Ranting to Myself: Self-Hate is Great

This is a great (and very self-conscious/aware) entry. I'm including this because the whole problem of self-esteem and being hyper-aware of what others think of me is something that I struggle with on a continual basis, and the author addresses some of this in a way that I found to be helpful and enlightening. As I have very often found conversations with this author to be.

Ranting to Myself: Self-Hate is Great: I was listening to the "WTF" Podcast by Marc Maron today, a common source of inspiration for me. Marc chose to repeat the 100th episode in ...

Hate, Choice, and Identity. Or, Bigotry Makes My Head Explodey

That right there is a fucking fact. People CHOOSE to be bigots, to do violence to another person, to hate. And it does not actually much matter where one comes down on the nature/nurture debate as it relates to being gay, hating someone and carving that hatred into another human being’s skin is FAR MORE OF A CHOICE.

Think about it, though. Why would someone choose to be a person who can be hated to such an extreme, so much so that they know that there are people out there who want nothing more than to carve “dyke” into her skin with a knife? No one chooses that! It just doesn’t happen. But the hatred does happen. And it is chosen. It is latched onto. Just at this very moment, I have no desire to try to delve into that mind and understand it. I will, eventually, in my private thoughts, try to understand what could possibly have brought someone to that level of hatred, and to empathize to some extent. But right now, I need the anger. (And oh my, yes, I see the dangerous line of potential hypocrisy looming up ahead as I stride that fine line bordering towards cognitive dissonance.)

Yesterday, very, very early in the morning, three men broke into the home of an openly lesbian woman in Lincoln, NE. Read the story here. Now imagine that you are her. Find something about yourself that is not part of your privilege, something about you that places you as a part of some sort of a minority population (nearly everyone has something about themselves that is like that).[1] Now imagine that three masked men, screaming obscenities and waving weapons around, shock you into consciousness; you’re confused, not quite aware yet of what is going on. You suddenly find that in the midst of their guttural slurs and threats, your hands and feet have been bound. It hurts. They cut your clothes off. You can’t tell, but the knives in their hands look dull and rusty to you. Their breath reeks, the rot in their brains apparently making its way down to their lungs and out of their open and panting mouths. They begin to carve the slurs of your minority status onto your face, your arms, your chest, your belly. The pain begins to take on an unreal, distant sort of quality, but full on shock won’t set in, yet, you won’t let it, because you know you have to escape. Maybe after that. Maybe not.

Alright, I think that’s enough of that exercise. The point is to empathize with the terror, the panic, the horror, the fucked-up-edness. And realize that someone is doing that to you because of WHO YOU ARE. And because you are willing and able to say aloud to the whoever is listening, whether they agree with you or not, This is who I am. I am who I am. Someone out there is apparently so uncomfortable with the fact that you are who you are, that they CHOSE to take a knife and carve the fact of who you are, the fact of their hatred of who you are, into your very body. It doesn’t matter what it is, at that point in the game; whatever it is, it should not be hard to see that they chose their hate far more than you ever chose whatever-it-is.

Hate is far more of a choice than ANY IDENTITY ever was or will be.

What has been beautiful to see is the response from the communities in both Lincoln and Omaha. That gives me hope that all of these beautiful people will rally to give this woman the strength to bear what she has born, to bear what she will have to bear. So that in the midst of hate that pushes back, pushes down, shoves, and tears, she will have the strength of beautiful people to take the next step forward for all of us. So that the children that see us doing this don’t have to suffer the same things. So that she can heal. This community will link arms and push back against the hate to ensure that she and so many others have a safe space to heal in. They will also push out, push up, push forward against hate.

Hate is far more of a choice than ANY IDENTITY ever was or will be. I do not, even from within the chaotic heat of my anger, choose hate. I choose love. I choose beauty.

I will choose beauty, along with a whole mess of other beautiful people, here. Join if you can, in your thoughts if nothing else, because that does make a difference.[2]


EDIT: I should also add that there is a fund set up to help out the woman, who has no insurance. http://starcitypride.org/victim-recovery-fund/

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[1] I know, right? It’s no fun, and requires that you recognize and acknowledge those parts of yourself that *are* part of your privilege.

