Atheism in Pop Culture: “Old Time Religion”

This one should be fun. In fact, I think we can make it into a contest.

Give-me-that-old-time-religion

It's the pagany folk nerd song parody of "Old Time Religion."

(You know. "Give me that old time religion/ Give me that old time religion/ Give me that old time religion/ It's good enough for me.")

I've loved this ever since I first heard it. Apart from just being silly and fun with many ridiculous rhymes, it's a neat reminder that Christianity really isn't "that old time religion" — many religions are much, much older. And it has a nice, gentle, "making fun of everyone equally" quality that I'm very fond of.

Technically, I suppose it's not atheist. It's more "pagan/ disrespectful of organized religion." And technically I suppose it's not pop culture, either, unless you consider folk nerd song parodies to be pop culture. But I don't care. The subject of Druids came up at work the other day, and this verse popped into my head, and I decided I had to share with the rest of the class:

Druidic_ritual_Stonehenge_2

Let us worship like the Druids
Running naked through the woo-ids
Drinking strange fermented fluids
And that's good enough for me.

(Give me that old time religion, etc.)

There are about eight hundred thousand verses floating around in the folk nerd world and on the 'Net, but not all of them are gems. Here are a few that I'm particularly fond of:

Aphrodite

Let us worship Aphrodite
In her silky see-through nightie
Though she's mean and somewhat flighty
She's good enough for me.

Let us sacrifice to Isis
She will help us in a crisis
And she hasn't raised her prices
And that's good enough for me.

Let us all bow down to Buddha
There's no other God who's cuter
Comes in copper, brass, and pewter
And that's good enough for me.

Let us travel to Valhalla
In Volkswagens, not Impalas
Singing "Deutschland Uber Alles"
And that's good enough for me.

Kali_Devi

Let us sacrifice to Kali
Let us worship her, by golly
To ignore her would be folly
And that's good enough for me.

Let us worship Zarathustra
Let us worship like we used to
I'm a Zarathustra booster
And that's good enough for me.

This next has always been my favorite:

Loki

Let us sacrifice to Loki
He's the old Norse god of chaos
Which is why this verse doesn't rhyme, or scan
And that's good enough for me.

And to show that it's an equal opportunity song parody, there are at least two verses on Christianity:

Let us all bow down to Mary
For she hasn't lost her cherry
And she cures the beri-beri
And that's good enough for me.

Let us worship like the Quakers
(silence)
(silence)
And that's good enough for me.

I wrote the next two myself:

Bacchus

Let us now form up a caucus
So that we may worship Bacchus
For his followers are raucous
And that's good enough for me.

(Alternate last line: "For his followers will fock us…")

Let us sacrifice to Hades
Looking spiffy in his shade-es
He's a devil with the ladies
And that's good enough for me.

My good friend Rebecca wrote this one:

There's a graven image of Ba'al
That I bought for my front ha'al
At the graven image ma'al
And that's good enough for me.

And my good friend Nosmo King wrote this verse, totally on the fly the first time he heard the song, earning the eternal admiration of all the drunken folk nerds at that particular party:

Yin_and_Yang.svg

Let us walk the path of Tao
Though it hasn't got much wow
But it's in the here and now
And that's good enough for me.

So now it's your turn! At parties we keep singing the same ones again and again, and we need new ones. Plus we desperately need some from the atheist pantheon of made-up religions, and I'm having a hard time rhyming "flying spaghetti monster" and "invisible pink unicorn." (I'm about halfway there on Russell's Teapot — something about "It's impossible to see, but" — but so far I'm failing to come up with a last line.)

So chime in with your verses! The winner — picked entirely by me at my own whim — will get a free copy of any of my three books that they want: Paying For It, Three Kinds of Asking For It, or Best Erotic Comics 2008. Entries must be made in the comments by August 31. Have fun, y'all!

(Druid photo by La Repubblica.)

Atheism in Pop Culture: “Old Time Religion”
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Update

Hi, all. I just wanted to give you an update on why I haven't been blogging in the last couple of days. Ingrid and I are currently dealing with a veterinary emergency. We had to take our cat Violet to the emergency vet on Tuesday morning, and she had surgery today. They found two bleeding ulcers, which they removed.

