writing

Because Sometimes I Actually Write About Writing

jacob

For those of you who might be curious as to what I get up to when I’m not spanking fuckwits of all shapes and sizes, you can head over to The Coffee-Stained Writer, where I’m a sometime guest-blogger, and peruse my ariticle on Multi-Dimensional Animals.

No, Schrödinger has nothing to do with it. Sorry and all that.

A sample:

Seems like a good time to answer a plea from an old and dear friend that ended up in me website email inbox:

When one puts animals in books, one should include a wide spectrum of emotions not just good/bad animals. Like us, they are complex living beings with a wide variety of emotions. In short, we are tired of reading about one dimensional animals!!


And yes, in case you were wondering: there is snark. Of course. What the fuck else did you expect from moi?

Because Sometimes I Actually Write About Writing
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Don't Start a Religion in My Name!

jacob12 Comments

Every novel comes with a standard disclaimer:

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.


The disclaimer itself is a brilliant work of legal fiction. I think everybody knows by now that authors filch shamelessly from real life. Resemblances are far from coincidental. Everybody just pretends otherwise when it comes time to go to court.

That disclaimer shall have to be expanded when I publish my magnum opus:

This work of fiction is entirely made up (aside from those bits the author filched from real life, like the entire city of Seattle, WA), and should not be used as a manual, scripture, handbook or other guide to live your life by. No matter how much you make like and/or agree with the gods, spirits, xenospecies, characters, ideas, faiths, worldviews, etc. contained herein, any attempts to start a religion in the author’s and/or characters’ names is strictly prohibited. Willing suspension of disbelief should only be employed within the pages of this book. Critical faculties
should be fully utilized once the cover is closed. The author is not responsible for the havoc wreaked by over-enthusiastic fans and their inability to separate fictional reality from actual reality.

And if you attempt to name your children after the aliens, planets, offworld locales, ships, or other completely made up shit contained within this book, the author reserves the right to fetch you a right ding round the earhole on behalf of your humiliated offspring.


All right, so I’ll need a lawyer to couch that in legalise, but you get the idea.

I seriously worry about this stuff, and with good reason. I’ve heard of the spate of Galadriels and Arawens that occurred after people read too much Lord of the Rings. I’ve seen the lines of folks dressed up in Star Wars gear, camped out for days waiting for the next giant turd George Lucas serves up. I knew a man who regularly wore his Star Trek: TNG captain’s uniform and knew how to say “Take your ticket and get on the damned boat” in Klingon. The fact he worked for a boat rental outfit on Lake Powell and thus had good reason for learning that particular phrase is beside the point.

But the worst, absolute most horrifying, moment was when a college roommate perused my map of Athesea, plunked her finger down on it, and said, “If I have a son, I’m going to name him Daneth!”

I explained to her in no uncertain terms that no, she bloody well would not name her son after a valley on Athesea. No child should have to suffer the massive bullshit a name like that would bring down on him. After I explained the taunting, teasing, and incomprehension that poor child would likely endure, she agreed that Daneth was probably not a very good name for a boy after all.

But I can’t be there for every fan. I can’t tell each of them personally that while I’m flattered they loved my story so much they want to dress like my characters, learn their language, follow their gods, and destroy children’s lives with names that sound wonderful in the book, if they do any of the aforementioned things, I shall be forced to beat some sense into them.

Some of it would be harmless, yes. We all have fun playing someone else for a while. It’s just that I don’t know how the hell I’d react at a book signing if faced with some poor dipshit dressed to the nines with two fake swords swinging from his or her hips, bubbling over with enthusiasm about how utterly awesome the Xtaleans are. And what people might do trying to imitate my Unicorns doesn’t even bear thinking about. I’m either going to burst out laughing, sobbing, screaming, or all three.

I don’t mind folks taking inspiration from what I write. Some of the issues I write about, I’d love it if that’s the way the world worked. If my book inspires some people to give up their fear of teh gays, stop killing each other over religion, and treat the planet with more respect, that’s fantastic. That’s part of what I’d like them to think more about. Fiction is, after all, a way of telling the truth through lies. You can learn a lot about yourself, fellow humans, and the world by approaching it through the eyes of fictional characters.

However.

Comma.

I do not, repeat not, want to hear that the Church of Scientology suddenly has a rival based off a novel by Dana Hunter.

I don’t want to hear about people worshipping Tarlah, because a) he’s a construct of my mind and b) he’s not even a bloody god nor c) a bloody he, when it comes right down to it.

And there’s going to be at least one person who swears up and down they’ve heard my message and they’re prepared for the secret war against Sha’daal. I can see that one coming ten thousand miles away. After all, I hung about with a guy in high school who thought Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series wasn’t so much excellent fantasy as concise history. OMFG. Shoot me now.

So I’m putting this out here now, so that I can refer the wankers who can’t separate fantasy from reality back here before I try to bash some sense back into them with a three-pound hardcover book. I want them to read the following sentence carefully:

Do not under any circumstances mistake fiction for reality.

My characters can and should seem real. My worlds can and should seem like actual places. That’s what the willing suspension of disbelief is all about. But they aren’t bleeding real.

And it shall go very hard for any reader who believes otherwise.

Do any of you other fiction writers in the audience ever worry about this kind of shit?

Don't Start a Religion in My Name!

Kaden: Seeking Aid!

chaos lee3 Comments

Hey readers!

No attempting-to-be-insightful blog posts today, I have a straight-up favor to ask. I was supposed to write something for this contest hosted by Urban Fantasy Writers. The goal was to re-write a historical speech (i.e., “I have a dream”) with an UF twist.

I need a speech.

Any favorites?

In particular, I was thinking about re-writing one of Hitler’s speeches, since it would set up well for a human vs vampire or something set-up. However, I don’t know much about such things, and I’ve been swamped with little details like, uh, graduating. So if you faithful readers could do me a solid, I’d be forever in your debt.

If anyone could suggest a historical speech, preferably with a link to a copy of the text or something. Then I can write something off it. I know that I should be doing the research myself, and feel free to scold me for my lack thereof, but I wanted to finish this. The deadline is this weekend. Don’t worry about the writing part, I’ll get it done. I just need some good source material.

Thanks, all.

Kaden: Seeking Aid!

Many Meetings with PZ Myers

jacob12 Comments

Meeting PZ Myers is like rubbing shoulders with a rock star, only with science.

