Humanist Symposium #48: A Winter Wonderland

A hearty welcome to one and all for this forty-eighth edition of The Humanist Symposium! This weekend, it's gotten down to twenty below zero (Fahrenheit) in Central Illinois: the solstice is past, but winter proper is just getting started as we've only gotten our first "real" snowfalls in the last three weeks or so. Similarly, I had thought that my paucity of posts would end with my return from the frigid northlands, but the togetherness and celebrations were just getting started as I caught up with old friends who had come back to town for new year celebrations and what-not.

The season seems to permeate even our Humanist blogosphere: the theme of this symposium, from reading the entries, is clearly a wintry one. We start off with the starkest reason for the season, death and rebirth. No matter what the superstitious zealots among us may say, the real reason for the season - and I've forgone the scare quotes because I actually mean this - is the death and rebirth of the Sun. In the northern hemisphere, our star wanes from the autumnal equinox until the winter solstice, that particular rotation of our Earth with the fewest hours of daylight in the entire circumstellar cycle.

Graham Phoenix will deliver our opening sermon, some thoughts of his on Death and Departure. A reflection on a Humanist memorial service, which I sincerely hope shall be given to me on my demise, he says of his departed friend:

She believed so much in people, she had no spiritual beliefs. Spirituality, religion, to her was a con that exploited people. There was no God, no after life, nothing beyond the memory someone holds in their heart for a person. So her touchstones were nature and people. Her funeral was a humanist one, first I have been to.

From Graham's description, the service seemed less a "goodbye" and more a "remembrance." It seems to have rubbed him the wrong way, which is a shame; or perhaps it was simply inevitable that he should feel some loss at his friend's passing, and no memorial service could ameliorate that. This dovetails well into our next entry, Greta Christina's thoughts on Atheism, Death, and the Difference Between Pessimism and Realism:

It bugs me when atheists with a more bleak view of death than mine present that bleakness as a logical consequence of atheism, the inherent and natural result of not believing in God or an afterlife. It bugs me partly because I disagree. Obviously. But it also bugs me because it treats a question of personal opinion and philosophy and perspective as if it were a question of fact.

Greta reminds us of the role that emphasis and perspective have on our outlooks in life. The particulars of what we emphasize about our lives on earth, and what perspective we take on the things that come our way, go a far longer way than many wish to acknowledge towards shaping our lives. As a case in point, Michael Fridman reflects upon the role of luck in his life and concludes that he is Living on Borrowed Time:

If we don’t get ourselves extinct, if things go well there may be a time in the not too distant future where (due to a growing population and improving living standards) most humans who ever existed will have had the same cushy conditions. This tirade will become obsolete — since based on a historical view I should have lived well past 25. But until then, it at least seems clear to me that we should stop romanticising the past — and in the words of a TED speaker I don’t remember, start romanticising the future instead.

Well said! We should all strive to help build such a future, where "there but for the grace of chance go I" sort of luck can apply to as many as possible. Although, I suppose that it couldn't really be called "luck," per se, at that point.

But sometimes it is appropriate to romanticize the past, if by "romanticize" we mean "think fondly about." Andrew West reminds us of this in A Humanist Miracle, comparing and contrasting the 1947 original A Miracle on 34th Street with the 1994 remake. Like all good reviews, West extrapolates the comparison between the two movies into a lesson we would all do well to take to heart:

Even if Christmas was 100% described in the Bible, we’d still get to strip the weird stuff and enjoy the rest. This isn’t rude or disrespectful – we’re not preventing others celebrating, but we’re not bound by their rules, because we’re not in their club. There’s no copyright on celebration, and nobody gets to forever assign meaning to ritual. I don’t care why we put up coloured lights – I just like pretty lights, dammit! This is the pleasingly secular message of Miracle 1947: celebrate however you like, and don’t worry about what other people think, but stand firm in your convictions.

This is the sort of lesson we should be looking for in all our daily lives, taking the opportunity to live out our values as TechSkeptic does while Shoveling Snow:

Some days, if the storm is real bad, I'll go around and help two or three people dig out their cars. I get offered money, I get asked what I want. I tell them I don't want anything, I just want them to help someone else out some time. Yeah, I saw the movie "Pay It Forward". I think its a pretty good idea, even if the reality is that almost no one pays it forward.

