A Little Ditty About Recent Events

ffffffI became an atheist, and joined in with others, because I wanted to belong to a Community of Reason. This current (and lengthy past!) shit I see going on with the flaming, mob targeting, jargon-slinging, code-wording, character assassination, labeling and pigeonholing — I hate being even on the edges of it, because the people doing it are as stupid and evil in their own way as the righty-religious community I escaped from. Waaaaay too many of the people I once thought were members of my Community of Reason are instead flaming, vicious assholes, working to hurt or silence people — sometimes relative innocents — for their own nasty pleasure. Or for blog hits (money), which is just as bad.

Something I’ve said many times: “Under the lash of strong emotion, humans become less intelligent.” I’ve characterized Fox News as Entertainment of Outrage, and I despise them for it, for controlling and parasitizing their audience with constant high-emotion stories that do nothing but ramp up the fear, anger and hate, leaving their viewers, stuck on a constant Fox diet, unable to reason even at very simple levels.

But in the past year or so, I’ve realized that a lot of what gets projected at we liberals is the exact same thing — stories of outrages done to women, to the homeless, to black people, to kittens. Blogging — and blog commenting! — conducted with blaming and finger-pointing AT MEMBERS OF OUR OWN COMMUNITY, all delivered at the level of an outraged scream. We’re being poisoned with anger, not just against rightful targets of that anger, but against each other — to the point where too many of US (!) can no longer think rationally, or plan and conduct long-term, broad-scale campaigns to right things — and it’s being DONE to us by people we think are allies, but who are really just more parasites.

The end result of all this? We’re that bucket of crabs that pinch and push and fight EACH OTHER, while people operating at levels of power and influence and deadly action far above us are continuing to conduct wars, poison the planet, lie, cheat, steal, murder, etc. … unimpeded.

Beta Culture: Being Grownups on Planet Earth

Cowboy DadFor most of the years I knew him, I unconsciously thought of my Cowboy Dad as “the grownup” in my life. Since he died, I’ve realized there were several side-effects of thinking that. One is that I cheated him out of all the years of ME being a grownup, so that we could be … well, friendly equals, fellow MEN together. The other is that I cheated myself out of all those years of me being a grownup. All the endeavors and relationships in my life were approached in some degree of a childish/childlike manner.

None of this was conscious, or by decision. It was something that simply appeared in my attitudes and behavior. If I had stated it in words, it would’ve come out to something like “It’s safe for me to be childish. I can be irresponsible. I can drift, I can put off critical decisions. I can party, I can laze around and not think about my present situation, or my future. If I screw up, he will rescue me. I can safely not worry too much about the people around me, or the larger world, because the Old Man is handling all that.”

I think a lot about religion and the effects it has on people and cultures, and I think my experience of “relating to the grownup as a child” is directly applicable to the experience of people in religion. I doubt we can imagine how much we’ve lost, how much Planet Earth has lost, by us feeling free to not be conscious adults.

In my case, I can’t place the entire blame on myself. I came into our relationship fairly  broken, and I needed the comfort and guidance, the there-for-you-ness, a real parent could provide. But that doesn’t mean the results were any less real, any less damaging.

In the case of we humans, I suppose I can’t place the entire blame there, either. As a species, we grew up without parents or wise guidance of any sort. We stumbled along figuring out things as we went, repeatedly falling back into mistakes and breaking ourselves and the world around us.

But the cost has been incalculable, and it’s something we – and our planet – can’t afford anymore.

A month or so after my Dad died, I woke up one day to the realization “Oh gosh, I have to be a grownup now.” It was a little bit scary, but mostly it was … strength. Determination. A little bit of steel injected into my being with the understanding that I could handle whatever happened, because that’s what grownups do. I understood that I had to relate to my own life and the world around me in an entirely new, entirely responsible way. And I was truly okay with that.

For any individual recovering from religion, I have to believe you have that same epiphany. After your god “dies,” you realize you have to be an adult. You have to deal with the reality of your own life, and the lives of those close to you, and even larger matters out in the world around you. But you also understand that you CAN. You — along with others like you — take each situation into your hands and change it for the better. Or you accept the fact of a bad situation and deal realistically with its cost. Because that’s what grownups do.

As an entire civilization, we’re nowhere near the point of waking up as grownups. Our world full of contentedly religious, drunkenly mystical, calmly unconcerned juveniles is this hapless, directionless child, fumbling around and breaking things, breaking each other and the world we live in, and thinking it’s all okay, because our Parent is dealing with all the hard stuff and picking up the clutter of each destructive act.

I think even most atheists inherit this mindset, and fail to notice they have it. We grow up in the culture that thinks this way, and it’s so deeply embedded we never get around to seeing it, or peeling it out of our own heads.

To all those soft-serve atheists who think we should just live and let live, that atheism will grow or not as events develop, and that meanwhile it’s all good …

I think you have no idea how deadly dangerous is the situation we live within. No idea how damaging it is to let people continue to believe in gods, and stay children. No idea what we’ve DONE, and continue to do, and will soon do.

It’s why I’m not just an atheist, but an anti-theist.

In the same way you have to cure disease in order to be well, we have to cure ourselves of religion, of the childishness of our race, in order to be grownups. In order to live and be well on Planet Earth, in order that the lot of us can wake up and see that we have to be adults now — in order to SURVIVE — our gods have to die.

We have to kill them.

Zoning Out on Liberal vs. Conservative Issues

Con vs LibI woke up this morning with this diagram in my head.

I tinkered it up in Illustrator later. Probably could have chosen brighter colors or a better layout, but I got tired of messing with it. You may have to click-and-embiggen it to see all the details.

Especially note that the center vertical bar is labeled to indicate a gradation from Greater Factual Information (More Informed) at the top to Lesser Factual Information (More Ignorant) at the bottom, whereas the center section is labeled (along the bottom) for Lesser Emotion, while the left and right borders indicate More Emotion. In other words, in both the Conservative and Liberal worldviews, you can be more or less informed about issues, and more or less emotional and excitable about them. There are important social and political consequences that flow out of positions in each area of the graphic.

This is based on a great deal of thinking I’ve been doing lately — reflected in several recent posts — about liberal and conservative approaches to certain issues.

Mainly in this diagram, I was thinking that there’s that obvious place (lower left) on the conservative side of the line where people are both uninformed and excitable, the crazies and teabaggers and gunny Christian patriots who form the natural audience of FOX News.

Then there’s that zone up above and to the right of the Foxbaggers, a Platonic Ideal conceptual territory where rational people — Reasoning Beings — can be equally well-informed, and equally calm about certain issues, and yet still trend either conservative or liberal, according to their own personal history and experience. It is in this (sadly not-well-populated) zone that liberal-trending and conservative-trending people can meet and discuss issues calmly, and possibly reach compromise positions.

