Burning Things with Meaning

starting a fire is magical

With SARS-CoV2 receding in Seattle, I threw the first yard party since fall of 2019, complete with a bonfire. Over the years, my guests and I have developed the practice of intentionally burning things in the fire as a little ritual. When our primeval ancestors danced all night around a fire, fire was literally at the center of human spiritual practice. Ancient Persian religion established the now-familiar pattern of a holy man (Zoroaster) and his holy book (the Avesta), and Zoroastrians have revered sacred fires ever since. Today, fire is still a potent symbol in people’s minds, and even Unitarian-Universalists have a flame as a symbol, in a slight nod to those ancestral fires. More prosaically, I have found the grownups and kids can both take joy in burning things up. 

In the latest fire, we had a chair to burn. Chairs are always welcome, as the first big item I purged many years ago was a dilapidated chair. Of special note this time was an original portrait provided by an old friend of mine. It was a portrait of her ex-boyfriend, and he had given it to her as a gift after breaking her heart. Into the fire with it! I contributed a bird nest, a literal empty nest to mark this part of my life now that my daughter has bought a home in Pasadena. It was fun to point out to other at the party-goers what the baby birds had left in the empty nest: crap. What a metaphor. Other party goers, young and old, wrote notes on paper and consigned them to the fire. Usually these notes document the negative things that people want to purge or have purged. They can also be love notes to the universe or whatever you want. For one party years ago, the theme was beautifying the world by burning ugly things, and ugly things are always a good addition to the fire. One friend brings old checks to burn, although I don’t know if he still uses checks. A couple I know burned stacks of old documents related to an online controversy that they had been embroiled in. Sometimes what gets burned is something well-loved but worn out, something too beloved to throw into a landfill but no longer worth keeping. 

big fires not allowed this year

Thanks to the heat and drought in the Pacific Northwest, there’s a burn ban across Washington state. Our next fire has to be a modest affair in a metal container. Stupid climate change. 

Other Posts about Ritual

Dance Church Seattle, 2017

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014

Reading about Religion, 2014

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013

Burning Man Temple, 2013

2019

Two timers, no waiting

Timing Group Discussions

Previously, I’ve posted about the problems I’ve seen during free-form discussions, specifically where some people talk more than they need to at the expense of others. When I teach my game-design class each fall, my rule is that students have to raise their hands and be called on. Without that rule, students with certain personality types would speak up more than their share. (The Y-chromosome seems to correlate with this behavior.) When I moderate panels at conventions, I give each member of the audience one chance to ask a question or make a comment before anyone speaks a second time. Otherwise, the quiet members of the audience are shut out while the talkative members get more than their share of attention. I’ve got a new trick that I’m using for a discussion of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: using one-minute hourglasses to give each participant a one-minute spotlight. We start the discussion with a round of one-minutes statements from each person, about a dozen of us.. Then we discuss things more less freely, after which we have a second round of one-minute comments near the end of the 90-minute session. There’s some time after the second round for discussion, but not much. The people in the book discussion group say they like the new system with the timers. 

The trick is to get two timers. We go around the circle and give each person a chance to speak. The first speaker turns over their one-minute hourglass, and when they’re done they hand the hourglass to the third speaker. If the hourglass hasn’t run out, the third speaker lets it run out while the second speaker talks. When the first speaker has finished, the second speaker turns over their hourglass, and when they’re done, they hand the hourglass to the fourth speaker, etc. You could use an electronic timer that restarts instantly, and then you wouldn’t need two, but where’s the fun in that?

I have seen single one-minute hourglasses used before, but they’re awkward when the previous speaker still has time left in their hourglass. I copied the two-hourglass system from a Unitarian meeting about climate justice. Having little props to fiddle with is fun. The timers may be a little dorky, but one thing I like about us Unitarians is that we’re not afraid to be a little dorky together. The Science Book Discussion group that’s reading The Righteous Mind is also through my Unitarian church. 

The one-minute timer is just one way to manage a conversation with a lot of different people and different personalities. My point isn’t that you should use my particular system. My point is that open-format discussions are systematically unfair and that everyone running a discussion needs ground rules or protocols of some sort to even things out better. 

PS: One-minute timers. If you’re in Seattle, you can get one-minute hourglasses at Top Ten Toys in Greenwood, like I did. It’s a neat store. 

Previous blog post. Talking Over Women: Misadventures in atheist meet-ups (October 2014). 

