Atheism the New Religion

Below are some excerpts from a recent article in Wired magazine examining atheism as an intellectual movement. Gary Wolf conducted interviews with several famous atheists including Richard Dawkins.

The Church of Non-believers

If trained theologians can go this far, who am I to defend supernaturalism on their behalf? Why not be an atheist? I've sought aid far and wide, from Echo Park to Harvard, and finally I am almost ready to give in. Only one thing is still bothering me. Were I to declare myself an atheist, what would this mean? Would my life have to change? Would it become my moral obligation to be uncompromising toward fence-sitting friends? That person at dinner, pissing people off with his arrogance, his disrespect, his intellectual scorn – would that be me?

~

Among the New Atheists, Dennett holds an exalted but ambiguous place. Like Dawkins and Harris, he is an evangelizing nonbeliever. He has campaigned in writing on behalf of the Brights and has written a book called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. In it, the blasting rhetoric of Dawkins and Harris is absent, replaced by provocative, often humorous examples and thought experiments. But like the other New Atheists, Dennett gives no quarter to believers who resist subjecting their faith to scientific evaluation. In fact, he argues that neutral, scientifically informed education about every religion in the world should be mandatory in school. After all, he argues, "if you have to hoodwink – or blindfold – your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct."

When I arrive at the farm, I find him in the midst of a difficult task. He has been asked by the President's Council on Bioethics to write an essay reflecting on human dignity. In grappling with these issues, Dennett knows that he can't rely on faith or scripture. He will not say that life begins when an embryo is ensouled by God. He will not say that hospitals must not invite the indigent to sell their bodies for medical experiments because humans are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. Ethical problems must be solved by reason, not arbitrary rules. And yet, on the other hand, Dennett knows that reason alone will fail.

We sit in his study, in some creaky chairs, with the deep silence of an August morning around us, and Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of overreliance on thought. He doesn't want people to lose confidence in what he calls their "default settings," by which he means the conviction that their ethical intuitions are trustworthy. These default settings give us a feeling of security, a belief that our own sacrifices will be reciprocated. "If you shatter this confidence," he says, "then you get into a deep hole. Without trust, everything goes wrong."

It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things.

“Can intelligent robots be religious?" it occurs to me to ask.

"Perhaps they would," he answers thoughtfully. "Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God."

Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don't have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary. "How else do we protect ourselves?" he asks. "With absolutisms? This means telling lies, and when the lies are exposed, the crash is worse. It's not that science can discover when the body is ensouled. That's nonsense. We are not going to tolerate infanticide. But we're not going to put people in jail for onanism. Instead of protecting stability with a brittle set of myths, we can defend a deep resistance to mucking with the boundaries."

This sounds to me a little like the religion of reason that Harris foresees.

"Yes, there could be a rational religion," Dennett says. "We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things." He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them.

I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us.

Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. "Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values," he says. For instance, Socrates.

I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers – this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that's not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. "Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled," Dennett says. "Socrates drank the hemlock. He knew what he was doing."

With this, I begin to understand what kind of atheist I want to be. Dennett's invocation of Socrates is a reminder that there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat. Having been raised under Christianity, we are well schooled in this tactic of belated victory. The world has reversed its judgment on Socrates, as on Jesus and the fanatical John Brown. All critics of fundamental values, even those who have no magical beliefs, will find themselves tempted to retrace this path. Dawkins' tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris' vision of apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery – this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy.

In Breaking the Spell, Dennett writes about the personal risk inherent in attacking faith. Harris veils his academic affiliation and hometown because he fears for his physical safety. But in truth, the cultural neighborhoods where they live and work bear little resemblance to Italy under Pope Urban VIII, or New England in the 17th century, or Saudi Arabia today. Dennett spends the academic year at Tufts University and summers with family and students in Maine. Dawkins occupies an endowed Oxford chair and walks his dog on the wide streets, alone. Harris sails forward this fall with his second well-publicized book. There have been no fatwas, no prison cells, no gallows or crosses.

a simulated person

There is no real Paris Hilton
(Killing yourself to live)

Paris Hilton said to hell with her private self. She erased the boundary between her life and her career and turned her entire existence into a public story and herself into a “brand,” as she has put it. She deliberately and programmatically offered herself up to us as an “It,” a being without an inner life, a personality whose only value is to be seen and known by all. She is, in other words, the total incarnation of postmodern identity, the individual who has disappeared completely—and happily—into her image.

