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Margaret Atwood, Author Of “The Handmaid’s Tale” On God, Religion & Politics - RI9
posted Sunday, 30 July 2006
Margaret Atwood, Author Of
“The Handmaid’s Tale” On God,
Religion & Politics - RI9
Margaret Atwood talks about what happens
when God and politics come together.
Transcribed from TV program by Tabacco
Bill Moyers: Writers from around the world were in New York recently. They were here at the invitation of PEN (Poets, Essayists & Novelists), a literary and human rights organization. Among their concerns is the threat to freedom of speech and conscience from religious extremism. And that’s a subject close to the heart of this noted novelist, Margaret Atwood. She is agnostic. For her ultimate reality is unknown and probably unknowable. Because as you’ll hear, when it comes to the mysteries of the universe, this skeptic has left slightly ajar her own door of perception.
Margaret Atwood has over twelve novels to her credit. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ arrived like an earthquake in the dialogue between faith and reason. In it she describes a woman’s fight to escape God-quoting oppressors, who have turned America into a theocracy, where women are stripped of their rights and torture is justified in the name of national security. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was adapted for the silver screen.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)
Starring
Natasha Richardson
Faye Dunaway
Aidan Quinn
Elizabeth McGovern
Victoria Tennant
Robert Duvall
Blanche Baker
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099731/
View the Movie Trailer at the website immediately above.
Margaret Atwood: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a blueprint of the kind of thing that human beings do when they’re put under a certain sort of pressure. And I made it a rule for the writing of this book that I would not put anything into it that human societies have not already done.
Bill Moyers: Now people said, when they read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, it could never happen here. But the fact of the matter is it had happened here under the Puritans.
Atwood: Oh yes, it’s happened many times.
Moyers: The Salem Witches’ Trial for example.
Atwood: Well the Salem Witch Trial is, in my opinion, one of the foundation events of American history. We can call it a clash between mythology and politics, if you like, because it depended very much on a belief in the invisible world.
This is what people believed. They weren’t being hypocrites when they did these things; they were actually scared of witchcraft and the devil, and they believed that the devil could work his way into their community through witches. So it was serious business. But it was also a hysteria.
The surprise to me has been, all of the stuff I learned long ago, I thought nobody’s going to interested in this again. What good is knowing 17th century theology ever going to be to me (smiling and snickering) or anybody else? Surely nobody’s interested. And now suddenly it’s all come back because things do go around in cycles.
Moyers: 17th century theology, how would you sum it up?
Atwood: The argument about predestination. There is a heresy called the “Antinomian Heresy”. Under antinomianism, you are convinced that you are one of the “Elect”; you are destined to be elect from birth, that you’re going to be saved no matter what; therefore you can do anything because you’re already marked as one of the “Elect”.
So that of course just let’s you do all the most atrocious things you might be inclined to do, while still believing that you are justified.
Tabacco: This is the only belief system imaginable, which could allow George W. Bush to behave as he has and still expect heaven as his reward. Sorry, George, but this Antinomian Heresy has to rank among the most ridiculous theories I have ever heard. It is equivalent to the justification of slavery because Blacks are sub-human, extermination of Jews under basically the same rationalization, and burning of witches because they were “infected by the devil”. I know George W. Bush is none too bright, but hell this is the 21st century. You’d think that even Karl Rove would have a tough time convincing GWB of that bullshit. This proves that totalitarian Heads-of-State can always be convinced that they themselves are gods.
I think it’s the kind of event that replays itself throughout history when cultures come under stress. These kinds of things happen. People start looking around for essentially human sacrifices. They start looking around for somebody they can blame. And they feel that if only they can demolish that person, everything’s going to be OK. And it’s of course never true, but there are these periods in history.
“If things aren’t going well, it must be the Communists; let’s have Joe McCarthy. Things aren’t going well, it must be ‘them Liberals’” (giggles).
Moyers: Well what ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ illustrates so vividly is that society can give up its ideals, its freedom, its values in an almost frighteningly normal way.
Atwood: In an almost frighteningly rapid way! Conditions change; there’s too much turmoil or fear of some kind than people can handle. And that’s the point at which they will trade their liberties for someone, who comes along and says, “I’m a strong leader; I’ll take care of it; trains will run on time”.
Moyers: If you wanted to take over the United States government today and setup your government, how would you do it?
