Atheism in Place

For the final project I wasn't sure exactly what to do... Looking over what I've done over the last few weeks I've found, not surprisingly, that most of my work has a somewhat atheistic purpose to it. Part of the reason I'm so aggressively atheist is that I feel that religion is such a prevalent thing in our society thats just not questioned by society at large. I think what bothers me is the relativism that goes along with having these beliefs. That said, as an artist I'm told that one of our duties is to challenge and question politics, society and culture. Even if I wasn't an "artist" I feel that in this day and age superstitions and the relativist ideology should be done with.

What I'm going to attempt to do now is, within this posting, restructure my already existing posts into a coherent statement about atheism and the natural world...

• My views and interests could be seen in the first thing I did. Starting with excerpts from my "Rivers and Tides" discussion:

1. "Not to get too philosophical but everything in the universe is part of nature but as humans we’ve learned how to use those natural properties to our advantage."
2. "Humans see themselves as outside of nature and we see nature just doing what it does. In the sense of the word Goldsworthy is using it puts a moral weight along with it. Nature is amoral so it would make sense that it wouldn’t feel like destruction..."

• I was much more outwardly critical of my "Mapping and This American Life" discussion. I've really thought hard about how critical I was of ths sound portion of the show and I've come to conclude that I should have been more critical and spent more time tearing it apart. I spent some time in the discussion boards with others talking about this part of the show specifically. I should reiterate that I don't think that sound doesn't have an effect on a persons mood but it doesn't have an effect to the degree in which it was discussed on This American Life: Mapping. Sound/music by nature is abstract and without "meaning." It is humans that create meaning to sound/music. What I'm trying to get at is simply that there aren't inherently "sad" or "happy" sounds. By human or any animals (although that changes from animal to animal) perspective there are pleasant and unpleasant sounds. The fact that the idea of a sound having some sort of inherent meaning that came from the same religion that locked up Galileo Galilei for figuring out we weren't the center of the universe why would anyone buy into this? Oh yeah... DOGMA. Here is a quick quote from my criticism of that:
  

"...the idea that the Catholic Church coming up with a feeling and a superstition assigned to that sound was, well, its amusing really. Then they kind of finished that idea up with a music critic that wrote a book that gave the Church’s sound assignment a “new suit” for the new age. Of course I’m highly skeptical that the book, like the Church’s definitions, has any real scientific fact or study behind it to make it at all relevant. I would guess it’s just the articulate rantings of a music critic. I haven’t read it so I wouldn’t know nor am I musically educated enough to be able to but I would think that a PHD in Psychology would write a book about such a thing."

I think thats a good intro to what I'll end up with. As you can already see I'm very critical of anything unsubstantiated. In the last part of this class we were asked to protest using our body as a mode to protest something... of course I picked religious institutions. There's just something so strange and counter productive about this to me.

In a way all of my projects (more so of course the last two), my writings and my walks were all protests of religion. I'm not so naive to think that I'm going to change the world with my art and writings but I do hope that I can affect people to think about things they normally wouldn't in ways they normally wouldn't. You see no one person has "it" but I think most people have some incite to the world. We're all just meandering through life trying to make sense of it and I believe that if you believe something to be true you should arrive at that belief on your own after careful consideration (and I should qualify that by saying that I'm not talking about whether or not I believe the chair I'm thinking about sitting on exists I'm talking about the kinds of things we take for granted that have a real impact on your life, my life and the world).

I placed this picture at Salpoint High School... It came down fairly fast... it was one of the "bases" of the "A" I marked into Tucson. This project was a blatant attempt at showing another side of faith to the public. This was just another institution for "learning" that is such a contradictory in terms.

I should have spent more time discussing this "tag" that I left in a wash that was fairly popular for tagging... The reason I feel like this deserves more attention is because of what the quote says and where it was placed I think has special meaning and could exist as a single piece without the rest of the quotes in the "A".

If you haven't already, you should click on the photo because its hard to see in the smaller preview where the quote is in relation to the other taggings...
This is important because the Epicurus quote poses a problem for the theist.
The problem of "evil" and the problem of omnipotence.
If you look closely there is a red blob that looks like blood dripping on the top left.
On the bottom right is a statement in gold that says "FUCK BLOOD" and as we all know (or should know) that the "bloods" are a gang. to me this reads as a gang statement showing gang territory.
The significance, to me, is that this is "evil" by most peoples definition. Gang members tend to be more religious than most people. So if there is this god that is believed in then why allow this "evil" by his followers?

