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Get Real: Losing the Love of God

Note for new readers: I lost my Dad, Dan Farris, a few months back. I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and what it’s doing to me. I keep a digital recorder with me all the time, and I record thoughts and impressions about the process and the milestones.

Here is one such thought. I relate it for the same reason I wrote my book, Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist — we have plenty of books and speakers to tell us about the WHY of atheism, but very few to tell us about the HOW. Yes, getting free of religion is about understanding the emptiness of religion, why it doesn’t work, why we shouldn’t accept it. But staying free of it, living your life day to day in the real world, is about figuring out the minute-to-minute HOW of thinking and living outside religion. Continue reading “Get Real: Losing the Love of God”

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The Brassican Heresy

Warning: The following post is long, and may contain insults to French people. And Christians. And probably frogs.

______________________________

I’d like to propose to you a daring hypothesis.

You may be surprised by it. You may be stunned. You might even be shocked. Because this is such a daring idea, some of you reading this right now may actually be horrified. There’s even the possibility – distant, but real, so I have to warn you – that one or more people about to read the following hypothesis will suffer deep psychological damage and end up under permanent psychiatric care, or possibly even comatose.

I don’t really want to just spring it on you suddenly. This is something so new, so different, so deeply significant, that I feel very strongly that it should have its own screen. It’s just not something I feel okay with plopping down in a sea of insignificant words, as if it were one common grain of sand on a vast beach.

This is something so special it demands treatment you’d immediately consider … unusual.

So. If you think you’re ready for it, brace yourself and look below the break. Here it comes: Continue reading “The Brassican Heresy”

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The Angry Atheist Podcast, With Special Guest: Me

Today Daniel Fincke of Camels With Hammers introduced me to Reap Paden, of ReapSowRadio and The Angry Atheist. With about 15 minutes advanced notice, I was suddenly on the air being interviewed.

If you listen past my uhs and y’knows, we have a fairly wide-ranging and — I think — interesting discussion. Reap’s a good interviewer, and someone I’m glad I’ve met at last. I enjoyed the experience so much, it felt like we talked for only about 15 minutes.

Worth a listen:

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Answering John Loftus: Is There an Atheist Community?

John Loftus, of Debunking Christianity, writes:

I want to briefly make the case that there is no atheist community. There are only atheist communities. There is likewise no atheist movement. There is only an atheist momentum. Atheists do not even share the same goals.

It’s a sound point, and I agree with several of his arguments, at least in the sense I believe he’s aiming. But it isn’t the only point, I don’t think. It will take me a bit to explain why: Continue reading “Answering John Loftus: Is There an Atheist Community?”

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Thoughts on the History of Broken Glass

Did you know they used to make baby bottles out of glass?

They did.

Amazing, isn’t it? You’ve got this item that, when dropped, shatters into razor-sharp and needle-sharp fragments, glass shards which are virtually invisible in low light, but capable of cutting deep enough to sever tendons, nerves, major arteries. Hell, every silver screen bar fight aficionado knows you can make a closely similar bottle into a deadly weapon simply by whacking it on a nearby chair. Continue reading “Thoughts on the History of Broken Glass”

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How To Be Wrong — Part 4 of 4

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4

The most basic fact about an apology is that it’s a social act. Both the mistake that inspires it and the apology itself are carried out on a stage on which more than one person is involved.

Meaning: An apology must be given, and it must be received. Which means there is a dynamic between apologizer and apologizee, or mistake-maker and mistake victim (or audience).

If we believe, as I think we do, that the maker of a mistake has some sort of social duty to attempt to balance the scales, we have to also believe that this attempt must be given a fair go. In other words, those of us on the receiving end of the apology have a duty too.

Not just to listen.

Not just to allow the apology to take place.

But also to open ourselves to the apology, to judge it fairly. To allow ourselves, if it meets our moral criteria, to be swayed by it. To allow the pan on our side of the scale to move.

(Side note: I should say right here that, to me, there are some things that are unforgivable. I see stories in the news every few years where a family member of a murdered person shows up at the parole hearing of the killer, and says “I’ve completely forgiven Punkass McNasty, and I appeal to this august board to grant him parole.” I find it very hard to think I could ever do that. I do know that forgiveness of others is in large part something you grant yourself, so that you can free yourself of this experiential millstone and move on with life. But – damn! – there are limits.)

