied within the CCP.

The book is called The Principles of Scientific Atheism. It is a massive text of some 400,000 words, published by Bashu Publishing House, and we are told it was six years in the making.

Its author is Li Shen, known for his History of Chinese Science, and History of Chinese Atheism, where he promoted Xi Jinpings theory that Chinese culture has always been intrinsically non-religious.

Li Shen was born in 1946. After earning his doctorate, he worked at the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and was the director of its Confucianism Research Office. He then became a professor of the Department of Philosophy at Shanghai Normal University, and the vice-chairperson of the Chinese Atheism Society. He is also an academic committee member of the International Confucian Federation, and in this capacity he promotes the theory, also supported by the CCP, that Confucianism is essentially a form of atheism.

The book includes four chapters, What is God, Proof of the Non-Existence of God, The Gods and Their Effects, and The Communist Partys Religious Theory and Religious Policy. There is also an appendix on the Main Theological Knowledge and Criticism of Religion. Zhu Xiaoming, former secretary of the CCP Leadership Group of China Tibetology Research Center, wrote a preface.

The book argues that both the non-existence of God and the harmful effect of religion have been demonstrated scientifically, through a process at work both in Western and Chinese philosophy, which culminated in the definitive demonstrations by Karl Marx and by the CCP in China.

The promotion of Lis book confirms the turn in Chinese institutions dealing with religion and departments of religion in the universities from a somewhat more neutral study of religious issues to propaganda for Marxist atheism. This turn can be traced to speeches and instructions by Xi Jinping himself.

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Book Promoting Atheism Launched with Great Fanfare in China - Bitter Winter

An Ariane 5 rocket launches with NASAs James Webb Space Telescope onboard on December 25 from Kourou. Photo: NASA JWST/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

It wasnt just that he mentioned a religious holiday. After all, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wasnt the only person to observe, following the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope last month, that the long-awaited feat had occurred on Christmas Day. Rather, Nelsons comments raised eyebrows for their spiritual tone.

Its significant that we had the delays and it kept us all the way to today, Christmas Day, Nelson said in a video released by NASA shortly after the launch. He went on to quote a passage from Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork.

To some viewers especially those who believe religion and science are incompatible the very mention of a religious text seemed to undercut the messaging of scientific achievement. The suggestion that the telescope served a Christian purpose, or that its use would reinforce a Christian worldview, also seemed to belie a commitment to inclusivity in science that NASA has claimed to value. (The agency is still reeling from the controversy over its decision to name the telescope after James Webb, a man alleged to have been complicit in the persecution of LGBTQ government workers.)

These are all valid concerns. But its also worth remembering that Nelsons biblical references follow in a long tradition of religious rhetoric in the US space program. Theres a tendency to flatten this history to imagine that religious language is and always has been inappropriate in the scientific discourse. But one needs only look back a few decades to find a time when comments like Nelsons were not only acceptable in the American space culture they were a central part of Americas science identity.

From the 1950s, the United States was embroiled in a decades-long rivalry with the USSR known as the Space Race a competition that turned the technological and military practicalities of space exploration into a sort of proxy battle for cultural, political, and economic validation. Each nations scientific successes were interpreted as triumphs of one national ideology over the other. Among those warring ideologies were the nations sharply contrasting attitudes toward religion.

The USSR had officially embraced atheism (though some Soviet citizens were people of faith). In her recent history of Soviet atheism, Victoria Smolkin describes how Soviet leaders and cosmonauts used their victories in the Space Race as occasions to wave a banner of antipathy toward religion. During a 1962 visit to the US, Smolkin writes, Soviet cosmonaut German Titov, the second person in space, proclaimed his atheism, remarking that he had not seen God or angels during his 17 orbits of Earth. Later Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev similarly joked to American reporters about Gods failure to show up in space. The brash rejection of God served to advance the Soviet effort to solidify state atheism and defuse religions threat to state authority.

