Watch My Fucking Language

This is a post about a teeny little thing. No, I am truly not being sarcastic, it really is a minor thing, but it was something that came up recently, and it’s something about which I have, as it turns out, turned over in the shadowy coils of my brain late at night, the sort of thing to which my brain turns when trying, for instance, to avoid pondering things of greater importance for fear that the things-of-greater-importance will send my heart scampering off in a pounding fit of anxiety.

I do. I love it. Very diverse word.

It’s about blasphemous language of various sorts. For instance, why do atheists persist in saying things like, “Oh my God?” Shouldn’t they say, “Oh your God?” (This is also perhaps linked to the musings on what an atheist utters mid-coitus.) But really it’s about blasphemous language in general and some things that sort of came up in conjunction; that was just the question that kicked it off and reminded me of all of the thoughts on the subject that I was barely even aware that I had been thinking, much less translating from thought to practice. And so I thought to myself, this is a thing about which I will have ALL THE THOUGHTS. 

Now, let’s be clear, here. I fucking love expletives. Dearly. They have an emotional oomph that normal language simply does not and cannot have, a fact that has some scientific weight behind it. For some explorations of the value of profanity, follow the links. But those rational explanations of the value of taboo language are only part of the reason that I relish them so much.  And I’m not so much interested here in those explanations, valuable as they are and genuinely interesting and cool as they are; I have other additional reasons, and that’s more what I’m interesting in exploring a bit here. Because this is my blog, and I get to do some self-exploration here (get your mind out of the gutter, you) that often I don’t otherwise take the time to make explicit (again, mind, gutter, you, out).

See? Very Diverse.

If I am to be perfectly honest with myself, it’s because I thoroughly enjoy the freedom to say these delicious words without guilt; it’s because for the majority of my life, I felt intense guilt about “taking the Lord’s name in vain” and all other forms of blasphemy and swearing. So when it comes right down to it, it was all about the fear of damnation. Because I said a word that had been imbued with a taboo meaning, there was the potential that I could be damned to hell. So, now there is a thrilling freedom in being able to utter the utterly damnable without the damnation bit. I don’t have to be scared any more. This, in turn, is really quite intimately connected with the much more serious idea that, if the carrot and the stick are imaginary, then I then carry the full weight and responsibility for the consequences of everything that I do. There’s no getting out of things by praying for forgiveness. So, breaking out of the guilt cycle imposed by religion[1] also means that I cannot get the reprieve, the temporary release from the tension of real guilt when I do actually do something remarkably stupid, which I am wont to do from time to time.

It really is sort of an odd thing, though, if you take the idea literally, of saying something like “Goddammit!” and not expecting any results. Whether one is a believer or not, though, the culture that we Westerners soak in through the societal water is without a doubt thoroughly steeped in Judeo-Christianity and theistically-tainted psychology. The result of which is that when I say, “Fucking Hell,” Or “Goddammit!” the biochemical reactions that fire off in my brain are somehow hooked like Velcro to that framework and it seems probably that no amount of work is going to completely clear my innards of all of that. So, I will bow to that, and hijack it for my own expressive purposes. 

This becomes relevant(-ish) in a moment. For now, just let it sink in.

And besides which, the vast majority of Christians and other believer aren’t taking it as literally as their institutions would have them do, either. With very few exceptions, I have yet to meet many persons of any faith who aren’t perfectly capable of cursing up a storm of epic, Rainbow-Brite-vomit level proportions. Here's a recent personal example. Last Friday, there was a local counter-protest for the Anti-Choice and blatantly religious bigotry motivated “Stand Up For Religious Freedom” protests taking place in scattered spots throughout the States. I was there. After the majority of the protestors had begun to retire, having prayed their useless prayers, sung their useless songs and in general felt very good about themselves, I think, a few of them inevitably wandered over to argue with us. Which was fun, since I do love to argue. (This particular format of arguing is still quite new to me, and I’m afraid I didn’t do it very well, but it was a learning experience.) Of course, I spiced up the arguments with the occasional, “fucking” this, and “fucking” that. One upper-middle-aged, clean cut gentleman who looked as though he may have recently retired, took umbrage with my use of the word, “fuck.” I asked him what the fuck that had to do with anything, and he responded with something, I don’t remember precisely what, that included the word “shit.” Me: “Wait, what? So, shit’s alright but fuck crosses the line? How does that make any sense?”[2]

And lastly, for those that argue that cursing is simply a sign of a poor vocabulary, a lack of intelligence, a lack of creativity, an inability to otherwise express oneself, I will offer the wise retort of Mr. Stephen Fry:

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[1] Which is not, like, a one-time thing that happens and then I’m magically free of all the jagged little shards of my brain’s glass prison; a lot of those jagged little shards stay embedded for a long time and have to be picked out one by one as I repeat, over and over as necessary, the process of breaking the glass.

[2] He then devolved into some incredibly hurtful ad hominem attacks. More importantly and what was really much worse (but less pertinent to the topic at hand, thus the footnote), was that it worked. His attack was intensely painful to me for reasons that he could not have been aware of, and it shamed me and stunned me into silence for a minute.

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No Gods, No Heroes

The phenomenon of idol- or hero-worship is fascinating to me. For many reasons. Personal and not so much. Emotionally and intellectually. It’s something that I want to study more and in some detail at some point and I hope that I’m afforded, despite everything, the opportunity to do so at some point. But for now, there’s this:

Far too many of the people I have looked up to throughout my entire life have failed to live up to the pedestal I put them on, and in many ways that is extremely frustrating. Both religious and secular heroes have fucking failed miserably. On the other hand, that was not, in the end, what drove my deconversion process and it will not drive me away from the secular movement either. In fact, in some ways, it is an incredibly important lesson, perhaps especially important for one who, like me, is still in the relatively nascent phases of being openly secular and atheist and trying my hand at what secular activism is available to me.

This has nothing to do with anything. It's just a neat picture and I like it.

There is no single figure that remains so important to me that when I find out that, like everyone else, they have failures, faults, or possibly even are people that I don’t even really like personally, it will (hopefully) disturb me not one whit. It has not, so far. Ever since Professor Richard Dawkins’ spectacular display of privileged white maleness and dismal logical fallacy #FAIL last year, I recognized that I can still love and respect and learn fantastic and wonderful things from his books and at the same time recognize that he still has things to learn. He does not need to be perfect in every respect any more than I am perfect in every respect. Holy shit, when I consider the perspective of myself being judged and dismissed in the same way as it is tempting to judge and summarily dismiss these “leaders” and “heroes” in their totality because of their imperfections, I have to humbly offer silent thanks to those around me that they do not reject me outright. (ß Tangled sentence, I know. Deal with it. It stays, because it says what I want it to say and it makes sense in my head.)

It has been freeing, too. I now feel free (or freer, anyway, I’m still hyper-self-conscious and hyper-sensitive to my desire for acceptance and shit like that) to be critical of what others think and inspect what they say a bit more carefully. Rather than trying to mold my opinions and thoughts and everything else about me so that I fit in the niche. Like, please please please, can I be cool, too? Granted, I still have to beware of my own tendency to do this. It doesn’t go away in the snap of a finger, and I still find in myself that unconscious desire to have an idol to worship, a hero to look up to, an example to which I can point and say, “That is the right. Good. Whew! I don’t need to think about it anymore, I can just copy them.”

See? That last bit is just the thing, I think. The reason that many of us so desperately WANT those heroes is because thinking about ALL THE THINGS is HARD. Well, so be it.

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