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Showing posts with label Only Sky. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Only Sky. Show all posts
Only Sky ✏ Written by Bruce Ledewitz.

 Brooks's essay is the kind that often exasperates nonbelievers. But is there something of value to secular civilization in his God-optional conclusions?

There will never be a secular civilization until we secularists can produce the kind of essay New York Times columnist David Brooks just published about his search for God. 

The importance of the essay lies not in the content of his journey but in its seriousness and depth. Brooks confronts secularists with the old Kantian question—what can we hope for in life?

It is a sprawling essay—4,000 words in a newspaper!—and thus hard to summarize. But Brooks does describe his search in several lessons he has learned. These are worth attending to.
When the search is the point

First, Brooks asserts that the search for God is not, as he had thought, a matter of belief—not about arguments over whether God exists. The search for God is more akin to falling in love. The experiences that lead one to God are “numinous”—"the scattered moments of awe and wonder that wash over most of us unexpectedly from time to time.”

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

What David Brooks's Search For God Can Teach Secularists To Embrace And Avoid

Only Sky ✒ After more than two years of sharing the perspectives of the nonreligious here at OnlySky, we’ve made the difficult decision to stop publication. 

The current landscape for online media, the turmoil of social media, and a difficult investment climate made it impossible to continue. We’re deeply appreciative of the time, support, and hard work of so many people who made OnlySky possible in the first place and helped bring this vision into reality.

First and foremost, we have to thank our amazing writers, editors, and creators. We had the tremendous opportunity to work with some of the greatest storytellers, journalists, and thinkers in this community. None of this would have been possible without them. We hope that you’ll continue to follow their work, and we’ll keep you updated about their next projects.

Second, it’s difficult to fully express our gratitude to the thousands of people who have financially supported OnlySky over the past two years. Big and small, your membership and investment in this work helped us do something that no one had tried before: exploring the whole human experience from the secular perspective. Our community’s voices were—and unfortunately still are—deeply underrepresented in mainstream media and journalism. 

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

The End Of OnlySky - An Experiment In Secular News And Storytelling

Only Sky ðŸ•¶ Mike Johnson, Speaker for the House of Representatives where the Republicans are hanging tenuously onto a slim majority, recently remained true to his label as a Christian nationalist. 

Jonathan MS Pearce

There was no sign of an interest in constitutional secularism at a GOP retreat intended to discuss and plan for a continued majority past the November 2024 elections.

It’s not as if Johnson has tried to hide his Christian nationalism as we have reported previously at OnlySky.

The presentation he gave to the attending captive audience was a prolonged sermon that surprised many who were there. This is the stuff of theocracy. Two people who had collected with other Republican lawmakers at Miami’s Mandarin Oriental Hotel indicated their alarm to Politico.

Instead of strategizing about appealing to a modern pluralistic society in a way that would be unifying, Johnson “attempted to rally the group by discussing moral decline in America—focusing on declining church membership and the nation’s shrinking religious identity, according to both people in the room.”

Without God in people’s lives, the government steps in. And as we know with such republicanism, the state is the enemy. 

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

Moses Johnson Delivers Sermon Tantamount To Theocracy

Only Sky 🕶 It has commonly been argued that there are no atheists in foxholes facing an oncoming enemy assault.

Jonathan MS Pearce

Equally interesting is who is behind the machine gun, driving the tank, flying the drone—or looking through the scope of a sniper rifle?

The horrors of war, the blood-soaked fields of battle, sadly make fertile ground for philosophy, particularly discussions concerning God.

Ukraine is a religious country. In 2022, 85% of Ukrainians saw themselves as Christian and 10% identified as atheists. It would be fascinating to see whether war has changed these demographics at all. My intuitive observation from a short time there is that it is indeed a religious country but in a way where religion is traditionally infused throughout society. It is not so much a modern Protestant phenomenon that is clashing with social and moral evolution in the culture wars we see in the US.

I was privileged to speak to a number of soldiers and civilians in my 10 days traveling a loop of the front lines. I was afforded the privilege of sitting down with one soldier to formally discuss ideas of God and belief in the context of fighting a defensive war against an aggressive invader. I cannot reveal too much about him for reasons of operational security. My discussion was revealing and it gave me an insight, from a liberal atheistic point of view, into the mind of a deeply religious man fighting a war for his own existence and for the future of his country.

It seems that belief in God can very comfortably coexist with the notion of killing people and committing acts of at least a defensive war. For example, there is a theologian called Yuri Chornomorets who is deeply involved in training snipers and fundraising for equipment for them. His Twitter bio is an interesting one:


Ukrainian volunteer, sniper, theologian, philosopher. I help highly professional Warriors of Light!

I have reached out to him previously and asked for an interview but although he was willing, he felt his English was not up to scratch. That is a discussion waiting to happen!