~ from The Trash Princess on the City Journal

As my former fridge magnet once said, “It’s not discovering your identity, it’s about creating it.” Though this slogan appears initially appealing, its instantiation comes at a cost. Paris Hilton created her identity. She annihilated her private life for the pursuit of her public image. She pursued fame and became the epitome of fame, but now that’s all she is (we usually become the things that we pursue).

[So if we create our identities in such a way that does not accord with our intrinsic identities*, then we risk losing or perhaps even destroying ourselves.]


*That is, the identity that we discover, if it does indeed exist.

too little religion*

CNN reported a grandfather of one of the murdered Amish girls said of the killer on the day of the murder: "We must not think evil of this man."

Jack Meyer, a member of the Brethren community living near the Amish in Lancaster County, explained: "I don't think there's anybody here that wants to do anything but forgive and not only reach out to those who have suffered a loss in that way but to reach out to the family of the man who committed these acts," he told CNN.

The Amish have reached out to Roberts' family. Dwight Lefever, a Roberts family spokesman said an Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.

An article in a Canadian newspaper the National Post stated that the Amish have set up a charitable fund for the family of the shooter.

The Amish do not normally accept charity, but due to the extreme nature of the tragedy, donations were being accepted. Richie Lauer, director of the Anabaptist Foundation, said the Amish community, whose religious beliefs prohibit them from having health insurance, will likely use the donations to help pay the medical costs of the hospitalized children.

~ from a Wikipedia entry on Amish school shooting

Despite the horror and tragedy of this event, the Amish response to it has been one that offers hope. It's so refreshing to see religious belief manifesting itself in action and not in the way the media usually portrays it -- long political debates about the Ten Commandments on government buildings, prayer in schools, dealth penalty, marriage or abortion. It is good to see an example of Jesus' radical words "Love your enemy" being lived out because people believe in Him.

There are times when I feel like Jonathan Swift's words are true: "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."And perhaps that is the answer, not that we have too much religion, but that we have too little-- we keep the superficial rules and regulations and take God and bend Him to conform to our own notions of who He is and we forget the heart (and the person) behind all of it. Jesus isn't about comfort and convenience and feeling good about yourself because you're moral and righteous. Rather, he tells you to give your other coat to the person that steals from you, he exhorts you to turn the other cheek to the one who slaps and asks you to love and provide for your very enemies.

*I wrote this entry soon after hearing about the Amish shooting and response to it. Posting it now seems slightly outdated. With today's media, it seems that news gets old fast and old news isn't really worth talking about. I disagree with that and thus, am still posting this.

The God Delusion

For those of you unfamiliar with Richard Dawkins, he is a biologist and adamant atheist. His most famous work is probably the Selfish Gene, which does a very good job of explaining natural selection (though, there is a very bizarre chapter on Memes at the end). His most recent publication, The God Delusion, apparently critiques religion and attempts to argue that the world would be a better place without religion.

A good critique of Richard Dawkins, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching written by Terry Eagleton, Professor of English literature at Manchester University is found in the London Review of Books. He basically points out Dawkin's error in considering all religious beliefs irrational and to believe that all religiously motivated behaviour ressembles those of the 911 hijackers as opposed to those of Mother Teresa. Eagleton is a fairly prominent academic and does not believe in the Christian faith, but I highly appreciate his critique of Dawkins. Much more valuable criticism, dialogue and debate could emerge if only religious people took more time to understand atheists and agnostics, and if only atheists and agnostics took more time to understand religion. If we spent less time lunging and flailing at each other, maybe we can actually have a conversation, instead of a bloodshed.

official declaration

the question of evil*

Who is more corrupt?
The robber, who plunders a village, killing and raping
Or the mastermind genius, methodically working out the logistics of a mass concentration camp?