Atwood: Well that is more or less how, and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is the answer to the question, “If you’re going to change the United States from a democracy into totalitarianism, how would you go about doing it?” Well you wouldn’t say, “Let’s all be Communists”. You wouldn’t get any takers for that. You might say a rather twisted sort of thing, “In order to preserve our freedoms, we have to give them up for now.”, which is kind of, I think, what’s been floating in the breeze this last little while. In order to preserve freedom, we have to demolish freedom.
Tabacco: Margaret Atwood won’t call a Spade a Spade, but Tabacco will: She’s talking about George W. Bush and his Washington Neocons (aka QuasiCons) in case any Reader is too naïve to read between the lines.
Americans cannot understand how Iraqis would tolerate Saddam Hussein for so long or how Germans could have permitted Hitler to destroy Germany as he did, but these same Americans sit quietly by and wait for somebody else to topple Bush and the Neocon Republicans in Washington. Well, folks, if we don’t do it, nobody else will. Lieberman won’t do it. Gore won’t do it. Kerry won’t do it. Schumer won’t do it. And you know damn well that Hillary Clinton won’t do it. I think that about covers the leading candidates for President from the Democratic Party.
So who’s going to do it, not just for Democrats, but also for Independents and disgusted Republicans? Who will step forward and lead us back to sanity? Stop waiting for a Messiah! It ain’t gonna happen. And Jesus didn’t fight wars anyway; he used words as his weapons. And you know what happened to Jesus! Do you think words will stop Bush and the War Profiteers?
Not only is there no Messiah to save us, we don’t even have a Joseph Welch, who stood up to Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 at Army-McCarthy Hearings witch-hunt!
Welch: You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman, "Call the next witness". At that point the gallery erupted in applause.
Picture: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
Text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Welch
First we must take away his unchallenged power this November. We must un-elect Republicans in droves. Until and unless we do that, nothing else can be accomplished. Republicans don’t listen to little people without big open checkbooks. And if we don’t make them pay the price for their evils, why should they listen to us?
Moyers: I keep in my notebook something you said once,
Atwood: That’s exactly right! If your government says,
Moyers: But you don’t imagine that could happen here?
Atwood: Wanna bet! Want to lay some bets as to that? You’d have to have quite a lot of uproar first, but it’s amazing how quickly people rolled over for the Patriot Act. They were scared enough so that they just said, “Oh OK, if that’s how we solve it, fine. Just don’t tell me.”
Moyers: Did you anticipate that you would be so vilified for suggesting in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that theocracy could happen in America?
Atwood: Well what has amazed me is the theocracy that I put in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ never calls itself “Christian”, and in fact it never says anything about Christianity whatsoever. Its slogans etc. etc. are all from the Old Testament. So what has amazed me was the rapidity with which a number of Christians put up their hands and said, “This is an insult to us”. What did it mean? It meant they hadn’t read the book. Because in the book, the regime does what all such regimes immediately do, it eliminates the opposition.
The Bolsheviks got rid of their nearest ideological neighbors – the Mensheviks as soon as they had the power. They got rid of any other socialists. They wanted to be the only true church brand of socialists. So any theocracy in this country would immediately eliminate all other competing religions if they could. So the Quakers in my book have gone underground, and the regime is wiping out little pockets of resistant Baptists here and there and stringing up nuns etc., which is exactly how they would operate because that’s what happens under those kinds of arrangements. Anybody, who could be a rival power, you got rid of them.
So I am one of those people, who do believe in the America of Thoreau. Thoreau, the conscientious objector, Thoreau the man, who stood upon his principles, who refused to pay taxes to a government that was waging a war he considered to be unjust, went to jail for it. That is the essence of the kind of American we have all looked up to for many years.
------------------------------------------------
Moyers: Are you suggesting that religious language, the language of the Bible, is also symbolic of a reality that we do not comprehend?
Atwood: Some of it is. It’s a very mixed bag, as you know!
Moyers: The Bible?
Atwood: Yeah! Because the Bible is what it is. It’s self-contradictory, it’s very mixed literary modes, it changes as you go through the Bible the point of view changes, the way God is perceived changes; it has been very schismatic. That is people will take a bit of the Bible, build a religion on that, more or less ignore the rest or say the rest doesn’t matter. There are all kinds of groups like that have differentiated themselves. Once the Catholic Church split at the time of the Reformation, there were a large number of other splits. Little groups have pulled off and developed their own theology really, based on certain passages in the Bible. So you can say “the Christians”, but you can’t make a generalization about that group except that they all seem to have something to do with this figure called Jesus of Nazareth, and they seem to have something to do with the New Testament, but which parts of it is the question.