While that conversation is yet to happen, the following one did. In this case, the soldier I spoke to (Dmytro, though I have changed his name), was very open in his answers to me. I’m incredibly grateful to him for the time we spent together.

We sat in a dark room guesthouse very close to the northern border of Ukraine. It would otherwise be a beautiful area to visit in peacetime but now there is very little scope for enjoying the scenery. At night, it is essential to keep the lights at a minimum to avoid unwanted attention from drones circling in the sky. This is something I have experienced elsewhere in Ukraine.

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

Crosshairs 💣 A Christian Fighter In Ukraine, And The Question Of God In War

Only Sky ✏ Reading the Bible is like an archaeological dig.

Adam Lee
The text we have today isn’t one book but many, written by different people from different cultures at different times. There’s no reason to expect that they all had exactly the same religious beliefs. As you read through them, you can notice the inconsistencies, like buried artifacts frozen in time.

There’s persistent speculation that some of the older parts of the Bible were written by ancient Hebrews who had a polytheistic belief system. They imagined Yahweh as one god among many, powerful but not omnipotent. They worshipped him as their tribe’s patron deity, but they didn’t deny that other people had gods of their own. (The technical term for this is monolatry or henotheism.)

Modern-day Jews and Christians wouldn’t admit this, of course. They’d say that the Bible is one coherent text, inspired by divine revelation to different people across the ages, but always conveying the same message. They’d say that there’s only one god, omniscient and omnipotent, and he faces no competition. Any claims to the contrary are demonic deceptions.
Iron chariots: God’s kryptonite?

However, there are some biblical verses that don’t fit with this smoothed-over modern theology. 

Continue reading @ Only Sky

How To Defeat God - Iron Chariots And Human Sacrifices

Only Sky ✏ Christians have been predicting Jesus’ return for two thousand years, and they haven’t given up yet. 

Adam Lee

In fact, evangelicals today still insist that the glorious apocalypse is closer than ever.

Why haven’t they lost hope? Why haven’t they gotten discouraged by the number of accumulated prophetic failures? Why don’t they take a dose of humility from all these previous generations who lived, aged, grayed up and died out while continuously predicting that the Rapture would happen to them?

When optimism becomes toxic

The enduring appeal of religion is that it provides comfort in a chaotic world. It promises believers that they’ll triumph, no matter the circumstances. When a faith is downtrodden and oppressed, it promises its members that God will enact justice on the oppressors. When a faith is powerful and dominant, it reassures its members that they’ll be on top forever because God loves them best.

We all have an optimism bias. we all want to believe that things will work out for us. It’s a built-in part of human psychology. By itself, there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’d argue that optimism is essential. It’s what gives us the strength to persevere when times are hard.

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

God, Trump, And The Psychology Of Inevitability

Only Sky 🔨 A friend’s grandmother took her own life when I was 18. 
M L Clark

She had nerve damage that left her face and neck with a burning sensation during flare-ups, and had been through seven treatment protocols attempting to alleviate the symptom. It frustrated her that she couldn’t be around her littlest grandchildren, whose careless touch could exacerbate the pain, let alone close to her husband. So she waited until her husband was out of town and took pills.

I was over when my friend and her mother heard the news, and I will never forget the character of her mother’s grief. She was devastated to lose her own mother, yes. But she was even more devastated that her mother felt she had to do this alone, without anyone by her side in her last moments, lest they suffer legal consequences. My friend’s mother instantly understood her mother’s choice. She just didn’t understand the cruelty of a society that would compound human suffering by driving someone to carry out that choice alone.

These were the days before Canada offered medically assisted death.

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

Our Secular Struggle With Medically Assisted Dying

Only Sky ✏ A string of deadly far-right attacks across the globe in the past decade or so had one thing in common: a white nationalist conspiracy theory known as The Great Replacement.

Eiynah
29-July-2022

From Utoya, Norway in 2011 to the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, El Paso, Texas and Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, to the mass shooting in a Buffalo supermarket on May 14 of this year—all these vicious attacks were motivated by this hate-filled conspiracy theory.

This paranoid far-right fiction holds that white European populations are being systematically replaced by non-white people through the efforts of a shadowy cabal of Jews/elites/Democrats. The most common alleged means is mass immigration, though different variations feature the elites encouraging low birthrates, abortion, interracial marriage and homosexuality, all to end the domination of the white race and render them a minority in “their own lands.”

In recent years, this alarming and dangerous conspiracy theory has gone from far-right fringe circles to the very core of Republican politics and mainstream TV. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has referenced it more than 400 times on his show.

Continue reading @ Only Sky.

‘The Great Replacement’ 🔨 How New Atheists Legitimized And Spread A White Nationalist Conspiracy Theory

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