PZ’s blog Pharyngula has, in a very short time, changed my life repeatedly. I stumbled across it at the turn of the year, spent a captivated few days reading post after archived post, and I’ve not missed a day of it since. Pharyngula gave me insight into a whole new world: one in which biology is discussed by ordinary people alongside actual scientists, where atheism is a glorious celebration of godlessness rather than a shameful secret, and where fruitful argument is the order of the day.

PZ proved that you can have your outspoken atheism and your job, too. So, change one: I started speaking out rather than try to slip under the radar. Change two: he was among those who inspired me to start this blog and speak my mind without fear. Change three: I now know that evo-devo exists, and it should prove a fruitful line of inquiry for a poor SF author trying to evolve her aliens properly. Change four: I found out that atheists had started coming together to effect change, and ended up feeling a lot less alone in the struggle against religious right fuckery. And the changes go on and on, right up to those that happened over the past week when my baby blog hosted the first ever Carnival of the Elitist Bastards and was fortunate enough to get an approving nod from PZ. That allowed me to meet PZ Myers not as some anonymous fangirl, but as the captain of the HMS Elitist Bastard, which I have to tell you is a change I liked very much.

Seeing PZ speak has changed my life just as much as his blog has. For one thing, I discovered he’s lying to us all.

He likes to claim he isn’t all that funny or fire-breathing in real life. I’m not sure how he gets away with such claims. Granted, he doesn’t shout from a pulpit like a Texas televangelist, but there’s plenty of fire there. Anyone who loves science as much as he does breathes fire. It’s not the fire of hell and brimstone, but the fire of the phoenix. It doesn’t burn (unless you’re a hapless Christian silly enough to try to take PZ head-on), but renews. It impassions. It’s going to keep me warm on a lot of cold nights.

As far as not being funny, well. The audience certainly laughed a lot in response to his incisive, at times diamond-cutter sharp sense of humor, so I think we can lay that self-depricating little myth to rest.

He is soft-spoken. He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t rant. He’s just implacable, which is a tremendous force all its own. Relentless logic doesn’t have to scream to ring out loud and clear. After watching him lecture twice, I have a lot of sympathy for his foes. It must feel like getting run down by a bulldozer shoveling an avalanche down upon you. I’m glad he’s on our side, I’ll tell you that.

His talk for the Northwest Science Writer’s Association is available in podcast at Real Science. I strongly urge you to listen to it. I’m not going to rehash it – others have done a better job. I’m just going to discuss a few points that are salient to me as a writer and blogger. You’ll filter his lecture through your own interests, of course, and it’s best that you do. Especially since what follows is based on my paltry notes and pathetic memory: it was a choice of relying on those or putting off this post YET AGAIN so I could listen to the podcast. Be warned.

With that caveat, let us move on into what PZ wants to see more scientists and science writers do: speak out. His students, when asked to mention scientists and popularizers of science, come back most often with Bill Nye the Science Guy, Mythbusters, and Marie Curie. Where’s Attenboro, Sagan? he asks. They’ve never heard of them. PZ tells us it’s our fault. We aren’t promoting science enough. And he’s right.

He has a list of what scientists and science writers can do to get science out in the public eye:

  • Show passion and personality.
  • Be a patient instructor.
  • Be an advocate (and in this, he advises us to shun caution and avoid those weasel words that make laypeople believe that science doesn’t have any near-certain answers).
  • Be positive.
  • Argue Argue Argue.

Looking at that list in stark black-and-white crystalizes matters. I remember looking at that Power Point slide and thinking this is it. This is exactly what we must do if we want science to become something the public can approach and enjoy. Carl Sagan was nearly all of these points. So were great popularizers like Isaac Asimov, James Burke, and Stephen Jay Gould.

In an impatient culture, though, people often don’t have the attention spans or the time necessary to sit down with a good book and read it cover-to-cover. I think this is why PZ emphasized blogging so much during his lecture. He encouraged more scientists (and lovers of science) to blog. And yepper, there was a Power Point slide for that, too:

Why Blog?

  • Short form writing.
  • Entertainment.
  • Community Building.
  • Consciousness raising.
  • Advocacy.

He pointed out that science blogging is good practice for scientists. It’s good practice for any writer – blogging forces you to get the words out, be succinct in your presentation of ideas, and garners you immediate feedback that can drastically improve your writing. Blogs are also becoming a huge part of the new media. A growing percentage of us are getting their news and entertainment through blogs. PZ’s right to advise more scientists to take advantage of the power of blogs to shape and inform public opinion.

PZ, of course, is something of a controversial figure (particularly to those Christians who took advantage of the question-and-answer period to challenge him for challenging their beliefs). It makes perfect sense that he’d include controversy as a major part of his talk. “Controversy sells,” he said, and that’s all too true. So you tackle the controversies head-on. PZ stated that you’ve got to get something that gets people angry. A fight gets people on your side. People against you help you hone your arguments.

I’ve seen that in action with Expelled – I don’t think we’ve ever done better at getting the message out about what science is actually about than when we were fighting that noxious pile of dog vomit. I can guarantee you that people who didn’t give two tugs on a dead dog’s dick what the scientific meaning of the word “theory” was now understand it simply because of the negative reviews of the movie. Plenty of folks ended up on Pharyngula, getting their daily dose of science blogging, simply because Mark Mathis was stupid enough to boot PZ out of the theater, but let Richard Dawkins in.

Science wasn’t something high on my list of priorities aside from a useful tool for my writing until I stumbled across the whole creationist attack on evolution. A huge community of very excellent science bloggers and writers made got me passionately, angrily involved in its defense, and because of that, I’m learning more science. I can’t be the only person that’s true for. And that’s one of the reasons PZ doesn’t shy away from controversy. It hooks people. It interests them. Any good writer will tell you that – without conflict, there’s no story, and without a story, there’s no readers. QED.

But controversy and passion aren’t the only tools in the science populizer’s arsenal. There’s also the little matter of the cultural hook. PZ mentioned several science books that did a wonderful job promoting science by using pop culture as a lure:

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios
The Physics of the Buffyverse by Jennifer Ouellette
The Sandwalk Adventures, Clan Apis, and Optical Allusions by Jay Hosler

I especially like the last three, seeing as how I’m a comic book advocate.

In closing, PZ had a startling tip: the most important thing about science, he said, isn’t its importance. There’s a tendency to emphasize what’s important – without science, there’s no cure for cancer, no solutions to the energy crisis, no flying car. And these are vital things, but PZ contends they’re not important enough to the general public to be the only hook.

“Never mind ‘importance,'” his Power Point slide said, thus shoving aside everything common sense tells us about what a writer should focus a science story on. “Science writing is all about beauty.”

