Category Archives: Atheism

Feb. 6Christian organizations and affiliated churches operate Colorado Springs' primary emergency shelters, soup kitchens and support programs for people who are homeless or otherwise in need.

Some clients say they appreciate the opportunity to pray or seek spiritual guidance. Others say they'd prefer to encounter no religious overtones while accepting a free meal or an overnight cot.

The old model of preaching to people who are down on their luck but not necessarily looking for proselytizing has given way to optional and voluntary choice for clients to hear Christian messages, say leaders of the city's largest homeless providers.

Though their locations may display crosses, have chaplains or clergy on site and offer worship services and Bible studies, Springs Rescue Mission, the Salvation Army of El Paso County and Catholic Charities of Central Colorado do not require participation in religious activities to receive meals, secure a place to sleep and get help with housing, employment, health care and addiction.

"We are a come-as-you-are, low-barrier shelter and meet everybody at their point of need," said Travis Williams, chief development officer.

The organization runs Colorado Springs' largest homeless campus, with 450 shelter beds, three free meals served daily, a 65-unit apartment building with support staff, employment programs and others.

"There's no witness test for anybody on what their beliefs are," Williams said. "We see in the Bible how Jesus consistently met people where they were at, regardless of their circumstances ... and that's the same philosophy we take."

But a common misperception prevails, he said, that clients are required to profess their faith, attend chapel or listen to sermons.

That was the format when Christians began outreach to the poor centuries ago. "A message and a meal" had been the standard for rescue missions since their inception in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1826, with Pentecostal leanings.

Springs Rescue Mission had used that format, said former President and CEO Larry Yonker, until he took over in 2013.

"I didn't feel like that was the best model for showing compassion for the guests, so I eliminated that," he said.

Yonker retired in 2020, after leading the organization through a $22 million renovation and expansion to build a 14-acre campus. The project started with securing a Community Development Block Grant from the city. Using federal money for a capital project was a relatively new move for a religious organization in Colorado Springs, he said, although such arrangements are becoming more prevalent.

"The state and the city are looking for people with vision to solve major social problems, and it takes a pretty good-sized organization to be able to sustain something like that," Yonker said.

Yonker said he strived to counterbalance city leaders' changing direction to manage the homeless by enacting municipal ordinances on camping, loitering and panhandling. Yonker wanted the city's approach to be tempered with a profusion of services to not warehouse the homeless but help them get off the streets.

"I am in favor of breaking up encampments around waterways because they're dangerous," he said, "but ordinances are just a tool to manage your city."

After visiting a rescue mission in San Antonio, Yonker said eliminating barriers of any kind, such as making room for pets, adding lockers to store belongings, and providing showers and laundry facilities, became a local focus to help the chronically homeless, who often have mental illnesses or substance issues, get re-housed.

Now, 20 to 25 chronically homeless clients of Springs Rescue Mission step up into housing each month, Williams, the chief development officer, said.

"In the past, we'd have 20 to 25 a year," he said.

One program at Springs Rescue Mission is Christian-based, a one-year residential addiction recovery course.

But planting seeds of the Christian faith is more likely to look like a volunteer sitting down at a table and eating a meal with diners, Williams said.

"If we're going to share our faith it's not typically from any pulpit," he said. "It's by doing the work, forming relationships and getting to know the people."

'We serve anyone'

The Salvation Army in El Paso County, which runs a 232-bed shelter for men, women and families and provides meals, senior housing, afterschool care and other programs, also has dealt with inaccurate perceptions, said Capt. Doug Hanson, who oversees local operations.

"Rumors have shrouded us the last handful of years that we don't serve everyone, and that's not true," he said. "We serve anyone and everyone that's the heart of why faith-based groups do this work."

Since the first day the Salvation Army opened soup kitchens in London, England in 1865, Hanson said the organization has been serving the poor, needy and destitute.

"While they ate, they heard the Gospel message," Hanson said.

Early organizers had "no intention of being a church, but rather a Christian movement that organized many churches to serve the homeless," he said. The Salvation Army church grew out of that.

Catholics also have a long history of responding to the Christian call to serve the common good by founding hospitals, schools, soup kitchens and social justice programs, said Rochelle Schlortt, spokeswoman for Catholic Charities of Central Colorado.

The organization is part of a nationwide network founded in 1910 and runs Colorado Springs' oldest soup kitchen, the Marian House, as well as homeless outreach, employment aid, immigration services, and assistance to pregnant moms and babies.

A priest, a spiritual care group and a nurse from Penrose-St. Francis Health Services are available at the Marian House for anyone desiring to pray, talk or have questions answered, she said.

"If people want spiritual guidance, we are more than happy to partner with them to help fulfill that spiritual need," Schlortt said. "But we don't force that on anybody or proselytize or require anybody to do anything to get help."

Seth Martin, a Colorado Springs native who has worked at a carnival, as a truck driver and at fast-food restaurants and has been homeless off and on for 21 years, has used homeless services at all three organizations.

"They don't push religion on you," he said.

Although Martin identifies as a lifelong Christian, he said he likes that there's no hard sell about Jesus when getting help.

The approach is more covert than overt, said Kristen Viers, who lives in the Greenway Flats supportive apartment complex on Springs Rescue Mission's campus.