There are some so-called Christians, who do nothing but think about the book of Revelations, with great delight contemplating the future spectacle of everybody frying to death except them.
Moyers: The Rapture!
Atwood: Yeah, well in the Rapture it never happens to be you, who doesn’t get raptured. (laughing)
“God & Science Are Synonymous, Not Incompatible; Bible Imperfect & Contradictory” Published September 3, 2005
http://tabacco.blog-city.com/god__science_are_synonymous_not_incompatible_bible_imperfect.htm
Moyers: What does the Rapture say about religion and the imagination?
Atwood: Well as far as I’m concerned it’s a heretical belief. The Rapture idea, which seems to consist mostly of flying on a cloud while other people suffer. That, I think, is just opening the door to some of the worst impulses in human nature, revenge and gloating.
Moyers: How do you explain it?
Atwood: Well we have a great capacity, as human beings, for being self-righteous and judgmental about other people, despite the admonition “Judge not, lest ye be judged!” We do judge, and some people take it to an extreme.
Moyers: If you were asked to design a new human being, as an improvement on the current model, would you eliminate the hunger for God?
Atwood: Well, that’s a very good question! I think the answer is “Could you eliminate such a thing?” It has been tried. It wasn’t much of an improvement as I recall.
Moyers: Where?
Atwood: Soviet Socialists Union replaced the Christian Western structure with its own, which is in fact another version of it. It didn’t seem to be that much of an improvement. I don’t think it’s a question of God or not God or religion or not religion; it’s what people do with their belief system, how they use that belief system. Whether they use it to really improve things for other people or whether they use it to tyrannize over other people.
In other words, if I could, I would confine the hunger for God to the personal realm so that it would not become something that people use to bash other people with.
Moyers: Does that mean you take your stand on the side of faith?
Atwood: No! (laughing) No, having been raised a strict agnostic –
Moyers: Not an atheist?
Atwood: No! Atheism is a religion … it makes an absolute stand about something that cannot be proven. A strict agnostic says you cannot pronounce as knowledge anything you cannot demonstrate. In other words, if you're gonna call it knowledge you have to be able to run an experiment on it that's repeatable. You can't run an experiment on whether God exists or not, therefore you can't say anything about it as knowledge. You can have a belief [in God] if you want to, if that is what grabs you, if you were called in that direction, if you have a subjective experience of that kind, that would be your belief system. You just can't call it knowledge.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/perspectives4.html
God appears in many different forms in the Bible, but never as an old man with a beard, floating in the clouds. Not in the Bible; nobody says anything about that. So where did we get that? Well we probably got it from Zeus, the old Greek god. That portrayal of God as an old man with a beard is a lot like the Greek and Roman sculptures of Zeus or Jupiter, who was given a beard to show his seniority. Nobodady! The false picture of God that human beings create for themselves. Instead of believing in the living spirit, they believe in a tyrannical, angry person, who is going to squash you.
So they believe in a series of rules and restrictions, imposed by Nobodady, because they have a need for rules and restrictions.
The universe, without an intelligence in it, has got nothing to say to us, whereas the universe, with an intelligence in it, has got something to say to us because it’s a mirror of who we are. How about that?
Moyers: Does a strict agnostic believe that we have a soul?
Atwood: A strict agnostic could believe that, but could not state it as a matter of knowledge. The soul is another one of these things that we know what we mean or we think we believe we know what we mean, but it’s not something you can measure or prove. So it has to exist in the belief system. I prefer to believe we have a soul because I like the story with the soul better than the story without the soul; it’s a better story.
Moyers: Margaret Atwood, thank you very much.
Atwood: And thank you.
In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)
“The Handmaid’s Tale” On God,
Religion & Politics - RI9
Margaret Atwood talks about what happens
when God and politics come together.
