Category: open thread

Open thread: Susan Jacoby talks about people who go through religious conversion

February 24, 2016 • 12:00 pm

by Grania

There’s an interesting interview with Susan Jacoby over on Fresh Air (NPR) about her new book Strange Gods: A Secular History Of Conversion. Susan looks at people in history as well as current examples, and examines reasons why people choose to exchange one god for another.

Interestingly, the answer is very rarely, as she calls it, the Road to Damascus-style epiphanies. The answer is almost always intermarriage.

She also notes, quite tellingly that rates of religious conversion also depend quite strongly on the level of religiosity within the country lived in.

This is – the rate of religious conversion here is much, much higher than it is anywhere in Europe, for example. People there tend – if they don’t practice the default religion, they often slide into secularism, but it’s not a conversion in the sense of you don’t find very many Lutherans converting to Catholicism or Judaism in Sweden, for example.

Sh also talks about “mixed” marriages in which people of differing religions or none have to decide to raise children together. It’s probably a situation that a lot of people find themselves in. How do partners come to an agreement about it? I know in my own family, my mother “won” and raised her children to be Catholics (with varying degrees of success as it turns out). But I wonder whether this very difficult question ever breaks relationships. Personally I don’t think I could raise children with someone who is deeply religious; our conflicting personal philosophies would cause too much of a divide. Jacoby appears to feel the same way.

I don’t have any children, but if I did – and I know that many people in mixed marriages have to negotiate this – but I believe that whether one believes in God or not is – it’s very central to who I am. I actually cannot imagine raising children or doing the things you do – other things you do with a partner who disagreed with me on something so fundamental. To me, it’s fundamental. I completely can’t understand people, for example, of different faiths who say that their children will choose when they grow up. I think that if you believe in a religion, most people believe that it’s right.

People also change. What happens if you are moderately religious at the start of a relationship; but non-religious ten years later?

Listen to the full interview here:

http://www.npr.org/player/embed/467067269/467091234

Have you ever had to face these questions in your life? How did you deal with them?

Open thread: the demise of religiosity in society

July 17, 2015 • 2:54 pm

By Grania

I apologize for two open threads in two days, Jerry’s back on the road and I had Stuff & Things to do today.

Here’s another question that Jerry posed for us to discuss.

If you could change one thing in your society that would lessen religiosity or cause it to gradually disappear*, what would it be?

Again, this very much depends on the country or state in which you live, given the wide variety of laws and the state of individual liberty there.

Here in Ireland, I think the thing that most needs to be changed to undermine an already rapidly dwindling interest in religion is the separation of Church and State in schools across the country.

Teach don’t Preach, Atheist Ireland’s education advocacy campaign notes:

The vast majority of the primary schools in the Republic of Ireland (approximately 3,300) are church controlled, over 90% by the Catholic church and about 6% by Protestant churches. The Irish State provides for education through the Department of Education and Skills and nearly all schools are publicly funded (teachers salaries, school operating costs, school transport, school repairs and building) but essentially privately controlled. The Irish Catholic Bishops say that “Catholic schools seek to reflect a distinctive vision of life and a corresponding philosophy of education, based on the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Essentially, nearly all schools in Ireland are paid for by the State, and yet are freely used by the Catholic Church as its main resource for evangelizing and instructing students in its faith and preparing them for Catholic ritual ceremonies during the school day.

If schools followed a multi-denominational model (at worst) or a secular model (preferably) and kept faith instruction as a voluntary after-hours activity, then I suspect that interest in religion would wane even further.

What would you change in your country?

* You can’t cheat and just ban religion. 😉

Open thread: change the law

July 16, 2015 • 2:00 pm

by Grania

Here’s a question Jerry posed this morning: If you could change one law in your country, what would it be and why?

Please say which country you are in too, seeing as this is a multi-national website (ahem).

There are a bunch of laws that I would like to change in Ireland which is the country I live in – the blasphemy law here is deeply misguided; but I think the one that is most urgently needed to change is the current ban on abortion, except in rare cases where a woman can convince a panel of doctors that her life is sufficiently in peril. So far this law means that anyone needing an abortion in Ireland has to travel to the UK to obtain one. Anyone who is unable to travel has no recourse at all, and the few cases where women have attempted to obtain a termination legally here have all resulted in grotesque violations of their human rights.

So far most political parties in Ireland are wary of the subject, so I suspect the law will take a long time to change.

What law would you change?

Open thread: Youtube algorithms and music

July 11, 2015 • 1:17 pm

by Grania

Youtube has collated me a list called My Mix: Synthpop. My first thought was “I don’t listen to synthpop” and then “I don’t actually know what synthpop is”. I don’t think Youtube does either. But nevertheless, it ever so often puts together lists of stuff that I have listened to and gives them a name, and more often puts together lists of stuff it thinks I might want to listen to (usually not an entirely successful endeavor, but you can’t blame an algorithm for trying, right?)

So what does Youtube call Synthpop?

Stromae for one. He’s more Electronic Hiphop, but whatever. Even if you don’t speak French you might enjoy him. He’s from Belgium and his lyrics are clever, full of puns and double entendres as well as a satirical commentary on society. The videos have English subtitles so you can get the gist, you may need a French speaker to get all the puns though.

