Category Archives: Atheist

Chennai: When Prime Minister Narendra Modi started his address in Dharapuram rally Tuesday, he did it by saying Vetri Vel, Veera Vel.

And, he was not the only one to hail the weapon of Lord Muruga ahead of the Tamilnadu Assembly elections.

Almost all top leaders, including Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, DMK president M K Stalin, BJP national president J P Nadda, BJP State president L Murugan and Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi chief Thol Thirumavalavan have had held or hailed Vel in the recent past.

Interestingly, Stalin and Thirumavalavan are known for their atheist stand and comments against Hinduism in the past. So, what made them praise Vel? The reason is simple election, says Subramaniam, a political analyst.

After BJP started Vel Yatra following an abusive video by Karuppar Koottam on Kandha Sashti Kavasam, other parties are not ready to take it light especially with elections ahead, he says and adds: Hence, Vel has become a political tool this time.

Recently, Edappadi Palaniswami said that God made Stalin hold the Vel. The Chief Minister was referring to a viral photo of the DMK chief, an atheist, holding a Vel at a makkal grama sabha meeting at Tiruttani in January of this year.

At the time, the AIADMK and BJP had termed Stalins actions as an attempt to alter DMKs rationalist image.

At a recent campaign meeting, EPS said Stalin did not believe in God and even insulted God several times.

When Stalin went to the Srirangam temple in Tiruchirappalli, he wiped off the holy prasad (offerings) from his forehead, Palaniswami said.

He went on to say that when Stalin went to the Pasumpon Muthuramalinga Thevar Memorial, he threw the holy ash given to him.

DMK leader insulted gods. But now, he had to hold the Vel. This is Palanimalai Murugans power.

Taunting the DMK chief, Palaniswami said, So you have held the Vel. The person who spreads slanderous thoughts, the man who said that there is no God was made to hold the Vel by God. Everyone believes in God. Do not insult that belief.

A DMK functionary said, We always respect the sentiments of others. Vel was given to Stalin by a party functionary at the meeting. It was a token of love.

Read more:

Lord Muruga's weapon Vel becomes political tool to woo voters in TN - News Today

Trouble is brewing in the backyard of Muslim-majority states competing for religious soft power and leadership of the Muslim world in what amounts to a battle for the soul of Islam. Shifting youth attitudes towards religion and religiosity threaten to undermine the rival efforts of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and, to a lesser degree, the United Arab Emirates, to cement their individual state-controlled interpretations of Islam as the Muslim worlds dominant religious narrative. Each of the rivals see their efforts as key to securing their autocratic or authoritarian rule as well as advancing their endeavors to carve out a place for themselves in a new world order in which power is being rebalanced.

Research and opinion polls consistently show that the gap between the religious aspirations of youthand, in the case of Iran other age groupsand state-imposed interpretations of Islam is widening. The shifting attitudes amount to a rejection of Asharism, the fundament of centuries-long religiously legitimized authoritarian rule in the Sunni Muslim world that stresses the role of scriptural and clerical authority. Mustafa Akyol, a prominent Turkish Muslim intellectual, argues that Asharism has dominated Muslim politics for centuries at the expense of more liberal strands of the faith not because of its merits, but because of the support of the states that ruled the medieval Muslim world.

Similarly, Nadia Oweidat, a student of the history of Islamic thought, notes that no topic has impacted the region more profoundly than religion. It has changed the geography of the region, it has changed its language, it has changed its culture. It has been shaping the region for thousands of years. [] Religion controls every aspect of people who live in the Arab world.

The polls and research suggest that youth are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority. They aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion. Their search leads them in multiple directions that range from changes in personal religious behavior that deviates from that proscribed by the state to conversions in secret to other religions even though apostasy is banned and punishable by death, to an abandonment of organized religion all together in favor of deism, agnosticism, or atheism.

The youth are not interested in institutions or organizations. These do not attract them or give them any incentive; just the opposite, these institutions and organizations and their leadership take advantage of them only when they are needed for their attendance and for filling out the crowds, said Palestinian scholar and former Hamas education minister Nasser al-Din al-Shaer.

Atheists and converts cite perceived discriminatory provisions in Islams legal code towards various Muslim sects, non-Muslims, and women as a reason for turning their back on the faith. The primary thing that led me to atheism is Islams moral aspect. How can, for example, a merciful and compassionate God, said to be more merciful than a woman on her baby, permit slavery and the trade of slaves in slave markets? How come He permits rape of women simply because they are war prisoners? These acts would not be committed by a merciful human being much less by a merciful God, said Hicham Nostic, a Moroccan atheist, writing under a pen name.

The recent research and polls suggest a reversal of an Islamic revival that scholars like John Esposito in the 1990s and Jean-Paul Carvalho in 2009 observed that was bolstered by the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, the results of a 1996 World Values Survey that reported a strengthening of traditional religious values in the Muslim world, the rise of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the initial Muslim Brotherhood electoral victories in Egypt and Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts.

The indices of Islamic reawakening in personal life are many: increased attention to religious observances (mosque attendance, prayer, fasting), proliferation of religious programming and publications, more emphasis on Islamic dress and values, the revitalization of Sufism (mysticism). This broader-based renewal has also been accompanied by Islams reassertion in public life: an increase in Islamically oriented governments, organizations, laws, banks, social welfare services, and educational institutions, Esposito noted at the time.

Carvalho argued that an economic growth reversal which raised aspirations and led subsequently to a decline in social mobility which left aspirations unfulfilled among the educated middle class (and) increasing income inequality and impoverishment of the lower-middle class was driving the revival. The same factors currently fuel a shift away from traditional, Orthodox, and ultra-conservative values and norms of religiosity.

The shift in Muslim-majority countries also contrasts starkly with a trend towards greater religious Orthodoxy in some Muslim minority communities in Europe. A 2018 report by the Dutch governments Social and Cultural Planning Bureau noted that the number of Muslims of Turkish and Moroccan descent who strictly observe traditional religious precepts had increased by approximately eight percent. Dutch citizens of Turkish and Moroccan descent account for two-thirds of the countrys Muslim community. The report suggested that in a pluralistic society in which Muslims are a minority, the more personal, individualistic search for true Islam can lead to youth becoming more strict in observance than their parents or environment ever were.

Changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity that mirror shifting attitudes in non-Muslim countries are particularly risky for leaders, irrespective of their politics, who cloak themselves in the mantle of religion as well as nationalism and seek to leverage that in their geopolitical pursuit of religious soft power. The 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as mass anti-government protests in various Middle Eastern countries in 2019 and 2020 spotlighted the subversiveness of the change. The Arab Spring was the tipping point in the shift []. It was the epitome of how we see the change. The calls were for dawla madiniya, a civic state. A civic state is as close as you can come to saying [], we want a state where the laws are written by people so that we can challenge them, we can change them, we can adjust them. Its not Gods law, its madiniya, its peoples law, Oweidat, the Islamic thought scholar, said.

Akyol went further, noting in a journal article that too many terrible things have recently happened in the Arab world in the name of Islam. These include the sectarian civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, where most of the belligerents have fought in the name of God, often with appalling brutality. The millions of victims and bystanders of these wars have experienced shock and disillusionment with religious politics, and more than a few began asking deeper questions.

The 2011 popular Arab revolts reverberated across the Middle East, reshaping relations between states as well as domestic policies, even though initial achievements of the protesters were rolled back in Egypt and sparked wars in Libya, Yemen, and Syria.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt imposed a 3.5 year-long diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar in part to cut their youth off from access to the Gulf states popular Al Jazeera television network that supported the revolts and Islamist groups that challenged the regions autocratic rulers. Seeking to lead and tightly control a social and economic reform agenda driven by youth who were enamored by the uprisings, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sought to recapture this mandate of change, wrap it in a national mantle, and sever it from its Arab Spring associations. The boycott and ensuing nationalist campaign against Qatar became central to achieving that, said Gulf scholar Kristin Smith Diwan.

Referring to the revolts, Moroccan journalist Ahmed Benchemsi suggested that the Arab Spring may have stalled, if not receded, but when it comes to religious beliefs and attitudes, a generational dynamic is at play. Large numbers of individuals are tilting away from the rote religiosity Westerners reflexively associate with the Arab world.

Benchemsi went on to argue that in todays Arab world, its not religiosity that is mandatory; its the appearance of it. Nonreligious attitudes and beliefs are tolerated as long as theyre not conspicuous. As a system, social hypocrisy provides breathing room to secular lifestyles, while preserving the faade of religion. Atheism, per se, is not the problem. Claiming it out loud is. So those who publicize their atheism in the Arab world are fighting less for freedom of conscience than for freedom of speech. The same could be said for the right to convert or opt for alternative practices of Islam.

Syrian journalist Sham al-Ali recounts the story of a female relative who escaped the civil war to Germany where she decided to remove her hijab. Her father, who lives in Turkey, accepted his daughters decision but threatened to disown her if she posted pictures of herself uncovered on Facebook. His issue was not with his daughters abandonment of religious duty, but with her publicizing that before her family and society at large, Al-Ali said.

Neo-patriarchism, a pillar of Arab autocratic rule, heightens concern about public appearance and perception. A phrase coined by American-Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi, neo-patriarchism involves projection of the autocratic leader as a father figure. Autocratic Arab society, according to Sharabi, was built on the dominance of the father, a patriarch around which the national as well as the nuclear family are organized. Relations between a ruler and the ruled are replicated in the relationship between a father and his children. In both settings, the paternal will is absolute, mediated in society as well as the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion.

As a result, neo-patriarchism often reinforces pressure to abide by state-imposed religious behavior and at the same time fuels changes in attitudes towards religion and religiosity among youth who resent their inability to chart a path of their own. Primary and secondary schools have emerged as one frontline in the struggle to determine the boundaries of religious expression and behavior. Recent developments in Egypt, a brutal autocracy, and Indonesia, the worlds largest Muslim-majority democracy, offer contrasting perspectives on how the tug of war between students and parents, schoolteachers and administrations, and the state plays out.

