Atheists Are Putzes Too: Lawrence Krauss's Teachable Moment

Miracle Girl: Atheists Are Putzes Too: Lawrence Krauss's Teachable Moment

I've recently been shown that atheists have their fair share of illusions. Atheists can be idiots, too.

I should know.

The hardest illusions to leave behind are those held about your own beliefs. #MeToo is for atheists, too. And so is white nationalism. 

All Aboard the Good Ship Nonreligious!

Miracle Girl: All Aboard the Good Ship Nonreligious!

Instead of nailing up a Keep Out sign, Patheos Nonreligious is putting out the boarding platform. Nones of all stripes will be needed if atheists hope to fight Republican attempts to breach the wall of separation between Church and State.

God say me eat COOKIE

Part 3 of a two-part blog about my encounters with nursing home and hospital clergy. I suppose you can call it part 2.1, since it's unpacking the subject of the second blog. I really should stop labeling linked posts with numbers. (Part one.)

Naturally, atheists think they're right about the nonexistence of God and consider the faithful misguided, at the very least. In fact, that's the very word I once used to describe the family members lamenting the fear of the dark they thought was preventing the poor dying girl in my ICU room from "crossing over." The same goes for believers, of course. How can atheists deny the "evidence" of God's work? But what sets the two groups apart? And what was different about the prevaricating hospital chaplain and his probable motivation for his behaviour?

When was the last time you read about a child being killed in an attempt to drive religion out of them? Take your time; I'll wait. In most cases, the adults involved in tragically fatal exorcisms are doing this through love, not malice. But surely it's unfair to link the probably well-meaning mainline Protestant hospital chaplain to such ignorant, fringe religious thinking, you may say. I agree, despite the fact that I snarkily used an image from The Exorcist to illustrate my last blog.

But what links these religiously based behaviours is an absolute conviction of the righteousness of their cause. It's a belief that the ends justify the means, and a faith that God is guiding their actions. Atheists, on the other hand, believe that their own biases and desires are shaping their motivations--duh!--not some outside force. They therefore tend to consider their moral actions with utmost seriousness. Far from being rudderless without God to guide them, it's been my experience that nonbelievers think far more deeply about the consequences of their actions. The faithful are more likely to translate their inner voice as God telling them to do, coincidentally, exactly what they want to do.

That's like Cookie Monster telling himself that God is the voice in his head. God say me eat COOKIE! Nom, nom, nom. An atheist is more apt to be like Oscar the Grouch. I love trash, and that's why I collect it. I don't steal trash from other Grouches because it would be wrong to take their battered and worn sneakers just because they have more holes. They love their ragged or rotten or rusty trash too.

So what does this have to do with our lying cleric? He was probably so convinced that he was doing God's work that anything he did was God's will, even if it involved lying. There was a life at stake, after all. Without God's light, she will surely die. Yes, all of her loved ones but one is a nonbeliever, but keeping me from praying for her is like preventing her doctors from treating her. It's God's will that I pray for her, despite her beliefs and her loved ones' wishes. I'm lying, but it's for the greater good.

Of course, he wasn't doing it for selfish reasons, but the fact remains that he lied because he thought he was doing God's work. God's will gave him him license to do exactly what he wanted to do. What a coincidence. No one thinks they're a bad person, and when they do wrong, they can usually find a handy excuse to justify their actions. But those who believe their actions are guided by a higher power don't even recognize that it's an excuse, however justified. To them, it's a command from God. They chomp down on that cookie, convinced all the while that it's not because me love COOKIES.

Saving my life by saving my soul?

A representation of the scene at the hospital, with some creative license.

Part two of my two-part blog detailing the uncomfortable situations I faced with nursing home and hospital chaplains. Part one: All Saints; one "none"

Though it was a fair characterization to place my Free Inquiry essay "Without a Prayer of a Chance" on the "it's okay" side of the prayer issue, I make a distinction between sincere prayers offered by my friends and ones imposed upon me by people who don't know me and for whom it's not personal. Case in point, the probably well-meaning, but nonetheless mendacious chaplain at the Kaiser Permanente hospital where I spent the bulk of the six weeks of my coma.

You would think he had never come across a nonbeliever before. My mother, who is also an atheist, informed the hospital chaplain of my atheism the first time he came into my room while she was there. Joella already knew him, so this wasn't his first visit. My mom allowed him to pray over me, however. Even though she was uncomfortable with it, she felt it was relatively harmless--as I thought after my awakening (as mentioned in part one). It was a generic sort of prayer, God's love and all that.

Keith was raised an Episcopalian, with a couple of priests in his family. He's an agnostic, but his interest in the history of religion led him to become a religious studies major. His second interaction with the chaplain was memorably fraught, fueled by Keith's lack of sleep in those terrible days early on when I was hovering near death. The cleric entered my room, but Keith tried to wave him away. "We talked about this before. Stephanie is an atheist, and you said you wouldn't bother her." "Sorry, I didn't know," the chaplain replied. Keith, who isn't generally a combative person, called him on it. "Isn't there something in the Bible about lying?" Unlike many believers, he's actually read the Bible. That's one of the reasons he's an agnostic.