"They imply just as many people who try to force their will in our society do what makes a good Christian to them and how I don't fit the bill," she said.

"My sentiment is, 'I'm sorry. There are plenty of people on this planet. Go and find one that will play with you then.'"

Compassion to fellow human beings

Working with the homeless population falls under the guiding Christian light that every person is a child of God who has value and should not be discriminated against, said Yonker.

Christians supply the majority of nongovernmental assistance for the homeless nationwide, according to a Baylor University Institute for Studies of Religion survey released in February 2017.

Faith-based organizations provided 58% of emergency shelter beds in 11 sample cities surveyed, including Denver, in addition to related services such as education, job training, health care, education and addiction recovery, according to the study.

As a result, the study estimates faith-based organizations create $9.42 in taxpayer savings for every $1 of government funding for homeless services.

More than 200 churches donate money to Springs Rescue Mission, and also clothing, food and volunteer hours, Williams said.

However, churches contribute less than 5% of the organization's $12 million annual revenue stream, he said. The majority is from individual donations and foundations, with less than 10% from local, state and federal funding.

While churches and faith-based organizations have tenets of belief and proven records of service to the poor behind them, they don't corner the market on charitable acts.

"There's a negative connotation that all these people who help are Christian, but Christians don't have a monopoly on serving and helping people," Schlortt of Catholic Charities said. "People of all backgrounds are compassionate to fellow human beings."

That's why Michelle Popejoy, a member of the Atheist Community of Colorado Springs, is a regular presence in a collective monthly effort to hand out food, clothes and other goods at Dorchester Park, where homeless people congregate.

"I didn't want to do it in a proselytizing environment," she said.

Popejoy started helping the homeless about 30 years ago in Phoenix, when her daughter asked her about volunteering. Popejoy has been connected to the local atheists' group, one of several in town, since she moved to Colorado Springs in 2013.

Popejoy usually wears an atheist T-shirt while manning one of many tables that stretch in a long line in Dorchester Park during the "Spreading Smiles and Sandwiches" event.

Lugging her table with water and food that goes on top, Popejoy joins other event organizers, who are from local churches and other organizations.

"I like being here to represent the non-Christians and destigmatize and normalize atheism," she said at a recent distribution. "We're a community of and for atheists, trying to serve the community."

Homeless people said they appreciate the effort.

"It takes everybody Christians, Jews, Catholics and many organizations," said Tim Davis, a reformed heroin addict who's known on the streets as "Bama."

"There are far more people that have mental issues and don't have the ability to turn their lives around than people who do," he said. "Some have been kicked out of the shelter because they have personality disorders or Tourette's or extra food."

For years, Popejoy has fashioned sleeping mats out of plastic bags for the homeless, participated in parks cleanups, sewn warm hats and scarves, and more recently part of the giveaway.

"I don't like it to be assumed that only Christians do this," said Popejoy, describing herself as never having been religious. "No, not only Christians do this.

"I've just always enjoyed doing stuff like this, and I'm obviously not doing it to fill pews."

'A church with working gloves'

That's not the goal of Christian organizations, either, their leaders say.

In the month of December, Springs Rescue Mission logged 53 attendees at chaplain meetings, 77 people at four weekly chapel services, 246 people at15 Bible studies and 667 people at 44 Bible classes, the agency's statistics show.

Such attendance represents a small percentage of clients; the shelter averages around 325 to 350 people a night in the winter.

Chapel services are provided by an outside church, Williams said, not rescue mission itself.

Christian organizations are more visible than other groups involved in homeless services, said Kayla Farris, co-founder of Because We Choose To, a nonprofit organization she and a friend started in 2015 to give away donated clothing to needy folks.

"Christian-based organizations get a lot of the recognition because they tend to get more funding from churches and government funds, so they're able to help on a larger scale," she said.

"But if you really get out on the streets, you'll you see there are other a lot of groups, too, that do meals and whatever they can every week."

Hanson said big organizations are needed to handle today's demands for the homeless population.

"We need large institutions that can be of one mind when it comes to making decisions, sheltering and taking care of people's needs on a large scale," he said. "In response to pushback on faith communities and the way we serve, I say, 'If Jesus did not walk the earth more than 2,000 years ago, we would not be here serving.'"

The Salvation Army shelter's on-site chapel offers a 20-minute morning devotional, full church services on Wednesdays and Sundays, Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings and a house chaplain.

Of the 220 or so homeless people who spend the night each evening, an average of 30 attend a religious gathering, Hanson said.

"We do this not to make a profit because we don't but it's clearly a faith component," he said. "We believe that everybody has value, and therefore we must take care of other people."

Some homeless people say they don't see workers at organizations subscribing to the Christian principles that leadership says employees and volunteers follow.

A homeless man who gave his name as Michael said staff target disabled people, those with criminal records or homeless who have medically implanted devices with seemingly unfair practices.

"What they do doesn't jive with their Christian morals," he said.

Organizations have rules to "minimize the risks" in an environment that brings together hundreds of people, many of whom might be high on drugs, are known to steal from others or display other negative behavior, Yonker said.

"Most of the complaints are because people generally don't understand the chaos and how quickly things can get out of control if you don't have simple rules," he said.

Having said that, Yonker said he understands how some clients "don't feel like they're quickly given enough grace."

