Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Some Terminology Clarification

What is an Atheist?   

 Right now I have finished reading Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and am almost finished with a book titled The Delusion of Disbelief: How The New Atheism is a Threat to your Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness.  One thing that Harris raises is the idea of what an atheist is. I find this idea powerful because it demands that we be more precise with our language.

What is an Atheist?

An atheist is someone who does not believe in the Divine (whether that be a God, multiple Gods or some kind of spiritual force) and also does not belong to an organized religion. Or as Dictionary.com would have it: a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

It is not a belief system. I want to be very very clear about this: It is not a belief system. It is not a philosophy, it is a lack of belief in something. It is only because of the prominence of religious thought in our cultural heritage (and present day life) that a word like "Atheist" is necessary.  

There are many groups that, were we to draw a venn diagram, many atheists would fall into.  One would be secularists: people who advocate for the building of secular institutions and who try to separate political institutions from religious ones.  There are many religious people who are also secularists (including the guy who runs Citizens United for a Separation of Church and State, members of many minority religions and several founding fathers).  Another group would be what I call anti-religionists which is to say atheists who actively seek the destruction of organized religion and have a vested interest in convincing religious people to become atheists.  I am not one of these people.  I will full vocally articulate my skepticism about faith and my opinions on the actions of various organized religions and why I am an atheist if it is relevant to a conversation, but I have many friends and family members who are deeply religious and members of various faiths. I have really serious problems with organized religion, but I also recognize that being part of a religious faith has done considerable good for many people I know. So I guess I would say I'm too deeply conflicted about organized religion to actively seek to destroy it.   I would say that, for the most part, the men called "The Four Horsemen" (Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and Harris) are anti-religionists.

This being said, it aids extremists on both sides of the religion/atheism debate to try to elide these categories as much as possible.  For the Four Horsemen, it is useful to conflate secularism, atheism and anti-religionism into one category, because that way it is easier to convince members of one group that they are in fact members of all of the others.  For outspoken anti-atheist religious people. it is necessary because it helps indict one group with the other.  So you can say to your fellow religious people "all atheists seek to destroy organized religion" or even "secularism is a mask for destroying organized religion".

Once this is done, pro-religion writers can then claim that atheism is a philosophy or belief system, which allows them to blame atheism for Pol Pot, Mao, Hitler and Stalin.  I'll address that issue in a later post. (It's worth noting that the characters in the play for the most part conflate the various categories into "atheism" and then ascribe "The Atheist" with familiar stereotypical characteristics)

Crossposted to Parabasis.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Today in Atheism News

Interesting article from New York Magazine about Atheism as a social movement.

Now, once again, nonbelievers have a fresh sense of mission. The
fastest-growing faith in the country is no faith at all. The Pew Forum on
Religion & Public Life released the results of its “Religious Landscape”
survey in February and found that 16 percent of Americans have no religious
affiliation. The number is even greater among young people: 25 percent of 18- to
29-year-olds now identify with no religion, up from 11 percent in a similar
survey in 1986. For most of its modern history, atheism has existed as a kind of
civil-rights movement. Groups like American Atheists have functioned primarily
as litigants in the fight for church-state separation, not as atheist social
clubs. “Atheists are self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent people who don’t
feel like they need an organization,” says Ellen Johnson, president of American
Atheists for the past thirteen years. “They’re so independent that if they want
to get involved, they usually don’t join an organization—they start their
own.”

The quartet of best-selling authors who have emerged to write the gospel of
New Atheism—Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Dawkins (the
Four Horsemen, as they are now known)—has succeeded in mainstreaming atheism in
a nation that is still overwhelmingly religious and, in the process, catalyzed a
reexamination of atheistic raison d’être. But for some atheist foot soldiers,
this current groundswell is just a consciousness-raising stop on the
evolutionary train, the atheist equivalent of the Stonewall riots. For these
people, the Four Horsemen have only started the journey. Atheism’s great
awakening is in need of a doctrine. “People perceive us as only rejecting
things,” says Ken Bronstein, the president of a local group called New York City
Atheists. “Everybody wants to know, ‘Okay, you’re an atheist, now what?’”

So some atheists are taking seriously the idea that atheism needs to
stand for things, like evolution and ethics, not just against things, like God.
The most successful movements in history, after all—Christianity, Islam,
Hinduism, etc.—all have creeds, cathedrals, schools, hierarchies, rituals,
money, clerics, and some version of a heavenly afterlife. Churches fill needs,
goes the argument—they inculcate ethics, give meaning, build communities.
“Science and reason are important,” says Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain of
Harvard University. “But science and reason won’t visit you in the
hospital.”

Many atheist sects are experimenting with building new, human-centered
quasi-religious organizations, much like Ethical Culture. They aim to remove God
from the church, while leaving the church, at least large parts of it, standing.
But this impulse is fueling a growing schism among atheists. Many of them see
churches as part of the problem. They want to throw out the baby and the
bathwater—or at least they don’t see the need for the bathwater once the baby is
gone.



Interesting article that goes longer and more in depth. Check it out.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

Compare, Contrast

From Atheist Viagra:

JEN: Then the stories started coming out

DARYL: Atheists working in schools.

ABE: Atheists working in day cares.

JEN: Didn't want to believe it. Didn't want to believe that someone I saw every day could be capable of that.

...[jump to]

JEN: I mean, it wasn't their constitutional right to work in child care.

ABE: Right. It's not in the Constitution. I checked.

DARYL: Then when you start finding out how extensive their network was.

JEN: Right. I mean, atheists working in the police?

ABE: The military?

DARYL: At truly surprising levels of Government...
From today' NYTIMES:

Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led To Threats

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. “People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!” Major Welborn said, according to the statement.... In November, [Hall] was sent home early from Iraq because of threats from fellow soldiers.

... It is unclear how widespread religious discrimination or proselytizing is in the armed forces, constitutional law experts and leaders of veterans’ groups said. No one has independently studied the issue, and service members are reluctant to come forward because of possible backlash, those experts said.

RTWT here. My favorite part is actually a minor thing, a grammatical screw up on the part of Major Welborn who says “I’d love to tell my side of the story because it’s such a false story.” Obviously, he means because Hall's story is false, not his own, but still...

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Response to Mark Ravenhill on Religion and Art

Maybe it's because I'm American and not British (and thus don't know the arugments happening in British culture) but the lack of a single quote, citation or hyperlink leads me to believer there might be some serious straw manning going on in this Mark Ravenhill column. There's also some rather dishonest elliding of seveal arguments that makes it seem like agnosticism means something it doesn't. Here's the graph where the arugment is laid out:


Christianity is a myth. But it's a myth that has helped us - and continues to
help us - ask searching moral and philosophical questions. Ours is an age in
which a lack of belief, at least in secular Europe, is prized. Before, having
one overarching belief was central to life, guiding our choices. But now we're
all supposed to travel light, be supple, so that we can swap jobs, partners or
political allegiances at a moment's notice. But this perpetual state of
agnosticism, this lack of commitment, must surely be corrosive. Those who are
able to locate, and to explore intelligently, a system of belief, be that
religious or political, are surely making a valuable contribution to our times.
We may not share their beliefs, but we should treasure them.


Disregarding the sentiment of the first sentence (which is sort-of accurate maybe about some people) the conflation of "agnosticism" with the idea of "lack of commitment" is inaccurate. Agnosticism- literally the idea that the truth is not knowable- is a philosophic way of living built around the idea of asking searching moral and philosophical questions. Agnosticism is built around quesitoning everything, whereas Christianity- when it does question- questions in very specific ways that largely revolve around the incompatibility of Jesus' teachings with leading a regular life in today's society.


This conflation leads to the contention that it is somehow secularism that is to blame for people feeling compelled to "swap jobs, partners of political allegiences at a moment's notice," is a lazy Christianist talking point. It returns us to the old religious trope that without religion (and specifically Christianity, Judaism apparently isn't worth talking about for Ravenhill), life has no meaning. The secularist answers this by saying without the oppresive strictures of meaning imposed by giant multinational institutions, people are free to create meaning themselves, and by keeping religion out of public and governmental institutions, we allow people to be free to choose their own paths, including religious ones. I would also note that as someone who isn't religious, I doubt Ravenhill actually believes his lack of commitment line, it's just a cheap shot to get in at those who might disagree with him to try to minimize the validity of their viewpoint.
I agree with Ravenhill's basic point that the Bible is an important work of literature (I studied the Bible as ur-text in my very-secular High School) and that the religious influence on great works of art is undeniable. Also, I agree with him when he talks about the frequently positive impacts churches are still having on the arts in Britain.


To make this argument, however, Ravenhill resorts to more strawmanning:


...we like to tell ourselves that their creators were covert humanists, who
wanted to make art and had no choice other than to make it within the confines
of a church that held all the power and money.


This idea that all artists are essentially humanists is a comforting myth
for an agnostic age. There is little evidence to support it. It is, if you like,
the agnostic's delusion - because the very opposite is true. The greatest
artists, from Matthias Grünewald in the 15th century to Benjamin Britten in the
20th, had a genuine Christian faith: complicated, questioning, agonised at
times, as any intelligent faith should be, but a very real faith all the
same.


What you mean we, Kemosabe? Who is making these ahistorical and innacurate claims about the secularist leanings of certain artists and works of art (he also mentions the Sistene Chapel)? I cCan't Ravenhill find one quote to support his claim that this is a big strain in cultural thought? (Again, perhaps it is so common in Britain that one needs not offer any supporting evidence, but I'm not so sure). And are the people who claim these things representatives of a wide spread mainstream cultural consensus? Or are they outliers in public cultural thought?


Where Ravenhill and I fundamnetally disagree, however, is in his column's conclusion:

Our Christian tradition is very different. We should celebrate the Christian
legacy in western art and society - and stop the Dawkins army from denying us
the possibility of drawing inspiration from faith to create the art of the
future.


I believe we need to work towards a complex reading of religion's influence on society that recognizes the good (which Ravenhill acknoweledges here) as well as the ills which people like Hitchens and Dawkins describe. One may outweigh the other, but that doesn't mean that the rather complex thousands-years-long history of religion in the world should be rendered simplistically, even if it does make us feel better or more certain in our views. Ravenhill, on the other hand, will brook no complexity. Despite the very dubious history of the Church of England- which includes oppresion and murder of Catholics and ethnic cleansing of Jews- Ravenhill only wants a celebration of the Christian legacy in western art and society. Can't we have both? Isn't there room for an acknolwedgement of the ills and the positives? Apparently not.


(crossposted to Parabasis)

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Title Wanted.

We need a new title for the play. Atheist Viagra, while awesome, brings certain legal concerns into play. So we need a new title. We're compiling a list here. AV participants, leave your suggestions and note your favorites in the comments.

So far we have:

THE PLAY ABOUT THE ATHEIST

THE TRUE STORY OF THE ATHEIST

ATHEIST WOODYPILL

THE DESECRATION OF A PLASTIC BABY JESUS BY THE NEFARIOUS ATHEIST

And, although inappropriate, my personal favorite:

ATHEIST TRADEMARK INFRINGEMENT

Monday, April 21, 2008

Seriously, a couple of books

Okay, I'm not messing around this time. There's many books responsible for this travesty of a vaudeville that is Atheist Viagra. Here's two of them:

1. Miriam Rubin's Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jewry. This is the book that planted the vicious seed of this play. I've always been fascinated by the function that stories play in both society and the individual psyche. In medieval Catholic Europe, stories of host desecrations were used to rouse the populace to massacre Jewish communities and steal their property. The stories are full of what we would call stereotypes: the conniving Jew, of course, but also the weak woman, the penitent thief, and the truthful child. The stories are consistently cast with these characters. Part of Rubin's point is that the stories depended on these caricatures, agreed upon by the population, in order to work their magic. This struck me right in the grey matter. We artists often concern themselves with the avoidance of stereotype, the search for truthful characters; but perhaps there are there fundamental agreements we make with our audience about types of people in the world? What are they, and how do we manipulate them?

Rubin never uses her historical distance to point up the absurdities of the story that seem obvious to us in the twenty-first century. But she does look at the reasons why the stories were found so acceptable and rarely resisted. In thinking about this, I wondered about stories that gain popular credence in contemporary society that are nevertheless demonstrably false: urban myths (more on these later). What function do they serve both in our society and in ourselves?

One thing the author also does is place one of the only extant contemporary responses from the Jewish community to the massacres, a verse lament, smack dab in the middle of the book. This takes the book out of the realm of scholarly publication and into something more artistic accessible, at least to a spongehead playwright like me.

But what was really awkward was explaining to my five-year old why they were cooking a child on the cover.

2. How to Have a Soul-Winning Church by Gene Edwards. This is a "how-to" guide for, well, winning souls. It mixes sales techniques with evangelism in a way that I think is at the heart of American Christian Fundamentalism. Edwards has a lot of practical advice, as well as thoughts on what the function of Christianity should be in our country (printed in 1962, he advocates the church as an "assassin of communism").

Not much more to say about this book. It has to be read (or at least leafed through) to be appreciated. I'll quote from the introduction, Edwards' argument of purpose:

This book is for the minister who desires to have the most effective Christian witnesses and soul winning church possible -- for the church that wants to see men come to Christ every week.

The goal of this book is to show you how a church can witness to, and seek to win, every human being in the city. This book is for the Christian who, more than anything else in all the world, wants to be a soul winner.

This is for the minister who wants to grow laymen in his church, who do nothing but talk soul winning, eat soul winning, dream soul winning, and do soul winning.

I rephrase this in purely functional terms: an organization whose entire function is to grow the organization.

More books later

Welcome. Now Here's the Required Reading List.

Seriously, get to work. As the playwight of Atheist Viagra, it's important to me that my audience is at least as smart as I am. In order to understand one-tenth of Atheist Viagra you absolutely must be familiar with the following: medieval Europe, the history of jazz concerts, Homicide: Life on the Streets, Marcel Duchamp, Host theology, vintner methods, polling data from Pennsylvanian hamsters, early Sesame Street, the largest three moons of Jupiter (excluding Ganymede), the back side of water, Swiffers, and Uncle Bruce.

If you don't know at least that, you will never understand the dick jokes.

Two Researchy Things

Both of these came up in my first meeting with Sydney (costume designer) and I think are worth looking at:

1) Host Desecration. Host Desecration plays were these little sketches performed in churches to help whip up pogroms against Jews. The idea was that, since the host was the literal body of Christ, stories started up about Jews torturing and desecrating the host. These Medieval answers to the urban legend would be recited from the pulpit (and, at times, acted out). And then the popular anger that arose would be directed at the nearby Jewish populations. In some ways, Atheist Viagra is an oddly-skewed Atheist Host Desecration Play.

2) The other thing that came up was stage magic particularly the idea of stage magic in the 19th century. This came up because formally the play works in very similar ways. Someone comes forward and essentially says "I am going to trick you" and then, even though you know it is coming you (hopefully) get suckered into it. I find thinking about this play as a stage magic trick very helpful. Perhaps we should all watch The Prestige again...

Hey Guess What?

I'm an atheist! It's true. Want to find out more about my personal relationship to atheism? Sure you do! Why not start with this three part series I wrote for my main blog about why I am an atheist, and what it's like to be an atheist on Christmas in America.

For the record, Dan Trujillo, writer of Atheist Viagra is not, as far as I know, an atheist. This is because Atheist Viagra isn't so much about Atheism as it is attitudes about atheism (amongst other things). Atheist Viagra is a secular humanist play, rather than an atheist play. When I was growing up, the phrase "secular humanism" came up a lot. It was a fairly broad category that even religious people could be a part of!

Now that we are in the midst of the Third Great Awakening, I almost never hear the term "secular humanist" anymore. I hear a lot about atheism. I hear a lot about religious people. I hear "secularist" sometimes (always disparagingly). But I rarely hear the phrase secular humanism. I think this is because the reinjection of religious furvor into American Life has polarized us to the point where this common ground is less desired by people on all sides of the issue. This is a minor cultural calamity, and I think it is one of the things that the play addresses.

Friday, April 18, 2008

So... What is "Atheist Viagra"?

In the summary of the play, Dan calls Atheist Viagra a game of three-card-monte played with the audience, with the truth hiding under a face card. Except the game is rigged and the truth can't be known. That's pretty accurate.

Three actors appear before an audience and tell them that they have a story to tell. The story is patently ludicrous and yet, through the magic of storytelling, they get you to-- if not believe-- than at least be compelled by it. And then every few minutes or so, the rules of the play change.  It shifts genres, uses songs, dances, direct address, playing multiple characters etc. Sometimes the actors believe what they're saying, sometimes they disagree about the veracity of their accounts etc. etc.

So how, as a director, do I want to approach this play?

Atheist Viagra resists a lot of the normal ways one might approach the script. It's a slippery con-game of a play, and it's not set anywhere other than in the theatre you're currently sitting in.  It's not like I can just go do visual research into 19th century theaters again, or whatever.

So what are the starting points?

There are several.  The first piece of outside research I'm looking into are Chick Tracts.  Luckily, knowing the playwright, I happen to know that Dan has read quite a few of them (and he passed me off a magazine from the late 1990s about Jack Chick).  Chick Tracts are small ultra-right-wing Christian comic books, that really must be seen to be believed. Trust me.

Second is my own autobiography as a formerly-devout-christian-cum-atheist with a secular Jew for a mother.  And what that's taught me about religion and secularism in America. Also, the fascination its given me with those issues. I'm sure I'll be discussing more of that eventually.

The third is to progress in a more grassroots fashion with the script.  Instead of reading it and seeing how to conceptualize it, I've been reading and re-reading the script to figure out what it's rules are.  Today, I divided into scenes, with each "scene" denoting a change of the rules.  The play has 25 scenes in 79 pages.  Next step is to break down each scene. What happens? What are the rules? Who is in it? Who are they playing? etc. and then give each scene a title. And then I'll start working through scene by scene with the designers to learn as much about this play as possible by breaking it down into its component parts.

I have yet to be super inspired in a visual / sonic direction. Yet.  Often by this point some switch flips in my mind and I'm like ah yes, Anselm Kiefer and The Decemberists come to mind....  But I think via investigating each section these will come to us. Perhaps different ones for each bit.  Who knows?

Welcome!

Welcome one and all to Atheist Viagra a blog that will chronicle the research and producing process of the play by the same name! My name is Isaac Butler, I am a director and blogger.  I look forward to giving you an inside peak into the play and putting it up!