This guest post comes to us from Melanie Rucinski, a Harvard sophomore and outgoing leader of the Harvard Community of Humanists, Atheists, and Agnostics (our undergraduate secular student group), formerly the Harvard Secular Society. This piece was originally published on Melanie’s blog, musique et chocolat, in July 2012.

I have read enough books about atheism and psychology to know that prayers do not have healing power, at least not to an extent that is statistically significant. Furthermore, the fact that I am an atheist kind of goes along with not believing in the power of prayer in general. In all of my years of sporadic church attendance, then, I’ve never asked for prayers for anyone I know. I’ve considered it multiple times, but if my skepticism weren’t enough, discomfort with asking congregations I’m not a consistent member of to pray for my sick or dying family members and music teachers would still hold me back.

In the past two years, I’ve seen more illness and death in my personal life than I’d experienced in all the years before. My maternal great-grandmother died when I was five and my maternal grandfather died when I was ten, but then everyone close to me was pretty much fine for a while. In the fall of my senior year, though, my oboe teacher was diagnosed with a frontal lobe disorder (the symptoms resemble Alzheimer’s), and since then both my paternal and maternal grandmothers, as well as my piano teacher, have passed away. So it’s not like there hasn’t been anything to pray for: my oboe teacher’s health is still going downhill. My maternal grandmother had had Alzheimer’s since shortly after I started high school, and my piano teacher had been diagnosed with cancer. There have been no truly sudden deaths.

Two weeks ago, I played piano in a service at the church I consider to be my church. It’s the church at which I sang in the choir when I was growing up, worked in the nursery when I was in middle school, and have always attended Christmas Eve services. I know many of the congregation members, and they know me. If I ever felt that I needed spiritual guidance, this church is where I would go. That said, my family is not the only one to refer to this church as a Unitarian church in disguise. I am not the only atheist who attends. The church is a religious community, but it’s the community part that’s important, not the religion.

At this point, my piano teacher had taken a sudden turn for the worse. She was in hospice care, and it was clear that the end would be soon. I had seen her a few weeks earlier, but I wasn’t really sure how to respond to the whole situation. I hadn’t taken lessons with her on a consistent schedule since my sophomore year of high school, and hadn’t studied with her at all since the spring of my junior year. Although I now respect her as a musician, I had a fair number of problems with her for most of the time I was her student. My mom was closer with my piano teacher than I was. Even so, I felt that if there was any time to ask for prayers from the congregation, this was it, particularly since my piano teacher would be leaving behind her husband and I thought that he, too, could use to be in people’s thoughts.

My mom came to the service, and after failing to read my lips during the ‘Concerns and Celebrations’ part of the service (I was sitting at the piano and she was in the third or fourth pew), finally made a reasonable guess as to what I was trying to say and stood up to ask for prayers for my piano teacher and her husband.

I do get chills sometimes during sentimental moments, and I do occasionally cry, or at least have tears in my eyes. I did not expect, though, to have the emotional reaction that I did in the moment after my mom finished her request. Nothing actually happened in that moment—it was followed just by a brief silence between my mom’s words and someone else’s concerns, unlike at another church I play at where the congregation gives a verbal affirmation after each joy or concern. Something about that moment, though, and something about knowing that at least some of the congregation members would be praying for my piano teacher and her husband, did get to me.

Even if I don’t believe in God or in the power of prayer, there is something truly powerful about knowing that there are people I know or people I don’t, people I’m close with or people I’ve never spoken to, who are thinking positive thoughts in the direction of someone I ultimately do care about. Maybe it’s the idea that positive energy is contagious and that if these people somehow try to send goodness out into the world, it will eventually reach the strangers they’re praying for. Or maybe it’s just the cliche that somebody out there cares, that in some abstract way, the people in the congregation are connected enough to each other—and to me—to take others’ concerns for their own.

