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Yeah, About That “Atheism as Intellectual Luxury” Thing

So … THIS got written: Atheism is an intellectual luxury for the wealthy

It starts with the writer’s Reasoning Guy bona fides. An atheist at 16, Chris Arnade sneered at religion, even later becoming an actual scientist.

Three years later I did escape my town, eventually receiving a PhD in physics, and then working on Wall Street for 20 years. A life devoted to rational thought, a life devoted to numbers and clever arguments.

During that time I counted myself an atheist and nodded in agreement as a wave of atheistic fervor swept out of the scientific community and into the media, led by Richard Dawkins.

I saw some of myself in him: quick with arguments, uneasy with emotions, comfortable with logic, able to look at any ideology or any thought process and expose the inconsistencies. We all picked on the Bible, a tome cobbled together over hundreds of years that provides so many inconsistencies. It is the skinny 85lb (35.6kg) weakling for anyone looking to flex their scientific muscles.

And then this man of science and reason started photographing homeless people. Talking to them, he discovered they were all strong in their religious faith. Takeesha, Sonya, Eric, Sarah, Michael — decades on the streets as addicts and prostitutes, they know that God is with them, watching over them, keeping them together when nothing else will. According to Arnade, every crack house — in addition to its “needles, caps, lighters and crack pipes” — contains a Bible.

In these last three years, out from behind my computers, I have been reminded that life is not rational and that everyone makes mistakes. Or, in Biblical terms, we are all sinners.

We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don’t. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.

Yeah, about that.

I work peripherally with drug users and alcoholics, and I get to talk to a lot of them. Most of the ones I deal with are normal, everyday people who also happen to have this problem. Some are literal street people, hookers and hustlers and worse, others are family men and women with homes and careers. Some are even a bit upper crust, people flying high in life until they suffered auto or motorcycle accidents and got addicted to pain killers.

I’m always 100 percent careful to keep my opinions — of which I have few, because I know I have an 8-year-old’s knowledge of addiction, and I’m not qualified to draw conclusions with so little information — to myself.

But I’ve wondered more than once if this type of deep, deep faith has some direct connection to the addiction and hopelessness. If it’s not just another addiction, or at least an enabler of addiction. If multi-generational exposure to religious unreason, coupled with an equally senseless and abusive government approach to addiction, AND rehabilitation and treatment programs which perpetually emphasize the importance of religion, is what delivers families and individuals into these unimaginably harsh lives, cycling through years of drug use and rehab, drug use and rehab, on and on. I’ve wondered if people not taught to think, or taught NOT to think, are especially vulnerable. I strongly suspect they are.

But no, according to Arnade, this is all Richard Dawkins’ fault, that cold, inhuman, privileged sonofabitch.

I also see Richard Dawkins differently. I see him as a grown up version of that 16-year-old kid, proud of being smart, unable to understand why anyone would believe or think differently from himself. I see a person so removed from humanity and so removed from the ambiguity of life that he finds himself judging those who think differently.

I see someone doing what he claims to hate in others. Preaching from a selfish vantage point.

Judgmental pot, meet faith-based kettle.

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Atheist Christmas Present from William Lane Craig

Eye roll. Fox Snooze gives us William Lane Craig writing A Christmas gift for atheists – five reasons why God exists.

He starts out, annoyingly enough, with this:

For atheists, Christmas is a religious sham. For if God does not exist, then obviously Jesus’ birth cannot represent the incarnation of God in human history, which Christians celebrate at this time of year.

However, most atheists, in my experience, have no good reasons for their disbelief. Rather they’ve learned to simply repeat the slogan, “There’s no good evidence for God’s existence!”

I know that’s what I’ve been doing for the past 45 years or so. Because fuck thinking, right? Far easier to parrot what I’ve been told, repeating stock phrases, kneeling, singing hymns, counting the Rosary … oh, wait.

And by the way, the dismissive presentation of that “slogan”? It’s not exactly false, is it? There is no good evidence for the existence of a supernatural superbeing in the mold of the Christian God.

But then again, Christmas — the religious part of it, anyway — IS a religious sham, even to some Christians. Take this article from Good News, United Church of God’s online magazine: The Top 10 Reasons Why I Don’t Celebrate Christmas … some of which are: Christmas is nowhere mentioned in the Bible. Jesus wasn’t born on or near Dec. 25. The Christmas holiday is largely a recycled pagan celebration. And the cool one:  You can’t put Christ back into something He was never in.