2017

Kate Willich’s Dance Church

Dance Church, Seattle

Secular communities are a pet interest of mine, and my latest discovery is Dance Church, which operates here in Seattle and now in Portland, too. In Seattle, the talented Kate Willich leads people of all ability levels through synchronized dance in a large group, as she has been doing for seven years. The group started as a movement class, but her students soon enough told her that the community she was leading is a church, and she embraced that terminology. The way the “church” concept bubbled up from a secular dance class reminds me of the way that a spiritual “Temple” bubbled up out of the profane Burning Man festival. Dancing together makes you feel connected to other people the way that talking just can’t match. If my Unitarian church featured more dancing, that would be fine by me.

Before we humans could talk about world politics over coffee and share gossip over the fence, we danced together. Walking is something that we humans have to learn, but we are programmed to learn it. It’s the same with dancing. Toddlers are desperate to learn to walk, and adults love to dance. To be fair, not every last person on the face of the planet over the last hundred thousand years has loved to dance, and not every toddler has learned to walk. It’s just the norm, the behavior that the human genome is adapted to. Today, not loving to dance seems common. I know people who basically never dance. But I’m not sure we love dancing any less. What’s different is maybe not so much that we love dancing less but that we fear it more. One reason it scares us is that we don’t know how to do it, and that’s generally because we dance like no one else ever has. In primeval terms, dancing is about making music and moving rhythmically together. In most languages, there’s one word for singing and dancing. In many languages, that same word means ceremony or ritual. For our ancestors, being able to sing and dance was assumed, just like being able to walk is assumed. Dancing together is how our ancestors reminded each other that they were all equal and were all one. But today the culture has taught us that we are all individuals and that it’s shameful to do what other people are doing because that’s bowing to peer pressure. “If your friends jumped off a bridge, would you jump off?” The obvious answer is that it depends entirely on what happened to your friends. If twelve of them are down there in the water under the bridge yelling up at you that it’s OK, then yes, jump off! Today, people are expected to dance as individuals. But not too much as individuals, because if you dance funny, people will laugh. Singers, even professionals, are not expected to write their own songs, but amateur dancers are expected to invent their own choreography, ad lib. The unmet need for dancing in synch creates dance crazes, such as the Macarena or line dancing. Dancers are so grateful to have the choreography provided for them that they flock to these popular dance styles. Predictably, the elites mock the “simple” people who like dancing and don’t like choreographing their own steps. Meanwhile, the people who dance most frequently are often those who are part of a choreographed program. They do square dancing, contra dancing, exercise dancing, or otherwise follow a caller. You don’t see those dancers at the clubs, but you see them week after week at community centers and ballrooms.

Seattle has a chapter of Jerk Church, for eating and singing together; the Seattle Atheist Church, for intellectual discussion; and Dance Church, for dancing. The big thing that any regular church has that these secular communities lack is a multigenerational community. That’s a big ask.

Find out more about Kate Willich, her Dance Church, and more at her website: http://katewallich.com/#/dance_church

For more about how deep dance and music go in the human psyche, read This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. 

Table Grace for Nonbelievers

Plenty to be grateful for

In my atheist household, we have a little ritual to replace prayer before meals. I’m sharing it partly in case some of you would like to try it, partly as a clear example of what I’m talking about when I say that atheists could use more rituals. Atheists don’t have much going on in the way of rituals. In fact, plenty of atheists are hostile to the idea, or at least used to be when we were younger. We don’t like rituals because they’re irrational. But now it turns out that most of how we see the world is irrational, and rituals are useful things for humans who know how to use them. The birthday cake comes with a ritual; and it’s good, irrational fun. Counting down to the new year is another secular ritual, as are weddings and funerals.  Here’s a simple, heathen-friendly ritual from my household.

At my family dinner table, before we eat, each of us says something that we’re grateful for. We call it “saying our gratefuls”.

“I’m grateful that I got rid of a bunch of my old books,” someone might say.

“I’m grateful it stopped raining today.”

“I’m grateful for old friends.”

The practice of praying before eating has a significant real-world effect even if there’s no God listening. It focuses everyone’s attention on the same thing. It marks the beginning of a shared meal. It might remind people to feel gratitude, a feeling that most of us could use more of in our lives. Since my family doesn’t believe in God, we don’t pray, but we “say our gratefuls.”

Visitors join right in. Prayers can be divisive, sometimes even when it’s two different sorts of Christians at the table. Religion is tied up with identity, so divisiveness is basically built in. But anyone can say what they’re grateful for and appreciate what others say. Believers and nonbelievers can say their gratefuls side by side. Sometimes visitors thank God or Jesus, and I’m glad they feel comfortable doing it their way.

