According to new data from the Pew Research Center only 70% of Americans are Christian. That’s down from 78% in 2007. Non-Christian religions — Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus — grew slightly from 4.7% to 5.9%.

The number of “unaffiliated” people grew more rapidly. More than 22% of Americans do not belong to any religion — up from 16 % in 2007. In California, 27% of us do not claim any religious affiliation. The number is even higher for young people.

Some unaffiliated people are spiritual but not religious: they have turned away from organized religion. But the unaffiliated also includes a growing number of atheists and agnostics, who make up 7% of the population — that’s more than all non-Christian religious believers combined.

These statistics have alarmed conservative pundits such as Pat Buchanan. In a recent column, he cited this data as portending the death of American Christian culture. Buchanan links declining Christianity with moral decay, citing broken families, assisted suicide and abortion. He concluded, “As Christianity dies, individualism, materialism and hedonism replace it.” Buchanan fears a wave of “barbarians” threatening Europe and America “from the south.” He ominously warns that we are committing cultural suicide.

This rhetoric is dangerous. Fears of barbarian hordes and cultural suicide can prompt the need for radical — and possibly violent — reaction. Beneath the fear-mongering, Buchanan fails to see that many come to Europe and America to escape religious fundamentalism in their home countries. They come here because of our secular system.

Even if immoral “barbarians” were really attacking core values, the solution is not reactionary religious intolerance. We can’t make church mandatory, as an Arizona legislator recently proposed. Rather, the solution is better secular education. We defend against “barbarians” by teaching them the virtues of secular democracy.

Modern secular culture is complicated. Science has opened new vistas unimagined by ancient scriptures. Technology creates new ethical challenges. And new voices join our public debates. All of this is difficult. But it is much better than a cramped world of forced conformity.

A secular legal system recognizes religious liberty as a basic human right. This means that some people will choose new religions or will leave religion behind. That sort of diversity is the price of liberty. And it is a great improvement over the stifling orthodoxy of previous centuries.

The worry about religious decline is based upon misplaced nostalgia. It is a myth that there ever was a time of religious harmony and homogeneity. Galileo was threatened by the Inquisition. Columbus left a world where Christians fought Muslims and slaughtered Jews. He discovered a world with completely unknown religious ideas. The world has been fractured by religious controversy for millennia.

Long centuries of violence within Christendom eventually gave way to our secular system, which allows us to live in peace despite deep differences. One result of secularism is that people will question traditional pieties. So what? As long as we treat one another kindly, tell the truth, pay our taxes, and take care of business, it makes little difference whether we are Christian or not.

And yet, Buchanan is right that individualism, materialism and hedonism are problematic. But you don’t have to be a Christian to understand that. The Roman Stoics warned of similar dangers — as did Confucius and the Buddha.

The great moral traditions teach a core of ethical common sense. Love your neighbor. Find something larger than yourself to believe in. And recognize that there is more to life than short-term pleasure.

Critics may argue that without God, morality loses its anchor. But basic moral truths do not rely upon any particular religious story. And secular culture does not require anyone to give up his personal anchor. It merely allows each of us to find our own way forward within common moral limits.

The growth of religious diversity and non-religion is not a sign of cultural suicide. Rather, it reflects the robust health of our secular system. In some parts of the world today non-believers are massacred. But we have found a better way.

Hedonism and materialism are problems. But intolerance and religious violence are worse problems. The only acceptable solution to any of these problems is more freedom, better education, some historical knowledge and a healthy dose of ethical common sense.

Andrew Fiala is a professor of philosophy and director of The Ethics Center at Fresno State. Contact him: fiala.andrew@gmail.com

May 15, 2015May 31, 2015

Living in Accord with Nature

Technology is amazing, but happiness comes from accepting life as it is

Fresno Bee, May 15, 2015

Technology promises infinite possibilities for improvement, while creating a challenge for happiness
Stoic wisdom encourages us to take the time to love and accept the world
Philosophical reflection on infertility, gender transition, and other technological innovations points toward deep questions about human life

We do not live in accord with nature. Never content to leave things alone, we tinker and experiment, invent and explore. Growth and innovation are the driving forces of the free world and the free market.

Technology has created previously unimagined possibilities. Bruce Jenner’s gender transition and Sofia Vergara’s frozen embryos are reminders of a new array of options, which create new ethical challenges. Gender and infertility were once viewed as fixed points of nature. Now they can be modified according to our own desires.

Hurray for freedom and ingenuity. But choice breeds discontent. When there is always room for modification it is difficult to accept the status quo.