But as a cultural celebration, Christmas is one of a category of fun mid-winter events (think Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, and at least 32 other Winter Solstice celebrations). I have fond memories of it as a kid, and fond feelings for it now. Sham or not, we can celebrate the hell out of it. Christians don’t own it. Christmas is not an item, it’s something people DO. And you can do it however it suits you.

I tend to think of it as Krismas, named after Kris Kringle, and my Nativity Scene would probably have a baby Skettymon cooing cutely from a large colander, but hey, the sentiment of joy and togetherness is there.

Back to Craig and his 5 reasons:

1.  God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe.
2.  God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe.
3.  God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.
4.  God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
5.  God can be personally known and experienced.

I am not well equipped to argue physics, nor is William Lane Craig. Items 4 and 5 seem so irrelevant to anything real they’re not worth answering. But I can argue with Craig’s craptastic conclusions in point 3:

Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

I doubt there are “objective” moral values. We’re sort of working our way toward it, aren’t we? Muddling along as best we can. For instance, we no longer care all that much about Exodus 20:4-6

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

Arrogant puffery. Such a god would be unworthy of worship, or even admiration, and every person reading this knows it … in perfect opposition to what it says in the sourcebook of Christianity. We no longer believe such stuff because we’re better than the Bible. Because our morals, at least in some things, have progressed in the past few thousand years. So much so that even Christians are now forced to ignore large parts of their own sourcebook.

But this was puffery written by PEOPLE (rather than gods) — humans who sought to control other humans with slippery arguments, subtle misdirection, and blatant lies.

Just as William Lane Craig does:

The good thing is that atheists tend to be very passionate people and want to believe in something. If they would only put aside the slogans for a moment and reexamine their worldview in light of the best philosophical, scientific, and historical evidence we have today, then they, too, would find Christmas worth celebrating!

 

 

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The Forcing of Bad Choices on Innocent Bystanders

I have a limited amount of respect for devout Muslims. Honestly, for any really religious people.

Probably pure arrogance on my part. If I peeled the attitude apart, somewhere inside there would be something like “Hey, I made it out of that hole. Why can’t they?”

Yet the emerging ethic in the atheist community seems to be that you don’t dislike the PEOPLE, you dislike the RELIGION. We want to see religion as a distinctly two-categoried thing, with victims in the pews and victimizers at the lectern (or, more likely, on the radio or TV screen). And you don’t want to go hatin’ on the victims. Hey, they’re already at a disadvantage, you know? Being victims and all.

But that seems a little naive to me. My experience was that the most energetic salesmen and enforcers of the thing weren’t the preachers at church or the stern-faced speakers down at Kingdom Hall. They were parents, aunts and uncles, cousins. It wasn’t the big people at church you had to watch out for, it was the little people at home.

If I had a nickel for every time my Wicked Stepfather told me what God wanted, or what God didn’t like, I’d have … well, a shitload of nickels. Certainly all the times in my adult life I’ve been castigated on some religious issue, it’s never been by an actual minister.

And it’s not just the things people say that matter, it’s what people do. If my religion/culture sanctions the killing of goats on the front lawn for an afternoon barbecue, that’s not a church event. But it’s still going to be visible, and disturbing, to the neighbors who don’t share my mores.

What makes me think of this is a story in PRI’s The World: For devout Muslim cabbies in New York City, parking tickets are the price of prayers

Roughly half of the city’s 40,000-odd cabbies are Muslims who hail from countries all over the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere — and a great number of the drivers are observant, praying five times a day. Which raises the question: How and where do these men on the move pray?

Answer: Anywhere. Everywhere.

Parking is the chief anxiety of every [observant Muslim] driver in New York. There are five daily windows for worship, some briefer than others. The prayer itself takes only 10 or 15 minutes to complete, but it must be done on time. Otherwise, it expires.

This is why religiously-committed cabbies will sometimes stop in front of hydrants, double park, triple park, forfeit fares and risk sizable tickets to stick to the day’s ritual schedule, especially on Fridays, when the most significant prayer of the week takes place.

If you’ve never been to New York City, I can tell you a great deal of the experience is the nightmare of traffic. And parking. Or rather, no parking. People in NYC casually gridlock intersections at every change of the traffic light, and streets that would normally be four lanes are squeezed down to two drivable lanes by double-parkers.