Tous Les Mêmes (You’re all the same)

Then there’s Ta Fête (Your Party) which always makes me grin because Stromae manages to look exactly like a 21st century Tutankhamen. Or at least, what Tutankhamen wishes he looked like.

susan stclair tut

 stromae-ta-fete

Youtube also included his Ave Cesaria which is an homage to Cape Verde singer Cesária Évora and is about as far away from “synthetic” or “electronic” as you can get, as well as being beautiful. Also check out Formidable (ceci n’est pas une leçon) which is the funny stream of consciousness as a man stumbles home drunk after seeing the object of his desire get married to someone else.

Other items to turn up in my list:

An A Capella group Pentatonix, who in fairness do mimic pop without a single instrument.

Walk Off The Earth, similarly couldn’t be called synthetic or electronic even if you squinted.

and lastly Superfruit – two-fifths of Pentatonix who if they sing, do it with a piano and a microphone. Here they are doing a list of contemporary hits as if they were Broadway anthems.

What I am surprised didn’t make Youtube’s “cut” is any of the Electronic Swing I have been listening to. This is Twenties and Thirties style jazz reworked by the likes of Parov Stelar which has spawned a new (old?) dance genre. Try All Night to see if you like it.

It’s proven so popular that it has even ended up in advertisements.

The one thing the algorithm does is never insert any classical tracks into the mix. Those get filed tidily into different mixes.

Otherwise, it would seem anything goes.

Have you had any strange items pop up in Youtube?

Open Thread: early Summer edition

June 11, 2015 • 2:00 pm

by Grania Spingies

Jerry’s on his way back to Chicago now, and while he’s in the air we have Professor Ceiling Cat’s permission to talk about whatever we want to.

It can be movies:

or real life stuff:

Ireland’s Marriage Referendum result is being challenged in some weird ways. They won’t get anywhere. Their arguments are tortuous and face-palmingly desperate. They’re currently appealing being rejected.

Or whatever you want.

Are any criticisms of theism kosher? (Open Thread)

June 7, 2015 • 1:00 pm

by Grania Spingies

In the wake of complaints such as this one and angry reviews of Jerry’s new book Faith vs. Fact, one has to wonder whether any criticism of theism is acceptable or valid to a believer. One of the complaints that irks Jerry the most is the charge that he – or indeed we – as fellow atheists, have not read the right theology books, or not enough of them, or that we haven’t understood them properly.

The charge continues: therefore we haven’t truly understood religion, and therefore we lack the credentials to rebut it.

 

Of course, the charge is bogus. At very least, Jerry has read more theology than the average human being, more even than the average church-going believer. Tomes of Sophisticated Theology are rarely if ever referenced by ministers and priests in their sermons and homilies, because they know that those in the pews have not read them and don’t intend to either. The notion that the real answers to difficult questions lie between the covers of such books is simply a security blanket proffered where the congregation appear to be of above-average education and perhaps don’t literally believe in talking snakes chatting up naked women.

Perhaps because most theology books are rarely read, the champions of theology as Christianity’s best argument aren’t always aware of the fact that, for example C.S. Lewis (still so very popular after all these years, perhaps simply because he writes more accessibly than the average theologian) has been very comprehensively taken apart by other theologians.

However, I maintain that most theology is dead in the water from the outset. Here’s why: they all operate off the base assumption that God is real, and is moreover the Christian God of the bible. This is why theology fails to convince anyone who isn’t already in the club.

Lewis actually tried his hand at “proving” God with his infamous “liar or a madman” argument. Basically Jesus is God because he said so, and he wouldn’t have said so unless it was true, because we know he wasn’t a liar or a madman. Plenty of people have pointed out that those aren’t the only two other possibilities. And any non-believer who has read the bible can attest that in fact some of Jesus’s doings come across as quite mad (figs, anyone?). In any case, anyone can spot a circular argument. Cosmological arguments and Pascal’s Wager don’t get any better even though some of them use really long words with lots of syllables.

Anyway, the point here is to have a discussion about whether it is possible to satisfy a believer that your lack of belief is not owing to a lack of theology. If not, why not?

Time to talk about anything except the weather

June 4, 2015 • 2:00 pm

by Grania Spingies

Jerry said I ought to post the tweet I saw from @AstroSamantha yesterday, amusing for me because I live in Ireland; but possibly of no consequence to anyone else. I was aghast, as I really do not want to bore anyone to tears by talking about the weather of all things. Then he suggested that it might be time for an Open Thread anyway as he is currently on a plane and on his way to Vancouver.

Here’s the Tw**t. On a typical day, that sort of cloud cover stretches over Ireland. Sometimes it’s worse.

Hence this meme that was going around on Twitter too this week. So very, very true. And sad.

CGaGY7NXIAAwpME

On the subject of Neverland, has anyone actually read the book Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, rather than the various Disney treatments of it? The book doesn’t extoll the virtues of childish imagination and spontaneity  quite as much as Disney would have us believe. Peter Pan is also self-centered, irresponsible and cruel – and a whole lot of fun at parties. He’s rather more complex and interesting than the rather flat daring hero that we see in the movie versions. Such, I guess, is the fate of all book to movie adaptations. Unless, of course, Peter Jackson can be persuaded to try his hand at it, in which case we might get a trilogy out of it.

Feel free to discuss anything you wish in the comments below.