Transcribed from TV program by Tabacco
Bill Moyers: Writers from around the world were in New York recently. They were here at the invitation of PEN (Poets, Essayists & Novelists), a literary and human rights organization. Among their concerns is the threat to freedom of speech and conscience from religious extremism. And that’s a subject close to the heart of this noted novelist, Margaret Atwood. She is agnostic. For her ultimate reality is unknown and probably unknowable. Because as you’ll hear, when it comes to the mysteries of the universe, this skeptic has left slightly ajar her own door of perception.
Margaret Atwood has over twelve novels to her credit. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ arrived like an earthquake in the dialogue between faith and reason. In it she describes a woman’s fight to escape God-quoting oppressors, who have turned America into a theocracy, where women are stripped of their rights and torture is justified in the name of national security. ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ was adapted for the silver screen.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1990)
Starring
Natasha Richardson
Faye Dunaway
Aidan Quinn
Elizabeth McGovern
Victoria Tennant
Robert Duvall
Blanche Baker
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099731/
View the Movie Trailer at the website immediately above.
Margaret Atwood: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a blueprint of the kind of thing that human beings do when they’re put under a certain sort of pressure. And I made it a rule for the writing of this book that I would not put anything into it that human societies have not already done.
Bill Moyers: Now people said, when they read ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, it could never happen here. But the fact of the matter is it had happened here under the Puritans.
Atwood: Oh yes, it’s happened many times.
Moyers: The Salem Witches’ Trial for example.
Atwood: Well the Salem Witch Trial is, in my opinion, one of the foundation events of American history. We can call it a clash between mythology and politics, if you like, because it depended very much on a belief in the invisible world.
This is what people believed. They weren’t being hypocrites when they did these things; they were actually scared of witchcraft and the devil, and they believed that the devil could work his way into their community through witches. So it was serious business. But it was also a hysteria.
The surprise to me has been, all of the stuff I learned long ago, I thought nobody’s going to interested in this again. What good is knowing 17th century theology ever going to be to me (smiling and snickering) or anybody else? Surely nobody’s interested. And now suddenly it’s all come back because things do go around in cycles.
Moyers: 17th century theology, how would you sum it up?
Atwood: The argument about predestination. There is a heresy called the “Antinomian Heresy”. Under antinomianism, you are convinced that you are one of the “Elect”; you are destined to be elect from birth, that you’re going to be saved no matter what; therefore you can do anything because you’re already marked as one of the “Elect”.
So that of course just let’s you do all the most atrocious things you might be inclined to do, while still believing that you are justified.
Tabacco: This is the only belief system imaginable, which could allow George W. Bush to behave as he has and still expect heaven as his reward. Sorry, George, but this Antinomian Heresy has to rank among the most ridiculous theories I have ever heard. It is equivalent to the justification of slavery because Blacks are sub-human, extermination of Jews under basically the same rationalization, and burning of witches because they were “infected by the devil”. I know George W. Bush is none too bright, but hell this is the 21st century. You’d think that even Karl Rove would have a tough time convincing GWB of that bullshit. This proves that totalitarian Heads-of-State can always be convinced that they themselves are gods.
I think it’s the kind of event that replays itself throughout history when cultures come under stress. These kinds of things happen. People start looking around for essentially human sacrifices. They start looking around for somebody they can blame. And they feel that if only they can demolish that person, everything’s going to be OK. And it’s of course never true, but there are these periods in history.
“If things aren’t going well, it must be the Communists; let’s have Joe McCarthy. Things aren’t going well, it must be ‘them Liberals’” (giggles).
Moyers: Well what ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ illustrates so vividly is that society can give up its ideals, its freedom, its values in an almost frighteningly normal way.
Atwood: In an almost frighteningly rapid way! Conditions change; there’s too much turmoil or fear of some kind than people can handle. And that’s the point at which they will trade their liberties for someone, who comes along and says, “I’m a strong leader; I’ll take care of it; trains will run on time”.
Moyers: If you wanted to take over the United States government today and setup your government, how would you do it?
Atwood: Well that is more or less how, and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is the answer to the question, “If you’re going to change the United States from a democracy into totalitarianism, how would you go about doing it?” Well you wouldn’t say, “Let’s all be Communists”. You wouldn’t get any takers for that. You might say a rather twisted sort of thing, “In order to preserve our freedoms, we have to give them up for now.”, which is kind of, I think, what’s been floating in the breeze this last little while. In order to preserve freedom, we have to demolish freedom.