The great thing about such thoughts is that, if enough people behave like that, it becomes reality. These nice little things are, after all, the whole point in a very important way. We don't just advocate for Humanism because it makes more sense or is more rational or has its underpinning supported better by the evidence. I mean, of course it does those things, too; but instilling Humanist values into a population seems to make that population better, to the best of our ability to tell. Godlessness, on a large scale, is good for people. And a good thing, too, as Adam Lee presents some encouraging statistics and solstice well-wishing in Happy Holidays! Atheism is Growing!:

What this shows, as I've said before and will doubtless continue to say, is that we should ignore the brow-furrowing and finger-wagging of the Very Serious theologians who sternly inform us that we're doing a disservice to our own cause by advocating and defending it in public. We have every reason to believe that atheist campaigns of persuasion are working, achieving their intended purpose of convincing more people to become atheists and weakening the social prejudice that treats religious belief as immune to questioning.

This should provide some comfort to the Mandi Kayes of the world, who have seen "meaning" connected to "religion" for too long by far, and fallen under the illusion that there is any necessary connection between them at all. As Mandi writes in a post on Fulfillment,

There are far too many people, including myself, who have never taken the time or effort to find their own sense of fulfillment in their lives. I’ve always relied on my pre-fabricated bubble to give me everything I thought I needed in my life. And when times get tough, I fall back into the familiar.

So here’s to finding real fulfillment within yourself in 2010.

Cheers!

Cheers, indeed! Keep fighting the good fight, even when it goes into your own head. In the greater scheme of things, we should be so lucky as to be able to worry about things like leading fulfilling lives, rather than worrying about having a life at all. Life is complicated, and Andrew Bernardin reminds us of this in The Mundane Secrets to Happiness:

When I first moved to Florida I noticed this about my new area: store clerks and other service providers seemed so much nicer. Sunnier in disposition. Now I know why that may be so. While it is not “something in the water,” it could be a bunch of things in the wider environment that lend themselves to more satisfying life experiences. And so the greater number of genuine smiles and warm words.

The "little things' really do add up, they're what we make our lives out of. Think about it - is your life made up of a few "big things," or a whole bunch of "little things?" Bernardin drives the point home with a bit of applied rhetoric in What to Do About Woo in the Family:

I rarely respond well to being publicly bitch-slapped by the truth. Instead, I appreciate having a breadcrumb-trail of clues placed before me so I may make the progress and then own the conclusion myself.

Nothing like applying a little bit of constructive psychology to the family, eh?

We'll close this symposium on life, death, meaning, and family togetherness by coming full-circle. Cubik's Rube brings us to a vexatious close with his thoughts on a Daily Fail and Akmal Shaikh:

But amidst all this vagueness, there’s one thing I’m pretty damn sure of.

And that’s that, when China executes a British citizen, whatever your thoughts on capital punishment in general might be, the correct response is not “I’m glad he’s dead, and the rest of his lot should all go the same way.”

I’m paraphrasing, but that’s pretty much the gist of this Daily Mail article by Leo McKinstry.

I read it, and so should you, and I have to say that I am pissed. McKinstry's impermissive deontological Othering is exactly the sort of thing we need to be fighting against. Law is not good in and of itself, drugs are not bad in and of themselves, and if you have such a huge problem with something that your society needs to kill people to stop them doing it, then you're probably barking up the wrong tree. Last I checked, the measure of civilization was how permissive it is in letting people do whatever they want so long as they don't harm others. Letting people fulfill themselves in a manner of their own choosing is the logical consequence of expanding our moral circles, and McKinstry's shrieking demagoguery is precisely the opposite of that.

So, in closing, let us Humanists go forth and shovel some snow, so to speak. Let us find fulfillment in making the world a more fulfilling place, let us spread the good news of our message to all corners, let us improve the lives of our neighbors and thereby also help ourselves. And let us do all of this with a happy heart, in full knowledge of the sobering fact that death comes to us all. After all, spring is coming. See you in three weeks at The Purloined Letter! Peace and love to one and all.

Bullshit Pulpit: The Gospel of Godlessness

My roommate, Silver Garou, recently saw this salt stain where his car was parked when he was visiting his girlfriend:

Click for huge!

He was kind enough to share with me, and now I want to share it with all of you. Now, everyone knows that A is for Atheism. Clearly, this is a sign from the Universe that he should keep on in his faithlessness and spread the gospel of godlessness. But there's a deeper meaning here, and that's what I want to explore today.