And if you don’t know what “double-parking” is, as I didn’t before I came here, it’s where there’s a car legally parked against the curb, usually at a meter, with ANOTHER car parked beside it, out in the driving lane of the roadway. It’s so common here, I’m not even sure it’s illegal. People just … do it. Driving in New York is a constant jockeying between lanes as one or more of them closes off ahead of you by double-parked cars and delivery vans.

So here come the nice Muslims — the ones we’d otherwise imagine as the victims of Islam, rather than Islam itself — double-parking, pulling in front of fire hydrants and filling bus stops with their taxicabs so they can pray for 10 or 15 minutes on the sidewalk. Five times a day.

My more liberal side instantly jumps in with “But if they’re nor hurting anybody, it shouldn’t be an issue!” And yet, if they’re parking in these places, or double parking, it’s still taking up a bit of the world — and if you drive in New York, damn, you know what I’m talking about — that is rightly not theirs, and doing it in the name of their religion.

Overall, when I read this whole article, and think about it, I feel sorry that the poor bastards believe they have to do this. They’re victims, no doubt. And I’d bet most of them at least try to find someplace out-of-the-way for this activity.

Still, I would hate to see this become one of those freedom of religion issues — as in “We have every right to worship in this way!” — that looks like a freedom of religion issue only as long as you ignore the rights and freedoms of the people driving the same streets.

 

 

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Religion is Weird. That is All.

Stumbled across a new word today: Tauroctony.

Wikipedia defines it:

The tauroctony scene is the [central icon] of the Mithraic Mysteries. It depicts Mithras killing a bull, hence the name ‘tauroctony’, given to the scene in modern times, probably after the Greek word tauroktonos (ταυροκτόνος) “slaughtering bulls.”

The Mithraic Mysteries, now referred to as Mithraism, was

a mystery religion practiced in the Roman Empire from about the 1st to 4th centuries AD. The name of the Persian god Mithra, adapted into Greek as Mithras, was linked to a new and distinctive imagery. […] The mysteries were popular in the Roman military.

[…] Numerous archeological finds, including meeting places, monuments, and artifacts, have contributed to modern knowledge about Mithraism throughout the Roman Empire. The iconic scenes of Mithras show him being born from a rock, slaughtering a bull, and sharing a banquet with the god Sol (the Sun). About 420 sites have yielded materials related to the cult. Among the items found are about 1000 inscriptions, 700 examples of the bull-killing scene (tauroctony), and about 400 other monuments. […] No written narratives or theology from the religion survive, with limited information to be derived from the inscriptions, and only brief or passing references in Greek and Latin literature.

Here’s a tauroctony, a more recent recreation of older, existing paintings and sculptures:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lemme call your attention to the creepy little dog and the snake, going after the blood gushing from the stab wound. What’s that all about?

But then notice this:

WTF??

Note that this wasn’t something just thrown up there like teenagers tagging a freeway overpass with spray paint. This feature, a scorpion latched onto the testicles of the sacrificial bull, is shared by all the depictions. It was IMPORTANT, a central feature of a religion that lasted hundreds of years.

You get the feeling that if the sculptor left that out, it would be an insult to the faithful.

“No, Appius, look, you gotta have the scorpion here, pinching the bull’s balls. You want riots? I ask you: Do you want riots? Because that’s what you’ll get. I tell you, bubbie, these are simple people. They don’t understand all this modern sentiment, with no scorpion on the balls. Tell you what, kid, throw me a scorpion on there and I’ll introduce you to my sister with the big cahooties.”

Freaky, right? Because we’re outside it.

Now picture the Catholic rite of consuming the blood and body of Christ, the Jewish ritual of circumcision, the Pentecostal practice of handling poisonous snakes, the conservative Islamic practice of requiring the women to wear burkhas.

Five hundred years from now, what’s that going to look like? Right. Equally freaky.

 

 

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Dying to Escape Hasidic Judaism

Tambor and Weiss

Generally I aim my verbal volleys at the Christian world, with the occasional whack at Islam. But this caught my attention after my recent riff on Hasidic Jews in Beta Culture: To Not Be Owned:

Outcast Mother’s Death, and Questions About Jewish Sect’s Sway Over Children

A women who left an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect committed suicide in September.

