Monthly Archives: April 2017

After last week, hopefully its a little easier to be an atheist in Iowa.

On April 5, I proudly stood in the Iowa state Capitol and delivered what is believed to be the first ever atheist prayer, also known as secular invocation, in the peoples house. Atheism was finally given the same platform and respect that had been extended to other religions and worldviews for years to start off a session of the Iowa Legislature.

The historic invocation garnered headlines across Iowa putting the words atheism and atheist front and center for many lawmakers and communities across Iowa. It also put our state government on notice that not all Iowans are Christians or even religious, and that we deserve the same access to our Iowa Statehouse.

While Im not so naive to believe that achieving an equal voice at the Statehouse and the subsequent attention it gained for atheism in and of itself will end bullying, bigotry and discrimination against atheists in Iowa, it is my belief, yes, atheists believe in some things, just not in the supernatural sense, that Iowans will begin to better understand that atheists are an essential part of the Iowa experience.

Atheists are presidents of companies, theyre doctors and surgeons, and they may even be your childs public school teacher. Heck, they very well could be the pastor of your church and just havent admitted to themselves and their congregation that they simply no longer believe what it is that they have made a career preaching about.

Dont just take my word for it. Studies by the Pew Research Center continue to show the increase in the number of atheists and people leaving religion, declaring that they are religiously unaffiliated. They also show the rapid decline of religion and religious affiliation. Its been reported that one of out every three millennial considers themselves a religious none.

Add that to the number of us known as religious dones that grew up in religion, but have studied our way out of it (like me), and you now have one of the largest and most influential groups in the country, one that will likely influence public policy and society for generations to come.

And while I fully understand and admit that this doesnt mean that these nones and dones dont necessarily identify as atheists, theyve already taken the first step to embracing atheism which is simply the rejection of the God belief. Having future generations that exclusively utilize what I described in my invocation as the holy trinity of science, (a phrase that was originally coined back in the 1850s by the infamous great agnostic Robert Ingersoll), the human race can finally break free from the chains that have been holding down scientific discovery and advancement for centuries.

Just like the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Questioning (LGBTQ) movement of the 1970s, the atheist movement is starting to grow legs and become better organized and galvanized both here in Iowa and across the country. Atheist groups like mine, the Eastern Iowa Atheists, continue to appear and network with other groups, creating a powerful force of godless citizens that are committed to demanding atheist rights while defending the constitutional separation of religion and government. Keep your theocracy off our democracy, thank you very much.

Theres a tidal wave of atheism and secularism thats been building for years and its about to crash onto the shores of religious America. If youre an atheist or on the fence with your religious beliefs or upbringing, now is the time to own who you are and come catch the wave with other Iowa atheists.

Scott is founder and director of Eastern Iowa Atheists. He lives in Denver, Iowa.

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Guest view: Atheism is rising in Iowa | Guest Column | qctimes.com - Quad City Times

I grew up in the Anglican Church. That is where I was baptised and confirmed. But, that is not where I felt the presence of God. A friend mine took me to a Mosque in Cape Town and, there too, I did not hear God's voice.

The day I felt the presence of God finally was in a Hindu temple, and I did not want to leave.

My wife and I had gone to the wedding of her Tamil friend and colleague. The groom was a black Cuban. Because of the religious, cultural and racial differences between the bride and the groom, only the friends of the future wife and husband were at the wedding. Both families boycotted the wedding. For me, therefore, the wedding was sweet sorrow. It was sorrowful because of the absence of the two families and even more sad because when we left the temple we went to celebrate at a restaurant.

It was sweet because it is at the temple that God found me.

At the time, I was an atheist and believed quite strongly in the materialist conception of consciousness. In addition, I was a Marxist-Leninist and a former gun-carrying member of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party.

Today, I am what people call a traditional healer. I am a sangoma.

To be honest, though, my atheism was an intellectual condition - a disease that started attacking my spirit when I was in my early 20s and it almost devoured my soul - a time in my life when my intellect was the most important dimension of my being. For too long, what was important to me was the need to wear my intellect like the feathers of a peacock. I had to prove to others that I was intellectually sophisticated and could, therefore, grasp heavy intellectual matters such as historical materialism, post-modernism, deconstruction and post-structuralism.To be an atheist was the highest form of intellectualism. I was a fake.

I was a fake because at no point in my life was I ever completely convinced that God does not exist. While I still believe that we create God in our image, the highest form of atheism I ever achieved was to doubt God's existence without being completely convinced he/she does not exist (I believe God is neither male nor female and to humanise God is to limit, not to enhance, our understanding of the divine).