Mada Masr, Egypts foremost independent news outlet, documented how in 2020 Egyptian schoolgirls who refused to wear a hijab were being coerced and publicly shamed in the knowledge that the education ministry was reluctant to enforce its policy not to mandate the wearing of a headdress. The model, decent girl is expected to dress modestly and wear a hijab to signal her pride in her religious identity, since hijab is what distinguishes her from a Christian girl, said Lamia Lotfy, a gender consultant and rights activist. Teachers at public high schools said they were reluctant to take boys to task for violating dress codes because they were more likely to push back and create problems.

In sharp contrast, Indonesian Religious Affairs Minister Yaqut Cholil Qoumas issued in early 2021 a decree together with the ministers of home affairs and education threatening to sanction state schools that seek to impose religious garb in violation of government rules and regulations. The decree was issued amid a public row sparked by the refusal of a Christian student to obey her school principals instructions requiring all pupils to wear Islamic clothing. Qoumas is a leader of Nahdlatul Ulama, the worlds largest Muslim movement and foremost advocate of theological reform in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Religions do not promote conflict, neither do they justify acting unfairly against those who are different, Qoumas said.

A Muslim nation that replaced a decades long autocratic regime with a democracy in a popular revolt in 1998, Indonesia is Middle Eastern rulers worst nightmare. The shifting attitudes of Middle Eastern youth towards religion and religiosity suggest that experimentation with religion in post-revolt Indonesia is a path that it would embark on if given the opportunity. Indonesia is where the removal of constraints imposed by an authoritarian regime has opened up the imaginative terrain, allowing particular types of religious beliefs and practices to emerge []. The Indonesian cases study [] brings into sharper relief processes that are happening in ordinary Muslim life elsewhere, said Indonesia scholar Nur Amali Ibrahim.

A 2019 poll of Arab youth showed that two-thirds of those surveyed felt that religion played too large a role in their lives, up from 50 percent four years earlier. Nearly 80 percent argued that religious institutions needed to be reformed while half said that religious values were holding the Arab world back. Surveys conducted over the last decade by Arab Barometer, a research network at Princeton University and the University of Michigan, showed a growing number of youths turning their backs on religion. Personal piety has declined some 43 percent over the past decade, indicating less than a quarter of the population now define themselves as religious, the survey concluded.

With the trend being the strongest among Libyans, many Libyan youth gravitate towards secretive atheist Facebook pages. They often are products of the UAEs failed attempt to align the hard power of its military intervention in Libya with religious soft power. Said, a 25-year-old student from Benghazi, the stronghold of the UAE and Saudi-backed rebel forces led by self-appointed Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, turned his back on religion after his cousin was beheaded in 2016 for speaking out against militants. UAE backing of Haftar has involved the population of his army by Madkhalists, a branch of Salafism named after a Saudi scholar who preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and projects the kingdom as a model of Islamic governance. My cousins death occurred during a period when I was deeply religious, praying five times a day and studying ten new pages of the Quran each evening, Said said.

A majority of respondents in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, and Iran said in a 2017 poll conducted by Washington-based John Zogby Associates that they wanted religious movements to focus on personal faith and spiritual guidance and not involve themselves in politics. Iraq and Palestine were the outliers with a majority favoring a political role for religious groups.

The response to polls in the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century contrasts starkly with attitudes expressed in a survey of the worlds Muslims by the Pew Research Center several years earlier. Pews polling suggested that ultra-conservative attitudes long promoted by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar that legitimized authoritarian and autocratic regimes remained popular. More than 70 percent of those surveyed at the time in South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa favored making Sharia the law of the land and granting Sharia courts jurisdiction over family law and property disputes.

Those numbers varied broadly, however, when respondents were asked about specific issues like apostasy and corporal punishment. Three-quarters of South Asians favored the death sentence for apostasy as opposed to 56 percent in the Middle East and only 27 percent in Southeast Asia, while 81 percent in South Asia supported physical punishment compared to 57 percent in the Middle East and North Africa and 46 percent in Southeast Asia. South Asia emerged as the only part of the Muslim world in which respondents preferred a strong leader to democracy while a majority of the faithful in all three regions viewed religious freedom as positive. Between 65 and 79 percent in all regions wanted to see religious leaders have political influence.

Honor killings may be the one area where attitudes have not changed that much in recent years. Arab Barometers polling in 2018 and 2019 showed that more people thought honor killings were acceptable than homosexuality. In most countries polled, young Arabs appeared more likely than their parents to condone honor killings. Social media and occasional protests bear that out. Thousands rallied in early 2020 in Hebron, a conservative city on the West Bank, after the Palestinian Authority signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.

Nonetheless, the assertions by Saudi Arabia that projects itself as the leader of an unidentified form of moderate Islam that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler and by advocates of varying strands of political Islam such as Turkey and Iran ring hollow in light of the dramatic shift in attitudes towards religion and religiosity.

Among the Middle Eastern rivals for religious soft power, the United Arab Emirates, populated in majority by non-nationals, may be the only one to emerge with a cleaner slate. The UAE is the only contender to have started acknowledging changing attitudes and demographic realities. Authorities in November 2020 lifted the ban on consumption of alcohol and cohabitation among unmarried couples. In a further effort to reach out to youth, the UAE organized in 2021 a virtual consultation with 3,000 students aimed at motivating them to think innovatively over the countrys path in the next 50 years.

Such moves do not fundamentally eliminate the risk that the changing attitudes may undercut the religious soft power efforts of the UAE and its Middle Eastern competitors. The problem for rulers like the UAE and Saudi crown princes, Mohammed bin Zayed and Mohammed bin Salman, respectively, is that the loosening of social restrictions in Saudi Arabiaincluding the emasculation of the kingdoms religious police, the lifting of a ban on womens driving, less strict implementation of gender segregation, the introduction of Western-style entertainment and greater professional opportunities for women, and a degree of genuine religious tolerance and pluralism in the UAEare only first steps in responding to youth aspirations.

People are sick and tired of organized religion and being told what to do. That is true for all Gulf states and the rest of the Arab world, quipped a Saudi businessman. Social scientist Ellen van de Bovenkamp describes Moroccans she interviewed for her PhD thesis as living a personalized, self-made religiosity, in which ethics and politics are more important than rituals.

Nevertheless, religious authorities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Qatar, Iran, and Morocco continue to project interpretations of the faith that serve the state and are often framed in the language of tolerance and inter-faith dialogue but preserve outmoded legal categories, traditions, and scripture that date back centuries. Outdated concepts of slavery, who is a believer and who is an infidel, apostasy, blasphemy, and physical punishment that need reconceptualization remain in terms of religious law frozen in time. Many of those concepts, with the exception of slavery that has been banned in national law yet remains part of Islamic law, have been embedded in national legislations.

While Turkey continues to, at least nominally, adhere to its secular republican origins, it is no different from its rivals when it comes to grooming state-aligned clergymen, whose ability to think out of the box and develop new interpretations of the faith is impeded by a religious education system that stymies critical thinking and creativity. Instead, it too emphasizes the study of Arabic and memorization of the Quran and other religious texts and creates a religious and political establishment that discourages, if not penalizes, innovation.

Widening the gap between state projections of religion and popular aspirations is the fact that governments subjugation of religious establishments turns clerics and scholars into regime parrots and fuels youth skepticism towards religious institutions and leaders.

Youth have [] witnessed how religious figures, who still remain influential in many Arab societies, can sometimes give in to change even if they have resisted it initially. This not only feeds into Arab youths skepticism towards religious institutions but also further highlights the inconsistency of the religious discourse and its inability to provide timely explanations or justifications to the changing reality of today, said Gulf scholar Eman Alhussein in a commentary on the 2020 Arab Youth Survey.

Pooyan Tamimi Arab, the co-organizer of an online survey in 2020 of Iranian attitudes towards religion that revealed a stunning rejection of state-imposed adherence to conservative religious mores as well as the role of religion in public life noted the widening gap becomes an existential question. The state wants you to be something that you dont want to be []. Political disappointment steadily turned into religious disappointment []. Iranians have turned away from institutional religion on an unprecedented scale.

In a similar vein, Turkish art historian Nese Yildiran recently warned that a fatwa issued by President Erdogans Directorate of Religious Affairs or Diyanet declaring popular talismans to ward off the evil eye as forbidden by Islam fueled criticism of one of the best-funded branches of government. The fatwa followed the issuance of similar religious opinions banning the dying of mens moustaches and beards, feeding dogs at home, tattoos, and playing the national lottery as well as statements that were perceived to condone or belittle child abuse and violence against women.

Although compatible with a trend across the Middle East, the Iranian surveys results, which is based on 50,000 respondents who overwhelmingly said they resided in the Islamic republic, suggested that Iranians were in the frontlines of the regions quest for religious change.

Funded by Washington-based Iranian human rights activist Ladan Boroumand, the Iranian survey, coupled with other research and opinion polls across the Middle East and North Africa, suggests that not only Muslim youth, but also other age groups, who are increasingly skeptical towards religious and worldly authority, aspire to more individual, more spiritual experiences of religion.

Their quest runs the gamut from changes in personal religious behavior to conversions in secret to other religions because apostasy is banned and, in some cases, punishable by death, to an abandonment of religion in favor of agnosticism or atheism. Responding to the survey, 80 percent of the participants said they believed in God but only 32.2 percent identified themselves as Shiite Muslimsa far lower percentage than asserted in official figures of predominantly Shiite Iran.

More than one third of the respondents said that they either did not belong to a religion or were atheists or agnostics. Between 43 and 53 percent, depending on age group, suggested that their religious views had changed over time with 6 percent of those saying that they had converted to another religious orientation.

In addition, 68 percent said they opposed the inclusion of religious precepts in national legislation. Moreover 70 percent rejected public funding of religious institutions while 56 percent opposed mandatory religious education in schools. Almost 60 percent admitted that they do not pray, and 72 percent disagreed with women being obliged to wear a hijab in public.

An unpublished slide of the survey shows the change in religiosity reflected in the fact that an increasing number of Iranians no longer name their children after religious figures.

A five-minute YouTube clip uploaded by an ultra-conservative channel allegedly related to Irans Revolutionary Guards attacked the survey despite having distributed the questionnaire once the pollsters disclosed in their report that the poll had been supported by an exile human rights group.