Interestingly, this is also a place where liberal people who disagree with other liberal people can meet and calmly discuss issues. On the conservative side, conservative-conservative meetings could conceivably take place to iron out differences, but that appears to be politically impossible right at the moment.

Low down on the right, there’s that other space that’s been bringing itself to my attention in recent months, the zone of the strongly liberal, excitable “OMG Screamers.” These people, with whom I would otherwise identify as fellow liberals, have begun to fall outside my fellow feeling because they react with great emotion but little thought. More than once I’ve found myself outside the apparent liberal mainstream on issues such as feminism, race relations, the homeless —  hell, even pit bulls.

I’m much in favor of marijuana legalization, for instance, but I don’t kid myself that young people smoking pot is some sort of wonderful positive end-result. I got into a discussion about feminism a year or so back in which one of the participants declared that no male, however staunchly in favor of women’s rights he might be,  should ever attempt to explain feminism to another man unless a woman was present. Despite my strong feelings about women’s rights, safety and choice, that (and a steady flow of other ridiculous assertions) persuaded me to drop out of the feminist (but not the women’s rights) conversation.

And yet I’m not, and never will be, a conservative. What I am is someone who insists on being liberal — compassionate, thoughtful, open-minded, commitedly non-religious — while at the same time paying close attention to the broader array of facts of each issue, facts that can sometimes lead you to disagree with a loud-voiced, knee-jerk mainstream.

There are people on my side of the line who believe you cannot be both liberal and wrong. Yet if you’re misinformed, if you fail to understand the entire situation, you can be not only wrong but malignantly wrong.

In addition, I’ve become aware — and I hope you have too — that quite a lot of the stuff projected at the liberal audience is designed to excite powerful emotions, while at the same time deliberately (or apparently so) failing to inform us of the full facts of each issue. I don’t like being manipulated in this way. I especially don’t like being herded to and fro by my own team.

When the manipulation comes at me from the conservative side, I can see it and defend myself by fact-checking, but when it comes at me from the liberal side, not only am I less apt to fact-check, if I DO fact-check and then disagree, even slightly, the price of that disagreement can often be a fairly nasty attack or dismissal from my own people.

There’s an over-dramatic act of line-drawing that happens in the presence of the OMG Screamers, where if you disagree with them even slightly, you get shoved over into the Conservative category and accused of hating the downtrodden of whatever issue is under discussion. This is an exact mirror of the same situation on the conservative side of the line, where, for instance, if you disagree about people with known mental illness being allowed to open-carry assault weapons, you’re a commie-fag-hater-of-America and probably deserve to die.

But obviously you can disagree with others around you on issues, in greater or lesser degree,  and yet still be arguing from within the same philosophical ballpark. Equally obviously, and in my view necessarily, you can disagree with people on details and yet still see them as allies in the larger struggle.

abortion restrictionsAs a for-instance, this graphic detailing U.S. states that have enacted strong anti-abortion legislation over the past 14 years shows a clear loss of ground for “our” side. We’re winning on gay marriage and marijuana legislation, but losing dramatically on reproductive rights, which has the potential to cause vastly more actual misery for women — but also for men, children and families. Not to mention the real social and economic cost of an unavoidable rise in numbers of unplanned or unwanted births.

Comparing the progressive loss of reproductive rights to catcalling, another subject dear to feminist hearts, one of them strikes me as something that should energize the concern of every reasonable person, the other — which probably received a thousand times more attention through the recent catcalling video — seems a minor issue designed to spur directionless outrage.

I think we liberals have to do a better job of THINKING about our issues, not only picking our battles but considering each issue and event carefully to see if we actually support the apparent mainstream position. More than anything, we owe it to our individual selves to be informed — well-informed — on any issue that we choose to speak out on.

I would much rather see myself up there in the company of Reasoning Beings than down in the region of the OMG Screamers, however effortlessly teamlike that second choice might feel.

Thoughts on “Privilege”

privilege copyI’ve been hearing a lot about “privilege” lately, and I confess I continue to be disturbed by the subject, and how it is most often applied.

I recognize that I have ADVANTAGES over some other people. For instance, I have the advantage that I’m healthy enough to donate blood, strong enough to carry a neighbor’s groceries, perseverant enough to hold a job, bright enough to learn fresh skills or read a book in a day, creative enough to come up with novel ideas and think about things in new ways.

But I also have certain DISadvantages. I never finished college. I’m broke pretty much all the time. I’m abnormally short for a man. I’m 62, and have yet to accomplish some of the things I wanted to do. Considering my age and financial situation, I will probably never get to retire. I’m mostly deaf in one ear. I have no family, and only a few close friends. I’ve always lived on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

When I’m told I’m PRIVILEGED — usually because I’m Caucasian and male — I can’t help but hear it as an accusation, and a rather counterproductive one. Privilege is something you’re supposed to feel guilty about, as if the good stuff you enjoy through either birth or hard work is directly responsible for the crushing and disadvantaging of others. If you’re privileged, it’s your FAULT that Kelly Smith is sick, or handicapped, or female, or black, or homeless. Apparently the theory is that the guilt will motivate you to pitch in and help.

One of the most obvious flaws in the thing is that there’s no bottom end to it. If you have ANYTHING, you can be accused of privilege … compared to the person poorer and more wretched. The man with two teeth is PRIVILEGED over the man with only one. It also seems to me that the blithe accusation usually takes no notice that those of us gathered here near the common bottom, 50 levels below those with the REAL wealth and power, just aren’t all that privileged.

I’m still thinking about this, but it seems to me there’s something very ->Christian<- in the idea that guilt will make someone feel expansive and generous. My experience of it is that guilt usually constricts you, makes you small and fearful, less connected rather than more. You’re LESS likely to listen to those flinging guilt at you, more likely to withdraw and look for people who appreciate and accept you. I know I have liked less every person who’s ever said to me that I was PRIVILEGED. I have sensed blame and hatred and exclusion from them, rather than good will and desire to work at common goals.

I think the whole idea of pointing out “privilege,” throwing it out as an accusation, is a failed strategy. I don’t see how it even CAN work. It might help the accuser feel good to have someone to blame for some particular social ill (or all of them), but it won’t enlist people — people at their strongest, proudest, most confident and creative — in a good-willed effort to better our common condition.

My suggestion is that we all think before we sling out the too-easy accusation of “privilege.” Think about what we really hope to accomplish.

If it’s having someone to blame and hate, I don’t see that as a useful goal. Nor do I see people taking this approach as good partners in the larger battle.

Targeting people who might otherwise be allies — driving them away or smallifying them with guilt and shame — is strategically self-defeating.

