Squublog

I like this "Atheist's Creed" written and posted by PZ Myers in this post at Pharyngula.

An atheist's creed

I believe in time,
matter, and energy,
which make up the whole of the world.

I believe in reason, evidence and the human mind,
the only tools we have;
they are the product of natural forces
in a majestic but impersonal universe,
grander and richer than we can imagine,
a source of endless opportunities for discovery.

I believe in the power of doubt;
I do not seek out reassurances,
but embrace the question,
and strive to challenge my own beliefs.

I accept human mortality.

We have but one life,
brief and full of struggle,
leavened with love and community,
learning and exploration,
beauty and the creation of
new life, new art, and new ideas.

I rejoice in this life that I have,
and in the grandeur of a world that preceded me,
and an earth that will abide without me.

I like it despite all the despites (which I'm not going into now) and I like it enough that I'm taking another easy out in this blog by quoting it in its entirety. I'm tempted to print it and hang it up somewhere, which isn't something I really do. I don't always agree with Prof. Myers, but here he's nailed something down very well, filled in a gap I hadn't even sufficiently known was there.

Over at Saradighm Shift we're having a small discussion about some issues related to atheism. I was about to post another comment when I decided to bring it over here. Maybe this'll still make sense to anyone else coming in cold.

In explaining that parts of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion bothered me, or struck me the wrong way, I said:

So it's possible that what hit me in the Dawkins book had something to do with the fact that when I'm reading about religion and what it does to people, one of the foremost "religious" people in my head is my mom. I sometimes get offended thinking "hey, that's my mom you're talking about," in a weird way.

To which Sarah responded:

That's actually one of my biggest problems with the way you talk about how harmful religion/faith is. My example is Michael's mom. She's the kindest, quietest, mildest woman you'd ever meet. And she's devout but not preachy. I keep thinking, does having faith destroy her? Is the world worse off because she believes?

It's interesting to have you do the "Hey, that's my mom!" thing when that's the thing I always do in my head when you say the things you do. "Hey, that's Michael's mom! She wouldn't be a bad jury member!"

So I have a hard time matching that with the religious people I hate, like a fucking library patron the other day who sent an e-mail signed "Blessings and love in Jesus" or who knock on my door and bring pamphlets. The elderly couple praying before dinner at Cracker Barrel just doesn't bother me.

Clearly there's a contradiction at work here in me, or at least something that could easily be seen as such if trying to see things as black and white. So now seems like a good time to talk about that.

I'd never be able to justify saying that there's something wrong with the kind of faith my mother has. For one thing, I don't know enough about it. For another, my mother's a wonderful person, and whether or not her Catholic faith somehow plays into that, at the very least I can't think of any instances where that faith caused her to behave badly.

So how can I say I have a problem with faith if I don't have a problem with my mother's faith?

You may recall that I've also briefly talked about having read The End of Faith by Sam Harris before reading The God Delusion. That's another book that contains a lot of inflammatory things. My dander can get up by that kind of thing even if I basically agree with what's being said; that book was no exception. But what Harris does a good job of presenting (although in what's to me probably a hyperbolic way,) is the idea that moderate religious folk to some extent clear the way for the fundamentalists to do their fundamentalizing. In a nutshell, and this probably isn't doing his argument justice, there's a sense in which moderate religious people defend religious faith and belief, on general principle, as something that should not be questioned. There is sense to them that religious belief is a personal choice.

The problem then comes when the beliefs being thus defended are extended beyond "personal choice." Examples of that are all over, and I won't go into them as that's not my goal here.

Further, I won't even say for sure that my mom defends faith on general principle that way. However, I can't make fun of religious nuts in her presence. I just can't. I can't explain why I sit and watch John Hagee on TV, or all of those other guys I just can't seem to take my eyes off of. Occasionally I'll slip just a little and I can see that what I'm saying is bothering her. If I make fun of someone else's faith, am I not also making fun of hers? After all, at their root all of those faith ideas are faiths, and one cannot defend them with reason.