Tehran may well be the least religious capital in the Middle East. Clerics dominate the news headlines and play the communal elders in soap operas, but I never saw them on the street, except on billboards. Unlike most Muslim countries, the call to prayer is almost inaudible []. Alcohol is banned but home delivery is faster for wine than for pizza []. Religion felt frustratingly hard to locate and the truly religious seemed sidelined, like a minority, wrote journalist Nicholas Pelham based on a visit in 2019 during which he was detained for several weeks.

In yet another sign of rejection of state-imposed expressions of Islam, Iranians have sought to alleviate the social impact of COVID-19 related lockdowns and restrictions on face-to-face human contact by acquiring dogs, cats, birds, and even reptiles as pets. The Islamic Republic has long viewed pets as a fixture of Western culture. One of the main reasons for keeping pets in Iran is that people no longer believe in the old cultural, religious, or doctrinal taboos as the unalterable words of God. This shift towards deconstructing old taboos signals a transformation of the Iranian identityfrom the traditional to the new, said psychologist Farnoush Khaledi.

Pets are one form of dissent; clandestine conversions are another. Exiled Iranian Shiite scholar Yaser Mirdamadi noted that Iranians no longer have faith in state-imposed religion and are groping for religious alternatives.

A former Israeli army intelligence chief, retired Lt. Col. Marco Moreno, puts the number of converts in Iran, a country of 83 million, at about one million. Morenos estimate may be an overestimate. Other studies in put the figure at between 100,000 and 500,000. Whatever the number is, the conversions fit a trend not only in Iran but across the Muslim world of changing attitudes towards religion, a rejection of state-imposed interpretations of Islam, and a search for more individual and varied religious experiences. Iranian press reports about the discovery of clandestine church gatherings in homes in the holy city of Qom suggest conversions to Christianity began more than a decade ago. The fact that conversions had reached Qom was an indication that this was happening elsewhere in the country, Mirdamadi, the Shiite cleric, said.

Seeing the converts as an Israeli asset, Moreno backed production of a two-hour documentary, Sheep Among Wolves Volume II, produced by two American Evangelists, one of which resettled on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, that asserts that Irans underground community of converts to Christianity is the worlds fastest growing church.

What if I told you the mosques are empty inside Iran? said a church leader in the film, his identity masked and his voice distorted to avoid identification. Based on interviews with Iranian converts while they were travelling abroad, the documentary opens with a scene on an Indonesian beach where they meet with the filmmakers for a religious training session.

What if I told you that Islam is dead? What if I told you that the mosques are empty inside Iran? [] What if I told you no one follows Islam inside of Iran? Would you believe me? This is exactly what is happening inside of Iran. God is moving powerfully inside of Iran? the church leader added. Unsurprisingly, given the films Israeli backing and the filmmakers affinity with Israel, the documentary emphasizes the converts break with Irans staunch rejection of the Jewish State by emphasizing their empathy for Judaism and Israel.

The Iran surveys results as well as observations by analysts and journalists like Pelham stroke with responses to various polls of Arab public opinion in recent years and fit a global pattern of reduced religiosity. A 2019 Pew Research Center study concluded that adherence to Christianity in the United States was declining at a rapid pace.

The Arab Youth Survey found that, despite 40 percent of those polled defining religion as the most important constituent element of their identity, 66 percent saw a need for religious institutions to be reformed. The way some Arab countries consume religion in the political discourse, which is further amplified on social media, is no longer deceptive to the youth who can now see through it, Alhussein, the Gulf scholar, said.

A 2018 Arab Opinion Index poll suggested that public opinion may support the reconceptualization of Muslim jurisprudence. Almost 70 percent of those polled agreed that no religious authority is entitled to declare followers of other religions to be infidels. Similarly, 70 percent of those surveyed rejected the notion that democracy was incompatible with Islam while 76 percent viewed it as the most appropriate system of governance.

What that means in practice is, however, less clear. Arab public opinion appears split down the middle when it comes to issues like separation of religion and politics or the right to protest.

Arab Barometer director Michael Robbins cautioned in a commentary in the Washington Post, co-authored with international affairs scholar Lawrence Rubin, that recent moves by the government of Sudan to separate religion and state may not enjoy public support.

The transitional government brought to office in 2020 by a popular revolt that topped decades of Islamist rule by ousted President Omar al-Bashir agreed in peace talks with Sudanese rebel groups to a separation of religion and state. The government also ended the ban on apostasy and consumption of alcohol by non-Muslims and prohibited corporal punishment, including public flogging.

Robbins and Rubin noted that 61 percent of those surveyed on the eve of the revolt believed that Sudanese law should be based on the Sharia or Islamic law defined by two-thirds of the respondents as ensuring the provision of basic services and lack of corruption. The researchers, nonetheless, also concluded that youth favored a reduced role of religious leaders in political life. They said youth had soured on the idea of religion-based governance because of widespread corruption during the region of Al-Bashir who professed his adherence to religious principles.

If the transitional government can deliver on providing basic services to the countrys citizens and tackling corruption, the formal shift away from Sharia is likely to be acceptable in the eyes of the public. However, if these problems remain, a new set of religious leaders may be able to galvanize a movement aimed at reinstituting Sharia as a means to achieve these objectives, Robbins and Rubin warned.

Writing at the outset of the popular revolt that toppled Al-Bashir, Islam scholar and former Sudanese diplomat Abdelwahab El-Affendi noted that for most Sudanese, Islamism came to signify corruption, hypocrisy, cruelty, and bad faith. Sudan is perhaps the first genuinely anti-Islamist country in popular terms. But being anti-Islamist in Sudan does not mean being secular.

It is a warning that is as valid for Sudan as it is for much of the Arab and Muslim world.

Saudi columnist Wafa al-Rashid sparked fiery debate on social media after calling in a local newspaper for a secular state in the kingdom. How long will we continue to shy away from enlightenment and change? Religious enlightenment, which is in line with reality and the thinking of youth, who rebelled and withdrew from us because we are no longer like them. [] We no longer speak their language or understand their dreams, Al-Rashid wrote.

Asked in a poll conducted by The Washington Institute of Near East Policy whether its a good thing we arent having big street demonstrations here now the way they do in some other countriesa reference to the past decade of popular revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Lebanon, Iraq and SudanSaudi public opinion was split down the middle. The numbers indicate that 48 percent of respondents agreed and 48 percent disagreed. Saudis, like most Gulf Arabs, are likely less inclined to take grievances to the streets. Nonetheless, the poll indicates that they may prove to be more empathetic to protests should they occur.

Tamimi Arab, the Iran pollster, argued that his Iran survey shows that there is a social basis for concern among authoritarian and autocratic governments that employ religion to further their geopolitical goals and seek to maintain their grip on potentially restive populations. His warning reverberates in the responses by governments in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East to changing attitudes towards religion and religiosity. They demonstrate the degree to which they perceive the change as a threat, often expressed in existential terms.

Mohammad Mehdi Mirbaqeri, a prominent Shiite cleric and member of Irans powerful Assembly of Experts that appoints the countrys supreme leader, described COVID-19 in late 2020 as a secular virus and a declaration of war on religious civilization and religious institutions.

Saudi Arabia went further by defining the calling for atheist thought in any form as terrorism in its anti-terrorism law. Saudi dissident and activist Rafi Badawi was sentenced on charges of apostasy to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis should be obliged to adhere to Islam and asserting that the faith did not have answers to all questions.

Analysts, writers, journalists, and pollsters have traced changes in attitudes in the Middle East and North Africa as well as the wider Muslim world for much of the past decade, if not longer. A Western Bangladesh scholar resident in Dacca in 1989 recalled Bangladeshis looking for a copy of Salman Rushdies Satanic Verses as soon as it was banned by Irans Ayatollah Khomeini, who condemned the British author to death. It was the allure of forbidden fruit. Yet, I also found that many were looking for things to criticize, an excuse to think differently, the scholar wrote.

Widely viewed as a bastion of ultra-conservatism. Malaysias top religious regulatory body, the Malaysian Islamic Development Department (Jakim), which responsible for training Islamic teachers and preparing weekly state-controlled Friday sermons, has long portrayed liberalism and pluralism as threats, pointing to a national fatwa that in 2006 condemned liberalism as heretical. The pulpit would like to state today that many tactics are being undertaken by irresponsible people to weaken Muslim unity, among them through spreading new but inverse thinking like Pluralism, Liberalism, and such. The pulpit would like to state that the Liberal movement contains concepts that are found to have deviated from the Islamic faith and shariah, read a 2014 Friday sermon drafted and distributed by Jakim.

The fatwa echoed a similar legal opinion issued a year earlier by Indonesias semi-governmental Council of Religious Scholars (MUI) labelled with SIPILIS as its acronym to equate secularism, pluralism, and liberalism with the venereal disease. The council was headed at the time by current Vice President Maruf Amin, a prominent Nahdlatul Ulama figure.

Challenging attempts by governments and religious authorities to suppress changing attitudes rather than engage with groups groping for greater religious freedom, Kuwaiti writer Sajed al-Abdali noted in 2012 that it is essential that we acknowledge today that atheism exists and is increasing in our society, especially among our youth, and evidence of this is in no short supply.

Al-Abdali sounded his alarm three years prior to the publication of a Pew Research Center study that sought to predict the growth trajectories of the worlds religions by the year 2050. The study suggested that the number of people among the 300 million inhabitants of the Middle East and North Africa that were unaffiliated with any faith would remain stable at about 0.6 percent of the population.

Two years later, the Egyptian governments religious advisory body, Dar al-Ifta Al-Missriya, published a scientifically disputed survey that sought to project the number of atheists in the region as negligible. The survey identified 2,293 atheists, including 866 Egyptians, 325 Moroccans, 320 Tunisians, 242 Iraqis, 178 Saudis, 170 Jordanians, 70 Sudanese, 56 Syrians, 34 Libyans, and 32 Yemenis. It defined atheists as not only those who did not believe in God but also as encompassing converts to other religions and advocates of a secular state. A poll conducted that same year by Al Azhar, Cairos ancient citadel of Islamic learning, concluded that Egypt counted 10.7 million atheists. Al Azhars Grand Imam, Ahmad al-Tayyeb, warned at the time on state television that the flight from religion constituted a social problem.