We begin with Douglas Gasking's proof that God does not exist. It is elegant in its simplicity, and it goes something like this: the impressiveness of an act is the product of both its inherent difficulty and the handicap to the actor; the creation of all existence is the most inherently difficult task imaginable; not existing is the greatest handicap imaginable; therefore, God (i.e. the most impressive actor imaginable) must have created all existence without existing himself. Otherwise, we're just not talking about God.

What's so amazingly powerful about this little bit of argumentation is that it succeeds where every other ontological argument fails: it explains how God could create all of existence, which is completely senseless when you consider that if God was around then he would have been all of existence. By positing God firmly outside existence (i.e. in the idea space of nonexistent entities), this ontological argument finally explains how stuff comes from nothing in a way that those science-challenged blatherskites can finally understand!

At this point, I think I should point out a key difference between Gasking's argument and all other ontological arguments, namely: Avicenna, Anselm, Plantinga, et al. have always sought to establish God's existence with their syllogistic gyrations. But they fail as a category for the simple reason that the existence of an entity cannot be positively established by argumentation alone. However, the impossibility of an entity's existence (and thus the necessity of its nonexistence) can be established by argumentation alone. To wit: from the definition of a square and the definition of a circle, we know that square circles cannot possibly exist, and thus we know that pro wrestling is fake. (As an aside, compare the commercial success of pro wrestling with that of religion, and then try to tell me with a straight face that the dim-witted mouth-breathers who believe in either of them aren't just plain retarded - and don't bother getting offended, because I didn't just make a slur; I mean that these people literally have a crippling mental disability.)

At any rate, Gasking's argument is not properly ontological, but rather the antidote to such foolishness. As a decoupler undoes the work of a coupler, Gasking's is a deontological argument. Since deontology also means duty-based ethics, we are therefore duty-bound to accept Gasking's argument by ethics, which is always the most important reason to do anything. We just have to buy it, no two ways about it, and anyone who says she doesn't buy it is lying to you and probably to herself as well because she hates God. Yeah, that's right: believing in God equals hating God. Furthermore, this argument applies with equal force to all possible gods (and even most of the impossible ones!), cancelling out all possible ontological arguments for those possible gods, forever, The End. You just can't argue with logic like this.

Perhaps the most elegant aspect of this whole scene, however, is that it also makes sense of the platitudinous deepities spouted by empty-headed theists. A "deepity," for those unfamiliar with the lingo, is Daniel Dennett's term for a profound-sounding statement with two interpretations: one of which is literally true but entirely trivial, the other of which would be profound if it were not manifestly false. Dennett's example is the statement, "Love is just a word," because of course the word "love" is just a word; but the referent of love is not a word, stupid. My favorite deepity is, "The only thing you can see is light," which sounds profound but is no more amazing than, "The only thing you can hear is sound." And so deepities like Karen Armstrong's "God is the God behind God" become obviously true when we replace the word "God" with what we really mean by it: a nonexistent entity, a nothing. Nothing is the nothing behind nothing. "God created all of existence" becomes the rather innocuous (and also scientifically supported) "Nothing created all of existence." "We're on a mission from God?" More like a mission from nothing! God is the source of morality? Oh, I get it now! Nothing is the source of morality - it all makes sense now!

And if a nonexistent entity could create all of existence, then of course it could also perform the comparatively trivial task of forming a salt stain to speak to an atheist. The message from God is clear as the salt crystals in which it is written: "I don't exist, so don't believe in me; and tell other people not to believe in me, too." So hop to it, folks! Go spread the gospel of godlessness!

Quickies Before Work

Got my tablet & stuff in the mail, so now I gotta draw that thing I said I'd draw. Also! I need to finish re-doing the cover for TQM, because that totally didn't happen over solstice vacation. And in the field of Participating in the Internet, PZ Myers is proposing a 2013 meetup in DC - I'm in, and so should you be! Speaking of PZ and Participating in the Internet, The Friendly Atheist has a poll about who is the most godless atheist of 2009. The options are "PZ Myers" and "Everyone else in the Universe combined." I picked PZ, because "everyone else in the Universe combined" includes theists, and there's no cancelling out how much godly idiocy they have (you can't be, like, negatively theistic - theism is already a negative thing! Rimshot!). Anyway, you should vote.

Yes, you.

Right now!

Legal Round-Up!

So it's been a new year for almost a week, but I've been in the frigid northlands since the 23^rd which basically means that I'm incommunicado because one of my family's computers has like forty-five viruses (that I could find), and the other is a five-year-old Mac. Argh.