Later that afternoon, we got a phone call saying that my piano teacher had passed away. I actually did cry about it for a few minutes, although it wasn’t until I was on my own and reflecting again on the church service. This is just something else religious communities offer that secular communities have trouble creating an alternative to: I feel comforted by the thoughts of the congregation members in a way I would not feel comforted by the thoughts of Harvard Secular Society members (if I even felt it was appropriate to ask for their thoughts on my piano teacher’s behalf). Somehow in that moment in church I felt the pervading love one is supposed to feel in the presence of God, and while at that point it was accompanied by sadness, it was still something beautiful.

I used to feel it was disrespectful to ask for prayers from congregations I play for, almost subtly condescending—maybe taking advantage of their beliefs. Now, though, I don’t think I feel so negatively about it. In the same way that I don’t feel it’s disrespectful to sing hymns during services since I really do enjoy the group music-making, maybe it isn’t disrespectful to ask for prayers since they do ultimately provide some comfort. And even if there’s no scientific evidence that says it helps to think positive thoughts in the direction of people I love every once in a while, it certainly can’t hurt.

Melanie spent six years of her youth in a liberal Jewish suburb going to church and Hebrew school before she became an atheist. She tells people that she is studying education research and policy at Harvard because saying that she’s majoring in Social Studies makes her sound like she’s in middle school. In her spare time, Melanie finds something like God in running along the Charles River, playing Bach, and baking pies.

This post, which is a hot mess that I am only republishing here against my better judgment out of an obsessive compulsive devotion to consistency, originally appeared on harvardhumanist.org.

This post is a part of the Humanist Community at Harvard’s 2012 Blogathon, a 12 hour blogging marathon by Chris Stedman and Chelsea Link to support HCH’s end-of-the-year fundraiser. Chelsea and Chris are both publishing one new post per hour, for twelve hours straight, and none of the posts have been written or drafted in advance. For more blogathon posts, click here. If you enjoyed this post or any of the others, please consider consider chipping in to support our work.

I became an atheist in my freshman year of college. It was a difficult transition for me. I broke up with my high school boyfriend, largely over religious differences. I was nervous about going home to spend the summer with my religious parents. I had, to my knowledge, one atheist friend – one person with whom I felt safe to be my true self.

This friend invited me at the last minute to accompany him to hear Joss Whedon, who was coming to speak on campus. “Who?” “The Dr. Horrible writer. You know, he also did Buffy and Firefly and all that.” I liked Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and had watched a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when I was younger, but I didn’t know much about Joss Whedon besides that. “What’s he coming for?” “Some kind of atheist thing.” Sounded cool enough, and I had nothing else to do (not many friends, remember?), so I went.

The enemy of Humanism is not faith. The enemy of Humanism is hate, is fear, is ignorance, is the darker part of man that is in every Humanist, every person in the world. That is the thing we have to fight. Faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.

This speech was a defining moment in my life. That night was my introduction to Humanism, and Joss Whedon warned me from the beginning that it would not be easy.

He was right. Some days, it truly is harder to believe that humans can be good than that a cracker can turn into an undead god-person.

The older I get and the more I see of the world, the more I struggle with this. In a personality trait (feature? bug?) that Greg Epstein has called my “general dissatisfaction with things,” I often become overwhelmed with righteous fury over human failings big and small.

I am told every day that I am literally worth less than a man is, that a non-sentient cluster of cells has more rights to the use of my organs than I do, that I am responsible for the consequences if I am physically attacked, and that I am generally an inferior specimen of humanity.

Chris Stedman’s book Faitheist, which makes the scandalous claim that it’d be cool if people were nicer to each other and maybe even friends sometimes, somehow caused a gigantic internet controversy. How…?

Walking into a crowded place and emptying a bunch of metal into other people’s bodies is not just a terrible decision that one person made, but basically a national pastime at this point.

The Holocaust. That happened.

I am constantly surrounded by people overtly eating corpses. Everywhere I look, people are cutting up dead bodies into little pieces and putting them into their mouths and chewing them and swallowing them. What are you all thinking?

I used to do that a lot too. What was I thinking?