Ms. Tambor, 33, had forsaken the Hasidic Jewish world in which she was raised and married, a decision that undermined her relationship with her children. Her Skver Hasidic sect in Rockland County, N.Y., was concerned that Ms. Tambor’s freer lifestyle might be a subversive influence on the children, and whether it swayed the children to keep their distance and limited her opportunities to visit has become an emotionally charged question in wider Jewish circles.

Articles in The Forward, The Jewish Week and the online magazine Tablet and on blogs run by Hasidic defectors, like Failed Messiah, have detailed the agonizing challenges facing those who leave the insular world of Hasidim, where dress is austere, the language is Yiddish and religious obligations structure each day.

Former Hasidim seeking child custody arrangements find that rabbis, community leaders and Orthodox Jewish family therapists line up with money and witnesses behind the Hasidic spouse. Such influence is especially powerful in a place like Rockland, a county near New York City where one-third of the residents are Jewish.

Descriptions of her forced estrangement from her children are heartbreaking. Though her ex-husband refused to comment, the husband’s cousin laid her death off on mental issues somehow related an automobile accident.

“She became unbalanced,” said Mr. Melber, who is Hasidic. “Her husband tried everything in his power to hold things together. She started going in a bad direction. There was a feeling the kids are not safe with her because of mental issues.”

Okay, crazy woman. Right. Protect the children. And it might be so. But another wrinkle comes in when you follow the links.

Weiss, her live-in boyfriend, said her family had disavowed her earlier, when she told family members that she had been sexually abused by a member of the tight-knit New Square community as a child and they denied it.

Driven by her depression, Tambor checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, said Weiss, which is when family members in New Square moved to block her from seeing her children, who are now 11 and 13.

“Her depression started when she decided to leave the community and was threatened with losing her kids,” Weiss told The Forward. “Her biggest issue was that no one cared for her, everyone blew off all her issues.”

The sordid story ends with family members — apparently “shamed” by her taking her own life — denying Weiss and 40 of her other friends the right to attend her funeral. One of Tambor’s uncles even called the police in an attempt to force them to leave the area near the funeral home.

Finally, there’s an interesting light shed on the cultural community itself. Footsteps is an organization that assists those desiring to leave the ultraconservative community for the larger world. From the “Challenge” page — “Why is Footsteps Necessary?”:

“There is one particular gole that I want to achive. That gole, is getting a hier education. By a hier education, I mene going to college or university for sevrel years and excelling in the particular subjects that I think I’m good at” (Benny, 19).”

This is a 19-year-old AMERICAN, remember. From the Jewish cultural community, widely respected for its strong emphasis on education. Except in this case …

Ultra-Orthodox communities are insulated from the contemporary secular world and keep outside influences from challenging their basic beliefs or affecting their highly structured way of life. Education is carefully controlled — for boys it consists almost entirely of religious subjects. Girls are given a limited practical education and for many men and women Yiddish is their first language. Exposure to radio, television, movies, secular newspapers and literature of any kind is officially prohibited.

Footsteps aims to assist with  “educational, vocational and social support” for those escaping “the insular ultra-religious communities in which they were raised.” This bit, from their “About” page, is eye-opening (emphasis mine):

People from the ultra-orthodox and Chasidic communities who choose to enter mainstream America currently do so AS NEW IMMIGRANTS IN EVERY SENSE. They face cultural disorientation and isolation coupled with a lack of practical and marketable skills.

Finally, from the “funeral chaos” story: The village of New Square, Rockland County, NY, about 50 miles north of NYC (emphasis again mine) …

… is considered one of the most culturally isolated towns in America, with SEX-SEGREGATED streets and FEMALE RESIDENTS WHO, in obedience to the town’s rabbis, DO NOT DRIVE.

The “sex-segregated streets” bit apparently means women are required to walk on the opposite side of the street from men. Gah.

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Christianity Facing Extinction? Wow. Cool.

An article in The Telegraph warns:

Christianity at risk of dying out in a generation, warns Lord Carey

I know this is disturbing and serious from the point of view of Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, but from mine, it’s heartening and funny.

Christianity is just a “generation away from extinction” in Britain unless churches make a dramatic breakthrough in attracting young people back to the faith, the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey has warned.

Clergy are now gripped by a “feeling of defeat”, congregations are worn down by “heaviness” while the public simply greets both with “rolled eyes and a yawn of boredom”, he said.

Further,

As I have repeated many times in the past we are one generation away from extinction. We have to give cogent reasons to young people why the Christian faith is relevant to them.

