Archive for September, 2009
Secular Sundays
In the US there are still many little places where the stores close on Sundays but Canada’s last holdout (Nova Scotia) succumbed to the secular Sunday this past year. While of course it is still a choice for an individual store owner whether they open or not, it is no longer legislated that they cannot remain open on Sundays. Of course, as a secularist I support this but I do wonder if we are throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In our house we want Sundays to remain a special day. The day will not be devoted to church or to god in any way but we hope to make it a day of peace and reflection. For us this will mean getting outside in nature. Being outside always makes me feel pensive and it gives me an opportunity to take stock and breathe. To prepare for the next week, to wonder aloud, what life is for and how we are going to live it. While I hesitate to use the word spirituality because of its supernatural connotations, I think it is important that we make time for that quiet part of us that can be drowned out by busy, loud lives.
My perfect secular Sunday would start off with a cooked breakfast and the opportunity to relax and read the newspaper or do a crossword while having a cup of coffee. Then we would go for a long hike in the mountains or walk in the park and hold hands, and laugh, and pick up leaves, and ask questions and talk. Our minds and our bodies would get some exercise. In the afternoon we would have a roast dinner of some kind. The day would be computer and work free. We could listen to music or play a board game and just enjoy being together.
Sundays might have been the only thing that religion ever got right.
What does your perfect “Secular Sunday” look like? Do you think its even necessary to make special time for self-exploration and quiet reflection?
Prayer ID Required
I have written before about prayer and how egotistical and irrational it really is. While I understand the emotional need to feel like you are “doing something” in a time of crisis, I think prayer is a perfect example of what can happen when you don’t actually stop and think about what you are doing.
Yesterday, a family friend was in a car accident and my MIL immediately started calling for prayers on Facebook. I have seen this a lot. I have been invited to prayer groups and been called to “pray for so-and-so because he/she needs your faith”. My response is to politely ignore the invitation, privately fume and move on. The thing I noticed yesterday however, was how many of these groups use the first name and last name of the people needing prayers. In the cases I’ve seen this is intended for those who don’t know the person personally but wish to add them to their prayers.
So, I can assume that God needs surnames? Should people perhaps include birth dates or addresses when praying on their behalf? Is there a risk of identity theft in heaven? What if there were two Steve Smith’s battling cancer and God was having bad day? Would one man live and the other die? If I just prayed for “Bob” would some guy in Utah sit up from his hospital bed while my friend remained in a coma?
Ridiculous right?
Right.
Edumacated?
Although I am a Canadian, I have many American friends and have spent a lot of time in the US. I recognize the power and influence that resides below our border and therefore, follow closely the political and religious (the line between which is increasingly blurry I’m afraid) ongoings of the country. I have to say that I am discouraged, bewildered and sometimes afraid at the state of affairs these days.
The anti-intellectualism exhibited primarily by the right-wing in the US is shocking. People seem to pride themselves in having faith over having knowledge and refuse to listen to any information coming from the other side, even if it is fact. They don’t believe in fact anymore it would seem – only nuance and semantics. Fox news will lie outright (a good example would be when they labelled disgraced Florida representative, Mark Foley as a democrat) and people don’t even notice. And when they do notice they somehow, don’t care! A true democracy relies on an informed base and I’m afraid that the American media and the American people have failed to do their job.
The question though, is where does this lack of critical evaluation and consideration come from? I would argue it is rooted in religion. When you are encouraged to take things on faith rather than evidence it is only a matter of time before that same approach seeps into the rest of your life. When your brain becomes habituated to shutting down, not questioning and ignoring evidence which does not support your world view, it starts to atrophy. This effect is crystalized by a society that celebrates this “fiction over fact” mentality and it perpetuates itself into homes, schools and the media. My mother-in-law, who is Mormon, has a sign on her fridge that reads “Character is higher than intellect.” Each time we visit, my husband and I are tempted to write “And intellect is higher than God.” but so far we haven’t touched the damn thing. What does character mean exactly anyway? Grrr…this could launch me into a whole other subject so I’m going to stop thinking about that sign on the fridge door. That damn sign that sets such low standards for a growing family.
The point is, people have been taught not to think. If you have to force yourself to accept that the world, contrary to so much evidence, is only 6,000 years old than I suppose it is not at all a stretch to believe that the President is a socialist. And if your Republican friends believe it too than it must be true. Don’t bother to pick up a dictionary and look up the term “socialist” (the dictionary is probably produced by some left-wing atheist publisher anyhow) or ask yourself what it must be like to truly live in a socialist country, or heaven forbid, actually read the health reform initiatives in their original forms, without interpretation. Why is it that the national newspapers are writing at a grade 4-5 level? How is it that so many people don’t know that Africa is a continent, or what “socialist” means or how the scientific method works? How is it that health reporting is so bad that experts now say it is causing more harm than good, and even “reporters” don’t check facts?
How did religion come to trump reason? And most importantly, how do we fix it?
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