Just call me Big Foot(print)

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin

I went to a site recently by way of an email that was sent to me by 4Years.go, which, according to its website, is “a global movement of commitment and action that will cause a positive tipping point in humanity’s future by the end of 2014, setting us irreversibly on a new path to a just, thriving and sustainable future for all.”

Well, I’m all for that.

I was asked to take a quick quiz to find out how big my carbon footprint is. The quiz was several pages long, each page with a separate category of questions, but it didn’t take long to answer them.

Mind you, I was thinking that my little old carbon footprint couldn’t be much because I’m one small person who doesn’t eat much, is a vegetarian, drives a 10-year-old car that gets 37 mpg and recycles regularly. So I was shocked to learn, according to this ecological calculator, that if everyone lived like I did, it would take 3.94 Earths to sustain our habits. Wow.

I figured that my main downfall, ecologically, was the amount of plane travel I incurred over the past year — going to California twice and to Costa Rica once. Since I’m not purchasing offsets each time I travel, that’s a large amount of carbon I’m responsible for in the air.

But when I retook the quiz without my plane travel to see what difference it made, the result barely budged. According to this site, it’s not just the occasional travel that matters; it’s also the daily conveniences we enjoy that contribute to the effect we have on our planet. Granted, this quick quiz doesn’t take into account all the nuances of how we live; some of it is based on national averages. But the methods used to arrive at answers are complex and well-explained on the site. It’s a good tool to get an idea of how we measure up, ecologically.

Here’s the Ecological Footprint website: http://myfootprint.org.

First, it asks you where you live, how many people live in your household and what kind of power you use; it asks what kind of car you drive and how many miles a year.

Next, it asks about your diet and where you purchase your food; it asks whether you seek out organic or locally grown foods, and whether you have a garden.

I don’t want to give it all away, but there are questions about your furnishings, how often you replace things, whether you buy secondhand sometimes and how consistently you recycle.

I retook the quiz a third time, this time answering as a person without a personal car, using public transportation, without any airline miles, living in an apartment of less than 1,000 square feet and buying most of my food from farmers markets. This time, the site told me that if everyone lived like me, we’d need just 2.33 Earths.

An improvement, but hardly encouraging. Purchasing offsets seems to be one of the best things I can do immediately, and it’s not as expensive as I thought — around $50 a year.

How rich are we?

This reminds me of another site I visited a few years ago, which allows you to see how rich you are in relation to the rest of the world. It’s www.global richlist.com/.

It’s very straightforward: Just enter your annual salary and it will instantly compute where you fall percentage-wise in relation to every other wage earner in the world.

Global Rich List was created by Poke, a company based in London whose “creative, nerdy and nice” staff seeks to challenge people’s perception of their personal wealth. The Global Rich List calculations are based on figures from the World Bank Development Research Group.

According to the Social Security Administration, the average wage index in the U.S. was $40,711.61 in 2009.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, using 2008 figures, the median income was about $52,000.

At the low end of the national average, someone earning $40,000 a year is in the top 3.17 percent of wage earners in the world. At the top estimate of the average U.S. wage, someone earning $52,000 is in the top 1 percent of wage earners in the world.

What if you’re making minimum wage in Kansas, currently $7.25 an hour, for an annual salary of $15,080? You’re in the top 12.22 percent in the world. And if you’re working only half time, or 20 hours a week, at minimum wage, you’re still in the top 13.85 percent of wage earners in the world.

In fact, if you’re earning only $1 an hour, working 40 hours a week, you’re still earning more than 83 percent of wage earners in the world.

So, no matter how you slice it, we’re mind-bogglingly rich here in the U.S. compared to the rest of the world.

As Global Rich List states on its site, we can make different choices in order to have a beneficial impact in the world:

$73 could buy you a new mobile phone OR a new mobile health clinic to care for AIDS orphans in Uganda.”

We sure have a lot of collaborating to do to extend the life-sustaining properties of our planet.

 •  This column first appeared in the Salina Journal on Aug. 15, 2011.
Posted in Sustainability, Wealth | Leave a comment

Why rivers intrigue us

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin

My son has lived in China for nine years, first in Dali, now in Kunming, both in Yunnan Province. Dali is an ancient, walled town at the bottom of the Cangshan Mountain Range and beside the large and beautiful Lake Erhai.