But the Soviet Unions dismissal of religion also stirred a backlash on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In fields ranging from evolutionary biology to cosmology, American scientists criticized the ideological dogmatism of Marxism, claiming that it impaired free scientific inquiry. Whereas the Soviet regime was totalitarian and oppressive, the American scientific establishment, by embracing religious tolerance, projected an image of openness. Opposed to the strict atheism of the Soviets but wary of the perceived anti-science attitude of fundamentalist Christians, the American scientific establishment staked out a middle ground of respectable, generic but still Christian-leaning religiosity.

As public figures as well as scientists, NASA astronauts were frequently seen as exemplifying this milquetoast religious identity. Some astronauts were explicit about their own Christianity; others were more vague about the spirituality they experienced in the stars. Neil Armstrong, though he considered himself a deist, was nonetheless looked up to as a Christian role model who fulfilled a divine promise that humanity would someday reach the stars.

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 broadcast themselves from lunar orbit reading from the opening passages of Genesis as the Sun rose above the Moons horizon: In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. The juxtaposition of those words with images of the lunar sunrise seemed to symbolize the convergence of religious and scientific values.

The Christmas Eve reading prompted Madalyn Murray OHair, the founder of the organization American Atheists, to file a lawsuit against NASA, arguing that the act abridged their First Amendment rights. But the lawsuit failed, and since then the tradition of astronauts expressing their personal faith, carrying objects of religious significance among their personal effects, even celebrating holidays in space, has largely been permitted and even incorporated into NASAs public outreach.

American Presidents including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan all used religious language when talking about the Space Program, often with implicit or explicit criticism of the Soviets. Ultimately, NASA, American politicians of both parties, and the wider US public created a narrative that Americas religiosity had helped the country succeed in the Space Race over its godless rival. This religiosity was effective in part because it avoided the messy specifics that might have created friction with science or between theologies.

Few people exemplify this melding of space exploration and spirituality more than Nelson himself. In 1986, decades before he became NASA Administrator, Nelson went to space on the shuttle Columbia, the last NASA mission before the Challenger disaster. His 1988 memoir described his extraterrestrial sojourn as an eye-opening religious experience that contrasted starkly with that of his Soviet counterparts. Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut, proudly proclaimed when he returned to earth that he had looked for God and had not found him, Nelson wrote (perhaps misattributing Titovs 1962 comments). I looked, and could see nothing else. The Soviets might have reached the heavens first, but the Americans were the first to find God up there.

Nelson also recalled reaching into his pocket and pulling out his Bible while on the Columbia:

I remembered when, as a student at Yale, I had read the ancient words of the 19th Psalm, written by a shepherd boy in Israel almost 3,000 years ago. My college mind had wondered, What could David possibly know about space? As I read those words again, I was amazed that they could express my feelings so perfectly: The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament sheweth His handiwork.'

More than 30 years later, Nelson uttered the same scripture nearly verbatim while reflecting on the launch of the the telescope. It is a passage that has long been invoked by scientists and theologians to express the idea that there are truths that can only be discovered outside of scripture truths that must be learned from the handiwork of nature. Its been quoted to argue against Biblical literalism and science denial. And, for Nelson, it seems to give voice to a certain sense of awe and spiritual wonder at nature that has abided in him since his time as an astronaut.

The scientific, religious, and political culture of the US, however, has evolved tremendously since then. Christian nationalism has become a widespread and antidemocratic political force one that has been deployed to attack government-supported, science-based efforts to stem the COVID-19 pandemic and curtail climate change. Cold War-era God-talk, and the embrace of generic religiosity, no longer exemplify Americas place in the modern geopolitical world. The words Nelson uses to capture his connection with the cosmos may not have changed since the 1980s, but its a different nation now.

Adam R. Shapiro is a historian of science and religion. He is the author of Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools and (with Thomas Dixon) the forthcoming Very Short Introduction to Science and Religion.

This article was originally published on Undark.

