There's more to agnostics than meets the eye?

 Well, maybe, or maybe not, if the eye observing the agnostic is critically perceptive enough.

PsyPost confirms what I think many of us have already known.

Using "atheist" in its modern Western sense of "irreligious" (after all, tens if not hundreds of millions of Theravada Buddhists are quite religious and quite atheistic), it says that agnostics have a different psychological mindset than either atheists or the religious. 

Research findings indicate agnostics possess a distinct psychological profile characterized by higher indecisiveness, greater neuroticism, and a stronger tendency to search for alternatives in life compared to both atheists and religious believers. ... Agnostics exhibited a greater tendency to search for life alternatives, suggesting they maintain a broader orientation toward keeping options open rather than simply being uncertain atheists.

The study, from the UK, has enough participants to be reasonably solid versus small sample size issues.

The study also notes this:

Strong agnostic identifiers rated both themselves and others positively on traits associated with being a “nice person” without exhibiting the “better-than-average effect” seen in the other groups. This pattern may reflect a form of humility or reluctance to assert superiority consistent with the agnostic worldview.

Which in turn reflects on part of why people like me scorn Gnu Atheists, seeing them as the Western atheism version of the religiously fundagelical.

Speaking of?

How much can these findings about agnostics be extended to non-Gnu Atheists, especially the type of people listed in religious   atheistic (in the western sense, of course, excluding Theravada) spectra in old books, i.e., people who were once called "soft atheists"? That's probably a bit firmer than "uncertain atheists" but might still have people who have the humility issues locked in more than at least the Gnu, or fundamentalist, atheists. That said, the study doesn't talk about how the religiously fundamentalist compare to the religiously latitudinarian. Nor does it talk about how monotheisms compare to Eastern religions.

Holy Week: A secularist perception 30 years out

Salvador Dali's ethereal version of The Last Supper, not the Lord's Supper. The title is theologically correct per Matthew.

It's actually been a bit over 30 years since I graduated from Concordia Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri with my master's of divinity degree, realizing before graduation that, at minimum, I wasn't a fundamentalist Lutheran.

But, I "searched" for a couple of years, looking mentally at more liberal Lutheranism, and bits of other more liberal Protestantism, too. I looked at Unitarianism. Went to a few services. Looking for a possible full-time career, as I realized I couldn't do liberal Lutheranism, either, I inquired about the Unitarian ministry. I was told I'd have to do another full-year internship, and then, there was still no guarantee of a hiring, of course.

Went to a few meetings of the St. Louis chapter of The Ethical Society; already then, it may have been the largest outpost of the organization.

I also ran through Buddhist ideas, what I knew then, in my head. (And, yes, once again, contra Robert Wright, it's a religion. Still is.)

I didn't think much about Hinduism, despite Eckankar having an office or whatever across one side street from the seminary's grounds. (Said grounds, with lots of semi-forested area, also attracted several people I am guessing were Shinto. And, real Shinto, not Meiji state Shinto.) Never thought about Islam.

Anyway, I passed on all of them, and by 30 years ago, was a confirmed secularist. Here's the last of a six-part series on my journey.

A few years later, encountering the self-help world, I tried to do that. Even read some of the "manifestation" type books, and — I couldn't.

About 20 years ago or a bit more, I got lost while hiking in Canyonlands National Park, in late July. I ran out of water. I cycled through prayers to Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Olympian and Norse divinities, Vishnu and more — and then stopped.

Anyway, here I am today.

Whipping through friends' of friends' Facebook pages yesterday, I saw .... gack.

Along with pious Lutheranism, cheapish memes. AI-generated versions of Maundy Thursday and Palm Sunday art. (This sets aside Hyam Maccoby's claim that this event probably happened on Sukkoth, not Passover [if it happened at all].)

Not on Lutheran friends' of friends' pages, but elsewhere, I've seen the "If Jesus had a gun, he'd still be alive." Some wingnuts may be trying to "own the liberals" with that, but others may not have a clue that most varieties of Christianity preach a substitutionary atonement. So, no, Jesus with a gun defeats the whole purpose, according to Christianity. (And yes, the idea that many self-professed [self-alleged?] Christians might be that theologically illiterate is no shock to me and shouldn't be to you.)

Anyway, even without the more cringey stuff on friends' of friends' pages, college or seminary alums of mine, I realized just how foreign that all is to me. 