During my first visit there, in 2002, we frequently ate our meals at the outdoor tables of the little shop he managed, the Sunshine Cafe. The tables straddled a tiny rivulet, right at our feet. It was basically a carved-out stone gutter running along the front of the various shops, about 8 inches wide, constantly fed by mountain streams. These gutters ran throughout the town. The girls used the water to mop the cafe floors, as did other shop workers down the lane. It was delightful.

That week, we took a trip to a popular tourist town called Lijiang. As our bus approached the ancient burg on that chilly, rainy day, I was immediately taken with the entrance, which featured a double water wheel that paddled water flowing down from the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain Range. This water feature was like Dali’s but on a much larger scale. Instead of little gutters, there were 8- to 12-foot-wide streams flowing briskly through the old-town section of Lijiang, right along the shops and cafes.

The first thing we wanted to do was to get in out of the cold drizzle. We chose a small restaurant, which, like the other shops around it, was open to the elements — no glass windows or doors to keep the chill out. We could see bowls of steaming hot soup on the tables inside. To get to this establishment, we had to cross over the rushing water on a plank, maybe 16 inches wide and 10 feet long, at about a 30-degree angle, up to the doorway. There were no handrails.

I remember thinking, this would never go over in America. But in China, if you fall into the water, it’s certainly not the shopkeeper’s fault — it’s your own fault for being clumsy. Many of the little shops and eateries were on the far side of the rushing water, with similar planks the only way to cross over.

That little town stands out as a highlight of my first trip to China, even though I hadn’t packed a warm enough jacket for the cold, rainy weather and was coming down with a monster of a cold. The rushing water there still sparkled. It dazzled me.

 

What is it about flowing water that captures your affections?

I remember thinking when I got back from that trip, I wish Salina would get its river flowing. I asked our in-house historian here at the Journal, Gordon Fiedler, why our river didn’t flow. I remember him showing me an old picture of someone water-skiing on our own Smoky Hill River back in the ’50s, before the river channel running through town was cut off because of recurring floods.

Flooding problems have been addressed in the Smoky Hill River Renewal Master Plan now being considered by the city’s residents.

I see this as a stewardship issue. In biblical terms, God put us in charge of the planet, to be careful stewards over it. To paraphrase Matthew: Freely we have been given (a river), and freely we should give (what it takes to maintain it).

I’ve noticed that the older I get, the less I manage to get my weeds pulled and my windows washed. Is that it? Are we growing older and not wanting to bother to clean up our own yard — in this case, our river?

Have we, as a city society, forgotten what it’s like to have a flowing river in our midst?

If you have forgotten (or you haven’t been around long enough to have seen it), I highly recommend the short video at the Friends of the River website, www.smokyhillriver.org; you’ll see how beautiful the river used to be and hear from your neighbors how much it was enjoyed.

Somehow, inexplicably, flowing water adds life to a community. It adds energy. It adds beauty.

You bet visitors will notice. And remember. And look forward to stopping by again. Because flowing water leaves an impression.

So does dirty, mucky, stagnant water … and that’s not the impression we want to leave on anybody. It’s embarrassing, during our “river” festival, to be situated next to that stagnant drainage ditch.

This is a matter of community pride, putting our best foot forward for guests to our city and taking care of what we’ve been given on this particular plot of ground we call home.

But what does a river cost? We can’t just turn on a faucet, we can’t just wish the sediment away, and here in the U.S., we can’t just put planks down to cross over to riverside cafes. I’ll talk about what I think it’s worth in Wednesday’s edition.

•   This column first appeared in the Salina Journal on October 12, 2010.
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TED, how do I love thee?

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin

I have found a place where I am never disappointed — and usually flabbergasted, inspired or filled with awe. It amazes me when I ask someone if they know about TED and they say “no.” 