People can be permanently banned from Springs Rescue Mission, primarily for violent acts, which Yonker said was one of his hardest challenges in leading the organization because "there's no safety net below the rescue mission."

The Salvation Army's R.J. Montgomery Center also enforces rules pertaining to behavior but doesn't ban people permanently, Hanson said. People can be kicked out for a day, a week or a month but then can return, he said, even if they've been turned away from other places.

"There has to be recourse and accountability to poor actions," Hanson said. "But we don't want them to die on the streets just because they made a bad life decision that day.

"We're a church with its working gloves on," he said. "It's the role we play in Christendom."

(c)2022 The Gazette (Colorado Springs, Colo.)

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Serving the homeless a Christian ethos, but others involved, too - Denver Gazette

by Peng Huiling

A new textbook promoting atheism is being promoted in colleges and to CCP cadres as part of the campaign implementing the decisions of the National Conference on Work Related to Religious Affairs of December 2021, where the book was first introduced. The textbook is promoted as an answer to Xi Jinpings instructions at that conference that Marxs views on religion should be more thoroughly studied within the CCP.

The book is called The Principles of Scientific Atheism. It is a massive text of some 400,000 words, published by Bashu Publishing House, and we are told it was six years in the making.

Its author is Li Shen, known for his History of Chinese Science, and History of Chinese Atheism, where he promoted Xi Jinpings theory that Chinese culture has always been intrinsically non-religious.

Li Shen was born in 1946. After earning his doctorate, he worked at the Institute of World Religions of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and was the director of its Confucianism Research Office. He then became a professor of the Department of Philosophy at Shanghai Normal University, and the vice-chairperson of the Chinese Atheism Society. He is also an academic committee member of the International Confucian Federation, and in this capacity he promotes the theory, also supported by the CCP, that Confucianism is essentially a form of atheism.

The book includes four chapters, What is God, Proof of the Non-Existence of God, The Gods and Their Effects, and The Communist Partys Religious Theory and Religious Policy. There is also an appendix on the Main Theological Knowledge and Criticism of Religion. Zhu Xiaoming, former secretary of the CCP Leadership Group of China Tibetology Research Center, wrote a preface.

The book argues that both the non-existence of God and the harmful effect of religion have been demonstrated scientifically, through a process at work both in Western and Chinese philosophy, which culminated in the definitive demonstrations by Karl Marx and by the CCP in China.

The promotion of Lis book confirms the turn in Chinese institutions dealing with religion and departments of religion in the universities from a somewhat more neutral study of religious issues to propaganda for Marxist atheism. This turn can be traced to speeches and instructions by Xi Jinping himself.

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Book Promoting Atheism Launched with Great Fanfare in China - Bitter Winter

An Ariane 5 rocket launches with NASAs James Webb Space Telescope onboard on December 25 from Kourou. Photo: NASA JWST/Flickr, CC BY 2.0

It wasnt just that he mentioned a religious holiday. After all, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wasnt the only person to observe, following the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope last month, that the long-awaited feat had occurred on Christmas Day. Rather, Nelsons comments raised eyebrows for their spiritual tone.

Its significant that we had the delays and it kept us all the way to today, Christmas Day, Nelson said in a video released by NASA shortly after the launch. He went on to quote a passage from Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament shows his handiwork.

To some viewers especially those who believe religion and science are incompatible the very mention of a religious text seemed to undercut the messaging of scientific achievement. The suggestion that the telescope served a Christian purpose, or that its use would reinforce a Christian worldview, also seemed to belie a commitment to inclusivity in science that NASA has claimed to value. (The agency is still reeling from the controversy over its decision to name the telescope after James Webb, a man alleged to have been complicit in the persecution of LGBTQ government workers.)

These are all valid concerns. But its also worth remembering that Nelsons biblical references follow in a long tradition of religious rhetoric in the US space program. Theres a tendency to flatten this history to imagine that religious language is and always has been inappropriate in the scientific discourse. But one needs only look back a few decades to find a time when comments like Nelsons were not only acceptable in the American space culture they were a central part of Americas science identity.

From the 1950s, the United States was embroiled in a decades-long rivalry with the USSR known as the Space Race a competition that turned the technological and military practicalities of space exploration into a sort of proxy battle for cultural, political, and economic validation. Each nations scientific successes were interpreted as triumphs of one national ideology over the other. Among those warring ideologies were the nations sharply contrasting attitudes toward religion.

The USSR had officially embraced atheism (though some Soviet citizens were people of faith). In her recent history of Soviet atheism, Victoria Smolkin describes how Soviet leaders and cosmonauts used their victories in the Space Race as occasions to wave a banner of antipathy toward religion. During a 1962 visit to the US, Smolkin writes, Soviet cosmonaut German Titov, the second person in space, proclaimed his atheism, remarking that he had not seen God or angels during his 17 orbits of Earth. Later Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev similarly joked to American reporters about Gods failure to show up in space. The brash rejection of God served to advance the Soviet effort to solidify state atheism and defuse religions threat to state authority.

But the Soviet Unions dismissal of religion also stirred a backlash on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In fields ranging from evolutionary biology to cosmology, American scientists criticized the ideological dogmatism of Marxism, claiming that it impaired free scientific inquiry. Whereas the Soviet regime was totalitarian and oppressive, the American scientific establishment, by embracing religious tolerance, projected an image of openness. Opposed to the strict atheism of the Soviets but wary of the perceived anti-science attitude of fundamentalist Christians, the American scientific establishment staked out a middle ground of respectable, generic but still Christian-leaning religiosity.