But even before the offering of an apology, I think those of us in the social pool with mistake-makers have some sort of obligation. Something we require of ourselves in the viewing of mistakes. Which, after all, we all frequently make.

I used the term “grief-space” in a previous post to describe the social space I think we should give people suffering the loss of a loved one – social space to both feel and express the loss so we can work through grief.

I have a similar term – “friend-space” – I’ll use here to describe a social atmosphere that accepts mistakes, and whatever apologies that follow, as very human things. It doesn’t mean you have to forgive at the mere mention of an apology. But it does mean you sort of have to listen, and be open to the possibility of forgiveness.

Friend-space is probably best described in light of its opposite. I don’t have a name for it, but every person who reads this will recognize it:

The opposite of friend-space is a social meanness that consists of

1) the unwillingness to see mistakes as anything but deliberate. In other words we imagine the act as something done in full, conscious knowledge of its wrongness,

2) the belief that mistakes are deep indicators of character, that the person doing them is a sociopath who simply doesn’t care who he hurts or offends, and

3) the unwillingness on the part of the witness or victim to accept, or even listen to, an attempted apology.

As I say, yes, some things are unforgivable. But unforgiveness should be reserved for murder, rape, deliberately cutting off your leg with a chainsaw, things like that.

Otherwise, in the same way that constant use of the word “fuck” dilutes its impact when you really do need it, the belief that EVERY single mistake must be met with a nuclear-level reaction leads to … well, to a society in which forgiveness is impossible, where nobody dares make a mistake, and where – because we all WILL make mistakes, and constantly – we’re all forced to live with a high level of meanness.

To the metaphor-maker in my head, there is a sort of speed-bump, a raise in the pavement, that resists progress in any positive direction. It’s sort of like, no matter what your direction or goal, you have to START by hiking up a bit of a hill before the ground finally flattens out and you can begin to make good headway.

That hill can be fairly flat and easily conquered – I want to start wearing low-rise  socks with my gym shoes instead of the high-rise ones.

Or it can be steep and long and virtually impossible to get over – I want to go to the gym for two hours, five days a week, and have a good hard workout with the weights.

You can accomplish the first one just by buying the socks you like and tossing them in your gym bag. That’s a very low hump, easy to conquer.

But, oh boy, good luck with that second one. You’re going to have to rearrange your daily schedule. Commit to going to the gym every day. Convince yourself every time you go, even in the midst of serious muscle fatigue, to STAY there and keep working out. That’s a BIG hump to get over.

EVERY change in direction requires the conquest of one of these humps. A cost. You might want to admit to being wrong, change an engrained habit, take your lumps for hurting someone – in each case, the act is energy-intensive or emotionally painful.

But in the case of mistakes and apologies, SOME of that cost is laid on the mistake-maker by the people around him.

I once made what I considered to be a gentle, mildly humorous comment on a feminist site, and some of the other readers took extreme exception to it. I was suddenly Mr. Hitler the Woman Hater, and commenters from the site actually pursued me to other blogs to tell people what a hateful, abusive shit I was. It went on for more than a week.

The whole thing was so painful, so dismaying, that I hesitated for some time – even years later in the writing of this piece – to even mention it. I was afraid that someone would say “Oh, now I remember, YOU’RE that Cock-Nazi bastard who wants women to suffer and die!”

There definitely are people out there – I instantly think of certain right-wingers – who would gleefully ride over the rights, and even the lives, of some of us on the left, and think nothing of it. And they deserve their lumps.

That pepper-spraying idiot cop at UC Davis, the one who calmly assaulted peaceful students sitting on the ground, sending some of them to the hospital … if I read that he’d been attacked by a mob of angry parents and beaten with shovels, I’d slap my knees, double over with laughter, and send every parent a Christmas card with a $20 bill inside.

Whatever penance HE might choose to offer – and I doubt he ever will, because he really DOES strike me as a sociopathic fuck, in an environment that encourages sociopathic fucks – there should be a HUGE hill he has to get over. Resigning, personally apologizing to every person he sprayed, personally paying their medical bills, personally apologizing to their parents, personally apologizing to UC Davis and the Davis, California community, and then committing himself to a couple of days a week of volunteering at an animal shelter, THAT might be a start.

But for the rest of us, who hurt people by mistake and not because we’re evil, the hill should be low, and possible to transit.