It would be fair of her to ask that question, and the honest answer from me would be that yes, I do have a problem with the very concept of faith. I have a problem with the notion that that way of thinking should be left alone, as if it actually IS beyond reason. As if there are two spheres here that have equal footing from which to say things about our world, and one should not confront the other. That would be the honest answer but I don't want to risk hurting her by stating it because she is my mother. I only get one of those.

The sense in which that kind of faith is dangerous, then, is that it can stifle honest conversation about something that has a profound influence on everything about our world. Granted, I could be the one in the wrong here. Perhaps the right thing to do would be to confront her, subtly or not, so that I can then better confront those things in general. So maybe what's dangerous is my response to that faith; it's unclear to me.

One other example of the way that situation can be dangerous, or at the very least confounding. Recently I found out that my dad, who's been going through some things lately, told my younger brother that while he (my dad) was in church one morning, God talked to him. He said everything would be okay.

Without going into all of the details of my dad's situation, I'll just say that he has shown some evidence that he's not entirely in touch with rationality right now. So this thing, this vision, to me it should be something that would cause him to question his mental state himself. In fact some of the other problems he's dealing with have done that very thing, and he's wondered openly, at least to some extent, whether he's imagining things. A person who can ask those questions of himself can decide that he should seek help. However, my dad, with his black and white view of the world, honestly believes that hearing the voice of god, or even seeing him sit down beside you in church, is a normal thing. Religion is what's right with the world, to him. The religious are the good guys (at least the Christians.)

What of the message he received in this revelation/vision/hallucination? The message that everything will be okay? I don't have a problem with that. However, foreseeing a possible argument with anyone who might take issue with this rant: I don't think the message that he got out of that experience is in any way a defense of religion. A person can sit down and have that sense come over him whether he believes in god or not. "Everything will be okay" is, I would think, a good thing for a person's overstressed mind to make a person think. When you get into a nearly blind panic like that, that emotional calm can be incredibly helpful in breaking you out of it.

This is one of the niftiest turns of thing PZ over at Pharyngula ever said:

"Pray harder! Exercise a completely ineffective technique more strenuously!"

Christmas was what it was when it was two days ago, here, while I'm writing this. We'll be scatterhairbrains today, resultant from a conglomeration of external factors over which I would have control if I were ever to attempt to have control over anything that exists beyond the bubble of my feeble brain.

If I'm not mistaken (though it's a rare thing for that to be the case,) this is the first "holiday season" in many years that I've not been off from work for the inter-holiday-calm that comes between xmas and newds year. I was off yesterday, but today I'm (supposed to be) working. Motivation is questionable for me on a good day; today there's nary a drop to be found even in the spare vat that I keep hidden in the garage for occasions such as this. My semi-occasionally-functional Windows Messenger tells me that of the 14 coworkers on my list, only one (1) is logged in. Everyone else is having a vacation day. For a normal person, especially a normal remote-worker working from home, this would offer nothing in the way of an excuse for being nonfunctional. However, I'm very much not, in this respect, a normal remote-worker.

So there's a little preamble explaining why this is going to be a horrible mishmash of nothing; regular readers will, of course, understand that what would actually be surprising is if somehow I could offer some reasons for why some post I post sometime isn't a horrible mishmash of nothing.

(Additionally: It looks like I'll be making this entry over the course of a day, instead of all at once. This helps with the cohesion.)

A couple of days before christmas this year, I started gathering steam toward posting something about godlessness and christmas (notey-note: I don't much like the term "godless," although I can't really say why. Or I probably could say why if this post were about figuring that out. Onward!) There are quite a few atheists, it seems, who don't celebrate the holiday -- either being overtly against it or just ignoring it in a more passive way. I mentioned that fact to my wife one night and she said, "If you get like that we're going to have problems." When I sort of forced a laugh and said, "Why ever would you think I'd get like that?" she responded, "I don't know, if you read one more book about that stuff..."