A 2012 survey by international polling firm WIN/Gallup International reported that 5 percent of Saudisor more than one million peopleidentified themselves as convinced atheists on par with the percentage in the United States; while 19 percent described themselves as non-religious. By the same token, Benchemsi, the Moroccan journalist, found 250 Arab atheism-related pages or groups while searching the internet, with memberships ranging from a few individuals to more than 11,000. And these numbers only pertain to Arab atheists (or Arabs concerned with the topic of atheism) who are committed enough to leave a trace online, Benchemsi said, noting that many more were unlikely to publicly disclose their beliefs.

The picture is replicated across the Middle East. The number of atheists and agnostics in Iraq, for example, is growing. Iraqi writer and one-time Shiite cleric Gaith al-Tamimi argued that religious figures have come to represent all thats inherently wrong in Iraqi politics society. Iraqis of all generations seek to escape religious dogma, he says, adding that Iraqis are questioning the role religion serves today. Fadhil, a 30-year-old from the southern port city of Basra complained that religious leaders overuse and misuse Gods name, police human bodies, prohibit extramarital sex, and police the bodies of women. Changing attitudes towards religion figured prominently in mass anti-government protests in Iraq in 2019 and 2020 that rejected sectarianism and called for a secular national Iraqi identity.

Even in Syria, a fulcrum of militant and ultra-conservative forms of Islam that fed on a decade of brutal civil war and foreign intervention, many concluded in the words of Al-Ali, the Syrian journalist, that religious and political authorities are protective friends one of the other, and that political despotism stems from religious absolutism. [] In Syria, the prestige sheikhs had enjoyed was undermined alongside that of the regime. Religion and religious figures inability to explain the horror that Syria was experiencing and that had uprooted the lives of millions drove many forced to flee to question long-held beliefs.

Multiple Turkish surveys suggested that Erdogans goal of raising a religious generation had backfired despite pouring billions of dollars into religious education. Students often rejected religion, described themselves as atheists, deists, or feminists, and challenged the interpretation of Islam taught in schools. A 2019 survey by polling and data company IPSOS reported that only 12 percent of Turks trusted religious officials and 44 percent distrusted clerics. We have declined when religious sincerity and morality expressed by the people is taken into account, said Ali Bardakoglu, who headed Erdogans Religious Affairs Department or Diyanet from 2003 to 2010.

Unaware that microphones had not been muted, Erdogan expressed concern a year earlier to his education minister about the spread of deism, a belief in a God that does not intervene in the universe and that is not defined by organized religion, among Turkish youth during a meeting of his partys parliamentary group. No, no such thing can happen, Erdogan ordained against the backdrop of Turkish officials painting deism as a Western conspiracy designed to weaken Turkey. Erdogans comments came in response to the publication of an education ministry report that, in line with the subsequent survey, warned that popular rejection of religious knowledge acquired through revelation and religious teachings and a growing embrace of reason was on the rise.

The report noted that increased enrollment in a rising number of state-run religious Imam Hatip high schools had not stopped mounting questioning of orthodox Islamic precepts. Neither had increased study of religion in mainstream schools that deemphasized the teaching of evolution. The greater emphasis on religion failed to advance Erdogans dream of a pious generation that would have a Quran in one hand and a computer in the other. Instead, reflecting a discussion on faith and youth among some 50 religion teachers, the report suggested that lack of faith in educators had fueled the rise of deism. Teachers were unable to answer the often-posed question: why does God not intervene to halt evil and why does he remain silent? The reports cautionary note was bolstered by a flurry of anonymous confessions and personal stories by deists as well as atheists recounted in newspaper interviews.

Acting on Erdogans instructions, Ali Erbas, the director of Diyanet, declared war on deism. The governments top cleric, Erbas blamed Western missionaries seeking to convert Turkish youth to Christianity for deisms increased popularity. Erbas declaration followed a three-day consultation with 70 religious scholars and bureaucrats convened by the Directorate that identified Deism, Atheism, Nihilism, Agnosticism as the enemy. Erdogans alarm and Erbas spinning of conspiracy theories constituted attempts to detract attention from the fact that youth in Tukey, like in Iran and the Arab world, were turning their back on orthodox and classical interpretations of Islam on the back of increasingly authoritarian and autocratic rule. Erdogan thundered that there is no such thing as LGBT and added that this country is national and spiritual, and will continue to walk into the future as such when protesting students displayed a poster depicting one of Islams holiest sites, the Kaaba shrine in Mecca, with LGBT flags.

There is a dictatorship in Turkey. This drives people away from religion, said Temel Karamollaoglu, the leader of the Islamist Felicity Party that opposes Erdogans AKP because of its authoritarianism. Turkey scholar Mucahit Bilici described Turkish youths rejection of Orthodox and politicized interpretations of Islam as a flowering of post-Islamist sentiment by a younger generation (that) is choosing the path of individualized spirituality and a silent rejection of tradition.

Saudi authorities view the high numbers in the WIN/Gallup International as a threat to the religious legitimacy that the kingdoms ruling Al-Saud family has long cloaked itself in. The groundswell of aspirations that have guided youth away from the confines of ultra-conservatism highlight failed efforts of the government and the religious establishment going back to the 1980s. The culture and information ministry banned the word modernity at the time in a bid to squash an emerging debate that challenged the narrow confines of ultra-conservatism as well as the authority of religion and the religious establishment to govern personal and public life.

The threat perceived by Saudi and other Middle Eastern autocrats and authoritarians as well as conservative religious voices is fueled by an implicit equation of atheism and/or rejection of state-imposed conservative and ultra-conservative strands of the faith with anarchy.

Any calls that challenge Islamic rule or Islamic ideology is considered subversive in Saudi Arabia and would be subversive and could lead to chaos, said Saudi ambassador to the United Nations Abdallah al-Mouallimi. Echoing journalist Benchemsi, Muallimi argued that if (a person) was disbelieving in God, and keeping that to himself, and conducting himself, nobody would do anything or say anything about it. If he is going out in the public, and saying, I dont believe in God, thats subversive. He is inviting others to retaliate.

Similarly, Sheikh Ahmad Turki, speaking as the coordinator of the anti-atheism campaign of the Egyptian Ministry of Endowments, asserted that atheism is a national security issue. Atheists have no principles; its certain that they have dysfunctional conceptsin ethics, views of the society and even in their nationalistic affiliations. If [atheists] rebel against religion, they will rebel against everything.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have sought to experiment with alternatives to orthodox and ultra-conservative strands of Islam without surrendering state control by encouraging Al Azhar to embrace legal reform that is influenced by Sufism, Islams mystical tradition. There is a movement of renewal of Islamic jurisprudence. [] Its a movement that is funded by the wealthy Gulf countries. Dont forget that one reason for the success of the Salafis is the financial power that backed them for decades. This financial power is now being directed to the Azharis, and they are taking advantage of it. [] Dont underestimate what is happening. It might be a true alternative to Salafism, said Egyptian Islam scholar Wael Farouq.

By contrast, Pakistan, a country influenced by Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism, has stepped up its efforts to ringfence religious minorities. In an act of overreach modelled on American insistence on extra-territorial abidance by some of its laws, Pakistan laid down a gauntlet in the struggle to define religious freedom by seeking to block and shut down a U.S.-based website associated with Ahmadis on charges of blasphemy.

Ahmadis are a minority sect viewed as heretics by many Muslims that have been targeted in Indonesia and elsewhere, but nowhere more so than in Pakistan where they have been constitutionally classified as non-Muslims. Blasphemy is potentially punishable in Pakistan with a death sentence.

The Pakistani effort was launched at a moment that anti-Ahmadi and anti-Shiite sentiment in Pakistan, home to the worlds largest Shia Muslim minority, was on the rise. Mass demonstrations denounced Shiites as blasphemers and infidels and called for their beheading as the number of blasphemy cases being filed against Shiites in the courts mushroomed.

Shifting attitudes towards religion and religiosity raise fundamental chicken and egg questions about the relationship between religious and political reform, including what comes first and whether one is possible without the other. Indonesias Nahdlatul Ulama argues that religious reform requires recontextualization of the faith as well as a revision of legal codes and religious jurisprudence. The only Muslim institution to have initiated a process of eliminating legal concepts in Islamic law that are obsolete or discriminatorysuch as the endorsement of slavery and notions of infidels and dhimmis or People of the Book with lesser rightsNahdlatul Ulama, a movement created almost a century ago in opposition to Wahhabism, the puritan interpretation of Islam on which Saudi Arabia was founded, is in alignment with advocates of religious reform elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Said Mohammed Sharour, a Syrian Quranist who believed that the Quran was Islams only relevant text, dismissed the Hadiththe compilation of the Prophets sayings and the Sunnah, the traditions, and practices of the Prophet that serve as a model for Muslims: The religious heritage must be critically read and interpreted anew. Cultural and religious reforms are more important than political ones, as they are the preconditions for any secular reforms. Shahrour went on to say that the reforms, comparable to those of 16th century scholar and priest Martin Luthers reformation of Christianity, must include all those ideas on which the people who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks based their interpretations of sources. [] We simply have to rethink the fundamental principles. It is [] said that the fixed values of religion cannot be rethought. But I say that it is exactly these values that we must study and rethink.

The thinking of Nahdlatul Ulamas critical mass of Islamic scholars and men like Shahrour offers little solace to authoritarian and autocratic leaders and their religious allies in the Muslim world at a time that Muslims are clamoring not only for political and religious change. If anything, it puts them on the spot by offering a bottom-up alternative to state-controlled religion that seeks to ensure the survival of autocratic regimes and the protection of vested interests.

This story was first published inHorizons

See the original post:

Battle For The Soul Of Islam Analysis - Eurasia Review

The most dangerous philosophy is the unacknowledged one.

I recently observed on my blog:

Atheist critics are constantly informing us lowly, ignorant Christians that atheism itself is, alas, not a formulated position, but only the absence of a position (belief in God). Its not a worldview, etc. I wish I had a dime for every time Ive heard that. Its not true, but we hear it all the time.