 No? Are you kidding me? I could hang out with TED every night and never tire of the experience. 
TED stands for technology, entertainment and design. It’s a small nonprofit devoted to the concept of “ideas worth spreading.” It started in 1984 as a conference bringing together smart people to share ideas. Since then, its scope has become considerably more broad. 
Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., and the TEDGlobal Conference in Oxford, U.K., TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site (TED.com, of which I’m a big fan), a new TED India conference and the annual TED Prize, as well as an online community and other branches of development. 
So what kind of talks can you hear on TED.com? One of the first talks I heard was by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who had a massive stroke and was able to describe how she watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. It’s an astonishing story, which she has put into a book called “Stoke of Insight.” 
Mathematician and magic enthusiast Arthur Benjamin puts on a show that could fall easily into the Entertainment as well as Technology categories as he races audience members working calculators to figure out 3-digit squares. His whole tuxedoed presentation is lots of fun, and he ends it with a mind-boggling feat: figuring out the answer to a random 5-digit square while he babbles his computations aloud to let us in on how his brain works. 
Under the mind-boggling category, there are many examples: TED Senior Fellow Frederick Balagadde shows how we can multiply the power and availability of a large, expensive diagnostic lab by miniaturizing it to the size of a microchip. He invented the micro-chemostat, a first-of-its-kind, dime-sized piece of transparent plastic that can orchestrate the behavior of living cells. He hopes to use it in Africa to treat HIV/AIDS. It’s faster, easier and cheaper than current strategies and can be personalized for each patient. 
Blaise Aguera y Arcas puts on a dazzling demonstration of Photosynth, software that allows us to see photos that might be taken with an ordinary camera but, when zooming in to see the details of such a photo, the display is as clear as can be. For example, if you took a picture of a page of a book a block away with your ordinary camera, with this software, he could zoom in on the page, and you could read it as clearly as if you were holding the book in your hand — no degradation whatsoever. 
Think your kid is wasting time with computer games? Au contraire, according to Jane McGonigal, a video game designer who says games like “World of Warcraft” give players the skills to save worlds, work in collaboration with teammates around the globe and the incentive to learn hero habits. If we could only harness this power that gamers possess, we could have them solve real-world problems — in fact, they are already doing just that. 
Under the Entertainment category, oh, my gosh, this isn’t your average run-of-the-mill entertainment. This category includes inhumanly talented teenagers like Jennifer Lin. Jennifer, at 14, dazzled audience members with an amazing performance on piano, then asked several individuals to write down one note — A, B, C, D, E, F or G; she picked four or five, then had someone mix them up into a random order, which she then used to compose a beautiful, complex piece on the spot. 
Percussionist Sivamani delivers a lively and inventive performance, using traditional Western and Eastern instruments, as well as a tub of water, corrugated metal, a suitcase and various other props. The result is a nonstop rhythmic extravaganza that leaves you breathless and delighted. 
The annual conferences in Long Beach and Oxford bring together the world’s most brilliant thinkers and creators who are challenged to give a talk (or performance) about their life’s work in less than 20 minutes. These talks are made available on TED.com for free. There are more than 600 TED talks on the website now and more are added every week. 
The purpose? Spreading spectacular ideas across the globe. 
Every year, three individuals receive a $100,000 prize and the granting of one wish to change the world. The TED Prize is designed to leverage the community’s incredible talent and resources. The wishes that have been granted thus far have led to collaborative initiatives with life-changing effects around the world. 
Forget YouTube. Discover the bleeding, frothy edge of all sectors of Homo sapiens’ endeavors. 
I invite you to visit TED.com and see if you, too, fall in love. Whatever your interest, type it into the little search window and get ready to be blown away. Whether you’re interested in music, videogames, photography, art, the future of technology, economics, medicine, sociology, evolutionary archaeology, space travel, psychology, the environment or any other topic imaginable, there is most likely a brilliant TED talk or two about it, each one given in just 20 minutes or less. 
If you can’t think of anything in particular to search for, just click on the “jaw-dropping” link, and prepare to be amazed. 
•  This column first appeared in the Salina Journal on May 12, 2010.
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Move toward peace

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin

The front-page story Sunday in the Journal about a town that may be financially devastated if a treaty between the U.S. and Russia is reached seemed to us to be a good example of short-sightedness.

Folks in Judith Gap, Mont., are worried the town will be crippled if the U.S. and Russia reduce their nuclear warheads over the next seven years by 30 percent. Nearby Malmstrom Air Force Base is home to 150 intercontinental ballistic missiles, and it takes 4,000 military personnel and civilians to manage and maintain them.

Great Falls, Mont., Mayor Michael Winters said, “I would keep Malmstrom at full strength, regardless.”

Really? Even if mankind as a whole has a chance to move forward toward greater peace?

Granted, in these economic times — in any economic times — it can be frightening to think about what could happen to a town if its main “product” was deemed to be no longer needed.

But this mentality of every town out for itself, regardless of the greater good for humanity, is also frightening.