(Warning: everything here is a tangent. Please buckle your strapless batteries.)

I don't love xmas, but I almost want to say here, "I love xmas." I have a bit of a love/hate thing going on with it (notated annotation: I don't want to say "love/hate" there; it seems like there's a word that reminds me of apathetic and antipathetic, but the asshole reverse dictionary doesn't uncover it, and my brain, of course, is useless in this (and most other) matter(s).) It's not quite so simple as to say that I like getting presents but I hate buying them, although there's some level of truth in there. I'm a fabulous procrastinator and a shoppingophobe extraordinaire, and I manage money like I manage my time, and like I organize my thoughts before I post them, and like I put stuff away after I'm done with it. So I actually enjoy finding things that I'm sure are absolutely perfect for the various members of my family, but I almost never afford myself the opportunity to actually do the finding in a timely manner. Which means I'm always stressed while searching, and I'm always broke (well, that's just because I'm always broke,) and so it rarely actually feels like a good time while I'm doing it.

I also would find the whole thing a lot easier if everyone could just pay no attention to how much I get for who. This isn't to say that anyone in my gift-exchanging circle does this explicitly so much as that everyone, naturally, has some meter for this sort of thing; or at least I assume as much. So in my perfect pre-xmas world, I'd start paying attention to things sometime in October. I'd have someone put x amount of money (my own money, even,) into a special account with which I could buy shit until it runs out and be gently reminded when the account is empty without the "gentle reminder" being seventeen thirty-nine dollar overdraft fees. Any time I saw something that I thought would be a good gift for one of the people in my circle, I'd buy it. When that ended up meaning both of my brothers got a bunch of shit from me that I thought they'd like, and my mother and wife sometimes got a bunch of stuff and others didn't, and my various in-laws and aunts and uncles and dad got pretty much nothing, no one would notice. When the money was gone, I'd stop buying gifts.

(Biggest small note ever: I should turn my blog into a wiki. Seriously. I'm still not getting to the post I sort of planned on writing, and now when I finally do it's going to feel like it ought to be its own post. Were this a wiki I could just put a fucking [[xmas and me]] link here and then follow that to create the post I'm really trying to create after I get off of this idiotic spewage. And speaking of that -- how much do these methods of composing things twist our mental functionality to suit them? I can't tell if my thoughts are this horribly disorganized, apparently moreso now than ever, because that's just the way my brain's wired, or because my brain's gotten wired that way because I've been using word-processors, blogs, and wikis to compose my thoughts for so long.)

Note here that none of this idea that my ideal gift-giving situation would allow the distribution to be lopsided has anything to do with how I feel about any of these people. It's more about the fact that I understand the likes and dislikes of these people in much different ways. Very often I'm looking for things for myself and find something that'd be ideally suited for one or the other of my brothers. On the other hand, there've probably been three times in my entire life that I've come across something and thought, "Dad would love that!"

(Insert graceless segue here.)

That ill-described and amorphous glob of thought is a lot of what Christmas is about for me: thinking about my family (and sometimes friends,) in a way that I don't have much opportunity to do otherwise. There's also, even as old as I am, a lot of good anticipation for me. Either I'm very lucky in that I've got a lot of people around me who are very good gift-givers, or I'm just not very picky. I'm generally very happy with whatever I'm given. (Tangent 17,401: this is also probably related to my inability to be money-conscious (tangent 17,402: my Uncle Snickel was probably the most money conscious person I've ever heard of, and it'd be nice to write about what the shit I mean when I say that here, but this isn't a wiki. f.) What I mean is this: if I were to spend on myself as much as I spend on all of these gifts that I get for other people, I'd probably find things more in-line with exactly what I want (or need) than the gifts I end up with. In other words from a strictly financial standpoint, Christmas is a good way to mis-spend a buttload of money on shit I don't really need and probably wouldn't buy myself.) (Okay that's not even a tangent, I just can't be bothered to organize myself AT ALL anymore.)