Is evil the crime of the visceral kind, or is it actually rather banal?
[Can we even draw a comparison between the two?]

What entails an even great disregard for human life?
The foot soldier, who injures and kills with his own two hands
Or the fighter pilot, who with a flip of a switch bombs entire neighbourhoods?

What entails more corruption of the heart?
To know right from wrong but still do what is wrong
Or to no longer be able to discern the distinction between the two?**


*just some general questions stirred by the comments on the previous post
**i plead your forgiveness for engaging in some cultural anachronism. i know that right/wrong as moral categories have debatably(sp?) lost their trendiness a few decades ago. but perhaps that in it of itself is indicative of the moral fiber of our age. i believe "moral fiber" is also an outdated term.

race to the top

So why do all the black people get all the rap for being criminals?*

Yes, it's true. Some do steal a few hundred dollars to help put dinner on their plate (or in some cases, a birthday present for a daughter).

Yet on the other hand, I'm reading through databases of hundreds of hundreds of cases of mainly rich white males in large corporations engaging in criminal and improper business and market practices to earn a few extra million to pad their already gold-lined yachts and country houses.

*Please read comments to this post.

simulated happiness

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief."

~ Ecclesiastes

New York yuppie life is an opiate for the masses.

Meager pleasures and pathetic comforts to anaesthetize the soul to overwhelming sorrow and overwhelming joy.

compassion is abnormal

isn't it bizarre...

...that nobody finds it odd when someone is crying after a movie with some sad ending.

However, if you find someone crying in the bathroom in the middle of the day because he or she feels broken and hurt for all the suffering and injustice that goes on in the world, be it here in America or elsewhere, it's very odd. By most standards of sanity, that person would probably be regarded as somewhat strange and abnormal.

But maybe it's just the rest of us that are not normal.

a carefree society part 4*

"The effectiveness of the mass media, however, as the key agent of psychological totalitarianism is not based on political or religious ideology. Rather it rests upon a base that I have described elsewhere as the myth of technological utopianism. Unlike religious myths in which meaning was spiritual—nature or the gods —this myth is thoroughly materialistic. Technological utopianism substitutes the perfect health and happiness of the human body for the spiritual well-being of the human soul. This meaning is ineffective because it is based on individualistic consumerism. For meaning to be effective it must be shared meaning that binds people together in common responsibilities and reciprocal moral relationships. Consumerism is a shared belief but it leaves one psychologically isolated, for it is based upon freedom without responsibility. The attempt to create meaning in consumerism, to spiritualize consumerism, fails because its utopian promise of perfect happiness and health cannot be achieved in this world, and therefore happiness and health remain transitory, as anxiety, suffering, and death constantly remind us."

~Richard Stivers, from Ethical Individualism and Moral Collectivism in America

Along with the contemporary fragmentation of our selves (Stivers' description for what a Biblical scholar might see as the sundering of community in the Fall---resulting in distrust of other people and fear of manipulation), our "collection of idols" has become equally fragmented, and as such, far more insidious and difficult to specifically identify. Perhaps it is not too far a stretch to say that our Molech is consumerism, and that which we fear is simply isolation as punishment for non-conformity to public opinion. The lie that real freedom is "freedom from responsibility" directly undermines the promise of a restored, redeemed community which results from taking responsibility and laying down one's life in purposeful sacrifice---the essence of true Freedom is a Choice, yes, but more specifically, it is the ability to choose that which is Good (permanently) versus that which is pleasing or pacifying (transiently). It is this dream of mutuality through sacrificial exercise of moral agency, in purposeful community, not mindless collectivism, that the words in Isaiah hold out: "inherit the land and possess my holy mountain."

*an excerpt from an entry on Anchor States

a carefree society part 3

what would Jesus say to a nation of professional servants?

The traditional summation of Christ's reversal of the given order has been defined by Christians as the imperative to be a servant- not a lord. The highest vision of Christian purpose is to reverse the order, to fulfill a mission of service. We serve Christ by following His example in washing the feet of His disciples. We are Christians, people who have it backwards, as we serve rather than rule- act as servants rather than rulers.

