You should buy all your greeting cards from the fine folks at Apoplectic.
December 2010
The Only Good Thing Ever to Come Out of Religion Was the Music
I know it’s de rigueur for the blognoscenti to avow their hatred of Christmas music, but I love it. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, carols like “O Holy Night”, “Angels We Have Heard on High”, “What Child Is This”, “Away In a Manger”, and even “The Little Drummer Boy” are some of my favorite pieces of music, holiday or otherwise. Being in the Appalachian region, it’s easy to find lots of instrumental versions of Christmas music featuring traditional folk instruments, and I especially love the version of “Snowbird on the Ashbank” on this compilation. (Here’s three other favorites that I’ve collected and listen to every year.)
Sound and scent are so especially conducive to a contemplative state of mind. Music like this, specially reserved for one particular time of year, thus heightening its emotional intensity, combined with the smells of cedar and pine, mistletoe and sugarplums, sage and holly, and, of course, freshly baked foods — well. Who needs heaven?
First They Came to Recruit the Gays, and I Said Nothing…
Did you know that the United States Army is concerned with the spiritual well-being of their soldiers? Did you know that if you choose not to believe in the supernatural that the United States Army can consider you unfit to serve?
Really? It’s that easy? Well, hot damn, that’s great news! I only wish someone had told me that before I went and got all these gang tattoos on my neck and face, thinking that would keep me out of Afrakistan.
This is not even an insinuation. The US Army has taken the position that a soldier who does not feel connected to a deity is an incomplete person, and that a lack of belief will somehow compromise their principles and values. It’s right there, in black and white. That the US Army would take such a position is deplorable, and the fact that it is mandatory appears to be a direct violation of the First Amendment of the constitution that these very soldiers put themselves in harms way to protect. It is discriminatory in every way and undermines the confidence that every soldier should have that their Government is supportive of them, regardless of their belief or disbelief in a deity.
Okay, look. I promise to not dwell on the bullshit assertion that our freedom of speech and assembly has fuck-all to do with occupying sand-strewn tribal battlefields across the world if you guys promise not to make this a thing. Some of us are just fine with being discriminated against by what we see as an immoral institution. And when did the fucking U.S. military become the vehicle of choice for obtaining equal rights anyway?
Sui Generic (Slight Return)
“Most people are other people,” Oscar Wilde wrote. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” You get the feeling, somehow, that he thought this was a bad thing. Seems likelier that it’s just an inevitable fact about a species whose members depend for everything on each other. No single one of us has wings, claws, beaks, or any easy way to make a laptop or a catch a tuna. What we have, instead, is our relationships to other people, through which come laptops, tuna, other necessities—and the sense of connection without which we’re miserable. We create a lot of ourselves by imitating others, then, and that’s not only because we lack enough lifetimes to reinvent all human knowledge. It’s also because imitation makes it easier to communicate information and connect emotionally.
Oh, Oscar. You know, it’s certainly an arresting myth, that of the bold artist storming the heavens, rolling up his sleeves, rudely shouldering aside the gods, and plunging his arms up to the elbows into the raw stuff of creation, fashioning novelties out of sheer willpower and breaking the mold immediately after, but it is still a myth. Ecclesiastes was moaning a long time ago about nothing new under the sun. Old wine is always being passed around in new bottles. Plus ça change. In reality, the context matters as much as the content. The originality and innovation is in the arrangement of the parts in the collage, the particular constellation of elements in a specific time or place. And sometimes, originality is an accidental byproduct of an unskillful attempt to imitate something else. Clever people just draw from a wider range of influences and are better at concealing the obvious roots that betray them.
I recently mentioned a friend of mine who imagines “God” to be something like all the knowledge in the universe, actual and potential. So for her, knowledge is pretty much the equivalent of a person’s soul. “What about all your knowledge?” she asked, after I disavowed any belief in a soul or afterlife. “It was never mine to begin with,” I said. I haven’t ever come up with any breathtakingly original ideas. All I’ve ever done is tinker with ideas that other people passed on to me, applying them to the specific circumstances of my experience, combining them in ways that are only unique to my time and place. Any impression I make on other people will influence them in a way specific to them, and so on it goes. We lay claim to our little treasure-trove of influences for a short while, and then they return to the whole, to be refurbished and brought out again in different guises.