[2] Not in some woo-woo pseudo-spiritual way, either. I think it is consciousness-raising, something that you take back out into the world later, and it affects not only the way that you think and behave, but also, through that, the way that other people behave around you.



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Grief in Aurora: or Being Useless Over Here In My Little Corner of Headspace

Whenever something happens that is as stupid, as senseless, as horrifying, as crushing, as violent as someone walking calmly into a theatre in Aurora, CO and murdering as many other fellow human beings as he possibly can, it seems perfectly natural to me to cycle, both personally and as a collective sort of public conscious, through the various stages of grief. Right now I'm vacillating between anger and a melancholic sadness.

I’m even allowing myself to wonder occasionally at the differences between the public reaction and attention to something like this and the deaths of military members in the sandboxes overseas. Or the rate of suicide in the military, which comes at me by way of getting angry over some stupid Texan senator’s statements about the Moviehouse Slaughters. And, of course, anxiety over whether anyone that I have a connection to was there, was hurt, knows the murderer, knows the victims, etc., no matter that the chances of that are slim. The chances of anyone going to see a movie at midnight last night walking into the stuff of decades of nightmares was pretty slim, too. Slim chances mean next to nothing taken in context.

And then I return to that deep, energy draining sadness. I feel a hopelessness. But the odd thing (and I think that I may be about to make myself look like a shit, here) is that it is a very personal sort of hopelessness, rather than the empathetic grief for others’ anguish. It’s possible that I just feel useless? Once upon a time, I’d have gladly clutched onto the idea that I can pray for them, that praying would help these aching people through their grief. But prayer is a useless homeopathic salve for a railing conscience, a water pill against a raging cancer in my head. To a certain extent, I can only accept this discomfort for what it is, hold it and name it.

This learning how to simply let emotions lay down and take up space inside my head does not come easily. It’s far too easy for me to say, “I don’t like the way that I feel, I am going to change it. I don’t know how to change it other than with booze, so I’m going to do that.” Calm down, I’m not going to. But I know that I could. Instead, I am going to accept the discomfort for what it is. It is part of the grieving process that we all go through, and I am thankful that there are internet spaces like this one that can help me learn the tools to grieve for myself and for others without the salve of prayer or of an afterlife to make even the worst of things alright, because they are not alright, they are the opposite of alright. And it’s okay to acknowledge that and allow space for that, both in my own consciousness and the public consciousness.



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Midwest Freethought Conference - coming up all too quickly

The Midwest Freethought Conference is coming up (all too quickly) on August 3-5 in Omaha, NE. We have a GREAT lineup of speakers, and, due to the OmahaCoR’s billboard invitation to non-believers (the first atheistic billboard in Nebraska), a huge amount of publicity. The speakers are, in (more or less) order of appearance: Brian Dunning, Adam Brown, Dave Muscato, Amanda Knief, PZ Myers, Amanda Brown, Hemant Mehta, Jerry deWitt, Sarah Morehead, AJ Johnson, Dan Barker, and Fred Edwords.

It promises to be a fantastic weekend full of great presentations, great conversations, and great fun! These sorts of gatherings are perhaps particularly important in the traditionally staid and conservative religious Midwest area, where being religious is more or less assumed, and the opportunity to gather and build community among nontheists is rare. The billboard and its reactions have proved this to us, with everything from people telling us to read Lee Strobel to notes from closet atheists thanking us for putting up the billboard, for letting them know that there is a community out there for non-believers.

A quote from someone who walked out of the restaurant that the billboard is located near: “Thank you so much for the billboard! My fiance and I have always wanted to be a part of an organization that supports our beliefs. We walked out of HuHot, I looked up and almost started crying. It really was a 'beacon of hope' for us. We're really excited to become a part of this community!! THANK YOU!!!!”

If you need or would like more information, please contact me at josiah.mannion5@gmail.com , or Sheila Cole at Sheila@OmahaAtheists.org, or William ‘Danger’ Newman at omahacor@gmail.com.

Also, here's a link to a short blog post from a friend that summarizes and provides most of the relevant links for all of the media response (both positive and negative) up to the date that it was written.

http://aparticularblogbyaparticularatheist.blogspot.com/2012/07/uncontroversial-billboard-is.html

And also, the link for conference:

http://midwestfreethought.org/index.html



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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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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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