...

As Christians we could celebrate the institutionalization of the good servant. Ours is finally a society of caring, helping, curing servanthood. We laud the value of professional servanthood and pay for it generously.

In our society of servants, it is interesting to consider what Christ might see with all His tendency toward getting things backwards? .. Would He even reject a society of good servants?

The answer is, probably not, unless He saw good servants becoming lords. Probably not, unless He saw help becoming control, care becoming commericalized, and cure becoming immobilizing. On the other hand, if He found servants involved in commercialized, immobilizing systems of control, He would certainly insist that we still have it backwards- that our servanthood had become lordship.

The question, then, is whether we are a nation of good servants or the lords of commericalized, immobilizing systems of service that actually control.

...

I wonder whether the human reality is always to make servanthood into lordship. It may be that there is no way to define service so that we will not get it backwards and make it a system of control. With all our Christian devotion to the idea of service, could service be an inadequate ideal- a value so easily corrupted that we should question its usefulness?

At the Last Supper, Christ was telling the disciples those things of greatest importance. It was His final opportunity to communicate the central values of the faith. In St. John's report of Christ's concluding instruction, Christ said, "No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what the master is doing. I call you friends for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you."

Finally, Christ said you are not servants. You know. You are friends.

Perhaps beyond the revolution of Christian service is the final revolution, the possibility of being friends. Friends are people who know, care, respect, struggle, love justice, and have a commitment to each other through time.

Friends are people who understand that it is not servants- the professors, the lawyers, doctors, and teachers- who make God's world. Rather, friends are people who understand that it is through their mutual action that they become Christians.

Christ's mandate to be friends is a revolutionary idea in our serving society. Here we are, a nation of professionalized servers, following Christ's mandate to serve. And here He is, at the final moment, getting it backwards once again. The final message is not to serve. Rather, He directs us to be friends.

Why friends rather than servants? Perhaps it is because He knew that servants could always become lords but that friends could not. Servants are people who know the mysteries that can control those to whom they give "help." Friends are people who know each other. They are free to give and receive help.

In our time, professionalized servants are people who are limited by the unknowing friendlessness of their help.

Friends, on the other hand, are people liberated by the possibilites of knowing how to help each other.

~ excerpt from The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits by John McKnight
(the only chapter that actually deals with Christianity and Jesus directly)

a carefree society part 2

why GDP per capita is a poor measure of quality of life and standard of living

just a few examples:
*a professional counsellor who talks to you about your problems counts in GDP while a good friend who will listen and be supportive and encouraging does not
*paid work hours are in GDP but volunteering is not
*driving a car to work requires gas that counts in GDP but walking to work and getting exercise in the process does not
*fast food sold counts in GDP but food eaten from home grown gardens does not

Has it ever occured to you that perhaps the more GDP/capita increases, the more poor our life is? The more we switch the professional services for counselling and troubles, the less we are able to rely on friends, the more isolated we become and the more dependent we become on professionals to solve our problems. The more we pay toxic containment companies to clean up the pollution we've made, the less we are preventing damage to the earth. The list continues...

I have a harrowing image of what society might become like: individuals sitting in sterile, whitewashed cell-size rooms, pushing grey buttons for the delivery of all the products and services that could give them happiness. And that is life.

But wait, hasn't that already happened? Think of the internet.*

individual cells in a city.
connected by the gentle blaze of the lcd screen.
thinking, dreaming, yearning for some magical unity
only to find themselves alone.
a web of simulated connections
a web of simulated community
individual cells. imprisoned. in the city.**

*I guess you can't buy happiness at the supermarket, but I believe it can be purchased on the internet
** I am thinking of this quote by V.S. Naipaul in The Mimic Men: "How right our Aryan ancestors were to create gods. We seek sex, and are left with two private bodies on a stained bed. The larger erotic dream, the god, has eluded us. It is so whenever, moving out of ourselves, we look for extensions of ourselves. It is with cities as it is with sex. We seek the physical city and find only a conglomeration of private cells. In the city as nowhere else we are reminded that we are individuals, units. Yet the idea of the city remains; it is the god of the city we pursue, in vain. "

simulated compassion

Movies such are Hotel Rwanda are designed to make us feel compassion. It humanizes the people involved in the genocide, shows harrowing scenes of their emotional turmoil and as a result, brings their suffering to a closer and more personal distance. Instead of just 30 second news clip, the genocide in Rwanda becomes an immersive 2 hour experience.