“They appreciate the fact you’ve told them this little piece of something beautiful,” he said as we sat absorbing that extraordinary claim. And I realized, sitting there frantically scribbling my notes, he’s absolutely right. Carl Sagan didn’t spend as much time emphasizing the importance of cosmology as exploring the wonder and the gorgeousness of it all. Controversy and pop culture may lure people in, but what they’re going to stay for is science’s awesome beauty.

Science has too often acted helpless in the face of public apathy and ignorance. Every scientist and science writer who bemoans the lack of interest in scientific subjects among the general populace needs to go listen to PZ’s lecture, and start employing his tactics. Especially that last.

PZ’s lecture put me very much in mind of something Neil Gaiman said when I saw him at the Chicago Humanities Festival in 2001. “Being contentious is what you should be doing,” he said. “You should be shaking people up.” I have a feeling PZ would be in whole-hearted agreement with that.

He’s certainly not afraid of being contentious. In the question-and-answer, a Christian stood up to challenge him on his outspoken atheism. PZ never flinched. He’s unapologetic in his views and never, ever compromises them. “Religion itself is a lie and a danger,” he said, also calling it a “perilous short-circuit in our thinking, and we have to be aware of it.” Plenty of people are out there who can support theistic views, he said. He isn’t interested in being one of them.

And I have advice for the next Christian who plans to stand up and bludgeon PZ with the old “Science can’t explain things like love” chestnut: don’t. The results are brutal. I’ll leave it up to you to listen to that delightful little exchange on the podcast. But it can’t bring across the smile that spread across PZ’s face when that got thrown in his teeth. “Wicked delight” I think describes it fairly well. This was the smile of a gunfighter whose pistol has already cleared the holster when he realizes his opponent is not only a fumbling klutz, but shooting blanks to boot.

PZ is one of those incredible people who has the courage of his convictions. Whatever you think of him and his outspoken atheism, you can’t deny him respect for that. He’s a fabulous advocate for science, and he’s a rock for atheists. Along with the fantastic ideas for science writing, he’s provided me a stellar example of someone who won’t compromise his values for the sake of pandering to religious sentiment. Even though we don’t fully agree on this point – I don’t mind religious moderates so much as he does – I appreciate very much the fact that he won’t back down. He’s not one of those thunder and no substance folks. There’s a cannon in all that smoke.

PZ’s talk at the Seattle Society for Sensible Explanations dinner on Friday was a lot more difficult, and I’m not even going to attempt to rehash the biology. I could follow a good bit of what he was saying, but it was the first I’d really heard of the evolution of the eye. That means that, even with my pathetic little notes, I can’t do his lecture any justice without a hell of a lot more reading on the subject. Thankfully, PvM from Panda’s Thumb was there, and has a post up with links to some spiffy science papers on the whole thing. PZ’s also promised to post some of the slides on Pharyngula soon, probably complete with an excellent write-up.

In light of that, I’m going to play up the sizzle more than the steak. PZ promised he’d trash the Bible in his talk. I figured he meant he’d trash-talk it, but no – he ripped Genesis right out of the Gideon Bible he’d filched, and waved it about at several points in his talk. His point: the “science” contained within that page and a half is absolutely ridiculous. You can’t encompass the whole of creation within a few verses of awful poetry. He compared that page and a half to the reams of papers tracing just the evolution of the eye. That was a stark example of the paucity of science in scripture. “This is not enough to be talking about science,” he said as he rattled it. And he pointed out another flaw: Genesis talks about the waters and the fish, but where are the squid?

Indeed, the squid are MIA in Genesis. So much for all the answers being there, eh?

Someday, I hope he writes up a brief little tract on the evolution of the eye that I can hand to creationists who show up at my door. I didn’t ken a lot of the intricate detail of the evolutionary biology, but I grasped just enough to know one thing for sure: things would have turned out very differently indeed had an actual God created the eye. It’s complex, to be sure, but not irreducibly so. It’s complex the same way a very old city is. You’ve seen ancient cities that grew up organically and are a complex, somehow-functioning but ridiculous mess. Old streets get pressed into service they weren’t originally intended for, old buildings get absorbed into the new, and a lot of nonsensical crap is forced into making some kind of crazy sense out of necessity, whereas things would be a lot more streamlined and sensible if the damned thing had been designed and built from scratch, with modern necessities fully in mind.

That’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s just about how the eye is. You’re talking something that’s actually neural tissue – would any self-respecting God press neural tissue into service for seeing when there had to be better material He could have created? What about those crazy upside-down photoreceptors? Looking at the eye is like looking at a stoned MIT student’s attempt to design something with the help of a chimpanzee.

PZ compared it to a Rube Goldberg machine. “Only an idiot would design something like this,” he said after entertaining us with a slide of a Rube Goldberg machine for making orange juice. “The Designer was demented.”

Looking at the slides of how the eye works, I can only agree. And yet, the damned thing works. Evolution doesn’t always give us the most elegant solutions to our survival needs – much the opposite – but it gets us there. Somehow. And at least it’s never boring!

I’m looking forward now to digging into the story of eye evolution. I’d never really considered before how my aliens see. I’ve now got a plethora of eyes to choose from, and a fantastic one-liner to come back at creationists w
ith. Everybody wins (except the IDiots).

These t
wo lectures have also inspired me to add a bit more science to this blog: expect regular Sunday Science features from here on, complete with controversy and a heaping helping of sheer beauty.

So that’s it. My two encounters with PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame. And I’ve got the pictures to prove it. That’s me in the one on the left, there, and JC from the Seattle Skeptics group on the right.

Envy us, don’t you? You know you do. So don’t miss PZ next time he’s in your town.

