by mr dan
Watch the vlog and see many more examples of hilarious pareidolia.

Last week my ever-astute local media brought to my attention a notable elm tree in the town of Wallingford, CT, which some believers claim bears the face of Jesus.

The tree, in front of David Doolittle‘s North Main Street home, had a limb cut a few years ago, and what looks like the face of the Nazarene appears in its place.

Wallingford is about an hour from me and I‘d never been there before, but as coincidence would have it, my band was due to play a show there only a few days later, less than 2 miles from the tree. Naturally, I had to make a pilgrimage.

I have to admit, the image is pretty obvious. Unlike some supposed miracles where you have to squint and turn your head the right way, this one very strongly resembles a somewhat goofy image of the traditional Western depiction of Jesus. Or at least a long-haired, bearded man. I can see how one might be tempted to take this as irrefutable proof that Jesus was actually a cartoon character.

Seeing funny images in random stuff is kind of a passion of mine. It’s what intelligent, or “not crazy,” people like to call pareidolia—the psychological phenomenon of attatching a special significance to a random stimulus. If you’re a word nerd, you’ve already noticed the word “idol” in there—both words come from the greek eidōlon, image or form (para- means beside).

Pareidolia can be a lot of fun. It can make a soap dispenser look terrified or a kayak look angry. It’s what makes people see a person in the clouds, or that face on Mars, or constellations in the night sky. It‘s how we know Mickey Mouse is a mouse, even though he looks nothing like one. It gives us the ability to see and interpret emoticons, Rorschach tests, and Georgia O’Keefe paintings.

Pareidolia gets a little scary, though, when the faithful not only see images of their religious icons everywhere they look, but also insist that the occurrences serve as proof of their God‘s magic and influence over this world. There‘s no end to the number of random smudges, smears, burns and growths that some faithful fools will call a miracle. The Virgin Mary on grilled cheese sandwich. Mother Theresa on a cinnamon bun. Jesus in a fish fillet. The name of Allah on the side of a goat. One of my favorites is a photo of a bonfire in Poland which some Catholics say shares a silhouette with Pope John Paul II.

Of course, because pareidolia is all in the eye of the beholder, each of us can interpret the image any way we wish.

Some believers say it was God‘s divine magic that brought the cartoonish image to Wallingford. More likely explanations include sap oozing from the tree, or the result of any number of diseases that trees can get. Though the limb was cut “three or four years ago,” Mr Doolittle only saw the image recently when someone pointed it out to him. Maybe the image just appeared (which is not so improbable if sap or disease is really the cause), or perhaps it‘s been there since the limb was cut, and Doolittle never noticed it until someone pointed it out.

Carl Sagan attributes the phenomenon of pareidolia to early humans’ need to easily recognize human faces with few details (for example, from a distance or in poor light). It also occurs in audio, giving rise to Elecronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) and backwards masking. We see or hear a few details, and our brain does its job of trying to interpret them to the best of its ability, fitting it in to what it knows.  And if our intent is to see Jesus on a tree, or hear a Satanic message in a heavy metal song, or see male and female genitalia just about everywhere, it’s very easy for our brain to pull that off.

Why is it always the Muslims who see the name of Allah, and Catholics who see the Virgin Mary? Why do religious images only appear to members of that particular faith? Because when atheists see Jesus on a tortilla chip, they dip it in salsa and eat it. The tiny blurs have no significance to someone who isn’t looking for an idol to worship. People who are inclined to think that Jesus is always with them are going to see him everywhere.

Jesus has as many faces as the artists who have depicted him throughout the last two millennia. All the paintings, drawings, mosaics, film and theatrical interpretations and sculptures have tended to portray him in the image of the artist. If he ever existed at all, no one knows what he looked like, but it’s quite clear he didn‘t look anything like the traditional Western Jesus. Though he was supposedly a Jew, he has never been portrayed on film by a Jewish actor, and appears to be a white, Northern-European in most artistic images. And since the Apostle Paul wrote that “if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him” (1 Corinthians 11:14, NIV), it can be safely assumed that he did not have the flowing locks he wears on the walls of churches and museums — or the trees in Connecticut.

It tends to be only the craziest theists who think God works miracles through tortilla chips or soap scum or cinnamon buns.  But they are out there, trying to make miracles out of molehills–or claiming to see Jesus when the rest of us just see some sap in a tree.

mr dan is the vice president of CVA. The views expressed in this posting are his own and do not necessarily represent those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its members.

by mr dan
Watch the Vlog.

Last week an article from CNN.com about spirituality got a bit of attention.  “Are there dangers in being ‘spiritual but not religious’?” by CNN’s John Blake covers myriad angles of the supposedly “new” fad, including its trendy new acronym — SBNR — because young people won’t touch anything that can’t be abbreviated, and, what else, its Facebook page, because how else would young people know it existed?