Anyway, we've got a bevy of new laws going into effect, so I thought I'd take some time to go over a few of them. In completely arbitrary order:

Three States Forward: ...and one state back. New Hampshire and DC joined Vermont and Iowa in legalizing gay marriage, bringing the total to five states. Maine backed out like California in a November referendum (Iowa is poised to do the same, if things don't go well), Massachusetts and Connecticut are still going strong.

Drive-by Communications: Wisconsin, Illinois, Oregon, Colorado, and Texas banned texting while driving, bringing the total number to 28 states to pass such measures. You also can't use cell phones at all if you're in a school zone (hands-free devices are still allowed). In the sensible traffic laws department, Wisconsinanians are now allowed to pass on the shoulder and make U-turns when the Moon is in the second house and Jupiter aligns with Mars.

Eat Right, Or Else: Raise your hand if you know why trans fats are bad for you. OK, if your hand is in the air, you can scroll past this. If not, then you should read up: our enzymes suck at breaking down trans fats, and they're accordingly more likely to accumulate in your bloodstream and clog your tubes. So California banned them.

Oregon Recognizes Religion as Disability: Well, sort of. Oregon passed a law that "redefines 'reasonable accommodation' to be more in line with the ADA." Consider the definition of delusional disorder:

Delusional disorder is characterized by the presence of recurrent, persistent non-bizarre delusions.

Delusions are irrational beliefs, held with a high level of conviction, that are highly resistant to change even when the delusional person is exposed to forms of proof that contradict the belief... Typically, while delusional disorder sufferers may be distressed about the delusional "reality," they may not have the insight to see that anything is wrong with the way they are thinking or functioning. Regarding the earlier example, those suffering delusion might state that the only thing wrong or upsetting in their lives is that the government is spying, and if the surveillance would cease, so would the problems. Similarly, the people suffering the disorder attribute any obstacles or problems in functioning to the delusional reality, separating it from their internal control. Furthermore, whether unable to get a good job or maintain a romantic relationship, the difficulties would be blamed on "government interference" rather than on their own failures or omissions. Unless the form of the delusions causes illegal behavior, somehow affects an ability to work, or otherwise deal with daily activities, the delusional disorder sufferer may adapt well enough to navigate life without coming to clinical attention.

Die In a Fire of Cancer: Florida, Michigan, and Arkansas joined nine other states in requiring cigarettes to turn off when not in use. North Carolina and Virginia joined 28 other states in passing some manner of smoking ban, refusing to let restaurant owners (or bars in 25 states) decide for themselves whether they'll be smoking or non-smoking. Oh, and you can't smoke with someone under 16 in your car if you live in New Brunswick.

Fun fact: the EPA's infamous December '92 study linking secondhand smoke to lung cancer was shot down in July '98 in a 92-page Federal trial for basically being a piece of shit (less-than-92-page rundown here). The short version is that secondhand smoke is gross to some people, which is a reason to allow business owners to forbid it on their property, but it is ultimately no more harmful than seeing boys smooch each other - though it's really gross to some people!

There are over 40,000 laws going into effect, and I'm not even going to bother summarizing them all (especially the silly ones, like Texas teens being unable to go to tanning salons without parental consent). But if you, Alert Reader, can come up with some more interesting ones that are either new or changing as of 01/01/2010, I'll be happy to add them in with credit!

Dear The Internet: Today I made a blasphemy!

Ahem. Inspired by Saturday's Daylight Atheism, I cooked up a little blasphemy in my kitchen just now to tide me over until I get the rest of my stuff in the mail. All of the below photographs can be clicked for huge.

Can you guess where this is going?

Wait for it...

I'd say "boo-yah," or something similarly triumphant, but the thing is, I don't give a fuck. Like, I know that some book-burning, cartoonist-threatening, bacon-hating shit-heads with carp for brains would get their undies in a bind over this, but they're stupid, so who cares what they think?

OK, that's enough pointless nonsense for now. I'll wait for the death threats to roll in, and follow them up with Miss Piggy kissing Mohammed (unless you, the General Reader, can give me something even more blasphemous to draw).

Follow-up here.

101 Interesting Things, part thirty-seven: Music

Music is probably one of the "realest" things there is, if "being real" can be considered a continuum and not just a binary thing. If you're having trouble imagining a spectrum of realism, think about how real chairs are: well, OK, on the one hand there are actually chairs in the world, but on the other hand there are just atoms arranged chair-wise. But those atoms are composed of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and those things are a little bit "more real" than the chair-like arrangements into which we place them. If you can dig that. Or it could be that, since words are imaginary, I'm just playing a pretty word game. Your choice, I guess.