As public figures as well as scientists, NASA astronauts were frequently seen as exemplifying this milquetoast religious identity. Some astronauts were explicit about their own Christianity; others were more vague about the spirituality they experienced in the stars. Neil Armstrong, though he considered himself a deist, was nonetheless looked up to as a Christian role model who fulfilled a divine promise that humanity would someday reach the stars.

On Christmas Eve in 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 broadcast themselves from lunar orbit reading from the opening passages of Genesis as the Sun rose above the Moons horizon: In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. The juxtaposition of those words with images of the lunar sunrise seemed to symbolize the convergence of religious and scientific values.

The Christmas Eve reading prompted Madalyn Murray OHair, the founder of the organization American Atheists, to file a lawsuit against NASA, arguing that the act abridged their First Amendment rights. But the lawsuit failed, and since then the tradition of astronauts expressing their personal faith, carrying objects of religious significance among their personal effects, even celebrating holidays in space, has largely been permitted and even incorporated into NASAs public outreach.

American Presidents including John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan all used religious language when talking about the Space Program, often with implicit or explicit criticism of the Soviets. Ultimately, NASA, American politicians of both parties, and the wider US public created a narrative that Americas religiosity had helped the country succeed in the Space Race over its godless rival. This religiosity was effective in part because it avoided the messy specifics that might have created friction with science or between theologies.

Few people exemplify this melding of space exploration and spirituality more than Nelson himself. In 1986, decades before he became NASA Administrator, Nelson went to space on the shuttle Columbia, the last NASA mission before the Challenger disaster. His 1988 memoir described his extraterrestrial sojourn as an eye-opening religious experience that contrasted starkly with that of his Soviet counterparts. Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian cosmonaut, proudly proclaimed when he returned to earth that he had looked for God and had not found him, Nelson wrote (perhaps misattributing Titovs 1962 comments). I looked, and could see nothing else. The Soviets might have reached the heavens first, but the Americans were the first to find God up there.

Nelson also recalled reaching into his pocket and pulling out his Bible while on the Columbia:

I remembered when, as a student at Yale, I had read the ancient words of the 19th Psalm, written by a shepherd boy in Israel almost 3,000 years ago. My college mind had wondered, What could David possibly know about space? As I read those words again, I was amazed that they could express my feelings so perfectly: The heavens declare the glory of God. The firmament sheweth His handiwork.'

More than 30 years later, Nelson uttered the same scripture nearly verbatim while reflecting on the launch of the the telescope. It is a passage that has long been invoked by scientists and theologians to express the idea that there are truths that can only be discovered outside of scripture truths that must be learned from the handiwork of nature. Its been quoted to argue against Biblical literalism and science denial. And, for Nelson, it seems to give voice to a certain sense of awe and spiritual wonder at nature that has abided in him since his time as an astronaut.

The scientific, religious, and political culture of the US, however, has evolved tremendously since then. Christian nationalism has become a widespread and antidemocratic political force one that has been deployed to attack government-supported, science-based efforts to stem the COVID-19 pandemic and curtail climate change. Cold War-era God-talk, and the embrace of generic religiosity, no longer exemplify Americas place in the modern geopolitical world. The words Nelson uses to capture his connection with the cosmos may not have changed since the 1980s, but its a different nation now.

Adam R. Shapiro is a historian of science and religion. He is the author of Trying Biology: The Scopes Trial, Textbooks and the Antievolution Movement in American Schools and (with Thomas Dixon) the forthcoming Very Short Introduction to Science and Religion.

This article was originally published on Undark.

Link:
Is There a Place for Spirituality in Space Science? - The Wire Science

Photo: Warner Bros./HBO Max

Some achieve teen angst, and some have teen angst thrust upon them. In less-fortunate cases, a pivotal trauma can jump-start a young persons maturation by challenging their base assumptions about a world no longer handling their innocence with kid gloves. Holden Caulfield turned bitter upon losing his brother. Lindsay Weir dabbled in atheism after her grandmother announced that she saw nothing in her final moments. And in The Fallout, Canadian actor Megan Parks well-measured first feature as a writer and director, a school shooting triggers a model students rebellious phase.

Well-meaning zoomer Vada (Jenna Ortega, going places) has kept her head down and nose to the grindstone all her life, her idea of bad behavior limited to risking tardiness for some Starbucks before class. But when the notion that we could go at any moment transforms from an abstract to a horrifying reality, shes moved to reassess her priorities. If every day might be your last, who would use it to memorize cell organelle functions?

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Jenna Ortega, Maddie Ziegler, Niles Fitch, Will Ropp

HBO Max January 27

We experience the semiautomatic rampage as she does, trapped in a bathroom stall for a few unbearable minutes near the top of the film. Through sheer chance, she shares her hiding spot with lower-tier TikTok star Mia (Dance Moms alumna and Sia affiliate Maddie Ziegler) and the sensitive Quinton (Niles Fitch). Aside from a general disapproval of the frequency with which this nightmare plays out in reality, Park keeps the politics to a dull rumble in the distance. Shes more invested in these kids personal, imperfect pathways forward through a thicket of grief.