That’s gonna be difficult, sir. We’ve seen what the Christian faith has done in the past and, well, we have other things on our minds now. Like, you know, reality.

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Is Handling Poisonous Snakes a Constitutional Right?

Pentecostal Pastors Argue ‘Snake Handling’ Is Their Religious Right

Is it? I’m going to say yes, with certain reservations.

1) The snakes should be protected.

2) Anyone handling them should be experts licensed by the state in which the church exists.

3) The church offering the activity has to have insurance that covers accidents and liability — just as fireworks displays and rodeos have to have insurance — so that if the snakes escape, or if someone is injured or killed during the service or at any time when snakes are present, they’re covered.

4) The right should be an ordinary RIGHT, and not a religious right. No special favors for churches in the possession and handling of wildlife.

Other than that … I think this is a stupid practice, and the people doing it are complete fools. But hell, let ’em.

I’m going to suggest that if the practice is banned, or some of these nice people are prevented from “worshipping” as they wish, they go blackberry picking in East Texas. They’ll have plenty of chances to meet up with diamondback rattlers, and they can just grab up anything that slithers.

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Do Atheists Have the Right to Offend Muslims?

The question was posed in an article from The Muslim Times (which features such articles as A challenge for Dawkins: Where did carbon come from? and Conversion of Mr. Bean to Islam?)

Recently some atheists at the LSE Freshers day were asked by university authorities to remove T-shirts depicting the Prophets Jesus and Muhammad (peace be upon them both) sharing a beer together. Well, to be more exact, they were asked to remove “Jesus and Mo” cartoon t-shirts, where “Jesus” is depicted as a cartoon caricature of the real Prophet Jesus (peace be upon him) and “Mo” is ostensibly a ‘body double’ of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).

Such conflicts are proliferating, and present an interesting challenge to our democratic society in the UK: do atheists have the right to offend Muslims?

On the face of it, this may seem a simple question, and most people probably will start reading this article with a fixed opinion on the issue. But it’s actually a rather complicated question!

That’s pretty much the meat of the article, and it trails off into a few more bland paragraphs. The author shies away from giving any suggestion of an answer, I suspect because reasonable people already know the answer: First, it’s the wrong question, and Second, when you ask the REAL question — “Do Muslims (or any other religious group) ever have the right to use ‘I’m offended!’ as a clinching argument to restrict the freedom of expression of others in public spaces”? — the answer is No, or at least, They Apparently Do But They Damned Well Shouldn’t.

The original incident was described on the website of the  National Secular Society:

A row over free expression has broken out at the London School of Economics after members of the LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Student Society were told they would be physically removed from the annual Freshers’ Fair unless they covered up t-shirts deemed “offensive”.

The group’s response was right on target:

We reject in the strongest possible terms that by wearing a non-violent, non-racist t-shirt we would harass other students or create an “offensive environment”. We reject completely that we were not behaving in an “orderly or responsible manner”. In fact, when faced with the entirely unreasonable request to change or cover up our clothing, we remained calm and asked for clarification on what rules or regulations we were alleged to be in breach of. Even though we completely disagreed with the instructions of the LSE, we still complied, making clear that we would challenge this decision through the appropriate procedures.

As much as we respect and defend the rights of others to wear whatever they choose to wear, we claim this right for ourselves. Our right to free expression and participation in the LSE student community is being curtailed for no other reason than that we are expressing views that are not shared by others. The t-shirts worn are harmless satirical depictions of fictitious religious figures and certainly cannot be considered intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive to anyone by even the most stringent standards.”

The LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Student Society is in the right here, and in the just world they’re working to create, the deeper question of freedom of expression — whether it involved Muslims or some other religious group — would never come up.

But in this case, a religious group complained of supposed intimidation and the university rolled over and REALLY intimidated this other, non-religious, group.

On a side note, The Muslim Times, which calls itself “A Blog to Foster Universal Brotherhood,” says on its About Us page:

We want to applaud the good writings of all the Muslims, the Christians, the Jews, the agnostics and the atheists and others, by sharing them with our readers.

So, hey, maybe I’ll be published on there someday.  Because they’re all over that brotherhood thing.

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No, I don’t believe in God. I thought YOU did. Well, heck. Now what?

We’re born to sanity. We instinctively feel that things should be reasonable. That it should all MAKE SENSE.

