Jon, your comments remind me of something my aunt Esther once said: "If the Bible said you could grow hair on a doorknob, I'd believe it."
That still cracks me up but she spoke in earnest.
My mom---the one who took the kids to church--is absolutely terrified of thinking anything that might go against the Bible. She won't read books ABOUT the Bible for fear she will be lead astray. I love my mom, but that's just stupid. Of course, what can I do? She's my mom. I can't very well take her over my knee or send her to her room with a sober biblical commentary.

I really like what you said here about how these same people--in other contexts--can be reasonable as you please. I know a guy from India who taught physics for years and had some profound religious experience---he went off and learned Greek and is now a published Bible shcolar who takes prayers for healing seriously. I still think: how does he do that? I assume his physics were fine and I know his Greek is awesome---and yet he's a certifiable believer in faith healing. And Catholic, of all things---many Catholics are embarrassed by Catholics who believe in faith healing. I don't know how the guy can think like he does. I really don't. But he's an accomplished scholar and a good teacher. "There are more things in heaven and earh, Horatio...."

When my mother died, all my brother could do was complain that no pictures of us children were included in her slideshow more or less of her life. He didn't bother to show up when it was time to pick out what photos were to be used. I had to remind him that the whole thing wasn't about us.....the funeral was about her life.

Thanks for that. A beautiful and obviously heartfelt poem. You illustrate well the down-to-earth compassion of us supposedly amoral/immoral atheists.

As Cenk Uygur was saying in his blog and I tried to restate, all we clever (and silly) monkeys really have for help and meaningfulness is each other - no gods to appeal to as all-knowing, powerful Parents, OR to hinder our taking ultimate responsibilty to act compassionately, as your uncles' Christianity blinded them and hindered their ability to act compassionately towards their mother. One could say they were obeying an imaginary Parent, which caused them to dishonour their real parent. (A very sad and disturbing story - I'm glad you and your brother were there to at least keep it from being even sadder.)

I hope I haven't come off as disrespectful of the religious *impulse* itself - humans' desire to make connections and find meaning - the Latin roots of the word being "re - ligere", "to rejoin". (Ligament being another word on that etymological branch.) As you alluded, there's a long history, in all cultures, which reflects this impulse. I just have a (huge) problem with the impulse being misdirected into the creation of imaginary beings which keep us from growing up and taking full responsibility for ourselves.

Interesting that you bring up the materialism vs. idealism divide (and I understand what you mean about the inapplicability of the usual, popular sense of those words) - I just started back in school for a philosophy degree, after many years, and in both the philosophy of mind and epistemology courses I just took, this is touched upon quite a bit. (It's interesting to me also that one of my uncles, the only other firm atheist I know of in my family, is a doctor of philosophy, and the most progressive politically in the family; many years active in the peace movement in England where he lives. I sometimes wonder if the intellectual rigor that studying philosophy entails tends to lead one to atheism. So far I think it does.)

My atheism doesn't stop me from admiring Sufis, Zen Buddhists, the Dalai Lama, etc. Even the occasional Christian. Humans come up with some interesting and valid insights into themselves and the universe within these traditions, even as they also have come up with a lot of Cosmik Debris (to quote one of my heroes, Frank Zappa) and made the theist mistake. Also, I'm a long-standing student of Indian music (years ago I got a degree in music) and I have a number of pictures and statuettes of Ganesh and Sarasvati (she's the goddess of music; and Ganesh symbolizes perserverance to me) around my place. Even my MySpace page (csharporchestra) has a Sarasvati as the background. Does this mean I think for a moment that the Hindu gods are real? Of course not; but I appreciate them as archetypal projections of human attributes, a lot richer than Christian archetypes, actually. (I''ve studied Jung a bit and been through some Jungian analysis.)

There was a line in one of Herman Hesse's books (which I read as a teenager) where one character says to another "honour all religions", in much the same sense that I just described. They are indeed part of our history and we should honour the connectivist impulse that motivates them (at root the same impulse that drives science), and take what may be useful from them - the parts that are really just illuminations of our own psyches and their relationship to the world - and discard the unfortunate theistic imaginings.

As far as the deep tendency to imagine "an external consciousness of sorts" - I suppose it's a psychological analogue of our being hardwired by survival selection to see and recognize faces, which leads us to see faces in the most random assortments of dots and lines, wrinkles on potato chips, mountains on Mars, etc.