There is a human toll beyond the death count, she submits, in how survivors reassess their lives and struggle to recognize themselves during the intimate hell of the aftermath. The Fallout makes this point without histrionics, speaking through little details of character while confining the maudlin stuff to a pair of scenes near the end. Im a chill, low-key kind of person, Vada tells the therapist (Shailene Woodley) her parents have requested she sees. The movie is low-key, tooa winning approach to such delicate subject matter.

With a firm handle on tone, Park skirts the pitfalls of bad taste one might expect from a film that uses mass violence as a narrative device for a coming-of-age plot. In the first sign of her restraint, she gives the carnage a wide berth by leaving it as unseen noise, without the faintest whiff of the morbid fascination that still haunts the reputation of Gus Van Sants Elephant. She conveys the intense pain thats left Vada numb through gestures closer to the banality and ritual humiliation of high school. On her first day back, Vada cant bring herself to return to the lavatory without an anxious panic, and must hastily chart an escape route after pissing herself. Getting high on ecstasy between periods moves her to gnaw on a pen until it explodes in her mouth. Park understands that agony doesnt preclude comedy, but rather accentuates the absurdity Vadas never noticed before.

The core of the film is Vadas gravitation toward Mia despite their differing social strata, as they form a bond over their shared tragedy. Popular hottie and bookworm learn to see each other as more than stereotypes couldve been dreadful stuff, but Parks credible, unforced dialogue enriches the afternoons these girls share. (Theres no overstating the benefit teen films reap by accepting an R rating, allowing their characters to talk like kids actually talk today.) Unfortunately, the naturalism of Ortega and Zieglers performances does have the adverse effect of accentuating the phonier bits of drama, like Vadas literal screaming into the void with Dad (John Ortiz) or her tension with the gay BFF (Will Ropp) restyling himself as a David Hogg type in the wake of tragedy. The twerpy lil sister (Lumi Pollack) seems to have wandered in here from another, broader script.

Even so, its a shame that The Fallout has received a little-promoted streaming run in the dead days of January. Parks got chops, and her work shows that off without drawing too much attention to them. She knows how to assemble and hold a wide shot, and use creative editing to condense visual information. (Eliding the funerals and instead piling up shots of In Memoriam cards in a small box is one such stroke of inspiration.) Moreover, shes got something to say about Gen Z, a wave of adolescents staving off the nihilism they have every reason to adopt. On a dying planet, risking life and limb every time they walk into homeroom, they can find refuge only in each other.

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The Fallout is a surprisingly restrained drama about the aftermath of a school shooting - The A.V. Club

Born into a Jewish family on October 12, 1891, in what was Breslau, Germany (modern day Wrocaw, Poland), Edith Stein eventually abandoned her faith and embraced atheism as a young adult.

Yet, it was through the influence of her friends that she came back to God and ended-up embracing the Catholic faith.

This is the Truth

The Vatican biography briefly summarizes her road to the Christian religion.

Back in Breslau, Edith Stein began to write articles about the philosophical foundation of psychology. However, she also read the New Testament, Kierkegaard and Ignatius of Loyolas Spiritual Exercises. She felt that one could not just read a book like that, but had to put it into practice.

In the summer of 1921. she spent several weeks in Bergzabern (in the Palatinate) on the country estate of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, another pupil of Husserls. Hedwig had converted to Protestantism with her husband. One evening Edith picked up an autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read this book all night. When I had finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth. Later, looking back on her life, she wrote: My longing for truth was a single prayer.

It was through these and other experiences that led her to find the truth in the Catholic faith, which she believed was a fulfillment of her Judaism.

On January 1, 1922 Edith Stein was baptized. It was the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus, when Jesus entered into the covenant of Abraham. Edith Stein stood by the baptismal font, wearing Hedwig Conrad-Martius white wedding cloak. Hedwig was her godmother. I had given up practicing my Jewish religion when I was a 14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again until I had returned to God. From this moment on she was continually aware that she belonged to Christ not only spiritually, but also through her blood.

Year of Edith Stein

According to Catholic News Agency, The city where the philosopher turned saint was born has launched aYear of Edith Steinto celebrate the life and legacy of the woman who was martyred at Auschwitz.

Various events will be held to honor the milestone.

To mark the year, the city council of Wrocaw has also set up an exhibit in theEdith Stein House, the saints family home, which is now a conference center and a space for interreligious dialogue.

St. Edith Steins baptism was just the beginning for her, as she eventually joined a Carmelite convent and died in Auschwitz, being both a Jew and a Catholic nun.

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Year of Edith Stein celebrates 100 years since her baptism - Aleteia EN

Contemporary explanations of wokeness are always insufficient. Public intellectuals either pretend there has been no major revolution in values, or offer silly debates about whether wokeness is really neo-Hegelian anarchism, or neo-Freudian Romanticism, or double-backflip Puritanism with a dash of neo-neo Kantianism. The work of an obscure Italian philosopher who died in 1989 is perhaps an unlikely place to find clarity. But Augusto Del Noce provides an explanation at once straightforward and original: Marxism changed the trajectory of the West.

Del Noces work seems particularly current in the Anglosphere, perhaps, because it has only recently become available in English. Carlo Lancelotti, a New York-based math professor, first translated Del Noces The Crisis of Modernity in 2014; this month, his translation of The Problem with Atheism was published. The latter was written first between 1917 and 1945 and produced the thesis about Marxism that allowed Del Noce to see the future.

