The Comfort of Suffering

This quote from an article I was recently reading got me thinking about the role of suffering in apologetics (and this is kind of a recurring theme in the part of my head that I affectionately label “dark & twisty"):  “Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected, they must be replaced. Where there is not any replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat” (Christ, cited in “The Cambridge Companion to Atheism” 244) ß(Yes it amuses me to no end that I get to cite Christ from a book on Atheism).

My life has not been a tight little ball of joy over the last couple of years. In fact, it’s been quite messy and quite a lot of it has been quite fucked up, not to put too fine a point on it. A lot of that can be directly linked to the very messy fact that I am a raging alcoholic, even if I am in recovery and quite quite sober. Part of the point of this blog is to write down and to share about the process of (re)learning what it is to be a real person again without running to a fifth of whiskey every time I get uncomfortable with myself, the way that I am feeling, or who I am. And part of that is that I am now dealing with a huge amount of extremely uncomfortable fallout as a result of abusing the privilege and greatness of alcohol (it really can be a fantastic thing, it’s just that I’ve trashed my relationship with alcohol) and some pretty dire and very real life consequences. 

This has not caused me to turn to religion. Having been in the military as well, one thing that absolutely drives me crazy is the argument that there are no atheists in foxholes, which is simply a trite way of assuming that life crises or things like that make people want to revert to religion, even if they had rejected it at some point. That may be a story for another time, so lest I get too distracted, I’ll leave that particular little slice alone.

The point that I’d like to make is that so many apologists turn to that sort of argument as proof that because human beings tend to turn to these psychological supports in times of crisis, there is some kind of ontological reality behind them. I do not take the story of me not reverting to “familiar structures” in my own recent times of life crises and hardship as any sort of evidence or proof of the atheistic worldview. Rather, I take it as a counter-argument to those who hold up the stories of those who do indeed turn to religion for solace in times of trial or need as evidence of the reality and/or benefit of faith. In other words, those stories are no more evidence for the ontological reality of the things behind the symbols and rituals of faith than my story is evidence for their unreality. It is, in fact, non-evidence.

So now I have used far too many words to say that all of that is nothing whatsoever. So what? Can it be said to mean anything at all, all of this is shit that I’m trying to trudge through? In some way, I don’t know that I’d ever actually have become an atheist if it hadn’t been for alcohol. That introduces some very tangled up things, though, that I’m still trying to untangle. It can be a very touchy subject for a lot of people, too, since the temptation (and in many ways, I think AA encourages this, even if unwittingly) is to reject everything that one was as an alcoholic as being inherently evil. However, it’s just not true. But that’s for a different post, I think.

Christ, Carol, cited in "Feminism and Atheism." The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. Ed. Michael Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 233-49. Print. <== Look, I know that citation format is not precisely correct, but I didn't feel like poring through MLA to figure it out, so Meh.

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Close the Closet Door Behind You

I live in the Omaha Metropolitan area. The population here (depending on just exactly what you are considering the “area” of the Omaha Metro area to be) is between about 409,000 to 1.2 million. Purely for the sake of simplicity, I’m going to round that number off and say, conservatively, about 500,000. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, the percentage of card carrying, flag waving atheists in America is around 1.6%. Purely for the sake of simplicity (read: so that my poor, tired, already-tax-numbers-beleaguered head doesn’t have to work too hard), I’m going to call that around 1%. Note that this is at the way down at the bottom end of the percentage of people that I’d like to call community allies of some sort in a freethought, skeptic-y sort of way, which is around 16%.

Now I’d like to take a look at the membership of all of the various atheist organizations in the Omaha Metro area. There’s an umbrella organization by the name of CoRTEX (part of a broader national movement of umbrella organizations) in Omaha, and according to their best guess, the membership of ALL OF THE ORGANIZATIONS COMBINED is around 500.

Now here’s the part where the math comes in (and the vast oversimplification of my numbers above begins to make sense, too). 500 is 1/10^th of 1% of the population. That is incredible to me. That is 1/10^th of the low end of the estimated Atheist percentage of the low end of the overall population estimate. To say that this is a proportionally inaccurate representation of the Atheist community is an understatement. So, even at the LOWEST of the LOW end of estimation, this represents a gigantic FAIL. Something is wrong here.

At least a part of that something that is wrong is that we have been quiescent. We have not wanted to create waves, to rock the boat, to make Atheists and Atheism look bad. But, you know what? Fuck that. Those numbers up there are one of the reasons that I want to be out, I want to be up, I want to be visible. I do not want to be timid in my Atheism. I want to rock the fucking boat. I want to be inspired. I want others to be inspired around me and with me, I want to be a part of that. I want to be a part of what inspires others. (And as an aside for those worried that we might make us look bad, I think in some sense that it is just as well that the broader civic community around us see ALL of thing that is Us, warts and everything; trying to hide the warts of their faith hasn’t worked out well for the religious – just sayin’.)