Many Meetings with PZ Myers

The Story Behind the Name

jacob2 Comments
By way of having a wee bit o’ fun before I dive back into the substantive stuff, and because one of our Brians has expressed a desire to know more about me and our most excellent George W. said very sweet things about my pen name, I shall now tell you the story behind it.
I realized early on in my writing career that if I wanted to avoid the urge to thump people on the head with hardcover copies of my book at book signings, I’d have to choose a different name. My legal surname lends itself to a single ridiculous joke that gets repeated ad nauseum. Many poor buggers wouldn’t resist the urge, and thus would end up with lumps. This is not a recipe for good public relations.
There was also the small problem of one of my characters filching my first name and refusing to give it back. And just try explaining to people that, although one of your characters shares your first name, she is a) most definitely not you, meant to represent you, or really anything like you and b) this isn’t an ego trip or the author playing stupid writer tricks on innocent readers.
So, a pen name it would have to be.
Choosing a pen name is not easy. You can’t just snatch the name of your favorite Star Trek character and run with it. You can’t use something snarky and pithy if you’re writing Serious Speculative Fiction. The damned thing has to have a little gravitas. It has to roll off the tongue, so it’s easy for people to remember when they’re asking after your latest work of profound genius. It should have a little hidden meaning and symbolism to give it some cachet. It, above all, has to be easy to sign 42,000 times in a row.
I went through pen names like I go through toilet paper. Should I do initials? T.N. Mordecai sounded good, until Mordecai started sounding too religious and silly. And what the fuck did T.N. stand for, anyway? I can’t remember most of the others, and I probably haven’t got the list anymore. Just know that there were a lot of very ill-conceived names in the running, and a few good ones, and they all got dumped in the recycle bin when I at last achieved the Perfect Pen Name.
“Dana” comes from Celtic mythology. The ridiculous little book on Celtic Magic I was reading in order to understand the character who had pilfered my actual first name claimed that Dana was the Great Goddess, and patron of many things, writing and intellect included. I suspect the author pulled most of the symbolism out of her ass, but it worked for me. Dana had a nice ring to it, belonged to an Irish goddess who shared my interests, and incidentally also belonged to Dana Scully, the World’s Greatest Skeptic. What X-Files fan could resist? Dana worked. Dana I would be.
Insert long period of trying to come up with the right surname here. And we won’t even go into the great debates I had with myself over whether my pen name should come complete with middle name.
We turn now to C.S. Friedman, and her delightful anti-hero, Gerald Tarrant. Most anti-heroes turn out to be heroes in tarnished armor. Not Tarrant. He started the Coldfire Trilogy as a bastard, and he remained a bastard, despite a few great sacrifices and some revelations that made his bastardry entirely understandable. He was smooth, suave, ruthless, and infuriatingly likable even though you knew he deserved to be brought down like a rabid dog. Friedman did a masterful job with that character: he never changed, not fundamentally, but your perception of him certainly did. I wanted to write an anti-hero that brilliant. I’d finally seen proof it could be done.
And in him, I had the second half of my pen name. You see, Gerald Tarrant is known as The Hunter.
Not bad, eh?
The Story Behind the Name

I Think Maybe We Could Use a Handbook

jacob15 Comments

The more I see Christians and atheists mix it up, the more I’m starting to think someone needs to write a little handbook for Christians. There are a lot of kind-hearted but clueless believers out there who tend to get blindsided by the way we think. I notice a lot of misconceptions and so forth. So I threw together an outline, and I’m going to write something we can place in the hands of our Christian mates.

They give us enough of their literature. They ask us to read their book. It’s only fair, right?

So here’s the outline I scribbled, with some explanatory notes. Suggestions, critiques and commentary in the comments, if you please. Keep in mind that when it comes to writing, I have a very thick skin indeed.

How to Talk to an Atheist

I. Introduction: The Scarlet A

Statistics – growing fast. Brief overview of this book’s purpose. Not a handbook for conversion. What this book is not about.

I just want to set things up here with the stats that show we’re a growing part of the population. I’ll probably throw in some stats from other countries for shits and giggles, just to show how far behind Western Europe America is. Here, I’ll set up the premise for this book: that if you’re going to talk to an atheist, here’s what to keep in mind. Obviously, I’m not instructing Christians on how to convert us – the point is to have fruitful conversations without trying to convert either side. So the book’s not about giving Christians pointers on how to defeat an atheist’s resistance to religion – it’s to help Christians understand who and what we are.

II. Right – What’s an Atheist?

Someone from Athies (joke, you see). Common Christian misconceptions. The quick and dirty definition. A more detailed look at the cat herd. Some famous atheists.

In this section, I’m throwing in that wonderful quip from a coworker. Q. What’s an atheist? A. Someone from Athies. Look, it was funny at the time. And it’s really not that far off the mark: a lot of Christians seem to think we’re aliens. Then we’ll move on to a few mistaken Christian definitions, such as “an atheist is someone who hates God” – Christians in the audience, I’m sure you have plenty to tell me about how your co-believers view atheists. I’ll do the quick definition, which is basically that an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in any god, and then segue into a more detailed look at different types of atheists. I call us the cat herd for obvious reasons – we’re not a unified mass of people with a common ideology, and it’s important for Christians to understand that atheists are as varied as the Christian churches are. Then we’ll close with a few famous atheists NOT limited to Dawkins, Hitch et al.

III. Why Talk to an Atheist?

No conversion rule. What we have to offer – and argue. Not talking gets us nowhere. The world could use more critical thinking. Good mental exercise. The things we have in common.

I want to reiterate here that the “talking to an atheist” part doesn’t mean trying to convert them, but holding conversations on the things that matter to us all, such as our environment, our communities, common problems we all struggle with. Atheists have plenty to bring to the table on those issues, but prepare for a robust argument on everything. Not talking to each other is just ridiculous – we all have to share this planet, we might as well figure out ways to get along. The world needs people who are willing to think critically and challenge ideas that don’t work, and besides, a discussion with us is an excellent mental workout – we make people sweat. Then I want to end the chapter by pointing out that we have plenty in common: we love our kids, love our friends, want to do good things, etc., along with the more mundane interests like hobbies and so forth. We’re not that different!

IV. How Atheists Think

Logic and reason vs. faith and belief. Arguments from authority and why they don’t work. The skeptical mind. Gleeful argument.

This one’s going to be tough, because explaining that we don’t believe to a believer never seems to get through. But I’ll attempt in this chapter to explain that where other people use faith, belief and intuition to guide their decisions, we rely a hell of a lot more on logic and reason. We don’t accept arguments from authority… that should be pretty self-explanatory to you guys, will have to explain to Christians why “X said so” is so odious to us. I’ll give an overview of the skeptical mind, which is skeptical of nearly everything. Then explain the pleasure we get from argument – we’re not being mean when we rip each other’s ideas apart, we’re just doing what comes natural. I think a lot of Christians get the idea we’re cruel bastards from the way we challenge ideas and assertations, and I want to make clear that an atheist still loves you even when he or she has left your ideas bleeding in the street. I want to bring across some sense of how much fun we have.

V. What You Can Expect if You Bring Up God

Don’t do it. You had to go there, didn’t you? We murder our own darlings – yours aren’t sacred. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Smackdowns.

