This is not my New Year’s resolution

I don’t make them. But I will lose more weight this year. Out of fear.

I was just at the grocery store, standing in the check-out line, which has become a gauntlet of terror. It’s the magazines.

Today, it was Paula Deen, round-cheeked and grinning, teeth bleached white, eyes like cold blue LEDs, photoshopped into perfectly plasticky plump grandmotherliness — a grandma with the complexion of an irradiated sixteen year old, glowing and sparkling — and she was holding a bowl of livid yellow macaroni and cheese that was bigger than her head. And I said to myself, this is the new face of death. And I said to myself, this is the American face of death, the death of viscid excess, the death that ends not in bones, but a quivering mass of adipocere. And I said to myself, don’t piss yourself, Myers, but that’s goddamn terrifying.

And I thought about buying that magazine and pasting that freakishly leering face on my refrigerator, but decided that placing a potent ward in my kitchen that would cause me to starve to death instead probably wasn’t a good idea.

But this is not a New Year’s resolution.

Tomorrow, it’ll probably be the Kardashians, and I’ll vow to Read More Books; or closeups of some starlet’s cellulite, and I’ll vow to be Less Superficially Judgmental; or creepy weepy exposes of a dying actor’s final hours, and I’ll vow to Crawl into a Cave When it’s my Time to Die. You can learn a lot from the supermarket checkout line, but mainly you learn that there’s a side of humanity that makes a fellow ashamed to be a humanist.

I get email

You found an odd-shaped rock? You think it looks like a fossilized organ? Don’t send a picture to me: go get some basic education in biology and geology, because I think you look like an idiot.

Yeah, some demented guy just sent me a bunch of photos of a “mineralized brain”. Judge for yourself.

That’s a subset. He also sent me these photos in much higher resolution. Why? Because he’s an ignorant nudnik. These things look nothing like the brain of any creature that has ever existed, unless maybe it’s the lopsided lumpy non-functional excrescence found inside the crania of creationists.

(Also on Sb)

Why I Am an Atheist – Fábio Jardim

I’m an atheist because I want to live my life honestly, not only in deed but in thought.

I used to be an enthusiastic catholic boy. The notion of an ordered universe, with a clear cause and effect for both good and bad things, was immensely appealing. Ironically, it was catholic school that stomped that belief out of me. First in showing how the actually engaging, intelligent teachers got frustrated and stonewalled by the older, conservative dogmatists, and eventually how even the best of them could only offer non-answers or cruel ignorance when confronted with any meaningful question. Children actually have a good bullshit detector, and mine was always reading off the scale, all the time.

My father actually helped, and not by accident. Like me, he was a catholic school student growing up; since they get colossal tax breaks, they actually offered decent education, comparable to the expensive private schools, for a very affordable price. So when my dad was confronted with the choice of putting me in a lousy school or try to give me a better shot even if it came with religious strings attached…he decided that since he survived it without too many scars, so could I.

He was right, but not for the reasons he thought. My father came out of catholic school a faint deist, perhaps, with a somewhat comical distrust of clergy. He doesn’t think much about it. I found the library and became an early history buff. I learned about Phoenicians and ancient greek and romans, and all the gods they believed in, with as much fervor as any christian or muslim of our times, and about as much proof. Even the funny gauls in the Asterix comics had a roster of deities as believable as the Christ being used to officiate marriages, fight sin and give us our morals.

Becoming a teenager, I kept waiting for the excuses and dogma to make sense, as if it was my failure to trust them that caused any confusion. But it only got worse. Seeing priests and religious people passing both judgment and comfort in the name of something so tenuous felt increasingly uncomfortable, then repulsive. It’s odd how you don’t really feel how omnipresent religious presence (and pressure)in society is until you start to doubt, and it was a disquieting time, to say the least.

It wasn’t until I leafed through Carl Sagan’s A Demon-Haunted World in high school that I finally saw I wasn’t alone. Ironically, I heard about it from a friend who had thoroughly misread the book and thought it was a vindication for superstition and pseudo-science (“He says there are demons in the world! And he tells of how he could remotely see the war in Europe from the USA as a kid!”). It wasn’t an overt defense of atheism, and that made it even better. It showed me that there were other people in the world saying “They don’t really know. All the mystics and priests and holy books do not have the automatic claim to truth and respect they try to claim”, and it was educated, respectable people saying so.

And so I stopped even pretending to believe. If I do anything praiseworthy or noble to and for others, I want it to be due to my empathy and commitment, not to earn points with some vague, unearthly being, nor to advertise my piety to my religious tribe or convert others. And if I ever do anyone harm, the responsibility is also mine. There doesn’t need to be anything more attached to that premise. It works fine without theistic add-ons and glitter.

Brazil used to be overwhelming Catholic, but now evangelical Protestantism is putting a large dent into that and in turn making the Catholic church more obstinate in its pursuits. It’s not a good shift for the non-religious here. Popular television anchors say on the air here that all the criminals in prison are atheists and only get more fame out of the deal. I’d never say atheists and agnostics here have it worse than anywhere else; not even close. But it’s still seen as synonymous with evil and immorality, and it’s going to stay that way for a good bit yet. I’ve lost girlfriends when I told them of my lack of faith. But I don’t believe in hiding it. There’s a lot of comfort and not a small amount of pride in knowing that whatever friends, ideas and respect you have, you came by it being honest to yourself.

Fábio Jardim
Brazil

The petty cowardice of Christianity

They simply cannot tolerate the idea that other people think differently than they do, and so they play the most petty, trivial games. Cee-lo Green sang Lennon’s Imagine at New Year’s, and he just had to change the words “no religion too” to “all religion is true” — not just changing the meaning, but changing it to something that makes no sense at all.

It’s only a pop song, but it’s the same sentiment that led the Church to hammer the penises off of classical sculpture; that inspired Islam to blow up Buddhas; that has sects fighting over who owns which piece of rock in Jerusalem; that leads cults to burn books and records. They must pretend that dissent not only does not exist at all, but never existed any where at any time.

At this time of year, there are choirs singing great pieces of Christian music everywhere, and there are atheists raising their voices to sing the St Matthew Passion or Messiah — and you don’t hear them demanding that the Vox Christi be silenced or mention of God be expurgated.

Why? Because we can celebrate the music without having to pretend that Bach and Handel were atheists. Because we aren’t afraid.

But Christians are. I regard them with the contempt I reserve for all superstitious cowards.