 

 

FORT LAUDERDALE!!! HATES!!! THE HOMELESS!!! — Part 2

conspiracyLet me toss some sentences at you.

I’M GOING TO HIT YOU.
BOB HATES THE HOMELESS.
JOHN KILLED THOUSANDS.
KARL ROVE SUCKS DICK.

But what if the real sentences, the complete sentences, were these?

I’M GOING TO HIT YOU … up for a favor.
BOB HATES THE HOMELESS … policy in this town.
JOHN KILLED THOUSANDS … of hours playing videos games.
KARL ROVE SUCKS DICK … Cheney into his arguments every time.

I sort of cheated you with those half-sentences, didn’t I? If each of those pieces was a factual news item, and I told you half the story like this, you’d trust me less, wouldn’t you? Because you’d know, on some level, that I had done something to you deliberately. If you sat and thought about it, you’d realize I’d done THREE things to you.

1) I told you half the story.

2) In telling you half the story, I got you to accept something that was not simply  incomplete, but perfectly false.

3) In telling you half the story and getting you to believe something false, I manipulated your emotions, making you angry, disturbed, or otherwise outraged, with messages of violence, hate, murder and sexual innuendo (*).

Stated as they are, each half-sentence leads you deliberately in a certain direction, not only misleading you but manipulating you.

Those sentences could extend into paragraphs, whole lengthy articles or televised “news” pieces, each one of which could lead you in a certain direction, each of which could cause you to reach conclusions which were not only divorced from the true story, but that made you angry, furious, dismayed.

But why would anybody do that to you?

Okay, you know that Fox News is a type of entertainment, right? It broadcasts entertaining fictions for well over half of its content. Only instead of making viewers happy and content – or, you know, INFORMING them about things they need to know –  their type of entertainment makes people angry, scared and unhappy.

But hey, no biggie, right? Their audience is those right-leaning, brainless Teabaggers. Sure, we have to deal with the way they vote and stuff, but at least it’s not US out there sucking up those manipulative lies.

But let’s talk about Fox News for a second. Why do you suppose they exist? They exist to do what they do, don’t they? They get large number of people to believe certain things – lies – and THEY MAKE THEM ANGRY ABOUT IT.

And they keep them angry and scared, keep them in a state of mind in which it is very difficult to think objectively about things. Believing what they’re being fed, trusting that this reputable person on TV or radio has done the research, they do almost no fact-checking to verify or disprove what they’re being told.

Those people are controlled. They’re puppets. They are sheep who run to and fro at the will of the bosses who own and control Fox News and other such outlets – people who know exactly what they’re doing, and are masters at it.

Do you believe that? Do you really believe it? Then here’s what you believe: There is a CONSPIRACY to brainwash conservative voters.

Wait … really? You really believe in a conspiracy? You? Haw, haw, haw! You’re a CONSPIRACY THEORIST!! Haw, haw, haw!

Except in this case it’s no theory, is it? The lies and half-truths and false stories happen on Fox News, all the damned time. If you watch it over a period of time, it will be impossible to conclude anything but that it’s deliberate, and part of a larger campaign. Powerful right-wingers, billionaires and GOP officials, hugely and shamelessly MANIPULATE their own conservative people with half-truths, falsehoods and deliberate, breathtaking lies. Through a concerted, planned effort, an advertising campaign that runs 24/7 on conservative media, and so closely coordinated that scores of different voices use the same words and slogans in each and every day.

Are there a handful of fat cigar-smoking billionaires who meet in an exclusive resort and decide what lies are going to be told on-air to their viewers and followers? You want to really hope not, don’t you? But however it happens, the effect is the same as if they did. They conspire to keep their conservative audience afraid, angry, confused and CONTROLLED.

Where else have we seen something like that?

I’ll suggest the Catholic Church is exactly that sort of creature. If the RCC didn’t originate it, they certainly perfected the successful model that allows large numbers of people to be frightened into obedience, angered into wars, and outraged into … anything. Betraying neighbors into torture and witch trials. Looking away when priests molest children. Opposing their own best interests, and the best interests of their families and loved ones. And the funny thing is, in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, there ARE a handful of what amounts to fat, cigar-smoking string-pullers who meet in an exclusive resort – the Vatican – and decide things for their billions of followers.

You think what happened with all those molested children, where the church silenced or shamed or paid people off, in recent history but also for generations prior, is some sort of clumsy accident? Did it just sort of happen that almost nobody went to jail? That all those molester-priests retired safe and happy on comfortable pensions?

I can’t even begin to believe that the whole response to the situation wasn’t some sort of coordinated, deliberate campaign, directed from the top office at the Vatican itself. It just worked too well, while so many of us looked on in disbelief.

But all this is not really my main point. It’s a preface to this other thing:

I’ve been worried for some time at how my own people are falling for a sort of mob hysteria, something that makes THEM afraid, angry, confused and controlled. What if we on the Left are just as susceptible to half-truths, lies and manipulative emotional stories?

The Fort Lauderdale story is just one instance, but it seems there are one or more stories every day that sends me – and a lot of others like me over here on the left – into an instant, all-consuming emotional state that is interested in reacting rather than fact-checking and thinking.

Wait, WE are subject to manipulation? No way! We’re the People of Reason! We THINK about stuff, we LOOK INTO stuff! And besides, who would manipulate us? That’s crazy talk!

There’s plenty to be angry and upset about, I’d be the first to tell you. But at the same time, I worry that we’re focusing on silly side-stories, things deliberately created for us, a sort of red-meat Outrage Bait cast in our direction every day to drum up audience.

The truth is, we’re humans, no less susceptible to this sort of stuff than the winger-sheep on the right.

That’s something worth thinking about, all by itself.

And even though there’s no obvious collection of billionaires meeting and deciding which way to herd us today, just the deliberate effort to increase views or hits or clicks can create substantial effects all on its own. (Among bloggers, by the way, if you can keep readers excited / enraged /engaged, it translates into money. I know a few who specialize in stoking constant outrage; whether that’s their main mission or a side-goal to their main mission, I couldn’t say.)

I do think there are forces interested in maintaining the status quo, in keeping reasoning people from thinking very deeply about so much that’s happening, but I can’t say it’s something central.

My own approach, in dealing with outrage stories, is to look past the anger I feel, to see if each story or situation I come across feels too pat, too perfectly outrageous, to be real, or complete. To research it if I can, and to reach my own conclusions.

This can be surprisingly hard to do, especially when some of the people you ordinarily trust are caught up in their own emotional storm, and don’t want you to question or discuss anything beyond their own quick conclusions. I’ve gotten flamed more than once – by my own people – while trying to expand a conversation into areas I felt were ignored.