Lo and behold, on the very next day an atheist on a prominent Christian-bashing atheist website, addressed this very topic and stated that an atheist is one who is not a theist. But he denied that atheism was itself a belief. No one doubts that that is the literal meaning of the word. It doesnt follow, however, that the atheist believes nothing in a positive sense, or that he or she possesses no worldview or sets of beliefs (which is my topic).

They certainly do as virtually all sentient human beings do, whether they acknowledge it or not. Someone wisely said: The most dangerous philosophy is the unacknowledged one. Briefly stated, almost all atheists are empiricists, positivists, philosophical materialists, methodological naturalists, enraptured with science as supposedly the sole valid epistemology making it essentially their religion (scientism) all of which are objectively identifiable positions, that can be discussed and either embraced or dismissed.

So its not so much that we are saying that there is an atheist worldview per se. Rather, we make the observation (from long personal experience, if one is an apologist like myself) that every self-described atheist will overwhelmingly tend to possess a particular worldview (whatever they call it or dont call it) that is an amalgam of many specific, identifiable things that themselves are worldviews or philosophies or ways of life.

Whatever one thinks of the above analysis, it remains highly likely that atheists will hold to one or more the (usually clustered) belief-systems outlined above. And they will often be blind to the fact that they are doing so, and will talk in terms of their simply following science and/or reason (with the implication that the non-atheist usually does not do either or is fundamentally irrational or naive or gullible simply because they reject atheism).

Im not discussing a mere word (atheism); Im talking about what atheists do in fact believe, and asserting that atheists hold to beliefs and belief-systems (usually quite predictable ones at that). In other words: atheists are just as likely to hold worldviews as anyone else.

The same atheist went on to decry the title atheist itself and lament that its widespread use was a game with language. This is downright comical; as if atheists dont massively choose to call themselves this name? They could reject it if they like. Theyre free to do so. No one is forcing them at gunpoint to use this name for themselves. They could use agnostic (and many do, but it is a less certain and less dogmatic outlook), or they could use a word like humanist (which a number of them also do). But the fact remains that lots and lots of atheists show no reversion to the term atheist. Quite the contrary, they proudly embrace it.

For heavens sake, on the very website where this essay was published, if one looks at the top, we see John Loftus books in a photograph: one of which is Why I Became an Atheist. The late Christopher Hitchens (a very famous and influential atheist indeed) edited a book entitled, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. The anti-theist atheist Dan Barker authored the modestly titled volume, Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of Americas Leading Atheists.

One atheist I have debated at length wrote an article entitled, Why is an atheist an atheist? in which he opined:

But ask an atheist why they are an atheist, and most times the person is so ready to respond to why the atheist is incorrect in her reply; they literally cannot wait for the poor person to stop talking.

You want to know why an atheist is an atheist. Ask him.

But atheists somehow dont like the term atheist anymore?

In conclusion, here are some of the many things that atheists en masse believe:

Im sure I could come up with many more things if I sat and thought about it a while, but this is more than sufficient to demonstrate my point: atheists (as people) have worldviews, even though the word atheism itself means (literally) rejecting a belief in God. And thats what we apologists (so relentlessly despised by atheists) are saying.

See more here:

Yes, Virginia, Atheists Have a Worldview - National Catholic Register

I posted last week about a disturbing recording that a West Virginia middle school student had made of her health teacher. The teacher told kids they should avoid sex before marriage because the Bible said so, that students needed to believe in God, that God would help them make better decisions about how to handle their hormones, etc.

It was proselytizating. Its illegal. And because the student recorded it, the Freedom From Religion Foundation was able to step in and send the school district a letter warning them about the problem.

That students father happens to be Owen Morgan, who goes by the name Telltale on YouTube, and he just posted an update that you should hear.

After spending a few minutes recapping the article I wrote about the situation, Morgan explains (around the 3:40 mark) how he and his daughter have basically been run out of town after a (now-deleted) private Facebook group with over 1,500 members doxxed him and revealed his personal information to a crowd of people out to get him.

At one point in the video, Morgan says, I cant go [out] in public, I cant go to the grocery store, I cant go to the bank, I cant go take out the fucking trash because I will be recognized and killed? Or at least beaten.

As he makes clear, though, hes not currently in West Virginia. Hes somewhere else. He told me hes safe. He has long term plans to move out of state. But all of this is happening at a speed he never expected because he dared to publicize how a Christian teacher working at a public school decided that preaching about Jesus was more important than doing her job. And now the same Christians who worship someone who talked about turning the other cheek are forcing Morgan and his daughter to fear for their lives.

Link:

After Exposing a Proselytizing Teacher, an Atheist and His Child Are on the Run - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Tiny Montenegro has long been different from its neighbors in the former Yugoslavia.

After a decade of bloody civil wars that included ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide, Yugoslavia in the 1990s split violently along ethnic lines into six different independent republics. But Montenegro escaped the worst of the war and for years remained with Serbia its dominant, Russian-allied neighbor as part of the rump Yugoslavia.

In 2006, Montenegrins voted for independence and separated from Serbia peacefully. Montenegro became a stable and inclusive democracy. It is a mountainous, postage-stamp sized country of 640,000 on the eastern Adriatic Sea.

Rather than maintain the Slavic ethnic identity of Serbia, Montenegro made room for all kinds of people. It was home to Montenegrins who are Orthodox, Muslim, Catholic and atheist yes, but also Bosniaks, Albanians, Roman-Catholic Croats and Serbs. Montenegro also has a Jewish community.

Montenegros post-independence leaders in the socialist party worked to build a broad civil society that recognized the many identities of its citizens. Many refugees from the Balkan wars sought safety in Montenegro.

Its political system favored neither majorities nor minorities, a value system inherited from Yugoslavia. In 2017, Montenegro joined NATO, the transatlantic security alliance, against Russias wishes. It wants to join the European Union.

Montenegros Balkan success story and its very national identity is now in danger after a right-wing coalition aligned with Serbia and Russia took power in December.

A fight over the Montenegrin language is symbolic of the broader political fight playing out in Montenegro.

All the former Yugoslavian republics Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia share a mutually intelligible language, previously called Serbo-Croatian. The differences among them are comparable to the varieties of English spoken by Americans, Australians, British and South Africans.

Since Yugoslavia broke up, each new Balkan nation has used language to create a common political and cultural identity for itself, establishing each language with its distinctive style and standardizing its usage.

As my research and others show, some were more successful in that effort than others. Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian are now well established as national languages, used in schools, the press, business and government.

Montenegrin, however, remains contested.

It is embraced by citizens who stand for an inclusive, multi-ethnic Montenegrin society. But those who view Montenegro as fundamentally an extension of the Serbian state consider Montenegrin merely a dialect of Serbian. According to a leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church, Montenegrin does not exist.

Montenegros new coalition government seems to side with the Serbs on the language question.

In March the new minister of education, science, culture and sports, Vesna Brati who identifies as a Serbian nationalist threatened to close the Faculty of Montenegrin Language and Literature in the old royal capital of Cetinje and has blocked its funding since January. The institute has led efforts to standardize the Montenegrin language and foster scholarship about Montenegrin literature and culture.

In a young country still forging its national identity, erasing the Montenegrin language that has bound its people together is akin to eliminating the Montenegrin identity.

Multi-ethnic Montenegro has so far achieved stability through a balancing act that recalled how Yugoslavian premiere Josip Broz Tito ran multi-ethnic Yugoslavia for much of the last century.

Yugoslavia, founded in 1918, was dominated by Slavic-speaking Serbs, Croats and Slovenes but was home to many Hungarians and Albanians, among other non-Slavic minorities. It was also divided religiously, between Roman Catholicism the faith of Slovenians and Croatians and the Eastern Orthodox Christianity of Serbians, Montenegrins and Macedonians.

After the Second World War, Marshal Tito and his Partisans having driven out Nazi occupiers led Yugoslavia under socialist rule. For four decades, Tito maintained order and quelled rivalry within Yugoslavia with an iron fist and by careful balancing of conflicting claims for cultural dominance.

From the Yugoslavian capital, Belgrade, Tito promoted a one-party system and ideology fostering brotherhood and unity among Yugoslavias many disparate traditions and communities.

That delicate balance broke down after Titos death in 1980.

Wars erupted in Yugoslavia along national, ethnic and religious lines. Serbian and Croatian paramilitaries seeking to carve out ethnically pure states carried out ethnic cleansing operations against their rivals in each others territories and elsewhere. Bosnia and Herzegovina fragmented among Catholics, Muslims and Eastern Orthodox witnessed the gravest atrocities.

Montenegro now seems to be at risk of a similar unraveling with its long-ruling Democratic Party of Socialists out of power. While rhetorically supporting Montenegros NATO and EU membership, Montenegros new political leadership is ideologically aligned with Serbia and Russia.

Many Montenegrins are appalled by their young democracys unexpected twist of fate. They fear Serbian cultural hegemony will negate their progress in nation-building and move Montenegro away from European values and toward Russia.

[Over 100,000 readers rely on The Conversations newsletter to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Russian President Vladimir Putin is watching the struggle over Montenegros future closely. Russia has traditional cultural and religious ties to Montenegro, and having Montenegro in Putins portfolio would give Russia access to a Mediterranean port.

Some Montenegrins even worry that violent ethnic conflict could begin again anew. For them, the Balkan wars are still a fresh memory. And theyve seen several democracies in Eastern Europe Poland and Hungary chief among them come under autocratic rule.

The West learned the hard way 25 years ago that conflict in the former Balkans can end in tragedy. Will this history repeat itself in Montenegro?

Excerpt from:

Montenegro was a success story in troubled Balkan region now its democracy is in danger - The Conversation US

It all started with a tweet.

It was March 2019, and the General Social Survey had just released its raw data, collected the previous year, on American political and religious life. For social scientists like myself, the survey is the most important instrument for analyzing changes in American society. Thats because its been asking the same questions on religion since its creation in 1972. If a researcher wants to know what share of Americans never attended church in the 1980s, the GSS is the place to go. As soon as I heard the latest results were in, I immediately downloaded the data file.