Del Noces take on Marxism was strange. It was, he believed, a stillborn ideology, dead upon arrival, yet its rotting carcass sprouted every 20th Century political movement. There is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction, he wrote. Marxs view of history, according to Del Noce, was a consequence of his commitment to atheism, which can never be proved directly, and must therefore present itself as the outcome of an irreversible historical process mans liberation, via science and technology, from primitive superstition. Marx argued that the idea of God was a symptom of mans alienation through oppression; as society removed forms of oppression, the question of God would disappear. Societys values, Marx believed, were just expressions of its economic arrangements and that the development of these arrangements was leading to an inevitable destination: the march of history would culminate in Communism, which would be free of both oppression and the idea of God.

Since, in the Marxist framework, removing oppression is the primary way of bringing about the future, philosophy is subordinated to politics. As Marx wrote, Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. In Marxism, reason is not something universally accessible to all; it is the tool that certain radically free people use to impose their will on existence. This creates a contradiction: how can anyone change the world if history is inevitably going to culminate in communism? And if all philosophy is just a reflection of economic arrangements, is the same not true of Marxism?

This contradiction bifurcated Marxism along two different paths. The first path embraced the revolutionary philosopher, while the other one embraced history. The first path led to Lenin, the revolution, and the Soviet Union. The second path led to us. Del Noce wrote, Marxism has ended up being a stage in the development of the technological and affluent society, which accepts all [of Marxisms] negations of traditional thought but at the same time eliminates its messianic and (in its own way) religious aspect. Marxs vision was achieved by his ostensible enemy.

Long before it became obvious, Del Noce wrote that the alliance between the technocratic right and the cultural left is there for everyone to see. He argued that liberalism sublimated, or absorbed, various aspects of Marxism, transforming into what he called the technological society. Bourgeois society always had two historical enemies: revolutionary thought and religious thought. As a synthesis of these opposites, Marxism provided bourgeois society with the tool needed to defeat both. Our society largely embraces Marxs historical vision: advancing technologies are viewed as de facto proof that the question of God, and all transcendent values, are irrelevant. Yet this vision of history is also turned onto Marxism itself. Communism was tried and it was a failed experiment. The technological society does not have to enlist any religious or moral claims to reject Communism. It simply dismisses Communism as inefficient.

The Leninist path of Marxism also stumbles through our society in a misshapen form. Del Noce argued that Leninism unleashed a type of post-Christian gnosticism which was an early Christian heresy that believed the world was evil and could only be saved by those with access to secret or esoteric knowledge. Lenin believed that the revolution wouldnt just happen spontaneously it had to be brought about by raising the consciousness of the proletariat. This required professional revolutionaries. Drawn from the people tasked with the job of modernising the Russian economy, these revolutionaries were an elect class that understands how the world really works. The British writer H.G. Wells understood the implications of this better than Lenin himself: in his 1928 book The Open Conspiracy, inspired by his trips to the Soviet Union, Wells called for the West to embrace rule by its own elect class of experts.

Everyone understands that a person is not wise by virtue of being an accountant, or a therapist, or an immunologist; we all understand that a person can have limited domain expertise, and be a complete fool outside of that area. Moreover, domain expertise is not the same as executive function: the act of governing a society is the act of choosing between competing goods, and this requires virtues like wisdom and prudence. And yet society has become enthralled by the expert, the idea of which works in the exact opposite way, suggesting that a person is equipped to make prudential choices between competing goods simply by virtue of possessing technical knowledge in some limited domain. Eventually this denigrates into absurdities, like the disinformation expert who is basically a truth expert.

Del Noce paints a landscape of a society that rejects all traditional values in the name of a supposedly neutral rationality, has a caste of revolutionary-cum-technocratic experts who function like gnostic priests, and engages in near-constant, system-approved revolution. This revolution was separate from Marxism, and was encapsulated in a sentence written by Friedrich Engels: the thesis that reality is rational leads, according to Hegelian dialectics, to this other one: everything that exists deserves to die. Del Noce wrote that the revolutionary is the executioner of a death sentence that history has pronounced. But since the radically bourgeois society rejects all transcendent values, its revolutionaries offer only negation. The global rebellion becomes an absurd revolt against what exists or what once existed. It becomes either a silly attempt to escape reality or a tool of the system it is revolting against. It should be obvious how this explains the woke, but it also shows how the anti-woke offer a mirror image.

There are many, like James Lindsay and John McWhorter, who champion Enlightenment values in the face of the woke. They praise things like reason, rationality, and positivism in the face of a new religious fervor. The miracle of rationality fought off the forces of religious superstition, we are told, and we must be vigilant not to slide back into the shadows of irrationality. Del Noce might call this the Enlightenment after Marxism. It is a mythic narrative that its proponents fail to see as myth.

Carl Schmitt once wrote that American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks were engaged in a common struggle. That synthesis is now complete. Del Noce helps us see how this synthesis is at the root of todays most pressing issues, and how those who want to fight the woke cannot retreat into the static categories of the 20th century. Decomposed Marxism limits our ability to see a new horizon, and the future seems impossibly hopeless because so few are willing to reassess past mistakes.