The article has an obvious spin against the movement.  Right at the top he quotes a Jesuit priest named James Martin who believes the SBNR phenomenon “can lead to complacency and self-centeredness. If … a religious community makes no demands on you, why help the poor?”

It’s a good question, the implication of which is that people only help the poor because the church tells them to.  Which would seem to be a statement about the heartlessness of church members; that they are not altruistic but subservient, literally meeting the demands of the church rather than the interests of themselves and other human beings.

While there may be a good many who are like this, I tend to think that most people who are religious and charitable would have been charitable even if they were not religious.

In my experience, most atheists I know are more charitable than theists, and the charitable theists I’ve known who have drifted away from their churches tend to become more giving, not less.  But that’s just anecdotal evidence, so I ask you, James Martin, can you show me any data that indicates that as church attendance drops, so does charitable activity? Are there more homeless going hungry? Is less money going to cancer research?  Are fewer 5Ks being run?

It’s no surprise to me that a man who makes his living from the church would lash out at anyone who isn’t buying what he sells. After all, Martin’s tragic realization is much like that of the owner of a restaurant that serves only peanut butter and jelly.  It may work for a while, maybe even fifteen hundred, two thousand or five thousand years, but sooner or later everyone’s going to catch on that they’ve got that stuff in the pantry at home.  It’s so much easier and cheaper when you realize that you can just make it yourself, with almost limitless varieties of bread, jelly and peanut butter.

I’m not saying anything shocking by suggesting that religion has consistently been out of touch with the needs and desires of its followers since it began to organize itself into a scroll-based pyramid scheme thousands of years ago.  When my father was a kid, mass was still delivered in Latin, even though no one I know went to mass in Ancient Rome. If it took them so long to figure out that maybe we can communicate with people better if we speak their language, it doesn’t surprise me that the church today has difficulty reaching young people, who are too busy tending to their Farmville crops to care about the Eucharist.

So to answer the article’s question: Are there dangers in being “spiritual but not religious”?  Well, if CNN is to be believed, it might turn you into a chubby Adam Duritz-lookalike praying on a polluted beach in your underwear.  Other than that, it really depends on how far you take it.  Spirituality is just as delusional as religious dogma, so the acronym might as well stand for Satisfying, But Not Real. Most of religion’s major dangers in the modern world involve car-bombs, gaybashing and misappropriation of tax revenue.  I don’t see the SBNR movement carrying that flag.  But then there are other side-effects of religion, such as opting for prayer rather than medical treatment or deciding which bits of science and history are too ugly to teach to kids, and these are pitfalls into which the SBNRs may just as easily step.

The rise of SBNR does not mean that society is shifting toward atheism.  On the contrary, it means that people are seeing that the walls of their church are practically made of baloney, but that they still need a spiritual sky-daddy (or perhaps sky-mommy). That can lead to a lot of meaningless infighting about which sky-parent is better, but that’s basically what goes on in the world now, so I can’t imagine anything changing.  Without any unified leaders, the SBNR movement seems unable to make any large-scale impact on the world, even if they do have a Facebook page.

To me the most annoying thing about SBNRs is that they tend to assume that all of the world’s religions are true, and then pick the bits of dogma they find most interesting or easy, and pretend that that is the one true way.  This is what the article calls “Burger King Spirituality,” as in, Have it Your Way.  You can do this with philosophy, but you can’t do it with fact.  There are millions of philosophies. To live your life based on a blend of whichever make the most sense to you is logical, and whether we admit it or not it’s what we all do.  It doesn’t really matter whether a philosophical precept was originally uttered by Jesus or Muhammed or Karl Marx or Gandhi or Dr Seuss.  I’m fine with life being a philosophical salad bar.  But no salad bar is complete without a good sneeze guard, and in all cases, logic should deflect any wayward projectiles that religion will try to sneeze back in.  Let’s hope the SBNR’s keep theirs clean.

mr dan is the vice president of Connecticut Valley Atheists.  The views expressed in this posting are his own and do not necessarily represent those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by mr dan
Watch this as a vlog.

For the past three years, both of the public high schools in the town of Enfield, CT, Enrico Fermi High and Enfield High, have held their graduation ceremonies at the First Cathedral Baptist Church, a megachurch in Bloomfield, CT. Several other towns have done so as well. While it seems to me and others that incorporating such icons and ideology into the ceremonies of public schools constitutes a government endorsement of religion, and violates the students‘ and parents‘ rights to a secular education and graduation, efforts to move the ceremonies to a more appropriate location have been ineffective.  This is partly because each time both the school districts and the church have promised to secularize the facilities by covering or removing all of the religious iconography. But each time they have failed to do anything as simple as taking down a non-permanent banner displaying Christian Bible verses.