I suspect this very idea right here, that liberals and science-minded people are susceptible to manipulation, that it happens all the time and that most of us probably seldom even notice, and that this is a bad thing to allow to continue, is going to spark ridicule rather than thought.

Because hey. It’s US.

.

.

(*) Okay, I’ll admit “Karl Rove Sucks Dick” isn’t really ‘innuendo’ – it’s more a flat-out accusation. I still wonder … Remember when that mysterious guy Jeff Gannon got admitted to White House press briefings, and he tossed up those softball questions for Bush and the press secretary? And it turned out he was a buff-bodied gay male escort? SOMEONE got that guy a press pass, and entry past the Secret Service. I’m not the only one who suspected it was Karl Rove, and done for Rove’s own personal reasons as much as public ones. “Secret Service Records appear to show that he checked in, but never checked out on many occasions, and visited the White House on several days during which no press conference or other press events were held.” ~ Wikipedia  The story vanished, and the supposed left-wing media let it, when it should have been major front page national news. But hey, there’s no such thing as a conspiracy.

 

The Wrong Answer on Race

race copyThis is my second Charles Barkley-inspired post. You can find the first one here – Assholes and the Umbrella of Safety – but I’ll echo the quote from that first one:

When asked about a report that Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson isn’t seen as “black enough” by some of his teammates, the NBA Hall of Famer went on a rant about how “unintelligent” black people believe they have to hold successful African-Americans back.

“For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you’re not black enough,” he said in an interview on CBS Philadelphia 94 WIP’s “Afternoons with Anthony Gargano and Rob Ellis.” “If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don’t break the law, you’re not a good black person.”

 

Wrong answers persist.  When we “learn” something, either a folk belief at our mother’s knee or a fact from a cutting-edge scientific experiment, we hold onto it. We repeat it to others. We automatically defend it against those who question it. And we pass it on, sometimes for generations. (Achoo! ~Bless you!)

We like to think we’re beyond hanging onto silly stories, wrong answers, but I think we’re still deeply immersed in it. The only way we get beyond such wrong answers is to actively work to disprove them, and that’s not something we’re willing to do with any speed.

Here’s something that seems silly and wrong to me: Our understanding of race.

Let me start explaining that by talking about something else:

Culture

I drive a van for a rehab facility, and I rub shoulders daily with drug and alcohol abusers.

Disclaimer: I learned quickly that most of the people I deal are not the cartoon drug fiends most of us would imagine, but rather ordinary, average people with this … problem. A housewife with anxiety issues finds herself dependent on Xanax. A middle-aged professional electrician develops a drinking problem that begins to affect his work. A young man has a motorcycle accident, and by the time he’s recovered, is addicted to painkillers. A suburban middle-class teenager dares to try heroin with friends, and soon finds himself with a $300 a week habit.

But among this population of drug users, I occasionally meet up with some who are NOT just “ordinary average people.” Some of them are very different from anything in my experience.

Making conversation with a client one time, I asked what he did for a living. He waved the question off with casual disdain. “Oh, I’ve never worked a day in my life.” He looked to be in his 40s. I kept any reaction to myself, but inside I was gasping. How can you not work? Yes, he might have had some invisible condition, mental or physical, that prevented him from working, but the dismissive reaction to the IDEA of having a job was something I’d never come across.

A 23-year-old man shared that he had 5 children. “How many kids do you have?” he asked me. “None!” I said, to his astonishment. “How can you not have any kids??”  I joked “Well, you used up my share.” Another client casually confided that he had 12 children by three women, none of whom he married, and none of whom – kids or women either one – he lived with.

On one trip up from New York City, I stopped at a roadside rest stop to give the clients a bathroom break. The rest stop had a McDonald’s, one of those with the drink fountain out where customers can serve themselves. I watched one of the clients, a young woman, beg a soda cup from the girl at the counter, so she could get some water. The counter girl gave her one of the small water cups at first, but the client asked for a larger one. “Oh, please, can I get one of the bigger cups? Because I’m really thirsty and I can only be here a few minutes!”

Back in the van, I listened to her telling the tale of how she filled the cup up with ice and soda, and the entire group had a big laugh at how she’d gotten a free soda.

This wasn’t a huge crime, just considering the value of the property involved. The cost of the cup and soda – mostly water and sugar, after all – was probably a few pennies.

But it was a pretty profound moral crime, in my view, in that one person did a generous, compassionate act for another, and that other instantaneously and automatically repaid the generosity with theft. And then laughed about it, and encouraged others to laugh. She could conceivably have gotten the counter girl fired.

To put it in blunter terms, she fucked over somebody who did her a favor, and this was not only okay with her, it was FUNNY.

Culture vs. Race

Can you tell the race of any of the people in these stories? No, you can’t.

If you come from the American South as I do – a place and a culture that has deeply entrenched views about race – the unmarried man with 12 kids will probably map out to “black man” in your head, but in fact there is nothing in the story – or in real life – that says it must be.

The color of any of the people described above is irrelevant to the REAL difference between them and me. The real difference is one of culture. Their cultures teach them certain values that are different from the values of my culture, or any culture I’ve lived in.

It’s a common social trope that all cultures are equally to be respected, but I don’t feel that way at all. For instance: Any culture that says women should not have full rights and equality with men (and vice versa), that’s an inferior culture, in my view.

The young woman who laughed about the free soda, I can say without doubt that she comes not just from a different culture, but a lesser culture, a culture that does not deserve equal respect. Any culture that encourages casual theft, especially from someone who helps you, is inferior to my culture, which says you NEVER do that. If you disagree, I think you’re just wrong, and it drastically lowers my respect for you.

I say “culture” in these cases rather than individual values for two reasons: One, the value demonstrated was casual and confident, obviously something of long familiarity and without any qualms of conscience. And two, even if I’m misjudging the individuals described, I’ve been in this business long enough to know the values demonstrated are out there in a cultural sense. They are common among large numbers of people, accepted and even admired, and definitely propagated – taught – from one person to another. There IS a culture of “fuck over other people and laugh about it” out there.

Let me toss another issue of culture at you. When famine in Ireland sent great numbers of Irish immigrants swarming to the United States, their reception was not uniformly warm. I’ve seen pictures of window signs that said “Help Wanted – No Irish Need Apply.”

Here’s British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli from 1836 :

The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.

Anyone steeped in the idea of prejudice based solely on race would find anti-Irish sentiment mystifying. Reading about it in 8th grade World History, I remember wondering “How could anyone not like Irish people? They’re nice. Besides, how could you even tell they were Irish? They’re just another type of white people, aren’t they?”

