Atheists' spiritual experiences

Philosophy professor Dan Fincke on the errors atheists make when they imagine they have no bodies:

When confronted with claims about immaterial spiritual souls or spiritual lives or practices, the first mistake is to imply that people’s experiences that they call 'spiritual' are not 'real.' 'Spiritual' experiences are real events that happen in the real world. Superstitious reifications are just hastily (and with all sorts of cultural and religious encouragement) naively misinterpreting them as somehow evidence for something otherworldly or something which puts them in touch with otherworldly things. It is useless and sounds woefully psychologically ignorant to question whether they refer to something real when they talk about spiritual experiences. We do much better to engage them about what their real experience really indicates.  

The parallel superstition among some atheists is a tendency to conceive of people as minds that respond to reason alone and that can only reason well if they are not being influenced bodily.

Finke concludes that atheists -- and he counts himself in that number -- should evaluate "emotional mechanisms" based on end results, rather than rejecting such mechanisms and practices altogether.

There's nothing inherently wrong, for Fincke, with atheists singing songs. Not singing songs, on the other hand, is often evidence of a philosophy deeply uncomfortable with human embodiment.

Read More

Culturally contested Christmas

A curious historical fact: the first people to work to "take the Christ out of Christmas," as it were, were not atheists, or crass materialists, or secularists/pluralists trying to diminish the role of Christianity in American culture. They were Protestants.

Protestants were very conflicted about Christmas in the 1800s.

For one thing, many were opposed to the "mass" part of Christmas, i.e., the Catholicism implicit in the holiday. If December 25 was a religious holiday, that seemed to mean accepting the Catholic tradition of the church calendar and the Catholic idea of tradition, the same tradition that led to the veneration of the Virgin Mary, the authority of the Pope and the church councils, and all the sundry things Protestants argued should be rejected because they're not in the Bible. The Bible which says nothing about a gift-giving solstice holiday.

At the same time, Protestants felt a strong impulse to take the cultural practice of the day -- the Christmas of the tavern, the Christmas of the department store -- and repurpose them as devotional practices.

This meant that they were at the same time critical of the non-religious celebrations of Christmas and leery of the religious celebrations too.

As Leigh Eric Schmidt writes in Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays:

Through much of the nineteenth century, the Christianization of Christmas was a quite fragile proposition, tentative and fragmentary. Every time a pastor tried to remind his congregation that Christmas was a solemn religious event that 'should be observed in the heart as well as at the hearth, in the temple as well as at the table,' he seemed to have to admit that the most visible observances of the season were 'rioting and vain amusement' -- shooting guns, callithumpian music, practical jokes, heavy drinking and the like. The churches were invariably hard pressed to communicate the devotional dimension of Christmas; the raucous plebeian version of the celebration always threatened to drown them out.

Confessedly, these Protestants in the Puritan mold were partially to blame for the sorry state of Christmas devotion in the colonial and antebellum worlds. The tradition of holiday purgation, long shared in by Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and many Methodists, bequeathed a model of thorough desacralization that actually helped Christmas go its secular way in American culture. Time and again these Protestants insisted that Christmas was just like any other day, that it was without 'any peculiar sanctity.' At best, Christmas was an object of 'mistaken piety'; at worst it was the occasion of superstition and corrupt tradition. Given these presuppositions about the idolatry of the ancient church calendar, when low-church Protestant began their home-centered recovery of Christmas in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they often welcomed it back explicitly as a 'social holiday,'not as a 'religious observance.' As one Sunday School publication, the Baptist Teacher, editorialized in 1875, 'We believe in Christmas -- not as a holy day, but as a holiday.'

As has been regularly pointed out, the so-called "war on Christmas" is pretty specious. It is the case, though, that the meaning of Christmas is and has always been culturally contested. In its practice, this holiday is often conflicted, with multiple meanings, divergent rituals, discordant customs, and perpetually competing interpretations.