Unfortunately, the threshold of penance – the social cost of even minor mistakes, and of fixing them – is currently very, very high.

Which is bad not so much because it unduly punishes any particular possibly-innocent transgressor, but because it raises a certain bar of fear on all of us.

It diminishes the freedom to experiment – with new ideas, new possibly-offensive opinions. Even with humor.

The way I see it, as you get older, with the helpful guidance of your friends and neighbors, you should get progressively stronger and more apt to be react appropriately and fairly. You should become more targeted toward compassion and understanding.

What you should NOT get is more fearful, more rigid. What you should not get is less willing to go balls-out on the wild edge of life, where creative, interesting new things can happen. What you should not get is so vigilant of every word coming out of your mouth or your pen that you fail to say anything at all.

Because face it – there are people like our beloved Christopher Hitchens who had balls of brass and rhino-thick hide, who could take the slings and arrows of his detractors and toss them back with an uproariously delightful cutting remark. And there are the cream puffs among us with paper-thin skin and sensitivity dialed up to 10.

That second group might have ideas every bit as interesting and worth listening to as anything of Hitchens’. In fact, it’s likely that such sensitive people DO have plenty we should hear, and they should be encouraged to say it.

(There’s also the somewhat-annoying fact that, though you might hotly disagree with Bob Smith on the justification of the war in Iraq, you might find Bob Smith is a man after your own heart when it comes to the desperate needs of homeless dogs and cats.)

But in a mean social environment, one which punishes mistakes or unusual ideas with the insistence that the person saying them is not just wrong, but evil, we might never hear from these shy ones. And we certainly would never work with those across-the-aisle people on these other issues that we do mutually agree upon.

I want to live in a culture where the making of jokes, the making of mistakes, is encouraged at least this much: That the cost of fixing the bad parts, for someone truly repentant, is affordable.

Those of us in the audience should definitely continue to critique, criticize, and  correct, anytime we see fit.

But we should also CONSIDER. Consider that there is a broader social context for every act, and that our goal is to increase diversity of voices, so that the unexpected good new ideas get through.

And certainly consider, if the person you’re mad at has previously shown every sign that he or she is on your own team, that even a little extra leeway might be in order on the parts where you differ.

So where does this leave us vis a vis apologies?

Exactly here: Assuming they’re willing to offer one, you should be inclined to give people

1. Gracious acceptance of their admission of a mistake.

2. A willing effort to understand their explanation.

3. Gracious reception of their willingness to accept responsibility.

4. The hearing of their apology.

5. The willingness to allow them to fix what they broke.

6. A genteel openness to their promise never to do it again.

7. The teaming-up with them to help them remember it. Not by bringing it up over and over and beating them over the head with it, but by gentle, friendly, “I’ve done the same damned thing and I just thought I’d remind you” input.

We should also remind ourselves, constantly, that it’s better to operate in friend-space, where we ourselves – mistake-makers all – will probably someday benefit from it.

Even if no apology is forthcoming, the disagreement may be tolerable … at least to the point that it’s possible to cooperate on other, perhaps more important, issues.

[ Previous:  Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4  ]

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How to Be Wrong — Part 3 of 4

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4

An apology is a social act, an interpersonal transaction. It’s an attempt – in that space between us – to repair something that we’ve broken by some prior act.

It can be as simple as a quick “Oops, sorry,” offered to the stranger you bump into in a store, or as complex as an elaborate healing ritual carried out to repair a serious breach between husband and wife.

In its fullest form (it seems to me), an apology can be teased out into seven separate parts:

1. You admit it.
2. You explain it.
3. You accept full responsibility.
4. You say you’re sorry.
5. You fix what you broke.
6. You promise never to do it again.
7. You remember and learn from it.

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1. You admit it.

I broke your window. I missed the meeting. I didn’t get to the store on time.

2. You explain it. That is, you show that you understand just how the other party suffered a loss, and why it’s your fault.

I never should have been playing ball that near your picture window, and I know it’s got to be fixed right away. I know the meeting was important, and how much you hate to repeat yourself to those of us who didn’t make it there. Honey, I know how much you were counting on me to get there while that sale was going on, and I know that carpet we liked is going to cost a lot more now.

3. You accept responsibility.

This is absolutely my fault. There’s nobody else to blame but me; I should have started earlier. There’s no excuse for it.

4. You say you’re sorry.

I’m really sorry about it. I hate it that I wasn’t there on time. I deeply regret that I let you down.

5. You fix what you broke (OR offer in return something of roughly equal value).

I’ll get my dad to take the money out of my savings, and we’ll get that fixed today if we can. Tell you what, I’ll do the set-up for the next meeting and make sure everybody gets there. How about if we go around tomorrow afternoon to other carpet stores and see if they have something we like, then we’ll have dinner at that place you like?

6. You promise never to do it again.

I won’t ever play ball on this side of the house again. That’s the last meeting I’ll ever miss. I promise I’ll go extra early the next time there’s a sale like this – I won’t let you down again.

7. You remember it, learn from it.

Man, I’ve got to remember never to even take a ball onto that side of her house. I can’t be missing another one of these meetings; I’ve got to juggle things around on Thursdays so I’m early from now on. I can’t keep doing this to her; from now on, I’m going to put these things first.

Not every one of these things has to be explicitly expressed. In the shorthand of close relationships, several of these things often come across as understood, so much so that an entire apology might be as simple as a sincere expression and a shrug.

But if an apology is missing any one of these things, at least in the sincere intent of the apologizer, it’s something less than a full apology, and probably achieves less than the healing we’d like to think occurs.

In failing to achieve the expected healing, you can actually end up worse off. Whatever anger lingers from the original transgression can be increased by the lack of intent or action to fix things. In addition, considering just your own interior well-being, if too many of these things get by you, it will begin to separate you from the people around you. Not only will people trust you less, you’ll become less able to feel any depth to your relationships. (Or so it seems to me.)

In any situation that demands an apology, there are about four different approaches you can take, and they vary in what they cost you, both in the short and long term.

First, you can offer an apology in all its parts, in a sincere attempt to heal the breach.

In terms of effort, this one is expensive. You have to pay back what you took, fix what you broke, possibly exert yourself even beyond the actual cost of the transgression. But the benefit may be worth it if it stands a chance of fixing the situation.

Second, you can simply fail to apologize. Walk away from the situation as if you don’t see it. Or maybe you really don’t.

In terms of effort, this one is cheap, but also doesn’t fix the situation and may be pricey in the long term. On the other hand, a non-reaction may either allow the thing to go away on its own, or leave the door open to a later apology if it doesn’t.

Third, you can actively refuse to apologize, in ways ranging from “It’s not my fault” to “Forget it – I’m not apologizing.”

This one is cheap in the short term, but probably inflames the situation. In fact, if you throw a little sarcasm into it – “Well, EXCUSE ME. I’m SORRY you’re SO SENSITIVE that you can’t take a joke.” – you can make it into a deliberate distancing device.

(I bear in mind that the incident under scrutiny might really NOT be your fault. In that case, your reaction depends on whether the thing is public or private. If it’s a private personal issue, it might still sometimes be in your long-term interest to apologize. But if it’s a public or legal issue, to me it seems better that you should vigorously defend yourself — even if, as in some cases, it makes things worse on the surface.)

Finally, you can offer a “not-pology” – something that looks sort of like an apology, but performs none of the vital functions.

This one is also cheap. It doesn’t do anything to directly fix the damage, but it MAY achieve a certain amount of breach-sealing simply because it confuses the audience enough that they may think you apologized.

The not-pology can be used by anyone, but it seems tailor-made for politicians and public figures who want to appear to be apologizing, but who can’t be bothered to accept any blame for the thing, or to undertake the onerous follow-up of doing something to fix it. It acknowledges there’s a problem, but carefully shifts the blame for the thing off the person speaking:

I’m sorry you got angry at what I said. I’m sorry people misunderstood me. I’m sorry the gay community was offended. I really regret that this was blown out of proportion.

… all of which make it seem the speaker did nothing wrong, and that the onus for the breach is all on an oversensitive audience.

In real terms, the not-pology is almost the polar opposite of apology. And yet it still seems somehow able to divert any expectation of further action.

Unlike the political model in, say, Japan, where an official might actually resign after a public shaming, we in the U.S. are so used to being screwed over by politicians that a political not-pology really does end most controversies. Maybe you don’t exactly forgive the official in question, but you move on because there are other, more important issues to deal with.