The best definition for music that I ever heard was, "organized sound in time." Now, the sound of music (phenomenologically speaking) is just vibrations in the air wobbling your eardrum and then turning those wobbles from air vibrations into liquid vibrations, followed by tiny hairs in your inner ear picking up those vibrations and telling your brain that you're hearing sound. But what's behind that is a bunch of rhythms, and what makes music interesting is the arrangements of (and relationships between) those rhythms. I don't just mean time signature and beat, I mean the rhythm with which the air must vibrate to carry, say, a C#.

Now here's where the "realness" of music comes in: the relationships between those vibrations are a matter of mathematical proportion. While it's fairly arbitrary what names we give to our notes and what scales we use, these rhythms have a direct relationship to the bits of reality from which they are constructed. What precisely that means is up to the reader, but the fact remains that sound (or more generally, rhythm) is a direct expression of the properties of reality that produce it. There is a key difference, however, between rhythm as we perceive it and rhythm as it actually is, and here I want to illustrate the point by reference to some of the differences between Indian and Western music.

Both Indian and Western music are based on the physics of sound, but whereas Western music only recognizes twelve notes in an octave, Indian music recognizes twenty-two notes in an octave. Interestingly, both styles typically choose only seven notes in that octave range to play in a piece, and this determines the key of the piece. While the variations of Western music typically involve play with harmonic progression, Indian music tends to focus its complexity on melody and rhythm: in an Indian performance, the audience can keep a steady rhythm while the performers play around, and then they meet back up and the audience is impressed with how they each went and played with the rhythm and then managed to meet back in the middle. In a Western performance, the audience just kind of sits and listens while everyone stays in the same rhythm and plays different parts in harmony. And whereas Western music tends to have a "mood," Indian music has a time of day: Westerners have happy music, sad music, suspenseful music; Indians have morning music, afternoon music, night music. And that's just skimming the surface! (A more thorough read can be found here.)

The point is, a Westerner might call Indian music dissonant and arrhythmic, while an Indian might call Western music repetitive and dull. Each would describe their own music as rich and soulful and all kinds of other positive adjectives, while the other thing is "just weird." Which you like seems to be based only on where you grew up, the local style to which you have grown accustomed, like language or an accent: Indians have three distinct sounds which Westerners seem to translate all as the "D" sound, and Westerners seem to do this thing with migrating Rs (which is why a Bostonian will "wash the cah," while a Texan will "warsh the car").

But underneath that style is the same physics, the same vibrations, the same travelling disturbances through reality. Much like language is all about communicating ideas, music is all about communicating rhythms; but while ideas are only in our heads, rhythms are actually "out there in the world." I think that makes music and rhythmic expression a little bit more real, more interesting, more visceral, than the things that we do with language alone.

Family Togetherness > Ideology

I got into town late on the 23^rd, and everything since then has been a blur of cooking, eating, drinking, wrapping and un-wrapping... y'know, family togetherness. But on the 24^th, my family went to a Christmas Eve service at the local Episcopal church. I had just shown and explained my book to my mom and her girlfriend, and they seemed to be really impressed with the fact that I cranked out a word count in a month and then followed up to get my proof copy, but only now - now that I've written a book, it seems - do they understand that all my talk of God being imaginary means that I actually don't believe in God. Like, I've been an atheist longer than I've been an adult (if you count 21 as adulthood, that is), and so my mom seemed to hem and haw and hesitate about asking me to come to service, even though I haven't done so for years.

There was one exception, two years ago: my youngest brother and sister were in the pageant, so I put up with being bored for an hour to support them. Oh, I also went to a church when my choir director died - he was a great guy, and celebrating his life/honoring his death was worth acting against my "church is stupid" principle.

Well, I told my mom that I'd sleep on it, and so I did. I woke up thinking that I really didn't want to go, but it meant so much to other people, and it's really not all that much trouble for me. Oh, they also have a gay pastor at this church, which sweetened the deal for me: like Pat Condell, I don't want there to be gay clergy only in the sense that I don't want there to be any clergy, but I have no problem with someone wearing a certain set of clothes just because of how they choose to stick it in the naughty place. And maybe if churches become inclusive and permissive enough (which, historically, has defined what church is not all about), then my problems with churches will just go away and religion might become a positive thing in the world after all. Or maybe my head's in the clouds, I don't know.