In theory, praying before a meal could encourage a sense of gratitude. In practice, however, saying grace is often done by rote. It can be so by-the-book that it doesn’t stir up much of a feeling. At the dinner table I grew up with, a child said grace quickly rather than with feeling. The sooner you finished the prayer, the sooner you ate. Saying gratefuls, on the other hand, can take a bit of time because each person speaks in turn rather than all at once. Nothing is rote. The extra time that gratefuls take may be a feature, not a bug. Sharing a meal is itself a powerful ritual. Steven Pinker says that it promotes a feeling of unity. A longer pre-meal ritual helps people prepare psychologically for a shared meal among family and friends.

Where rote prayers are general, gratefuls are personal. You generate your own statement; no one hands you a script. Everyone listens to each person in turn. When a group of people recite a rote prayer or listen to one person say grace, most of those people contribute nothing. When the people gathered around a table say their gratefuls, on the other hand, each person contributes something unique to the ritual, and everyone else pays attention to them while they do it.

As a game designer, I inevitably have some rules of thumb for how to do gratefuls “right”. First, you can’t repeat what someone else says. That rule is always fun when someone gets scooped, and they have to come up with a new grateful on the spot. Second, you should say a grateful that not everyone could say. That rule makes sure that each person is being personal and not abstract. “I’m grateful for old friends” is OK, but “I’m grateful that John and I took the same chemistry class in college” is more personal. Third, guests have to go first. That’s a joke rule that I spring on guests to get a laugh. Guests don’t have to go first. In fact, there are no rules for what your grateful can or can’t be. I like people not to repeat themselves, and I like people to be personal, but there’s not Pope of Gratitude to lay down laws one way or another. Just speak from the heart.

The reason that religious people do rituals is that rituals actually do work. That is, they have real-world effects, even if their supernatural efficacy is overestimated. Today, many secular people have jettisoned rituals because now we know that those rituals don’t provide supernatural benefits after all. There’s room in the lives of secular people, however, for natural rituals. In fact, we ought to be able to dream up better rituals than ever.

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Here’s an earlier post about rituals: Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man

Land of Nice Atheists

Society without God
by Phil Zuckerman

Here in the States, people willing to call themselves “atheists” are a rare breed. When we gather for a convention or other social function, we find that we have certain traits in common, much like gamers do. Even more than gamers, atheists are brought closer together by the general population’s distaste for us. The same would not be true in Denmark. There, atheism is so common that there’s little to distinguish atheists from the general population. They are the general population. We atheists like to point at Nordic countries as models of modern society. There, we say, atheism is normal and life is good. Why can’t it be like that everywhere? Phil Zuckerman’s book Society Without God takes a close look at Denmark, with an eye toward what atheism, belief, and Christianity are all about there. The Danish atheists, it turns out, are not New Atheists reproduced on a national scale. Surprisingly, these atheists say they’re Christian. They support “Christian” values, pay taxes to support the state church, and even have their atheist kids baptized and confirmed. Can you imagine American atheists happily watching their adolescent children affirm a Christian creed during confirmation ceremonies? Here in the US we take our religion too seriously for that, and our atheism too.   

Christianity is different in the US because we have never had an official church to suppress demagogues and to force religion to stay boring. The Founding Fathers supposed that people would use their freedom from state control to reasonably throw off the superstitions of the priests. Jefferson predicted that the nation would turn Unitarian. Instead, Americans used their freedom from state control to make religion more thrilling. Given free rein in the US, religious visionaries and hucksters have delighted the masses with apocalyptic visions, Doomsday predictions, faith healing, speaking in tongues, new revelations, and the “prosperity gospel,” according to which giving money to a televangelist will make the giver rich. In Europe, by contrast, the official churches kept religion reasonable, respectable and dull. The official church was your religion by default, so all it had to do to retain members was not drive anyone away. The resulting religion is so innocuous that atheists don’t bother to quit. If Danes don’t feel much need to go to church, neither do they see much need to leave it.  