Business leaders in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming have lobbied their congressional delegations to try to persuade Congress to keep the ICBM silos at full strength. The bases involved, and the towns surrounding them, have “fierce pride,” Sunday’s article said, about being at the center of the nation’s defense.

What about taking pride in a positive, peaceful step forward for the human race?

Grand Forks, N.D., lost 150 ICBMs to Malmstrom in 1995 during a round of Base Realignment and Closure. Two thousand people left the town in the years that followed.

What happened next? Grand Forks Air Force Base adjusted. The base got a new mission (supporting unmanned aerial vehicles), and Grand Forks diversified its economy so as not to be so reliant on the military.

Isn’t that what Salina did, too, when it lost Schilling Air Force Base in the mid-1960s? We changed, we adapted, we survived and thrived.

Any time we can make a move toward peace, we should consider the greater good and look for ways to adapt.

 This editorial first appeared in the Salina Journal on April 8, 2010.
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I’m no Bible scholar, but …

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin

Goodness, I stirred up a hornet’s nest when I wrote my last column (“No, I’m right about Scriptures,” March 9). Unfortunately, the people who agree with me and applaud what I write are a very quiet group, while those who disagree are quite prolific, industriously writing letters to the editor to refute me.

That’s OK. I don’t mind. I have to say, in regard to my main argument — that Scriptures can be interpreted in any number of ways — these letter writers pretty much prove my point.

Don Nofsinger asks, “Can truth survive in a postmodern society?” I ask, “Can postmodern enlightenment and education shed light on the Bible, or must we continue to look at the Bible with the eyes of civilizations thousands of years old?”

Nofsinger says, “Jesus said that the written word of God is truth that lives and abides forever.” I don’t know what Scripture he’s referring to; no matter. Jesus could not have been talking about anything other than the Old Testament, since the New Testament hadn’t been written yet.

But Christians don’t follow the rules of the Old Testament much — the forsaking of jewelry, the sacrificing of animals on the altar … one could go on and on about Old Testament laws that are long-since forgotten and ignored.

Once again, the words of the Bible are used only to build up one’s own position, regardless of how incongruent they are to the argument. I use them, too, to point out those contradictions.

As for those who say God says the Bible is true, or the Bible testifies to its own truth, I’d like to note that there is no other arena in which we would tolerate that kind of argument as proof — because it’s not a proof.

One thing I will specifically take issue with is Marty Higle’s assertion about my “ignorance of the word of God.”

In my 50 years of Christian living, I have studied the Bible for perhaps thousands of hours.

I went to an Episcopal church and Sunday school every week with my family until my late teenage years. After getting married, I attended services regularly, tending toward Baptist and nondenominational, Bible-believing churches, and attended Bible studies in small groups as well as Sunday school. I’ve read the Bible cover to cover at least once, done daily devotionals for years and did Bible studies on my own to learn more about certain aspects of the Christian faith and about God. I’ve read many Christian books, have two concordances, several Bible translations, a Bible dictionary and encyclopedia.

I visited many churches in Salina, finally settling on First Covenant Church, was active in the church and attended Sunday school and small-group Bible studies on a regular basis for several years.

While I certainly don’t pretend to be a scholar, it’s not for a lack of effort on my part if I’ve misunderstood Christian teachings.

On the contrary, it’s been my interest in the Bible — how it’s been put together, translated and interpreted — and my desire to live the Christian faith — how do we know God? how do we follow God? — that has driven me to study it.

And it was my interest in understanding what the Bible says about hell that led me finally to depart from fundamentalist teachings.

Let’s remember that in the 1898 Young’s Literal Translation of the Bible, the word “hell” doesn’t appear even once. BibleGateway.com writes, “This is an extremely literal translation that attempts to preserve the tense and word usage as found in the original Greek and Hebrew writings.”

If that’s an “extremely literal translation” and it doesn’t mention the word “hell,” then why are fundamentalist churches preaching hell and damnation, I wondered.

Some come to the conclusion, then, that I’m an atheist. Not that it’s anyone’s business but my own, but the answer to that question is no, I’m not an atheist. My interest in God and spiritual matters continues to grow, albeit from a different perspective. In fact, I recently went to a weeklong conference in California attended by people from a wide variety of faiths and traditions who are devoted to seeking out not what divides us, but what unites us in our spiritual lives. Rather than focusing on disagreements or discord, this was a time to honor each other’s various spiritual traditions and lineages.