This, I think, is going to be the most fun to write. For one thing, if Christians don’t want to have their sacred ideas battered and bruised, they shouldn’t bring it up in the first place. A bunch of critical thinkers aren’t going to shut down their critical faculties just because God’s now in the mix – much the opposite. If we tear each other’s ideas down, what the fuck do you expect us to do to something we don’t even believe? I want to bring across the fact that in our world, the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence needs to be for it, and that means religion doesn’t fare too well in our discussions. And I think I’m going to throw in some famous smackdowns from various threads and public debates – if you know of any good ones, I wants ’em!

VI. How to Survive the Scrum

Believers can gain our respect. No special pleading. No evasion. It’s nothing personal – unless you make it so.

Too many Christians seem to think that an argument against their ideas means we can’t respect them. I want to debunk that myth here, and show how they can earn our respect. Most Christians who’ve faced the tough questions head-on, been candid and honest in their beliefs, and haven’t resorted to special pleading, goal-post moving, evading the question, and other typical tricks fare fairly well in the respect department. And one of the major problems has been folks making things personal that really aren’t – we aren’t going to attack the person (much) unless the person attacks us. Criticism of an idea isn’t a criticism of a person – that needs to be reiterated, because there are far too many people who take things way too personally.

VII. Why Do Atheists Hate God/Christians/Religion in General?

We don’t. How an atheist views religion. The dangers of unthinking faith. The crap we take from believers. Why we kill Kenny (the creationist who always gets his ass kicked in Pharyngula threads). The dangers of woo.

We get accused a lot of hating God, don’t we? I want to try to bring out our views on religion, why we think certain varieties of it are dangerous, the fact that uncritical acceptance of extraordinary claims are anathema to us. Then there’s the amount of shit we take from people that gets really annoying – atheists are one of the most despised groups out there, and if there were more of us, we’d be taking a lot more crap. There’s also a severe lack of understanding when it comes to our bashing of dogged dogmatists like Kenny – so I want
to explain what happens to f
olks who repeat the same ridiculous arguments and never give up trying to impose views we’re never going to buy, so yes, we do sometimes get cruel because we get fed up. And there’s another element – where others think faith and belief are good things, we see too much of the harm that comes from uncritical thought, so we tend to kick back rather hard against woo.

VIII. Why Can’t I Convert an Atheist?

Many have tried. The de-conversion experience. We’ve already explored those ideas. Proving God – and why you can’t. The sillyness of asking the faithless to take something on faith.

It seems like a lot of Christians believe they’re the only ones who have ever talked to us about God, and that if we only heard the Good News, we’d convert. I want to debunk that right here. For one thing, most of us have endured far too many people trying to convert us. People never get that we can live without faith, so they keep trying to impose it. Then, too, many of us used to be true believers. I’m going to do a generic overview of the typical de-conversion experience, showing that it’s not something sudden (in most cases), but a process. Being a process, it’s nearly impossible to reverse. Christians also seem to believe that we just haven’t thought about faith, so I want to make it clear that many of us have explored faith deeply. We probably know more about religion than many theologians. So we already know about it, and we’re still not impressed. Then there’s the little problem of being able to prove the supernatural – you really can’t. Until you can offer really real proof that God exists, an atheist probably won’t be persuaded. And besides all that, it’s really kind of ridiculous to ask someone who by definition doesn’t believe to take something on faith, innit?

IX. Common Fallicies

No morality. Nihilism. Atheism is religion. Theology = philosophy. Impoverished world.

I want to take down the most common myths here. Christians claim we can’t have morality without faith (false), atheism is nihilistic (false), atheism is just another religion (sooo false), theology is somehow equal to philosophy (they’re different beasts, and I shall explain why), and that our lives must necessarily be impoverished by not having God in them (they most certainly aren’t).

X. We Can Coexist

Agree to disagree. The things we all want.

I’ll be showing how we coexist – by agreeing to disagree, by finding points of commonality, by respecting each other’s differences, and so forth. There are plenty of things we have in common: we want to live good lives, we want a better world, we want to be good people. We have different ways of getting what we need out of life, but there’s no reason my unbelief and your belief shouldn’t find a way to accomodate each other. Remember, this handbook is for moderates and more rational Christians, so this will be true. We’ve all got Christian friends who have learned to accept us for who we are, and I hope we return the favor. Neither group is going away any time soon, so we’d best learn how to get along. And together, we can accomplish the things that matter.

Appendices

The Rules
A heavily revised version of the Rules I posted here a while back.

Resources and Links
A bibliography and some links to sites where Christians can learn more about atheists.

So. There it is. My idea for a handbook. The outline will change – I can already see some places where a different order might be better, and your input will of course impact matters. What think ye? Would such a thing be of use?

I Think Maybe We Could Use a Handbook

Why I've Become a Portable Atheist-carrying Atheist

jacob12 Comments

Up until now, I’ve not been the sort of atheist to buy books on atheism. Haven’t read a single one, in fact. Not Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian. Nothing by Hitch. Nothing by Dawkins. Don’t even spend much time on atheist blogs, unless they’ve got something else going on and the atheism’s just incidental. I just didn’t feel a need. I don’t believe in God, gods, goddesses, demons, spirits, fairys, the Divine, or anything else. Don’t need validation for that, it’s just who I am. Don’t need a philosophy to fill any empty holes in my life – friends, science and Zen do the trick nicely. Why the fuck should I need a book on atheism?

I think I’m buying them now as a protest against what’s happened to my beloved Sci-Fi section.

Garrett and I went to Barnes and Noble in the U-District. I wandered over to the Religion section to see if I could get a chuckle – I wouldn’t have been surprised if some stupid fucker in the corporate office had decided that atheism belonged next to Judaica and Christianity. They’ve bunged the atheist tomes in with philosophy, alas, where it almost makes sense. They didn’t have The God Delusion anywhere I could see, but Hitch’s bright yellow (why, WHY yellow?) covers were bulging from the shelves, and there were several others whose names escape me at the moment. I had my quiet chuckle – we’re growing in volume and quantity, take that, religion junkies! – and headed up the escalator to Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Crap, crap, pure crap, and more crap, with a few shimmering diamonds thrown in.

Science fiction is a misnomer for that section. It should be “vampire bullshit, paranormal detective bullshit, and really vapid fantasy bullshit.” What the fuck has happened? It used to be you’d go there and see maybe a few silly books written by utter fucking wankers. Now, they’re everywhere. They’ve grown like kudzu.

And don’t even talk to me about the bargain book section. It’s overflowing with woo. Fortune telling, new age crap, fluffy bunny spirituality crap, and more crap.

If this truly reflects the tastes of the current reading public, then I understand why that public elected Bush not once but twice. (We won’t get into semantic arguments over stolen elections. If the margins had been big enough, Republicons wouldn’t have been able to steal a peanut, much less foist Monkey Boy on us for eight years of assclownery).