Most of us, as we grow to adulthood, at least TRY to be sane and sensible. But we all know we share the world with some crazy-ass others.

In my view, the biggest reason for rampant craziness in the world is religion. Religion is not only mistaken about basic facts of reality, it sets up a social field of acceptance to casual lies, deliberate falsehoods, even malicious acts, by both the priestly and the pious.

Churches TEACH falsehoods, and they garb themselves in the appearance of the highest good as they do it.

Deliberately denied the tools that would help them critique church claims, credulous followers are set up to become victims of all the other liars and con men … who often don the same mantle of goodness. It creates an entire society where lies are easy, even expected, and where all manner of inglorious acts can be defended, because nobody really knows what’s right, what’s just, what’s good.

But even deeply immersed in the inner workings of churches, there are those who find they want sanity. Discovering eventually that they are too reasonable to believe, they reach the point where they either sacrifice honesty as the price of keeping their jobs and positions, or they quietly leave the career.

More than a decade into the new atheist movement, though, outspoken atheists have created a field of acceptance to non-belief great enough that it has lowered the barrier to admitting loss of faith, even to those IN the faith.

Church Pastors Become Atheists

More than 200 church leaders across the country now say they no longer believe in God, including a Houston-area pastor who was one of the first to publicly announce his decision.

Mike Aus, who was pastor at Theophilus church in Katy, Texas, went so far as to make an announcement on TV about his loss of faith, during an appearance on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes Sunday morning show.

Aus was a long-time Lutheran pastor at churches in the Houston area, but now he said he no longer believes in the message he had been preaching for almost 20 years.

…

“As I started to jettison the beliefs, I came to realize fairly recently there wasn’t a whole lot left,” Aus said.

The effect was immediate on his church with about 80 members. Weeks after his announcement, the church dissolved. Members […] said their pastor’s complete change in faith was devastating.

I’m just wondering what happens when hundreds of millions of church members realize they’re not alone in wondering what the heck it is they’re doing, and why. Why they never “felt the presence of God,” or why prayer never felt real to them.

It starts to look like we’re building up to that point.

 

 

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This Is Disturbing as Hell

This post on Between a Veil and a Dark Place — What it is like to be a Muslim woman, and why we know what freedom is (and you may not) — is like a bad car accident. You pass by and it’s not you, but you can’t look away because it’s horrible, and it’s SOMEBODY.

I have keys.

When I first moved to the United States eleven months ago, it took me several weeks to grasp this bit of information.

I have keys.

I have keys to my own front door and I can open this front door and walk down the street whenever I want to.

I can walk down the street without being watched through the windows and without anyone calling my parents and telling them I am roaming loose on the street.

I can walk down the street, sit down on a bench under a tree, and eat an ice cream cone. Then I can stand up and walk back home.

There will be nobody waiting for me at my house to ask me where I have been, refuse to let me in, call me a liar, and use my walk as renewed incentive to rifle through all of my possessions for proof that I am doing something wrong.

Because the simple desire to take a walk cannot but hide something deviant.

The piece speaks line by line of new-found freedoms, and you would expect subject matter like that to inspire joy. Instead it provokes horror: Every freedom described is a reflection of soul-sucking bleakness, a murderous militancy over matters so utterly miniscule it can only leave you gasping “Why? Why?”

A second reflection arises out of the robotic cadence of the writing. Thought the writer is free to do all the things she writes about, she still stands partway in that world of tortured bleakness; rather than relating a tale of victory in battle, the lifelong battle against frozen repression, she speaks merely as a stunned survivor.

If I spend more than five minutes in the bathroom, nobody will bang on my door demanding to know what I am doing in there.

I can shave my legs without being interrogated as to why I’d do such a thing when nobody ever sees them.

I can brush my hair and look in the mirror and try on clothes and try to feel like I can manipulate and move and enjoy my body, try to feel pretty, without being interrogated and asked who he is and how long I have been seeing him and what I am doing with him and whether I am a prostitute or pregnant.

I can slim down inadvertently or say I am not hungry for dinner without anybody demanding to know why and for whom I am trying to lose weight.

I can shower without being asked why.

I can smile because I had a good day at work without being forced to explain why I am so happy.

I can cry at my empty, robotic life without being forced to explain why I am unhappy.

I can have facial expressions. Facial expressions.

I can have facial expressions.

I can have facial expressions.