This is a great seguay into my one of my last walks in which I walked for Feminism. God, his profits and the religious stories tend to be pretty anti-women. This all seeing all knowing being happens to be in everywhere but still manages to have a male form (pretty convenient). In all the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religions women are not people they are property like a car or a pet. That is one of many reasons for my view as a feminist. The problem with religious dogma is that the beliefs hold on things that cannot change because if they do the religion falls. Or you get what is called religious apologetics. Once you have to defend old superstitions, to me thats just an admission of crap that isn't true and doesn't work.

This was a recent video that I came across and it illustrates this point quite well. If you can explain something without god then why include god?

In my first walk I wasn't very good at using blogger so I had some issues with getting the images to display correctly... but in spite of the overall aesthetics of my formating I would like to reflect on it in the context of this discussion. Part 3, having to do with touch, isn't really about anything but the superficial sensation of touch. The funny thing about touch, and all senses really, are both objective and subjective... I know thats hard to grasp for some but everyone experiences the subjective feeling of touching an object and that is translated as a quality of the object being touched. Those qualities are objective qualities that others can relate to. So how does that have anything to do with what I've been talking about up until now? Well it actually has a lot to do with what I've been discussing. Every ones senses tell us from the day we're conceived some sort of information about the world around us that we then have to make sense of. The senses that I speak of are touch, taste, hearing, seeing and smelling. Some say their are extra senses that some lucky few posses but I wont use this as a forum to talk about what BS that is. Anyway... this is important, because these senses tell us about the world they are simply tools that living things have evolved. These tools aren't perfect but sense we have no other tools to exchange and compare thats all we get. Those tools don't always work perfectly. But there is another sense that people seem to think they have and that is this sense of some sort of holy being. I find this sense troubling because it is completely subjective in every way. In other words, the pictures you see from this project like this one:
It is easy to imagine by just looking at it what that might feel like based on your subjective experiences and you would be close if not compleatly right when you got there and felt it for yourself... I could also just simply describe it to you in words and you would still have an idea of what kind of texture it had. But when you do that with this holy spirit idea there's no objective way to describe it.

I couldn't say it any better than that

I couldn't avoid my protest even my walk to discover the "gamer" culture in and around the Tucson Mall area. You know what it is? It's ignorance. I'm so outwardly atheist and oppose religion not because I feel like god abandoned me or that I was hurt in some way because of it. Nope, I just can't stand how uninformed and how ignorant people are of the universe and the only life they have. There was a project done by a fellow classmate that I skimmed over a bit and my head almost exploded because of this statement: "...there is no wind on the moon nor is their gravity." So after reading it carefully I realized that she was paraphrasing someone else but it's still unclear to me whether or not she realizes there is gravity on the Moon... you can check it out here and tell me what you think.

"I see the human animal very much part of the "natural" world simply because there is no such thing as the "unnatural" world. I just find it funny how people see themselves outside of nature and feel the need to "reconnect" to it but its something you can never escape from."

This is a quotation from my first project that is very much a reflection and a foreshadowing of the projects to come... But I want to take a moment to consider what I'm really saying here. Partly, if not mostly, why people see themselves "outside" nature is because of these funny little books that tell us that we're special. We surround ourselves with things that we created and make ourselves feel bad about our very nature. EXAMPLE:

“Save sex for marriage.”

Translation: “If I can’t have consequence-free sex, neither can you.”
Acceptable Response: “I pledge myself! Give me a promise ring!”
Unacceptable Response: “So how did that work out for you?” Or, “Where exactly does the Bible say that?”

So I'm going to end where I started in this post, with my last project. I visited these places of worship with every blasphemous ideal against what is held to be true... If I stand or enter a place like the one pictured above and their god was really watching (according to their doctrines he has to be but it doesn't matter because he knew I would be there anyway) He would strike me down so fast... I would like to think I'm a greater "evil" than the starving children in Africa or really anywhere. Yeah I know, "I couldn't begin to understand Gods will." Save it... I've heard it all. I don't want to hear apologetic rhetoric I want understanding and that can't be gained from a dismissive statement that doesn't say anything. My protest is a challenge, much like the blasphemy challenge, but not to prove to me but to anyone who will view my work and challenge themselves in there own lives.