08.03.08
Posted in Mike Clawson at 11:06 pm by Mike Clawson
Mike Clawson here:
Some publishers recently sent me a book to review called Greater Than You Think: A Theologian Answers the Atheists About God. So far, despite the fact that the author’s supposedly on “my side”, I’m less than impressed. However, I was curious about one statement he made towards the beginning of the book. He said:
“I have never known an atheist who could not identify the event or events that brought about his or her unbelief?”
That makes me wonder how many atheists he actually knows, and whether he’s ever met any that were brought up without religion and are not simply ex-Christians. But at any rate, I was also curious about how well his statement reflected the average atheist at this site. Is his statement true of you even if it’s clearly not universally true? Can you identify some specific event or events that led (whether directly or gradually) to your rejection of belief in God? And if so, what were those events?
BTW, forgive me if Hemant has already asked this question at some point in the past. If he did, I must have missed it. And though I’d hope it would go without saying, I just want to reassure all of you that I’m not asking this with any ulterior motive or hidden agenda. I’m just simply curious.
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07.06.08
Posted in Mike Clawson at 7:28 pm by Mike Clawson
Building on an idea first popularized in Donald Miller’s book Blue Like Jazz, a new website has been put up called “Christians Confess”.
When most people hear the word “Christian”, they think of a lot of other words — likely all of them negative. Words like “hypocrite”, “judgmental”, “self-righteous”, and — well, you get the idea. For many people, meeting individuals who identify themselves as Christian is also likely to stir up past memories of hurt and pain.
This site was started in order for Christians to acknowledge that we have got it terribly wrong at times, and to apologize for this. We understand that many will feel that words aren’t enough. We agree! Though we also admit we don’t know what else to do practically about this. If you have any ideas please contact us and let us know how we can show, not only in word, but also in deed, that we’re sorry.
The cool thing about this site is that it’s pretty much user generated. There’s no attempt to control the message, anyone can post any kind of apology they want (though they are specifically asking for Christians to apologize to non-Christians). Here’s a few:
I’m sorry for all the times we’ve shoved God in your face and loved you with an agenda- trying to keep you from the burning pits of hell. I’m sorry we don’t live more unique and genuine lives centered around loving one another. I’m sorry we get over righteous on you and fail to see life as it is. I’m sorry I told you I was a christian but I never minded gossiping about my sister or brother. I’m sorry I judged you.
–Krisann
I’m sorry i overlooked you as a potential friend just because our beliefs were different.
–Cindy
I’m sorry for ignoring you in preference to the “God stuff” that I was doing.
–Heather
Here’s the thing … it’s pretty clear that Jesus came to bring hope, healing and freedom and we, the church, his followers have sucked all the fun out of that. We’ve taken the hope out of hope and continued wounding the wounded and piled chains on slaves. I am so sorry.
–Sonja
I am sorry we have not been a more frequent, more firm and more graceful voice in environmental, political, and human rights arenas.
–Anonymous
I am sorry that so often the church has twisted Jesus’ message to exlude rather than include people.
–Sally
I am sorry for acting like I know-it-all and have the corner on truth while making fun of people who have actually devoted their lives to studying things like the Bible, or science, or history.
–Julie
The site also has a section for non-Christians to tell their stories of how they’ve been hurt by Christians or to give feedback about the site. Here are a few:
Wow. I came to this website with apprehension. Is this a trick? Am I going to be insulted, threatened with damnation, made fun of? Told I have to believe, or else!? I started getting teary eyed around the fourth apology and was crying by the end. Your apologies are brave, and I forgive you. I apologize for all the times I feared you when you revealed yourself to be a Christian. I apologize for all the times I rejected your thoughts and opinions just because you are a Christian. I apologize for all the times my beliefs in universal unity wavered. I apologize for all the times my patience gave out. I think we have a lot more to offer one another and a lot more to gain from coming together then we have by staying separated and pulling apart. Hopefully one day we will all come together under the umbrella of love.
–Jennifer
I am not Christian. I am sorry that I rolled my eyes when I saw the name of this site. I am sorry that I judged every Christian on the planet to be the same.
–Anonymous
I am a “recovering” Catholic living in a mid-sized city in the Bible Belt. I’m also a published writer, and I make no bones about my atheism in my writing. My children are both beautiful, smart, funny, kind-hearted kids, but they have very few friends. My husband heard recently from the rumor-mill at work that some of the ladies on our block have said that they don’t let their kids play with mine because we don’t go to church. I don’t mind so much that we don’t get invitations to the neighborhood get-togethers. We’d rather stay home, anyway; we enjoy each others’ company. But it upsets me greatly that my children are having a lonely childhood because my neighbors are intolerant of religious difference. It hardly seems Christ-like to punish them for our beliefs.