The answer must be that you could tell they were Irish because of their culture. Other than red hair or the occasional wearing of green, we the U.S. today have no idea whether someone is Irish, but back then it must have been blatantly obvious, and in ways more profound than mere accent. Work habits, dress, accent, religion, family size, the part of town they lived in, ‘clannish broils’ … plenty of indicators that made it easy to pick them out from the larger population of white people, and discriminate against them because of it. White skin and all, you could probably have spotted an Irishman, or an Irish family, a block away.

What was different about them? Culture.

What changed so that they are today invisible in the social larger pool? Culture. They gradually adapted to the American overculture – they acculturated – and became ordinary Americans.

Race

Here’s something I know about me: I’m not white. I’m not. I’m pink and tan and even a little bit blue and sort-of-yellowish in places. My ancestry is mostly (there was this family story) or wholly Caucasian, but I’m not “white.”

In fact, there are no “white” people. (If you bring up mimes, I’ll have to hurt you.) There just aren’t. NONE OF US IS WHITE.

Likewise, I doubt there are any “black” people. There are a lot of different shades of brown, is what there are. NONE OF US IS BLACK.

Look at the “black” people around you, and note the variety of skin tones. Line up a random bunch of humans from New York City and you’ll notice that some of the “black” people are lighter-skinned than some of the “white” people. (And yes, I know I’m not the first to point this out; hopefully you’ll hear it here without the smug tone often associated with it.)

In deference to the difficulty of relating to skin color, plenty of people would talk about Black Culture rather than just Black People. But they’d still likely be talking solely about black people, in that black culture relates to “white” people only in the broad sense of culture and not in the specific sense of individuals. No matter how many “black” cultural attributes a “white” kid adopts, he never becomes “black” … to either side of the color divide. The closest he might come is the unflattering “wigger.” If he checked “Black” on the Race question on some official form – say to get an affirmative-action-based scholarship – he might even face prosecution.

In common usage, “black” is therefore probably not culture. It is color. Race.

And yet, as I said before, there aren’t any black people. Even scientists agree: “Race” does not exist in any definable sense. It’s a pleasant – or unpleasant – social fantasy.

What we’re really doing when we discuss race is attempting to figure out which of the people around us are “my people” and which are “those people.” But the answer to the question of how you do that is CULTURE. Not race. Not color. “My people” – your people – are the ones who share some large part of your values, customs, aspirations and view of life.

There are plenty of “ black” people with whom I have more in common than certain “white” people. Considering the fact that I dropped out of college and have done blue collar work most of my life, any particular “black” man stands a chance of being my better in education and career, income and sophistication. I not only consider an educated “black” man or woman my equal, I go farther in that I know any social inequality between us is likely because *I* don’t measure up to THEM. If I ever managed to meet them, I doubt I would offer a high-five or a fist bump to Barack Obama, Neil deGrasse Tyson or Morgan Freeman. Lurking in my mind is the feeling that I don’t deserve to be taking up the time of these accomplished, admirable men.

And yet I consider them “my” people … because self-respect, knowledge, achievement, honesty, decency, a reverence for reason and science, so many other social and personal traits of they and the people like them, are what my people – the sociocultural group I most identify with – does.

My Somewhat Sloppy Conclusion

There should be a punchy ending here that ties up what I’m saying into one simple, understandable package. But I’m finding it difficult to end this, because … well:

One of the ways I write is to flow with my main theme along the path that maps itself out before me as I write, but to fairly often space down far below the main body of text and add in side thoughts as they occur to me. Later I read through them and see if they fit into the main body, and then try to insert them where they seem to go.

But in thinking about this subject – race, color and culture – it continues to open out in front of me, illuminating and disturbing me at every turn. I realize no single essay can cover the subject. Considering the wrong answer we’ve been living with, and the cost to everybody suffering under it for so long, it’s obvious that a book – or a lifetime – would be too short to deal with it fairly.

There is an infinite amount more that could be said.  (And I know it. I hope the fact that I’m only saying this little bit of it appears to readers more as “incomplete” than as “wrong.” In thinking about this huge subject, you have to start somewhere, and this was my Somewhere.)

For instance:

With the majority of us still keying on skin color, every “black” person in America lives in a state of siege – constant mental and sometimes even physical abuse – by “white” people. It involves cops and courts at the extreme end, but the near end includes co-workers, store clerks, teachers, government, even people just walking by on the sidewalk … and hundreds of things I know I can’t even imagine.

There has to be an entire personality-shaping stage every “black” kid goes through, a minute-to-minute, years-long dismay that amounts to “What the fuck have I done to deserve this?”

Surviving that and staying sane is … well, it’s not something I think I would have gotten through. Pondering it, I have to wonder if pretty much ALL of the “black” people I know aren’t better people than I am. Like human icebergs, I see only the top part of them – the ordinary guy / nice lady – but underneath is an immense mass of forbearance and patience and strength of character that I never had to develop, making me a simple-minded lightweight in comparison.

And for instance:

This generational siege has been a powerful shaper of a black culture (notice I say “a” and not “the”), such that one key attribute of it is the understandable Not White: “If they’re going to treat us like enemies, fuck it, we’re going to BE enemies – to every value they hold.”

Barkley and others like him – trying to live their lives as best they can – suffer not only the siege from the “white” side of the thing, but this other siege from that “black” side: “After all this has cost us, how can you let yourself be one of THEM? How can you not be Not White?”

Paraphrasing Barkley, those who catch crap for not being “black enough” have greater values and aspirations than mere blackness, the desire to operate on a broader social landscape than that bounded by skin color, or a culture based on it. Barkley asserts that the stereotypical and limiting street culture can’t work for him, nor for so many others who want a larger landscape on which to live their lives. In his success, he’s saying he won’t be limited by “white” people, but he’s also saying he won’t be limited by “black” ones.

In the end, my only conclusion is that “black” and “white” are huge mistakes. EVERY discussion of race starts from this mistaken first principle. A racial view of the people around us is false, incomplete and damaging. What separates us, or joins us, is culture.

Culture is not race. It has nothing to do with race. Race is something you’re born with, culture is something you DO. It’s that body of values, attitudes and behaviors you were either taught as a child or adopted somewhere along the way and now practice in daily life.

Realizing all this has been a final illumination for me in how to think about and treat other people. Having grown up in the Deep South and learned racism from my earliest conscious moment, it’s taken me way, way too long to get to the point where I begin to be able to see people as people, and not as races or colors. I like to think I’m there at last.

One more side issue comes to mind, something that feels both disturbing to realize and necessary to say:

There is a ruthless fairness within giving up the idea of race, something that argues against my staunch liberal tendency to believe that in every disagreement between a “black” person and a “white” one, it must be the “white” one who is in the wrong, that in every news story of “black man and cops,” it must be the cops who are the source of the problem.

