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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Shame Shame Shame and Sexism

So a thing has come up lately in the atheist blogosphere; an ugly thing, sort of, and an inspiring thing, sort of. LOTS AND LOTS of people have been posting, commenting, saying things. (I suspect that this post will largely consist in a shit-ton of hyperlinky thingies.) I count myself as a feminist, if an inexperienced and bumbling one that may say the wrong thing at any given instant, and I thought that it was about the coolest thing ever that there was a Women in Secularism conference that took place last weekend, and I so wish that I could have been there. I am also extremely grateful to Ashley F. Miller for providing a good summary of the whole thing and also for live-blogging the entire thing so that I could at least get a flavor of the conference in my head and a fair amount of the detail. I’m sympathetic to her fingers doing all that typing, and would just like her to know that the results did not go unappreciated. I can’t say that I felt like I was there, exactly, but still, it’s as close as I was going to be able to get. (I also just discovered that Ophelia Benson also has a whole slew of live-bloggy posts about the conference as well, but you’ll have to dig a bit to get at them all.)

I absolutely intend to write something about some of the other wonderful and inspiring things that were said at the conference, but just at the moment, I am now going to address the sort of ugly thing, maybe just so that I can get that shit out of my system a bit more and onto paper (however digital it may be – yes, I do keep an actual journal on actual paper as well – no, you will never see it – well, bits of it do bleed onto over here, which gets a bit messy sometimes, but that’s okay) and then move on to parts that make we want to fly.

So, the ugly thing: Sexism is very fucking real. And it happens all the time. Even among those of us that like to self-identify as freethinkers and humanists and skeptics and atheists and the like. For me, all of those things are a completely natural byproduct of and direct consequence of my atheism, which I’ve talked a bit about before so I won’t go on and on about that here. There was a mention of the fact that some not-so-small-fry men-speakers at conferences were behaving in some very sexist ways and that women-speakers, for a myriad of reasons, had formed a sort of underground warning system in order to cope with what in the end amounts to harassment, plain and simple. For more about the details, see Stephanie Zvan’s original post about the topic, and her follow up post. As an example of why women do not very often drag this shit out into the open, the example of the explosion of horrible that happened around “elevatorgate” was pointed to; it is an excellent example of what happens, and boils down to a form of “slut-shaming.” I hate shaming. HATE IT. Violently. Which I’ll come back around to in a minute, I think.

I posted the original article in my local atheist group and got an immediate and surprising amount of push-back on the issue, which largely swirled around the specifics of elevatorgate, rather than addressing the sexism-at-conferences and sexism in the movement issue as a whole. To be fair, that was addressed as well, but the whole underground network system of warning women about skeezy speakers was labeled as something akin to high school girls posting about ex-boyfriends on the internet and gossipy things. All of the push-back took me a bit by surprise, and I felt what I always feel when confronted with confrontation, especially from people that I genuinely like, want acceptance and approval from (which, I know, is a whole other, if related, issue); I felt shamed. I was sorely tempted to just drop it and delete the post. But, I hate shame. And this is important. So I asked for help, which is also difficult for me, so that I wouldn’t feel quite so backed into a corner by myself. With that help, I then stood up and stuck to my fucking guns. I did not back down.

This not backing down is an important part of me dealing with my own sense of shame, and that’s incredibly important to me and for me, so I didn’t want to leave that entirely out. However, that’s not really the point that I’m trying to make in this post, so I’ll leave that for the moment, but it can be expected to return periodically as it is something with which I do and will continue to struggle and work through.

There were many other people that have weighed in on the issue from a variety of different perspectives. Stephanie Zvan had a follow up post addressing some practical aspects of what to do, Jen McCreight (whose off-hand comments at the conference spurred the whole blogosphere discussion) had a great post on it, JT Eberhard (from whom I shamelessly stole the word “skeeve”) asked what he and other men who self-identify as feminists could do to ensure that consent and boundaries are respected while recognizing that sexual people will be sexual people, Greta Christina has a few posts on the topic, Beth Presswood, Matt Dillahunty (who threatened to and, I believe, did block people from his FB wall who were using that same trivializing and slut-shaming technique [“The point of bringing this up at the convention was to note that this should NOT be back-channel communication and that the individuals should be called out on it. Those of you who are STUPIDLY just ranting that this is all just unsupported allegations - that's part of the fucking point. …  It's fucking disgraceful that even the meta-discussion about what to do in the future is being reacted to in a way that virtually ensures that mouths will stay closed.” – Oh my shit, I love that quote]), Ed Brayton, Skatje Myers (who was guest posting at Pharyngula) has a brief discussion of it at the end of her also excellent summary of the event, etc. I know I missed some that I’d read. Feel free to post links in the comments if you know of anymore.

Alright, in closing, and I think this addresses a couple of different things I might be trying to say, I’d like to bring up this thing called the Johari window. It’s a bit Psych101, I know, but I find it a useful model for a lot of things.