Atheist Danes don’t just go to Christmas services; they get their kids baptized and confirmed, too. Unlike weddings and funerals, baptisms and confirmations are about religious identity and faith. Baptism makes an infant part of the Church, and in confirmation a young person declares faith in Christianity’s tenets. So why do atheist Danes baptize their kids and get them confirmed? When Zuckerman would ask them, they often said that it’s just what they do. A big part of religion has always been “what we do,” the customs and traditions of a people. Practically speaking, getting confirmed means a party and presents, so a youngster has little incentive to bow out. I went through confirmation in the Lutheran church I grew up in. Yes, there was a party, but there was also a year of preparatory education so we could know what beliefs we were confirming. The minister’s wife made clear that, if one didn’t believe the doctrines, one was supposed to back out of the process. Family pressure kept me in the program, and I went through the confirmation rite, but it was onerous to be pressured into publicly avowing things I didn’t believe. Atheist kids in Denmark don’t face any such inner conflict when they go through confirmation. The kids aren’t actually devoting their souls to the service of Christ. Confirmation is just what they do.

In the States, atheists complain about how much tax money is being lost by our not taxing churches. Many would like to take away religion’s special tax status, and many would like to see religion torn down altogether. Personally, I’m more concerned that we enforce the laws we already have against political campaigning from the pulpit and against inordinate salaries for clergy. But atheists in Denmark don’t begrudge a special status to the official Lutheran church. In fact, most of them pay a regular tax whose revenue supports the church. This arrangement, where the government collects revenue on behalf of official churches, is common in Europe but strikes Americans as bizarre. Most Danish atheists are happy to support the Lutheran Church as part of their cultural heritage. 

While most Danes are atheists, they often think of themselves as Christians who support Christian values. What do they mean by Christian values? Opposing gay marriage and abortion? Far from it. They mean being a decent person, helping the poor, caring for the sick, and the general welfare-state apparatus. As Zuckerman observes, the Nordic welfare state is the best realization yet of Jesus’ message that we are to care most for the people who have the least. US atheists are likely to claim that such concerns are merely natural elements of human morality, but this drive to help people who can’t help us in return only feels natural in a culture that’s been steeped in Christian idealism, as ours has. Nietzsche hated Christianity for the way it promoted concern for the lowly and equal rights for all. He saw and despised unspoken Christian ideals motivating the supposedly logical schemes of the utilitarians. Will atheists in the US ever speak admirably of these “Christian” values that they uphold and honor? Not any time soon, I’d reckon.

The atheistic Christianity of Denmark makes neither side in the US happy. Believers don’t want faith to be stripped from their sacred rites, reducing them to mere cultural traditions. Atheists don’t want to pay taxes to support churches, and we don’t want to send our kids to be baptized and confirmed in a church. Both sides take religion too seriously for going through the motions. But if Denmark’s example is too accommodating on both sides to work in the States, can we still learn something from it? If nothing else, Denmark shows us that the bitter animosity in the States between atheists and believers is not the only way.    

2014

Sunday Assembly in Seattle

In Seattle on September 28th, the Sunday Assembly is bringing together nonbelievers to sing, listen to a speaker, and presumably mingle. I’m going to be there to check it out, and if you’re in Seattle, you’re invited to come along. The Sunday Assembly has me curious because it’s the latest big news in efforts to redefine “church” for agnostics. It started as a single location in London, and now it’s spreading across the world. The 28th is the first session in Seattle. It’s common for atheists to assume that believers go to church and sing together because they think God wants them to. Since atheists don’t believe in God, most of us see no reason to gather and sing. But what if gathering and singing is something that originates not from doctrine but from our own primeval history? From the human spirit, one might say. What if there’s something to the experience that’s separate from any supernatural beliefs? That’s what I figure, and that’s why I’ve been following the Sunday Assembly. 

The Seattle chapter of the Sunday Assembly describes itself as “the best bits of church but with no religion and with awesome pop songs!” The Sunday Assembly’s motto seems to be “Live Better. Help Often. Wonder More.” It’s hard to argue with “live, help and wonder.” On the issue of supernatural belief, they finesse the issue. Probably they’ll never describe themselves as an atheist association, and that’s a prudent decision. And they don’t want you to stay away just because you believe in an afterlife. Their mission is to celebrate not “the one life we have,” which would exclude believers, but is instead to celebrate “the one life we know we have.”  