The good news is that the surgery went well, and she's currently stable. We visited her tonight after the surgery: she was doped up, but she definitely recognized us and was happy to see us and be petted by us. They don't know for sure when she can come home, but they said "soon." We're hoping that means tomorrow, but don't know for sure.

The bad news is that we are not out of the woods yet. They don't yet know why she got the ulcers, and that's kind of a big question. Cats apparently don't get ulcers very often (it's not like they have a lot of stress at the office), and when they do it can be a sign of something bad. The vet did a zillion biopsies and other tests, and will have results for us in about 3-5 days. So while she seems to be out of immediate danger right now, we won't know for a few days whether we're looking at a larger problem or just at a basic recovery from surgery. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I may not be blogging much in the next couple/few days. I'll try to put some stuff up from my archives or do a repost or two, but this is taking a lot of time and attention as well as emotional energy, and not yet knowing what we're dealing with is very difficult. It may be a few days before I'm back to my usual bloggy self. In the meantime, give your pets and other loved ones a hug. I'll talk to you soon.

Update

Living Each Day As If It Were Your Last

Homer Simpson

There's an episode of the Simpsons — I can't remember which one right now — where Homer is reading some book on how to be a successful go-getter, and he sees this piece of advice: "Live each day as if it were your last." And in the next scene, he's sitting on the curb, sobbing heartbrokenly, and crying out, "I don't want to die."

I'm sure you've all heard this at some point. "Live each day as if it were your last." It's the sort of folk wisdom that it's easy to nod along with sagely, without really thinking about it.

And it's the sort of folk wisdom that, once you start thinking about it, doesn't actually make any sense at all.

Drug_cocktail

Back in the early '90s, when the AIDS cocktail first came out and people with AIDS suddenly started having a decent life expectancy, a lot of those people were suddenly stuck with a happy but not inconsiderable problem: They had run up enormous credit card debt. In some cases, they had even quit their jobs. They had been living on the assumption that they weren't going to live more than a few months or a year… and if you're not going to live for more than a few months or a year, then why the hell not run up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card bills? So when it turned out that this wasn't the case, and that they were probably going to live for a while, they were kind of screwed.

They had been living each day as if it were their last. And while that made a certain amount of sense when they only had a few months to live, once they had a reasonable life expectancy, it turned out to be a really bad idea.

I guess the idea behind this bit of folk wisdom is that you're supposed to do the things that matter to you now, and not wait until it's too late. Okay. Fine. Except — what if the things that matter to you are things that take time and patience and discipline to accomplish? What if the things that matter to you are getting a book contract, or a nursing degree? Making sure your kids can go to college? Deciphering the genome of the coelacanth? Winning a gold medal in badminton? Building a scale model of the Battleship Potemkin in your garage?

Vacuum cleaner

Let me put it this way. If I were to live each day as if it were my last, I wouldn't have spent three hours this weekend cleaning the house. I wouldn't have gotten up at 8 a.m. on Saturday to take the cat to the vet. I wouldn't try to get book contracts, or drum up publicity for the books I've already written. I sure as well wouldn't go to work: I like my job reasonably well, but not enough to spend the last day of my life there.

And yet, doing these things is what makes the things that matter to me possible. I love having a home with Ingrid, a home that's a welcoming place to share with each other and with our friends and family. I love our cats. I love writing, and getting my writing out into the world to be read. And I love having food and clothes and a roof over my head… and I'm grateful that I can do it by working with a bunch of hippie punk rock anarchist book freaks.

The ability to make plans and sacrifices, to set aside what we want right this second in order to get something we want even more later on, is crucial to human happiness. People who can't do it tend not to be very happy.

You might think that, as an atheist, the "live every day as if it were your last" philosophy would be appealing. After all, in the atheist/ humanist world view, this is our only life. There's no pie in the sky when we die — so why not just live for the moment?

