Kristin Rawls – Solidarity Sunday

December 18th, 2011   by   Andrew

I have been posting TED talks on Sunday, but instead I want to redirect you to an article by Kristin Rawls on Killing the Buddha.

Please read Kristin’s F$%& Your Prayer, Show me Solidarity: A coming-out story in an age of predatory credit (first three paragraphs to get you reading it):

I’m going to tell you a story. It’s the story of a good girl from a quiet town who prayed, studied hard, said no to drugs, and otherwise did everything she was told—and then went on to become Sallie Mae’s bitch and lost just about everything. This story is mine.

I grew up in an evangelical home, and was an earnest “liberal-evangelical” into my early twenties. Now I think that my former religious faith—not unlike my faith in the U.S. higher education system—gave me a warped sense of optimism about the way the world works. I believed in faith-based platitudes, plus a few secular ones. Examples:

  1. God has a plan for my life.
  2. My whole future is ahead of me.

Until a few days ago, I was too ashamed to talk publicly about what happened to me. That’s when I saw Natalia Antonova’s incredibly brave piece at Alternet detailing her pending student loan default. This issue is so cloaked in shame and humiliation that many of us stay silent. Check out Natalia’s post-articleblog post if you don’t think stigma and shame are deeply intertwined with defaulting on debt out of necessity: she has been contacted by people who say they hope her lenders drive her to suicide.

(…continued here…)

I felt some kinship with Kristin (from her short bio):

Kristin Rawls has a useless MA in ethics and international relations and an even more useless one in philosophy. Her work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Religion Dispatches, Bitch Magazine, Global Comment, and elsewhere online.

Her story matches up with the words of Peter Thiel on the Bubble of Education (link to my post here):

“A true bubble is when something is over-valued and intensely believed. Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”

Also, I think Kristin has touched on some problems in the underlying mythological story in our contemporary world. Our present-day culture is, in terms of story, a Father that destroys or eats his own children (link to my blog post that explains this a little more). Regardless of whatever good intentions or even charitable acts come from such a system of control, it cannot be maintained because it’s ultimate purpose is not it’s own children.

Thank you to Kristin Rawls for the article. I don’t have much power, but I’ve got your back.

What do you think of Kristin’s article?

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Posted in Belief, Beyond Belief, god, Philosophy, psychology, story | Comments Off


Effectiveness of Prayer?

March 8th, 2011   by   Andrew

A friend’s aunt has moved into a small apartment. She is in her late 80s, hale and hearty, but no longer able to maintain a full house. Actually, the amount of stuff she and her husband collected over forty-some years in the house simply became too overwhelming for her. She asked my friend to clean the place out, and my friend then asked me if I would help.

What surprised me the most was the amount of paper. Books, political pamphlets, old fliers, binders of scrap paper, art canvases, how-to crochet catalogues, recipe boxes of little 5×3 cards, and… a closet full of correspondence from Morris Cerullo’s God’s Victorious Army, Peter Popoff’s ministries, and the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association.

This one stood out for me.

Can you imagine the effort and commitment involved in four days of prayer, in a tower?

Prayer was one of the things that made me uncomfortable with the Christian label in my teen years. I started to feel, in a sense, self-conscious about it.

It wasn’t the fear of getting caught or looking foolish. I talked to myself all the time. I still talk to inanimate objects now, and I talk to the cat ( she actually does respond to me,  if she’s wants food or attention). But even when I was a little kid, it felt weird, consciously asking for things from something that was supposed to know what I wanted anyway.

And, it made me feel guilty for being selfish.

My parents, from what I remember of my childhood, encouraged prayers of gratitude and guidance over gettin’ stuff and gettin’ my way. I could have maybe believed in an absolute deity, but I don’t think I could ever hope to have the power to change the mind of that deity.

But even gratitude and guidance didn’t help, really. I mean, saying thank-you is one thing; being grateful is something else.  Gratitude should inspire some sort of change of behavior or attitude, right? That meant walking the walk. And guidance rarely came to me in any small, still voice. If anything, it was in Mom’s voice, cementing in a solid guilty conscience with words like, “You don’t really want to do that, do you?”

I probably lost a lot of opportunities for good experiences and stories inspired by bad judgement on account of Mom’s good judgement.

At one point, maybe in my mid-teens, Dad and I were talking and he compared prayer to meditation. It helped at the time, somewhat. Prayers became quick little conscious check-ins with myself. Why am I doing this? Why do I feel this way right now? Do I really think I’m going to get away with this?

My parents had us over for dinner recently and asked me if I would say the prayers. I could hear myself talking to myself in my head:

Be respectful now…

Earlier in this blog I was playing with the idea of prayers to self (bottom of this post here). I threw something together that went like this:

Thank you for the food.
Thank you for the challenge.
Thank you for the inspiration.
Thank you for the ability.

This was as much a prayer to my parents as it was to my self, or to their God, as you could likely tell. Not much to it, but I got a slight pause from everyone, and a little smile from Dad. Maybe it was the inflection in my voice…

We talked about prayer that night over the meal and Dad recalled something he was told, again and again, in Theological College.