The Sunday Assembly has been in the news, but it’s not the first attempt to create a “church” without belief. Jerk Church has already spread from Oakland to other cities, including Seattle. Members, who call each other “jerks,” are mostly from the Burning Man community, and their “services” are casual, fun-loving potluck suppers, with plenty of booze, weed, and singing. They meet in homes without an authority figure running the show, sort of like first-century Christians. It’s an extremely personal version of church, a private event very different from the public church service that’s typical of mainline churches. The Unitarian Universalist Association provides a cradle-to-grave church community without a creed, and I’m happy to be in a congregation. The Atheist Alliance of America convention had a number of us Unitarians in attendance, but overall I think that UU is probably too churchy for most atheists. It was too churchy for me, at least until my late wife made me attend for several years. The Ethical Culture movement includes congregations with Sunday services, coming-of-age ceremonies, and other church-like elements. The movement started without the ritual elements, but they were added to the the repertoire by popular demand. Ethical Culture’s emphasis on rationality might appeal to atheists, but it doesn’t have a prominent public profile. The Sunday Assembly is expanding, which gives it an appealing story, positioning it as the most approachable “non-church” yet. 

It’s no accident that the Sunday Assembly, Jerk Church, and Unitarian Universalism all feature group singing. In Faith Instinct, Nicholas Wade makes the case that singing and dancing together is a primeval ritual for group bonding. Jonathan Haidt says it activates the “hive switch,” generating group spirit. Once you see a biological reason that singing and moving together helps you feel connected to other people, the song “Kum Bah Yah” makes a lot of sense. The hokey pokey makes sense, and so do the Macarena, Zumba, and country line dancing. In addition to dancing, people sometimes gather to sing songs. Before radio, singing around a piano with friends was a common pastime. Perhaps those were simpler, happier times. Singing, however, is a real watershed moment, where the participant can go one way or another. Singing in a group is so awkward that some people can’t stand it. My Unitarian church has a contemplative service as an alternative to the regular one, and presumably that’s better for people who don’t like singing in a group. For many other people, however, singing together is elevating. They seek it out in choirs, churches or other outlets. Sunday Assembly is banking on providing a powerful human experience that secular people aren’t getting enough of as it is. That’s smart. 

While I’m curious about the Sunday Assembly, I can’t  say that I actually endorse it. It’s a promising concept, but social engineering is tricky and full of ways to go wrong. I’ve heard some great things about the Sunday Assembly and some discouraging things. Time will tell, and I’m hoping for the best.

PS: Since this post, I've been to a few services, spoke at a couple, and gotten to know the local leadership. I'm cautiously optimistic. —JT, April 2015

PPS: The Seattle chapter has closed in 2017. —JT, 2017

Reading About Religion

Humans are tribal.

As near as I can tell, religion is more about ritual, practice, and community than about creeds or theology. It seems as though believers and atheists both want to downplay the practical benefits of religion. Atheists commonly refuse to grant that religion has any benefits at all, and believers prefer to think of religion’s benefits as supernatural rather than practical. My understanding of religion’s practical benefits derives largely from reading I’ve done over the last several years. Here are the books that you could read if you wanted to get a better sense of religion as a social institution that promotes group cohesion.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt

This book talks about the ways that humans are “groupish.” It’s common to see people as selfish, which is how economic theory describes the “ideal human,” but we are also groupish. That is, we have instincts that allowed our ancestors to band together into cohesive groups, especially groups in which one can “lose oneself.” In the West, especially among the educated elite, individualism is so strong that we have a hard time even understanding the way that most humans see society and morality, that is, as oriented toward the needs of the group rather than toward the rights of the singleton. The topic of this book is morality, not religion per se, but it is at the top of my list because it cuts to the heart of the matter. It shows how religion is not primarily about intellectual assent to a creed but rather about practices and rituals that create group identity and mutual cooperation. It also helps educated Westerners see beyond the educated Western worldview. One can’t understand religion without understanding its emotional, group-oriented nature. I’ve run two book studies on Righteous Mind, it’s popular among Unitarian-Universalists, and you can see my supporting material here.

Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, by Ara Norenzayan

An excellent synthesis of current scientific understanding of religion, especially the historical success of religions with a single, judgmental god. Norenzayan combines findings about how religious beliefs affect group behavior today and applies cultural evolution theory to the history of religion. Basically, when people shared fear of divine judgment, they were able to trust each other in larger and larger groups. Today, secular authorities replace God as the source of social trust, especially in places like Scandinavia. Plus an eye-opening chapter about modern-day atheists.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, by Alain de Botton

The author, a Swiss philosopher, challenges secular readers to see the smart systems that religions use for improving human life. He says, for example, that we can emulate how religions derive extra value from community, travel, and art. Some of de Botton’s particular suggestions for secular institutions sound impractical, but he makes a good case that we could come up with some good ones if we tried, and that we should try.