Well, Christmas Eve slipped by, mostly. I had to help the kids accomplish their lists for the day: E had to finish a present for Mom, C had to clean her guinea pig's cage because it hadn't been done for weeks, that sort of thing. And my task was to make the Jell-O for Christmas dinner, since it was layered and required brief periods of attention between long spans of inactivity. Just my style! Anyway, I'm in the middle of making Jell-O (four of seven layers in), still wrapping presents, my brother A & my father haven't shown up yet, and mom tells me it's time to go to church. They're heading out the door right now! We gotta go!

Well, OK. I'm thinking to myself, "I could go to church and be bored but have a little bit more family togetherness - which we're getting anyway - or I could stay home and do useful things that actually accomplish something. Hmm..." So I said that I needed to get to a stopping point, but if Dad & A were going and the whole family would be there except me, then I would go. I called my dad and left a message as the rest of the crew headed out the door. Well, Mom calls me from the road to say that they have actually seen my father's vehicle on the way, then my father calls me to say that he's bringing A to church and wants to know if I'll be there.

Ugh. Fine. OK. "Yeah, I just got to a stopping point. I'll throw on my boots and coat and I'll be right along." I briefly consider a shot of rum - just to keep me warm, you understand - but then I think better of it. I'm only five minutes late, and according to the program, they're still singing the prelude hymn. I sit down amid hugs and whispered greetings and smiles, all of which I return, and then hear the priest say, "Blessed be the one, holy, and living God."

The congregation responds, "Glory to God for ever and ever."

The priest continues, "Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen." (You see, I kept a program. It's all annotated an' shit.)

The first reading was from Isaiah 9, which seems to be all about the Lord's people coming together to live in peace while all those ungodly folk live their awesome lives in civilization. Read it. It's civilization versus the country bumpkin believer, and God comes along to lay low the people who actually try to improve their lives and feel good about themselves for it.

It wasn't all backwardness and foolishness, though. There was some humor, too! At one point, the pastor said, "Therefore, according to his command, O Father," which I totally heard as, "...according to his commando father." It gave me the giggles and I had to explain by passing notes. And at the end, when we were about to sing Joy to the World, the pastor realized that we skipped over Silent Night and said, "Wait! We forgot Silent Night! It's just not Christmas unless we sing Silent Night, after all." That gave more people the giggles, so I had no problem laughing along.

So, OK, an hour of boredom, but at least everyone's nice. There was no Hellfire or brimstone, no shrieking condemnations of difference, just a bunch of innocent god-walloping nonsense with a central message of love. I can't quite get behind that on account of the nonsense, but it could be a whole lot worse. And it made for a great conversation starter, too! At dinner, my mom started telling me how the congregation has shrunk with the gay pastor, and she told me about how she ran into one of the no-longer-attending families while she was out shopping and asked why she hadn't seen them at church. She responded that there had been some changes, at which point I said, "Huh. Cute. A bigot in civilized clothing." I got to talk about Conservapedia and their stupid project to remove liberal bias from the Bible, too. Then we actually talked about the Bible, and how it's a mixed bag and you can get whatever you want out of it depending on how you go into it. Good conversation!

There was something of a reprise last night at my grandparents' place (they have a 26-acre valley for a backyard, so this is where the sledding happens). I got to talk about my book again, and my mom brought up that I came to church, and then she brought up the Conservative Bible Project again and I got to talk all about it. So it was good, in the end, because the family unbeliever got to rally with the rest of the crew against what we all recognize to be idiocy. And at the end of the day, I really don't care what people believe, so long as they leave their unprovable crap at the door when it comes to telling others how to live their lives. There's a difference between "You should take your full course of antibiotics to cure an infection" and "You should refrain from sticking it in the naughty place in thus-and-such a way because it makes baby Jesus cry." They know the difference. They just... believe some things that I find silly.

Whatever. I probably believe some things that they find silly.

Oh, I had entirely forgotten about the Jell-O, but of course church didn't get blamed. I just went out to buy more and picked up where I had left off. It came out great!

Turning off my computer...

...and so begins my sojourn to The Frigid Northlands. Happy whatever you do, everybody!