Pray until your prayers are answered, or until what you want aligns with what God wants.

He quickly added this could sometimes take a long time. Human beings can be amazingly persistent. We love doing the same thing over and over again, all the while expecting the results to change more than ourselves ever changing. Did Richard and Lindsay, in that prayer tower for four days, have an epiphany that maybe they should rethink how they go about their God’s work? Or did they just keep on praying and eventually change that God’s mind?

Dad provided us with another nugget to consider.

Pray, but then set about answering your own prayer. Work like your prayers won’t be answered, and only pray if the work can’t be done.

This struck me as a revealing confession about the nature of theology, and more generally, how we human beings get things done.

Could it be useful to look at prayer as a kind of folk-decision-making, or folk-project-planning?

Folk-psychology is effective for some people. It may not be rigorous or scientific, but some people seem to know how to get useful information out of little anecdotes and solve problems with home-spun theories.

Folk-decision-making might work quite well for people that set about answering their own prayers. Such people tend to keep working whatever angles or opportunities they find to complete their work. Some people have a knack for making decisions, even if they might not use the most efficient or scientific means to carry out those decisions.

It’s not about magic then. Not in the least.

Prayer just needs an upgrade.

:-)


What do you think?

- – -

Inspiration, and Further (more rigorous) Reading

A history of some recent studies on the effectiveness of prayer, from religioustolerance.org

Freethoughtpedia’s article on a Harvard Prayer Experiment

Templeton Paper on Intercessory Prayer

Folk Psychology according to the SEP


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Posted in Behaviour, Belief, Beyond Belief, education, god, humour, psychology, Religion, Science | 4 Comments »


Resources for Parents: A Prayer to Self

August 30th, 2010   by   Andrew


One of the things that bothers me most about atheists, agnostics, skeptics and general-non-believers is their lack of (serious) community ritual. De-baptism by blow-dryer may have a role in promoting awareness, but it doesn’t seem spiritually uplifting…

I mean, they may very well have a workable and very plausible worldview, (I wore the agnostic badge for quite a while until recently converting to anti-label-ism) but what practices are in place to bind communities together and assist individuals in become morally better people? And let’s be fair — blogging doesn’t necessarily count!

Do these same skeptics trust a government-run public education system to guide their children into being well-socialized, ethically aware members of the community? Is the community social club or the kids’ little league enough?

P.Z. Meyers put together an atheist creed a few years ago which is beautiful in its thoughtfulness, humility and simplicity. I especially appreciate that it is AN atheist creed, and not the atheist creed. However, the irony produced from atheists dipping into the creed-business while churches are questioning, editing, abandoning and repenting over their own does need to be examined.

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.
We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

My only real criticism of this statement is about the arrangement of word-choice  — it starts with “I” and ends with  “me”. “Community” appears only once.  We all go through stages of being self-obsessed and even self-possessed, but how about we try to grow a little beyond this if we are to come to some better ends? If there is change to be made, let it only begin with “me”.

Some non-believers are offended by prayer. They liken it to talking to imaginary friends or to using exclusive language that perpetuates the ingroup/outgroup barriers.

But ritual is important. If you don’t consciously choose your rituals, and the language of your rituals, they get chosen for you. The morning coffee is a clear example. Television and advertising is a way-too dominant example.

Prayer is as much talking to yourself, giving yourself guidance, as it is any sort of  call out to the unknown. Sometimes your own voice, your own thoughts, can help you be conscious of the moment and conscious of the choices you have when it comes to behaviour.

A common mantra on faithless blogs is the idea of being “good without gods”. I want to help with part of this. I don’t really care if you use a god or not, if you need a god or not. This is about being good, and getting better.

Here is an offering, something I believe could be universal. Months ago I wrote a review of a book by Gretta Vosper, “With or Without God.” This is a prayer from the book,  cleared of all supernatural elements but still designed to inspire change within the individual.

As I live every day,
I want to be a channel for peace.
May I bring love where there is hatred
and healing where there is hurt;
joy where there is sadness
and hope where there is fear.
I pray that I may always try
to understand and comfort other people
as well as seeking comfort and understanding
from them.
Wherever possible, may I choose to be
a light in the darkness,
a help in times of need,
and a caring, honest friend.
and may justice, kindness, and peace
flow from my heart forever,
Amen.

If a child said this each day and understood what the words meant, what would be the effect? Is there anything in this prayer that would offend a non-believer? Is there anything in this prayer that would offend a believer? Can this still be called a prayer?

Maybe that last word,  “Amen” is still too strong. We can edit that out. In fact, we can edit lots of things. That’s one of the rewards of challenging your own beliefs (I think Meyers might even agree with that).

What rituals do you have that help you move from being good to being better?


Take care. I won’t say my prayers are with you, but my thoughts are of you. All ways.


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Posted in Behaviour, Beyond Belief, ethics | 3 Comments »