Ex Nihilo
Peter Lawler, summarizing David Bentley Hart:
Hart’s “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.…Christ, the Christians claimed, freed us from the limitations of our merely biological natures through his perfect reconciliation of God’s nature and man’s nature. He was, the Nicene fathers concluded, fully God and fully man, and his redemption was to divinize every man. Christ freed each of us for unlimited love for every other person made in God’s image; Christ was the foundation of a virtuous way of life based on a vision of the good that has no pagan counterpart. Charity to all became the virtue most in accord with the truth about who we are. For Hart, the wonder is that anyone could have imagined the ideals of the Christian faith in the first place, given that those ideals had so little support in any pre-Christian conception of who we are.It is barely too strong to say that, for Hart, Christ transformed each of us from being nobody to being somebody—indeed, a somebody of infinite value. None of us is destined to be a slave, and death has been overcome. We are no longer defined by our merely biological natures, because our nature is now to be both human and divine. From one view, there is no empirical evidence that death has been overcome for each particular human being. From another, the evidence is the unprecedented virtue flowing from the unconditional love present among the early Christians and that virtue’s indirect, historical transformation of the broader social and political world. The change in who we are is the result of a deepened human inwardness or self-consciousness: Christ made each of us irreducibly deeper by infusing divinity into every nook and cranny of our natures.
John Gray has made much the same point about the roots of rational humanism, but he, at least, went further and noted that the real problem was that both Christians and humanists refuse to accept the fact that homo sapiens are still, at base, another species of animal, probably destined to pass away like so many others did. Hell, Dimetrodon ruled as the Earth’s top predator for fifteen million years, all for naught; we’re barely 50,000 years into our reign and already constantly flirting with planet-wide self-destruction, yet we can’t stop singing our own praises over how essential we are to the universe.
But the logic here just cracks me up. Ignoring the fact that many of our altruistic inclinations are indeed rooted in our biological nature as social animals, conservatives like Hart claim that it’s intellectually dishonest and illogical to arbitrarily decide to value the humane virtues. Grounding them in agreement arrived at through shared experience and dialogue isn’t good enough, evidently. But arbitrarily deciding to believe the myth that an anthropomorphic deity granted us a magical essence that allows us to appreciate and embody those virtues makes for a rock-solid foundation to build a culture upon. Got it.
Again, we see this fear of nihilism that’s so peculiar to Christianity. By staking all value and meaning to a teleological conception of progression toward an unchanging, timeless realm of perfection, we convince ourselves that nothing in the here and now can be worth anything in and of itself. Like poor old Wile E. Coyote, we’re seduced by the illusion that we’re suspended over an abyss, and if we take our eyes off that heavenly future and glance down, if we fail to keep running in place, we’ll plummet to our doom.
The Dust of Exploded Beliefs May Make a Fine Sunset
Proving she’s no one-trick pony, Mary Elizabeth Williams demonstrates that she can be just as stupid about atheism as she can about Michael Vick. Oops, did I just prove her point? I’m so mean.
Unlike those who would rub what they want you to “know” in your face, Gervais has a gentlemanly, eminently British way of conveying his philosophy. He considers the astonishing number of animal species in the world and understatedly muses that perhaps the story of Noah’s Ark “isn’t totally accurate.” He refers to the Bible as “a dusty old book” that sounds “a little bit farfetched.” And in a highly entertaining “holiday message” for the Wall Street Journal this week titled “Why I’m an Atheist,” he wrote, “I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true.”
Of course, when other boogeyatheists like Dawkins or Hitchens point out the exact same things in more detail, even while taking pains to stress that they know and respect many intelligent believers, they’re accused of being condescending by reducing everyone’s beliefs to a caricature. Not everyone is a biblical literalist, you know! Some of them – like Williams herself, imagine that! – manage to be believing Christians without being tied down by all those dogmatic rules! May I make a suggestion? Perhaps she should take a moment to be grateful that there’s no church hierarchy with the power to violently punish that sort of heresy anymore, thanks to people who, uh, weren’t afraid to be confrontational and rude.
