Oh there’s some virtue signalling all right, but I don’t think you’ve correctly identified the source
Oops, yeah. Mea culpa.
Added, no. In there from the beginning, yes. It’s just that almost nobody sings all the verses.
Verse 4:
O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov’d home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with vict’ry and peace may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv’d us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto - “In God is our trust,”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Got it. I agree. I think spirituality must be somewhat genetic, since my family does not have it at all.
Isaac Asimov did. He used his super memory to memorize all the verses, and he told us he did it so that when some right winger called him a Communist, he could challeng them to an anthem singing contest.
I think so too. My friend the Lubuvitcher grew up as an ordinary conservative Jew. One of his sisters became an evangelical atheist and another close relative converted to Christianity and became a nun or something. That’s got to be a lot more interest in the spiritual than an average family displays.
As the saying goes, “You can’t reason a man out of a position he didn’t reason himself into.”
I grew up believing in hell, and had some very extreme religious experiences from a young age - well outside the mainstream Christian experience. Somehow when I was about twelve an adult convinced me to try exorcising a demon from her daughter by laying on hands and speaking in tongues, which I did of course, not really understanding what the hell was going on. My friend was having some kind of fit, and I didn’t realize until years later, when I actually had one myself, that she was having a grand mal seizure.
I not only believed in hell, I felt hunted by demons, and occasionally I still get worried about going to hell, but I am usually able to keep myself in check by reminding myself that I have an anxiety disorder and a vivid imagination.
Compare this experience to some atheists I know, like my uncle in law and his sisters who were raised atheist. They said the first time they encountered the idea of Jesus they were like, “You believe what? LOL.” And beyond that, they never really gave it much thought.
In this sense, I agree that we can’t really assume atheists all have the same experience or the same reasons for their conclusions. There is no one atheist mindset. The story of how I came to become an atheist is a really complicated one. For a lot of people it was as simple as having always been one.
You got there first. I was coming in for that. I knew it without looking it up as I can give all four verses from memory.
Show me where I, as an agnostic, has even tried to convert anyone to my religion.
Not really, I mean unless they call people of Faith idiots, fools, etc.
No, they just bully and ridicule on message boards, etc. There are different ways of proselytizing.
I see your point, and it may be better than the point I am trying to make. Bullying and virtue signaling, not attempted conversion? Hmmm.
My family’s all over the place. Some atheists, some believers; some practice, some don’t. I don’t think we’ve got any proselytizers, though I can’t be sure, as the family’s very scattered and I don’t know all the cousins.
I had to look it up; all I had was a vague sense of ‘wait a minute, I think that is in there somewhere.’
(Which probably makes it even more annoying that I got in first!)
I think the last time was around 2009. I had two employees from competing evangelical churches who were both deeply concerned for my immortal soul. I made clear that I would be concerned for their employment status if I caught them proselytizing in the office again. Can’t think of another incident off-hand.
It’s been a long day. Yes, as a Jew I can saw (now that I know the word) Judaism is orthopraxic. Think of the ten commandments (we can forget about the other six hundred and three for now). ‘Thou shall not covet’ is the only one I can think of that concerns thought and belief rather than taking or refraining from specific action.
Re Ceremonial Deism
It really really pisses me off. I want a moral government certainly. BUT, I want one based largely on reason and constrained by laws, checks and balances. If it’s meaningless and just ceremonial, change G-d to Hashem or Allah or Odin. I like my church and state separated- just like meat and dairy.
Re Atheism
To an atheist, a believer is crazy. To a believer, an atheist is blind and deaf. The important thing is to be nice to each other. I’ve made my variant of Pascal’s wager. It’s worked out for me so far.
Have you read the “left behind” books? They call atheists evil. Not “evil by omission” or anything like that, active practitioners of evil, just hoping to trip up Christians, or at least hurt them. The abortionist who is really upset she doesn’t have any babies to kill is one of the most over-the-top characters I’ve ever seen.
I don’t like superior assholes of any stripe. But I’m really embarrassed when they share some sort of identifying characteristic with me.