I snatched up a couple of Neal Stephenson novels and fled into the loving arms of Hitch’s the Portable Atheist. And I found Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale behind the counter, along with a Pharyngula fan.

When my finances have recovered from this best-friend-visiting extravaganza, I’m going to have an orgy on Amazon. The God Delusion. That one that Neil Gaiman contributed to. Russell. More Hitch. All of the science books PZ mentioned in his talk. Louis Black’s new one whose name also escapes me at the moment. Look, I’ll have the titles for you once I order.

I’m going to fill my house with godless goodness. I shall fondly recall the days when fantasy and science fiction shelves were chock full of actual fantasy (as in the brilliantly-written, epic, magic totally rational in that milleu type of fantasy) and science fiction (science fiction that included science, not just a rocket or an android or other gimmick). Eventually, I’ll comb Amazon for SF authors who really know their shit and who wouldn’t touch a vampire with a ten foot garlic-encrusted stake. And then I’m going to finish writing this damned novel, the one that doesn’t have magic per se, and doesn’t have a single fucking paranormal investigator who’s also a vampire who’s investigating the murder of a fucking fairy. It’s going to be unique, which means it probably won’t have a legless, senile octagenarian’s chance in a triathlon of getting published – but I’m sure as fuck gonna try.

And if you ever see a single fucking vampire trying to creep into my books, I want you to take me out back and shoot me with a grenade launcher. Ditto for paranormal investigators looking into the death of another fucking fairy. Or any of the other fluff that’s currently standing in for the genuine article.

I’m going to read every single fucking worthwhile book on atheism, just so I can marshall the philosophical arguments of far greater thinkers than I the next time some stupid fucker tells me atheists are nihilists. But the most devastating blow will come when I extract the information that they’re the tasteless fuckers who’re lapping up regurgitated dead-fairy murder mystery with vampire investigator thrown in bullshit that’s infesting my genre, and ask them what fucking philosophical need that can possibly fulfill in a person’s life.

And as for those who buy those ridiculous fortune telling books, I’ll just have one question: why didn’t their predictive powers warn them they were about to get beaten over the head by an angry atheist wielding a bright yellow copy of the Portable Atheist?

Anything to make the woo go away.

Why I've Become a Portable Atheist-carrying Atheist

Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your dictionaries!

Jason Thibeault19 Comments

Allow me to introduce myself. I am Nicole Palmby. You killed grammar. Prepare to die.

Okay, not really. But I needed some sort of introduction for my first post as sub-blogger of Dana’s Wonderful World of Snark. I am Nicole Palmby. And while you may not have killed grammar, it certainly is on its deathbed, and, as grammar is my mama, I plan to avenge its impending death.

I wrote this article late last week and edited it earlier this week, but I was a little reluctant to post it following Kaden‘s beautiful piece on grade inflation. I think, though, that what I have to say needs to be said, and I look forward to what you have to say about it, as well. Enjoy.

—–

My current day gig is shaping the literary, grammatical, and writing minds of the future leaders of your local Target team.

Okay. Maybe that’s an unfair assumption. I could be shaping the minds of future political leaders. For example, I could be grading the vocabulary assignments of the next George W. Bush! Some days I feel like I am.

Regardless of the future endeavors of the attitude-wielding, SMS-ing, bleary-eyed nodes of apathy, I am entrusted to ensure each pile of flip-flops and hoodie is able to identify the theme of classic but boring novel title here> and write a competent, even if uninteresting, five-paragraph essay.

Anyone who knows me might smile and mutter some comment about the ease of my vocation–“You mean you get to talk about books and writing all day and get paid for it? Man! Your life is rough, innit?”–but let me assure you that getting paid to talk about books and writing is not what it once was.

There was a time during which schools valued the education gifted to their students (because education really is a gift) and parents cared about what their children were doing all day. It wasn’t so long ago that students went to school because they knew they had to, and the community was proud if it was the custodian of a “good district.”

It seems that while the days of the “good school districts” still exist (I teach in one), much of what makes a school “good” has morphed into something wholly unrecognizable.

It used to be that, upon graduation, students were not only capable of writing a five-paragraph essay, but an 8- to 10-page research paper in MLA style with print sources. They understood the mechanics of the English language. They were able to communicate their thoughts and ideas effectively within those mechanics.

However, I have received numerous essays this year completed–grudgingly, mind you–in what is known as text-speak. Yes, that’s right: English Honors students turned in formal essays that used the number 2 instead of “to” (and in place of “two” AND “too,” for that matter), used “ur” for “you’re” and “yr” for “your.”

While I love the ease technology gives my workload, I can’t help but shake my head at the price American children are paying for the conveniences they have. My junior students–also Honors–have difficulty placing apostrophes properly. They can’t tell me the difference between “there,” “their,” and “they’re.”

Programs that proofread, while I admit they can be helpful, have created a dependency. Students have no accountability for their own writing skills. After all, why should they remember that it should be “all right” not “alright” when Microsoft Word in its infinite wisdom makes the correction for them as soon as they strike the next key?

When I was younger and still taking math classes, my teachers usually allowed us to use calculators to check our work–after we had done the problems ourselves. Their logic was simple: you have to know the long way before you can use the shortcut. I think the same logic should follow in writing. Yes, you do need to know to correct the spelling of “there” to “their” so that when, later, the computer does it for you, you’ll know why.

Students today put no value on their education.

Although perhaps I shouldn’t put all the blame on the students. If they could they’d text and watch Flavor of Love all day. They don’t know enough to value their education.

Besides, it isn’t only students who devalue education in the United States. Some parents have a decreasing amount of involvement in their (not they’re) children’s educations. They blindly trust that the school is taking care of things.

Unfortunately, when a school budget is dangled by a thread of standardized test scores, many schools find themselves focusing the curriculum on test-taking skills rather than academic skills. I don’t agree with the practice, but when it comes down to teaching “real” curriculum or not having to eliminate instructional positions, I can’t say I’d act any differently.

I have my opinions about standardized testing, but that’s for another carnival.

Regardless, there is still a significant decline in the emphasis put on education in our nation. And yet, college enrollment (and graduation) is higher than ever. What kind of message are we sending to our children when they barely graduate high school and are admitted to colleges and universities once thought of as prestigious?

The result is a nation of employees who rely on the automatic proofreader in their word processors, and who are unable to be accountable for what they write.