A lot of people get very angry when other people want to formally celebrate their love for and commitment to another person and then do nice things together like cohabitate and raise children.

Some people directly cause the deaths of children because they think it is better to pray for health and selfishly endanger everybody around you in the process than to get a life-saving vaccine.

So how am I supposed to go on talking about how humanity will be its own salvation? How can I keep babbling about fixing all our problems with reason and compassion? Why should I keep living out my values when it doesn’t seem to do any good?

This would probably be a good time to warn you that I am not leading up to a miraculous answer. I am mostly whining out loud. Happy Festivus, world: here are all the ways you have disappointed me lately.

But the fact is, even when it seems pointless, we must keep the faith. Maybe we won’t manage to save ourselves from ourselves, but it seems pretty clear that nobody else will, either, so we might as well try, right? We are our own best hope. Disappointing, maybe, but we have to work with what we’ve got.

You should also remember that wonderful things are happening all around, even though you can’t see most of them. At any given moment, billions of people are being perfectly nice to each other. The media only reports on the bad stuff because it is the exception to the rule.

It helps to have a boyfriend who is constantly ready to appease your rage with a well-timed picture of a bunny snuggling with a kitten, or an uplifting motivational speech, or an affectionate note, or a supportive hug. I actually don’t know of any other boyfriend who is as good at this kind of thing as the one I use. I don’t even know if they make this model anymore, but I recommend investing in one immediately if you fine it – maybe try Craigslist?

But perhaps most importantly of all, remember that you do not need to save the world yourself. To Frankenquote two of my favorite people and horribly mix my metaphors in the process, the arc of the moral universe is very long and life is very short, so although it does bend toward justice, we cannot always tell because we die on the march. Your responsibility is just to make a difference and not to worry about the size.

I am often comforted by a rather trite little parable that you have probably heard. A man is walking along a beach where thousands of starfish have somehow become stranded above the waterline. (Is this a thing that even happens? Do tsunamis do this? I don’t even know. Hush. It’s just a metaphor.) He sees a child picking the stranded starfish up one by one, walking down to the water, and dropping them back into the ocean where they belong. He asks the child, “What are you doing?” The child responds, “I’m saving their lives.” The man returns, “But there are so many of them. Even if you work all day, most of them are still going to die. What you are doing will not make a difference.” The child picks up another starfish and returns it to the sea, answering, “It did to that one.”

So here I am, at the end of twelve hours of blogging, attempting to wrap up probably the rambliest and least coherent piece of writing on the internet. Did we even raise any money? I have no idea. Have I revolutionized Humanism? Probably not. Did I have fun? Yes. Did I eat way too many kettle chips? Definitely. Am I still kind of disgusted with the world? Also definitely.

But I have a nice warm cup of tea here, and my boyfriend is probably downloading some cute pictures of baby animals for me to look at later. And tomorrow I will get up and keep living while I have the chance and hope for the best.

Chelsea Link recently graduated from Harvard University, where she studied History & Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She is the founder and intermittent author of Blogging Biblically, and has contributed to blogs such as the Interfaith Youth Core and Social Action Massachusetts. She has also left a trail of abandoned blog detritus in her wake, ranging from Sewage & Syphilis to The Unelectables. While at school, she served as both the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. Now that she’s graduated, she is a full-time Adult Impersonator, complete with an apartment (in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts) and a job (as the Campus Organizing Fellow at the Humanist Community at Harvard). She tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare.

This post originally appeared on harvardhumanist.org.

This post is a part of the Humanist Community at Harvard’s 2012 Blogathon, a 12 hour blogging marathon by Chris Stedman and Chelsea Link to support HCH’s end-of-the-year fundraiser. Chelsea and Chris are both publishing one new post per hour, for twelve hours straight, and none of the posts have been written or drafted in advance. For more blogathon posts, click here. If you enjoyed this post or any of the others, please consider consider chipping in to support our work.

Josh Stanton of State of Formation recently coined an excellent new term (in a Facebook comment thread, no less) that I desperately hope will catch on: theonormative.