Yet sometimes I wonder if the increase of such movies have made us less compassionate. (I am speaking of movies that are designed to make us cry and weep over tragedy as opposed to those that tend towards glamourizing death and violence. i.e. think Hotel Rwanda, Schindler's List, vs. Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill)

Movies take months to years to come out, whereas everyday we are bombarded with real news and tragedies concerning real people that we do not feel compassion towards. As Hotel Rwanda pointed out, we say "how awful" and go on eating dinner.

On one hand, this can definitely be attributed to our own need for comfort-- it's easier to detach ourselves from horrible things happening around the world because we can ignore the nagging inside to do something about it. (Such action is often costly and too often inconvenient). By detaching ourselves, and not viewing the people who are suffering as actually human, we can continue living our comfortable lives.

But in addition to this, I think we have the unspoken expectation that anything truly tragic must appear the way it does in movies to produce an emotional response. Absent in real life situations where compassion would be appropriate responses, are the signifiers that mark movie scenes where we are to cry-- closeups of tears, sorrowful music, meaningful and well scripted lines.

In contrast, when we hear basic news broadcasted or hear about a friend's suffering, it does not appear as tragic as it does in movies. But we consumers of movies and simulations are not used to doing the mental legwork ourselves-- we are not used to imagining ourselves in another person's shoes, because we have relied so much on simulated signifiers in movies to make us cry or to make us feel.

Even one of the most beautiful emotions that we are capable of experiencing, compassion, has become simulated and rendered unreal. Our heart wrenches at the movies, tears gush out and then we walk away, perhaps silent for a few minutes, but then in almost all cases, doing nothing different except perhaps talk about how good the movie was. They make us feel compassion but afterwards, it's over. Holocaust. Genocide. It's over. And yet we've become accustomed to all the signifiers that mark sadness and times where we are supposed to feel compassion. And, we perhaps end up even more desensitized to the real people out there and nearby for whom we should have compassion, because we've become accustomed to only have compassion on Hollywood glamourized tragedy.

Gateway book review

interesting books read (or partially read) during Gateway

on poverty and development
****The Careless Society: Community and Its Counterfeits by John McKnight ~ if you haven't noticed, several of my entries are based on an alteration of this title. basically, the book offers a fairly poignant argument for the destruction of community by the emergence of the professional service industry. it has an almost foucault-ian (is that word?) critique of "needs" and "wants" that the service industry produces. definitely a worth-while read! it is written by a Christian but the entire book except for the last chapter, is based on secular research and written for a secular audience.
***Renewing the City: Reflections of Community Development and Urban Renewal by Robert Lupton ~ offers a similar vision of what actually builds community. this book basically proposes a way of renewing the inner, impoverished city: for middle income families to move in (not to gentrify) and become part of the inner city communities. it offers both scriptural and anecdotal support for this vision.

on prayer and spiritual discipline
****With Open Hands by Henri Nouwen ~ at first glance, this book appears a bit like those new age self-help/feelgoodaboutyourself, but if you give it a few more pages, it is full of insightful comments and thoughts about prayer and knowing god. the language is simple, almost child-like, but very thoughtful and profound.
***The Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster ~ a lot of people have been reading this book this summer-- divided into sections on various spiritual disciplines (i.e. prayer, service, solitude, fasting). the book explores activities that can be pursued not necessarily to get anything out of God, but to lay ourselves open to what God wants to do with us.

