Don’t tell an atheist she’s not an atheist

[cbayer]

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/15/dont_tell_an_atheist_shes_not_an_atheist/singleton/

TUESDAY, OCT 15, 2013 03:30 PM PDT

Winfrey disputes Diana Nyad's atheism -- and she's the one who's wrong

BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS


Diana Nyad, Oprah Winfrey (Credit: Reuters/Andrew Innerarity/AP/Matt Sayles)

Diana Nyad is a woman who knows intimately the power of the human spirit, and the fierce beauty of nature. Diana Nyad is also a woman who says she is an atheist. And Oprah Winfrey disagrees with her.

On a “Super Soul Sunday” with the 64-year-old long distance swimmer this weekend — just one month after Nyad’s extraordinary, triumphant swim from Cuba to Florida — Winfrey took strong issue with Nyad’s assertion that she’s “not a God person, but a person deeply in awe.” It’s true that perhaps appearing in a venue with the word “soul” in it might seem an unusual choice for a self-described atheist, but Nyad explained. “I don’t understand why anyone would find a contradiction in that,” she said. “I can stand at the beach’s edge with the most devout Christian, Jew, Buddhist, go on down the line, and weep with the beauty of this universe and be moved by all of humanity — all the billions of people who have lived before us, who have loved and hurt and suffered. So to me, my definition of God is humanity and is the love of humanity.”

Oprah quickly stepped in with some semantic disagreement. “Well, I don’t call you an atheist then,” she said. “I think if you believe in the awe and the wonder and the mystery, that that is what God is. That is what God is. It’s not a bearded guy in the sky.” But Nyad, who knows a thing or two about being undeterred, pressed on, explaining her skepticism of a “creator or overseer.” Later, Oprah, still trying to pin Nyad down, asked her if she felt she was “spiritual,” Nyad replied, “I do. I think you can be an atheist who doesn’t believe in an overarching Being who created all of this and sees over it. But there’s spirituality because we human beings, and we animals and maybe even we plants, but certainly the ocean and the moon and the stars, we all live with something that is cherished and we feel the treasure of it.”

Oprah’s swift insistence that to experience awe and wonder disqualifies one from atheism was immediately picked up on and criticized as a misunderstanding of nonbelievers. As Hemant Mehta explained on Patheos on the “awkward” exchange, there needn’t be anything religious or spiritual at all about an “amazement at how life, the universe, and everything works — how evolution made it that way and how lucky we are to be a part of it at all.” Religion doesn’t have the copyright on awe or gratitude.

more at link

[tanyev]

1. I think Oprah's got atheists confused with curmudgeons.

[intaglio]

2. Links to previous post on this

by pokerfan http://www.democraticunderground.com/121898140
there were also 2 locked posts in GD

[Laochtine]

3. Co-opting awe

to make death pleasant, shameful

[AtheistCrusader]

4. There was one strange bit in it.

“I think that the soul lives on, because we have created so much energy and when we display courage and hope, it lives on. But I do believe the body goes back to ash and it is never more.”

I could interpret that a couple different ways. Information that lives on? Historical record? The memories carried by other people?

Or does she mean a metaphysical soul?

If Nyad meant a metaphysical soul, in anything like the classic sense, then Oprah actually had it right. I would use that term only in the philosophical shorthand of living on in other people's memories, for a time.