Tabacco: Margaret Atwood won’t call a Spade a Spade, but Tabacco will: She’s talking about George W. Bush and his Washington Neocons (aka QuasiCons) in case any Reader is too naïve to read between the lines.
Americans cannot understand how Iraqis would tolerate Saddam Hussein for so long or how Germans could have permitted Hitler to destroy Germany as he did, but these same Americans sit quietly by and wait for somebody else to topple Bush and the Neocon Republicans in Washington. Well, folks, if we don’t do it, nobody else will. Lieberman won’t do it. Gore won’t do it. Kerry won’t do it. Schumer won’t do it. And you know damn well that Hillary Clinton won’t do it. I think that about covers the leading candidates for President from the Democratic Party.
So who’s going to do it, not just for Democrats, but also for Independents and disgusted Republicans? Who will step forward and lead us back to sanity? Stop waiting for a Messiah! It ain’t gonna happen. And Jesus didn’t fight wars anyway; he used words as his weapons. And you know what happened to Jesus! Do you think words will stop Bush and the War Profiteers?
Not only is there no Messiah to save us, we don’t even have a Joseph Welch, who stood up to Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1954 at Army-McCarthy Hearings witch-hunt!
Welch: You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch cut him off and demanded the chairman, "Call the next witness". At that point the gallery erupted in applause.
Picture: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/welch-mccarthy.html
Text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Welch
First we must take away his unchallenged power this November. We must un-elect Republicans in droves. Until and unless we do that, nothing else can be accomplished. Republicans don’t listen to little people without big open checkbooks. And if we don’t make them pay the price for their evils, why should they listen to us?
Moyers: I keep in my notebook something you said once,
“What is needed for a really good tyranny is an
unquestionable idea or authority. Political
disagreement is political disagreement, but
political disagreement with a theocracy is
heresy”.
unquestionable idea or authority. Political
disagreement is political disagreement, but
political disagreement with a theocracy is
heresy”.
Atwood: That’s exactly right! If your government says,
“Not only am I your government,
but I represent the true religion.
If you disagree with it, you’re not
just of another faction, you’re
evil!”
but I represent the true religion.
If you disagree with it, you’re not
just of another faction, you’re
evil!”
Moyers: But you don’t imagine that could happen here?
Atwood: Wanna bet! Want to lay some bets as to that? You’d have to have quite a lot of uproar first, but it’s amazing how quickly people rolled over for the Patriot Act. They were scared enough so that they just said, “Oh OK, if that’s how we solve it, fine. Just don’t tell me.”
Moyers: Did you anticipate that you would be so vilified for suggesting in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that theocracy could happen in America?
Atwood: Well what has amazed me is the theocracy that I put in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ never calls itself “Christian”, and in fact it never says anything about Christianity whatsoever. Its slogans etc. etc. are all from the Old Testament. So what has amazed me was the rapidity with which a number of Christians put up their hands and said, “This is an insult to us”. What did it mean? It meant they hadn’t read the book. Because in the book, the regime does what all such regimes immediately do, it eliminates the opposition.
The Bolsheviks got rid of their nearest ideological neighbors – the Mensheviks as soon as they had the power. They got rid of any other socialists. They wanted to be the only true church brand of socialists. So any theocracy in this country would immediately eliminate all other competing religions if they could. So the Quakers in my book have gone underground, and the regime is wiping out little pockets of resistant Baptists here and there and stringing up nuns etc., which is exactly how they would operate because that’s what happens under those kinds of arrangements. Anybody, who could be a rival power, you got rid of them.
So I am one of those people, who do believe in the America of Thoreau. Thoreau, the conscientious objector, Thoreau the man, who stood upon his principles, who refused to pay taxes to a government that was waging a war he considered to be unjust, went to jail for it. That is the essence of the kind of American we have all looked up to for many years.
------------------------------------------------
Moyers: Are you suggesting that religious language, the language of the Bible, is also symbolic of a reality that we do not comprehend?
Atwood: Some of it is. It’s a very mixed bag, as you know!
Moyers: The Bible?