My primary objective was simple: I wanted to know how the seven major religious traditions in the United States had shifted over the previous two years. As soon as my boys were fed and happily playing in a bubble bath, I bounded down the stairs to my office and ran the more than 200 lines of computer code that would calculate the size of all seven religious traditions in every survey dating back to the early 1970s.

The result stunned me.

For the first time, the religiously unaffiliated were the same size as both Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, the two largest religious groups in the United States.

I had to let the world know, but I was on a time crunch. My boys were starting to get restless in the bathtub. I quickly put together a graph, picked a premade color scheme and added the names of each religious tradition to the visualization. I wrote a quick Twitter caption, noted there was some big news and hit the tweet button.

I went back upstairs to get my boys ready for bed. I turned the lights out, and I looked down at my phone. The graph had already been retweeted nearly a hundred times. It was going viral.

What followed was one of the busiest periods of my life. Before this, I had spoken to two or three reporters in my entire academic career; now I was fielding two or three interview requests per day. They all wanted to learn about this ascendant group of Americans people of faith who check none when asked about their religious affiliation. The Nones. That one simple graph had taken on a life of its own. It was picked up by most major media outlets in the U.S. Reporters from Europe were intrigued. Journalists, podcasters and pastors were all asking me the same questions: How did this happen? And what does this mean for the future of American religion? I didnt know it at the time, but my entire life had led me to this moment.

While I have been a quantitative social scientist for over a decade, I have also been in Christian ministry since just after my 20th birthday. Wrestling with questions about the future of American religion is not just some cold and calculated academic exercise for me. Its something I experience every Sunday when I get behind the pulpit.

I grew up Southern Baptist. My mother was a Sunday School teacher, and my father drove the church bus. My grandmother was the church secretary, and my grandfather was an usher. We went to church every time the doors were open. I was the kid who was there every Sunday morning and Sunday night. When I entered junior high, the youth group of First Baptist Church of Salem, Illinois, became my home away from home. I went to as many church camps, youth rallies, spaghetti fundraisers and lock-ins as I could. As I moved into high school, I began to lead Bible studies for the younger kids. I was all in.

While pursuing a graduate degree in political science, I began pastoring a small church of about 30 retirees. Thirteen years later, Im still behind the pulpit.

During that time, I finished a masters thesis, got married, bought a house, defended my dissertation and had two children. My church went from having about 50 people in the pews to just over 20. What was happening in American religion was also happening right in front of me.

But why? Every interview I do about American religion leads to this question. The truth is, I cant point to just one reason why the religiously unaffiliated, the Nones, are growing astronomically, and no other academic can either. The problem with social science is that its the study of people. People are emotional, unpredictable and completely unintelligible most of the time.

One individual can leave a church after years of spiritual soul-searching because of a theological disagreement. Others leave because the congregation moved the Sunday service half an hour. Each person who walks away from religion has their own reasons and their own spiritual journey. However, there are large, unseen forces in American society that may make the decision to change religious affiliation easier or more difficult. Those invisible factors can be cultural, political, theological or just the spirit of the times.

On the European continent, where dozens of religious wars have been fought over the past several hundred years, very few people actually attend church with any regularity. Poland and Ireland have high levels of religious attendance but those are outliers. In Italy, the center of Catholicism, religious adherence matches that of the U.S., with just 1 in 4 attending services once a week. Other populous European countries like Spain and Great Britain have attendance rates in the low teens, while in Germany and France, fewer than 1 in 10 of their citizens attend church once a week or more. While there are no reliable measures of European religiosity before the 1970s, the hundreds of vacant churches that exist across the continent bear witness to the reality that Europe has become an overwhelmingly secular continent since World War II.

Yet despite all the evidence that developed democracies have cast off religion as they have gained higher levels of educational and economic advancement, one case is clearly an outlier from this trend: the United States.

There are several explanations for why secularization theory which contends that higher levels of educational achievement and economic prosperity results in a gradual move away from religion doesnt work in the case of the U.S. One argues that this is an exceptional country, so the social science theories about religion and economic advancement just dont apply. Some have argued that American society is a decidedly individualistic one where authority is distrusted, and the low-church ethos of many Protestant churches appeals to the anti-establishment predispositions of many Americans. Another explanation comes from the French social scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States just a few years after its founding and was surprised by the strong separation of church and state.

In essence, American religion dodged a bullet by not being sponsored by the state. Finally, some social scientists credit the religious pluralism of the United States as the cause of American exceptionalism. The fact that no one tradition encompasses more than 30% of the American population might insulate religion from a national backlash against all expressions of faith.

Another way to think about the issue is that the United States is experiencing secularization but that it is several decades delayed in comparison to countries in Europe. The evidence suggests that the United States is seeing a wave of delayed secularization.

Its worth noting, however, that the highly religious in America havent gone away. A 2017 study from Indiana Universitys Landon Schnabel and Harvards Sean Bock suggests intense religion has persisted even as more moderate religion has seen declines. Put another way, as secularism in the United States has increased, theres been a deepening of religious intensity among those who still go to church.

Surveys also show the highly religious have remained steady as a percentage of the population, which means that their overall numbers have grown with the population and their higher-than-average fertility patterns are one sign the trend probably wont reverse. With these trends a full conquest of secularism in the United States is unlikely but even more unlikely is a modern-day Great Awakening.

Maybe I am slightly biased because I am a trained political scientist, but I have always felt that the best explanation for the rapid rate of religious disaffiliation can be traced back to the recent political history of the United States. In recent years, everyone who studies religion and politics has been confronted with the same statistic: Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

While many political observers were quick to note that the GOP and white evangelicals have consistently had a strong relationship, many pundits viewed the 81% figure as some sort of statistical aberration when in reality it was just business as usual. In fact, 79.1% of white evangelicals voted for John McCain for president in 2008, and 77.4% cast a ballot for Mitt Romney in 2012. Outside of Black Protestants, there is no more politically homogeneous religious group than white evangelicals.

Its important to understand that the connection between the devoutly religious and the Republican Party hasnt always been this strong. In fact, in 1978, half of all white weekly churchgoers identified as Democrats, while today, just one quarter do. This shift to the right among the devoutly religious may have ignited a backlash whereby political moderates and liberals fled church in droves when their political beliefs were challenged.

The other big factor in the countrys shifting landscape? The American family. It doesnt look the same in 2018 as it did in the mid-1970s. A raft of social science research concludes that being part of a religious community is more likely when someone comes from a stable household environment. This may be because of a perceived hostility in churches toward single mothers or divorces. It could be that people see religion as a luxury for people who have a weekly routine, something that falls out of the reach of many Americans.

In the 1970s, nearly three-quarters of all adults in the United States were married. That dropped below half in the late 1990s and has continued a downward trajectory. In 2018, just 42.5% of all Americans said they were married. Put another way, if you selected 10 random adults in 1972, seven of them would have been married. A random sample of 10 adults in 2018 would only contain four married individuals.

While marital status is an important part of the religious affiliation puzzle, it is not the only family-related variable that can drive disaffiliation. One of the most well-cited theories in the sociology of religion is called the life-cycle effect, which is the understanding that religious attendance waxes and wanes over a persons lifetime. Specifically, children are often very religious, with many growing up in youth groups and attending church camps and other religious events. However, when they graduate from high school, they move into a more adventurous stage and try to find their own identity. Often, this leads to less-frequent church attendance. This disaffiliation is short-lived as many begin to settle down in their late 20s or early 30s, a life stage often characterized by marriage and child-rearing. Many want their children to grow up with a moral foundation like they did, so they regain a religious affiliation. If the life-cycle effect applies, the societal institutions of marriage and family should draw people back into the pews.

Thats exactly what the data from the General Social Survey shows: Its clear that the group of people who are most likely to be religiously unaffiliated to be Nones are people who are not married and do not have children. In fact, 35% of that group said they had no religious affiliation in 2018, which is 12 percentage points higher than the rate of the general public. Its worthwhile to note that someone who is neither married nor a parent is twice as likely to be unaffiliated as someone who is both.

While the rate of marriage has dropped substantially in the past 40 years, the share of Americans who say they have no children has stayed remarkably stable. The data indicates that the rate of childless adults was approximately 24% in the early 1970s but rose to 28% by 1990 and has stayed at that level for the past 30 years. The issue is not necessarily fertility; its family structure. Americans are having as many children as they did three decades ago, but a much smaller share of those children are being raised in two-parent households.

Taken together, the data paints a chilling picture. While it would be easy to say that this is largely driven by young people moving away from a religious faith, theres also some evidence that older Americans are moving away from faith communities as they enter their twilight years. While churches used to rely on many of their young people moving back toward a religious tradition when they hit their 30s and 40s, that seems to be less and less likely with each successive generation.

The data indicates that less-educated Americans are only slightly less likely to move away from religion than those who have at least some college education, but as more and more Americans pursue coursework at the collegiate level, the likelihood of disaffiliation does increase. At the same time, many of the societal factors that used to keep women in church have begun to fade. In 2018, a woman without children was just as likely to be a None as a childless man. That portends a bleak future for religion, as more Americans are choosing to be child-free. Meanwhile, some of the cultural influences that surround religion among racial groups have diminished as well. Disaffiliation among Black Americans is rapid, and now there is no racial group that is not at least 30% religiously disaffiliated.

Truth is, theres no segment of American society that has been immune to the rise of religious disaffiliation.

When it comes to understanding the rise of the Nones, I like to compare American churches to a foam cup of water. Churches have always had pinholes punched in the sides of their cups. They would lose water through the deaths of their older members, but the water kept being replenished by young families bringing their children or by members converting people from the community. For many, the water being poured in vastly exceeded the amount that was lost through the pinhole-sized leaks. Now those small drips have become gaping holes, and the water is leaving rapidly. Those holes represent a rapidly aging core demographic that is dying off, but those punctures also include those who grew up in the church but then left, never to return. At the same time, the flow of water that used to refill the cup has slowed to a trickle as churches continue to struggle to bring in new members.