Credit cards

But that's not how I see it at all. And I don't know any other atheists or humanists who see it that way, either. In a humanist philosophy, this life is the only life we have — so we have to make the most of it. All of it. Not just this day, but all the days we have. Life is short and limited, and we should make the most of it… but that doesn't mean getting twelve credits cards and running off to Amsterdam. It means doing the things that give our lives the most meaning, the things that connect us with the world and make our mark on it. Some of which involve patience, and sacrifice, and deferred gratification.

Besides, being a humanist means being a realist. And unless you're very old or very sick or happen to be hanging off a cliff by your fingertips right at this very moment (in which case, what are you doing surfing the Internet?), the reality is that you probably have a little while yet to live. Yes, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow and die, and that's a reality too. But living as if that were true, instead of just a slim possibility, is out of touch with reality.

Now, if you're talking about life being precious and not wasting it on trivia, then I'm with you. It's something I pay more and more attention to as I get older. Life is short, and I could get hit by a bus tomorrow: do I really want to spend today watching "Law & Order" reruns?

And if you're talking about living in the moment, as opposed to living for the moment, then I'm totally with you. It's one of the great challenges of my life, actually: learning to get the hell out of my head and actually experience my life, instead of analyzing it to death all the time.

Fresh_vegetables

But I don't think that's about cashing in your life savings and buying a hot air balloon, or whatever. In fact, I think it's a much more interesting challenge to be in the moment and fully experience your life, not when you're going up in a hot air balloon for the first time, but when you're making dinner, or walking to work, or rubbing the cat's belly. Being fully present in the ordinary dailiness of your life — the things that ultimately give it meaning even though they're not that special or exciting — that's the cool stuff.

Yes, I want this day to be a day that matters, a day that I've lived fully. But chances are I'm going to be alive in a couple years. And I want that day two years from now to be a day that I live fully as well.

I don't want to live this day as if it were my last.

I want to live this life as if it were my last.

Living Each Day As If It Were Your Last

Tee Hee, You Said “Bonk”: The Blowfish Blog

Bonk-cover

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog: a review of the new Mary Roach book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. It's titled Tee Hee, You Said "Bonk", and here's the teaser:

If ever a book was tailor- made for me to enjoy, this is it.

I’m a huge science nerd. I’m a huge sex nerd. How could I not love a book called Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex?

Well, let me tell you how. Exactly.

First, I should disclaim for a brief moment: Bonk is not a terrible book. The subject matter — the history of the scientific study of sex, and some of the more interesting examples of its current state — is a compelling one, loaded with fascinating ideas both about sex itself and the appallingly/ entertainingly conflicted attitudes society has about it. And the author — Mary Roach, celebrated author of Stiff and Spook — is no slouch. She’s a thorough researcher and a clear, chatty writer, adept at taking complicated and potentially boring scientific ideas and making them accessible to the lay reader.

Please note that I refrained from making a childish, Beavis and Butthead- esque sex joke about the "lay" reader.

Which brings me to the problem.

To find out what my problem with this book is, read the rest of the review. Enjoy!

Tee Hee, You Said “Bonk”: The Blowfish Blog

God’s Will, and Pathetic Excuses for Bad Behavior

Mystery of gods will

So what does it mean to say that something is God's will?

Especially if it's something done by a person, or people?

And double especially if it's something done by, you know, you?

There was an amazing and heartbreaking story on This American Life this weekend. A longish, complicated-ish story, but the short version is this: Two babies were accidentally switched at birth. The parents of one of the babies figured it out almost immediately. And yet they didn't say anything about it, to anyone — not the kids, not the other parents, nobody — for over 40 years.

Their reason? Well, that's part of the longish, complicated-ish story. (The full story is available here if you want to hear it.) But the short version: The father — an evangelical minister, a fact that'll factor in soon — didn't want to embarrass the doctor by calling attention to his mistake. And the mother was very sick for months after the birth: she didn't have the strength to go against her husband (who was apparently a difficult man to go against), and by the time she recovered, she felt it was too late.

So. Here's where the atheist blogger gets her dudgeon on.