There’s an especially effective variation of the not-pology that comes across in religious terms. This one is also used by scandal-plagued elected officials, but it seems more the domain of religious figures convicted of crimes:

“I’ve done a lot of soul searching, I’ve prayed and talked to God about it, and I’m confident He has forgiven me.”

This one works not at all on people who don’t buy into that person’s particular god, but it actually does seem to have some effect in the religious community.

After all, if you’ve been taught you have no right to judge people, that offenses are to be weighed and punished only by your god, you might back off and refuse to render a negative judgment. Further, if you’ve been brought to believe there are powerful people who have a direct line to your god, unlike little unimportant you, you might buy into the assertion that this big important person actually HAS spoken to your mutual god, and that he actually has achieved forgiveness. In which case, you dare not openly disagree because you’d be placing yourself in the position of second-guessing God himself.

I’d be prone to think, because of this last part, that what really happens is that these situations end in simple non-accusing silence. Nobody dares to hold the transgressor guilty because that would be doubting God’s word. On the other hand, it seems weirdly true that some people appear completely convinced that this person has been forgiven. And therefore they completely forgive him.

In actual cases in the news over the past few decades (Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart), some people will see the offender in even more sympathetic terms after the breach: We’re all only human. And hey, if God Himself forgave the man after he stole millions from church collection plates, built himself a huge mansion and a Corvette collection while members of his congregation were suffering, and even participated in elaborate bondage scenarios with a whip-weilding dominatrix, he MUST be in a supreme state of grace with God.

[ CONTINUED:  Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4  ]

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How to Be Wrong — Part 2 of 4

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4

Okay, I know I promised Part 2 would be a look at the nature of an apology. But I’m thinking first I should make a point about WHY you apologize. Why you even admit to making a mistake at all. So:

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Modern-day Conservatives piss me off. For soooo many reasons.

But one of the main reasons is that they’re so goddam SURE they’re right about everything. Given the history of conservatism, you’d think they’d have a few second thoughts. But no.

Because conservatism is, at its roots, “Things should stay just like they are.” Or at its worst, maybe even “Things should go back to the way they were.”

(It always sort of baffles me when I hear about prominent women being conservatives. Because, after all chicky-baby, you little barefoot kitchen-minder – hey, great dinner, by the way, sweetie, and now (fond ass-slap) go do your little thing with the dishes while the grownups talk – THIS is the way men would still be treating you if the world had lived up to your ideals. You’d be without the vote, without the voice, most places without even the right to own property. The freedom you have to be an outspoken conservative was championed and won not by conservatives, but by liberals. Even that vicious, smirking cow Ann Coulter is, in large part, the child of liberal victories.)

Who opposed slavery? Liberals. Who championed it? Conservatives. The ones who wanted things to stay the same. Who created unions, and the 40-hour work week? Liberals? Who opposed it? Conservatives. On and on.

Liberals were there at the founding of the United States. Not the first to think that we should all be — rather than lords and peasants — people who were innately equal, and deserving of an equal chance to succeed and prosper. But certainly some of the noteworthy, and someone who first created a whole new country on that idea.

One of the things that worries me about conservatism, a little-remarked side-effect, is the power it gives you in the moment. Look at the Republicans, who appear to send out talking points memos to the entire GOP every week or so, and then slam those talking points at every opportunity, on TV, on the radio, in public appearances, firing in powerful synchrony, never letting up, like cannons blasting at a weakened timber in the gate of a fort.

Muslim. Birth certificate. Obamacare. Socialism. Socialism. Socialism.

Even as a minority in Congress, they set and controlled the agenda, and the idiot Democrats backed off and let them.

Face it, if you entertain NO doubts about the fact that you’re right, that you’re good, it gives you enormous power in every moment of conflict. Whereas if even the thinnest edge of doubt creeps in, if you pause to ask yourself “Am I really right about this thing? Is this a good thing? What if I’m wrong?” … well, the pause itself is an easily-exploited weakness. Doubt erodes your confidence to advance, or even to hold your position and not lose ground.

But conservative power applies only in the short term. Absolute certainty makes you strong in the moment, but as a long-term strategy, it is enormously weak.

Because … well, because this is the real world, and being right is stronger than being wrong, however long it takes you to get there.

And that’s the power of the progressive. Doubt, the willingness to consider that you might be mistaken, is a weakness in the moment. But in the long run, thoughtfulness is an enormous strength.

