{"id":186,"date":"2018-02-23T16:20:14","date_gmt":"2018-02-23T16:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/onusloom\/?p=186"},"modified":"2020-01-30T10:58:43","modified_gmt":"2020-01-30T10:58:43","slug":"ed-buckner-on-not-seeing-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/onusloom\/2018\/02\/23\/ed-buckner-on-not-seeing-god\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Buckner on Not Seeing God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed Buckner is a good man, not least because he kindly agreed to write the forward to the recent anthology of Patheos Nonreligious writers,\u00a0Not Seeing God: Atheism in the 21st Century<\/a><\/em>, released last month. Here is his foreword (and a massive thanks to him):<\/p>\n

\"not<\/p>\n

Something to Learn<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Ed Buckner<\/strong><\/p>\n

I served a satisfying three years as executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, working with and for leading atheists like Paul Kurtz and Tom Flynn. Then, a few years later, I served for over two years as the president of American Atheists, with bright, inspiring colleagues like Kathleen Johnson and David Silverman. (Silverman, by the way, is likely to be best pleased by Hank Fox\u2019s opening lines, since Fox aptly credits an event arguably most important in Silverman\u2019s professional atheist career.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019m a smart, well-read, well-educated guy (modest, too) and relished talking with many hundreds of my fellow secular humanists and atheists before, during, and since those periods. I thought I would be justified by now in thinking that I honestly did not have much to learn about atheism and religion anymore. It gives me great pleasure to tell you I was wrong. Anyone who has even a passing interest in religion or atheism has much\u2014interesting things, important things, fun things\u2014to learn from the writers included in this book.<\/p>\n

If you, even you the longtime student of (and activist for or against) atheism over there in the corner, think you don\u2019t have something to learn by reading these essays, think again.\u00a0 Learn, with zesty delight, how yoga and atheism relate (thanks to Suzanne Titkemeyer), how American military troops and leaders are twisted by religion, how real conversions from Christianity to atheism come about (hint: it\u2019s not just rebelling against \u201cproper\u201d authority), how the claimed omniscience of God renders him impotent, and so much more. Laughs are also abundantly available.<\/p>\n

There are two groups of people who owe it to themselves to read this book: 1. Thoughtful atheists who want to understand more about their irreligious conclusions from a wide variety of practical, moral, and philosophical perspectives; and 2. Thoughtful theists who really want to understand more about their religious conclusions and to learn why thoughtful atheists wisely don\u2019t accept those religious conclusions (or, often enough, don\u2019t even consider the religious conclusions reasonable).<\/p>\n

Those two categories surely include millions of potential readers but not everyone. Atheists blas\u00e9 enough to hold an important conclusion or lack of belief without Socrates\u2019s famous imperative to make life worthwhile by examining such things can ignore all this. Theists who ignore this book can meander through life, wasting time, focus, money, and energy shoring up religious leaders and institutions when there are far better ways to live. The latter can even be smug, as long as no one has ever introduced them to the gospel (the real<\/u> \u201cgood news\u201d conveyed in these pages).<\/p>\n

Atheists can even learn how we might be blindly (religiously?) following Richard Dawkins and not know it, or that we really shouldn\u2019t consider theists \u201cstupid\u201d or see religion as a \u201cmental illness.\u201d If these things puzzle or irritate you, blame Matthew Facciani, not me. Facciani is also the one who can sort you out on why a detective agency and agency detection aren\u2019t the same animal.<\/p>\n

The atheist writers included in this book are all over the map in many ways\u2014professional philosophers and military crime scene analysts, young and old (oh, OK, from my stance at least, they\u2019re all damned young), men and women, cheerful sorts and more grave ones, etc. But they do all have stuff in common\u2014<\/p>\n