Forty plus years later, these parents finally decided to tell. A terrible, disruptive event, as you might imagine. The evangelical minister father wrote to the other mother, apologizing for essentially having stolen her daughter and raised her as his own…

…but at the same time, saying that it was God's will.

?!?!?

You know, I have come up with some truly shabby excuses for my bad behavior in my day. I'm human, and I am not immune to the siren song of deflecting blame and guilt onto other people. Or onto bad luck, and accidents of the universe at large. But this? This takes chutzpah of a Herculean scale. This one has got to go in the Rationalization Hall of Fame. I'm actually somewhat awe-struck. Or I would be, if I weren't so appalled.

Sawzall_large

I mean, by that logic, you could say that anything you did was God's will. Stealing someone's car. Sleeping with their spouse. Carving their liver out with a Sawzall. Shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die. Anything at all that you do — the most selfish, wicked, fucked-up shit imaginable — could be defended by saying that it's God's will.

Of course, this inevitably leads to questions of free will and God's omnipotence, how can any of us truly have free will if it's all part of God's plan, yada yada yada. But right now, I'm just focused on the astonishing abdication of personal morality and responsibility.

And this isn't from just any old hard-core evangelical Christian. This is a minister we're talking about.

In a way, it's a fascinating version of that classic half-assed excuse, "Well, it all turned out for the best." In this case, of course, it didn't turn out for the best. A lot of lives were pretty badly fucked up by these people's actions. But if it's God's will, then by definition it turned out for the best. If God willed it, and God is all-good, then it must be the best. Q.E.D.

Which, again, could be applied to anything at all that you do. Or anything that anybody does.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

It's a good thing this guy's not an atheist.

Because if he were an atheist, he'd have no sense of responsibility, no basis for morality, and would act as if he could just do whatever he wanted.

God’s Will, and Pathetic Excuses for Bad Behavior

Sexual Freedom In A Shopping Bag: “Sex And The City”

Sex and the city poster
This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog. And yes, the movie came out two months ago; but I have to wait two months before reprinting the stuff I write on the Blowfish Blog, so suck it up.

The problem isn’t that it's sexually conventional.

The problem is that it's sexually conventional… while giving itself airs about being sexually modern and cutting- edge, and pretending to offer innovative, category- breaking, woman-positive insight into sex and relationships.

That's only one of the problems, actually. This is a movie loaded with problems. In fact, I would argue that the "Sex and the City" movie is essentially a series of cinematic problems loosely strung together with some pictures of pretty clothes. But this is my Blog and not the New York Times or Film Threat, so the problems with the sexual politics are the ones I'm going to talk about.

I should tell you right now: I am not a fan of the show. At all. I've seen roughly a dozen episodes, and every one made me want to throw the remote through the TV screen. So I did not come to this movie with the proper, unbiased film- critic attitude. I came thoroughly prepared to despise it and everything it stood for.

But I've come to movies before with that attitude, and have found myself pleasantly surprised.

Not this time.

And so we come to the problem at hand. The attitudes about sex in the "Sex and the City" movie are deeply conventional, as facile and unimaginative as anything else in the movie … and yet it presents itself, in this smug, self-congratulatory way, as an example of brave, ground- breaking, "I am woman watch me fuck" sex- positivity for the modern age. It offers glib platitudes as if they were profound insights, and its approach to sex is as consumerist and status- oriented as its approach to… well, everything.

Lots of spoilers, btw. Consider yourself warned.

Shoes

Let's start with just one small example. There's a bit in the movie where Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) is interviewing potential assistants, and she goes through an amusing parade of blatantly terrible candidates before she hits on the perfect Jennifer Hudson. She meets the brainless ditz who doesn't want to do any hard work. She meets the scary, obsessive, borderline- stalker fan. And then she meets the ridiculously over-qualified gentleman in the impeccable suit, with the outstanding credentials and the beautiful manners and the business degree from Harvard or wherever, the guy who you're wondering why the hell he's applying for a job as Carrie's personal assistant instead of at a brokerage or something… until he gives her a simpatico smile, and the camera pans down, and you see that he's wearing pink spike heels.

