4 posts tagged “religion”

I'm discombobulated.  I'm verklempt.  I'm flabbergasted.

I don't really think Barbara Ehrenreich is a tool of the Republican elite.  Right?  I don't think she's a scaremonger or a fishmonger or any other kind of monger, and I don't think she normally publishes "I gave birth to a four-headed antelope!" sorts of stories. 

So, uh.  WTFF?  No, seriously, can someone explain this to me?  Hillary Clinton is in a cult?  So, when Bill had his affairs, maybe those were cult rituals?  I think Christ was down with oral sex.  What else could he have meant when he said he came to bring a sword?*

Goddamn if voting Mickey Mouse doesn't look better with each passing day.

*Oddly, I can find no authoritative interpretation of the Gospels that supports the oral sex thesis.  Strange.

I've had the Mormons* over a few times now--you know, the earnest young men in suits who come around trying to convert you, like the Jehovah's Witnesses, only Mormon instead.  T thought I should have shooed them off a long time ago, but I like having company.  They've been putting my lack of faith to the test, and it's been interesting.

No, no, I'm not converting, not at all, but it was interesting trying to explain to people who clearly have a lot of faith in God what it means to have none at all and how you could come to be like that (to be honest, I don't know how I came to be like this--I just am and always have been, though certainly living with an archaeologist and a physical anthropologist has not helped). 

Anyway, it got me to thinking about atheism.  I've been an atheist as long as I can remember, but for me it means exactly what it says--a lack of belief.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It has never meant to me that I'm absolutely dead certain that no god exists or has ever existed.  It does not profess some alternate belief.  It does not define me or anything about me.  It only means I don't believe in God or any other god (and, OK, it also means that when confronted by that heinous song, "Our God is an Awesome God" I am prompted, unlike Christians, to ponder whether any of the other gods implied by the phrasing are more awesome or at least equally awesome--the song does not rule out such a possibility, which I think would really piss the Old Testament God off a lot.  Ahem.)

The point is that I was always somewhat confounded by the accusations occasionally hurled by Christians that atheism is a religion, too.  But looking around at other atheists, including but by no means limited to the Atheist group on Vox, I can kind of see their point.

Atheists, let me ask you this:  Whence the fucking moral superiority?  I understand you think people who believe are stupid and intellectually inferior because they have just not seen the light understood the wonders of science as deeply as you have.  Also, you think "religion kills" which is akin to saying "guns kill" or "silver hammers kill"--the point is that none of those things kill in the absence of people (and specifically, people named Maxwell). 

Let's start there.  The first point is obviously falsifiable.  Stupidity has plenty to go around and it does not spare those who do not believe in God.  Some of the smartest people I've ever known have been religious.  The rest of the smartest people I've ever known haven't been.  There has been no discernible difference in quantity or quality of intelligence between the two groups.  It seems to be true that more educated populations tend to be less religious, but that doesn't say anything about the intelligence of any given individuals, and even in less religious societies you will find intellectuals who believe in God. 

As to the second point, "religion" does not kill and cannot, being a concept rather than a concrete thing.  Certainly, all manner of craziness and slaughter has been perpetrated in the name of religion.  On the other hand, there has been all kinds of craziness and slaughter perpetrated by humans that had nothing to do with religion or had to do with religion in name only.  The current quagmire in Iraq would be a case in point, I believe.

Furthermore, just as we insist that you cannot prove the existence of God (and you can't--if St. Thomas Aquinas failed, if Descartes failed, then so, surely, will you), neither can we prove the nonexistence of God.  It is generally held to be logically impossible to prove nonexistence, but even if this were not the case--if nonexistence of a thing can be proven--and even if we thought we had proved that the Judeo-Christian God does not exist, this does not demonstrate that no other god or gods exist, and so the work of disproving "god" is not ever really going to be done, even if it were theoretically possible (with an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters...). 

There are good arguments that gods generally and God specifically are inventions of the human mind.  Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Julian Jaynes put forth a whole slew of direct and indirect arguments that this is so, enough that I find their logic compelling.  It is worth noting two things about that, though.  The first is that I was already a person lacking faith.  The second is that the fact that we invented god/God does not mean God didn't or doesn't exist.  Hear me out.