If the flow of water into the cup slows down even more or the holes expand in diameter, the cup is going to run empty at some point in the near future. But all is not lost. If the church wants to increase the flow into its cup, there are potentially large reservoirs in the American population, some of which seem fairly easy to tap. If less water flows out the bottom and more pours in from the top, churches can maintain their congregations far into the future.

Lets begin with the things that cannot be changed. I think that no matter how effective American churches are at evangelism or missions or community service over the past four decades, those efforts would have been only slightly effective at stopping the rise of the Nones. The best apologists, the most charismatic speakers, or the catchiest praise and worship bands would not have held secularization at bay. Theres no way to know for certain, but its fair to say that a significant chunk of the increase in the unaffiliated was due to shifts in American culture away from religion. It is foolhardy to think that what happened in Europe, which was also experiencing a dramatic rise in educational levels, would not, to some extent, come to American shores. The reality is simply this: Americans used to be Christians simply by default. Secularization merely gave permission for a lot of people to express who they truly are religiously unaffiliated.

But I must make one more data-driven observation. While there are dozens of data points about the tremendous number of Americans who no longer affiliate with a religion, religious belief in this country is still surprisingly robust. In 1988, 1.8% of respondents to the General Social Survey said that God didnt exist, and another 3.8% said that God might exist but theres no way to find out. In 2018, just 4.7% of people said that there was no God, and 6.5% said there was no way to know for sure. While nearly 1 in 4 Americans no longer affiliates with religion, just 1 in 10 Americans does not believe God exists. The issue is not that interest in spiritual matters has declined; its that people do not want to label themselves.

So what gives? If almost all Americans still believe in the divine, we should not be seeing the number of Nones continue to slowly and steadily grow every passing year. But we are. So how do we respond? To start, we should listen to Nones stories, and understand how Christians, specifically white Protestants and Catholics, have made left-leaning believers feel more and more marginalized with every passing election.

People who grew up in faith communities but left them when they moved into adulthood all have a story to tell. Some of those stories are not that enlightening. The church just didnt work for them and they saw no benefit in regular attendance. Others left for reasons that are much more instructive. Whatever their motives, we should be seeking out people willing to tell their stories, inviting them to tell us, and listening really listening to them.

What sort of stories might we hear? Many people have been abused at the hands of people who claim to act in the name of Jesus Christ. For decades, parents have told their LGBTQ children that they are no longer allowed in their house. Some have been made to feel unwelcome when theyve asked too many questions about why God acted so terribly in the Old Testament or how an all-powerful force could allow children to die of cancer. Others have been raised in such a controlling environment that rebellion has become their motivating force in adulthood. Many have been forced to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, and church is a luxury these people feel they cant afford. Some felt ostracized for marrying someone of a different faith or getting pregnant out of wedlock. These stories, and many more, are completely legitimate reasons to walk away from any institution regardless of whether it embodies the truth or not.

A phrase I often repeat to my students when we talk about respecting other peoples political viewpoints is, Your world is not their world. I might also say, Your story is not their story. I think many Christians have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of the person who left church and never came back or those who never made the connection in the first place. They dont recognize that to belittle, minimize or try to explain away the stories of those who walked away or never connected to a church home is to fail to understand that not everyone comes to faith the same way we did.

One aspect of peoples stories that we often do not attend to is their politics. I know this observation has become an overwrought clich, but God is not a Republican or a Democrat. But if someone walked into most Christian houses of worship this upcoming weekend, they would not find much evidence to support that conclusion. In 1972, half of all white weekly churchgoers were Democrats; now just a quarter are. Of the 20 largest predominantly white Protestant traditions in the United States, 16 became more Republican between 2008 and 2018. Four in 5 white evangelical Protestants voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016. The totality of that shift is absolutely staggering, and for many people whose politics lean left but who still want to be part of a Christian community, there are no options for them locally. And some churches seem to go out of their way to make that reality known.

Im friends with a number of pastors on Facebook, acquaintances I have picked up over the past 15 years in ministry. Often, I feel like scrolling my newsfeed is a type of social science experiment. Im just flabbergasted by how often these pastors post things that belittle, demean or misrepresent the views of their political opposition. In my mind, what they are doing is no different from placing a sign on the front door of their church every Sunday morning that says, No Democrats Allowed. If Christians want to seek and save the lost, why would some of them go out of their way to alienate a third of the population of the United States? There are already enough hurdles for someone who might want to come back to church. Why add another?

I have arrived at two conclusions. The first is that these pastors dont realize there are Democrats who could potentially want to visit their church next Sunday. The second is that these pastors are convinced that no other political beliefs are compatible with the Gospel. And I see my liberal Christian friends fall into this trap as well. There are lots of people who voted for Donald Trump for well-considered reasons, and maligning these Republican voters does Christianity no favors. Either conclusion shows such an unbelievable lack of awareness and leaves no doubt in my mind as to why so many people have become or remain religiously unaffiliated.

Now, thats not to say that all pastors engage in such behavior on social media. I know what many of them would say: I dont preach politics on my Facebook feed or from the pulpit! Id agree with them, and so does the data. But they need to recognize that their members are absorbing political messages from other aspects of their church involvement. They might pick up clues from a conversation they had before church about property taxes or a Wednesday evening small group discussion about abortion or gay marriage. There are no truly apolitical churches.

I understand the conundrum. Most religious leaders realize that speaking about politics from the pulpit might engender support from a majority of congregants but might drive others away, so they know its prudent for them to steer clear. Thats a natural response, and I think it comes from a good place. However, church members are always on the lookout for people to help them think about how to respond to current events or government policies.

When we do not apply the Gospel to the very real concerns of modern society, were opening the door for others to influence church members. Those others might be friends, family, pastors of other churches almost anyone, really. But a pastor once mentioned to me that while he has a captive audience for one hour once a week, the cable news networks are piped into members homes for eight hours a day, seven days a week. Thats a sobering thought. If pastors dont give congregations guidance on how to think about politics, then they will get it from somewhere else. And unfortunately, what drives clicks, eyeballs and ad revenue are media personalities who do their best to not only make their political party look good but make the other side of the aisle look ignorant, out of touch and immoral.

If I were a younger man, I would try to offer some sage wisdom and practical advice to fill the pews back up. However, experience tells me that there is no easy answer. I became a senior pastor at the tender age of 23. I had just started a graduate program and honestly needed to make some money to pay the rent. Luckily, the older congregants of a small church welcomed me with open arms. I thought that if I just preached really well and did a lot of visits, people would come to church. After a year, I left. I think that the church expected me to be a miracle worker, and I did nothing to downplay those expectations.

I learned that just last year, the church officially closed its doors, and the building was razed a few weeks later. The church I currently serve had 50 regular worshippers when I assumed the pulpit 13 years ago. Today, we are down to about 15 most Sundays. Weve had weeks when the total attendance was in the single digits. Again, I thought that if I set myself on fire, people would come to watch me burn. Thats not what happened.

About five years into my ministry, I became listless and angry. Why wasnt the church growing? Why cant we bring in some young people? I thought of myself as a failure. I felt like one of those factory workers who got laid off after 20 years of hard work and dedication, wondering why my efforts werent being rewarded. I kept thinking about what the church used to be scores of members with activities almost every day of the week and a tremendous influence on the community. Now we were struggling to keep the lights on. I was no different from the guys who meet for coffee at fast-food restaurants and talk about life before the factory closed.

The word nostalgia can be translated an ache for home. It seems that I, the coffee-shop crew, and frankly, a lot of people are consumed by this pining for a bygone era. But after a period of wallowing, I realized that our church must move forward. So we stepped out in faith and began packing brown paper sacks filled with food for schoolchildren who were struggling with poverty in our community. We started with 30 bags per weekend. We had no idea if it would work or if we could actually afford it.

Nearly a decade later, we pack nearly 300 bags of food each weekend and serve three local schools. Every time we think that the money is going to run out, a check shows up. Like the factory worker who sees the plant closure as an opportunity to go back to school and retrain for a different career, our food program was the avenue we took to keep moving forward.

When we first started organizing our brown bag program, some members of the congregation thought that we should drop a tract into the bags, but I refused. For me, the purpose of those bags was not to try to bring people to Christ. It was to show those kids that someone they dont even know loves them and wants to help. So we just include a simple note saying who we are and what we are doing. We make sure to let them know that if they need help, they can just give us a call.

Well, one Friday, the phone rang. It was a grandmother of one of the children who had received a bag. The temperature had begun to drop, and her grandson didnt have a warm coat. She asked for help. It just so happened that we were having a rummage sale that weekend and had a fellowship hall full of clothes. We invited her to come down and take whatever she needed. Just an hour later, she and her grandson stuffed two armloads of clothes into her trunk and drove away.

I have no idea if that young man or his grandmother will ever come to know Christ whether that young man will be an atheist, a churchgoer or a None. But heres what I do know: When that young man is sitting around as an adult one day, talking about spiritual things, he might have some bad things to say about the church, but I hope that when he tells his story of faith, he at least makes mention of the one time when he needed help and a church came to his rescue.

Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University. This article is excerpted from his new book, The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are and Where They Are Going.

This story appears in the April issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

Go here to see the original:

Who are the religious nones and why is this group of Americans growing? - Deseret News

Famous British scientist Richard Dawkins has been an ardent atheist for his entire adult life. Now, as he approaches the twilight of his life, he is not changing that view. Speaking on BBC Radio 4 today, the evolutionary biologist has maintained his position that there is nothing after death.

He instead said we should focus on the positives of being alive.

However, he conceded he is now certainly "conscious of death".

Speaking to promote his latest book, Books Do a Furnish of Life, Dr Dawkins said it is a "privilege" to be alive right now thanks to modern science.

Dr Dawkins also said that not many actually are lucky enough to be born.

The chances of you as an individual being born are around a staggering one in 400 trillion, so Dr Dawkins argues we have already won the lottery of life.

The scientist told Nick Robinson: "I've always been conscious that we're all going to die. We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones.

"Most people are never going to die because they were never born.

"I'm conscious of death, we all are, but I hope to go on a while yet.

READ MORE:Richard Dawkins in fiery attack on 'cowardly liberals

"I am thrilled to be alive at time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding.

"Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits."

The scientist has previously admitted there was one thing that would make him believe in God, however.