It's not clear whether he's a drag queen, a transvestite, a fetishist, or just a guy who likes to wear women's shoes. That question is never answered, or even asked. Carrie's reaction — and the reaction of the movie itself, the reaction it's trying to create and assuming it will get from its audience — is reflexive, unthinking rejection. Of course he's not qualified. He's wearing heels. Next.

Now. To be fair. Even if you're the most progressive, sex-positive person on the planet, you might find something a little inappropriate about a guy — not a transsexual, but clearly a male- identified man in a man's suit — wearing pink high heels to a job interview. You might see it as inserting a note of sexuality into a situation where it's not really called for. But on the other hand… well, if you were interviewing for a position as Carrie Bradshaw's assistant, wouldn't you wear the best pair of heels in your closet? And if you were a writer who was famous for being a shoe-obsessed fashion victim, would you really reject a job applicant out of hand simply because he — and not she — shared your passion, and showed it? It may have been a miscalculation… but it's hardly cause for the automatic ridicule, revulsion, and rejection that the movie presents it as. If you're really a cutting- edge woman with modern sexual attitudes, a guy in spike heels should not be that big a deal.

But let's take a larger example. A clearer example. An example that's not ambiguous, and one that's actually central to the plot and character development (such as they are) of the movie.

Samantha

Let's take Samantha.

Samantha (Kim Cattrall), for those of you who've never seen the show, is the shameless slut, the woman who "acts like a man," the one with the sexual appetites and attitudes of a Casanova. As the movie begins, she's been settled down for years with a man she loves, and loves to fuck. But she's starting to feel restless — for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest is that she still has a roving eye for pretty men. She feels that her relationship is forcing her to suppress an essential part of who she is — the part that likes to pick up cute guys for casual sex. And so she ends her relationship: sadly, regretfully, but clearly believing that it's necessary.

Now. Did anyone else see this movie? And at this point in the story, did anyone else want to stand up and scream, "For the love of Loki and all the gods in Valhalla, will you PLEASE try non-monogamy?"

Opening up

I'm not saying non-monogamy is for everybody. I'm not saying it's the perfect answer to all problems in all relationships. I'm not even saying it would have solved this couple's problems. But if a central problem in a relationship is that one of you really likes to fuck around and feels stifled when you can't — if one of you truly loves the other and wants to stay with them, and at the same time genuinely feels that you can't be true to yourself if you don't have the freedom to be a big slut — then non-monogamy should at least be on the table. It might not work, your partner might not consider it, it might not be what you ultimately want… but at the very least, the concept should cross your mind.

But it never crosses Samantha's mind. Samantha — the proud slut, the sexual adventurer, the one of the four friends who supposedly has the most sexual knowledge and experience — seems to have never even considered this option.

And none of her friends suggests it to her.

I'm going to indulge in a little cultural stereotyping here, so please forgive me. One of the big themes of the TV show (and a lesser theme of the movie) is that these four women are… well, let's not say "fag hags." Let's say "modern cosmopolitan women with lots of gay male friends." Therefore, the fact of non-monogamy cannot have escaped their notice. Non-monogamy isn't universal in urban American gay male culture, but it's certainly very, very common. And anyone who's familiar with that culture knows it. Yet none of these women — not Samantha, and not any of her friends — considers Samantha's dilemma and thinks, "Gee, she acts like a gay man anyway — why shouldn't she try having a relationship like one?"

I could go on.

Sushi

I could talk about the idea that combining sex with food — what Dan Savage calls "faux naughty, boring breeder kink" and Susie Bright calls (I'm paraphrasing here) "a vain attempt to get your lover to go down on you" — is wild and kinky and adventurous. Not that there's anything wrong with combining sex with food, and not that sex is a competition… but if that's your idea of cutting-edge modern sexual adventure, you need to go someplace where they're doing flesh-hook suspensions and anal fisting.