I love this term because it encapsulates a more nuanced and more pervasive phenomenon that I used to clumsily lump into the dissatisfying catch-all category of “religious privilege.” I don’t mean to say that religious privilege is not a real thing – it certainly is. But I think that a lot of the time, when we talk about religious privilege, we really mean theonormativity. And I think that being able to articulate this problem better will make it easier to address.

Theonormativity is when theism is the default, the standard, and everything is a deviation from this norm.

Theonormativity is when politicians say that “We all worship the same God” and pat themselves on the back for being so inclusive. It is when people do not realize that this excludes not only atheists, but also many Buddhists, pagans, and other religious/spiritual nontheists.

Theonormativity is why God has invaded our money, our courthouses, our schools, and our government in what New York Times columnist Frank Bruni calls “The God Glut.”

Theonormativity is when sociologists call me a None.

Theonormativity is behind the unsatisfactory word “interfaith” and the awkwardly inclusive phrase “religious and nonreligious.”

Theonormativity is all the forms and websites that collect demographic information with a field labeled “Religion” and offer me a checkbox labeled “Other.”

Theonormativity is people who ask me which church I go to.

Theonormativity is the question “so…what do you believe?” (Um…pretty much everything else you do besides the God part?)

Theonormativity is the crosses on anonymous graves.

Theonormativity is all the psychology and sociology studies that ask me how often I attend religious services, and all the research assistants who are bewildered when I ask whether nonreligious services count.

Theonormativity is “interfaith prayer.”

Theonormativity is the fact that I have to explain this.

Chelsea Link recently graduated from Harvard University, where she studied History & Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She is the founder and intermittent author of Blogging Biblically, and has contributed to blogs such as the Interfaith Youth Core and Social Action Massachusetts. She has also left a trail of abandoned blog detritus in her wake, ranging from Sewage & Syphilis to The Unelectables. While at school, she served as both the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. Now that she’s graduated, she is a full-time Adult Impersonator, complete with an apartment (in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts) and a job (as the Campus Organizing Fellow at the Humanist Community at Harvard). She tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare.

This post originally appeared on harvardhumanist.org.

This post is a part of the Humanist Community at Harvard’s 2012 Blogathon, a 12 hour blogging marathon by Chris Stedman and Chelsea Link to support HCH’s end-of-the-year fundraiser. Chelsea and Chris are both publishing one new post per hour, for twelve hours straight, and none of the posts have been written or drafted in advance. For more blogathon posts, click here. If you enjoyed this post or any of the others, please consider consider chipping in to support our work.

Often, when I try to explain the work of the Humanist Community at Harvard (or just Humanism in general), I get the question, “So why don’t you just join a Unitarian Universalist church?”

It’s actually a great question. UU churches are pretty awesome. They’re extremely politically progressive, pluralistic, and social justice-oriented. They have fantastic Sunday school programs, which are of particular interest to me. They’ve got a lot of infrastructure in place since they’ve evolved out of more traditional churches – infrastructure that would save us from having to reinvent the wheel and build these kinds of communities from the ground up. And they are full of atheists. There’s even a joke about it:

Q: What do you call an atheist with a family?
A: A Unitarian.

And UU churches aren’t the only barely-theistic religious communities around. Humanistic Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism are both thriving communities in which many atheists and Humanists would feel at home.

So if all this is out there, why bother starting over?

The limitations of nontheistic forms of Judaism are obvious: if you are not ethnically and/or culturally Jewish, it’s probably not your jam. Those communities are fantastic for people who want to stay in touch with their Jewish roots, but anybody who wasn’t raised speaking Hebrew and starting everything at sundown is likely to feel a bit out of place.

As for UU churches – and other extremely liberal religious denominations that welcome atheists – I think these present a subtler but even more important limitation: they don’t really take a stand on belief. God isn’t really in, but he certainly isn’t out, either.

To be clear, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing in itself. There is something pretty awesome about a bunch of people with different theological/philosophical beliefs coming together regularly to support each other, raise their children together, work for justice, and so on. UU is great for that. It’s not necessarily better or worse than Humanism; it’s just different.