It's common today, for example, to find evangelicals at once upset that Christmas has been "commercialized" and that Wal-Mart clerks don't recognize the religious nature of the celebration in their standard customer greetings. This isn't a new thing, though; the conflict over what Christmas is has a long history. And it's not only the case of a conflict between the American Protestant majority and others, be they Catholic or non-religious. The conflict runs even through American Protestantism itself.

Read More

Ritual, money, & the death of a pet

By some accounts, the function of religion in daily life, and especially of religious ritual, is to lend solemnity to otherwise puny, pallid human moments.

I think of this as the Peter Ivanovich theory of religion, named after a character in Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Iliyich. Ivanovich, at the start of the story, finds himself at a funeral and "like everyone else on such occasions, entered feeling uncertain what he would have to do. All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to cross oneself."

This is religion as a response to what could be called existential awkwardness. Ritual being what you do when you don't know what to do. The idea is that religion and/or ritual serve to mark, to recognize the seriousness and importance of a moment that would, without that mark, not seem that important at all. There is, in the act, an insistence that something is important and meaningful, despite how it might seem.

This is how I would see pet funerals, the practice of treating deceased pets to the same processes and ceremonies traditionally reserved for humans.



In a mostly horrid bit of journalism, Business Week recently re-discovered the industry of pet funerals, as seems to happen somewhat regularly. Mostly this piece is a baseless trend story, written up as a will-you-believe-this-ridiculousness?, without actually demonstrating much interest in understanding what might explain this "phenomena" or why people, apparently lots of them, want funerals for their cats and dogs and pot-bellied pigs and hamsters.

There's one interesting moment of insight, though. At the very end, Bob Walczyk, the apparently empathy-less owner of Forever Friends in Green Bay, Wisc., notes that services such as his allow people to solemnize their pets' deaths and lives, and to do something, perform some act, that declares the importance relationships with their pets.

Except, for Walczyk, what allows people to mark out meaningfulness in the face of apparent meaningnessless isn't religion, and isn't ritual. But money.

As the reporter writes,

"the most valuable secret he’s learned after years in the business, Walczyk says, is that selling a pet funeral means never offering the lowest price. Customers aren't looking for value; they're looking for quality.  

 "'We're the most expensive place in town,' Walczyk says with a laugh. 'And everybody still comes to us.'"

Maybe one should update Tolstoy: "All he knew was that at such times it is always safe to spend money."

One way to think of this would be as a market essentially functioning to replace religion in modern life. I wonder, though, if it might not be more helpful to broaden the standard understanding of ritual, to think about how consumption can also be ritualistic, and how, whether people are religious or not, there's still this need to mark out aspects and moments of life as different, and rituals still serve this important, Peter Ivanovich-function in people's lives.

Read More

Let me root, root, root for the home team: When sports replaces religion in the rites of death

"It was such a big part of her life, why not be a part of her send off too."

Errol Morris' latest short documentary, on sports funerals:



As a reporter, I covered one of these in Georgia in 2007 or '08. The viewing was set up as a tail gate party, and everyone wore University of Georgia Bulldog gear in accordance with the will of the man who'd died. A large bulldog was inflated in front of the funeral home, bulldog flags were flown from the hearse, and the man was buried with two tickets to the next game in his hand.

Morris doesn't get into the specifically religious aspects of these funerals, though he does ask one Cubs fan if there will be sports in heaven.

The Georgia funeral director I spoke to saw sports funerals as replacing traditional religious rites. For these people, he said, religion was too dour, too somber. They didn't want organ music and a rented minister. What they wanted was a celebration, and for their friends and families to enjoy at their deaths what they had enjoyed in their lives. Religion wasn't an important part of their lives, wasn't what gave their lives meaning. Sports was. So they designed these non-religious rites of passage around that idea.

The widow at the viewing I attended agreed with that. She said she hadn't known of her husband's plans until he died and she read his will, but that he'd done what he knew would comfort her and everyone who cared about him.

"All this," she told me, "is him saying to me, 'don't cry, now. I don't want no crying.'"

Read More