–Wendy
I read through the apologies on this site and unexpectedly started crying my eyes out. I was raised in the church and left a long time ago. There are too many stories to even begin to share here. It amazes me that something that is supposedly all about love and grace can cause so very much wrenching pain and damage. …can’t even begin to say…
–Anonymous
I have to say that I came here with doubts. But I can leave saying that this is a wonderful website. I used to be Christian, but have since left because of what I felt was intolerance, hatred, and the unwillingness to listen to others who were different in any way. I still feel that there are many Christians out there who are like this, but more and more everyday I meet many who aren’t. I feel like they are also getting the crappy end of the stick because the intolerant Christians are shutting them out.
But this is an apology website. I do apologize for hating Christians when I was younger. I can’t hate an entire group for the failings of a few. I do apologize for laughing at Christians. It was just as bad as some laughing at me.
I think with age comes maturity and I realize now that I can’t hate people at all. I can dislike, that’s something you can’t help, but I can no longer hate people. I wish that people of any religion could understand that. It’s ok to disagree, but hatred just pulls everyone down.
–Lex
So what do you think? Is a site like this helpful? Worthwhile? If you’re a Christian, are there any apologies you’d like to add? If you’re a non-Christian, do you have any stories or comments you’d want to contribute?
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06.18.08
Posted in Mike Clawson at 7:55 pm by Mike Clawson
This was originally written by Derek, one of our regular commenters here and a personal friend of mine (though sort of indirectly). His intent, in his words, was…
…sort of an attempt to capture in a semi-prosaic form the ways in which I identify with various views and beliefs of people and how no single label describes me completely in a “I believe all this and only this” sense.
He wrote:
I live in a world of people, animals, places, things, ideas, time, space, matter, energy, forces, galaxies, quasars, mesons, and bosons. I live in a universe that seems self-sustaining and acts a whole lot like there’s no God in it. I am an Atheist.
I believe I have not yet sufficiently investigated the myriad of religious, spiritual experiences others claim to have had, and that there are too many well-educated, intelligent people who claim religious belief without a hint of shame, to discount the existence of an otherworld completely. I am an Agnostic.
I believe the teachings of Christ regarding positive social change and mercy to the oppressed are just a bit too clear a message of the gospel to be swept up as a minor sub-plot to securing an eternal country club membership for oneself. I am a Christian.
I believe that by and large, suffering is brought on by the mindless pursuit of people’s desires, and that suffering can be mitigated by increasing one’s awareness, tempering one’s desires, and following a couple relatively intuitive guidelines. I am a Buddhist.
I believe that in small and loosely organized groups of people, the voluntary sharing and distribution of wealth provides badly needed assistance to many without the means to achieve or produce it on their own. I am a Communist.
I believe that governments should not prevent human beings from doing whatever they wish, so long as they are not a danger to others. I believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all, not just those who have the means to afford it or who act a certain way or whose skin is a particular color. I am a Liberal.
I believe in the right of all people to seek monetary gain by their own means and increase their standing in society through honest work. I am a Capitalist.
I believe in responsible control of public funds over increased taxation. I support the use of force to prevent one human being from harming another. I am a Conservative.
I believe that no self-sufficient living organism should have to fear a superfluous death for the selfish desires of another. I am pro-life.
I believe that an acorn is not an oak tree, and that what could have been is not what is. I support the right of a family to decide when raising a child is right for them, including in the early weeks of pregnancy, without fear of backlash. I am pro-choice.
I am a person who despises labels and categorizing. I am a whole person with many beliefs and views (some of which are contradictory and conflicted), hopes and dreams, worries and fears, qualities and quirks, delights and aversions. I would prefer that you take the time to get to know me rather than try and pigeonhole me from something someone said about me or something I wrote on a blog at one point or another.
I am a person who has made a conscious choice to make no overt profession of faith or disbelief. And yet, the spiritual journey continues.
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06.10.08
Posted in Mike Clawson at 5:24 pm by Mike Clawson
And Zack Exley wants you to know about it.
Zack is a left-wing activist and organizer who writes for the Huffington Post and at his own blog, Revolution in Jesusland. And what is Jesusland, you ask? Well, perhaps you’ve already seen the internet meme that redraws the map of North America thusly:
As Exley puts it:
The image was a hit because it expressed a sinking feeling in the hearts of many progressives that America had been taken over by an incomprehensible cult of ignorance, intolerance and hate—a cult they knew as “evangelical” or “born again” Christianity.