I could talk about the displacement of sexual affection and emotion into consumer goods and status symbols: the way all four main characters use an elaborate system of hieroglyphics where objects — jewelry, clothing, beautiful apartments — stand in for emotions and relationships…. with the attention focused almost entirely on the objects, at the expense of the actual emotions. And I could talk about how this is presented as normal, reasonable behavior. Comical, yes: but comical in an "isn't it funny how we all do this, what a silly universal human foible" way. (Yes, we all invest certain objects with symbolic meaning…. but the "Sex and the City" women transform this tendency into a vapid consumerism so extreme as to be grotesque. A far cry from the cutting- edge rethinking of sexual culture they supposedly aspire to.)

And very importantly, I could talk about the idea that when you deny your partner sex for months — and are snarky and dismissive when they want one of those rare times to be more than just routine — you nevertheless don't bear any responsibility when they cheat on you, and have the complete right to present yourself as the sole injured party. The movie seems to think it's being super- modern for acknowledging that one-time cheating shouldn't be met with inflexible unforgiveness… but it never considers the possibility that, when you deny your partner sex for months — with no sympathy, and no good reason. and no end in sight — then maybe, just maybe, you don't have the right to expect them to stay celibate forever.

I could go on. But I think you get my drift. The sexual consumerism, the default assumptions about sex and gender and relationships, the mocking revulsion at anything that resembles actual sexual transgression… it all adds up to a conventional, reflexive, not very imaginative view of sexuality.

Subvert the dominant paradigm

Which is fine. Not every sex comedy has to subvert the dominant paradigm. But not every sex comedy pretends to. Not every sex comedy offers a preachy little homily at the end about breaking down categories, after it's spent two hours reinforcing almost every sexual category in the book. Not every sex comedy smugly pats itself on the back for being more feminist and sexually progressive than "Leave It to Beaver."

What gets me mad isn't the retrograde attitude. What gets me mad is the retrograde attitude being packaged as sexual revolution in a Gucci shopping bag. The fact that this glib, shallow, vapid piffle is being presented as the new erotic feminism — the fact that this is what's being offered to women as a ground- breaking vision of sexual possibility — that's what made me want to throw my popcorn through the screen.

P.S. For an even more vicious — and, if I'm to be honest, much funnier — review of the "Sex and the City" movie, visit my friend Nosmo King's blog, Faster than the Speed of Satire. And then tell him to get off his ass and blog more often.

Sexual Freedom In A Shopping Bag: “Sex And The City”

Good Stuff, or, Greta’s Sporadic Blog Carnival #2

Carousel horse

And it’s time for another round of Stuff I Saw On The Blogosphere, And Liked, And Think You’ll Like Too. Otherwise known as Greta’s Sporadic Blog Carnival. #2.

A Natural Selection, by Olivia Judson of the New York Times Blog. On examples of evolution taking place in our lifetime, in an observable time span. (I especially like the example of the Croatian lizards: it seems to me to be a wonderful counter to the idea that sudden jumps in the evolutionary record indicate divine intervention. This is a pretty drastic evolutionary change in a short period of time… and there’s no reason to think it’s the result of anything other than descent with modification.) Via Pharyngula.

Cereal Box Science, by Jens Hegg of Please Hold, Your Call is Very Important To Us. On why you need to be careful when reading commercially- motivated or self- serving “science”… and how to recognize it. Via the Tangled Bank carnival.

I’m Only Going To Be Alive Once, from Susannah Breslin’s
Letters from Johns. In the Letters from Johns project, sex customers write in anonymously describing their experiences with sex workers and explaining the reasons they’ve done it. This is a particularly thoughtful and articulate example.

Need a Babysitter? Don’t Call God!, by The Chaplain at An Apostate’s Chapel. Why do so many Christians believe that God helps them find parking spaces and car keys, but doesn’t protect children who are being abused? An idea that’s been expressed before… but The Chaplain expresses it uncommonly well here, with articulate intellect and passionate anger.

Back into the secondhand smoke fray, this time with a Scottish brogue! by Orac at Respectful Insolence. On a large, rigorously- done study measuring the effects of workplace smoking bans on rates of acute coronary syndrome… and on the results, which were so striking they amazed even Orac.

Doctor Bashing by Steven Novella at Neurologicablog. A defense of doctors and the medical profession against outdated stereotypes… and a discussion of how confirmation bias works to bolster bigotry. Via the abovementioned Respectful Insolence.