You know, you just can’t win when you allow yourself to get baited into arguing with someone’s feelings. She thinks a billboard by American Atheists is an example of “shoving your beliefs on other people” (as opposed to writing an essay in a national newspaper, apparently), which seems awfully mild to me. I see more aggressive advertisements for consumer products every day, but I don’t worry that someone’s going to think I’m stupid because I don’t care to own an iPad. But as we already learned, she’s vaguely devoted to some “spiritual” (of course) version of Christianity, so I get the impression that almost any blunt reminder of those who refuse to affirm her choice is going to be too much for her to abide.
Really, this sort of whining is only possible in a society where believers have long had the luxury of never having to be challenged at all. I get told by my friends that calling myself an atheist – in response to their own questions – is arrogant, and my repeated attempts to patiently explain the nuances of my stance don’t prevent me from having to answer the same questions again later on. I don’t complain about it; it’s just the way it is. Having a lot of unusual opinions and tastes in general means I’m more often than not having to listen to some uninformed blustering about a topic of interest or rude dismissal of something I hold dear. Eventually, you just learn to expect it, ignore it, laugh it off, or, if someone’s up for it, argue about it. Sometimes you actually even learn something by being offended, because it takes you out of a comfort zone you’d never get around to leaving on your own. But for fuck’s sake, how insecure do you have to be to be offended by someone who “thinks they’re sooo smart”?
…I left this out of the original draft of this post, figuring it was too obvious to need elucidating, but what the fuck; the holidays are for indulging in sweets, so let’s enjoy the scrumptious irony of a self-professed Christian complaining about pushy, judgmental behavior. After all, exclusivity is the entire point of Christianity — there is one true God and he had one, and only one, son who came to Earth to provide humankind with the one, and only one, path to salvation from sin. Just ask him, he’ll tell ya: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Oh, but that Bill Maher sure does smirk a lot, doesn’t he?
Yes, yes, I’m sure she, like so many other mushy modern Christians, would say that’s the sort of literal dogma that enlightened, spiritual believers like her have outgrown (which would probably sound awfully condescending to at least 40% of the population, but let’s not unduly worry her with that right now). But if you don’t believe in sin, if you don’t believe in hell (or, at the very least, some sort of painful consequences for rejecting God’s gift), if you don’t believe in the exclusivity of Jesus’s claim to divinity, if you feel that other beliefs (or a lack thereof) are just as valid and conducive to living a good, fulfilling life, then what the hell do you call yourself a Christian for? Why be saved if there’s nothing to be saved from? Strip away all the exclusivity, and all you’ve got is some deranged asshole wearing a sandwich board, wandering around making a nuisance of himself, haranguing people to heed his simplistic platitudes or face the brutal consequences when the world ends, which, by the way, will be any day now.
But don’t ever have a strong opinion or act like you know something. Perish the thought. That would be intolerant.
Is You Is or Is You Ain’t?
“I received your letter of June 10th. I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist. Your counter-arguments seem to me very correct and could hardly be better formulated. It is always misleading to use anthropomorphical concepts in dealing with things outside the human sphere — childish analogies. We have to admire in humility and beautiful harmony of the structure of this world — as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.”Four years later, in 1949, Raner wrote Einstein again, asking for clarification: “Some people might interpret (your letter) to mean that to a Jesuit priest, anyone not a Roman Catholic is an atheist, and that you are in fact an orthodox Jew, or a Deist, or something else. Did you mean to leave room for such an interpretation, or are you from the viewpoint of the dictionary an atheist; i.e., ‘one who disbelieves in the existence of a God, or a Supreme Being?’” Einstein responded on September 28, 1949:“I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”
I agree, and would also add what Noam Chomsky said when asked the same question: what do you even mean by “God” or a “Supreme Being” in the first place? At least the believers in an anthropomorphic personal god have something specific in mind that we can dismiss as a fantasy, but the attempts of sophisticated theists to be more nuanced about it quickly devolve into, uh, poetry (if you’re feeling generous), or gibberish (if you’re not).