So continuing from one of those threads -- I grew up with a pretty solid idea of what Christmas "means." The odd-duck-out in the season has always been this formulation of the season's namesake -- the little baby Jesus Christ. For all of my childhood, every year I would get a healthy dose of "remember the true meaning of the season," and "keep Christ in Christmas," and never once did I really understand what the shit that meant. The true meaning of Christmas is that we get time off and see pretty lights everywhere and hope it snows and give and receive gifts; why did people keep saying that the "true meaning" of it had something to do with Jesus?

Recently I've come to more solidly understand that that lack of understanding didn't have so much to do with my own mental capacity as with the fact that this is (at least) two holidays crowbarred into one undersized box. There's a Christian fairy tale that doesn't actually make much sense by itself being celebrated, and then there's a celebration of something else. The cynical way to express what the non-Jesus celebration's about is to say it's about capitalism: pure, unadulterated mismanagement of money. But the more interesting thing, for me, is that idea that we're all given a chance at xmas to try to see the world, even if only a little bit, through the eyes of the people with whom we're closest. There's a period of trying desperately to think like dad, or my uncles who I rarely see, or my brother's wife, followed by the explosion of gifts that somehow tell me how those people think I think. Sometimes what comes out is obvious -- gift cards for a hardware store, for example. Other times it's not obvious at all -- a nice leather coat that I'd probably never even have looked at on my own but which suits me perfectly, a heavy-as-shit gargoyle for the rock garden in my back yard, a digital-camera built in to a pair of binoculars.

I like to call this season xmas because I keep Christ out of it. I understand that there's one more moronic metaphor there -- God "gave us" His Son (who was also His Own Self,) for us to kill so that we could be forgiven, in the future and the past, for murder (well, yes, for "sinning," but here I'm using "murder" as a metaphor for "sinning," because the mismanagement of metaphor is what religion's all about.) So in giving each other gargoyles, books, and socks, we are offering our own pale version of the "sacrifice" that God made (since it's ever so logical to say that a "being" who is omni-everything actually sacrifices anything by creating an avatar of himself to be killed, as if in the face of infinite time those few hours spent hanging on a cross actually somehow hurt this being that cannot be hurt, as if this death of God-the-Man-Version were any different from what it's like when I play a video game and get myself eaten by zombies (yeah, yeah, here I'm hamfisting my own metaphor, god : our universe :: I : virtual world inside a game.) Sue me.)

I like that I can admit that I'm celebrating what I'm actually celebrating. I don't have to run around telling people to remember to keep the spending of money on each other in xmas. Even more, I don't have to give a shit if anybody chooses not to keep that in xmas, or not to celebrate anything right now at all.

Of course there are a lot other things to "celebrate" now; probably none of them any more worthy than any others. Ultimately maybe there's a different phenomenon here: celebrating stuff is, or can be, fun. Having a celebration makes for good times. Every holiday is just an excuse for a celebration; we twist things just a bit so that it's not all raucous good times, trying to remind ourselves of something or other during our celebrations so as to avoid the appearance that we're just having a good time to have a good time. I'm not going to moralize one way or the other about that -- quite possibly it's a good idea to balance our celebrations with remembrances or thankses or, at the very least, story tellings. Or maybe it'd be just fine to celebrate just to celebrate, and leave for normal days the balance of those weighty things.

In lieu of any actual posting, I'm just going to embed a tube. Everything this guy says is awesome, for real. At least in this video. I dunno, maybe it's just the accent. But still, worth watching this talk about Roman gods vs. the Christian God, and Christians vs. Christ, and freedom and religion, and all that.



(Got this over at Cynical-C Blog)

I saw a t-shirt hanging in the mall on Monday night. I was astounded by its brilliance, and its inspiring message has stuck with me lo these two days.

It said:

Open Letter to God

Dear God,
Why do you allow so much violence in schools?
- a concerned student

Dear Concerned Student,
I'm not allowed in schools.
- God

I briefly wondered about what writing instrument I could find that would let me update the t-shirt for the vendor.

