"PRAY FER 'MERICA" The Bus Stops Here

DA BUS

That’s the bus. That’s the only picture that I’m including of the bus, although I did get a couple of others that I sort of liked. Because as tacky and awful as that fucker is, it’s not the point. It points to the point, but it’s not the point.

Okay, lemme back up a second here. There’s this bus making a trek across America (Murrca!) encouraging people to pray for America in a pretty blatantly political, Dominionist-y kind of way. We heard about it here. A couple of us decided to crash the party. One of us (not me, I suck at those things) is hassling them online and in email for the way the article was written (as though everyone in Omaha is presumed to be Christian, and not just that, but the sort of Christian that thinks Separation of Church & State is A Very Bad Thing). And in a blog post, which I shall link here as soon as I have it. You’ll love his blog posts. THEY ARE AWESOMESAUCE. Plus, the title of his blog. I mean, come on: All These Pious People. How good is that? At any rate, this is a little photo essay of the experience. (You’ll have to pardon me on not getting correct the finer details, whatever the fuck they are, of photo essay-ing. This is my first go at just quite this sort of blogging/essaying/photoing.)

DA TENT

Why they actually put the outdoor canopy up in the middle of the indoor facility is not actually that baffling. It just makes the fact that it’s pure propaganda that much more blatant.

DA PREACHERMAN

A predictably old white dude who was just as predictably trying to preach to the kids while not excluding the adults (who were all predictably in the very front and very eager beaver, while the kids were in the back and… not so much?

DA COHORT

Okay, I'm gonna stop with the DA BEARS references. Shit, I'm not even from Chicago.

I think we managed to get so close and personal because they took us for some sort of journalists. Which, I suppose, we are. (Not that we actually talked to any of them, except for the one lady who commented on my shirt [a Kaylie/Morton Salt mashup which I absolutely love] saying, “That’s an appropriate shirt for today,” and then I think I actually said, under my breath of course, “You… don’t know what it is, then.” It also turned out that I’d completely missed her meaning though [it was raining cats and dogs outside, and Kaylie's holding that umbrella - you know the one] so I guess turnabout is fairplay.)

There weren’t actually all that many people there, I thought. At least not for something that’s supposed to be this big national tour thing. I may have just had inflated expectations.

The age range you see represented here in these two pictures was pretty much it, whichmay have been a quirk. But I doubt it. These kids were fucking bused in from wherever. Already creepy, right? At any rate, there were the teens, and then the over 50 crowd with very very little in between. In fact, the little Latina making googoo eyes at the pastor on the far right of the second of these was pretty nearly the only representative of any other age range, near as I could tell. Not that I’m the best subjective judge of ages, I guess, but you get the point, right?

A couple that are, I’m presuming, on staff. I included this one because something about the tilt of her head, her posture, and her clasp on her husbands arm speaks volumes to me.

This one is here for two reasons, both are very very serious. I found the backrub that the one girl was giving the other girl through the whole fucking thing slightly… odd, given the prayerful, preacherful, evangelical context, and a little amusing. Now, I know that there may have been absolutely no erotic undertones whatsoever, and the other girl may have just needed some knots worked out after volleyball practice or whatever. But then again, teenagers. Hormones. Raging.

The other reason is that the look on the middle girls face at just that moment said something to me. Actually, it’s one of the few of these that I really thought the lighting worked for me for just a second, too. This kind of gymnasium flourescent indoor lighting is my fucking worst enemy. (Well, almost, anyway.) I hates it. Aaand that’s as far down the photo-geekery rabbit hole as I’m gonna let myself go for the moment. I do have to warn you, though. That’s gonna happen from time to time. Because I love photo-ing. So, nyeah.

So after doing some preaching, and trying to get the adults not to answer the question of what the kids were struggling with (when he finally got a kid to answer [the back-messaging girl from above], the answer was, “they’re disrespectful.” What? Really? That’s your biggest fucking struggle in life? Of course, it was immediately re-couched in the appropriately biblical “honor thy mother & father” terms), preacher man invited all of the other preachers up (a good 1/2 or more of the non-bus-riding adults present) and began praying over them, for strength against persecution, strength to stand up to the sinful ways of godless ‘murica, etc, etc. There was the typical laying on of hands, the raising of hands, the tight closing of eyes, the nodding of heads, and even the low-voiced glossolalia that they call “speaking in tongues.”