But what he wants us to know is that there are some radical changes taking place among evangelicals. He writes:
…there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.
…
From mega churches to tiny country churches, evangelical Christians are rediscovering the “gospel of the God of the oppressed.” Perhaps the most surprising among these are the suburban, white evangelicals who are stepping outside of their comfort zones to “get into relationship” with the poor, the oppressed, the homeless, prisoners—the people of whom Jesus said,
Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me….Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me. —Matthew 25
They are building houses for and teaching job skills to homeless people, they are creating tutoring programs for kids in failing schools, they’re paying health care bills and sending off rent checks for people living on poverty wages—and there’s even a movement afoot among these people to move their young families out of wealthy suburbs and into forsaken inner city neighborhoods, putting their kids into broken and often violent public schools. And in their Sunday services and Bible studies they are questioning the very foundations of modern American capitalist ideology.
So why should secular progressives care about what is happening among evangelical Christians?
By learning to work together with “progressive” evangelicals, secular progressives will stand a better chance of achieving their goals and also learn an enormous amount from these remarkable people and their organizations that will help secular progressives strengthen their own movement.
Even Exley himself has been caught up by this movement. In a recent post at Sojourner’s God’s Politics blog he wrote:
Over the last few years, I’ve gotten acquainted with a movement of Christians that is vibrant, enormous, and yet refuses to let itself be named or to take credit for any of its accomplishments. Some have named subsets or aspects of the movement — for example, “The New Monastics,” “The Emergent Church,” “Ordinary Radicals,” and even “Revolutionaries.” But there are millions of people swept up into this movement who have never even heard those phrases.
I grew up an atheist and a left-wing activist/organizer. I got a view into this movement only when I married a Christian and started going to church (the only way it was ever going to happen) a few years ago. When I first saw thousands of upper-middle-class, white, Southern suburbanites respond passionately to a sermon titled “Two Fists in the Face of Empire,” I knew that something incredible must be going on. Afterward, a minute of Googling revealed that the U.S. was already full of churches preaching that same “anti-empire” gospel — both mega- and mini-churches, suburban, rural, and urban.
…
I started weeping in worship services myself when I started to see what this movement was actually doing in people’s lives. It was taking very isolated, individualistic middle-class suburban people like me and breaking them open in all kinds of ways. Even though I had spent a lot of time working as a community and union organizer, I had always been careful to keep my life totally unentangled by the immediate needs and troubles of the people I was organizing — that’s what I was most comfortable with, and it’s also what I was taught to do by all my mentors.
I was organizing for “big” solutions and staying away from all the “little” stuff that to me just seemed too messy and complicated to ever solve anyway. But these young Christians I was meeting were “falling in love with each other across class and racial lines,” and wrestling with demons of poverty, addiction, community violence, family violence, sexual abuse, depression, hopeless schools, and all the other troubles that plague American life. They were “making redemptive history” by healing wounds and repairing families and communities one at a time. It’s really the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve had the opportunity to witness it up close in a dozen states and scores of giant mega-churches and tiny house groups.
At any rate, Zack’s blog is, in his words, “A guided tour for secular progressives” into this new Great Awakening among evangelicals. His goal is to help other people like him see that there is more going on among heartland Christians than what the media stereotypes and shocking stories of the extremes would seem to indicate. I’d definitely recommend giving him a read.
Besides the articles I’ve already linked above, I’d also recommend a two part series he recently did for the Huffington Post about Shane Claiborne and his new book (together with Chris Haw) Jesus for President. They are:
Jesus for President, a Book Review for Atheists; Part 1, What is Shane Claiborne?