Instead, it turns out I’m going to have to THINK about every situation and instance, to evaluate the thing based on known facts, and not racial sway. (Without, of course, losing sight of the fact that plenty of “white” people and cops – and the system they serve – really can be viciously racist.)

Hopefully I now have one more good mental tool for doing that.

Assholes and the Umbrella of Safety

Retired NBA star Charles Barkley said something recently, something probably reported with the intention of shocking readers, but actually fairly tame, all things considered. Here:

When asked about a report that Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson isn’t seen as “black enough” by some of his teammates, the NBA Hall of Famer went on a rant about how “unintelligent” black people believe they have to hold successful African-Americans back.

“For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you’re not black enough,” he said in an interview on CBS Philadelphia 94 WIP’s “Afternoons with Anthony Gargano and Rob Ellis.” “If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don’t break the law, you’re not a good black person.”

I thought about this for several days, and two different ideas for blog posts came out of it. Here’s the first, addressing some part of what Barkley’s saying:

——————————-

Statistically, there must be a regularly-distributed concentration of assholes in the world, wouldn’t you say? (Of course, this is ignoring those philosophies and cultures that produce them in high concentrations as a matter of course.)

Oh, wait. I guess I need to define “asshole.” As I’m using it here, an asshole is a person who lives in his own little world and who really doesn’t give a shit what effect he has on others. A self-involved jerk, in other words.

There are assholes driving on the roads. Assholes riding motorcycles. Assholes in the theater flashing their cellphone screens while you’re trying to watch the movie. Assholes who park next to you at the gas station and leave their music blaring while they get out and go into the store. Assholes at your party. Assholes in public service. Assholes in the military. Asshole co-workers. Asshole employers. Asshole upstairs neighbors. Asshole parents and asshole kids departing the public park in a blizzard of left-behind trash. Asshole “friends” who borrow your stuff and break it, and then just hand it back to you as if it’s your responsibility. Assholes who inevitably show up on the ski slopes, in the stadium, and on the lake. Assholes sleeping through their own car alarms at 3 a.m. Assholes who call you late at night to try to sell you stuff. Assholes who spit on the sidewalk, or throw their sandwich wrapper and soda cup down in front of you.

Assholes in bars? Oh, yeah.

Assholes on the Internet? Oh hell yes.

Assholes in politics? Sweet Baby Jesus, YES!!

It is an observable fact that assholes can come from any demographic. A lot of us don’t want to admit it, but it’s true. I have met both religious and atheist assholes. Male assholes. Female assholes. French assholes, Mexican assholes, Arabic assholes. Handicapped assholes. Minority group assholes. Homeless assholes. Hell, I’ve met asshole dogs and cats.

(Possible exceptions: I have never met a Humanist asshole, or an Australian or New Zealander asshole. I have a hard time imagining the first; the second two may be an artifact of my limited experience.)

You can expect to meet them on a fairly regular basis. We all know that most people are NOT assholes. It’s just some people, some small percentage of larger society. And certain other people SOME of the time. (Who, me??)

But assholes exist, and we all know it.

Another thing, though, is that assholes get feedback that keep them somewhat in check. The police get called. Their girlfriends/boyfriends ditch them for someone nicer. They get publicly shamed. They get voted out. A little old lady shoots them the finger and they get laughed at. Their friends tell them to grow the hell up. They get their comeuppance on YouTube.

But then again, there are certain safe havens where they are protected. Where they almost never get called out.

I’m not talking about positions of wealth and power. Although those are certainly good insulators for assholes, they’re not impenetrable. Even rich, famous assholes can suffer if they go on long enough, if enough of their fan base catches on, if they make that one critical mistake the public can’t tolerate. And when they do fall, they get no sympathy. Everybody loves ‘just desserts’ in action.

The safe haven I’m thinking of occurs – disturbingly enough – in an atmosphere of social activism. There are assholes both among the downtrodden and among the champions of the downtrodden. And they have an umbrella of safety – our own caring and compassion – that protects them from being called out. The worst part is, they know it, and use it.

Think about this for a bit before you reject the idea. The fact is, it’s not something we’re comfortable admitting, even to ourselves in private. But don’t you really know of assholes who find safe haven in certain movements, or certain social situations, because nobody calls them out?

Ever met a black asshole? Someone that you didn’t dare say anything to – or about – because you were afraid you’d be called a racist?

Ever met a feminist asshole? Someone you didn’t dare confront because you knew you’d get attacked as a mansplaining woman-hater?

In both cases, I have. (And so has Barkley, but even he will get sniped at for saying something about it.)

Right now in your head, I’d bet you’re saying “But white people can be assholes too! And men are the worst assholes of all!”

I absolutely agree. But then again, at least in the social circles where I live and work, racist white assholes and misogynist men catch shit by the shovelful when they act out their assholiness. There is a LOT of backpressure on majority-group assholes.

By contrast, some time back I had a run-in with a Hasidic Jew who deliberately parked directly blocking the walkway into a highway rest stop. When I told him mildly there was an entire parking lot out there where everybody else was parking, his response was essentially “You’re only treating me like this because you hate Jews, you bastard!” In fact, he went one freaky-racist step farther by saying “Look at my face! If my face was black, you wouldn’t have said anything!”

Plenty of people walked around his car without complaining. But to me it looked like he was being a bully. Not a bully that would beat anybody up, but the small bully who makes people walk around him, just because he can. In short, an asshole. But an asshole with an umbrella of protection, the protection of the rest of us who didn’t dare look like Holocaust-loving monsters. The best I could muster at the moment was “You’re being rude and inconsiderate.”

Those of us in the liberal camp are so focused on the concept of “the downtrodden and disadvantaged” that we sometimes miss out on realizing that among the people we defend and campaign for, there are a certain number of assholes. Some of whom are there – who concentrate there, in numbers greater than in the general public – because they are SAFE.

And here’s the thing: Whatever movement they find shelter in, they weaken it. They USE the movement as cover for their own petty bullying, and even sociopathy. They create enemies for the movement – for the people who truly do deserve special caring and consideration – by turning people outside the movement, who can’t distinguish the few specific assholes from the larger downtrodden population, against it.

They also drag down those in that population who are working by their own efforts to overcome the problem. This is pretty much what Charles Barkley was saying.

You might argue that such people have reason to be offensive, that their treatment somehow justifies them being assholes. You might even be right. But you might also be helping to create that umbrella of protection that allows them to continue to operate. Regardless, we’re still left with the effect they have on everybody else, even others in their same demographic. If nothing else, this is reason enough to think about the fact that they exist. To SEE them, and what they do.

If you’re in the social justice movement – as I am – look around you. If you see one or more people who seem to be having a little too much fun busting on others, those who are working a little too hard at coming up with the perfect cutting remark, the most stinging put-down, the most vicious dismissive comeback, people who are putting in extra effort to create enemies rather than to create understanding and sympathy …

… you may be looking at assholes.

And you may be better off without them.

Processing Atheist Grief: Some Thoughts

blue roseI continue to think about death and grieving, coming up on three years after the passing of my Cowboy Dad (not a blood relative, but someone more special in my life than any of my real relatives). I occasionally have new ideas about the subject. Here’s a couple:

1) If you lose someone to age or illness …

Ask Yourself ‘What If?’

Consider the pain you’re in, the magnitude of it. Now imagine that you could go back in time and change the events of your life so that you’d never met that person. So that when they died, it would be just some stranger off in some distant place, dying a death that would have zero impact on your feelings.

Okay, here’s the big question:

Would you take that trip? Would you relieve yourself of the pain by erasing the entire experience of having them in your life? Would you rather never have known your son — your sister, your mom, your grandmother, your wife, your dad, your best friend — never have had them in your life for those years (or months!) … so you wouldn’t have to feel like this now?

If your answer is NO!!, as mine was, it’s because you know you wouldn’t trade a day of that too-brief togetherness, even for a lifetime’s freedom from grief. This pain is, in its left-handed way, a GOOD thing, a necessary thing, and shouldn’t be avoided.

Grief is love.

That’s what it is. Love, interrupted. Few of us would trade love for the tepid unconcern we feel for distant strangers.

2) On the other hand, if you lose someone suddenly, so that you don’t get to hear their final thoughts, or tell them yours …

Write a Letter

Not long back, I hit on the idea of writing a letter to my dad. I was thinking it would be cathartic in that I would get to say some things I’d thought of since his death, additional things I would like to have said to him in his final days. And I still intend to write that letter (and maybe some letters to OTHER departed friends), but meanwhile, when I started writing, it was this other letter, the one HE would have written to ME, that came out.

I discovered I really could write his letter. When you know someone so well through the familiarity of years of close attention and love, you can often tell what they might say on any subject. What sort of goodbye would he write to me? In part, it would be this:

Hank, thank you so much for being there in my last days. I can’t tell you how much it meant to me to open my eyes and see, not just a hospital and nurses, but somebody who loved me. And it was clear all those years, even when you were unhappy with me for not calling, that you really loved me. Dying is scary business, and it helped to have you there, talking to me and touching me, in my last hours and days. There can’t be many greater gifts to give a friend than to be by their side at the end, comforting and caring. I want you to know I heard everything you said, and it made those last days bearable, knowing I was loved so much by someone I cared about.

Just like you, I wish we’d had time for one more pack trip, one more fishing expedition, one more Whiskey Ditch, one more shot of Apricot Brandy. I saved up some jokes from the years we were apart, and I would have loved telling you one or two of them.

One of the best things ever to happen to me was meeting you, having you in my life all those years. Partner, I couldn’t have asked for a better heir to remember me and carry on with life in grand style.

I know you’ll do something wonderful with your life. I ask you to remember this: Find someone to love, find someone to love you, and live your life to the fullest. Have your adventures, make your life as full as you can of the things that only you can do. I know you have greatness in you, and the world needs you as your best self.

For whatever mistakes you feel you’ve made with me, I forgive you. None of that stuff ever really mattered to me. For the mistakes I made on my side, I hope you can forgive me.

I’ll close for now. Well, I guess I wish I’d done more with my life, but all in all, it wasn’t a bad one. I got to do the thing I loved, being a packer and wilderness guide, living in a place I loved, for 60 years and more. I met some wonderful people, and had my own adventures to be proud of. And it wasn’t such a bad end, was it? I wouldn’t have chosen this time to go out, but knowing I was going, at least I got to choose the way of it. Despite being in a hospital bed, I think I died with my boots on, as Louis L’Amour would have put it.

Hank, I wish I could always be there for you, but the best I can do is tell you that you were on my mind in all the years I knew you, and I thought nothing but the best of you.  In return, I hope you’ll remember me in all the good times we shared. You called them Golden Moments, and there were a lot of them between us. I hope you live a long time, finding all the happiness and success and adventure you deserve, making your own Golden Moments over the years to come.

You were one of the good things in my life, partner. Thank you for being my friend, my confidant, my audience. My Son.

Take care.

Dan

Final Notes

When it comes to dealing with death, we unbelievers are imagined to be at a disadvantage compared to believers. After all, having no Heaven to hold the spirits of our missing loved ones, we have to live with the constant grim reality of Real Death.

Probably even most of US believe that, on some level. But we stick to our guns, feeling that we’d rather experience this pain than live by lies.

The thing is, my own careful considerations about religion and its repercussions, over decades, has invariably shown that reality-based thinking is better. The chief reason always seems to be that religious thinking is just about 180 degrees opposite of reality.

Atheism itself, viewed through the lens of religion, looks like a hateful assault on all things good, a refusal to accept the glorious wonders of God’s Kingdom on Earth. But what it REALLY is, is the opposite. It’s a respect, a love, for true things and real people, unsullied by a harmful, petty fantasy. It’s the hope that the lives of everybody and everything can be made better, if we only claw our way out of the falsehood and begin to understand the way things really work.

Likewise, I think grief as an atheist is better than that same grief colored with a religious filter.  Far from being at a disadvantage, I sense that we atheists/unbelievers have great advantages over believers. The problem is, having had to exist in goddy culture that has stifled and stepped on non-religious thought for thousands of years, we don’t yet have clear ideas of what-all those advantages might be.

But we will. We’ll find them.

 

Reimagining the Conceptual Foundation of Atheism

The_ThinkerInevitably, in any discussion with those critical of atheism, you’ll hear “You can’t prove there’s no God, therefore atheism is not logically supportable.”

Here’s the counter: There’s this thought experiment we’ve been conducting for the past three centuries or so, the thought experiment of “What if everything works by completely natural laws and forces, with no capricious supernatural superbeings involved?”

It doesn’t matter whether or not the supernatural superbeings exist! We just decided to see what we could come up with if we assumed they didn’t. It was a trial run regarding a certain way of thinking.

That thought experiment, science, has paid off in practically everything you see around you. Not one object in my modern house, no part of our cellphones or computers or cars, nothing in modern medicine, depends on belief in gods for its existence, and in fact, could not have been created (and demonstrably was not created) by people operating solely on faith. It turns out that the thought experiment of science returned massive benefits, things never before seen, or possible, in the thousands of years before we tried it.

Atheism is this same type of thought experiment, a trial run of “IF WE ASSUME no gods exist … How would society look? How would government work? What would morality be like? How would we relate to each other? And … is it possible that by assuming this we might see the same massive benefits socially as we got scientifically?”