It's not as distant as it may be for an Orthodox Jew, let alone a Buddhist, but ... it's foreign.

That said, Gnu Atheism — especially Jesus mysticism subvariants that seem to believe Jesus MUST BE and MUST BE PROVEN TO BE nonexistent for atheism to be firm, are just about as foreign. And possibly even more stupid. It's definitely more illogical.

And, with that said, as a good secular humanist, as long as fundagelically religious — and Gnu Atheist — neither pick my pocket, nor break my bones, per Thomas Jefferson, I have less and less interest on a regular basis at going attack dog on either one.

Top blogging of 2024

 As usual, these are the most read pieces from last year, whether or not written in 2024. "Evergreen" ones will be noted by approximate date of publication.

At No. 10, a piece on a mishmash of problems at r/AcademicBiblical (which seems to continue to head downhill) and other biblical criticism subreddits.

At No. 9, since 2017, I have continued to say "Goodbye to 'History for Atheists'" and Tim O'Neill's Samuel Huntington-like Catholic Chistianism.

At No. 8, an exemplum of what's wrong with r/AB, "The Unbearable Lightness of Chris(sy) Hanson," who is independent, and arguably a researcher but most certainly not a scholar.

No. 7 goes to the world of aesthetics, which is part of philosophy, and specifically, to the world of classical music. That's my savage critiquing on how what could have been a good book about 20th century American classical music got butchered.

No. 6? Yes, until proven otherwise, Morton Smith is still the forger of Secret Mark.

No. 5? It's from five years ago, but trending because I posted it at the ex-Lutheran subreddit. The idea of "Gun Nuts in the Name of Luther" and its lies by omission on biblical interpretation will probably jump up more in Trump 2.0.

At No. 4, from early 2024? Contra philosophy of religion prof, it's not fundagelicals vs other Christians, and it's not even literal vs liberal religious believers in general. It's secularists vs everybody else on treating climate change as a climate crisis.

No. 3? Riffing on Rolling Stone et al, in 2023, I wrote about "Fascism in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod." I expect a resurgence in Trump 2.0.

No. 2 was also from 2023, and riffed on Paul Davidson of "Is That in the Bible," as well as, via him, my reading of Idan Dershowitz's then-new monograph on what Moses Wilhelm Shapira may actually have found. "Standing Josiah and Deuteronomy on their heads" tied together a number of threads in biblical criticism.

And at No. 1?

A very evergreen, 2007, "More proof the Buddha was no Buddha." (I have a new piece about Stephen Batchelor coming up in a week.) For more on my thoughts in general, click the Buddhism tag.

A monotheistic holy days mash-up with blood on everybody's hands

Christians in the world outside of Orthodoxy (unless Zelensky got the Ukranian church to move Easter as well as Christmas) celebrated Easter March 29.

Muslims had started Ramadan before that. 

Then, came the solar eclipse April 8, which means nothing to the non-superstitious.

But, the sliver of crescent moon the day after meant Ramadan was done and it was time for Eid al-Fitr.

Up next? Passover, starting Monday, April 22.

And, to wrap? The Orthodox Easter (a majority of Palestinians are Orthodox, I think, but don't quote me) is May 5.

All three of these world religions have genocidal blood on their hands against each other.

Christians, even if Hitler wasn't one, actively participated individually in the Holocaust. Centuries before that, before the Protestant Reformation, both Catholic and Orthodox leaders promoted the blood libel that Jews needed Gentile blood for matzoh. And, Pope Urban II did nothing to condemn First Crusade genocide against Jews in the Rhineland. Let us also not forget, via de las Casas, debate over whether American Indians were pre-Christian or anti-Christian, and thus, how they could be treated. Or mistreated.

Muslims? In what's widely recognized as not "just" genocide, but a holocaust, the Ottoman Empire, where the sultan was, at least nominally, the spiritual leader of Sunni Muslims as well as secular head of the empire Beyond that, per Wiki's page on the causes of this, the Empire committed further massacres before World War I that arguably also rose to the level of genocide. (So did the secular Turkish state after the war.) Those earlier massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, even if not entirely religious, had a religious element. So did the WWI genocide under Mehmed V, who also formally declared jihad after entering the war. On the other hand, these and other genocides weren't entirely religious, and it's hypocritical for Jewish historians like Benny Morris to go ax-grinding.