Our technological prowess encourages us to dream of who we want to become. Our political liberty allows us to actualize our dreams. So we avoid reconciling ourselves to the flaws and faults of the world. Why accept our limitations, when we can overcome them through science?

Technology promises solutions for all of our problems. There is even an app called “Happify,” whose website claims that happiness is “winnable” with just a few clicks per day. So much for the long, slow struggle up the mountain to find enlightenment. We are too busy for that.

Each consummation of happiness is fleeting. So we jump back on the treadmill, looking for other satisfactions, expecting something new, exciting, and different.

A sign of this is the experience of phantom phone vibration, an imagined pocket vibration, which feels like your phone is buzzing when it is not. Apparently, this is common. Ask a teenager for confirmation. We are so primed for diversion, so eager for new stimulus that we conjure it up for ourselves.

I worry that with each bit of instant technological gratification and each new choice, we forget that life includes boredom, sadness and grief—as well as joy and inspiration. In the end, our freedom will come to naught: there is no app for immortality. In a technologically mediated world, it is easy to ignore the natural, human processes of living, learning, loving and losing.

Of course, our lives are easier today. Technology is useful, in moderation. But the urge to improve must be supplemented with the wisdom that comes from being reconciled with the inherent imperfection of things.

Tranquility comes from learning to love the world as it is and accepting things as they are. This is a common refrain in the world’s wisdom traditions.

The ancient Stoics encouraged a life in accord with nature. A central lesson of Stoicism is the need to embrace life as it is—along with its fragility. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus said, “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do.”

Wouldn’t it be great to love the world as it is, without qualification? Perhaps the best model is a mother’s love. A loving mother completely affirms the goodness of her child. She wants the child to grow and develop. But an adoring mother does not dream of a different child: she loves this one, with all of its beautiful blemishes.

Mindful acceptance of the world is the path to peace. This world exists here and now—as it is. We can tinker around the edges, but reality can’t be fundamentally changed. This body is what it is. It will continually age and degenerate. The people I share the world with are finite and flawed, like myself. I’m stuck with them, as I am stuck with myself. Mindful acceptance embraces flaws and faults along with beauty and charm, acknowledging that this is reality—messy, broken, and incomplete.

In our free and creative country there is ample opportunity for innovation. But there is a pressing need for unqualified love and serene acceptance. This is the only life we are privileged to live, the only world we will ever know.

Acceptance is difficult in a world of faultfinding pundits and dreamy advertisement. Our culture thrives on the idea that things could always be better. The hope for the better gives us a reason to roll up our sleeves and get to work. But work makes no sense without a Sabbath that consummates our efforts with an affirmation that loves the world.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/living/religion/article21117348.html#storylink=cpy

May 1, 2015May 5, 2015

Mind Your Own Business

Love, death and the spice of life

Fresno Bee, May 1, 2015

Gay marriage, assisted suicide and marijuana reform point in libertarian direction
Meddling busy-bodies often breed unhappiness
Liberty and diversity allow for human flourishing

We would all do much better if we would learn to mind our own business. Sometimes we need help and guidance. Children certainly do. But with regard to the moral and religious commitments of adults, it’s best to keep your opinion to yourself.

Recent issues point in this direction. Lawmakers in California are considering new legislation that would legalize physician-assisted suicide. The U.S. Supreme Court is debating gay marriage. Marijuana has been legalized in a variety of places.

Our multicultural society is becoming more complex as we work our way through the question of how much liberty we ought to permit. Liberty breeds complexity, creativity and conflict. When we leave people alone, the world becomes more interesting.

But it is not easy to leave others alone. We have a natural compulsion to meddle. If I believe that my ideas are right and good, it is reasonable to think that others can benefit from them. All true believers have the urge to evangelize.

But in a pluralistic society, our evangelical urges collide with the equal and opposite energies of those who have different ideas. Disagreement is a natural law of liberty. We can measure our freedom by the extent of our disputation.

Some like alcohol. Others like marijuana. And others abstain. A similar diversity is found with regard to the question of who we love and how we want to die. There is no consensus about these topics. The best we can do is agree to leave each other alone.

A friend and mentor of mine, the philosopher John Lachs, wrote the recent book “Meddling: On the Virtue of Leaving Others Alone.” Lachs encourages us to “curb our desire to rule over other people.” He says we must abandon the supposition that ours is “the only natural or worthy way to live.” We must resist the evangelical urge.

For that to happen, we need humility and a bit of historical perspective. People have disagreed about religion, morality, culture, and politics for millennia. Most attempts to impose rigid homogeneity have produced suffering. The solution is to allow as much liberty as possible.