Dear God,
Oh, so you mean "all powerful" has an asterisk, and below that in the fine print somewhere it says, "powers can not cross boundaries, such as school walls, where god is not given permission to cross."
- a concerned, and now slightly confused, student

Dear concerned, now slightly confused, student,
It's not that I CAN'T cross the boundary of a school wall, where I've not been given permission to cross. It's that I've not been invited, and I do not intervene if I'm not invited.
- God

Dear God,
I'm not sure that makes sense. Sorry, maybe I'm just stupid (I'm only in seventh grade, you know, and in a public school, at that.) Are you saying that none of the students who get killed "invite" you to help them? Earlier you said you weren't "allowed" in school. To me that sounds like it means that someone's rules are keeping you out.
- a concerned, slightly scared, apparently stupid, student

Dear stupid student,
Let me clarify. First, I'm not allowed in schools by the laws of your government. Second, this means I'm not being specifically invited into school by that government. I will not get involved in violence in schools so long as I'm not officially invited. Official invitation would mean that the laws of your government would change in such a way that I was no longer disallowed from being in your schools.
- God

Dear God,
Now I understand. It's okay with you that innocent students get killed in school, even if those students regularly pray to you for your help, because by getting killed that way maybe our government will come to its senses and change the law so that you are allowed in school. You're trying to make a point.
- a student

Dear student,
No, you idiot. I'm not making a point. If I wanted to make a point I'd rain fire down on your paltry little school. I'm just saying... I'm just... no, fuck this. Get your parents to send you to a private, Christian school. 'k? Nothing bad ever happens in those places. I wouldn't allow it.
- God

Some of that might not fit on the t-shirt, is the reason I didn't pursue the idea.

There are a lot of things I could be writing about today, when I'm really wishing I were more motivated to be doing something else, but there's just this one thing that I've got to get out. It's not about the busy-ass weekend (maybe later I'll do that.) Instead, it's about one of my old pet subjects that's frequently avoided around here because I'm not always in the mood for being controversial. Now, though, I feel it bubbling out whether I like it or not.

My wife came home for lunch today and pulled from her purse two small, white pieces of paper to show me. On these papers were printed black line representations of butterflies. Over the surface of the papers were crayon scribbles from a baby. My baby, it just so happens. These were the first crayon drawings our daughter has done for us. Incidentally, there were words printed inside the butterflies. One of them said, "Praise the Lord!" The other said, "Jesus died so that we might live!"

I'm not normal, I'll readily admit. I'm not free of hypocrisy, for sure. There are probably contradictions in me that I don't know about because I'm too close to them. So if the fact that I honestly felt a physical revulsion at the sight of these things means there's something about myself that I'm not entirely aware of, so be it. But that feeling was there, and it was quickly followed by anger, and that all-too-common feeling of helplessness in the face of some overwhelming environmental force. I feel this helplessness a lot now that I've got a daughter. My feeble brain is being overworked in its attempt to navigate the maze of fatherhood.

I want to be a good father, I want to teach my daughter well; and I want my daughter to be with family who love her. Those two things don't always necessarily contradict each other, but in this case they're doing so in a very clear way. I'm an atheist. Beyond being an atheist, I'm a bit fanatical in my opinion that faith is anything BUT a good thing. So while, before I was a father, it was fairly easy to keep my anti-religious viewpoint to myself, I'm finding that the real-world consequences of religion are not making it easy for me to keep my viewpoint safely hidden beneath the banner of abstract philosophy. My daughter is learning things every day, and she will soon (if she isn't already) be learning abstract concepts that could be with her forever.