And, we're now there. Beyond the genocide now having some degree of religious undertone, let us not forget that the Tanakh / Christian Old Testament has Yahweh ordering a holocaust — not just a genocide, a holocaust — against Amalek. Doesn't matter if it's legend/myth. Orthodox Jews, and everybody in power in Zionist Israel's government, cites it. And, historically, the forced conversion of the Idumeans at least approaches genocide. (Given that, per Yonathan Adler, most Jews didn't start regular observance of dietary and ritual purity laws until Hasmonean times, I think these conversions, as well as those of the Itureans, were indeed forcible.) And, Jews can be racist like Christians or Muslims even to fellow believers. Look at the treatment of Beta Israel.

Let's go back to the other two "western monotheisms." In addition to the jizya, many Muslim empires, nations, powers, required both Jews and Christians to wear special, identifying clothing long before popes came up with Magen David for Jews in the Rome ghetto they had created. But, and possibly by direct influence, popes did do that and it spread from there.

That said, don't get smug, Gnu Atheists. 

Stalin has genocidal blood on his hands from the Holodomor. But, don't act so persecuted, Ukrainians. By death rate, it hit harder in the Kazakh SSR than in the Ukrainian SSR. That said, Gnus, don't pull out the old bullshit about "Stalin went to an Orthodox seminary." I'll kick you in your genocidal ass.

Mao has genocidal blood on his hands from The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and in smaller degrees other Maoist-derived stupidities.

Yes, they're all genocides, at least in my book. A deliberate targeting of one's own people, or socioeconomic classes within one's own people, counts as genocide in my book just like racial or religious genocides. That makes the French Revolution one, too, does it not?

Oh, and Hitler wasn't really Christian, even if not "anti-religious" (other than against Judaism) in the way Stalin and Mao were. We'll just leave that there.

Further bye-bye thoughts on OpenSky, re climate change

Per a group statement, it self-imploded.

Having snarked on them a last time recently, I thought I would take one last look, to see what it did, or did not, write about the climate crisis, being a bunch of neoliberal types, overall.

I wasn't snarkily disappointed.

ML Clark says the US won't get the election it deserves, and can't find one line of electrons to write about third parties, let alone third parties of the left, let alone Democrats' connivance with Republicans in keeping third parties off the ballot.

Earlier, she rightly bashes COP28 for a cop-out. She wrongly fails to mention "carbon tax" or "carbon tariff" as part of the solution.

Adam Lee has a good piece about minimalism in possessions, but without mentioning directly its ties to the climate crisis. And, that's offset by his piece from last fall being a sucker about Biden on the picket line.

Back to Clark, the main writer on this.

She earlier talks about the fifth US climate assessment. Several missing items here. First, "adjustments" to agriculture are nowhere near enough. Regenerative ag and feed to cut methane belches aren't enough. Eating less meat — a LOT less beef, and a fair amount less pork — are the ticket.

Lee then writes about the "Green New Deal" without telling you it's the Dems' fake Green New Deal, not the original Green Party one.

Weirdly, per Pew data that Ryan Burge misread or whatever, all these folks miss the biggie. NONE of them tie secularism specifically to how seriously people view the climate crisis, or even that they see it as a crisis at all. I wrote about that earlier this year.

"You had one objective .... " and you failed.

Beyond not really anchoring the climate crisis to secularism, to the degree anybody offers solutions, they're not that much.

I was going to snark again on OnlySky, but ...

Per a group statement, plus this, this, this and this ... it self-imploded.

As regular readers know, I snark semi-regularly on Reddit's AcademicBiblical subthread. I've done that here on occasion in the past for OnlySky, but not for their particular atheist takes on biblical criticism, or biblical issues in general, nearly as much as ...

Their conflation of Gnu Atheism with secular humanism and

Their proxy war warmongering on Ukraine. Multiple links on that below.

I had gone to the website, since I hadn't been in several months, to see the take on Israel-Gaza post Oct. 7, 2023, and instead, they're dead?

(A part two, focused on environmental issues and more specifically on climate change, is now up.)