Curiously, though, I never doubted the existence of izinyanya (the ancestors). I was a fake atheist who believed in izinyanya despite the fact that I grew up in a modern, urban and Christian family which did not venerate amadlozi (the ancestors). In fact, my paternal grandfather was a university professor in America and my mother's maternal grandmother, uMamKhuma, qualified as a teacher in 1901. That is the kind of family I come from. This notwithstanding, my ancestors started announcing their presence in my life before I started going to school. As a sangoma, I now know that I was born umntu omhlophe which translates into "a white person" but actually means umntwana wezinyanya - a child of the ancestors.

As a sangoma, I now know that my calling is something I was born into because my childhood dreams, which showed that I walked with the spirits of the water, were dreams about me and the sea. I started having them long before I saw the sea with my own eyes at the age of ten. As I grew older, I realised, and this my parents realised much later, that I could see things about people and events before they happened. So, I knew I was odd but did not know why until I had an interesting encounter with a traditional healer we used to visit before we went on any mission of Umkhonto weSizwe (MK).

The only time we went on a mission without consulting him first, we were captured by the South African Defence Force. It is the same traditional healer who, 30 years ago, told me about my calling. For thirty years, I ran away from my destiny until it caught up with me in 2013. The twists and turns of my spiritual journey cannot be told in a single article. With the benefit of spiritual hindsight, I now know that the sound of the drum at the Tamil temple transported me to a place where I met God and my ancestors, but it was many years later, in 2013, that I understood what the drum was saying. I was born to be a healer. I was born to be a sangoma.

My journey has been long. It will never end. It is eternal. It is eternal because birth is not a beginning and death is not the end. As a sangoma, I know that there is only life. Death does not exist.

Aubrey Matshiqi is an independent political analyst. In his life he has been involved in the ANC, Umkhonto Wesizwe, the student movement and the South African Communist Party. He began training to be a sangoma in 2013.

Ahead of Easter 2017, The Huffington Post South Africa is delving into what faith and spirituality means to South Africans now. Against the backdrop of a renewed wave of thought around decolonisation, a new generation are rediscovering their traditional beliefs, while some are reconciling with Christianity. And on another note, we tell South Africa's real good news story: our remarkable and peaceful religious diversity. In a world fractured along religious extremism, we have a large Christian population with significant Muslim and Jewish communities, who often come together peacefully and with purpose, as has been evinced at the memorials for departed struggle stalwart, Ahmed Kathrada. Read the rest of the special report here, or choose from our selection below:

27 Quotes By Desmond Tutu On Faith, Justice And Love

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My Atheism Was A Disease That Almost Devoured My Soul Until I Found My Calling - Huffington Post South Africa (blog)

Science has failed to prove or disprove the existence of God, but recent studies suggest certain beliefs are better for you than others, and that includes your Darwinian fitness. These ideas aggravate moral relativists who argue that no way of life is superior to another. You cant judge, they scold. Its all the same. Thatsexactly what someone would say before convincing you to do something stupid. Which tradition you follow matters, and its effects can be measured.

Both the Old Order Amish and the Hutterites are at the front lines of the resistance to modern life and its myth of progress. Buta studypublished in theNew England Journal of Medicinelast summer reveals a crucial difference. Because the Hutterite sect takes a more liberal approach to industrial farming than their Amish brethren, Hutterite children are far more likely to suffer from allergies and asthma.

The authors control for cultural and genetic variables. The two religious groups hail from the same sixteenth-century Anabaptist tradition and share a closely related bloodline. Casual observers can barely tell them apart. Both maintain traditionalist dress codes, are known for their impeccable piety and baffling pacifism, and subsist through a rural agrarian lifestyle. Its the machines that make the difference.

The Old Order way of life derives from the sacredOrdnung,or rules and discipline. This code rejects the moral and intellectual authority of the Enlightenment, with all of its bells and whistles and brain-numbing TV shows. It looks backward to the values of ancient tradition and communal identity. However, each Old Order community has its own unique standards, and the extent to which theOrdnungis interpreted to reject technology affects childrens health.

While the Amish get down and dirty with old-school barn-raisings and horse-drawn plows, the Hutterites live and work and produce an astounding number of babies in tech-savvy communes. They employ computer databases and industrial farming techniques. As a result, the Amish are grubbier, and Amish children are less allergy-prone.

The Amish homes tested in the study had nearly seven times more endotoxic bacteria than Hutterite homes. The researchers found allergens in the dust of 4 in 10 Amish homes, while only 1 in 10 Hutterite homes had comparable levels. Yet Amish kids were four timeslesslikely to have asthma and six times less likely to have allergies.

Due to the remarkable genetic similarity of the two populations, the studys findings indicate a hearty immune response to a pathogen-rich environment. This provides strong evidence that soft-palmed kids who dont play in the dirt are more likely to become asthmatic Eloi. It also shows how different approaches to theOrdnung produced unforeseeable effects.