In conversation with fellow atheist Ricky Gervais, Dr Dawkins said he was "privileged to be here to enjoy it even if it's for a short time".

The comedian retorted: "Oh yeah, it's good that we were born after they discovered fossils and dinosaurs isn't it?"

Prof Dawkins explained it was good that "we were born at all", before Mr Gervais asked: "What would you be like if you were pre-Darwin?"

The atheist replied in 2012: "Oh I would probably believe in God if I were pre-Darwin."

More:

Richard Dawkins on life after death: 'We're all going to die - but we are the lucky ones!' - Daily Express

The Culpeper County Circuit Court in Virginia is having a special election next Tuesday to fill the remainder of a retiring clerks term. Its one of those elections thats bound to have small turnout, where many people probably couldnt even tell you whos running, but this one could have ramifications because of how different the two candidates are.

On one hand, you have Carson Beard, an independent whos worked in the clerks office for several years, knows the place inside and out, wants to digitize the place as much as possible, and make everything easier for the public to access. A perfectly sensible platform for a candidate running for a non-partisan position.

On the other hand, you have a Republican named Marshall Keene whose primary goal in office would be putting a Christian stamp on everything.

Consider a simple question: What are your goals in this position? That was posed to both candidates during a recent Q&A session hosted by the local Chamber of Commerce. Beard gave a perfectly normal response:

Beard said modernization is vitally important as new technology such as e-filing allows the office to better serve the public. Even with modernization, he noted that the office would provide traditional access options. Regarding customer service, Beard said he hopes to continue the outstanding public service established by [predecessor Janice] Corbin.

Now heres Keene, making it clear that non-Christians would not be welcome in the building:

Keene said his first order of business would be placing In God we trust on all stationery and signage. In addition to modernization of the office, he said fiscal responsibility is important along with supporting the 2nd amendment. The most important goal, he said, is ensuring the office is accessible to all citizens.

Nothing says accessible like a phrase telling atheists theyre outsiders

And thats his first order of business! Not helping the people, but shoving his religion in everyones faces. (By the way, the clerk has no say in 2nd Amendment issues. Theres no legislating in the job. Thats just catnip for conservatives.)

All of Keenes responses are like this. Its obvious he doesnt know anything about the position other than its an elected office and hes a Republican who wants power in order to proselytize. Its entirely possible hell use this very post as proof of Christian Persecution even though the problem isnt his faith; its the way he wants to push it on others.

I dont know what Beards religion is because its irrelevant. I dont know what his politics are because, again, its irrelevant. Its possible we disagree on quite a bit. But at least he seems to be taking this race seriously. The same cant be said of Keene.

Local races, especially ones with no big-ticket races on the ballot, can be very tight. So if you or someone you know lives in the area, please make sure to vote.

(Thanks to Brian for the link)

Read the original here:

GOP County Clerk Candidate's First Goal? Putting In God We Trust on Everything - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Completing the census should have been simple all you have to do is say who and where you are. In the grand scheme of history, its not like journeying to Bethlehem with nowhere to stay. But still it was an ordeal.

Separated parents who share custody equally are expected to list the kids at the house they are in on the night of 21 March. I would happily have done that if my kids were due to be with me today, but they are not. So, when the question came up, I merrily texted my former spouse: Sod it. Im putting them down anyway. You cant put them down anyway, he said, with some dignity and patience. Its a census. You know what, King Herod? Screw you! I replied with gusto.

Then I did what I always do when faced with a difference of opinion took the issue to Twitter. Apparently, population scientists study this exact conundrum: what do you do about divorcees who double-count for sentimental reasons?

A couple of people said there was flex built in, to account for anyone who was staying somewhere other than their main residence on 21 March. Most people said: Just put them in the house they are in that night and stop being an idiot. One censorious tweeter said simply: Time to be generous. That was my mother, ladies and gentlemen. Boldly siding with my ex in the open waters of social media. And you think you have problems.

Whether or not to mess with the system was not my only decision: the humanists were in touch almost daily, to remind atheists that we should answer no religion to the religion question. In about the strongest language I have heard a humanist use, they called the faith question on the form biased and leading and worried that it had previously encouraged many people with no religious beliefs and no religious identity to nonetheless tick a religious box out of cultural affiliation.

Its rather consequential, all this: if you get an inflated read on how many Christians live in the country, it not only encourages faith schooling, but also people who love the phrase Judeo-Christian worldview, which is the classy way to kick off a racist rant. (It is not that they mind foreigners no, it is just that everyone ought to adhere to the Judeo-Christian worldview.)

Atheism is a peculiar thing: so many of us live it 39% of those in Great Britain, according to ONS data from 2019 yet the word retains connotations that were already a bit rum by the 50s. To say you are an atheist is a needless provocation why cant you just say agnostic? Why deny God altogether when you could just not know? If atheist is insufficiently respectful, its also not respectable its like saying you dont have a driving licence. Its fine, society can live with it, but its not going to fall over itself to get you into the golf club.

So atheists should definitely say so, yet I have this embarrassing hunch that in 2001 I put Jedi. (It was funny then, OK? Times change.) In 2011, I may even have put Christian, thinking with a toddler-mashed brain that I should try to get the kids into one of the faith schools that I emphatically dont agree with.

Finally, there was a petition afoot to subvert the national identity question. Instead of putting British, English, Welsh, Northern Irish or Scottish if any applied the idea was to tick other and specify European. That way, if you disagreed with something significant that had happened recently perhaps you thought Brexit wasnt a brilliant idea you could really stick it to the man. Let him know how you felt. He would definitely be listening.

This sent me into a tailspin of futility. First, I dont think the man is listening and if he happens to hear, he will only smirk. Second, I have no view on my national identity. Mr Z has incredibly strong views if you accidentally say English about anything, he will correct it to British, unless you are talking about mustard or bull terriers (its surprising how often I am). He hates nationalist or regionalist sentiment of any stamp; he probably has views on Catalonia, should anyone be so foolish as to ask.

I, conversely, think nationalism is the outward sign that there is nothing more interesting going on, much like there is always a scrap at the end of a festival because the bands have stopped playing. I would feel a bit fraudulent putting European, given my scant language skills. If I were to put British, though, it would feel like the end of an era.

So, there was my answer: I would place the kids in my house, even though they were at their dads, and leave myself off altogether, so as not to mess up the numbers. I would no longer exist, but at least the children would be European atheists (thanks for asking, census-takers).

Of course, when it came to it, I filled in the form accurately. If there is one thing I hate more than a crisis of national identity, its a 1,000 fine.

Read the original post:

For divorced atheist remainers like me, this census was a minefield - The Guardian

Filling in the census form is very grown up. Here is my existence. This is my life. Count me in! But as with all form filling, its also completely boring and so I leave it until the very last minute before Im fined for not letting the state know that I live in a terraced house.

Non-believers, however, have had fun in the past with the religion part of the form. In 2001, there was a movement in many English speaking countries to put Jedi down as your religion.

It was a geeky protest by atheists (and a few actual Jedis) against being asked to record a faith at all. Nearly 400,000 people put Jedi as their religion in 2001, including me. There were more Jedis that year than Jewish people and Sikhs. At the time I thought it was hilarious. Who doesnt like to bring a Star Wars vibe to a tedious bit of admin?

Back then, I didnt think about the bigger picture. Not registering ourselves as having no religion excluded us from being counted and therefore not considered when it came to spending money on public services, or deciding whose views are expressed on the school curriculum.

The protest was fun, but the reality was that we were saying, you guys go ahead and do your thing, dont worry about us. Wanna build a state-funded religious school with an incredible music department where our children wont be allowed to go to even though we live around the corner? Go ahead! Ignore us, were still giggling smugly about the Jedi thing, while our kids play on guitars with one string.

As Yoda said, your path you must decide, and this year I decided the right box to tick was the no religion box. Why have I become such a killjoy? I shall tell you. When non-religious people skip this optional part of the form, or write a joke answer, or write other, the less represented we are, the less our values and views are considered when it comes to spending money on public services.

If you have no religion, it doesnt mean you dont want your voice to be heard, or your values included. I have no religion. I believe in trying to go through life without causing harm, for the sake of us all in the here and now, and my beliefs are as valid as those in a religious framework.

The views of Humanists and atheists cant be dismissed as irrelevant. Im a former president of Humanists UK and now vice president and let me tell you, I have met the most incredible minds in the role. I could give you a list of brilliant Humanist thinkers and artists so long and so far back in history that some of them we have only seen as oil paintings or statues (I wont as I know Ill miss someone out and theyll see this and my heart cant take the social nightmare).

They are people whose voices should be at the hub of any debate, any educational curriculum, any discussion of funding for a new school. But they wont be if we dont register ourselves.

As the Humanist UKs Tick No campaign points out, there are many atheists, Jewish people or Sikhs who dont want to relinquish that identity. I get that. There is an ethnicity question where its possible to ensure this identity is counted and you can still tick no religion.

Most state schools still dont accommodate the views of the godless. In primary school, my children were taken to mosques, gurdwaras, a Hindu temple and churches. My daughter cheerfully sang, Its Diwali festival of light! in assembly and it was gorgeous. She was Mary in the Nativity play.

I want my kids to learn about religion and to be respectful of other peoples faiths and to crash their parties, but I dont want them to be left out. Belief systems without faith in a higher power are as valid. Humanist wedding ceremonies and funerals are among the most meaningful I have ever been to. If enough people tick no religion, Humanist weddings would have a better chance of being recognised in law instead of atheists having to get a council official involved in their special day. Ceremonies arent just for religious people; humans have always marked significant events, had rituals and gathered.

Iranian new year is on Sunday and on Tuesday night, like millions of other Iranians, my children and I built a small fire in the garden and jumped over it chanting a rhyme in Farsi about throwing our negativity into the fire and gaining from it health and positivity. Just because Im an atheist, it doesnt mean I dont love the Zoroastrian traditions of my heritage and delight in having a cultural reason to play with matches.

Millions of us in the UK have no religion. We need to be counted properly. So, lets put our lightsabers away and tick no religion in the census.

See the article here:

I will be ticking no religion in the census there is so much more at stake than you might think - The Independent