on gender
***Men and Women in the Church: Building Consensus on Christian Leadership by Sarah Sumner ~ i haven't read too much on complementarian/egalitarian perspectives of gender, but this book was a really helpful start for me to think through the issues. it supports neither a complementarian (men and women are created equally, but are designed to take different roles within the church and marriage) nor egalitarian view (men and women are created equally and for the same roles within the church and marriage), but leans more on the egalitarian end. it does some thorough investigation of troublesome and difficult passages in the Bible and also illustrates some of the damaging effects of twisted notions of gender on women and men in the church.

a carefree society part 1.5

another example

perhaps a more poignant example of how professional services have tried to replace community is the grief counsellor.

generally speaking, when someone suffers a death of a close family member or friend, neighbours, families and friends would gather together to comfort and provide for the mourner. nowadays, the grief counsellor is called in. instead of being surrounded by friends and family, one can pay someone to talk about his sadness.

the implicit message is: we're not capable of helping someone out. we lack the expertise to care for someone who has suffered a close death. instead of caring, let's call in the expert and let him take care of it, when in fact, it would probably be more beneficial for the mourner to be surrounded and cared for by close friends, family and neighbours.

a carefree society part 1

"People in rural communities used to take care of each other. If someone's barn burned down, the entire community would turn out for a barn raising. Everyone would work at an assigned job: some doing the site preparation, some doing the heavy constructions, others cooking and watching the children. Before long, a new barn would stand where the old one had burned down.

The most important feature of the barn raising was that everyone would chip in something, so that no one would have to suffer a large and uncompensated loss...."*

Today, insurance companies have taken the place of barn raising. Instead of contributing labour or materials when someone's barn burns down, we pay an insurance premium to some sterile corporation. Instead of asking our neighbours for help when we suffer an unexpected loss, we file an insurance claim and receive money.

In one case, we depend on the market system, on the insurance company contracts. In the other case, we are called to depend on each other, on community and we ourselves are called to care for our neighbours.

Insurance companies have made us more carefree, but they have also deprived us of opportunities to care.


*Getting a Grip on your Money by William Wood (not that great a book actually--- I have issues with it-- it is very practical about how to manage your money but fails to address the Biblical tensions and concepts that should underly our spending and saving)
** recommended reading: The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits by John McKnight

I am Puerto Rican

Some snippets of conversations about race/appearances at the homeless shelter where I am volunteering

Conversation between Bryanna, a Puerto Rican-white mix and Skyye, a black-white mix after Bryanna sees Skyye's mum:
B: How come you're Puerto Rican when your mum is black?
S: I'm not Puerto Rican. I'm mixed.
B: No you're not! You're Puerto Rican!

Then Sally, a Puerto Rican mother of four kids-- two who look hispanic, one who looks white, and one who looks black but without the nappy hair replies:
"I'm Puerto Rican and so is she and she" (as she points to the girl that looks white and the girl that looks more black).

Then I ask the kids: So what do you think I am?
Kids: You're Puerto Rican. And if you're not Puerto Rican, you're white.
Me: No, I'm Chinese.
Kids: No you're not! You're Puerto Rican!
(This happens numerous numerous times)

Apparently my very white friend who taught kindergarden in the past encountered similar difficulties with explaining his race.
Kids: What are you?
White Guy: I'm white.
Kids: So are you African American or Jamaican American?

*In general, the kids are a bit confused too. Devin (white), Olivia (Filipino), and I (Chinese) are all volunteering and we're known as the "sisters". We told them we're sisters because we're all part of God's family, but I think they still believe that we're biologically related even though we told them that we don't have the same parents.

Sean says to Olivia: You and that other girl (aka me) look alike but you and Devin don't look alike.
Sean (after two minutes of staring): Actually, you two do kind of look alike.

God is not

God is not white.
He is not male. (Nor has he created female to be inferior to male).
God is not American.
He does not hate gays, transexuals, lesbians or women who have had abortions.
God is not a capitalist.
God is not a tyrant.
He does not want to deprive us of joy.
He has made sex to be good.
He turns water into wine.
God wants us to enjoy life and enjoy Him.
He wants to serve us.

Jesus hates religion

this is what Jesus said about and/or to the religious establishment of his day:

"The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat. So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy loads and put them on men's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

"Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries^[a] wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted in the marketplaces and to have men call them 'Rabbi.'