Then, for the culminating event, the real brainwashing power of which I hope to leave to the photos and my cahort’s description (because it just creeps me the fuck out thinking about it), he invited the kids out. To hold up their arms, to pray for the pastors, to give the pastors strength. Woah.

And yet, the stances of some of those people read discomfort. Maybe some of the same discomfort I felt as an awkward kid when people were doing this shit, and I wanted to believe, I wanted to be in the ingroup, I wanted to be able to pray like that, I became that, dove deep inside and refused to acknowledge the fourth wall of my brain that was SCREAMING WITH WHAT THE FUCK. (Remind me to tell you about the time my best friend & I went to a YWAM Conference Thingy when I was around sixteen or so & I figured out the Speaking In Tongues Is Bullshit.)

Here was the tongue talker walker whisperer. I swear I’ve seen this guy before.

Afterwards, they broke into smaller groups. The bus’ preacher man invited anyone who was troubled and needed specific prayer to come up to the front, vaguely under the tentish, along with some of the other preacher peoples. And the general intensity dissolved, sort of, or devolved into some people being released from the tension while other were gathered up more intensely into the smaller little prayer huddles of mostly twos, but one very intense little circle of five or six.

This adorable, timid woman was hesitant to interrupt the two people praying just a couple of feet away, but really wanted to listen and to help them pray. So this is the, “I’m praying with you, but not intruding,” stance. Then again, maybe some part of her wasn’t really so timid, because I’m pretty sure that this is her purse, too.

And then this. The quality of the image came out for shit because I’d just switched lenses to try to get a wider shot, and my little 18-55 doesn’t do that well in low light, but then we saw this. It had to be shot. So regardless of the graininess and what-not, I still think this is a telling, compelling image. A pretty decent summary and closing line.

Godless Groups Just Get Together To Do Shit

Something that’s been occupying the backburner spaces in my mental kitchen over the past year or so has been the place of groups and activities within an atheist community that are not specifically related to atheistic activism. There’s been a growing number of these popping up in our local community lately, and I’ve been loving it. Not only do I think that there is a place for these sorts of groups, I think that they are necessary.

The example I usually use is book clubs. I really want to be a member of a book club, I love talking about books and what I’ve read. Almost all of the book clubs I’ve found around here and taste-tested are full of very nice people who inevitably assume in every single participant a deistic belief system, and freely sprinkle that assumption into the conversational cookpot. I want to be able to have conversations about books, whether they be literature, scientific, philosophical, fantastical, young adult, whatever, without that assumption being made. Or rather, where the opposite assumption can be made explicit (and, thus, not really an assumption, I suppose).

I think that this is important and not something to be lightly swept aside as not really having anything to do with freethought, atheism, and atheist activism.

On Atheism Plus (Finally)

After much delay, I guess it’s about time to actually throw my inconsiderable opinion into the interesting stew pot of Atheism Plus. (The actual decision to go ahead and throw this out there was a combination of Tanya over at Daisies and Shit kicking my ass just a tiny bit for not writing… well, anything, lately, and a thought process that looked about like this in my head: OH MY SHIT I AM SO BEHIND ON ALL OF MY READING AND AM NOW GOING TO SAY FUCK IT TO ACTUALLY GETTING CAUGHT UP AND JUST HIT THE GODDAMN RESET BUTTON IN 1… 2… 3… and done).[1]

Before I actually start talking about it in any detail, I’ll just start by saying that I heart the Atheism Plus idea. And I’m also going to attempt to focus on what I think is so great about it, and not so much on the hullabaloo (read: shitstorm) that’s been flying around the interwebs about it. Although that’s probably going to be unavoidable to a certain extent. (Also, this is part of the reading and research that I’m so woefully behind on. But I have semi-successfully gotten semi-caught up on at least that one little slice of reading. I’m also just about equally behind on podcasts. And, with the exception of a few of my very favorites, probably HITTING THE GODDAMN RESET BUTTON on those, too.) Onward.

Secularity has been dragging the world forward on all kinds of social justice issues for just about as long as social issues have had any forward progress. And religion has been retroactively taking the credit for it for just about as long[2]. And secularists, atheists, haven’t had any choice but to just shut the fuck up about it, because our position, for all its merits, has simply not been creditable. That’s up until relatively recently. Lately, atheists have been more vocal. More present. More cohesive. More of a lot of things. More of a lot of really great things. The atheist movement, the atheist population, the atheist whatever-you-want-to-call-it has been growing quickly, and with all of the growing pains that come with that in any given collective movement.