I also pretty much agree with his characterization of the “professional atheist”. I personally identify as an atheist because, like he said about the Jesuit priest, I am one as far as the vast majority of my society is concerned. Also, given how much actual, dangerous oppression faces those in many countries who refuse to conform, I think it’s important to not take for granted our luxury to be open about our lack of belief, to help destigmatize it. But I don’t think religion ever will be totally eradicated, and my suspicion of human nature is such that I can’t get truly enthusiastic about what a wonderful world it will be if only it could be. And while I certainly understand the impulse, I can’t help but shudder a little to see the sort of tribal mentality that wants to highlight all the examples of those on “our side” — atheist musicians, actors, and other public figures. I know it can be comforting to be reminded that one isn’t alone in holding an unpopular belief, but as is so often the case with politics, it’s easy to develop a monomaniacal fixation on such a distinction. Roy Edroso has long been keenly critical of conservatives who subordinate art to propaganda for the party line, disowning entertainers who express heretical opinions, but I’ve seen quite a few liberals as well who care more about the political beliefs of an artist than the art itself.
So I feel like my atheism is more positional than ideological. I am not on anyone’s “side”. I have no desire to convince other people to agree with me; I only want to retain enough personal space in which to be free from excessive pressure to agree with them. But I’ll also assert myself against those who seem to feel that Einstein’s “attitude of humility” is somehow incongruous with open expressions of atheism. I’ve said before, and I’ll say again: in my eyes, agnosticism is a statement about the boundaries of knowledge. Atheism is a statement about the credibility of belief. We can fully admit that we don’t know absolutely everything, that we can’t see everything from a – ahem – God’s-eye perspective, while feeling confident enough to say that we see no reason to believe that our imperfect knowledge leaves a loophole for any metaphysical fantasy we can dream up.
It Seems Your Ring Is Sliding Off My Hand
We could call them the lower-middle class or the upper-working class, but the better term is the moderately educated middle. They do not have BAs, MBAs, or PhDs. But they are not high-school dropouts either. They might have even achieved some college or training beyond high school. They are not upscale, but they are not poor. They don’t occupy any of the margins, yet they are often overlooked, even though they make up the largest share of the American middle class. In many respects, these high-school graduates are quite similar to their college-educated peers. They work. They pay taxes. They raise children. They take family vacations. But there is one thing that today’s moderately educated men and women, unlike today’s college graduates or yesterday’s high-school graduates, are increasingly less likely to do: get and stay happily married.
As they note later on, this same group has seen their wages diminish and employment opportunities vanish over the last few decades. If nobody can afford to own anything but the clothes on their back, what’s the point in joining an institution centered on the orderly transfer of property? What are they going to bequeath to their children, a mountain of credit card debt?
I was just talking to a friend last week who told me about her recent engagement. She said they were going to spend the next year saving up for the wedding, which struck me funny. Maybe a more realistic approach would be to skimp on the wedding and save your money for the divorce attorneys.
Saturday Shuffle
- Robbie Robertson — Mahk Jchi
- Primal Scream — Exterminator
- The Dresden Dolls — Night Reconnaissance
- Andreas Kisser — Virgulândia
- Tomahawk — Antelope Ceremony
- The Wildhearts — Tim Smith
- Faith No More — Stripsearch
- Erik Mongrain — Fusions
- Black Mountain — The Hair Song
- Eisbrecher — Kuss
- The Obsessed — Touch of Everything
- Sigur Rós — Ágætis Byrjun
- Yawning Man — Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway
- Dead Can Dance — The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove
- Nine Inch Nails — My Violent Heart
- Primus — Here Come the Bastards
- Rob Zombie — Virgin Witch
- Type O Negative — Haunted
- The Beta Band — Alleged
- Grandaddy — Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance
The Ghost in the Machine
io9:
Fruit flies and other simple organisms might seem like they’re creatures of instinct, governed by a set of basically predictable stimuli and responses. But fruit flies actually have free will. Depending on what your definition of free will is.Leaving philosophy aside, we know humans have free will because we’re able to evaluate a set of different options and make a conscious decision as to which of them we’re going to choose. But for animals, we can’t ask them how they go about making decisions, so figuring out whether they possess free will in a biological sense is much trickier.
I don’t know about you, but I think I could present at least some examples of people who appear to be “creatures of instinct, governed by a set of basically predictable stimuli and responses.”
But yeah, I’ve always thought the supposed distinction between free will and determinism is such a misleading way to frame the issue. We humans are able to visualize a set of options (within certain constraints) and choose between them because the type of brain we have allows for that sort of abstract thought. Other mammals have that ability to lesser degrees, so I’m not surprised that other animals might also have some ability to intelligently react to new situations. It’s a difference more of degree than kind.