I consider myself a spiritual person, though I lack a belief in the supernatural. I guess I mean spiritual in the sense of always looking for meaning and reflecting often on how I make sense of the world. And always seeking that something bigger to connect to. With meditation, it’s good enough for me that it works. I don’t need to ascribe better well-being to a mystical source. But I also enjoy the ritual of it all. I light a candle, I ring a bell, I think about the tradition that came before me.
I used to subscribe to a newsletter called Free Will astrology. I don’t believe in astrology at all, but that particular author always provided something interesting to reflect on.
It’s rare that I meet other people like this. Surely I meet other people who are as interested in spiritual practice as I am, but they usually believe in some kind of mysticism. My experience with Christianity and slide into atheism totally rocked my foundation, and I’m not interested in having that experience again. I’d rather just live with uncertainty than be consumed by that much belief in anything ever again. So I don’t really have anything to proselytize about.
I find it a little bit reassuring to learn that there are conceptualizations of religion that don’t require faith. Like maybe I’m not alone in that.
I am getting old, my friend, I am not about to risk what brain cells I have left on that crappy dreck.
They sold a lot better than dawkins.
In 2016, several books in the series were bestsellers and 65 million copies were sold in various languages.[10]
The scientist and atheist said he was “greatly encouraged” to learn that the unofficial Arabic pdf of the book had been downloaded 13m times. Dawkins writes in The God Delusion about his wish that the “open-minded people” who read it will “break free of the vice of religion altogether”. It has sold 3.3m copies worldwide since it was published in 2006 – far fewer than the number of Arabic copies that Dawkins believes to have been downloaded illegally.
(Bolding mine)
And yet, somehow, the existence of dawkins makes Christians “under attack”, but the wild success of books like “left behind” (and that’s just a poplar one that came to mind) is ho hum. I’ve been to religious services where the preacher tells his flock that atheists are bad. It’s everywhere. But if atheists moan and bitch about that, they are in the wrong, for putting down religion.
I don’t care what you believe, your posts are carrying water for the worst kind of atheist-bashing.
And, fwiw, i am not opposed to religion. I practice one, and i believe religion serves a valuable role in the lives of many. I think that most of the evil perpetrated in the name of religion would have been perpetrated with some other excuse if those people hadn’t happened to be religious.
But “atheists are okay, so long as they shut up and never mention it” is problematic. Especially to anyone who lives in America, where we are all confronted by expressions of Christianity every day.
Ayup.
And, nevertheless, “shut up and never mention it” is for the most part what I do. It’s so much easier, on most occasions, if I have to say something, to say “I’m a non-practicing Jew”. While this does sometimes cause people to try to convert me, it doesn’t generally seem to occur to them to ask “why aren’t you practicing?” And it’s true enough; just incomplete.
– I agree that I could practice Judaism and be an atheist; but it would be pretty awkward, considering among other things that I manage and sell at a Saturday morning market.
– I’m an agnostic about some of the Small Gods (spirits of particular places) and also about the possibility of the universe as a whole being in some sense an intelligent being, though it wouldn’t be in any sense we can comprehend. But neither of those is remotely like what most people mean when they say ‘do you believe in God?’ I’m entirely atheist about those gods.
– I will occasionally give a close friend the whole explanation.
Not per se, but it is ubiquitous to arrogate many qualities or talents human possess to humans alone, although it is ever more obvious there aren’t very many that we don’t share with some animals, and many we share with all mammals, at least. Atheists tend to come at it from a “science and progress” perspective and Christians from a “God put the world here to be our footstool” belief. Same shit though.
No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
My wife started the first one, but abandoned it not because of theology but because the writing was so bad.
Come at what? I’ve seen far more atheists cite the research showing that animals exhibit traits such as fairness than theists - at least during relgious discussions. (I have no idea about the religious breakdown of scientists doing the work.) Special creation implies a solid break between us and the other animals, evolution does not. I’d guess that the majority (I hope) of theists who accept evolution would have similar opinions about this as atheists.