{"id":8491,"date":"2015-09-24T19:38:39","date_gmt":"2015-09-25T00:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/?p=8491"},"modified":"2015-09-24T19:38:39","modified_gmt":"2015-09-25T00:38:39","slug":"notes-on-atheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/8491","title":{"rendered":"Notes On Atheism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Despite his stance on same-sex marriage, and the sacredness and dignity of same-sex love and romance and sex, I’m finding myself just \u00a0thoroughly touched and uplifted by this Pope. Today he had company with the homeless of Washington D.C., rather than dinned with the city power elite. And he told them that “The Son of God came into this world as a homeless person.” Whether or not you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was god incarnate is beside the point. Those people surely needed food for the soul as much as their bodies. For a moment they would have felt loved, and Valued<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’ve written here often about a \u00a0passage from the biography of Mary Renault, who gave \u00a0me a vision when I was a teenager of that sacredness of same-sex love that I so badly needed. In it her biographer quotes her as saying that politics like sex was a reflection of the person within, and if you’re mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your sex life and in your politics when what really matters is you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that. To that I would only add religion. If you’re mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in your religious beliefs and your spirituality \u00a0when what really matters is you aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that.<\/p>\n

That includes atheism. The stereotype of atheists like myself is we’re arrogant, uncaring, selfish. But it’s the inner person that matters, not the clothing \u00a0of their politics or religion. They say without religion there can be no morality. Atheists reply that religion has been responsible for some of the cruelest, \u00a0bloodiest passages \u00a0in the history books. But it’s the person. It is always the person. Everything else is detail. I am an atheist because belief simply stopped making sense to me. Love, kindness, trustworthiness, lending a helping hand when you can…these things have always made sense. I could sit here and type out \u00a0rationalizations for why, \u00a0and maybe you could type out some theology to prove my rationalizations are just empty hand waving, and then I could say the same about your theology. It’s all just reflex. What matters is the heart.<\/p>\n

I could wish this pope could see the people for the homosexuals. But unlike Ratzinger, I can’t imaging him ever \u00a0excusing \u00a0violence toward us. Or anyone. His religion is his logical frame of reference. But the heart within is a noble \u00a0one. When he made company with the homeless of the nation’s capital, he \u00a0preached to both them, \u00a0and to the high places. It was stunning.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Despite his stance on same-sex marriage, and the sacredness and dignity of same-sex love and romance and sex, I’m finding myself just \u00a0thoroughly touched and uplifted by this Pope. Today he had company with the homeless of Washington D.C., rather than dinned with the city power elite. And he told them that “The Son of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[189,99],"class_list":["post-8491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-atheism","tag-the-human-status"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}