If the notion of "god" is a product of human imagination, this would have to mean that no god exists independently of humans, that the gods we usually think of, and certainly God as written in the Bible, do not exist in the absence of human consciousness.  But to say that something cannot exist if it is the mere product of our minds is, again, patently false.  We would have to say, then, that music does not exist, that language is not real, that consciousness itself is nothing.  It's true that there are differences between language and God or music and God, yes, but there are also similarities (not the way Christians think of God, as a being who created us and exists completely independently of us, no, but in the way that I think gods came to be).

To me, faith is a beautiful thing and belief in God is not essentially less worthwhile than sincere appreciation of music or linguistic art.  That's not to say that I believe in God or any god.  I don't.  While I do appreciate music and especially linguistic art, my faith component is missing.  I look to other sources to explain the same things that people who believe explain via gods (or I just don't explain them and let things be all cool and mysterious), but I don't think this makes me a better or smarter person than someone who has the faith that I don't.

Back in the grad school days, when I was taking a lit seminar called The Literature of American Imperialism (one of the best classes I ever took, by the way), I wrote for my seminar paper an essay about otherness.  Obviously, the class was permeated with opportunities to curse Privileged Dead White Men--it was an excellent survey of the peculiar sorts of horror that colonialism and even just the imperialist attitude can perpetrate.  "Other" was a term that got tossed around a lot, too, and in the wrong hands even such a simple word takes on an air of jargon, but generally speaking, it means someone who is not like you, but particularly someone who is oppressed in some way by you and people of your ilk.  The idea in such seminars is that the Other who was once objectified and silenced is now given space and respect and individuality and Thou-ness (to borrow somewhat obnoxiously from Buber). 

But apparently that meant that the former objectifier--the aforementioned Privileged Dead White Man--became the objectified, the vilified, the silenced.  Now I am not so silly as to have tried to argue that the Dead White Man was right in his opinions and actions--certainly not--but I was naive enough to venture the argument, just occasionally, that these Dead White Guys were Other to us now.  Even though we're white (we all were in that seminar, go figure) and think we are therefore similar, we are actually not.  Not only has the elapsed time made us think much differently than they did, the changes in religion vs secularism, changes in science and education about the world, et cetera, have made us so different from those guys (OK, sure, not the guys who perpetrated the Vietnam War, but from Columbus and Cortez?  Uh, yes) as to make them unknown and Other to us.  We think, because of our skin color, that we know them, but we don't and if we silence them, we never will--and that means not understanding our own history as well as the histories of the Others (because those histories are intertwined, see?).

It was a long essay, and I'm oversimplifying here (the actual essay was apparently so complicated, and so infused with Heidegger, that when I presented it at a conference, some of the audience confessed to me that they hadn't understood it at all--okayyyyyyyy), but the point is that it's become commonplace for atheists to denounce Christians as stupid bigots, and maybe you think that since they are the majority there can be no serious bigotry against them (which would mean you don't believe in "reverse racism" and so forth either, probably).  But I say that that is wrong--wrong and immoral.  The fact is that since everyone is Other to you in some way, everyone deserves identical respect as an individual and an equal, fair hearing.  Bigotry is bigotry, no matter what college it went to.  And I'm having no more of it.

Obviously, my general contempt for humans remains.  Sure, I can think we all suck equally and still provide everyone, no matter their race or creed, an equal opportunity to suck.  We suck as a species, and the general self-righteous bigotry from all sides just kind of supports that thesis.  A few days ago I was sad about William Buckley's death because I had a lot of respect and admiration for him, even though we obviously disagreed about many, many things.  Doesn't matter, see?  It isn't only the people who are like you already who are worth listening to.

*By the by, is anyone else surprised to hear that Mormons and Jews each constitute approximately 1.6 percent of the US population?  I would have thought there were many more Jews than that and certainly more than Mormons, but apparently it is the case. 

**A lot of this post probably needs further development to make it really coherent and sound.  But it's very late, and I'm getting tired, so it will have to wait.  No doubt my brilliant commenters will have things to add, too, that I never even thought of.  I hope so.  The era of my moderation is still in its infancy, and it could use some help growing up.

Because there are some people who are insisting on repeating the fiction that our entire sense of morality, including the prohibition against murder, are derived from the Old Testament, I offer this true conversation with my long-suffering (Japanese) husband:

Me:  Honey, do you believe in God?

T: No.

Me:  Have you ever believed in God?

T:  No.

Me:  Have you ever read the Bible?

T:  No.

Me:  Before we moved to Mormontown, had anyone ever taught you about the Bible?

T:  *giving a small snort of laughter* No.

Me:  Were you taught that it's wrong to kill other people?