Jesus for President, a Review for Atheists — Part 2: God’s Story
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05.22.08
Posted in Mike Clawson at 12:18 am by Mike Clawson
One of my favorite podcasts is NPR’s program, Speaking of Faith, a conversation on “religion, meaning, ethics and ideas”. Each week the host, Krista Tippett, interviews scholars and practitioners from a stunning variety of religious backgrounds - evangelicals, Muslims, atheist humanists, Mormons, Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, even a Haitian Vodou priest with a PhD. Recently I also read Tippett’s personal memoir from the show, also titled Speaking of Faith: Why Religion Matters and How to Talk About It. In it she cites a conversation she had with the eminent University of Chicago scholar of religious history, Martin Marty, about his groundbreaking study of fundamentalisms in twenty-three religions around the world. I was intrigued by his basic description and definition of fundamentalisms. Ms. Tippett writes:
Fundamentalism is never “old-time religion,” [Marty] says. It is a modern phenomenon - by which he as a historian means roughly the last two hundred years. It is always reactive, born when there is an assault on values that people have and are uncertain about. And around the world in our time, he says, people are having trouble with identity - what do I believe, whom do I trust, who trusts me? The Fundamentalism Project crafted an evocative conclusion - that there is presently a “massive, convulsive ingathering of peoples into their separatenesses and overagainstnesses to protect their pride and power and place from others who are doing the same thing.” In the United States this doesn’t manifest itself usually in violent insurgencies or terrorism. It does appear in a cultural readiness to divide the world up into us and them, virtuous and vicious, good and evil.
I don’t know if Marty’s study focused at all on atheists or other secular people, but it strikes me that this kind of fundamentalism could infect pretty much any ideology, not just religious ones.
Tippett goes on to offer more of her own observations about the potential for constructively engaging with fundamentalists and redirecting their energies. She then comes back to Marty’s own advice for engaging with religious people of all sorts:
In the end, Martin Marty doesn’t divide the world into conservative and liberal. He divides it into “mean and non-mean.” Billy Graham, who ushered in a gentler, earlier tradition of evangelical religious influence in politics, was not mean. Some of his descendants are, and so are some liberals. As the specter of the fundamentalist religious identity of Al Qaeda has come to overshadow international affairs and identities, Marty has this advice for policymakers and citizens that echoes everything I learn in my life of conversation: Don’t lump the faithful and fundamentalists together in any tradition. Don’t demonize any group of religious people as an enemy. There is great diversity whenever large numbers of human beings are involved. Do all that you can to help them show their varieties and make it easier for them to be diverse. Make it easier for moderates in all of these movements to be moderates. Marty helps me better understand an important side effect of the work I do. Speaking of Faith is among a growing number of spaces in our culture for intelligent, innovative, and moderate religious voices to in fact serve as moderators within their traditions and our culture - to be seen and heard and to act. Marty himself only speaks of religious movements in the plural - as Protestantisms and evangelicalisms and fundamentalisms. In the simple act of pluralizing these broad categories of faith, he defies their use as ideological boxes, wedges, and bludgeons.
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05.11.08
Posted in Mike Clawson at 11:31 pm by Mike Clawson
Emerging church blogger Matt Stone recently posted some extracts from a 2005 article in the Journal of Parapsychology entitled “Personality and motivations to believe, misbelieve and disbelieve in paranormal phenomena”. As the title indicates, the article discusses how personality (e.g. Myers-Briggs types) affects one’s tendency towards skepticism or belief in what they call “psi”, i.e. psychic phenomenon. I’ve not read the entire article (it’s rather long) but the excerpts on Stone’s blog are fascinating. Here’s a few quotes:
Paranormal beliefs and experiences are associated with certain personality factors, including absorption, fantasy proneness, and the Myers-Briggs intuition and feeling personality dimensions. Skepticism appears to be associated with materialistic, rational, pragmatic personality types. Attitude toward psi may also be influenced by motivations to have control and efficacy, to have a sense of meaning and purpose in life.
…
Research studies have found that belief in paranormal phenomena is associated with the N and F personality factors…. In a study of a technique attempting to induce a sense of contact with someone who had died, 96% of the participants with NF personality types reported after-death contact experiences, whereas 100% of the participants with ST (sensing, thinking) personality types did not have these experiences….
Interestingly, and contrary to what some have suggested, the article states that a strong desire for control is actually more common among skeptics than among psi-believers. It says:
Skeptics also tend to have a greater internal locus of control (belief that they control the events in their lives) than those who believe in psi…. This is consistent with a stronger motivation for control by skeptics or possibly with less belief in supernatural influences.
…The initial evidence suggests that skeptics may tend to have a greater need for control. In fact, the speculations that an illusion of control is a significant factor in psi beliefs have primarily been proposed by skeptics and may be projections of their own needs for control.
If one moves beyond the motivation for control and looks at psi on its own terms, a different motivation emerges as prominent. Many people report experiences of ostensible spontaneous paranormal phenomena that occur without attempting to elicit or control the phenomena…. Even a casual review of these reports indicates that the experiences do not seem to be guided by self-serving, materialistic motivations or needs for control.
Research indicates the primary effect of psi experiences is an altered worldview and an increased sense of meaning and purpose in life and spirituality….
It is also important to note that this article is specifically correlating personality with belief in psi, not with religion in general. In fact it notes that the more skeptical personality types (STJs) are often found in authoritarian religious circles.
People with STJ personality types tend to rise to positions of leadership and authority in hierarchical organizations…. Fudjack and Dinkelaker (1994) noted that the masculine “extraverted/rational-empirical/pragmatic/ materialist” ESTJ personality is prominent in western culture and tends to prefer hierarchical organizations that emphasize power and control rather than creativity and flexibility. Kroeger, Thuesen, and Rutledge (2002) administered the Myers-Briggs personality test to over 20,000 people in all levels of a wide variety of corporate, government, and military organizations. Across these diverse groups, they found that 60% of 2,245 people in top executive positions had STJ personalities (ESTJ or ISTJ). The proportion of STJ types increased as the level on the management hierarchy increased.
Research indicates that the S personality types are associated with conservative religions that emphasize institutional religious authority and tradition whereas the intuitive (N) types are associated with more liberal, subjective, experiential approaches to religion and tolerance for religious uncertainty…. Similarly, greater dogmatism was associated with the S and J personality types….
Other personality models describe related factors like authoritarianism, traditionalism, or right-wing authoritarianism…. Altemeyer (1996) argued that fundamentalism is a religious manifestation of the authoritarian personality. Monaghan (1967) described “authority-seeker” as one of the main motivations for attending a fundamentalist church.
Fundamentalist religions often consider mystical or paranormal experiences as delusions or dangerous events.
All this of course raises some interesting questions about the degree to which personality type influences one’s proclivity towards certain worldviews, whether atheism, authoritarian religion, belief in paranormal phenomenon, or whatever else. For instance, the commentary on Stone’s blog below the article notes, anecdotally, that most people in the emerging church tend to be NFs or NTs (which has certainly been true in my experience - for instance I am an INTJ and my wife is an INFP). I’m curious, for those of you here who have taken the Myers-Briggs test, what is your personality type? If the research plays out, one would predict that most here are probably at least S types.
(Note: most of the ellipses in the quotes above are where I took out the citations to improve readability. If you’re interested in the citations backing up these statements, see the original post.)
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04.26.08
Posted in Mike Clawson, Friendly Atheist at 11:48 am by Mike Clawson
Apparently someone decided to take Hemant’s idea one step further. Kristine Dias’ friend sold her immortal soul on eBay for $18.63, plus $.37 shipping and handling. (I guess that’s the standard postal rate for human souls these days.)
Considering Hemant got over $500 bucks for his soul, I think she got ripped off.
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04.23.08
Posted in Mike Clawson, Friendly Atheist at 11:48 am by Mike Clawson
Mike Clawson here again.
Maybe I should just start with the disclaimers. I am posting this question solely out of a desire to get to know people better, and hopefully to help find some common ground and common passions. I have no hidden agenda, and if you think you perceive any subtle digs directed at atheists then please assume that you are misreading me. Also, this post is not an invitation to play “Ask a Christian Pastor” again and bombard me with demands to defend every little aspect of my faith. Let’s talk about our other passions, not about what you don’t like about my faith. And if you decide to hammer me with these questions anyway, please don’t get offended if I decline to engage.
So here’s my question: I know that most of you here are pretty passionate about atheism and also usually about the separation of church and state. And I’ve noticed that whenever Hemant or whomever invites you to become more activist it usually has to do with supporting either Atheist groups, groups fighting for Separation, or (less frequently) groups supporting science education. That’s all well and good, and it’s natural that these would be emphasized on a specifically atheist blog. It’s also natural that at a blog like this people would talk about those passions and not so much about other ones.
However, I don’t want to make the mistake of assuming that these are the sole or even primary defining passions in your lives. I’m sure that many of us are also passionately committed to other causes and issues, perhaps even more so than atheism or religious/non-religious freedom. For instance, I am passionately committed to social justice issues - e.g. issues of fair trade, anti-slavery, poverty reduction, environmental sustainability, ethical consumption, racial and gender equality, and active peacemaking. You might not know it based on the things I end up talking about here, but I’m actually far more interested in these topics than I am in discussing atheism vs. theism.
So I’m curious about you. What else are you passionate about? What issues are most important to you? What causes have you devoted your life to? Are “atheist” and “religious” issues your primary interests or are those simply what shows through here on this blog?
Let’s share our passions. I’m hopeful that we’ll find more points of commonality than perhaps we would expect.