In the end Lachs suggests, most of what other people do simply doesn’t matter. Does it really matter what other people do in the bedroom, who they love, how they recreate, how they pray, what they eat, or how they end their lives? It’s obnoxious to think that your neighbor’s private choices are your concern.

Of course there are some difficult questions. There are risks and benefits that must be weighed. It is possible, for example, to imagine insurance companies profiting from permissive suicide laws. Drug addiction and intoxicated driving are serious concerns on the marijuana frontier.

Such problems should make sense to everyone involved, even proponents of these ideas. Legislation and regulation should aim to minimize these risks. But the most significant goal of a secular political system is to prevent government from meddling in our moral and religious beliefs.

Liberty destroys conformity. There is no denying that. Those who value a dull, bland sameness will be disappointed by what happens when liberty is unleashed.

We often forget that libertarian political systems are new and innovative. In the old-days, a priest-king would decide what everyone had to do. Conformity was often enforced under penalty of death. And even when busy-bodies don’t have political power, meddling moralists make life miserable.

In a free, pluralistic society, we will often dislike the choices that others make. But as long as we leave each other alone, we’re making progress. We don’t have to agree about sex, marriage, death, dying or drug use in order to get along. We simply need to stay out of each other’s business.

Living, loving and dying are hard enough for each of us. Tending your own garden is work enough for a lifetime. And when we are left alone to cultivate our gardens in our own way, we may be pleasantly surprised by the result. Some will plant tomatoes. Others will grow carrots. Some will invite the wildflowers to bloom.

Freedom gives birth to variety, which is, as they say, the spice of life. Liberty, diversity and social conflict make life exciting, nutritious and often unexpectedly beautiful.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2015/05/01/4504941/andrew-fiala-on-ethics-love-death.html#storylink=cpy

April 17, 2015May 5, 2015

The Vegetarian View

The vegetarian view

Fresno Bee, April 17, 2015

Environmental and health concerns point toward vegetarian diet.
Concern for animal suffering leads some away from meat.
Vegetarian morality has deep roots.

Vegetarianism is on the rise. Actress Pamela Anderson recently served vegetarian meals to inmates in an Arizona jail. Anderson explained that vegetarian meals help promote compassion and nonviolence. The sheriff was less idealistic: he touted meatless meals as a cost-saving measure.

Not only is a meatless diet compassionate and cheap, it is also good for the environment. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that avoiding meat saves water. According to the Times’ data, it takes about 22 gallons of water to produce one ounce of soy burger, compared with 106 gallons of water to produce one ounce of beef. Earlier this year, The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee concluded in a draft report that vegetarian diets are both better for the environment and better for human health.

The health argument is complex. Another study, from a medical university in Graz, Austria, concluded that vegetarians are less healthy. Exercise, affluence and other factors matter with regard to health. If you double down on French fries, you don’t benefit from skipping the burger. Despite the Graz study, the consensus seems to be that vegetarian diets are healthy and environmentally sustainable.

My own journey to vegetarianism began 20 years ago when my sister asked me to clean a chicken. She liked to eat chicken, she said, but the preparation grossed her out. That got me thinking about my own disconnect from the meat I ate. I decided that if I wasn’t willing to kill it and clean it myself, I wasn’t going to eat it. I haven’t eaten meat in 20 years. And I’m healthy and happy.

I discussed vegetarianism with a carnivorous dinner companion the other night. He told me of growing up on a poultry farm, where he’d killed more than his share of chickens. He had also slaughtered goats and cows. He admitted that it’s not pleasant to kill and bleed a cow. But he happily munched his steak. Disgusting but delicious, he suggested.

There’s no doubt that some disgusting things are necessary and justifiable. But meat eating is not. You can live quite well without it. But an argument based upon our feelings of disgust is fairly weak. A deeper moral argument focuses on the question of animal suffering.

Now some deny that animals suffer, claiming that animal pain is merely a physical response without moral meaning. But pet owners will disagree. Dogs wince in pain and wag their tales in delight. If I care about the suffering of dogs or cats, then I should care about other critters.

Some carnivores argue that the pleasure of meat offsets the suffering of the animal. But vegetarians claim that the pain of the pig outweighs the pleasure of bacon. We should be more humble, I think, about causing suffering in the name of pleasure. Related to this is the idea the we should “live simply so that others may simply live.”

Vegetarianism also has mystical and ascetic overtones. In Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, a commitment to nonviolence can be extended toward compassion for all living things. In ancient Rome, the philosopher Porphyry made a similar argument. He thought that learning to be considerate of animals helped us learn to be compassionate to one another. He also thought that taming the appetite for meat helped to liberate the soul.