The written word is a powerful weapon. Writers wield whole worlds with their pens, and, unlike surgeons, lawyers, and real estate agents, there is no examination that must be passed in order to become certified. Anyone can become a writer with just an idea, paper, and pen.

And instead of sanctifying this power, we reduce it to busywork assignments, let students take it for granted, and eventually, take it for granted ourselves. In fact, a colleague of mine suggested encouraging students to take their notes in text-speak in order to practice summarizing and resist the urge to write every single word. What an optimistic way of ensuring students are incapable of doing what every employee must do at one time or another: write intelligently, following general writing standards.

Unfortunately, this travesty has become so widespread as to be seen in every media outlet all over the world. Just today, in fact, while watching TV, the closed captioning on the television clearly read “presidentsy” instead of “presidency.” Really? I mean, really?

As what often feels like a single, tiny voice shouting into the wind, I fear there will be no end to the apathy toward the English language. Today prepositions are generally accepted at the ends of sentences. (I’m guilty of this myself when the “proper” grammatical construction reads/sounds awkward.) What happens tomorrow? “You’re” and “your” become one interchangeable word? Come on. (Oops! Preposition!)

Are Americans really so lazy that we’ve gone from omitting the “u” in various words—color, honor, etc.—to accepting English essays that use “yr” in place of “your,” which should really be “you’re”? I’m curious what Lynne
Truss would say about American students (and adults, for that matter) English education and writing styles.

As a writer, as a teacher, as an American, I urge citizens and political leaders to work to effect (and that’s effect, not affect) a change in the state of English education in the United States. Write to your senators, representatives, school board presidents, governors…whoever will listen! We need to act fast or No Fear Shakespeare will become Shakespeare for Americans, and the Bard’s famous line, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” (Julius Caesar III.ii.74) will quickly become “Peeps, lstn ↑!!1!”

Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your dictionaries!

Literal vs. Philosophical: FIGHT!

jacob4 Comments

Admitting I’m an atheist has seriously damaged my research, but not my enjoyment of cheesy martial arts fantasy films. Go figure.

Allow me to ‘splain. Or at least sum up.

I’m deep into research on the soul for the upcoming short story my Wise Readers have valiantly volunteered to vet. That research involves digging into the idea of the tulku, which seemed like a good philosophical idea to riff on. So I’m reading a book on Tibetan Buddhism.

It’s not a great book on Tibetan Buddhism. In fact, it’s shallow and silly. It focuses more on what you might call popular practice than the ideas. I know Buddhism, even the more religious kinds replete with gods and other such things the Buddha would’ve had no truck with, has some excellent philosophical depth. But this book wants to focus more on things like folks staking bits of the land down so they won’t run away.

So here I am, reading this, and instead of thinking, “Interesting – that could be useful for an alien culture, suitably camouflaged,” I’m thinking, “Do people really believe that silly shite? I mean, on a scale of everyday concerns, is this really important to them?”

I’m gonna have to stay away from the popular stuff for a while. Avoid people running around driving stakes through bits of ground so it doesn’t get filched by demons in favor of the stuff that treats such matters as allegory and philosophy rather than as matter of fact. Gah.

I must be an Elitist Bastard. Even with religion research, I prefer the hoity–toity, scholarly, metaphorical, very complicated theological systems advanced by deep thinkers than the stuff practiced by the simple folk. That’s not new, mind, just more pronounced.

And yet I can go to a movie like The Forbidden Kingdom and have absolutely no problem at all with Monkey gods and a lot of extreme silliness. Bronx geek with an unhealthy fascination for martial arts films ends up transported to another kingdom, has to return the Monkey King’s staff? Not a problem! Runs into a Taoist immortal who’s perpetually drunk? Better still! Nothing makes logical sense? Who cares! It’s beautiful and it’s fun and it works in the context of the story, even when it’s cheesier than a truckload of Cheez Whiz.

I thoroughly enjoyed picking up on bits and pieces of myth, legend and philosophy. There’s a lot more Zen in there than you typically run in to in Chinese flicks – a great moment where Jackie Chan’s drunken Taoist character, Lu Yan, is teaching Jason kung fu, and pours him a cup of tea as Jason’s going on and on about all the martial arts moves he knows from the movies. I knew what would happen: Lu would keep pouring.

It’s an old Zen story. A man comes to the Zen master for teaching, bragging about all the things he already knows about Zen. The Zen master nods and smiles and pours tea – and keeps pouring, until the cup overflows and runs all over the floor. “Stop!” the visitor protests. “The cup’s already full!” “Exactly,” the master says. “How can I teach you anything when your cup’s already full? Empty your cup!”

This is exactly what happens in the movie, and it’s a sheer delight.

Lu Yan’s based on Liu Ling, I’ll bet you a dollar to a donut hole. Don’t know Liu Ling? Hang about me for any length of time and you soon will. He was one of the legendary Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. One story about him says that he was followed around by a manservant who carried a jug of wine and a shovel. The wine was in case he sobered up too much. The shovel was in case he drank himself to death.

Now, that’s a man comfortable with his life!

Seeing as how Wikipedia already butchered my favorite story of Liu Ling, I shall retell it here:

One day, a Confucian friend of Liu’s went to his house and found him nude. Confucians, of course, put a lot of store by propriety, so the friend was a little discombobulated by this unashamed nakedness. They’re sitting there chatting, and the Confucian friend is getting more and more disturbed, until finally he can take no more. “Why aren’t you wearing any trousers?” he splutters.

“The universe is my house. This room is my trousers,” Liu says to him. “What are you doing here inside my trousers?”

I think you can begin to see why I love Taoist philosophy so very much.

And I think that may be what’s missing from that book on Tibetan Buddhism: the playfulness. The spontaneity. The delight in the absurd, the deeper meaning behind the seemingly meaningless. It’s one thing to go around staking down plots of earth in all seriousness. It’s quite another if it’s treated as something of an in-joke. The simple folk may seriously believe those stories about the land flying away if you don’t nail it down, they may believe in the objective reality of the demons and the gods, but that’s just a surface meaning. It’s not, when you get right down to it, what it’s really all about.

And I’m not even sure those Tibetan peasants are so literal. I have to wonder if that’s just the artifact of a Western mind trying to comprehend the Eastern. After all, Western religion got right out of the joyful absurdity business and took things way too literally for far too long. I find that strange, when you look at the New Testament and see how often Jesus taught in parables. If you ever wonder why I tend to giggle when fundies proclaim every word of the Bible is literal truth, there it is: Jesus himself said otherwise. So if you’re using the Bible to prove the Bible… watch out.