Atwood: Yeah! Because the Bible is what it is. It’s self-contradictory, it’s very mixed literary modes, it changes as you go through the Bible the point of view changes, the way God is perceived changes; it has been very schismatic. That is people will take a bit of the Bible, build a religion on that, more or less ignore the rest or say the rest doesn’t matter. There are all kinds of groups like that have differentiated themselves. Once the Catholic Church split at the time of the Reformation, there were a large number of other splits. Little groups have pulled off and developed their own theology really, based on certain passages in the Bible. So you can say “the Christians”, but you can’t make a generalization about that group except that they all seem to have something to do with this figure called Jesus of Nazareth, and they seem to have something to do with the New Testament, but which parts of it is the question.
There are some so-called Christians, who do nothing but think about the book of Revelations, with great delight contemplating the future spectacle of everybody frying to death except them.
Moyers: The Rapture!
Atwood: Yeah, well in the Rapture it never happens to be you, who doesn’t get raptured. (laughing)
“God & Science Are Synonymous, Not Incompatible; Bible Imperfect & Contradictory” Published September 3, 2005
http://tabacco.blog-city.com/god__science_are_synonymous_not_incompatible_bible_imperfect.htm
Moyers: What does the Rapture say about religion and the imagination?
Atwood: Well as far as I’m concerned it’s a heretical belief. The Rapture idea, which seems to consist mostly of flying on a cloud while other people suffer. That, I think, is just opening the door to some of the worst impulses in human nature, revenge and gloating.
Moyers: How do you explain it?
Atwood: Well we have a great capacity, as human beings, for being self-righteous and judgmental about other people, despite the admonition “Judge not, lest ye be judged!” We do judge, and some people take it to an extreme.
Moyers: If you were asked to design a new human being, as an improvement on the current model, would you eliminate the hunger for God?
Atwood: Well, that’s a very good question! I think the answer is “Could you eliminate such a thing?” It has been tried. It wasn’t much of an improvement as I recall.
Moyers: Where?
Atwood: Soviet Socialists Union replaced the Christian Western structure with its own, which is in fact another version of it. It didn’t seem to be that much of an improvement. I don’t think it’s a question of God or not God or religion or not religion; it’s what people do with their belief system, how they use that belief system. Whether they use it to really improve things for other people or whether they use it to tyrannize over other people.
I could not eliminate the hunger for God without
eliminating language. I might however eliminate
the desire to use God as a weapon.
eliminating language. I might however eliminate
the desire to use God as a weapon.
In other words, if I could, I would confine the hunger for God to the personal realm so that it would not become something that people use to bash other people with.
Moyers: Does that mean you take your stand on the side of faith?
Atwood: No! (laughing) No, having been raised a strict agnostic –
Moyers: Not an atheist?
Atwood: No! Atheism is a religion … it makes an absolute stand about something that cannot be proven. A strict agnostic says you cannot pronounce as knowledge anything you cannot demonstrate. In other words, if you're gonna call it knowledge you have to be able to run an experiment on it that's repeatable. You can't run an experiment on whether God exists or not, therefore you can't say anything about it as knowledge. You can have a belief [in God] if you want to, if that is what grabs you, if you were called in that direction, if you have a subjective experience of that kind, that would be your belief system. You just can't call it knowledge.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/perspectives4.html
God appears in many different forms in the Bible, but never as an old man with a beard, floating in the clouds. Not in the Bible; nobody says anything about that. So where did we get that? Well we probably got it from Zeus, the old Greek god. That portrayal of God as an old man with a beard is a lot like the Greek and Roman sculptures of Zeus or Jupiter, who was given a beard to show his seniority. Nobodady! The false picture of God that human beings create for themselves. Instead of believing in the living spirit, they believe in a tyrannical, angry person, who is going to squash you.
So they believe in a series of rules and restrictions, imposed by Nobodady, because they have a need for rules and restrictions.
The universe, without an intelligence in it, has got nothing to say to us, whereas the universe, with an intelligence in it, has got something to say to us because it’s a mirror of who we are. How about that?
Moyers: Does a strict agnostic believe that we have a soul?
Atwood: A strict agnostic could believe that, but could not state it as a matter of knowledge. The soul is another one of these things that we know what we mean or we think we believe we know what we mean, but it’s not something you can measure or prove. So it has to exist in the belief system. I prefer to believe we have a soul because I like the story with the soul better than the story without the soul; it’s a better story.
Moyers: Margaret Atwood, thank you very much.
Atwood: And thank you.
In 1981's 'Body Heat', Kathleen Turner said, "Knowledge is power".
T.A.B.A.C.C.O. (Truth About Business And Congressional Crimes Organization)
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