Godless love for Christmas

From "Christmas Is a Wonderful, Secular Holiday" by Rich Juzwiak:

Late in my teens, I stopped attending church. There were all kinds of reasons for this, but even the most politically righteous ones (where to begin: the Catholic church's inherent anti-gay stance, its allowance of child abuse, its institutionalized misogyny) didn't hold a votive candle to the simple fact that I left church because it was fucking boring. Whiling away the hour in church on Christmas was a metaphor for my general relationship to organized religion—I was really just waiting for it all to be over. 

I never stopped loving Christmas, though. To me it's a secular holiday, and its importance in my life is unwavering.

Read more on Gawker.

Dahn Yoga: scamming folks in NYC, Boston, and beyond

Over at Gawker, writer Cat Ferguson has added a new installment to the Cult Rush Week series, titled "I Punched Myself at Dahn Yoga." A snippet:

On its face, Dahn yoga is not very scary. It is a vague combination of yoga and tai chi that promises practitioners they will "experience the transformative power of energy." But the cult is championed by shady "Grand Master" Ilchi Lee, who is described as "a global educator, mentor, and innovator devoted to teaching energy principles and developing the full capability of the human brain," but was also the target of a 2010 lawsuit that accused him of preying on young recruits, brainwashing members, and fraud.

Ferguson was dipping into Dahn down in NYC, but we've got our own Dahn locations here in the Boston area: Arlington, Cambridge, Brookline. If you keep your eyes peeled, you'll see Dahn brochures occupying choice street-facing locations in store windows all over town.

Here's what I do when I see one of their stand-up brochure holders: I duck into the establishment -- nail salon, grocery store, what have you -- and breezily tell the clerk that I'm "here to pick these up." Then pick them up I do, leave, and then and, just like I do with Maum flyers, I throw them away in the first trash receptacle I see. Lest you think I'm on the dole for Scientology, let me set the record straight: I'm not favoring one scam cult over another. It's just that Scientology is more about palm-cards than brochures. I simply can't conscience the marketing of yet another pseudo-scientific, pseudo-spiritual extractive industry in our fair city, so, sorry Dahn yoga, they've got to go.

Read Ferguson's full post over at Gawker to learn more about the Dahn experience (tldr; they want your money), or check out these informative links:

• My Story: Dahn Yoga is a Cult (blog)
• Dahn Yoga: Body, Brain and Wallet (Forces)
• Lawsuit calls yoga chain a cult (CNN)
• The Yoga Cult (Rolling Stone)

Boston Nonsense Watch is a free service of the Boston Atheists.

Boston Nonsense Watch: Maum flyers seen in the wild

I've just uploaded a new document to the Boston Atheists Meetup files section, accessible here. It's a PDF scan of a flyer I saw at Panera Bread at Alewife plaza where I was meeting other members of the Sunday Assembly Boston planning team. What caught my eye was the provocative slogan on the front panel: STOP THINKING. Whoa! Is thinking so dangerous? I've been doing it all this time... think of the damage I might have been doing to myself!

So I pick it up and, lo and behold, it turns out to be up a propaganda for Maum Meditation, a network of cultish storefront offices found across the globe. Maum links its gospel messages of "Calm your spirit!" (hmm, okay) and "Empty your mind!" (wait, what?) to the fashionable craze for gobbledygook neuro-nonsense. The Maum system may be nothing more than a heap of reheated philosophicalish New Age fluff married to scientific-sounding terminology, but it is very good at extracting money from members-cum-victims.

Now, I see these flyers all over town: cafes, bookstores, stacked on the inside counter at beauty salons and grocery stores. When I see them through the window, I go inside, and in businesslike fashion, pick up the whole stack, and leave. I throw them away in the first trash can I pass, ripping them in half first to ensure that they aren't put back into circulation by well-meaning parties who don't know the background about Maum.

There are a number of other dubious outfits in Boston, including Twelve Tribes, New Acropolis, and Eckankar. (And of course members likely already know about the fine brownstone on Beacon Street off Mass Ave near the south footing of the Harvard Bridge, the one that houses the Boston branch of the Church of Scientology.) Let's make a collective agreement to stay alert to these kinds of organizations. Some may be benign, or merely nonsensical, while others that seem just as nonthreatening may afflict members with coercive, disorienting, destructive teachings and pressures. Make sure to let us know here at Boston Nonsense Watch headquarters about anything you want us to know more about.

Boston Nonsense Watch is a free service of the Boston Atheists.

Related reading:

• Chicago Tribune: "Lake Forest meditation center generates controversy"
• Reddit: "Please watch out for a cult movement called Maum Meditation!"
• The Daily Free Press at BU: "Maintain Caution Around Sects"

Slate: "The Real Victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse"

Everyone's been talking about the proposal to put a statue of Satan on the grounds of the Oklahoma state house; it's timely then that we see this article at Slate magazine, reporting on recent affairs relating to one of the strangest, widest-reaching, and most damaging moral panics in America’s history: the satanic ritual abuse panic of the 1980s and 1990s."

From the article:

"[It] was literally a witch hunt," said Keith Hampton, pro-bono lawyer for the Kellers. "We say ‘witch hunt’ in this figurative way, but that was a modern-day literal witch hunt. They really were after people who they thought were worshipping at the feet of the Dark Lord."

The defendants profiled in the article seem to have been the victims of a bizarre and antirational social affair, but that isn't to say that child abuse itself is a figment of overactive supernaturalistic imaginations. I think here to mention the good work of the organization CHILD ("Children's Healthcare Is a Legal Duty"), that works to identify and lobbies to close legal loopholes that allow persons guilty of religiously-motivated medical neglect of children to avoid prosecution.

The example closest to home of this kind of abuse is seen in the Christian Science religion, whose teachings tell parents that prayer facilitated by a religious practitioner is enough to heal any ailment... as long as one's faith is strong enough, of course.

Related reading

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" by Charles MacKay

"Why People Believe Weird Things" by Michael Shermer

"A Delusion Of Satan: The Full Story Of The Salem Witch Trials" by Frances Hill and Karen Armstrong

CBS Boston asks: Should we have religious monument in govt buildings?

Continuing the conversation started by the proposal to place a statue of Satan at Oklahoma's state capitol, the Facebook team at CBS Boston has asked a question:

Should commissioners approve the monument, or should religious monuments not be allowed at a government building?

Well, no.

The civic space should be equally accessible to all members of the community, since it is owned collectively by that community.

Philosophy and ethics are determinedly private matters, and cannot be readily translated into public language that we can all partake in. It isn't about removing contentious symbols that might offend some people; it is about making sure our government does its work in a language we can all speak. (See John Rawls for more about the distinction between private and public language.)

Here's an interesting thought: Why don't we think of the concrete absence in the public space of symbols that are religious or similarly "private" in nature, as a monument in itself? A monument that says something in its silence about our solemn shared commitment to a form of government in which persons of all and any creed can all participate equally.

(cross-posted from the Atheology blog)