Continued here:
How Marxism created the West - UnHerd

Westernisation can provide a basis for a claim for leave to remain in the UK where individuals face a real risk of persecution if they would not be able to adhere to the norms of conservative societies, a tribunal has ruled.

A westernised family of five who fled Iraq in 2006 have won an appeal against the refusal of leave on the grounds that they would face a real risk of persecution because they are atheists.

Upper Tribunal Judge Gaenor Bruce said: They do not wish to adhere to conservative Islamic norms because they fundamentally do not agree with them. They should not be expected to do so simply in order to remain safe.

Bruce held that the Refugee Convention does not provide a protected and unfettered right to enjoy ones life in the way that one would like: there is no human right to listen to a particular kind of music, drink alcohol or to wear jeans.However, it can offer protection where the modifications required of the claimants amount to suppressions of the inalienable rights afforded to them by international law, she added.

Westernisation can also entitle an individual to protection where, if they have been living in the UK for a long time or is unfamiliar with the prevailing culture in their country of origin, there is a risk that their modified behaviour will slip.

The tribunal heard that the family, who were all nominally Muslim but have never been practising, previously lived in an affluent area of Baghdad where their atheism was simply never an issue.

However, Bruce said that the Iraq of 2021 is very different from the Iraq that they left and referred to expert evidence suggesting that today religion permeates the public space and that atheists often keep their views secret for fear of harassment, attack or even murder.

In that context an individual does not have to sell books, or shout on a street corner, to proclaim that he is not a Muslim: his lack of faith is apparent in his everyday actions, Bruce said.

[The father] will be regarded with curiosity if he permits his daughters to go out unchaperoned; that curiosity will rise to suspicion if he is never seen at mosque; suspicion would quickly escalate to hostility if the family fail to observe the fasts in Ramadhan or to don black during Muharram; that hostility could, at any time, give rise to persecution if, for instance, the women insist on remaining unveiled or the familys attitudes lead to them being identified as particularly wealthy.

She added:Although evidence about fashion, or entertainment preferences, appears at first glance to consist of little more than an appeal to pluralism, and thus lying entirely outwith the protection framework, that evidence must be carefully assessed.

First, to determine whether the lifestyle choices of the claimant are in fact an expression of beliefs prohibited or disapproved of in his country of origin. Second, whether there is a real risk of that claimant failing to effectively mask his "western" identity and thus exposing himself to harm.

The parents and their youngest childs human rights claims were previously allowed by consent, as the Home Office accepted that it would not be reasonable to expect their young child to leave the UK, and their two other childrens human rights appeals were also allowed.

Read more here:
'Westernisation' can provide basis for leave to remain in UK, tribunal rules - Law Gazette

The Libyan Ministry of the Interior in late-December 2021 issued a warning to citizens not to celebrate Christmas or New Years Eve.

This directive follows a police warning that Christmas and New Year celebrations are not in accordance with the countrys religion (Islam).

New Years Eve is often wrongly perceived as a Christian festival in Islamic contexts, partly because Islam follows a different calendar with its own date for New Year.

Celebratory gatherings on New Years Eve were until recent years commonplace among many Libyans, and much greater toleration existed of Christians celebrating Christmas. With the emergence of hardline Islamist politics, however, the government has adopted a much more restrictive stance.

The General Directorate of Criminological Investigations in Libya instructed all restaurants and cafs not to celebrate New Year, with the threat of closure for those refusing to comply.

In a nationwide campaign initiated to confiscate Christmas decorations, Lieutenant General Muhammad al-Obeidi, head of the government media unit, said the police were targeting decoration, gift and rose shops, where many Christmas trees of different shapes and sizes that were on sale were seized.

Al-Obeidi defended the seizures by stating that the items sold do not represent our religion or our religious beliefs, emphasising that goods associated with festivals other than the two Muslim holidays, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha, were contrary to Islamic law.

In Benghazi Al-Kubra Ibrahim Al-Shahr, a member of the Fatwa Sub-Committee, stated that celebration of the New Year and participation in Christian holidays were forbidden.

In May 2021, the Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs instructed the General Authority for Communications and Informatics to close down and ban various web pages that incite youth to follow other religions, or those calling for atheism and devils worship.

Read more here:
Libyan authorities ban Christmas and New Year celebrations - Barnabas Fund

(RNS) Visitors to Patheos, the multifaith media platform that hosts commentary from writers in many of the worlds religions, may have noticed some changes lately.

Its nonreligious channel has become an empty hulk, bereft of most of the familiar names that once occupied the space, including its most popular blogger, Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist.

Mehta and 14 other nonreligious bloggers, along with the channel manager, have decamped to a new site, OnlySky Media, set to launch later this month.

The changes come amid new surveys showing the number of people who are religiously unaffiliated has exploded in recent years, rising to 29% of the U.S. population, up from 19% in 2011. These nones, a catchall for a host of groups, including atheists, agnostics, humanists and just plain secularists, have established multiple service and advocacy organizations to serve this growing segment of the population. But there is no media platform solely dedicated to those who are not part of traditional religions.

RELATED: Poll: America growing more secular by the year

Efforts to reach Patheos management team were unsuccessful, but the departing bloggers and their channel manager, Dale McGowan, said that about a year ago, Patheos decided to change its editorial direction. Bloggers were advised they could stay at Patheos so long as they stopped writing negative or critical posts on religion or politics and instead focused on how to live a good life within their own worldview.