Link:
Is There a Place for Spirituality in Space Science? - The Wire Science

Photo: Warner Bros./HBO Max

Some achieve teen angst, and some have teen angst thrust upon them. In less-fortunate cases, a pivotal trauma can jump-start a young persons maturation by challenging their base assumptions about a world no longer handling their innocence with kid gloves. Holden Caulfield turned bitter upon losing his brother. Lindsay Weir dabbled in atheism after her grandmother announced that she saw nothing in her final moments. And in The Fallout, Canadian actor Megan Parks well-measured first feature as a writer and director, a school shooting triggers a model students rebellious phase.

Well-meaning zoomer Vada (Jenna Ortega, going places) has kept her head down and nose to the grindstone all her life, her idea of bad behavior limited to risking tardiness for some Starbucks before class. But when the notion that we could go at any moment transforms from an abstract to a horrifying reality, shes moved to reassess her priorities. If every day might be your last, who would use it to memorize cell organelle functions?

B

Jenna Ortega, Maddie Ziegler, Niles Fitch, Will Ropp

HBO Max January 27

We experience the semiautomatic rampage as she does, trapped in a bathroom stall for a few unbearable minutes near the top of the film. Through sheer chance, she shares her hiding spot with lower-tier TikTok star Mia (Dance Moms alumna and Sia affiliate Maddie Ziegler) and the sensitive Quinton (Niles Fitch). Aside from a general disapproval of the frequency with which this nightmare plays out in reality, Park keeps the politics to a dull rumble in the distance. Shes more invested in these kids personal, imperfect pathways forward through a thicket of grief.

There is a human toll beyond the death count, she submits, in how survivors reassess their lives and struggle to recognize themselves during the intimate hell of the aftermath. The Fallout makes this point without histrionics, speaking through little details of character while confining the maudlin stuff to a pair of scenes near the end. Im a chill, low-key kind of person, Vada tells the therapist (Shailene Woodley) her parents have requested she sees. The movie is low-key, tooa winning approach to such delicate subject matter.

With a firm handle on tone, Park skirts the pitfalls of bad taste one might expect from a film that uses mass violence as a narrative device for a coming-of-age plot. In the first sign of her restraint, she gives the carnage a wide berth by leaving it as unseen noise, without the faintest whiff of the morbid fascination that still haunts the reputation of Gus Van Sants Elephant. She conveys the intense pain thats left Vada numb through gestures closer to the banality and ritual humiliation of high school. On her first day back, Vada cant bring herself to return to the lavatory without an anxious panic, and must hastily chart an escape route after pissing herself. Getting high on ecstasy between periods moves her to gnaw on a pen until it explodes in her mouth. Park understands that agony doesnt preclude comedy, but rather accentuates the absurdity Vadas never noticed before.

The core of the film is Vadas gravitation toward Mia despite their differing social strata, as they form a bond over their shared tragedy. Popular hottie and bookworm learn to see each other as more than stereotypes couldve been dreadful stuff, but Parks credible, unforced dialogue enriches the afternoons these girls share. (Theres no overstating the benefit teen films reap by accepting an R rating, allowing their characters to talk like kids actually talk today.) Unfortunately, the naturalism of Ortega and Zieglers performances does have the adverse effect of accentuating the phonier bits of drama, like Vadas literal screaming into the void with Dad (John Ortiz) or her tension with the gay BFF (Will Ropp) restyling himself as a David Hogg type in the wake of tragedy. The twerpy lil sister (Lumi Pollack) seems to have wandered in here from another, broader script.

Even so, its a shame that The Fallout has received a little-promoted streaming run in the dead days of January. Parks got chops, and her work shows that off without drawing too much attention to them. She knows how to assemble and hold a wide shot, and use creative editing to condense visual information. (Eliding the funerals and instead piling up shots of In Memoriam cards in a small box is one such stroke of inspiration.) Moreover, shes got something to say about Gen Z, a wave of adolescents staving off the nihilism they have every reason to adopt. On a dying planet, risking life and limb every time they walk into homeroom, they can find refuge only in each other.