Now, I generally try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but Keith had written in my records that I was an atheist. And he had reminded the chaplain repeatedly of this fact. You would think he'd want to check that before ministering to a patient. You wouldn't want to pray to Jesus over a Jewish patient or speak of heaven to the family members of a dying Hindu, perhaps offering them a little beef jerky as a snack. My mother is not the type to mince words. She made my beliefs (and hers) perfectly clear. Was it too much to ask that our beliefs be respected? Perhaps he thought he was lying for the greater good. God knows.

He promised Keith that he would stop coming around, but that was a lie too. Unbeknownst to Keith, my mother encountered him two additional times. On the second visit, she repeated that I was an atheist. He said that Keith had told him that, as well (but he neglected to mention his promise not to return). He again asked if he could pray for me, and she agreed despite her reservations. "May you take the lord's light into your heart and be healed," he prayed. My mother was offended by the attempted conversion and the implication that I wouldn't be healed without it. He should've saved his breath. It would've taken the profound brain damage my doctors thought I had for me to believe. The third time he showed up while she was there, she refused his request to pray.

I had one last encounter with the minister, this time personally, after my awakening. I had returned to the hospital to repair a hemorrhaging ulcer caused by my feeding tube. The cleric asked if he could he could pray for me. I nodded reluctantly. But I quickly changed my mind, with a sharp shake of my head. Like the priest in the nursing home, he looked stunned. It was as if the previous encounters with Keith and my mom never happened. Yes, it was weeks later, but given the conflict with him and my relative youth, you would think my case would've stood out in his mind. Was he shocked that I hadn't taken God's light into my heart and was still healed?

To me, his prayer request felt like an imposition--like he wasn't praying for me, but at me. By then I knew my friends had been praying for me. I appreciated the feelings behind their prayers, but it wasn't personal for the chaplain. Why should I have to be subjected to this? And why was I worrying about saying no; didn't my feelings enter into this? It wasn't as if I could get up and walk away.

Yes, I believe all prayers are pointless, but some prayers are more so than others. My friends' prayers were a deeply personal gesture. To them, prayer works, so it was the most effective way they could help me. Forget my feelings about the efficacy of prayer; to them, this was the deepest form of support they could offer.

When Keith told the chaplain--in answer to his question--that he was an agnostic, he said, "Good, there's still hope for you." He wasn't kidding. But Keith isn't an agnostic because he can't make up his mind, but because there's no way to prove the existence or non-existence of God. This comment leads me to believe that the chaplain was indeed trying to save my life by saving my soul. God help me.

Before he left, the minister asked if he could visit me again. I shook my head once more. I'm sure his presence is a comfort to believers, but I just wanted to be left alone.

Confessions of a stupid bitch

A while ago, a friend shared an opinion piece on Facebook positing the right to comment on what you think was the gist of an article, even you didn't have time to read it, tl;dr;ca (too long; didn't read; commented anyway). It was tongue-in-cheek, but was seriously arguing that this was okay because you are creating your own interpretation of what the piece said, or didn't say, as the case may be. I suppose it was a postmodernist kind of argument. I am not a postmodernist, and I didn't like that post, in either the usual sense or in the Facebook one. I don't think my friend was actually advocating that position...I hope.

To me, there's no excuse for incivility, but even less so if you haven't bothered to read what you're attacking. Perhaps there should be a Godwin's law-like rule for the inverse relationship between the amount a poster has read of what they're commenting on and the quantity of invective they spew. Let's call it Savage's law for now.

In this scheme, the woman who labeled as bogus Claire Wineland's story of her own version of a coma-dream had read only a portion of the article or watched parts of Claire's video before her blinkered mind said, "No way!" If she was especially closed minded, it's possible that she read the entire article, watched the video, and still couldn't accept the idea of Claire's mind translating the ice treatments for her fever into an Alaskan landscape. I had ice treatments too. The only reason I didn't mention the ice packs as another potential source of my ice cream-related coma-dreams in my Skeptical Inquirer article was I didn't know about it then.

The woman who said of my coma-dream, "Didn't experience anything so stupid as this bitch's overactive imagination," clearly got no further than the phrase "near-death experience." She thought I was claiming to have seen Heaven, but had no idea that I had actually said that I didn't see angels or dead relatives precisely because I'm an atheist. Yet she felt perfectly entitled to call my story stupid and label me a bitch.

It's hard to say how much the guy who said of my story, "Does anyone really believe this shit?" had read. Did he even get past the title or only a single word? He refused to name what part of my story he disbelieved. Was "this shit" the story as told in the VICE interview or my article? Or both? Was it stupid and did he also think I'm a bitch? And if it was shit, it was almost certainly bogus, as well. Perhaps it was all of the above.

Yes, these are the same examples I used in my last post. And you may be thinking that these are relatively mild considering the bile often dished out online. But I'm new to being a semi-public figure, and I imagine this is barely a taste of what's to come. I can't help wondering, if this is a form of postmodern online argument, will post-post-post modern online debate bring rational discourse or will it make us envy Socrates his cup of hemlock?