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, by Nicholas Wade

A hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors danced all night around the fire. What does their “religious practice” have to do with religion today? This book helps one see religion as derived from these ancient rites, grounding one’s understanding of religion in evolved human nature. In the West, we commonly think of religion as a mental phenomenon, built out of declarative statements of faith. We use the term “creeds” to mean ”religions”. Wade, thankfully, helps us see the communal practices and unconscious instincts that underly religion. The material in the middle of the book about Islam is interesting but off-topic, and there’s no harm in skipping it.

Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, by David Sloan Wilson

If you think religion is bad and don’t want to change your mind, don’t want read this book. Wilson makes the best case ever for religion’s positive role in civilization. Wilson is an evolutionary biologist, and evolutionary theory explains why religion might be important for human group bonding. Without a mechanism for acting in concert, human groups can only accomplish so much. Because of relentless evolutionary factors, cheating beats cooperating in groups of any size. It takes something special, such as religion, to enforce cooperation and overcome free-riding. Wilson controversially argues in favor of group selection, but that technical issue is separate from the value that religion contributes to society.

Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, by Joshua Greene

The neuroscience of tribalism, how individuals unite into tribes and how tribes fight each other. Although the book isn’t explicitly about religions, it provides the framework for understanding the group cohesion that religions so often promote.

The Evolution of God, by Robert Wright

Wright covers thousands of Western history to show how people have used religion to promote trust and cooperation. Not always, but repeatedly.

This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel J. Levitin

In the human soul, how deep do music and dance go? Very deep. Can you find a community where the members sing and dance together? 

23 March 2015 Addendum

The Origins of Political Oder, by Francis Fukuyama
An amazing work from a powerful intellect, this book provides an overview of state-building from our chimp-like ancestors to the French Revolution. The focus is on political institutions, but he shows how religion has repeatedly served to help order society and foster cooperation on a broader scale. In particular, he shows how the medieval church in western Europe promoted individual rights and women’s rights against the power of tribal patriarchies, thereby laying the foundation for modern, independent judiciaries.

American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, by Robert Putnam and David Campbell

This work is saturated with data about religious people in the US and how they differ from each other and from secular people. It explains an important piece of the puzzle of why religious practice in the States is so different from religion in Europe. Believers in the US innovated a new style of religious practice focused on individual congregations, where members support each other in a socially connected group.

2016 Addendum

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman

A Nobel-prize-winning economist summarizes his groundbreaking career to show you just how irrational humans are. A brilliant, sweeping tour de force. National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012.

2020 Addendum

The Human Swarm, by Mark Moffett

How is it that religion provides a source of group identity that was previously reserved for the tribe or nation? Here’s how. A student of E. O. Wilson’s explains the anonymous societies of Argentine ants, of Homo sapiens, and of a few other animals. Anonymous societies are groups in which individuals can recognize each other as fellow members without first knowing each other as individuals. Most animal groups are undefined (such as herds of gnus) or defined by personal familiarity (such as bands of chimpanzees), but human tribes are defined categorically (where one can identify fellow members even if one has never met them). I reviewed it here.

2021 Addendum

The WEIRDEST People in the World, by Joseph Henrich

Here’s a data-driven account of how modern society developed, with individualism replacing clannishness and analytical thought replacing religious feeling. 

External Link

Have We Evolved to Be Religious? by Jonathan Haidt, 2012

Christmas Unitarian-style

Nordics like to honor Santa Lucia,
a figure of light in the darkness.
Her name means “Holy Light-Girl”.

If you’ve ever wondered how a church congregation might handle Christmas when it’s not a Christian church, you’re in luck. The Unitarian Universalist church where I teach Sunday school is big enough to offer a variety of Christmas-themed events, and they provide a special insight into how a congregation without a creed conducts itself. Here’s a rundown, with commentary.

Festive solstice potluck: First off, if you want some holiday cheer but don’t want to honor the Christmas tradition, per se, you’re covered. Local “Freethought” groups, such as Humanists of Washington and Seattle Atheists, gather at the church for a “Winter Potluck”. Lots of atheists attend but think it’s weird to meet in a church.

Family holiday service: This is my favorite, where the kids do a semi-traditional Christmas pageant, with little kids dressed as sheep, wise men, and the rest. It’s not all by the book. The number of wise men expands to keep kids from getting left out. Sometimes we Unitarians are smeared as “atheists with kids,” and this event plays to that stereotype. Where else could my atheist daughter have ever played Mary?

Family candlelight service: This one’s a little more serious, taking place in the evening, with kids doing readings. Our Seattle congregation has a large number of Nordics, so we do the Santa Lucia bit, where a teen girl with candles on her head walks through the sanctuary with attendants, all in white. There’s nothing particularly universal or unitarian about this ceremony, other than that as Unitarian Universalists we can do whatever we want, and this is one of the things that we want to do.