Atheism Plus is, I think, is the Atheist Visibility movement, next step. I may be jumbling labels a bit here (and this is not altogether unintentional), but one of the graphics that I’ve seen that I really liked that pithily described the difference between atheists of the old order and New Atheists (not to be confused with Atheism Plus… the new new atheist movement… :-P) as being that New Atheists, when told to shut up, say, “No.” Which is awesome. We should be saying no. We should be as visible as it is feasible for us to be, given individual circumstances. And we should be visible and active AS ATHEISTS. That’s part of the point, right? To get atheists and atheism out there in the public eye, to make us an every day, ordinary, accepted part of American society. Except that so often we are not doing that.

We've segmented our atheist activism apart from all of our other forms of activism. We've said to ourselves, “Over here, I am a feminist and I will be active for feminist causes. Over here, I believe in gay rights and I will fight for marriage equality over here. But those things are not my atheist causes. My atheist causes have only to do with my atheism. And I will partition the inside of my head that way.” Which some people can do, I guess. Actually, I probably do that a little too well. Which is part of my own all consuming personal issues. I don’t actually want to be that partitioned in my life. That’s one of the reasons that I actually started this little clusterfuck of a blog; so that I could be all (or most) of the things that I self-identify as in one place, in one piece, and integrate all of the different parts of myself into one organic, healthy (or, at least, getting healthier, which is part of the point, right?) whole.

I’ve written before about how I am, in fact, a feminist specifically because of my atheism. Regardless of what the dictionary definition of atheism is or is not, there is a deep causal connection between my lack of belief, the kind of integrated thinking that allowed me to overcome some equally deep cognitive dissonances, and so many of the other aspects of my life and the way that I think about the world. Becoming an atheist, and openly adopting that self-identification, was not an isolated thing, nor could it be held in isolation. It was a revolutionary overthrow of a complete worldview that forced me to reevaluate every other little thing about the way that I looked at the world. And every other big thing.[3]

So there’s that part.

Atheism+ vs Secular Humanism: Well, okay, but what about Secular Humanists? Aren't they doing all of that great activism stuff already? Yes. But they're not doing it AS ATHEISTS. They're not raising the awareness that atheists are an integral part of the broader activist community; they're not raising the awareness that atheists care. That as atheists, caring is an integral part of our self identification as atheists. Using the label of Secular Humanism allows those (both ourselves and others) that are uncomfortable with the label of atheists to dodge that particular issue, rather than branding the scarlet A on our chests and walking around naked with it until the discomfort for ourselves and everyone around us finally wears off, and nobody minds that we’re naked sluts . That’s how we get accepted. (Note: I am absolutely not saying that everyone should walk around naked at work. That probably won’t fly. Maybe that can be something for down the road a bit.)

Why so angry? Some of the anger in the negative reactions to this whole thing strikes me as very similar to anger surrounding the geek label and fringe culture in general that I wrote about before (inspired by Ashley Miller’s much better [and more polished] piece on the subject [but fuck being polished… right?]). It’s the, ”Hey, we were here first! We were doing this before doing this was cool! Quit trying to reinvent the wheel!” sort of thing. That argument is fucking stupid and pretty juvenile. Let it go, grow up, blah blah blah. Instead, get excited! Join the movement.

And that’s part of it, too, really. Galvanization. This kind of thing gets people excited, gets them moving, gets them to want to be involved. Which is a GOOD THING. Because atheists, as atheists and openly in the name of atheists, need to be in ALL THE THINGS. Then, rather than being blocked off into a corner or fringe of society that can be easily ignored, ridiculed, reviled, feared, shunted off as some academic, irrelevant concern to society, rather than that, we will come to be considered a necessary part of forward progress in the world. In order to be an accepted segment of modern society, we really need to be completely pervasive in all levels and quadrants of society. (And, really, we already are, we’re just not open and vocal about that bit. Which, again, is part of the point.) You want to be relevant? This is how. Be an atheist feminist, not an atheist and a feminist. Be an atheist egalitarian, not an atheist and an egalitarian. That kind of thing. All of these social justice causes get people’s blood moving, because it’s real to them, often on a very visceral level. It affects them and the people that they care about every day (and this is true no matter which way you roll on any given one of these issues).  This shit is relevant. This is shit that people care about. This is shit that we can work together on, that we can have a legitimate and hefty voice on. That we can make a difference in. And we can!