T:  *giving me a suspicious look, as he is certain that he has not killed anyone*  Well, case by case, I guess.

Me:  Oh, I don't mean those Aum Shinrikyo assholes or in war or self-defense or whatever.  I mean just in the normal course of things.  Like, you were taught that just because you don't like your mom or your teacher, you don't kill them, right?

T:  *looking at me as if I might be retarded*  Yes.

Me:  So, you were taught and believed that murder is wrong without any exposure to the Bible or God?

T:  *looking at me as if I am definitely retarded*  Yes.

Me:  How about adultery, then?

T:  *laughing*  Oh, case by case.  It's fun sometimes.

ERGO:  There exists at least one avowed (though hardly militant--he finds belief in God to be mildly delusional but he doesn't really give a crap if others believe or not), lifelong atheist who has never read nor been exposed to the Bible who still believes that murder is generally wrong. 

When I explained to him why we had that conversation, he said, "Well, of course, in Japan, we are all atheists and we still think murder is wrong.  In fact, we murder a lot less than these Christian Americans."

Q to the E to the muthafuckin D.

There has been a running theme to my intense irritation and weariness with people lately.  It has come up obliquely in some of my posts (or rants, whatever) about feminism.  It again reared its head covertly in my disgust with that post about racism that I discussed earlier.  Now, it once again comes sneaking round the corner, only this time the proximal issue is religion and atheism. 

The silent beast that so fatigues me is this:  YOU (whoever you are) ARE NOT SUPERIOR TO ANYONE BASED ON THE COLOR OF YOUR SKIN, YOUR GENITALIA, THE COUNTRY YOU LIVE IN/WERE BORN IN, YOUR FAITH OR LACK THEREOF, YOUR SEXUAL ORIENTATION, OR THE LEVEL OF EDUCATION AND/OR WEALTH YOU HAVE OR HAVE NOT ATTAINED.  FULL MOTHERFUCKING STOP. 

Sorry to shout, but this really rankles.

I know a lot of you probably assume, and it's a fair assumption based on my constant ranting, that I think I am superior to a lot of other people.  But I don't.  I am better educated than most people.  I am far better read than the average person.  I am more intelligent than most people--indeed, if the various standardized tests and grades and all that are an indication, I am more intelligent than 99% of Americans.  I have other strengths, and I know them and use them. 

However, I will be the first to admit that I am lacking in other areas.  I am not forgiving.  I am not gentle or kind, and I lack empathy.  I am moody and temperamental.  I can be utterly asinine.  I know this.

The point is, of course, that this means that no matter how smart and well read I know myself to be, I also know that other people have strengths and goodness-es that I lack.  I admire people who are genuinely kind and forgiving.  I admire people with the spatial intelligence that I sorely lack.  I admire people who exhibit more control over their temper.  My husband is one such person, and I admire him greatly.  We are different, but we both see each other as equal.  EQUAL.

On the racism post I ranted about earlier, I was bothered deeply by the fact that she posited that the experience--both historical and contemporaneous--of "POCs" is more important than that of "whites" whom she indiscriminately lumps together.  This struck me as a simple reversal of the old paradigm, i.e., previously "whites" thought their stories mattered and those of POCs didn't, and that was a form of asserting their superiority.  It dehumanizes the other.  That a black woman would sanction such an assertion in reverse, i.e., sanction an attitude that one group deserves dehumanization, wearied me greatly. 

With feminism, it has long bothered me that there is a strain of vocal feminism that takes as its goal (mostly covertly--most of them would not say this outright, but then neither would the racist discussed above) the repositioning of women as superior with respect to men.  Interestingly, Doris Lessing just commented on this and was dissed by Broadsheet as being in line with the views of the rancid reactionary, Ann Coulter.  Doris Lessing as Ann Coulter...just...no. 

Anyway, there is evidence that this repositioning is happening in certain areas.  For one thing, men are being demonized as likely rapists and pederasts.  Police officers advise children to, if lost, find a woman to help them--not a man.  Nevermind that it is actually a tiny fraction of men who abuse children in any way.  Nevermind that child abuse (though not sexual abuse) happens as often at the hands of a woman as a man and that most children who are killed through abuse or neglect are killed by a woman.  No--kids, find a woman!  And fathers are reporting being subjected to questioning from the police for merely taking their daughters out for lunch.  Young boys are being punished for sexual harassment for touching girls in nearly any way--pinching and hugging are apparently sexual now among the kindergarten set, but only if the pincher or hugger is male.  Men who complain about this obviously want to return to a day when they had the legal right to beat and rape women.