The writing on the wall was that unless youre prepared to say nice things about religion you need to find a new outlet, said Mehta, who has written for Patheos since 2011, often posting multiple times a day, with a special focus on stories about religious hypocrisy.

Some 20 bloggers left the site in the last days of 2021. On Tuesday (Jan. 4), the top story on the homepage read, Dont Stop Believing: Faith for the New Year.

Patheos is owned by BN Media, which last year created a new umbrella organization called Radiant. It includes Patheos, the lifestyle site Beliefnet and three other wellness and spirituality platforms with a mission of helping people live their most fulfilled lives.

Beliefnet, once a vigorous journalistic site, underwent a similar transformation after it was twice acquired, first by the Fox Entertainment Group in 2007 and later BN Media, where it became an inspirational site focusing on spirituality, health and wellness.

What they were asking of us was not compatible with the editorial tone we had taken until then, said Adam Lee, who wrote the Daylight Atheism blog for Patheos. Many of us felt this would require an editorial shift to such an extent as to make our blogs unrecognizable.

McGowan said he was told last March that Patheos wanted to rebrand.

This was a business decision to position themselves for the long term, said McGowan. It may have been hard for Patheos to attract advertising among religious businesses while at the same time providing a forum for atheists to criticize religion, he said.

McGowan, the author of 10 books about nonreligious life, including Parenting Beyond Belief, had already been talking with investors about creating a new platform for nonreligious people.

When Patheos announced this change in direction, we realized it was an opportunity to provide a soft landing for some of these bloggers, he said.

Fifteen Patheos bloggers agreed to join OnlySky, where McGowan is now chief content officer.

The new media platform is envisioned as a site that combines storytelling and commentary exploring the breadth of the human experience from a secular point of view, said Shawn Hardin, its founder and CEO.

A Bay Area entrepreneur who has created several media products for AOL, Yahoo and NBC, among others, Hardin said he envisions a space that explores a wide range of secular values.

We think the unaffiliated are a woefully underserved segment of the population, Hardin said. Were pretty optimistic about our opportunity to build a business that meets the interest of the audience and can invest in its own growth.

(The name of the new media venture was inspired by John Lennons song Imagine, which envisions a world without heaven or hell above us only sky.)

Author Hemant Mehta. Photo by Steve Greiner, courtesy of Mehta

A key will be creating a sense of community for a diverse set of people who are searching for meaning and want to connect with others on a similar path. Whether nonreligious Americans want community is not yet clear.

The Sunday Assembly movement, which tried to create local congregations for nonbelievers, had 70 congregations in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. About half have shut down or gone dormant.

Beyond polls indicating their growing numbers, little is known about the nonreligious or whether they want to engage on issues as a group.

There are people passionate about secularism, atheism and agnosticism, perhaps because they dont like what they see about religion in the news, said Diane Winston, professor of religion and media at the University of Southern California. But thats a small minority of the people who make up the unaffiliated or disaffiliated. A lot of those people dont care one way or another.

Mehta, however, said he had high hopes.

There arent any media outlets that cater specifically to atheists, he said. All the other atheist specific blogging networks are run by volunteers and people who are passionate about the subject but dont do business-savvy anything, so they falter and die. This one has digital expertise.

RELATED: The Sunday Assembly hopes to organize a godless future. Its not easy.

Read more from the original source:
What happened to the nonbelief channel at Patheos? - Religion News Service

The Atheists in Kenya Society (AIK) is accusing its former secretary Seth Mahiga of fraud.

Mahiga is alleged to have withdrawn an undisclosed amount of money from the societys bank account without the knowledge of the Executive Committee.

AIK President Nyende Mumia says members of the committee were shocked when they visited their bank on Friday, only to find a huge sum was missing from their account.

"The new executive committee, including myself, the incoming Treasurer Samson Mbavu and the incoming Secretary Mary Kamau had visited KCB today only to be informed that the former Secretary Seth Mahiga, had withdrawn funds from the Atheists In Kenya Society bank account without our authority," Mumia said in a statement.

Mahiga resigned from AIK in May last year, saying he was no longer interested in promoting atheism in Kenya as he had found Jesus Christ.

This evening, regretfully, our Secretary Mr. Seth Mahiga made the decision to resign from his position as Secretary of our society. Seth's reason for resigning is that he has found Jesus Christ and is no longer interested in promoting atheism in Kenya, Mumia announced in a press statement.

Until his resignation, Mahiga had served as the societys secretary for one and a half years. A video shared on social media showed Mahiga at church telling the congregation, Ive been going through some difficulties in life. Im so happy to be here.

AIK was registered as a society under the Societies Act, Cap 108 on February 17th, 2016.

The 2019 National Population Census placed the total number of atheists in Kenya at 755,750, representing about 2.5 percent of the countrys total population.

Kilifi County had the highest number of nonbelievers with 146,669, followed by Nakuru (67,640), Nairobi (54,841), Narok (45,617), Kiambu (30770), Kitui (23,778), Meru (20,985) and Mombasa (11,148).

Originally posted here:
Former 'Atheists in Kenya' Official Who Found Jesus Accused of Fraud - Mwakilishi.com