Liberal church analogue. The closest analogue that I can think of for what we ought to be doing here is that of the liberal religionists reaching out the GLBTQA communities, and what a difference it’s making. Not just that subculture, of course, but so many. That’s just the most recent one. Does it frustrate you that churches are appealing to the very same people, populations, cultures and subcultures that they were doing their damndest to suppress just a few fucking minutes ago? Yeah? Well, how did they do that? By getting out there in the name of their churches, their faith, and reaching out to those people. Making a place for them. And I know that the idea of taking a lesson from them may sting a little, but we need to do the same thing. We need to reach out to them, take their side, acting as atheists. Taking the secularity that has for so long dragged the religious world forward while they dug in their heals;  take that secularity and say, “Hey, you know what that is that helped you win your place in the world? That’s atheism. I’m an atheist, too. Let’s go be atheists, and make a fucking difference in this world, shall we?” It is, in fact, secularism that has made the world a better place. About time we shed a little light onto that secularism, instead of it hiding in the shadows while the world’s religions vie for the credit, for the spotlight; because when you shed the light on it… secularity? It’s atheism. It really is.

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[1] Also, if you don’t like asides and footnotes and things like that with no particular rhyme or reason other than where they feel like they should go at any given moment, you should probably go ahead and stop reading now. I’m taking a page from Robin McKinley’s blogs and will probably be doing more of this sort of thing. I think it is a pretty fair representation of what the inside of my head looks like. And, far from being polished and pretty writing, that’s what this blog is supposed to be. If you want my polished and pretty writing, it does exist… just not here so much.

[2] Despite the fact that religion was more often than not the motivating force behind many of the injustices, and in the aggregate, fought the progress every bloody inch of the way.

[3] There is a forest/trees subtext going on here that I am not going to try to tease out at the moment. But it’s there, just so that you and I know that.

Here's A People List: Atheists

A good friend and fellow blogger over at Storms started putting together a list of Atheists (he makes lists for everything… EVERYthing… it’s what he does), and was asking for some names (in case he forgot anyone). I realized that his list and my list are likely to be somewhat different, so I thought I’d make my own list, too. Atheists that helped me in the process of deconverting, that inspired me to be more active, and ones that just plain inspired me.

In no particular order, then, here are some people that I love.

Greta Christina, JT Eberhard, Matt Dillahunty, Beth Presswood (and Jen Peeples & Tracie Harris – The Godless Bitches), Dan Fincke (Camels With Hammers), Jenn McCreight, Stephanie Zvan, Ashley Miller, Maryam Namazie, Phil Zuckerman, Sikivu Hutchinson, Natalie Reed, Ophelia Benson, Zinnia Jones, Hemant Mehta, Jessica Ahlquist, Ed Brayton, Hector Avalos, David Silverman, Jamila Bey, Brianne Bilyeu, Emily Dietle, Christina Stephens, Tanya Higgins, AJ Johnson, Sarah Morehead, Darrel Ray, Jerry DeWitt, … The list will only continue. Feel free to add some.

And I think this whole idea goes back to something that I am finding to be more and more the case as time goes on. There is, in fact, a new generation of atheists coming into our own, finding our own way in the world, expanding the voice and the visibility of atheism in the world. And this, I think, is what Atheism+ is really all about. (And, yes, of course, I have quite a bit more to say about this, but I’ve fallen SO FAR BEHIND on my reading, etc. So before I say much else about that, and thereby reveal the depth of my ignorance, I’ll just get caught up a bit over here, and then say more.)

Good, Bad, Ugly (But... I Want Beauty): Brief Personal Notes

I'm not actually writing about anything today. This was something that actually started as a fb update a couple of days ago, got too long & introspective, and so got copied into a note on my phone. I am now spewing it here for lack of a thought in my pretty little head.

Extremely busy the past few days at work. I'm learning. It doesn't feel like it's fast enough, but I am learning.

In other areas of life, it feels as though... well, that it's a rough, gravel fucking road & I'm ill equipped for the travel. Or maybe it's more that there's good, there's bad, and there's ugly right now, and all I want is the beautiful.

And yet on another hand, I look back at this weekend and think of how awesome it was. Did I mention that I got to actually meet and talk to at least three of my absolute favorite bloggers? That I sat and talked to one of them for a good hour before I realized that I was talking to her and husbandish?

And then I also think about what I missed last weekend, too; there is a palpable ache there. So many things all held in tension in moments in time, from one moment to the next. I try to capture them, hold them, release them, let them be what they may be.

And a very happy birthday to one of my beautiful, amazing daughters. I wish that I could have been there.