But I do think there is value to forming that kind of community around not only shared values, but also shared beliefs. Simply put, it matters a great deal whether God does or does not exist. We are looking at a very different world in one case than in the other. Different approaches to purpose, ethics, and meaning are called for in each case. Although the outcome is often very similar – from the outside, living a good life as a theist looks a lot like living a good life as an atheist – the path and the inner experience are different in non-negligible ways.

I want to belong to a community that shares my beliefs and my values. I want to have a place where I can talk openly about my beliefs, fears, hopes, and questions, and where people with similar convictions can hash out these ideas together. I want to mourn my losses with people who will not tell me my loved ones are with God now. I want to celebrate love and commitment with people who agree that life is short and finite. I want to raise my children in an environment where they can tackle big questions early on and grow alongside like-minded peers. I want to work for justice alongside people who see ourselves and each other as our only hope for salvation.

I want a Humanist community.

If you want one too, then please donate and help us build it.

Chelsea Link recently graduated from Harvard University, where she studied History & Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She is the founder and intermittent author of Blogging Biblically, and has contributed to blogs such as the Interfaith Youth Core and Social Action Massachusetts. She has also left a trail of abandoned blog detritus in her wake, ranging from Sewage & Syphilis to The Unelectables. While at school, she served as both the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. Now that she’s graduated, she is a full-time Adult Impersonator, complete with an apartment (in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts) and a job (as the Campus Organizing Fellow at the Humanist Community at Harvard). She tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare.

This post originally appeared on harvardhumanist.org.

This post is a part of the Humanist Community at Harvard’s 2012 Blogathon, a 12 hour blogging marathon by Chris Stedman and Chelsea Link to support HCH’s end-of-the-year fundraiser. Chelsea and Chris are both publishing one new post per hour, for twelve hours straight, and none of the posts have been written or drafted in advance. For more blogathon posts, click here. If you enjoyed this post or any of the others, please consider consider chipping in to support our work.

And now for another moment of awesomeness brought to you by SCIENCE!

One of the coolest things I learned from working as a teaching assistant for a biology course is that there are some pretty incredible parallels between human evolution and linguistic evolution. Prepare your mind, for it is about to be blown.

1. Genetic and linguistic data show that the relationships between both human ethnic groups and language families are nested hierarchies.

Don’t worry, this sounds more complicated than it is.

Basically, if we had a ton of genetic data, we could map every single human who has ever lived onto one gigantic family tree. Within this tree, each person would be a leaf. The other leaves on your branch would be your immediate family members. The leaves on other branches near your branch would be your cousins, second cousins, etc. Your branch would be one among many other branches on a big bough that held your sixth and seventh cousins. As you move inward toward the trunk, you would find your great-great-great-grandparents and your great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents and so on, until eventually you would trace the trunk all the way in and down to the first human. This organization – leaves on a branch, branches on a bough, boughs on a tree – is a “nested hierarchy” because it is composed of groups within groups within groups. It’s the pattern you get when you trace back anything that has diversified over time – which means it’s also the pattern you get when you map all of life on Earth into one giant family tree, like Darwin did in the only diagram in On the Origin of Species:

http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/2009/trimmingthet.jpg

Species make up a genus, genera make up a family, families make up an order, and so on, all the way back to the first little microscopic blob.

Languages follow the same pattern. Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, and others all came from one Germanic dialect; Flemish and Dutch came from another; all came from the same Germanic language, which came from the same Indo-European origins as the Italic languages (like Latin which then gave us French, Spanish, Catalan, etc.), the Hellenic languages (now represented by Greek), and so on. Again, it’s a nested hierarchy:

http://brasileiracrowley.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/language-tree.gif

This is probably the least surprising parallel, but it’s still pretty cool.

2. Silent letters in words are clues to their etymology, just like vestigial organs in organisms are signs of their evolutionary origins.