The first "this" is by cofounder Adam Lee. Confirming what I suspected, and refudiating Gnu Atheist claims that the rise (kind of stalled) of the "Nones" means a rise in atheism, with more refudiation here, the bucks weren't there to support it. (It's not just that full atheists aren't Nones, or that atheists make up only a small percentage of Nones. In one OnlySky piece from 2022, James Croft notes the withering and imploding of the Ethical Culture world, saying the St. Louis Ethical Society's 350 or so members are one-tenth of the whole of EC in the US.)

None of this stopped Lee again, earlier this year, from, at least by implication, conflating Nones and atheists. Nor, globally, did it stop Dale McGowan, in looking at China, from conflating secularism and atheism. There are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, surely, of atheistic and quite religious Theravada Buddhists. Yes, Buddhism is a religion, and a pre-emptive shut-up to claims otherwise. Ditto for Daoists and a fair chunk of neo-Confucianists. The reality, contra McGowan, is that terms like the Dao or Way, or T'ien or Heaven, is that they are metaphysical concepts in traditional Chinese thought, even if not deities.

The second, meh-ish, is by Captain Cassidy. She is religiously illiterate, IMO, having conflated Calvinism and Lutheranism.

The third? Jonathan MS Pearce. "The Self-Besotted Philosopher," I called him, to pun on his own moniker. A deep-fried proxy war warmonger over Russia-Ukraine. (Indeed, per a piece there, deep-fried enough to actually go to Kherson.) And, per this piece, also an Islamophobe and a Jesus mythicist, or at least a "fellow traveler." (I don't know if any other people at OnlySky were Islamophobes, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were.)

The fourth? M.L. Clark, which finally gets me to the intended snarking.

As far as Israel-Gaza, M.L. Clark seems to have written about it far more than anybody else, and in pieces that probably needed editing for size or broken into multiple parts. This one, her best overall since Oct. 7, nonetheless never comments on the issue of many Jews conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism. And, while the Nakba is mentioned, details of it are not discussed, nor is pre-World War II British Palestine and other things.

Item No. 1, per Wiki's surprisingly generally very good page about the Nakba, MUST be established, and that is that it was started BEFORE any Arab League armies attacked Israel. Zionists, even if they don't directly say so, will hint, to the degree they admit that anything like a Nakba happened, that it was a response to being attacked.

Of course, about the same time late last fall, Clark used the issue of Israel-Gaza war crimes to attack Russia for war crimes while ignoring Ukrainian ones. She does mention Russian claims that Ukraine has committed war crimes but never steps beyond "Russian claims." That said, she appears to be at least a low-level proxy war warmonger, or did. And, as with the Nakba, there's no backstory. Of course not; that would undermine being a proxy war warmonger.

Elsewhere, she shows she's a one-trick pony. Talking about German state elections in Thuringia, she notes that the Alliance for Democracy failed to come out on top. Two-thirds of the way down, she finally mentions Russia-Ukraine war issues and their effect on domestic politics, but doesn't get into detail.

Clark may not be as much a warmonger as Pearce, but she is just as much a neoliberal. I suspect that goes for others.

As for comments on the group announcement page? Yeah, other people besides the above that I snarked on early on? Kind of not writing any more.

And, commenters call out Adam Lee (and by extension, other cofounders). MANY of them talk about the commenting system being crap and say they told Lee et al that from the start. Sounds like an arrogance problem on the part of the founders. Shock me. 

Also? One person calls them out for neoliberalism. Another snarks on the Democratic identification in another way. 

As I mentioned in the "conflation" link? Robert Price is an atheist, unless he believes in Cthulhu's existence. He also walks, talks and quacks like a racist. (H.P. Lovecraft himself was definitely one.) But, the point? While I say that you can't be a humanist, secular or otherwise, and be a racist, you certainly can be an atheist and racist. Or an atheist and other things. I've said it repeatedly and repeat it again, atheism is no guarantor of moral or intellectual superiority.

But, by conflating atheism and secular humanism, and even among non-racists, excluding conservatives or true leftists alike, they had a narrow focus.

Back to the Nones not being atheists. You also had a narrow target audience. Your expectations were probably too high in the start. As for a place like Skeptical Inquirer? It doesn't pitch secularism as its focus.

Related? It reaches out more beyond the USofA. OnlySky was pretty much a Merikkka-only project. Again, more non-Americans should have been recruited from the start.

So, you blew it!

Bye!