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Post script. As I went to get the link for Daisies and Shit above before posting this, I saw my name there... and I was confused for a moment. Then I read. Then I squeeeeeeee'd. OH. MY. SHIT. One of my favorite blogs just mentioned me. I may be a little excited by that. A bit.

Also, rest assured, she did not forget anything; I did not mention that I blogged during that conversation, which in retrospect, may have been because I'm too goddamn shy about that stuff, I was thrilled that I was talking to her and husbandish, I was tired, and blah blah blah.

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Fringe Culture, Anger, and Maturity: Or, It's Okay To Be Cool Now. No, really. You just need to get the fuck over it.

Ashley F. Miller has a great post that on one level is about “geek culture,” but is really about any fringe culture going through a process of growth into mainstream culture. It is truly insightful and you should go read it. What I want to touch on here, though, is something that she doesn’t quite come out and say in her post. She quotes at length a commenter on her blog, who basically says that if a person has not earned the right to be called a geek, has not had to fight through the high school experience of being bullied and shunned, then they should not be allowed in the ranks of geekdom. And he is bitter about that, and angry. The hurt he went through is palpable in his screed comment. This is understandable, since the self-identification as geek was and still is, for many people, a sort of psychological defense mechanism, the badge of honor, that one wears in a community of only a very few. Military Vets can be that way, too. Even among ourselves, there can be other subdivision. Like, if you didn’t serve in combat, then you aren’t really a vet. Alcoholics can be that way, too, in some weird way. “Look, son, I drank more in a week than you have in your entire life.” (I even have to wonder if, perhaps, all communities have something like this. Even the “popular” peoples. “Look, you don’t know what hard is until you’ve done two-a-days in 100 degree heat all fucking summer to be on the football team.”) So I think that this line of thought is perfectly natural and allows people to make it through some very difficult things and in that way forge a place for themselves, a belonging to a community.

Geek Culture can be very... thorough

But you can’t stay there in that mind set. It will implode in a messy cloud of dust and noise, and you will be left with a complete lack of identity; just a hole where the structure of identity that you struggled to build once stood. There’s another line of thought among alcoholics that I think may be applicable here. They say that during your drinking/using time, you basically stop developing, emotionally and mentally. I don’t necessarily buy that wholesale, but nonetheless, I do think that there is some truth to it. I also think that the sort of anger grasped onto by the commenter and so many other bullied and fringe social groups is just as poisonous and stunting as any drug or alcohol. When nurtured like that, it excludes and inhibits all other possibilities for growth and development.

This is not to say that anger is not a healthy emotion. The whole idea of “healthy” vs. “unhealthy” emotions is completely overrated, to begin with. Emotions just are. They happen for perfectly valid reasons. Anger is just anger. It is useful. It serves a purpose. It can even, on occasion, be intensely satisfying. But when clutched to the breast and petted and fed and nurtured, it turns into something vile. It turns into hate, and turns from something that you clutch for survival into something that seemingly takes on its own vile life and claws through your ribcage to take possession of you.

Ashley Miller closes her blog with some truly good advice:

Being a geek shouldn’t be about a persecution complex.  It shouldn’t be about being better than other people.  It shouldn’t be about bullying people who want to be your friend now because of what you think they may have been like in high school.  It should be about embracing people for being themselves and being grateful that they can be themselves when they are with you.

In order to do that, one has to mature as a person. The immature anger that allowed for survival in high school or whatever other environment, must be released; if it is not released, it takes over. And then that poor demon-possessed person is stuck there, in high school, never progressing beyond those juvenile emotions, that juvenile intellect. No matter how many other bits of knowledge they collect and cobble together, they will be stuck in that tar pit of misery.

So, in order to truly open up and enjoy the community of Others, we have to let go of all of the anger and hatred from all of the bullying in our past or present. That anger has served its purpose, it has outlived its usefulness, and it’s okay to let it go. And, really, if you can’t find shit to get angry about in a much more positive and useful way these days, then you just aren’t paying attention.

I want to grow. It is never too late to grow. I think I’ve been stuck long enough in a lot of my own tar pits and sand traps. I’ll do whatever it takes to get out of those, and scour all of that poison off till my skin glows and breathes the fresh air. And then I’ll keep walking out into the world. Let that world be wide, not narrow, and let it be populated by whoever is there, and let me, for once, dance with them instead of holding myself back and just watching. (More on that in some other post down the line. I know, I say that a lot. I mean it every time.)

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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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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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