Candlelight Christmas Eve service: This service is the most traditional of our services, for those of us who really want to get our Christmas fix. Christmas Eve services are beautiful whether you believe in anything or not, and especially if it plays into your nostalgia.

Messiah Sing- and Play-Along: For the real music lovers, there’s an event the day after Christmas where you can sing along to Handel’s Messiah, solos and everything. If you’re handy with an instrument, bring it along and play. It’s so popular that you have to buy tickets, and they always sell out.

Blue Christmas: This special Christmas service says something about how intentional we are about our church experience. This service is especially for people who are sad around the holidays, which is a lot of people. For people in grief, all the holiday cheer, Christmas carols, and kids’ events can make things worse. This quiet service is for them. What other church acknowledges how many people feel the holidays as a time of loss?


In the nineteenth-century, Unitarians and allies, such as Charles Dickens, were central in the successful campaign to transform Christmas from an adults’ drinking party to a tender-hearted, family-oriented holiday. Our congregation continues in that tradition, honoring Christmas, but taking it on our own terms. Our approach is customer-centric. There isn’t any church hierarchy telling us to do anything other than what the various people in our congregation want to do. Merry Christmas!

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man

The Baggage Check dome in 2009. My friend and I
slept in the rental truck on the far right.

Penn Gillette is an outspoken atheist, but in his book God, No he speaks highly of the time that the guests at his party all sang “Kumbaya” together. God might not exist, but “Kumbaya” is real. My atheist “Kumbaya” moment happened at Burning Man this year. At Camp Baggage Check, we performed a welcome ceremony that I had invented for us. It was a little dorky, but it went over well.

Here’s how I introduced the ceremony to the camp, as we were gathered in a circle in our central dome. “Camp Baggage Check is a place that we set apart. Here we come together intentionally, and we behave differently toward each other from how we would in the everyday world. One way that we designate this space as a special is by sharing a welcome ceremony together. For this ceremony, we use three things that humans have used in community-building ceremonies for a hundred thousand years: shared vocalization, shared music, and shared gesture.”

During the ceremony, each camp mate in turn says, “Hi, my name is BLANK,” and then the other forty people in the circle chant in unison, “Welcome home, BLANK!” The chant has a simple melody, just enough to count as music. We included arm gestures, first throwing the arms wide open and then pantomiming a hug. For laughs, I call that the “astral hug." This simple ritual is a far cry from singing and dancing all night around a fire like our ancestors did, but it has vocals, music, and motion. Some researchers say that we evolved particular mental adaptations that help us use these shared activities for group bonding, and I think they’re right.

This year was the first time we did the ceremony with the melody and the astral hug, and I was worried that my campmates would find it too dorky. Frankly, it sounds pretty dorky. But it went over well. People respond warmly to everyone else in the camp chanting a welcome for them. Now we're talking about adding a brief ceremony to do each evening before our shared dinner. It will be an original Burning Man version of saying grace before a meal.

Link

Singing Changes Your Brain, by Stacy Horn, 2013

The Burning Man Temple

The Burning Man Temple is different each year.
This is 2011's Temple.

New Atheist Sam Harris says that if we all magically forgot our religious traditions, we would find no use for our churches, mosques, and other places of worship. In his mind, we would go about our lives without whatever it is that happens in churches and never miss it. It's easy to find fault with organized religion, but I suspect that there is something of value going on in a church or other sacred space. The story of the Temple at Burning Man is an interesting case in point, in which a sacred space insinuated itself into a raucous festival.

In 2000, artist David Best lost a close friend just two weeks before he was scheduled to erect a wooden “Temple of the Mind” at Burning Man. Instead of cancelling their plans in grief, Best and his friends turned their temple into a memorial to their friend. In true burner fashion, they encouraged other people to use the temple to memorialize their own dearly departed, and since then the Temple has been a fixture at Burning Man, rivaling the Man itself in its power. Best is a professional artist with work in museums, but his “Temple” built of waste wood touched people in a way that none of his previous works ever had. To this day, burners gather at the Temple to write messages of loss on the surfaces of the wooden Temple. The Temple and the memorials left in it go up in smoke one day after the Man itself burns. The Temple is a beautiful place where a full-on atheist like me can leave a memorial alongside someone who expects to be reunited with their lost loved ones on the astral plane. It seems as though a spiritual place like the Temple is serving such an important role that it appeared spontaneously in the middle of a wild festival and immediately became part of the culture.