You don’t have to prove there’s no God to be an atheist. Atheism is a thought experiment, and every atheist — every person! — is perfectly justified in performing it. The goal of this thought experiment is not rock-solid proof of the non-existence of gods. In fact, that question is virtually irrelevant. The goal is to see what social and cultural benefits we can obtain from postulating that we live in a world devoid of mystical forces. A world where the things HUMANS do and think is the main deciding factor in eventual outcomes.

Just as it was with science, the result of this experiment might be off the charts of anything we’ve seen until now.

The Club Nobody Wants to Join

I’m an avid supporter of Grief Beyond Belief. Grappling with the death of a loved one — human or animal — is monstrously difficult, easily the most jarring event a person can ever undergo. Throwing religion into it, for someone who is NOT religious, only adds to the suffering.

Having a support network for grieving unbelievers is an absolute necessity, in my view. Anything less is, simply, cruel. But it’s a cruelty that’s gone unrecognized, unlamented by society at large. The goddy majority that can’t imagine a life without gods also can’t imagine reacting to life crises, or supporting those who are, without gods. They’ve either left us alone (rarely!), or intruded with fervent preaching — at the hospital, at the memorial service, in the days and weeks following — at a time when the last thing a grieving nonbeliever needs is More. Fucking. Preaching.

Intended or not, the message that blares out at us is “YOUR FEELINGS ARE NOTHING! STOP THIS WHINY GRIEVING AND BELIEVE IN JESUS AND GOD AND HEAVEN!”

Grief Beyond Belief is an alternative. A crucial NECESSARY place where unbelievers can express grief and share stories, where empathy and counseling can take place without the preaching. Where grieving unbelievers can feel visible rather than invisible.

I have a second, larger reason for supporting it, one that goes beyond my own experience of grief.

I think about atheism all the time. Not in the sense that I compulsively fixate on it, but in the sense that I try to understand what things would be like without religion. What our society, our language, our selves would be like.

I strongly suspect even fellow atheists/agnostics/humanists have little idea. We make the atheist journey as individuals and then rest content, most of us, in our own private mental freedom.  When it comes to envisioning an entire society free of religion, we have difficulty even thinking about it. We can’t imagine how different life might be if we cast off the social structures and viewpoints grown out of, and fertilized by, thousands of years of religiosity.

And yet … you have to believe it would be better, possibly vastly better, in pretty much every way. The difference between a majority of us “believing” a seductive falsehood and that same majority knowing true things has to be huge. It would change not only the structure of society, but our individual selves, in health-giving, life-affirming ways.

But in the same way my own unbelief took a good 20 years to mature, even if we flipped to an atheist majority today, a lot of the really good results would take time to develop. Possibly hundreds of years.

I wish we were at the far end of that journey. Instead, we’re here at the beginning. We have no idea what sorts of things we’ll discover along the way. But one of the things I hope we’ll find is that death and grief is only one aspect of a much larger view of life, and that taking this more realistic view of death and dying will transform all the rest of life in fantastically positive ways.

The transformation starts here :

________________________________________

Press Release

SECULAR GRIEF-SUPPORT NETWORK, GRIEF BEYOND BELIEF,
LAUNCHES WEBSITE

On Thursday, June 19th, secular grief support network Grief Beyond Belief will celebrate three years of providing comfort and community to bereaved nonbelievers with the launch of griefbeyondbelief.org, the internet’s first faith-free grief-support website,

Founded by school counselor Rebecca Hensler following the death of her son, Grief Beyond Belief has been operating on Facebook for three years, providing grieving atheists, Humanists and other Freethinkers with spaces in which to share compassion and advice without the uncomfortable intrusions of prayer and proselytizing.  From the page’s much-welcomed launch on Facebook in June 2011, to its surprising growth following glowing coverage in USA Today in Spring of 2012, to its expansion to a confidential Facebook support group the following fall, the community has continued to serve the growing secular population’s need for grief-support appropriate for those who do not believe in a higher power or an afterlife.

“When our Facebook Page reached ten thousand “likes” and our support group swelled to over a thousand members,” explains Hensler, “it became clear that it was time to expand to an independent website where we could provide additional resources for grieving nonbelievers.”

The website offers a number of features previously unavailable through Grief Beyond Belief’s Facebook-based presence, including:

  • The world’s largest collection of purely secular grief-related writing, videos, and podcasts, presented in a library of over 250 links sortable by topic or medium.
  • A directory of grief resources, including a growing list of secular and Humanist funeral officiants in over 25 US states and 4 countries.
  • A blog, which will feature links to newly published writing, news and other media related to secular grief as well as content written specifically for Grief Beyond Belief.
  • Interactive forums in which members can share thoughts, feelings and stories, seek and offer comfort and advice, and post tributes to the loved ones for whom they are grieving.

The forum feature also allows subgroups within the network to delve deeper into shared experiences, such as grieving while leaving religion, or losses in common, such as miscarriage or bereavement by suicide.

The evolution of Grief Beyond Belief from a Facebook-based support community to an independent website marks an important step in the progress of the secular support movement, a step that is not going unnoticed by leaders and opinion-makers in the secular world.

“I’m so glad Grief Beyond Belief is expanding into a website,” says Greta Christina, author of the newly released Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other,and Why. “The service they provide is so important, and now it’ll be much more accessible to a lot more people. The secular grief library and resource guide alone make the site invaluable. And with the website format, it’ll be much easier for grieving non-believers to talk with each other about specific issues they’re dealing with. It’s a big development.”

Sarah Morehead, the Executive Director of Recovering from Religion and American Atheists’ 2013 Atheist of the Year, agrees with Christina about the importance of Grief Beyond Belief’s mission.  “People experiencing the heartache and emotional trauma of loss need comfort, community, and acceptance…not conversion attempts.”

Morehead explains how Grief Beyond Belief fits into the larger movement to provide for the emotional needs of the secular community: “Recovering From Religion regularly refers people to Grief Beyond Belief and we see firsthand how much people appreciate a safe, secular, and caring place to deal with the challenging emotions related to the grieving process. Seeing the concept grow from a social media, grassroots effort to a cohesive resource center is truly fantastic, and we are tremendously proud to support and encourage them at every step.”

The website’s launch on June 19, 2014 has been over a year in the planning, as the project has depended on a small group of volunteers to design the site, collect and input links for the library, and gather contact information for the resource directory.  All the while, Hensler, her co-administrator, Nita Grigson, and a handful of moderators have continued to provide safe spaces for grieving nonbelievers on Faceboook and plan for the future of secular grief support.

“I know that the next step is to bring secular peer-to-peer grief support into the real world,” says Hensler.  “But for now, griefbeyondbelief.org is going to help a whole lot of people who are grieving without faith feel far less alone.”