Saying Grace

The big holidays are fast approaching, especially here in the U.S. Thanksgiving is less than a week away, then Christmas. For many, it's a time for family and friends to get together and eat way too much delicious food.

As a Pastafarian, I celebrate Holiday which is the whole holiday season and requires nothing formal. But my husband and I also do the traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with his family.  

Since everyone knows I'm a happy godless heathen, no one ever asks me to say a prayer before our meal. But I also get together with my fellow heathens for dinner near these two holidays, and so I thought it might be nice to have something to say.

I looked up some definitions and found that prayer and invocations are both fairly religious terms, namely to beg to a god. 

But this morning I thought, oh, what about grace? What does grace actually mean? There are many definitions but here is one I particularly like:

Grace: favor or goodwill. Synonyms: kindness, kindliness, love, benignity (what an awkward word that is!)

On that same page I found the following Word Story:

¡Gracias! Grazie! When a Spanish or Italian speaker says thanks, they are invoking one of the meanings behind the word grace. That’s because grace, gracias, and grazie all descend from the same Latin word, gratia. For the ancient Romans, gratia had three distinct meanings: (1) a pleasing quality, (2) favor or goodwill, and (3) gratitude or thanks. We find all three of these meanings in modern-day English. The first when we describe someone as having (or not having) grace: “Dancing, she had all the grace of an elephant on skates.” The second when we talk about giving or getting grace: “by the grace of God.” And the third when we say grace (i.e., “thanks”) at a meal. So if you have something to be grateful for, you can say thank-you, gratia, gracias, or grazie.

While I can skip the god bit, I like the idea of being thankful. None of us is an island, so it's good to reflect on our interconnectedness and interdependence with our fellow humans, and all other life.

Around this time of year, I usually think of all the things I'm grateful for, and to whom I owe thanks.

It's good (and human) to have traditions with those you care about, it's good to be mindful of events and markers in your lives, to honor those who deserve it when appropriate.

Here are some things you can say if you are asked to say grace at a meal:

Do We Choose To Not Believe?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote Spot On!, which was about Alise Wright's list of assumptions for Christians not to make about Atheists. I thought they were excellent.

There was one little thing that she said though, that has spurred a follow up post on her own blog, about Free Will and Faith. She said,

Most atheists who have “deconverted” from a religious background have studied it and other religions thoroughly before choosing not to believe.

Mikespeir, in the comments, called attention to this:

If I have any reservations at all about this, it’s that “choosing not to believe” hung off the end there. I never chose not to believe. Once I realized I didn’t believe anymore I chose not to keep practicing the Christian religion. That was the choice involved.

I agree with Mike. I never chose not to believe.

Of course, I agree with Alise that we seem to have some say in our actions. We choose to read certain books/information (the bible¹ and/or Dawkins), attend different events (either church or TAM²), and we choose the people we associate with.

I have to throw in here, that this assumes that we have free will. I have learned in the past year that we most likely don't. We are determined by a myriad of previous factors. But I won't get into that here. 

Support Nontheistic Festival For Our Troops

An awesome secular event was planned at Fort Bragg, North Carolina on April 2, but now it's been canceled. You can write letters and emails to try to get it going again (see below). Justin Griffith has tirelessly put this event together, so let's help our secular troops out.

Secular Coalition for America sent me this information a bit ago:

Demand Fort Bragg Support Nontheistic Festival
Army Garrison Commander Refused to Provide Event Support

“Rock Beyond Belief,” a festival of nontheistic speakers and musicians that was going to be held at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on April 2, has been canceled after Fort Bragg’s garrison commander refused to provide adequate support for the event – even though Fort Bragg officials had made similar arrangements for a religious event just months ago.

Among those scheduled to appear at the festival were author Richard Dawkins; Dan Barker, copresident of the Freedom From Religion Foundation; “Friendly Atheist” blogger Hemant Mehta; Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation; and musicians Spoonboy and Roy Zimmerman.

Rock Beyond Belief’s organizers had asked for lesser or equal amounts of support for their event than the Army and Fort Bragg officials provided for the Billy Graham Evangelical Association’s “Rock the Fort” celebration in 2010. You can see a complete comparison of the more than $100,000 in government funds provided to the Rock the Fort event to the funds asked for by the Rock Beyond Belief organizers here.

Petitions by Change.org|Start a Petition »

Letting the Holiday Pendulum Come to the Middle

I like things in balance. I like moderation. I don't always eat in moderation, but I understand I'd probably be happier if I did. I know we can't always be balanced, of course, but sometimes the middle ground is a nice, mellow place to be.

As you know, I don't talk about politics, but if you asked me what I am, I'd probably label myself some sort of moderate. I think both extremes are unhealthy. When you start talking about diets where something is given up, I think moderation is a much more realistic goal.

Certainly there are areas where denial of something is for the best, where something like alcohol or cigarettes are completely harmful (alcohol is not completely harmful to most people, but to someone who can't control their intake, then it is definitely a serious problem).

Anyway, what am I rambling on about? Well, I was raised in a traditional dysfunctional christian household with Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. Even after I shed the heavy dead albatross of religion and became a godless heathen, I still put up a tree, gave christmas cards and gifts, and had christmas dinners with family.

Then a couple of years ago I completely swung the other way. I ditched the tree and decorations, told people I'd rather just spend time with them during the holidays than exchange gifts or cards (thereby abandoning the stress, guilt and huge expense), and basically just went to family dinners (well, can you blame me? Good food should never be forsaken!)

But a friend's status update on Facebook a few minutes ago reminded me that maybe my little black cindered grinch heart is still beating after all. My friend merely said that he was getting ready to celebrate Festivus and I thought, "Oh, that sounds like fun. A secular celebration!" So I don't have to seem like such a scrooge. I can just say I celebrate something different.

Finally a Non-AA Solution To Addiction: Lifering

I don't claim to know a lot about addiction to alcohol or drugs, since I don't drink, smoke or take drugs (unless prescribed). Of course, I am addicted to coffee and caffeine... and naps. Anyway, one thing that really frustrates me as a godless heathen, is how the only game in town for people who want to overcome their addiction to alcohol or drugs is AA or NA, which are heavily religious and not really based on scientific research.

The main idea behind AA/NA is that you admit you are helpless over your addiction and must turn your life over to a higher power. If you have a problem and end up getting pulled over for drunk driving or caught with drugs, you can end up being court-mandated to go to AA/NA. So if you're an atheist you still have to go and "work the program" and give your life over and admit you are powerless. If you fight it though, the court can't force you to go to AA, because even though "it's not deemed a religion, it contains enough religious components to make coerced attendance at AA meetings a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the constitution".

And then there are the studies done about the effectiveness of AA/NA. The results so far have been inconsistent. AA, which has been around since about 1939 (when the Alcoholics Anonymous book was published) and now has 1,867,212 members and 106,202 AA groups worldwide, still can't produce conclusive studies that show it works.

So far in the research that has been done, the participants have been self selected. So no randomized double blinded trials exist. I don't know how they would be able to do that, but certainly it shows a huge limitation that everyone is self selected. A Cochrane Review of 8 studies published between 1967 and 2005, measuring the effectiveness of AA, found "no experimental studies unequivocally demonstrated the effectiveness of AA" in treating alcoholism, based on a meta-analysis of the results of eight trials involving a total of 3,417 individuals. To determine further the effectiveness of AA, the authors suggested that more studies comparing treatment outcomes with control groups were necessary.

Also, most people who start AA drop out, 95% according to AA's own surveys. But there really hasn't been much of an alternative. Until recently.

Now there's Lifering Secular Recovery. Here are some facts about Lifering: