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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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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In My Very Own Skin

I would love to be able to say that it was solely reason and calm analysis that drove my de-conversion process, but it wouldn’t be quite true; which is not to say that reason and analysis played no part whatsoever, because they did, they played a huge part. However, after reading (I think) one of Michael Shermer’s books, I, if I was going to be completely honest with myself, had to re-evaluate some of that intellectual history. I had to include and give proper weight to emotional history as well.

Looking back, I can, of course, find quite a few examples of times where I had doubt, times where I expressed doubt, times where I explored and grappled with doubt. Hell, I wrote a paper trying to tease out why in one version of the story of Kind David taking a census, it was God that told David to do it (2 Sam 24:1), and in the other, it was Satan that told him to do it (1 Chr. 21:1), I told priests in confession (I was Russian Orthodox, confession is an even bigger deal there than in Catholicism, I think) about DOUBTING IT ALL, I refused to get confirmed in the Episcopal Church as a teenager because the catechism instructor wouldn’t answer my questions, I read The Selfish Gene as a teenager. I had me some doubtings, is the point. But every time, I let faith trump doubt, I begged for more faith, the priests told me they saw my faith, I performed some impressive mental gymnastics and lived with the regularly recurring bouts of cognitive dissonance, I defended the fucking indefensible position of the sinfulness of homosexuality to my gay friend. I fucking well believed, I fucking well doubted. I did not engage my doubt. I pushed it aside and shoved it down, I trusted that it would all eventually become clear to me.

I went through a long period of time where I would (usually over beers or whiskey or both) be discussing religious things with a friend or friends and would insist that I was, in fact, very religious, I just wasn’t very good at it. (Yes, I was well and truly an alcoholic by then as well, I just wasn’t ready to deal with that yet, either, other than perhaps in one or two [drunken] diary entries.) So I guess that was a sort of transitional faith period for me. I tried to get back into the church, even, tried to re-become the Reader I had once been ordained to be (like, literally, ordained… by a Bishop and everything – I still have my Reader’s robe, and it’s fucking cool – makes me feel like Neo or something).

Then I met some people. More than that, I met the people that I knew were my people. And they were atheists. Every one of them. Or near enough. One was an igtheist at the time (and yes, I did have to look that one up). One is just an avowed hippy who doesn’t believe in a god, but doesn’t really give a shit about any of that – or no, just gives a shit way more about the people around her. These were the people that, in their own way, sort of deconverted me. They did not by preaching, per se, but by being open about who they were. Yes, we did talk about that stuff. With gusto, with joy, with passion. More than anything, really, they made it acceptable for me to begin to engage with my own doubt. Let me say that again, just in case: they made it okay. I did the thinking, the engaging, the reading, the research – in the end, all of that really is done with oneself; faith is an intensely personal thing, in some way (intensely social, too, but that’s a separate, if related, topic). But they made it ok to be me.

So after a while of doing some more reading and research, I did what I called, “Trying it on for size.” I couldn’t just jump off the bridge and free fall into atheism, so I tried it on for size for a little while, as if it were a t-shirt, to see how it fit. It fit. In fact, after a while, I realized that what I had actually done was take of a whole suit of ill-fitting clothes so that I could walk around naked comfortably, in my very own skin.

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Obligatory Introductories

So, I went back and forth on this labeling stuff for a long time, but a while ago, I decided that (for the moment, at any rate) I'm alright with it. I know there's the fear of being restricted by labels, but I think that I like them for quite the opposite reason; they give me a freedom. Mostly it's the freedom of not being alone. These words help to connect me to a larger group of people in some very real ways.

Now, the other confession/frustrating thing is that I don't believe I have ever laid out in a single place for any one group of people all of the self-identifications that I like. This sucks. This is the opposite of freedom. I hate hiding, I hate the implication that I am constantly acting, because I constantly feel as though I am and I struggle with that.

And so, I am... a papa. I am... an atheist. I am... a secular humanist. I am... a religionist in recovery. I am... an alcoholic in recovery. I am... a polyamory person (totally not in recovery). I am... a feminist. I am... a total bibliophile. I am... a geek (in a limited sense, technology not really being one of them)... or a nerd, depending.

And I will discuss and reference and otherwise sling about related words and things that grab my interest, excite me, piss me off, etc.


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