This particular parallel was pointed out by Charlie D himself. A lot of animals (and plants, but I don’t know crap about plants so I’m going to ignore them for now) have various limbs and things that don’t really serve any purpose – you have extra wisdom teeth and an appendix that does nothing but threaten to explode; kiwibirds have pathetic little wings they will never fly with; etc. We have these things, of course, because our ancestors had fully formed versions of them that they actually used. Our ape-y ancestors probably used their appendices to digest cellulose in plants, which we no longer need to survive. Kiwibirds evolved from birds that flew to New Zealand and then didn’t need to fly anymore. So even though these vestiges don’t do anything for the organisms that possess them, they do serve us as handy hints in tracing evolutionary history.

Similarly, a lot of words have letters that are phonetically unnecessary. For example, why does “leopard” have an “o” in it? We don’t say “LEE-oh-pard,” so why do we spell it that way? Well, the word originated when the Greeks combined “leon” (lion) with “pardos” (panther) to describe the animal that looked sort of like a mix of both. The “o” sound has since been lost, but the word’s etymological history has left its stamp on the spelling.

3. Global patterns of phonemic diversity mirror those of genetic diversity.

This is the really bizarre one.

So, just like your DNA is made up of strings of protein codes called “genes,” words are made up of little sound chunks called “phonemes.” Some languages have lots and lots of phonemes in them, and others have just a few phonemes. The fewer phonemes a language has, the longer its words tend to be, because you need more of them to encode the same amount of information and differentiate words from each other. This is why the fish called a “reef triggerfish” in English (a language with 26 letters) is called a “humuhumunukunukuapua’a” in Hawaiian (a language with only 12 letters).

Now back to genes for a second. Humans originated in southern Africa, where we evolved from chimps (with a lot of now-extinct hominins in between – think Lucy). Some humans stayed in southern Africa – and, ad you may have noticed, their descendants are still there today. Others left and migrated around the world – first to northern Africa, then to Europe, then Asia, the Americas, and Oceania.

Each time humans migrated to a new place, some stayed behind – the groups of humans who founded new societies in new places were always small samples of the groups they had left. The inevitable result of this pattern – called serial bottlenecking or serial founder events – is that genetic diversity is gradually lost with each migration, so that the places where humans went last are inhabited by a less diverse population than the place where we started out.

In case you’re not a statistician, you can visualize this with a bag of marbles of lots of different colors – red, green, yellow, blue, purple, orange, pink, mauve, magenta, white, grey, brown, tan, etc. If I reach in and grab a handful of marbles and drop them into a new bag, chances are I probably didn’t manage to pick up one of every single color of marble that was in the first bag. So the marbles in my second bag will be a less diverse sample of the ones in the first. If I again take just a few from the second bag and move them to a third, I’m going to lose even more colors. The colors are like different genes, and the marbles are people. Except you’d have to pretend the marbles could reproduce with each other, which is kind of disturbing, so don’t think about that part.

Anyway, genetic tests have confirmed that the humans in Oceania are less genetically diverse than Asians, who are less diverse than Europeans, who are less diverse than Africans. Pretty interesting.

But here’s the awesome part. When you map phonemic diversity in languages across the globe in the same way, you get exactly the same pattern:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QvN0bbf0Kh8/TaidA8YbrhI/AAAAAAAADfs/2XxTkISGwrY/s1600/atkinson_language.png

So there’s your daily dose of wonder and awe.

It turns out that during each migration event, humans not only lost a bit of genetic diversity, but also dropped some phonemes along the way!

HUMANISM!

Chelsea Link recently graduated from Harvard University, where she studied History & Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She is the founder and intermittent author of Blogging Biblically, and has contributed to blogs such as the Interfaith Youth Core and Social Action Massachusetts. She has also left a trail of abandoned blog detritus in her wake, ranging from Sewage & Syphilis to The Unelectables. While at school, she served as both the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. Now that she’s graduated, she is a full-time Adult Impersonator, complete with an apartment (in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts) and a job (as the Campus Organizing Fellow at the Humanist Community at Harvard). She tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare.