“I do not feel obligated to believe that the same god who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their use.”
– Galileo Galilei
Sunday Reader –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In April of 1966, Time magazine set off a firestorm of public debate and made a fortune in sales by publishing a cover story asking the question: “Is God Dead“?
It was the 1966 version of clickbait.
On the 50th anniversary of that publication, the magazine — under completely different ownership and with a major decline in circulation and readership — published a retrospective about it that was mostly ignored and lost in the social media shuffle, since America was in the full throes of a presidential election at the time.
But looking back, the magazine pointed out that survey results showed a full 97 percent of Americans believed in God in 1966, but only 63 percent did in 2016.
That was simply reported as a fact. No conclusions were drawn on whether that was a good thing or bad.
“The number of God’s devotees has been shrinking ever since,” the editors report. “In 2014, Pew found that only 63 percent of Americans believed with absolute certainty.”
“And yet,” they continued, “even as Americans belief in God declines, religion retains a powerful hold. Its presence is felt throughout politics, education and pop culture.”
As World War II and civil rights were part of the death-of-God movement, they report, one question is: “How can an omnipotent God exist in a world with so much misery and injustice?”
William Hamilton, the author of the piece who had his life upended by it, was interviewed in 1985, and said that maybe God didn’t die but that “the wrong people have him and he should be killed.”
For some people, however, the question has never changed. There are radical theology Facebook groups, according to Time.
In the anniversary issue, they quoted a number of celebrity authors, who asked other related questions. You can click on the link and see them all, but I’m picking this one to quote now.
“Are we going to make the sacrifices needed to insure that the Earth will be habitable for our kids?”
That was the question from Rob Bell, author of What We Talk About When We Talk About God.
Well as newspaper circulation is once again in decline since Trump was defeated last November, a Capitol insurrection was put down, and the world seems on the verge of coming back from the brink of global catastrophe with the coronavirus pandemic sort of under control after a hellscape year of death and worry, The New York Times may have just set off another firestorm about the death of god, this time by asking for answers from Amazon and Google.
I put the question to Facebook and YouTube Saturday night, and nearly over flooded the FB servers and broke the algorithm.
The main thing to learn from the New York Times story is that religious believers are being asked to write the scripts for what Amazon’s Alexa and other voice activated devices will answer when asked these questions. This is NOT truly artificial intelligence. It is still human programming.
The same is true when asking Google the question in the search engine. The algorithm just prioritizes the answers that come up, to some extent based on your own personal preferences, which Google knows by your search history.
There is actually no way for Facebook to answer the question. Only the people on Facebook can respond in the comments with their “opinions” and “beliefs” — which quite frankly don’t mean very much. The founders of this country talked about “nature’s laws.” If you must call it god for some religious reason, oh well.
I found YouTube to be the most interesting in a way, or at least the most entertaining. In the top five responses, number 3 on my computer screen, the video channel totally ignored the question and just pulled up Hank Williams singing, “Hey Good Looking.”
Am I making light? Of course.
I guess the point is, we should stop looking to new technology to answer our most pressing questions. There are still thinkers and writers out there who keep up with big news and academic scholarship, the hard and social sciences, who perhaps should not be ignored by the social media algorithms.
President Barack Obama honors Congressman John Lewis with the Medal of Freedom in 2010: White House
Here’s another story that got lost in the social media shuffle this week, and I doubt it’s on cable TeeVee much either.
This Saturday, July 17, 2021, marked the one year anniversary since the death of John Lewis, a man I knew personally and respected highly.
As I said on Facebook, “the people” did turn out to vote in November to unseat Trump, especially in Lewis’s Atlanta, which helped carry the national election for Democrat Joe Biden and helped win two Senate races for the Democrats.
The people in Selma, Alabama, did not name the bridge after Lewis, however, which I believe was a mistake. There are a lot of mistakes being made by the people in power in my native state. I’ve spent half a lifetime trying to help people there understand and get involved to fix things. But like people everywhere, most people don’t listen. They just keep on “believing” what they believe. Facts and data have a hard time penetrating the grey matter of people’s brains, especially when you get the answers you are looking for that comport to your beliefs on social media.
This is what I wrote for Sunday, June 19, 2020. It stands as a historic testament to his life and our times, even if Zuckerberg’s programmers and algorithm won’t show people the news link.
John Lewis Spurs Us On to Continue the Revolution
I’ve asked my friends to share it, but not many will. Trump and the Republicans are not the only self-centered narcissists in the room, and Facebook has clearly just made matters worse. The selfie itself helps tell the story. Pretty much everyone these days is the center of their own universe. I get it.
But I can’t help but reuse a quote I found last year from Martin Luther King, Jr., which I’ve never seen any other publication use or talk about.
“Everyone must decide whether they will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” – MLK
I guess this just goes over everyone’s heads on Facebook. It’s not on every channel. I think it should be.
What it says to me is that Dr. King was a very smart, well-read man, probably a genius, who clearly got the point after delving into the literature on evolution.
Surely he had to read all about it, considering that his people had been pilloried for a hundred years with the stain of eugenics, pseudo science that some men in the early 20th century used to try to justify the argument that dark colored people where genetically inferior to light colored people.
This could not be further from the truth. All humans share a nearly identical genome.
Just ask Google.
“The human genome is mostly the same in all people. But there are variations across the genome. This genetic variation accounts for about 0.001 percent of each person’s DNA and contributes to differences in appearance and health.”
Skin color, like eye color, is just a minor mutation of one set of genes. The very idea that people were enslaved for this minor mutation is a major travesty of history, and an original sin and a stain on the history of the United States.
We should all be working as hard as possible together to save democracy in this country and to keep life livable on planet Earth for our entire species, light and dark.
We are all in this together, even if there is not a politician who can articulate this for the masses, or a social media program or digital voice device that knows this answer.
I learned something new about this color discrimination thing this past week while camping in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland. But it too got lost in the social media shuffle.
Faces of Industrial Slavery Emerge From DNA in African Graveyard Discovered in Maryland
This is the conclusion you won’t get from Google or Alexa.
The United States Constitution protects the freedom of everyones’ religious beliefs right there in the First Amendment along with the freedom of speech and my freedom of the press. So believe what you want. Pray all you want. It probably won’t do any good, but you have every right to do it.
But for the sake of democracy and the planet, we must overcome this radical, religious cult movement sweeping across the land.
If we sweep away the separation of church and state, one of the key principles this country was founded on, we will end up going the way of the dodo bird, and the ivory-billed woodpecker and Neanderthal man [Neandertals, Homo neanderthalensis].
Believe it?
Or not.
“I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follows from the advance of science.”
– Charles Darwin
More Related Quotations
UBI DUBIUM IBI LIBERTAS: “Where there is doubt, there is freedom.”
“Religion is so absurd that it comes close to imbecility.”
– H. L. Mencken
“The bible has noble poetry in it… and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
– Mark Twain
“The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing.”
– Thomas Paine
“Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man.”
– Thomas Jefferson
“What have been the fruits of Christianity? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.”
– James Madison
“This would be the best of all possible worlds if there were no religion in it.”
– John Adams
“God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say that god did it.”
– Carl Sagan
“I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for departed individuals, or of a personal god.”
– Thomas Edison
“I believe the simplest explanation is that there is no god. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I am extremely grateful.”
– Stephen Hawking
“When man is freed of religion he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.”
– Sigmund Freud
“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
– Christopher Hitchens
“All great truths begin as blasphemy.”
– George Bernard Shaw
“As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise.”
– William Shakespeare
“The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.”
– Socrates
Thank you for publishing quotes from all these people who were not afraid to express their thoughts on this contentious subject. If I had the words, I could have said something close from the time I was pulled down the aisle at a church when I was a child 65 years ago, pushed onto my knees and “prayed over” till I thought I would faint from lack of circulating air in the stifling heat of the summer night. I gave in and then a few days later stood in a pond with mud and no telling what else squishin between my toes and two men bent me back into the murky water.
Growing older has taught me that I was right then as now. I will fight for your right to believe what you might, will you?
Your experience must be something like mine. I fight the good fight every day.