...

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men's faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.

...

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.

...

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men's bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

"You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town.

...

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

~ Matthew 23

as christians, and today's religious establishment, we must very wary that we not end up committing the same sins and injustices.

and if not religion, then what is jesus about?

shoppers in praise of sweatshops

"Well-meaning American university students regularly campaign against sweatshops. But instead, anyone who cares about fighting poverty should campaign in favor of sweatshops . . . . If Africa could establish a clothing export industry, that would fight poverty far more effectively than any foreign aid program. . . . [A] useful step would be for American students to stop trying to ban sweatshops, and instead campaign to bring them to the most desperately poor countries."

~ excerpt from an op-ed article by Nicolas D. Kristof "In Praise of the Maligned Sweatshop" in the New York Times*

So I don't know enough about development to know whether sweatshops are good for development or not. In fact, professors at universities probably have varying opinions about this. Yet even if sweatshops are able to combat poverty, are they necessary the best way to combat poverty? (it is true that there are so many qualifiers for best: effective, efficient, humane, just-- perhaps what is best is a combination of all of them?)

But let's put campaigning and such theoretical questions aside and instead put the question this way, personally:

Would you rather spend 30 bucks buying tshirts from Adidas who probably uses various South Asian sweatshops to lower costs on production and then spends millions of dollars on celebrity endorsements? (and whose eventual profits go to line the pockets of already-rich stockholders and executive managers with yachts and mercedes)

Or would you prefer to spend that money buying a tshirt (or even two) from Nueva Vida, a worker owned cooperative in Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in Central America? (whose eventual profits go directly to the pockets of the workers to help pay for food, health and education for their families?)

Would you spend 20 bucks on a tshirt from JCrew that manufactures their clothing in various locales in Southeast Asia with workers at the machine 12-16 hours a day, while JCrew earns a ridiculous profit off each shirt and spends its extra money on huge marketing campaigns with chiseled ab models (that also happen to create unreasonable expectations for what the human body should look like, setting a standard of beauty based on superficial qualities instead of the content of one's character and breeding discontent amongst various relationships because outward appearances do not match up to these absurd ideals)?

Or, would you rather spend 20 bucks buying a tshirt from a store like American Apparel who manufactures all its clothing in LA, paying its workers twice the minimum wage while also providing health care benefits?

In today's consumer culture, you send a message with what you buy-- where will you spend your money?

Companies definitely create jobs in developing countries with their involvement there-- but there may be better ways to be involved than others. And spending so little to pay sweatshop workers and paying so much to use celebrity endorsements and models for their advertisements or for building their brand name is not a business model that I feel comfortable supporting.** If consumers are unwilling to buy from companies who follow such a business model, eventually they will have to change it and find better ways to produce. Or on the flip side, if consumers buy from fair trade and worker-friendly clothing labels, then these labels will thrive, allowing them to expand and hire more workers that they can benefit with their high wages.

(It's like recycling-- sometimes you don't want to do it because you feel like it doesn't really make a difference especially if noone else does it. But if everyone does it, it will make a difference.)

I would rather not campaign for sweatshops in third world countries, but rather campaign for and buy from companies who are willing to forgo corporate profits as their only motive for existence in order to run socially responsible businesses in third world countries.***

Why support something questionably good when you can support something undoubtedly better?



*The article is found here but it's only for Times select members. There's a commentary on the article called Something to Cheer at the New York Times written by Gregory Reisman-- the commentary is in support of the Times' article (kind of obvious once you read it).
**On a more personal note, I don't want to hold myself up as some sort of free-trade saint that doesn't buy anything manufactured in a sweatshop. I actually probably own plenty of stuff that have been manufactured in sweatshops. This is a new and recent question that I have been dealing with and struggling with-- and these are some of my thoughts pertaining to it. Still very much in the process of thinking things through.
***If I'm not mistaken, the book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid offers some sweatshop-alternatives to third world development that still allow for corporate profits. It is possible to help the poor and earn a profit without making them work 14 hour days without health care benefits on a wage that barely allows them to survive.