A Matter of Scale

I have to thank Silver Garou for pointing me at this video of the Universe as we see it:

It reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex from Adams' Hitchhiker trilogy. Then there's this, from Rhodopsin:

The Universe is such a huge and awesome place! And while I'm at this, I should also mention that cl linked me to Symphony of Science a few weeks back, which is great stuff! What's not to love about auto-tuned prose from great science popularizers, set to ambient techno with imagery from science programs? Here's Our Place in the Cosmos, which features one of my favorite Dawkins quotes: "Matter flows from place to place and momentarily combines to be you. Some people find that thought disturbing - I find the reality thrilling."

Enjoy!

Arguing on the Internet: Writer's Remorse

I've been re-reading my response to Sarah Braasch, both in light of the comments left there (and in the DA thread), and because I re-read things often to try to get a different perspective on them. Well, now I've got a different perspective on my own words, and I feel compelled to say something about it. Here I go!

The more I read what I wrote, the more it comes off as a couple pages of "I don't like your style, young lady!" It strikes me more and more as finger-wagging nonsense, and I always get pissed when people do that to me, so why would I do it to anyone else? As both Sarah and Ebonmuse have said, the criticisms are valid ones - but what was I criticizing? Well, Sarah didn't genuflect before the facts in a manner suitable to my tastes - she didn't cite sources when making points. Why did that stick in my craw so much? Because... because... because facts matter, dammit, and if you don't keep track of where you get them from, then you might be wrong and then... and then... well, you'd be wrong.

But was Sarah wrong in anything she said? Umm... no. As Ebonmuse was kind enough to point out, the facts are on Sarah's side here - while her apocalyptic tenor* may indeed have been hyperbolic, I think such hyperbole is justified by the facts in this case. And ultimately, the availability of that justification is what matters to me, not whether it's laid out right the Hell then and there. Missionaries do in fact bring their death cult with them and tie it to what comforts of civilization they also offer, and their death cult is in fact anti-civilization, anti-health, and anti-sanity. How better to bring about the end of the world than by poisoning all that is best in it, both in practice when giving aid to people, and in the public mind by causing the disease to be consistently linked with the cure? Oh, and for clarity, disease=unevidenced superstition (but I repeat myself!), cure=secular civilization (oh, I repeat myself again!).

To be fair, nobody goes all the damn way to Africa just to ruin a bunch of strangers' lives. These missionaries, of course, have nothing but the best of intentions in their heart of hearts, I'm sure of it - but who's always saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? Must be someone who believes in Hell...

Anyway, I think I got a little carried away with my academic desire for citation. But this ain't Wikipedia, it's not even college, and so picking nits over something like that just seems inappropriate now that I've had a couple days to think about what I wrote. My first reaction to her piece was that it was moving and well-written, and while that admittedly does rely on the sort of background that she and I share (i.e. growing up amid religious insanity), we do in fact share that background, and I think appealing to that is no bad thing. As Sarah said, this is not academic writing, so my criticisms are at least a bit out of place.

I guess what I'm getting at is that everyone's an asshole from time to time, and I think I just took my turn. Sorry about that. I should have thought about what I was saying before I said it, and then I might not have gone off on a tangent about... nothing at all, really.

* - I try to use the phrase "apocalyptic tenor" at every available opportunity, because I read it here and it's awesome (it's also awesome here). But am I the only one who thinks of a giant Luciano Pavarotti destroying Italy when this phrase is mentioned? That would be quite an "apocalyptic tenor" indeed! Man, now I want to see giant Luciano Pavarotti wreck the Vatican... that would be awesome, too! Also, today's Dinosaur Comics is pretty awesome, too (fortune cookie moment).

Too Awesome Not to Share

This was just too amazing to leave alone on the internet:

click for big, source

So yeah, this site is just awesome. It might even be called "epic," in a "win" sort of way. For the win.

Arguing on the Internet: Whose Work Is Sarah Braasch Doing?

So I've been thinking about Christian Missionaries Are Doing God's Work, and re-reading it with a more critical eye. I started off liking it a whole bunch, but then again, I started off agreeing with Sarah in the first place. Now, I think the piece (as a stand-alone essay) expects perhaps a bit too much from the reader, or bites off more than it can chew. Maybe both.

I'm not troubled by the initial revulsion at the missionaries on the plane. I think it's an understandable emotional reaction all on its own, and the conversation Sarah relates between her and her friend shows a great opportunity for growth. My issue starts with "The Ghion was a sea of entitled whiteness."