You don’t have to be a mystic or monk, however, to understand that it is good to avoid causing suffering. Nor do you have to think that animals are equal to humans to reach vegetarian conclusions. Human interests matter more than animal interests. If I were trapped with my dogs and my children on a desert island, we’d eat the dogs. But in a world with plentiful vegetarian options, one can eat well without eating meat.

I’m not dogmatic about this. I eat fish and eggs on occasion. I don’t nitpick the ingredients in food served by friends or in restaurants. And I don’t mind sharing a table with amiable meat eaters.

There are vicious vegans and caring carnivores. There is no necessary connection between diet and morality. But vegetarianism reminds us to think about reducing suffering and simplifying our needs. Vegetarianism can improve the world, one bite at a time.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2015/04/17/4482343/andrew-fiala-on-ethics-the-vegeterian.html#storylink=cpy

April 3, 2015April 7, 2015

Digital Immortality and the Promise of Eternal Life

Fresno Bee, April 3, 2015

Modern technology makes the Easter promise of eternal life look a bit old-fashioned. Businesses such as Eterni.me promise virtual immortality in the form of a “digital avatar” or “mind-clone.”

A mind-clone is a smart digital replica of your self, based upon a collection of your memories, thinking habits, and values. Future generations would be able to interact with your mind-clone as if they were interacting with you: hear your stories, get your advice, or ask for your blessing.

Advanced mind-clone technology would build a profile of you by tracking your preferences in music, videos, or news — just as Google and Amazon already do. The program would analyze your tastes, interests, and writing style. You could also upload value preferences and stories, training your clone to think and respond like you.

Your descendants could chat with your virtual avatar. You could program it, for example, to send birthday greetings to your grandchildren long after your death. If the technology works, it would be difficult for your grandchildren to tell the difference between you and your mind-clone in a chat-room or email exchange.

But is this really immortality? That depends. When we say that someone like Shakespeare has achieved immortality, we mean that his works and ideas endure. Maybe that’s all we mean by immortality. When viewed from the outside, the self is, after all, merely a collection of habits, actions and thoughts that are observed in the world. All we really know about the immortal bard is what he wrote down.

Shakespeare himself told us (in Sonnet 55) that what lives on against death and oblivion is “the living record of your memory.” As long as memories of you remain alive in someone’s mind, a part of you continues to exist. An interactive mind-clone would keep your memory “alive” in cyberspace.

But, most will protest, the self seems to be more than a collection of data piled high in defiance of the encroaching sands of time. From the inside, I experience my self as soulful conscious being. Death ends my consciousness, even if my mind-clone lingers in its small corner of the Internet.

Moreover, human relations are spiritual — an exchange of souls that is more than a mere transfer of data. An email from the virtual “you” would be a sad echo of genuine communication. From this perspective, digital immortality is a false promise.

As we spend more of our time in virtual reality, however, the spiritual side of things is being transformed into a digital alternative. What, after all, do you really know about the humanity of your Facebook friends besides the images they deposit online?

Leaving these existential questions behind, the ethical question remains: Should we pursue digital immortality? Answers depend upon the motivation for creating a mind-clone. Hope for immortality may be a narcissistic wish. Or it may be a celebration of love.

A narcissist may think he is so important that the future needs him, as if the loss of his point of view will make the universe worse. But it’s presumptuous to think that my great-grandchildren would care to have my mind-clone around, emailing them my opinions about the news, while they are busy leading lives I cannot imagine. On the other hand, it could be cool to have a virtual Shakespeare to consult when we need inspiration.

The best reasons to consider digital immortality are grounded in love. We, the living, may want a virtual clone of our dead loved ones, just as we want pictures and videos of them — as a way of keeping their memory alive. This technology could ease grief and mourning.

It may seem unhealthy to keep oneself focused on interactions with the dead. Chatting online with your dead spouse’s mind-clone may prevent you from moving forward. But this may not be so different from reading a poem written by the dead or whispering a word to the dead in silent prayer. What matters is the dosage and degree of our concern with the departed.

Our lives leave traces in the minds of those we love. That may be all that matters in terms of an afterlife — to be loved in the memories of those we leave behind. Beyond that, there are mysteries that the human mind and its technologies cannot fathom.

Read more here: http://www.fresnobee.com/2015/04/03/4459250_fiala-on-ethics-digital-immortality.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy

Category: Fresno Bee Religion and Ethics Columns

Secular Values are Worth Defending