In this case, it’s really the “blind spot” window that I’d like to talk about just briefly. These are things that other people can see about us, but of which we are, for whatever reason, unaware. The reall challenge is how we react when other people point out some things about ourselves of which we are, perhaps almost willfully unaware. It can be an incredibly uncomfortable thing to have that shit pointed out to us. It has certainly been uncomfortable for me in the past, and I imagine for most people. But it levels the playing field, so to speak. When we get uncomfortable, we often get defensive. Things get said. Words are used. People get hurt.

On the other hand, if we take a step back and look at ourselves, and recognize that perhaps there really was something there (and, of course, it’s not always going to be the case that the person was right, but how will we know if we don’t at least look?), then we can shift those things that were hidden from ourselves into the realm that is not hidden from us, but is rather known to both us and those around us. That is how we become more ourselves, more whole, more self-aware; that is how we change, grow, affect change around us, become better people, become a better community.

That all feels incredibly incomplete and very poorly stated, so don’t be surprised if I come back and edit the shit out of this later, but at least it’s out of me and onto this, and that’s a starting place.

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I Said the Word, or Being "Spiritual" In the Rooms

A few weeks ago, The Skeptical Novice had a post about saying, “I’m an Atheist,” in a context where one might not normally say that and how it felt to say that. I had a very similar (in some ways) experience right around then (in fact, I’m not sure whether I read this before or after, just that when I did, I may have actually said, “FUCK YES!!” out loud and then looked around innocently).  Except I said it at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. At my “home group” meeting. It’s a big meeting. There are a lot of people at that meeting. I love that meeting. I really really like a lot of the people at that meeting. Aaand a lot of them believe in the classical AA Higher Power, i.e. Jesus Christ. (No, I am absolutely not going to get into my very complicated and not un-conflicted relationship with AA – that’s a whole separate post – probably many whole separate posts.) The reading had been on spirituality. The topic was spirituality. People were saying a lot of things about God and prayer and what not.

I have not, in some ways, been terribly shy about being an atheist. I think it comes with the actor in me. On the other hand, that actor bit of me has always also been about being horrendously insecure, and being an out atheist is certainly no different there. One of the parts that I identified strongly with in TSN’s post was this statement, “First off, I did this without thinking too much about it. This is a huge step for me.  Looking back two years, there is no way in hell I would have said to a large group of mostly strangers that I identified as an atheist.” Now, I did think about it. But not too hard. It was unnatural for me to speak, but natural. I owed it to the other people that I knew goddamn well were in that room trying to stay sober without a god to say something, to let them know that they are not alone, that it’s okay to be an atheist. And a fucking drunk. At the same time. Especially then.

When the topic of conversation at AA meetings turns to spirituality, atheists often feel pushed out to the perimeter, and, yes, absolutely pressured to at least try to believe in a deity HP, however vague. We often feel as if it is absolutely taken for granted that we, because we are Atheists, have no spirituality. Which is complete horseshit[1]. It’s just that my spirituality doesn’t have any, you know, actual spirits in it.

My spirituality is other people. My spirituality is aloneness. My spirituality is trees. My spirituality is galaxies.

My spirituality is...

I love others, and I am loved; I care about them, they care about me, and I even care about myself (well, I try to anyway). That is spirituality. Being able to be comfortable alone with myself in a room, alone with myself in the forest, alone with myself in my head, in its dark-and-twistiness and its light-and-airiness, too. That is spirituality. The world around me, from the grass and leaves still before the rain to the universe and the universes beyond the universes flinging nothingness behind them. That is spirituality. Being able to live in the gray, in the tension and uncertainty between blacks and whites that don’t exist; slowly learning to carry my own emotions. That is spirituality. What need for a god in all that?

I didn’t say all of that, but I’ve had more time to think about it now. I didn’t think about it as much then. What I did say was enough, though, enough for them to get the gist that I really do have my own "spirituality" and some of what it means to me. And that I am so deeply grateful that AA (or at least, this AA, this meeting, this group, these warm people) has room for me, too, an Atheist.

(Afterword: It did make a difference. Right afterwards, the guy next to me, an artist that I have a HUGE amount of respect for and who came and picked me up and took me to meetings after I had relapsed once and was still detoxing too acutely to fathom driving, leaned over and said, “Well, you fucked me up!” and laughed. Maybe you had to be there, but that was a good thing. Several other people approached me afterwards to thank me for speaking up and said that they were Atheists, too.  One of them was the chair of the meeting.)

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[1] This is leaving aside for the moment my very real misgivings about language and words. Like, for instance, the whole God thing. So many times I question why, once one understands the concept of the God people are actually trying to defend, they insist on continuing to use that word when it so clearly does not correspond to the meaning that it implies when one actually says the word. (ç VERY EASILY DISTRACTED BY SHINY MIND-OBJECTS, THIS ONE.)

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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