With my wife and I being unbelievably busy trying to sell our house, move, work, buy a house, etc., we've had many opportunities to have family members help us out. One of the ways our families have been invaluable to us is in watching our daughter so that we can do those things that need to be done. It just so happens that for the past three Saturday nights and Sunday mornings, she's been taken care of by one of my wife's sisters. This sister (I'll call her Mary just because,) is wonderful. She clearly loves our daughter. She has two children of her own, a boy and a girl, and THEY clearly love our daughter, too. She has a husband who's a great guy and he loves our daughter. I have never felt that she's in anything less than good hands when we've left her there.

The downside is that they are practitioners of some protestant Christian religion. They're saved, they're born again, they're whatever. They aren't just casual Sunday churchgoers. Mary makes it a point on most Saturdays to ask her extended family whether they'll go to church with her family the following day. She used to ask me occasionally, but something I said must've convinced her it was a lost cause. She continues to ask my wife, however, and her other sisters and their families.

So you might be asking, if you're still with me this long into my rant, where's the harm?

First, the harm is the unbalanced position this puts me in. There's a serious double standard going on here. How, I wonder, would this sister react if I began asking her and her family if they'd stay home from church on Sunday? What if I watched her children and sent them home with a picture of a butterfly containing the words, "Which Lord Should We Be Praising?" Or, "What State Am I in in Relation to Living/Not Living if in fact Jesus never lived at all?" My suspicion is she'd be angry, and she'd tell me not to teach her children such blasphemy.

Unfortunately I don't actually KNOW what she'd do, and I won't ever know, because I would never do that to her.

Now I'm pretty certain that no one had any malice in mind when they gave my daughter some cut-out generic-jesus-phrase-themed pictures to color. It was something for her to do while the family was at church. There's no harm there, really. Unless I miss my mark, my daughter can't read yet at 8 months old.

The trouble is that this is a precedent. There's a pattern starting here and I can see a very limited number of ways that it can play out. One general way: I ignore it and let my daughter continue going to church with Mary and her family as my daughter grows up. Why not?

Why not leads to my second point in my list of answers to "Where's the harm," - what people are taught through this religion is misleading, and probably dangerous. This is the crux of my problem. The message that is taught is this: "Faith is a Virtue."

What is this virtue? Faith means knowing things that we cannot prove, or things that cannot be proven. At its heart it seems to be a pretty simple concept. To some people it might amount to nothing more than feeling to be true something that can neither be proven nor dis-proven. There are clearly people (probably some of them regular readers here,) who can somehow isolate this faith thing in such a way that it doesn't have any real negative influence on their thinking. Perhaps for them, if a question can be answered rationally, then the rational answer is the true answer, while questions for which an answer is not forthcoming through reason can be safely answered by faith.

But faith as a concept is much less benign than that. Faith says that things can be known to be true without being proven as such. It is ultimately the abdication of the responsibility of verifying that what you claim is "truth" is, in actual fact, true. A tenet or practice can therefore be right just because someone else tells you it's right. Even if there's a God, and even if the dogma of some particular faction of some particular religion can describe this God in details that are, in fact, true, there are more people believing they know the "actual" truth than there are practitioners of that particular faction of that particular religion, and so they are basing what they "know" on something someone who is not God is telling them.

There are already volumes written on this subject. I'm not going to write my own volume right now in talking about pictures of butterflies. I've already jumped into a hundred different arguments and left the justifications unwritten so that it'll be easy to call me a hypocrite. If so, maybe that can lead to some discussions. At any rate, my problem, dear reader who has stuck with me all the way to the end, is this: how do I keep my daughter from being brainwashed without offending people who I so very much do not wish to offend? (First person who answers by saying, "You can start by not calling religion brainwashing," gets a cookie.) My mother is a practicing Catholic. My wife's family are not all devout, but very few of them would take anything I have to say about christianity to be anything other than insulting. I do not want the way this plays out to be by my getting a bib for my daughter that tells them exactly what I think and thus leaves me, and possibly my daughter, as outcasts from the family. And while I don't really think she'll be truly an outcast when I figure out how to confront this and then confront it, I DO think that it will cause some kind of rift between my daughter and her cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents on that side that I don't want for her.