In light of that experience and in an effort to learn and grow, I would like to apologize for those times I’ve come off as glib or flippant. The topics we’re discussing — abortion, faith, Scripture — are enveloped by our most deeply held beliefs and are colossally difficult to talk about rationally because of people’s most fundamental convictions about what is true and good. I don’t take these topics lightly, nor do I mean to ridicule anyone or make light of what people believe.

I do believe wholeheartedly that God is love, as is written in 1 John 4:8 and 16. Not, “God is loving,” or, “God loves Christians,” or, “God loves us most of the time”; but “God is love.”

Perhaps this is where we can find common ground, where, together, we’ll find God in our midst.

• This column first appeared in the Salina Journal on March 20, 2010.

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No, I’m right about scriptures

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin

Denise Hoeffner’s letter to the editor in Monday’s (March 2010) edition, referring to Berthenia Banks’ letter regarding abortion, is a nice example of how interpretation of the Bible can be so confounding.

Hoeffner says that the Bible verse quoted in Genesis by Banks was taken out of context, and that God was referring to breathing life into all of mankind, not Adam, specifically. She knows this because … ?

I agree that the viability of a fetus is certainly much earlier than in past societies, with our high-tech respirators and incubators, so that now we can help with the breathing of a baby whose lungs are not fully formed.

Hoeffner says, “God does not magically place a soul into the baby’s body on a specific day when that child is able to breathe on his own.” No, that would be silly, she seems to say. Because everyone knows, God magically places the soul in the zygote at the moment of conception … or is it when the brain activity begins? Or is it when the heart starts beating? Dang, no Bible reference for that.

She quotes Jeremiah 1:4-5 to remind us that God knows the unborn child “before I formed you in the womb.” Hmmm, that does say “before” the womb, so even before the moment of conception. So that suggests to me that God knows this soul up in Heaven as a fully formed nonphysical being, and at some point — we don’t know when — God places this soul into a developing fetus. So if that fetus is aborted, God places the soul in the next fetus … but that’s just my interpretation.

Hoeffner says that Scriptures point to the need for Americans to “stop the slaughter of our unborn babies” just as Nazis should have stopped the killing of the Jews. She quotes Proverbs: “Rescue those being led away to death.” Have you ever seen fetuses being led away to death? That does sound like what the Nazis did to the Jews, leading them to gas chambers or forcing them to stand in front of open graves so they could mow them down. It also reminds me of cattle being led from trucks to the slaughterhouse door. But I can’t quite picture fetuses all in a line being led to slaughter.

Continuing, “Hold back those staggering toward slaughter.” Again, I’ve never heard of a fetus staggering; sounds like it refers to people who can walk who are staggering from hunger or beatings.

Continuing further: “If you say, ‘but we knew nothing about this,’ does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who guards your life know it?” Reminds me of all the people in Darfur in abysmal conditions for years, beaten, slaughtered, raped, their villages burned to the ground, their families decimated, waiting in squalid refugee camps for some kind of life to begin again for them, while the American people sit by and go on about their business and say, “Oh, we didn’t know,” or, “We forgot,” or, “We thought someone else was taking care of it … .”

Better watch out because, as Proverbs says: “Will not God repay each person according to what he has done?” Or not done?

Reminds me of the children kidnapped in Congo to become child soldiers, forced to kill their friends or family members, to be raped and rape others by order of their captors. What are we doing about that? Is life still a gift when you live in those circumstances? Aren’t those children’s lives every bit as precious as those not born?

But that’s how interpretation of Scripture goes. One person uses a Scripture for his position, another for the opposite position, each one saying, “God said so, so I’m right.”

The interpretation of prophesies is particularly tricky. To claim that something written by King Solomon in the 10th century B.C. refers to the Holocaust in the 20th century A.D., and then to extrapolate that it also refers to aborted fetuses is a long and winding stretch.

In my mind, such interpretations have led to unending wars in the Middle East, where prophesies and Scriptures constitute foreign policy, and by extension, lead to U.S. involvement.

Never mind that a lot of Scripture is poetry, that much of it could be interpreted symbolically rather than literally, that it relates to events taking place thousands of years ago, that Jesus told stories so his illiterate listeners could understand basic principles, and that the various books of the Bible were written by many men and have been translated by hundreds of people (almost exclusively men, for whatever that’s worth) with diverse understandings and various agendas, levels of education and cultural proclivities.