After a long and winding journey, we have finally looped around to the point: I can enjoy The Forbidden Kingdom without the slightest hint of annoyance because I know that while there’s serious stuff in there, it’s not meant to be taken seriously. No one is claiming these things happened in actual reality. These are true stories, but in an allegorical, not empirical, sense. This movie is sheer entertainment with a little bit o’ good philosophy mixed in. And there’s no silly Western bugger going, “Wow, people actually b
elieve the story of the Monkey King, and we have to treat it as The Truth, ‘cos it’s their religion.”

Unlike this bloody book.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go track down some bugger who knows what the tulku are really all about so I can tell a ripping good story meself.

*Bonus points to anyone who caught the Mortal Kombat reference in the title.

Literal vs. Philosophical: FIGHT!

An Atheist's Long Ramble About Religion

jacob4 Comments

As I’m about to dive into the night’s fiction work, I’m reminded of one of the bajillion reasons I left church behind.

The attitude of the church I went to so briefly could be summed up thusly: “I don’t know much about God, but I’d say we’ve built a pretty good cage for him.” (Oh, how I wish I’d actually seen that Simpson’s episode rather than merely hearing it described!) Not that the people I went to church with would’ve admitted the first bit. They were absolutely convinced they, and exclusively they, knew everything there was to know about God.

One of the things they knew was that every other religion not only had it wrong, but was pure evil to boot.

I wish I’d had Rowan Atkinson’s delightful A Warm Welcome to quote back then: “And finally, Christians. Ah, yes, I’m sorry – I’m afraid the Jews were right.”

I never could get the niggling sense that nobody had the exclusive claim to the truth out of my head. The life of a bleating sheep was never the life for me. You see, I had this terrible penchant for reading history and thinking subversive thoughts like, “Wow. The flood myth shows up in Ancient Sumeria – somebody’s been plagarizing.” And, “Kung Fu Tzu came up with the Golden Rule before the Jews. Interesting, that.” And, “What’s wrong with Allah? He’s God, too – says so right in the Qu’ran. Look – Abraham and Jesus are even in there!”

Point being, I enjoyed other religions immensely, and it irritated the bugshit out of me when some self-righteous little fucker would tell me that all of those other religions were just myths, or worse, lies told by Satan.

“I’ve read Job,” I’d say. “Satan and God seemed pretty tight. Oh, and did you know that in the Old Testament, Satan means ‘adversary’? That’s all Satan is – not the ultimate evil, just a speedbump.”

They never liked that much. Can’t fathom why.

Even as a child, I’d think unChristian thoughts, such as, “Why is the Bible supposedly true, but all the Greek and Roman religion’s just myth?” No one could ever prove to me the “truth” of one over the other. (Evangelizing Christians in the audience, open your Bibles and find the “shake the dust from your sandals” verse. You’re gonna need it if you start trying to prove the truth of God over all the other gods ’round here. I’ll sic Woozle on you, see if I don’t.)

Religion, as far as I could tell, made smart people stupid. They got so obsessed with proving God literally true and the Bible infallible that they tied themselves into complicated knots trying to explain away the innumerable contradictions in the Bible. It’s amusing, to be sure, but pathetic. Their God, it seems, was incapable of using allegory as a teaching tool. I once saw a thirteen-year old annihilate a Bible literalist. Twasn’t pretty. Someday, I shall tell you that story.

Christians who see the Bible as allegory fare a lot better, and their God looks a lot smarter. Come to think of it, that’s true for just about everybody’s gods and holy stories, isn’t it?

So. The claims to exclusive truth, the pathological fear of other religions and ideas, and the penchant of calling anything that didn’t fit a terribly restricted worldview “evil,” all of those things cemented my determination to never ever again make the mistake of joining a congregation. I felt I was missing out on a lot of interesting shit by letting these silly buggers dictate what I could and could not know, and I was right.

I mean, imagine what the next few days’ research would look like if I were restricted to the fundamentalist Christian view of things? Actually, come to think of it, there wouldn’t be a next few days’ research. I wouldn’t have the Ahc’ton as heroes, now, would I, because reincarnation ain’t part of the bargain.

I wouldn’t be slogging my way through Aristotle’s De Anima right now, and wouldn’t be making a beeline for research on the Tulku next.

I wouldn’t have Shiva Nataraja dancing on ignorance on my shelf. I wouldn’t be wondering just where the bloody hell Green Tara ran off to… shit. Oh, there she is, right beside Shiva. And there’s Ganesha. Hello, you.

Had I stayed with that very restrictive brand of Christianity that I flirted with for a few months way back when, I would still be writing insipid, theologically safe tripe if I was writing at all. Sure as fuck wouldn’t be writing a series of books that draw very heavily on Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, and Norse themes. Would’ve never experienced the pleasure of “Thou art that,” and a thousand other truly breathtaking mythological themes. Good and evil would have been in black and white rather than the fascinating shades of gray I get to wrestle with.

Yes, I have a lot of religious symbols and themes for an atheist. Being an atheist allows me to filch from whomever I like, guilt-free. These ideas are powerful. They’re interesting. They’re frequently fun.

Some religious folks accuse atheists of wanting to do away with all religion, and some atheists certainly lean that way. I’m not one. What I’d like to see vanish from the world is the pig-headedness of religious folks who think their religion is the one-and-only, and want to make sure everybody else thinks exactly the same. That’s a tragedy, to me. That’s an impoverishment and an offence against God. I’d be pretty pissed if I were the omniscient, omnipotent Divinity that kept getting stuffed into little cages, my power and variety denied. After all, if God is all, God really is all: every single human religion, past, present and future, has a little snippet of the Truth.

That’s the conclusion I came to as an agnostic, anyway, before I woke up one day and realized I’d become an atheist somewhere along the way. But I’m an atheist who loves what religious ideas say about life, the Universe and everything, about being human, about the power of ideas. And I’d like to see a world where those ideas have perfect freedom to coexist. Some religious folks seem to feel the same way. They’re just as fascinated by other ways of belief as I am. They appreciate them, welcome them, threaten nobody with hell for preferring one path over the other, and those are the religious folks I’d like to see come into power.

Would certainly be a world filled with a lot less fanatics playing silly buggers, now, wouldn’t it?

No Ray Comfort and his bananas. No DIsco. No Expelled.

…

…..Come to think of it, I’d lose a major source of my daily entertainment…..

Thankee gods I’d still have politicians to bash.

Click on the Ray Comfort link, my darlings. Seriously. Just swallow any liquids before you do so. Trust me, your computer will thank you for it.

An Atheist's Long Ramble About Religion