I have said in the past, and will probably continue to say, that there are simply a large number of people who are at the very least functional atheists, but for whom the issue of faith in a deity or religion are not that great of a concern, and who are therefore not likely to feel the need to belong to an organization of this sort. I’ll have more to say on that later, but for the moment, I’ll just say that I don’t think that those numbers can possibly account for the disparity represented by 1/10^th of 1%.

If we are not out and open, the numbers will never even out and it will never be okay or acceptable for anyone at all to be an atheist in our Midwestern metropolitan area. Or any area. Anywhere. I want anyone no matter who they are, what personality type they are, no matter where they see themselves fitting on the “scale of activism” to feel like it’s okay to be us just the way that we are. Come on out, boys and girls, come out and play. Close the closet door behind you.

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I'm a Feminist Because I'm an Atheist

Why, oh why do I read the comments on PZ Myers’ blog? Well, in part, it’s because I want to begin garnering some idea how to respond to complete idiocy when it pops up without completely losing my shit. However, sometimes it ends up serving as a complete distraction from a potentially useful or interesting train of thought that I was on. Then I end up feeling as though I’m a hobo that’s been thrown off the train and despite pumping my arms and running furiously, I’ll never be able to perform the feat of catching up to and leaping back onto the train. I’m just not that mentally fit.

At any rate, the derailed thought process. I clicked on what I thought was the very interesting title, “I am an atheist because I am a feminist.” This actually makes total sense to me, but then I thought, “Well, hang on. I think that, for me, I am a feminist because I am an atheist.” In the process that led up to me letting go of God, in particular in considering the argument from morality, it was very much the case that I was forced to acknowledge the grating clash of cognitive dissonance between the values and views about women that I knew were moral and what my religion attempted to tell me were moral. The relief that I felt from no longer having to hold onto that cognitive dissonance was definitely palpable. I could just acknowledge in a very straightforward manner the morals that I knew were right. The process of then shining my moral flashlight into the jumbled corners of my mind and behaviors has been something that is ongoing to this day, and every now and then I am astonished to find a little heap of shit in some corner of the way that I think and act that is so very… sexist, misogynistic, patriarchal, privileged, whatever. And then I try to clean that bit out and get rid of it.

Oh, the comments completely derailed that train of thought because of some dumb shit that wanted to thank the poster of that entry for showing him just how fucking stupid atheists are that anyone could possibly let feminism debunk all theism. Yeah.




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Reconversion Blues

This is just a quick 2 cents post.

So, the atheist blogosphere had (an admittedly minor) explosion over Patrick Greene. See here at the Friendly Atheist for a blessedly brief latest on. I know that I harp on about the No True Scotsman fallacy quite a bit, but it's because it's an obvious trap that SO MANY PEOPLE fall into, and I also hate it (like, little bit of vomit in the back of my throat, hate it) when someone questions the quality and honesty of the faith that I once had. However, I have to wonder if, perhaps, a bunch of atheists haven't just fallen into it a bit. We see this public example of someone seeming to convert to Christianity and we want to say, "Fuck that, he wasn't a real skeptic to begin with." But on the other hand, what I do see people doing is not simply saying that and brushing their hands briskly together and walking away; they go on to say, "And here's why I don't think so... look at this and this and this." And really, when I googled him and searched for past posts about him, he doesn't look so good. Still, though, I think that the community should be careful when something like this happens not to simply say, "Oh, well, he's not a real skeptic, she was never a real atheist." All of this, of course, is a moot point now that he has re-de-converted. But, then, I don't think he was a real Christian to begin with.

New Newer Newest

I had an interesting conversation this morning and hit upon a minor realization. The atheism movement is changing. I know, I know, that’s kind of a DUH moment. But really, it is. There’s a generational shift happening, and what brought me to this realization was looking with some frankness at who my “heroes of atheism” really are at the moment. It is no longer the big bigger biggest names that inspire me to want to stand up, speak up, speak out, come out, and be out. The works of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Dan Barker, etc. will probably always hold an important place, at least they will in my intellectual history. But now, it is people like JT Eberhard, Greta Christina, Christina Stephens, Amanda Marcotte, Maryam Namazie, Jessica Ahlquist, Hemant Mehta, Beth Presswood & the rest of the women of Godless Bitches, Matt Dillahunty and the rest of the Atheist Community of Austin, the Ask an Atheist folks, Jen McCreight, Jerry DeWitt, Rich Lyons, Deanna Joy Lyons, the folks at Reasonable Doubts, David Smalley (or, the dude that does Dogma Debate), and the list really does go on. The big shots have had their sort of moment. It’s over. Now the broader community is taking over. And they are awesomesauce. They make me excited to be a part of this community right here and right now.

Even more than any of those individual contributors to the new newer newest atheism, it’s the people that are most clearly and closely around me. They are real, they are blooded members of this community, they shake my hand and smile when they see me (my insecurities notwithstanding, but that’s a whole different thing), they ask me to do things, they do things, they like to talk about EVERYTHING. I love them. They make me glad that I am a human among them.

On an entirely different note, job searching fucking suuuuucks. <sigh> 

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