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The Fallout is a surprisingly restrained drama about the aftermath of a school shooting - The A.V. Club

Born into a Jewish family on October 12, 1891, in what was Breslau, Germany (modern day Wrocaw, Poland), Edith Stein eventually abandoned her faith and embraced atheism as a young adult.

Yet, it was through the influence of her friends that she came back to God and ended-up embracing the Catholic faith.

This is the Truth

The Vatican biography briefly summarizes her road to the Christian religion.

Back in Breslau, Edith Stein began to write articles about the philosophical foundation of psychology. However, she also read the New Testament, Kierkegaard and Ignatius of Loyolas Spiritual Exercises. She felt that one could not just read a book like that, but had to put it into practice.

In the summer of 1921. she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserls. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth. Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: My longing for truth was a single prayer.

It was through these and other experiences that led her to find the truth in the Catholic faith, which she believed was a fulfillment of her Judaism.

On January 1, 1922 Edith Stein was baptized. It was the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus, when Jesus entered into the covenant of Abraham. Edith Stein stood by the baptismal font, wearing Hedwig Conrad-Martius white wedding cloak. Hedwig was her godmother. I had given up practicing my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God. From this moment on she was continually aware that she belonged to Christ not only spiritually, but also through her blood.

Year of Edith Stein

According to Catholic News Agency, The city where the philosopher turned saint was born has launched aYear of Edith Steinto celebrate the life and legacy of the woman who was martyred at Auschwitz.

Various events will be held to honor the milestone.

To mark the year, the city council of Wrocaw has also set up an exhibit in theEdith Stein House, the saints family home, which is now a conference center and a space for interreligious dialogue.

St. Edith Steins baptism was just the beginning for her, as she eventually joined a Carmelite convent and died in Auschwitz, being both a Jew and a Catholic nun.

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Year of Edith Stein celebrates 100 years since her baptism - Aleteia EN

Contemporary explanations of wokeness are always insufficient. Public intellectuals either pretend there has been no major revolution in values, or offer silly debates about whether wokeness is really neo-Hegelian anarchism, or neo-Freudian Romanticism, or double-backflip Puritanism with a dash of neo-neo Kantianism. The work of an obscure Italian philosopher who died in 1989 is perhaps an unlikely place to find clarity. But Augusto Del Noce provides an explanation at once straightforward and original: Marxism changed the trajectory of the West.

Del Noces work seems particularly current in the Anglosphere, perhaps, because it has only recently become available in English. Carlo Lancelotti, a New York-based math professor, first translated Del Noces The Crisis of Modernity in 2014; this month, his translation of The Problem with Atheism was published. The latter was written first between 1917 and 1945 and produced the thesis about Marxism that allowed Del Noce to see the future.

Del Noces take on Marxism was strange. It was, he believed, a stillborn ideology, dead upon arrival, yet its rotting carcass sprouted every 20th Century political movement. There is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction, he wrote. Marxs view of history, according to Del Noce, was a consequence of his commitment to atheism, which can never be proved directly, and must therefore present itself as the outcome of an irreversible historical process mans liberation, via science and technology, from primitive superstition. Marx argued that the idea of God was a symptom of mans alienation through oppression; as society removed forms of oppression, the question of God would disappear. Societys values, Marx believed, were just expressions of its economic arrangements and that the development of these arrangements was leading to an inevitable destination: the march of history would culminate in Communism, which would be free of both oppression and the idea of God.

Since, in the Marxist framework, removing oppression is the primary way of bringing about the future, philosophy is subordinated to politics. As Marx wrote, Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. In Marxism, reason is not something universally accessible to all; it is the tool that certain radically free people use to impose their will on existence. This creates a contradiction: how can anyone change the world if history is inevitably going to culminate in communism? And if all philosophy is just a reflection of economic arrangements, is the same not true of Marxism?