I understand that First World folks can (and do) cop an attitude of entitlement, especially when they think they're helping others and see any inconvenience as ingratitude (or some such horse-shit). But this is never shown, we are simply expected to believe that an attitude exists without ever seeing it in action, rather than presenting it as a reasoned conclusion from any observation that was shared with the reader. Sarah says, "The only dark faces were those of the employees and the babies," but aren't those the people who live in this country? And isn't the point of a hotel to accommodate its guests? And why on Earth is she complaining that children are being taken from an impoverished nation to a home with parents who can provide for them? I understand that the situation these children are being brought into is far from perfect, ideologically speaking; but I think it's a damn sight better than the destitution in which they would otherwise be raised.

Then there's this bit: "I would have been more than happy to forego any creature comforts to not be staying in the same hotel as every other overfed Westerner in Addis Ababa. ... I decided to soak in the tub for a little ablution." Now, maybe she had no choice in terms of which hotel to stay in. I'm just saying, it makes for a rather awkward juxtaposition to say, "I'd sacrifice X to escape Y; but now I'm going to indulge in X without getting away from Y at all!" When you don't have a choice about Y, sure, you may as well do X anyway. Just sayin'.

Moving on, there's the conversation with the other missionary (from a story logic perspective, this would have been an excellent place to capitalize on that aforementioned growth opportunity). Sarah asks, "Why can missionaries and evangelicals and proselytizers sense a former believer like sharks detect blood in the water, like rapists and child molesters can smell the lingering odor of victimization emanating from the pores of the abused?" I didn't know that they could! But in any event, it doesn't seem like this particular one is doing anything of the kind. Sarah, by her own admission, isolated herself - she put herself in a position where she looked lonely, and this other person seemed to be trying to make friends with her. She reined herself in and remained civil, but it seemed unnecessarily strenuous for her to do so. Was she starting off in a confrontational mood, I wonder?

At the end of it, Sarah simply leaves as soon as her cigarette is finished, which is coincidentally when the missionary is at her most vulnerable. Why not take this opportunity to exercise a little patience and do some missionary work of her own? Moreover, what is this Christian likely to say to her friends about the encounter? Would she glowingly recount the friendly conversation she had with the atheist, who wasn't a fire-breathing Satan-worshipping demon but actually a nice person just like her? Or would she probably have something else to say? Perhaps something that reinforces her preexisting notions about atheists?

As for her conclusion and call to action, I'm half with her, half confused. On the one hand, I agree that the actions of missionaries cause direct and real harm, but on the other hand, Sarah doesn't seem to acknowledge how screwed-up the pre-existing superstitions and circumstances of these people often are. It's not like the Christians need to tell these Africans to believe in the supernatural, they do that on their own already. Really, the harm that the Christians do is... well, yeah, by mis-educating them on sex, they actively contribute to the spread of disease. By not correcting misogynist attitudes, they reinforce those attitudes. Christians are throwing fuel onto an already blazing fire of primitive superstitions, and the fact that the transplanted primitive superstitions are linked to the civilized help these people bring makes for a detrimental juxtaposition on the world stage. Sure.

However, I think her point would have been better served if she limited it to showing how the actions of American Christian missionaries are detrimental to their goals. They want to help people? Great! Go help people! Oh, but if you also want to spread your religion, then there's gonna be a problem. 'Cuz, you see, we checked, and it turns out that religion is bad for people. Her points at the end, backed up with some statistics (perhaps links to news stories concerning the torture of witches inspired by missionaries, or wars started over ideas spread by missionaries, or really any kind of data at all), would have admirably served this purpose. But "they are the apocalypse?" Sure, Christianity's a death cult and all that - as Pat Condell points out, the defining moment of Christianity is its founder's death, and all the benefits accrue after death, and so on and so forth - but I think a bunch of unsubstantiated sneering renders such an apocalyptic tenor a bit needlessly hyperbolic. To wax verbose.

So yeah, as I'm sure can be gleaned from the feedback Sarah's received already, the stuff she talks about isn't entirely unreasonable. However, to someone who doesn't have a background of experience that is remarkably similar to hers, to someone who doesn't know about the racism/sexism/elitism/entitlement that often runs rampant in God's chosen cults, this could come off as a bunch of condescending and confrontational bullshit. That objection could easily be removed with the simple inclusion of a few supporting facts, even anecdotes: perhaps a story of a missionary berating a hotel employee, if such a thing did in fact happen. A good piece of activist writing should educate the reader on problems, not simply state them and blame them on somebody. Or it could just be a rant, but then it ought to get the rant tag, so people know to take it with a grain of salt.