This year the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State filed a lawsuit against the district on behalf of 5 anonymous Enfield residents– two high school seniors and three of their parents. Atheists are getting the blame for this, and while we‘d love to take the credit, none of the five is a self-described atheist. Which doesn‘t matter at all; this isn‘t an issue of the existence or nonexistence of gods, or of religion versus irreligion. This is about freedom of religion–something that every decent person of any belief ought to stand behind–versus religious indoctrination — something that every thinking person ought to abhor. Nonetheless, the media has done its job of painting this as a Christians vs Atheists battle.

Throughout the winter and spring of this year the clash went back and forth. All other public school districts eventually announced they would find secular venues.  Enfield persisted in their fight to have the graduation in a Christian Church, until Judge Janet Hall ruled that they must find a secular alternative.  She wrote that the plaintiffs “clearly demonstrated a likelihood of irreparable harm … on the merits that holding the graduation ceremonies at First Cathedral violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.”

Enfield appealed the ruling, even as they agreed to hold the ceremonies at the schools. The town insists that their graduation, despite being held in a religious facility, was to be a secular event. They also insist that students will be “harmed irreparably” if this secular event is not held in a religious facility. You can‘t have it both ways. The fact that you think it is crucial to hold the ceremony there proves that it shouldn‘t be there.

Those who argue that the relatively small number of plaintiffs should render the case absurd need a strong lesson in the US Constitution, a document which exists to protect the rights of all Americans, including unpopular minorities. A court has found that some students may be harmed if the graduation is held in the megachurch; no students will be harmed by holding the event in a secular facility. If you think harming some is better than harming none, then your religion failed to teach you morality as well.

The First Cathedral is an inappropriate venue not because of what goes on there on sunday mornings but because of what students, faculty and their families will be tacitly endorsing when they enter. The church, as should be expected, is replete with Christian imagery.

A very large cross rises above a stained glass cupola on top of the Cathedral’s roof. This cross is visible from all angles of the Cathedral’s surroundings.

Above the main entrance doors, there is a large cross (approximately 25 feet high and 10 feet wide) embedded within the window panes.

…a large fountain that could be perceived to be a representational shape of a tomb.  The jets that supply the water in the fountain are arranged in the shape of a cross…

…numerous pictures depicting biblical scenes, such as the birth of Jesus Christ.  On the first floor, there is a framed poster of the Lord’s Prayer.

These are just a few details from Judge Hall’s decision.  In short, the only people capable of covering all the religious paraphernalia inside and outside the megachurch are Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

All of this will undoubtedly serve to make any non-Christian attendees feel excluded.  Christians pretend to have a hard time understanding how religious imagery can alienate people of other beliefs, yet many seem to be thoroughly disgusted with any attempt to include other beliefs, philosophies, languages and lifestyles, and act as if their rights are being violated by not being permitted to spread their ideas. Vincent McCarthy, lead counsel for Enfield’s defense team, claimed that “graduating students … will be harmed irreparably, as they will needlessly forfeit their graduation ceremonies at First Cathedral.” He makes it sound as if having a religious graduation is a right that is being stripped from the students, but I’ve perused the Constitution and can find no support for such a right.

A further complication to the use of the church is the fact that taxpayer money will be used to pay for the services of an organization whose only purpose it promote a religious agenda, and this too is an unacceptable violation of our rights.

It has been falsely reported that the church is charging the school $5,000 or $8,000 to use the facility.  According to Judge Hall’s decision, the First Cathedral is charging $8,500 for the use of the church for the evening, an additional $1,000 for the rental of a temporary handicapped access ramp (because for some reason the church is not adequately accessable), and $1,160 for an afternoon reception — for each of the two schools.  That’s a total of $21,320 going directly into the pocket of a Baptist church. This comes at a time when the Hartford Courant is reporting that “About 25 teachers may be laid off, and more than 40 other staff positions may be cut” due to budget restraints in the town.

And because it is a fact that there were many alternative venues available, at a lower cost and closer to the schools, it must be concluded that the decision to hold the graduations in the megachurch was based on nothing more than the town’s desire for the ceremonies to be at least partly Christian.

I don’t think I need to descend into cliche by asking you to imagine the scene if graduation were held in a mosque, or if behind the students marching toward their hard-earned diplomas was a large banner that read “Darwin was right!” or  “Oh, the places you’ll go if global warming doesn’t kill you first.” Or why not hold it in a strip club or a gay bar? What’s the big deal — we’ll just throw a sheet over the dancers and stock the bar with Fresca. Presto–perfectly secular.