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04.18.08
Posted in Mike Clawson, Friendly Atheist at 4:06 pm by Mike Clawson
Pastor Mike Clawson here again.
For those interested in thoughtful Christian responses to atheism and especially the “New Atheism” characterized by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, et al. (as opposed to the kind of responses you might get from say, Ray Comfort or Ken Ham), you might be interested in this new book by Dr. John Haught, a distinguished theologian at Georgetown University. According to Wikipedia:
[Haught’s] area of expertise is systematic theology, with a special interest in issues of science, cosmology, ecology, and reconciling evolution and religion…
Haught, who established the Georgetown Center for the Study of Science and Religion, is the author of several important books on the creation-evolution controversy, including Deeper Than Darwin: The Prospect for Religion in the Age of Evolution, God After Darwin: A Theology of Evolution, and Responses to 101 Questions on God and Evolution. A theistic evolutionist, he sees no conflict between science and religion because they explore different levels of explanation. Therefore, “Science and religion cannot logically stand in a competitive relationship with each other.”
His new book, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris & Hitchens, attempts to take a serious and philosophical look at the New Atheists, whom he calls “soft-core atheists”, claiming that their contemporary brand of anti-theism is not nearly as deep or as challenging as that of past generations, for instance the great atheist-existentialist thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus, and thus presents little challenge to the more noteworthy theologians of our own time. According to Publishers Weekly:
Haught… argues that there is nothing really new about the New Atheism; it is instead a rehashing of antireligious arguments that are as old as the Enlightenment. In fact, Haught criticizes the New Atheism as being theologically unchallenging, its all-or-nothing thinking representing about the same level of reflection on faith that one can find in contemporary creationist and fundamentalist literature. Haught draws upon theologians such as Tillich, Bultmann, Ricoeur, McFague and Pannenberg to refute some of the New Atheists’ most common contentions.
Just speaking personally, I’ve had essentially the same reaction to the New Atheists as Haught. Their level of dialogue seems about right for a critique of fundamentalist religion (Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren in Newsweek, or the RRS vs. Comfort and Cameron on ABC seemed like fairly appropriate match-ups), but I honestly can’t see Dawkins, Harris or Hitchens going toe to toe with the likes of NT Wright, Nick Wolterstorff, Miroslav Volf, Jack Caputo, Walter Bruggeman or even John Haught.
Granted, I’ve not yet read Haught’s book to know for sure how he does, though I have added it to my list. I’ll let you know if it doesn’t live up to my expectations. However, if you want to read a little bit more of his perspective now, there is an interview with Haught up on the God’s Politics blog. No doubt most of the atheists here will still disagree with his conclusions, though, if you’re not entirely a fan of the New Atheists and appreciate someone who is calling for a deeper level of dialogue and encouraging atheists that they can do better than these popular-level critics, you may want to take a look at Haught’s book.
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04.02.08
Posted in Mike Clawson, Friendly Atheist at 12:54 pm by Mike Clawson
Mike Clawson here. I saw this article in the paper today and thought some of you here might be interested.
You maybe remember media-mogul Ted Turner as the guy who once called Christianity a “religion for losers”, asked employees who celebrated Ash Wednesday if they were “Jesus freaks” (and told them they ought to be working for Fox), and joked that the Pope ought to step on a landmine. Turner has said that he rejected religion after his younger sister died of lupus when they were both young.
Apparently Turner has recently had a change of heart as he is now partnering with several major Protestant denominations to raise over $200 million dollars to fight malaria in Africa. Turner will be teaming up with both the mainline (i.e. liberal) Evangelical Lutheran Churches in American and the United Methodist Churches, as well as the significantly more conservative Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod - groups that have already been working overseas to fight poverty and disease for over a century. Turner has likewise been known for his philanthropy and social activism throughout the years.
According to the article, Turner, who used to describe himself as an agnostic or an atheist, now occasionally attends church and has recently apologized for any disparaging comments about religion he had previously made.
What accounts for his change of mind? Turner said that he is “always developing” his thinking. “As I get older, you know, I get more, you know, more tolerant,” Turner said at a news conference. “Religion is one of the bright spots as far as I’m concerned, even though there are some areas, like everything else, where they’ve gone over the top a little, in my opinion. But I’m sure God, wherever he is, wants to see us get along with one another and love one another.”
Regardless of what you think of Turner or his apparent “conversion”, it is encouraging to me to see former antagonists set aside the name calling in order to make a real difference in the world for people in desperate need.
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