Most people are surprised to hear about Burning Man’s spiritual side, but there are many sides to Burning Man.

Here’s a story about a memorial by law enforcement officers at 2013’s Temple (click).

And here is an online paper that describes the Burning Man Temple (click).

A previous post about my own experience with grief (click).

2011

Burning Man theme, 2011

Rites of Passage

The theme for this year’s Burning Man is rites of passage. That theme provides an opening for me to talk about the Unitarian church where I teach Sunday school. As society has become less traditional and more individualistic, rites of passage have fallen by the wayside. Ironically, Unitarians are so nontraditional that we have circled all the way back to doing some pretty decent rites of passage.

Communal rituals in general and rites of passage in particular used to be a big deal. Adolescent males had their flesh gashed or penises sliced. People endured punishing ordeals or lonely vision quests. Greeks went to Eleusis to have their minds blown in secret mysteries, which apparently involved drinking a psychedelic concoction. Today our rites of passage are attenuated. We still have personal milestones, such as getting your driver license or graduating from school, but rites have lost most of their power. A Bar/Bat Mitzvah or a confirmation ceremony carries less weight in the community at large than does reaching your legal drinking age. As Nietzsche said about modern marriage, rites of passage have lost their meaning and are as good as abolished. Elders have ceded initiation rites over to frat boys, who haze their initiates in a crude approximation of the rites that once inducted boys into manhood.

The Lutheran church I grew up in had two rites of passage, both anemic: first communion and confirmation. In ancient times, these rites accompanied the life-changing event of adult baptism, marking your initiation into the body of church. Often, your ties to family were severed at the same time. But when I experienced them, these same rites lacked any sort of gravitas and even lacked any real supernatural weight. Given my experience growing up, you can imagine my surprise when my Unitarian church turned out to deal seriously with a young person’s rites of passage.

The first stage of passage from child to youth is a world class sex ed program for middle schoolers. Unlike the dry, tentative programs you find in public schools, the Unitarian sex ed program deals forthrightly with feelings, desires, social roles, and personal issues, not just anatomy and condoms. A male and a female teacher run the class together, and a promise of mutual confidence among the students encourages open discussions. The visual aids are remarkably frank, and a broad range of sexual expression is portrayed as within the pale.

The second stage is a full-on coming-of-age program. The goal is to help the kids develop their own beliefs and ideals, rather than inculcating in them any particular set of official tenets. Each child is paired with a same-sex adult from the congregation, someone with whom the child can develop a personal relationship and have confidential discussions. The program also engages in group bonding events, such as a ropes course. The program culminates in a weekend retreat. The kids leave on Friday as children and return to their parents on Sunday as youth. We don’t pretend that they’re adults and instead acknowledge “youthdom” as a distinct stage of growing up. On the retreat, the kids participate in imaginative rituals, designed to have psychological effects rather than supernatural ones. The most arduous trial that these kids face is sitting alone in the woods for six hours without any electronic devices or other distractions. It might not be as severe as the mutilating ordeals of adolescents in many other cultures, but let me assure you that the prospect of this “vision quest” strikes fear into the hearts of these multitasking kids.

As modern people, we no longer have the option of participating in the rites of passage that our ancestors passed down to us through the generations. As the poet Wallace Stevens repeatedly alluded to, we’re in a brave new world where we have no choice but to find our own way. I’m lucky to have found a congregation where the elders take the challenge of growing up seriously.

Now we Unitarians might not be much for proselytizing, but if you know some nontraditional parents with grade-school or middle-school kids, consider forwarding this link to them.


PS: This post was originally written based on my daughter's experience with these classes. Since then, I've served as a coming-of-age mentor myself and have now seen the program from the inside. It’s pretty remarkable. —JT, 2015

Other Posts about Rituals

Burning Things with Meaning, 2021 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2021/07/burning-things-with-meaning.html 

Dance Church Seattle, 2017 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2017/09/dance-church-seattle.html 

Table Grace for Nonbelievers, 2016 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2016/07/table-grace-for-nonbelievers.html 

Land of Nice Atheists, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/10/land-of-nice-atheists.html 

Reading about Religion, 2014 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2014/08/reading-about-religion.html 

Christmas Unitarian-Style, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/12/christmas-unitarian-style.html 

Welcome Ceremony at Burning Man, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/welcome-ceremony-at-burning-man.html 

Burning Man Temple, 2013 https://jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-burning-man-temple.html