We send our kids to public schools so that they can learn facts, problem solving and the scientific method. We teach them about the famous political leaders and philosophers, secular and religious, and what they believed.  But we shouldn‘t force them to adopt any of those beliefs, and we can‘t exclude them from any school events because they don‘t share them. It seems to me that one of the most important goals of public education is to teach students about our nation’s history and its founding documents, especially the Constitution, and the rights they provide, including the separation of church and state.  Capping off 13 years of secular public education with a religious ceremony is a bit like closing an AA meeting with a game of beer pong.  But thanks to Judge Hall, this time, students won’t be forced to drink the Kool-Aid.

mr dan is the vice president of Connecticut Valley Atheists.  The views expressed in this posting are his own and do not necessarily represent those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.

by Johanna
Watch this as a vlog.

Now that we’ve grown used to (and weary of) the debate over what should be taught in science class, Texas has apparently decided to take things in a new and exciting direction. The latest attempt at converting public schools into factories designed to spit out Christian conservatives is aimed at a different subject: history. The Texas State Board of Education has decided to “remove the liberal bias” from the classroom, which apparently requires no small amount of revisionist history.

Funnily enough, I don’t completely disagree with them. The current curriculum is biased. I don’t think it’s nearly as liberal as they seem to believe, but then again, I’m biased. And of course I am; I’m only human. Bias is an intrinsic part of who we are. We’re only capable of interpreting the world through our own unique perspective. Who I am and what I’ve experienced directly informs my opinions and priorities. The same can be said of those who assembled the current history curriculum in Texas and elsewhere. Their decisions about which historical events and figures are important enough to be included in the lesson plan are colored by their own personal histories. A pacifist would naturally tend toward creating a curriculum that helps illustrate their belief that peace is better than war, while a religious scholar would tend to downplay events and people that challenge or contradict the supremacy of his or her own specific religion. They may not even be aware of this bias, but it does exist. History lessons also tend toward a strong patriotic bias. It’s unavoidable.

Because it’s impossible to please everyone, there’s still a lot of controversy over what is and isn’t taught in schools. As I’m sure you’re aware, a lot of parents would rather their precious babies never even heard the word evolution, while my dad still thinks it’s a travesty that I don’t know how to use a slide rule.

The problem here is that Texas is trying to fight bias with bias. This is a ridiculous proposition. It’s not like fighting fire with fire; it’s like fighting the rain with sprinklers.

The new curriculum being put forth by the board is a blatant attempt at skewing the bias as far to the right as possible under the guise of “restoring the balance”. In doing so, they’re removing Thomas Jefferson from the picture, marginalizing the separation of church and state, and emphasizing the supposed Judeo-Christian influences of the founding fathers, all in spite of the historical evidence to the contrary. Then there’s my personal favorite: Joe McCarthy is to be touted as a national hero. That’s right, the man who ruined countless lives in the 50’s in the name of his fruitless witch hunt was a good guy. Apparently.

Honestly, I could do without the judgment statements from history teachers and textbooks. I think teaching history in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys” is a terrible idea. Wars aren’t battles of good against evil, they’re complicated conflicts in which all involved tend to commit atrocities in the name of what they believe to be the greater good, or at the very least the greater personal benefit.  We can explore the motivations of different factions and their leaders, but labeling one side “good” and the other “bad” is not only biased; it lays the foundation for the very same type of “us vs. them” thinking that leads to wars and atrocities in the first place. History isn’t full of heroes and villains, it’s full of three dimensional people doing good, bad, and (most of all) morally ambiguous things.  There’s nothing wrong with a history teacher pointing out when certain actions or beliefs led to pain and suffering, but labels like “good” and “evil” actively discourage rational thought. Of course, none of this is about encouraging rational thought.

It’s pretty obvious that the Texas SBOE isn’t trying to cut down on the bias. It’s a political agenda, plain and simple; even they aren’t arguing that. Representative David Bradley said it quite clearly:

“We’re an elected body, this is a political process. Outside that, go find yourself a benevolent dictator.”

This is about politicizing basic childhood education, and unfortunately, Texas has the clout to influence curriculum around the nation. Textbook publishers look to Texas for their guidelines for the simple reason that Texas is their largest customer. It’s clear that however they might feel about others messing with Texas, Texas doesn’t mind messing with us.

Representative Mike Villarreal from San Antonio said it best:

“They fail to understand that we don’t want liberal textbooks or conservative textbooks. We want excellent textbooks, written by historians instead of activists.”

I wholeheartedly agree. We don’t need Bradley’s “benevolent dictator,” we just need qualified people assisting us in ensuring that our children get a decent and accurate education. The only way to alleviate any of the bias in classrooms, political or otherwise, is to present as much factual information as possible and teach the students to come to their own conclusions.

Of course, rational thinking is just as frightening to religious conservative parents as liberalism, if not more so. At least if teachers are telling kids what to think, the parents can counter it by telling their children that it’s all lies. If the children learn to analyze evidence and come to their own conclusions… well, that’s how I became an atheist. How about you?

Johanna is a member of Connecticut Valley Atheists.  The views expressed in this posting are her own and do not necessarily represent those of Connecticut Valley Atheists or its individual members.