 

• This column first appeared in the Salina Journal on March 6, 2010.

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What atheists miss

Posted on January 24, 2012 by admin

I’ve been thinking about atheism this past week. I listened to a talk by philosopher Alain de Botton on what he calls “Atheism 2.0.” (Find it at TED.com.) In it, he laments the fact that nonreligious people miss out on a good many traditions that come with being a believer — the weekly fellowship with people of like mind, the transcendent music, the inspired art, for example.

It’s been about six years since I left the last church I attended regularly. I was a faithful and involved member of a large Salina church for several years.

I left at the beginning of what I now refer to as my mid-life crisis, a time when several major life changes came upon me and buried me like a wall of bricks. I left the church because I didn’t believe in hell, and I didn’t feel I was in integrity staying at the church, especially being a visible part of the worship service.

One can’t make up one’s mind to believe something. You either do believe something or you don’t. You can perhaps be persuaded one way or another if evidence supports a different point. But all my understanding of a loving God couldn’t support the idea of hell.

Although that year was certainly a difficult one on many levels, I have no regrets about leaving the Christian church. But I do miss a lot about the tradition.

I miss the people, the friends I saw every week. I miss the music, the sermons, the get-togethers.

I certainly wouldn’t call myself an atheist. Whatever made the universe, the force behind the beginning of time as we know it, 13.7 billion years ago — whatever that force was, or rather, is, that’s what I would call God.

And since there was nothing before the beginning, as far as we know, then all that is must be made of that force, through and through. That’s how I see it — God within us, God all around us.

And that idea still holds for me the sacredness and unfathomable mystery it always has.

The church I grew up in as a little girl and into my teens was a beautiful old Episcopal church, with stained-glass windows depicting the great stories of the faith, with statues standing holy and wise, with young altar boys and girls holding candles to light the way for the priests in their embroidered robes, with the choir singing hymns and the scent and smoke of incense swirling throughout the sanctuary.

Atheists and other … what shall I say? … unaffiliated people do miss a lot by not going to a weekly church service.

While I spend time in silence, meditation or prayer most days, I no longer think of God as a heavenly father who watches over me. The child in me misses that comfort. I take consolation, though, in the idea that whatever is behind the godly force of creation seems to be going in a certain direction, toward ever-greater complexity and ever-greater unity. I also brighten at the idea of connection to the stars in the sky, as well as all the people in the world. We share 99 percent of our DNA with all other people, 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees and a considerable chunk with fireflies and bananas. How could one be lonely?

We unaffiliated don’t have the traditional church calendar to remind us of the noble lessons of life (although retailers certainly won’t let us forget the goodness of giving when it’s coming up on Christmas). Churches remind us that even small gifts are valuable; that telling the truth, even when it’s difficult, is honorable; that giving hours in service to others is worthwhile; that we shouldn’t judge one another, or be unkind or selfish. Churches remind us that even when things look bleak, there is hope.

As I write this, I imagine fundamental Christians at this point shaking their heads in pity over my missing the main point: that Jesus is the way and the truth and the life, and that all my hope and attempts at human goodness are worthless without that confession.

The Rev. Michael Dowd, who wrote “Thank God for Evolution” and who still considers himself a Christian, recorded a talk a couple of years ago, just two hours after learning that he had an especially aggressive form of cancer and could die soon, perhaps within a few weeks. (He has since undergone chemotherapy and surgery and is cancer-free.)

The possible imminence of his death brought him to this question: “If I have only one message left to deliver to the world, what would it be?” The answer to that question resulted in this talk: “The New Atheists as God’s Prophets,” which I highly recommend for both atheists and believers … and the unaffiliated.

Who are the New Atheists? They are those who tell us of reality, which in Dowd’s mind is another name for God.

Dowd makes the distinction between subjective and objective truths. Atheists speak objectively, using documented, evidential, tested and peer-reviewed methods of discovery. Subjective truths are those that mean something to an individual, such as “I feel God’s love in my heart.” That’s not something you can prove to anyone objectively, but something you feel within yourself.

It seems to me religion has something unbelievers long for, and atheists have something believers need, and that the two groups could have a beautiful, meaningful, life-long conversation if their prejudices could be put aside.

 •  This column first appeared in the Salina Journal on Jan. 23, 2012.
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