Who Can Discuss Sex Without Discussing Damage?, by Dr. Marty Klein at Sexual Intelligence. Dr. Klein asks, “Is there any point in talking about cars without mentioning car accidents? Certainly. Is there any value in discussing the Golden Gate Bridge or Niagara Falls without bringing up drowning or suicide? Of course there is. So why do so many people find it impossible to tolerate a serious conversation about sex that doesn’t include human trafficking, rape, kiddie porn, and child molestation?”

And, of course, for the six of you who may not have read it already, The Great Desecration, by PZ Myers of Pharyngula. In which PZ desecrates a cracker (and gets an unimaginable shitstorm of death threats and hate mail as a result). A thoughtful and well-written piece, with enlightening information on the anti-Semitic history of host desecration. (See also this piece by Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism, On Desecration, in which the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy deplores PZ’s cracker desecration as not only unethical but unconstitutional. No, really.)

Good Stuff, or, Greta’s Sporadic Blog Carnival #2

The Problem of Unfishiness: Religion, Science, and Unanswered Questions

How do we deal with unanswered questions? Especially when it comes to the most basic things we believe in?

I once had a Christian friend tell me that she didn’t have a really good answer to this question, which she called the “problem of evil”. I was flabbergasted; it seemed that merely naming it was enough to keep its rhetorical force from having an effect.

It’s like meeting someone who thinks that everything in the world is made of fish, but when you ask why things don’t feel like, smell like, or behave like fish, they say “ah, the ‘problem of unfishiness’, it’s occupied our brightest fishists for many years!”

Mystery of gods will

One of the peeviest of atheist pet peeves is the way so many religious believers, in the face of huge unanswered questions about their beliefs, essentially throw up their hands and say, “Yup, it’s a mystery.”

Exhibit A: the comment above from Paul Crowley. The question at hand is a familiar one: an all- knowing, all- powerful, all- good God, but evil and suffering in the world, blah blah blah. And the answer… well, the answer varies, from person to person and from sect to sect. But essentially, the answer is always some version of, “We don’t know.”

“It’s a mystery.” “God moves in mysterious ways.” “It is not up to us to question God’s ways.” “That’s where faith comes in.”

Zebrasoma_flavescens

And as Paul pointed out, this drives atheists insane. Far too often, it’s exactly as he described it: you point out to an ardent fishist all the different ways that the world is not fishy, and they nod sagely and reply, “Ah, yes, the problem of unfishiness.” And then they go on blithely believing in the fish-based world: as if the unanswered question had no relevance, as if it didn’t reveal a major crack in their fishy foundation. (Possibly getting mad at you in the meantime, for being so intolerant.)

But are atheists being fair here?

After all, the world of science and secular knowledge is also full of unanswered questions. Big ones. What is consciousness? How did life originate? What happened before the Big Bang, i.e. what caused the Big Bang, i.e. why is there something instead of nothing? And the world of science responds to these questions by essentially saying, “Yup, it’s a mystery. We don’t know the answer. Sorry.”

But I think there’s a difference.

A huge one.

Man using microscope

For one thing: When science is confronted with a question it doesn’t know the answer to? It doesn’t just give up. It doesn’t throw up its hands, gaze into the air, and revel in the glorious mystery. It says, “We don’t know the answer to that question — yet.”

“Yet” being the key word.

Science’s response to unanswered questions is to say, “Hm. Interesting question. What might the answer be? We really don’t know — but we’re working on it. We have a number of possible theories; we’re gathering data; here are some of the promising directions we’re moving in.”

Crayon

Whereas, when religion is faced with questions it doesn’t know the answer to, it just gives up. It takes the empty places in the coloring book, the places we haven’t filled in yet with actual tested knowledge… and fills them all in with a blue crayon. And it calls that blue crayon God. And it thinks that’s an answer.