This contradiction bifurcated Marxism along two different paths. The first path embraced the revolutionary philosopher, while the other one embraced history. The first path led to Lenin, the revolution, and the Soviet Union. The second path led to us. Del Noce wrote, Marxism has ended up being a stage in the development of the technological and affluent society, which accepts all [of Marxisms] negations of traditional thought but at the same time eliminates its messianic and (in its own way) religious aspect. Marxs vision was achieved by his ostensible enemy.

Long before it became obvious, Del Noce wrote that the alliance between the technocratic right and the cultural left is there for everyone to see. He argued that liberalism sublimated, or absorbed, various aspects of Marxism, transforming into what he called the technological society. Bourgeois society always had two historical enemies: revolutionary thought and religious thought. As a synthesis of these opposites, Marxism provided bourgeois society with the tool needed to defeat both. Our society largely embraces Marxs historical vision: advancing technologies are viewed as de facto proof that the question of God, and all transcendent values, are irrelevant. Yet this vision of history is also turned onto Marxism itself. Communism was tried and it was a failed experiment. The technological society does not have to enlist any religious or moral claims to reject Communism. It simply dismisses Communism as inefficient.

The Leninist path of Marxism also stumbles through our society in a misshapen form. Del Noce argued that Leninism unleashed a type of post-Christian gnosticism which was an early Christian heresy that believed the world was evil and could only be saved by those with access to secret or esoteric knowledge. Lenin believed that the revolution wouldnt just happen spontaneously it had to be brought about by raising the consciousness of the proletariat. This required professional revolutionaries. Drawn from the people tasked with the job of modernising the Russian economy, these revolutionaries were an elect class that understands how the world really works. The British writer H.G. Wells understood the implications of this better than Lenin himself: in his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy, inspired by his trips to the Soviet Union, Wells called for the West to embrace rule by its own elect class of experts.

Everyone understands that a person is not wise by virtue of being an accountant, or a therapist, or an immunologist; we all understand that a person can have limited domain expertise, and be a complete fool outside of that area. Moreover, domain expertise is not the same as executive function: the act of governing a society is the act of choosing between competing goods, and this requires virtues like wisdom and prudence. And yet society has become enthralled by the expert, the idea of which works in the exact opposite way, suggesting that a person is equipped to make prudential choices between competing goods simply by virtue of possessing technical knowledge in some limited domain. Eventually this denigrates into absurdities, like the disinformation expert who is basically a truth expert.

Del Noce paints a landscape of a society that rejects all traditional values in the name of a supposedly neutral rationality, has a caste of revolutionary-cum-technocratic experts who function like gnostic priests, and engages in near-constant, system-approved revolution. This revolution was separate from Marxism, and was encapsulated in a sentence written by Friedrich Engels: the thesis that reality is rational leads, according to Hegelian dialectics, to this other one: everything that exists deserves to die. Del Noce wrote that the revolutionary is the executioner of a death sentence that history has pronounced. But since the radically bourgeois society rejects all transcendent values, its revolutionaries offer only negation. The global rebellion becomes an absurd revolt against what exists or what once existed. It becomes either a silly attempt to escape reality or a tool of the system it is revolting against. It should be obvious how this explains the woke, but it also shows how the anti-woke offer a mirror image.

There are many, like James Lindsay and John McWhorter, who champion Enlightenment values in the face of the woke. They praise things like reason, rationality, and positivism in the face of a new religious fervor. The miracle of rationality fought off the forces of religious superstition, we are told, and we must be vigilant not to slide back into the shadows of irrationality. Del Noce might call this the Enlightenment after Marxism. It is a mythic narrative that its proponents fail to see as myth.

Carl Schmitt once wrote that American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks were engaged in a common struggle. That synthesis is now complete. Del Noce helps us see how this synthesis is at the root of todays most pressing issues, and how those who want to fight the woke cannot retreat into the static categories of the 20th century. Decomposed Marxism limits our ability to see a new horizon, and the future seems impossibly hopeless because so few are willing to reassess past mistakes.

Continued here:
How Marxism created the West - UnHerd