Another strain of feminism asserts that working women (mothers or otherwise) are superior to women whose only work is taking care of their households and children.  But you've all heard me gripe about this enough, I think.

And then just yesterday, this came to my attention.  So, some "freethinkers" in Wisconsin gave a talk called "Religion Kills" and put up a billboard that had an anti-religious message.  That leads this Christian (oh, so Christian!) blogger to broadcast her ressentiment thusly: 

This freedom from religion group pompously struts around, asserting that christians all believe blindly and unscientifically, which is laughable, especially if you've ever debated or listened to a christian / athiest debate. They make a point to prey on human pride that drives us to reject conformity, they are full of charming sarcasm and wit and they are like the cool kid at the party - they exude confidence and intelligence, but inside they are just scared little boys (and girls) who desperately do not want anyone to find out that they can't look themselves in the eyes in the mirror.

This is the voice of a person who thinks she is superior to them because of her faith. (If you plow through the comments thread, you will later find her asserting that you cannot have any morality outside of the Judeo-Christian tradition, among other things).  True, there are atheists who feel superior to her because of her faith in Christ, but as with the racists and the feminists, NO GOOD comes of reversing the hierarchy. 

It's so classic, really.  Let's take a little refresher course in ressentiment. 

Ressentiment is a sense of resentment and hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, an assignation of blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying value system, or morality, which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an enemy, to insulate itself from culpability.

I'd say asserting that atheists are by definition immoral (or possibly amoral--she isn't clear) and incapable of looking themselves in the mirror is a very classic case of ressentiment, and it masks a fear and also an inability to admit what the real fear is.  A person who knows herself to be strong has no need of ressentiment or this kind of deep hatred against a group.  It has always amazed me when Christians assert the profound strength and truth of their faith in one breath and then show great delectation in how nonbelievers will be punished in the Last Judgment in the next.  That is a revenge fantasy, and in some of the early American Christian sermons (Cotton Mather and that ilk), the excitement at imagining this revenge is palpable.  If your faith is strong and you honestly believe Christ is your savior, you ought have no special desire or need to hate others or delight in their damnation.

Anyway, the connecting thread here is a consuming need and desire not for equality but for a mere reversal of the traditional paradigm.  Being a person of color becomes superior to (in moral terms) being white.  Being female becomes superior to being male.  Being Christian becomes superior to being "freethinking."  (Actually this last one is exceptional because that already is the dominant paradigm in North American society...so...whence the ressentiment?) To me, that's just a different side of the same oppressive coin. 

In contrast to these positions that I find reprehensible, I am for equality.  Legally, there should be absolute equality, although this is often easier to postulate than to achieve (what does it mean for men and women to have equal reproductive rights, for example?).  In personal terms, I try to see each individual as an individual rather than thinking, "Oh, he's a (member of X group)."  I try to live by the ethical positions elaborated by Heidegger, Buber, Borgmann, and Charles Taylor with a healthy dose of Camus, Aristotle, and Nietzsche thrown in (incidentally, many of them didn't specifically write works of ethics--but I believe that ethical principles are derivable from the ontological frameworks, i.e., knowing our relationships with one another and the world implies an ethics.  Of course, I also believe ethics are implied by such diverse sources as the poetry of Rilke and contemplation of the night sky, so....I could be a little crazey).

But, you say, but!  You, GinBaby, are a known misanthropist!  Yes, this is true.  I dislike nearly all people and think that we probably are, in fact, a virus with shoes.  Mostly I dislike people because I find most of their little weaknesses and insecurities and petty competitiveness to be tiresome.  I don't mean weaknesses of the sort that, say, Gabriel Garcia Marquez characters have, which are charming, or the general sort in which we are not all equally good at all things.  By "weaknesses" here, I mean the incapacity or unwillingness to know oneself completely, to stand strong in the face of opposition, to question received wisdom and authority, to be free for rather than merely free from, to face uncomfortable truths.  These things--jealousy, ressentiment, envy, petty bickering, ego stroking--I just do not have the energy for--or rather I don't have the will to give energy to these things. 

We would be a better society--both nationally and globally--if we all were strong enough to give up our little prejudices and hatreds and insecurities because then we might stop feeling such a pressing need to treat other people like shit.

I apologize for the length of this post. But your brevity does not make you superior.  Wink.