Social experiments will always have unexpected results. For instance, belief in germ theory led to effective sanitation and the discovery of antibiotics. On the other hand, the secular faith in endless medical progresscoupled with reckless sexual liberationled to the rise ofantibiotic-resistant gonorrhea. Of course, strict monogamy precludes the possibility of gonad-devouring superbugs ever getting a foothold, but only a sex-negative yahoo would ever entertain the notion.

None of this is to say that religious traditions that reject the modern world will produce healthier children. Christian Scientists refute the benefits of modern medicine entirely, and the fewstudieswe have on themindicatea lower life expectancy. Various religions clearly motivate all sorts of counterproductive behavior. Whatever the spiritual benefits of martyrdom may be,strapping bombs to your childrenis rarely good for their long-term health.

What wecanconclude is that the structure of a societys moral universe will have critical downstream consequences. Some strategies will be more successful than others, depending on the environment and our standard of measurement.

From a Darwinian perspective, the Hutterites are doing alright, sneezes be damned. After a hard run of Old Country persecution in the late 1800s, adherents began immigrating to America. Most wound up on the harsh Dakota plains, where theyve been breeding ever since. An1880 U.S. censusfound just 443 Hutterites living in four communities. Despite a steady stream of sniffling kids who abandon ship and defect to pop culture,todaythere are more than 40,000 Hutterites in America spread across more than 480 communities.

AlongsideMormonsandHispanic Catholics, the Hutterites reproductive work ethic is paying off, especially when compared to their fellow secular Americans. Underlying belief systems appear to drivedifferential reproductive ratesademographic trendthat may determine the next centurys ideological landscape.

Apaperpublished inEvolutionary Psychological Sciencesthis month contributes to the mounting evidence that the future belongs to the children of God. The cross-sectional study, led by Lee Ellis and Anthony Hoskin, looked at a population of 2,511 university students in America and 2,059 in Malaysia, with a large female majority in both. The researchers used questionnaires about the subjects families to measure the connection between religious commitment and fertility rates.

Their results showed a strong correlation between the intensity of religious belief and number of offspring, particularly in the Muslim population under study. As another liberated generation screws around and tosses its gametes into the void, their devout neighbors are pairing off and making babies.

The authors readily acknowledge their sample isnt a global representation. The data only considers the parents of university students, which means childless people are excluded. Also missing are those sections of the population who send their children to religious colleges, or who shun secular institutions completely, such as Hutterites. Having admitted these limitations, the researchers offer their results as fuel for an important debate that is largely suppressed.

Secular progressives have imagined no religion for over a century now. Multiple academic disciplines put forward variations on the secularization hypothesis, but it was just their imaginations. Ellis and Hoskin condense these into a core assumption: As humans become more rational and scientifically enlightened, religiosity will fade. The authors then propose a biologically informed contra-secularization hypothesis which is based, ironically, on the very evolutionary principles which are supposed to replace primitive superstition.

The contra-secularization hypothesis is supported by plummetingbirth ratesin numerous zygote-squashing secular nations, especially Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, as well as the exploding populations in moretraditional regionsof the world like Africa and the Middle East. Even if we bracket the genetic aspects of Ellis and Hoskins argument, its obvious that the belief that this life is all we have, paired with birth control and abortions on demand, can make a serious dent in demographics. Creationists may be completely wrong about how the cosmos was born, but they clearly know how babies are created. And in a Darwinian calculus, expected reproductive rates are what count.

Different belief systems yield very different societies, and some societies are better equipped to respond to shifting historical circumstances than others.

By its very nature, the postmodern mind cant conceive of religions objective advantages. At least their New Atheist counterparts are sane enough to know that ideas make a difference, but they insist religion is a virulent meme that drives its hosts insane. The loudest antichrists warn us that religion will push us to civilizational collapse. What they fail to recognize is that traditional religion is the scaffolding that every great civilization is built on.

Thesecular utility of religion, as biologist D.S. Wilson calls it, is an open question. But its a question we have to take seriously. Society is the aggregate of individual behaviors. Behavior is motivated by belief. Different belief systems yield very different societies, and some societies are better equipped to respond to shifting historical circumstances than others.

Thats why I advocate for the absolute freedom of religion, including scientism, hedonism, and other secular variants. You never know what might work. But the freedom to conduct social experiments is empty unless were also free to openly criticize the varied results.

You can judge a healthy tradition by its fruits. If civilization is teetering, it may be because the supporting spiritual structure was torn out before another, sufficiently sturdy foundation was put in place. And if your sneezy offspring are getting thrashed by Morlocks, you should let them play outside more often.

Joe Allen is a writer and fellow primate who wonders why we ever came down from the trees.A lifelong student of religion and science, he has kept his hands dirtyas a land surveyor, communal farm hand, kitchen servant, andfor over a decade, climbing steel as an arena rigger.His work appears in various outlets from left to right because he prefers liberty to security. Daily interjections:@EvoPsychosis.

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The Darwinism That Fuels Atheism Actually Favors Religiosity - The Federalist