(In other words, when science is faced with a question it doesn’t know the answer to, its response is, “Processing… processing…” Whereas, as Ingrid put it, religion’s response is, “Error… error…”)

Which is a big problem. It’s a practical problem: for one thing, when an actual real answer to an unanswered question does come along, it can be damn difficult to scrape the blue crayon out of people’s brains and replace it with the right color. (Witness the difficulty many Christians have accepting the theory of evolution, or the age of the planet and the universe.) And in my mind, it’s a philosophical and ethical problem as well. When faced with an unanswered question, I think it’s a lot more honest to say, “I don’t know,” than to say, “The answer is God.” (And despite atheists being so frequently accused of arrogance, I think it shows a lot more humility as well.)

But I think there’s another difference as well. An even huger one. And it has to do with the nature of the unanswered questions themselves.

The questions that religion can’t answer? They cut right to the heart of their theory. They reveal profound inconsistencies of the theory with observable reality…and fundamental contradictions within the theory itself.

Tornado

The obvious example is the one this whole post started with: the obvious contradiction of an all- knowing, all- powerful, all- good God who nevertheless permits horrible evil and suffering, and even causes it directly himself. I have never seen a theology or an apologetic that explained this without either (a) conceding some portion of God’s knowledge, power, or goodness… or else (b) copping out with “mysterious ways.” The hypothesis of the God who is all- etc. and yet permits and creates terrible suffering is fundamentally flawed: a theory that completely contradicts everything we see about the world, with a logical paradox at its very heart.

Whereas in science, the unanswered questions are simply unanswered questions. They’re gaps in the knowledge… but they’re not flaws in the knowledge. There’s a difference.

Evolution

Example. Take evolution. As of right now, the question of abiogenesis — how the process of life originated in the first place — is unanswered. It’s a question that’s being worked on, but right now we don’t know the answer. But that doesn’t undercut the theory of evolution. The theory of evolution — the theory of how life forms became so well adapted to their environments, how complex forms of life descended from simpler ones, etc. — is still supported by a massive, overwhelming body of evidence from every field of biology… regardless of how the process started. Abiogenesis could have come from some chemical process whose exact nature we don’t currently know, or it could have come from visiting space aliens, or it could have come from the invisible magic hand of Loki… and the theory of evolution would still hold up. The unanswered question of abiogenesis is a big one — but in the science of biology, it’s not a flaw. It’s merely a gap.

And when actual flaws in scientific knowledge are revealed, then the knowledge gets discarded as mistaken pretty damn fast. In science, if your theory is shot full of internal contradictions, or if it conflicts with a massive body of data, then that’s it for the theory. Individual scientists may cling to their pet theories, but the scientific community as a whole discards it, and moves on to a new theory that better explains all the data, and that makes better predictions about the future, and that isn’t shot full of internal contradictions.

And scientists who cling to their pet theories, despite the contradictions, aren’t admired as “people of faith.”

BarbusCarnaticus

Hanging on to the fishist viewpoint, coming up with elaborately contorted rationalizations for it, devoting your life to explaining either why it makes sense or why it doesn’t have to — and refusing to let go of even one aspect of the fishist hypothesis to make it more consistent both with itself and with reality — is not seen in the world of science as noble, or admirable, or a sign of strength of character.

Which is a big, big difference.

The Problem of Unfishiness: Religion, Science, and Unanswered Questions

On Watching… The Blowfish Blog

Remote_1

Please note: This post, and the post it links to, contain detailed descriptions of my personal sex life and sexual practices. Family members and others who don’t want to read about that: This would be a very good post to skip.

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog. It’s about… well, the title on this one is pretty self- explanatory. It’s called On Watching The Same Ten-Second TV Spank Scene  Over And Over And Over, and here’s the teaser:

It seemed vaguely ridiculous at the time.

It seems even more ridiculous now.

Why — in a world where I have almost infinite pornographic material at my fingertips — would I find a ten-second spanking scene in a cable TV comedy series so erotically compelling? Why would I rewind and re-watch it a half a dozen times… and then fetch my vibrator, and watch it a dozen times more?

What is it about sex scenes in non- porno movies and TV shows, novels and comic books, that makes them hot? Not necessarily better than porn; but different, and different in a way that makes them special and exciting?

To find out why and what, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

On Watching… The Blowfish Blog