Because, again, this is the real world. The place you MUST accept the possibility of being wrong in any one choice, so you can consider all the others and find the strongest and best one.

Take two histories with alternate Thomas Edisons, the one who tried the 10,000 (apocryphal) materials for electric light bulb filaments, and the other who said “No, it’s corn silks, it has to be corn silks, goddamit, because by Jesus I’m not trying anything else!” and you’d have one world of light and one of dark.

This peculiar progressive power, the open-minded willingness to be wrong, applies after the fact as well as before it. It’s not just “I might be wrong” going into it, it’s also “I was wrong” coming out of it.

Because mistakes aren’t dead things to be buried — and hey (heh-heh-heh) when’s the last time you heard any Republican proudly tossing George W. Bush’s name out into the ether? Bush seems to have just poofed out of existence, conservative-history-wise — mistakes are live things to cherish and remember. Mistakes are things you LEARN from. You study them, think about them, figure out where you went wrong.

Victories might be the cherished mile-posts of forward progress, but mistakes are the road along which they’re planted.

Which means you have to look at them.

Slavery isn’t something you bury in an unmarked grave. The Holocaust isn’t something you sweep under the carpet. No, you keep things like that out in the light, hang ‘em up and beat ‘em like dusty rugs, over and over and over, IN PUBLIC, to let people know “See that? See that? Man, we fucked that one up, big-time! Jeez, never want to do THAT again!”

You look at your mistakes, you admit and study them, because you want to achieve something better.

Which is what modern conservatives never seem to want to do. To them, the “something better” is what you have, or what you had 20 years ago, or 50, or off in some every-man-for-himself, the-strong-emerge-victorious-over-the-weak frontier fantasy.

So why do you admit to being wrong? Why do you apologize?

Because in the end, it makes you more powerful. It makes us more powerful together. It allows us to shrug off mistakes and fuckups, the hurts and pains we inevitably bestow upon each other, and make progress together.

You apologize not because you’re weak, but because you’re strong. Strong enough to admit mistakes.

And because you want to be stronger still. Strong enough to attempt to fix them.

[ CONTINUED:  Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4  ]

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How to be Wrong — Part 1 of 4

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4

I’ve been reading PZ Myers’ blog since his first weeks in business, and I’ve disagreed with him, that I can recall, exactly once.

It was a very small disagreement, a matter of opinion about a minor subject. (The cloning of pets, to be precise. And I’ll probably be revisiting the subject in a blog post someday soon, so kindly save any replies on that topic.)

But more than once, after reading one of PZ’s articles, I’ve come away in such delighted, newly-enlightened agreement that I have to ask “How the heck does he DO that?? How can you be so good, so accurate, so brilliant, so thoughtful, so RIGHT all the time?”

Of course to say that, I’m comparing him to me. I make blunders, large and small, all the time.

I’ve concluded that Paul Zachary Myers is two things: One, someone extremely bright. Two, someone who happens to be, apparently effortlessly, a genuinely good person.

Whereas I probably am not. Bright, possibly, but maybe not all that good. Not innately so, I mean. If I let myself go and just say or do the first thing that pops into my head, I can easily be wrong – bad wrong, sometimes even mean wrong.

Thinking about it, I suspect that being right and good doesn’t just come naturally to me.  So I have to concentrate on it, think about it, work at it.

Growing up where and as I did, oh boy, do I have to work at it.

I grew up with racists. Gender nazis. Anti-gays. Animal abusers. Godders. People who thought ignorance was okay, and even to be admired. A stepfather who assumed, without giving it any thought at all, that it was okay to burn hundreds of books (on Science! Philosophy! History! Nature! Mathematics!) when my favorite uncle died, simply to keep from having to bother with giving them away (to ME, you stupid worthless dogshit sumbitch!).

Insular, pig-headed bastards who thought everything they did was right, everything anybody else did, if it was different, was wrong.

And people who, more than once, took away or killed my pets when I was a kid. Horrible example: Sometime in the late 50s, my father came across the family kitten (MY kitten!) thrashing around behind the refrigerator, jaws locked after biting into an electric cord, and he took the time, chuckling all the while, to stroll into the living room and call the rest of us to the kitchen to see the hilarious spectacle. BEFORE pulling the plug. The kitten lived for fucking days with half its face burned fucking black, before someone took it to the fucking city animal impound to be fucking euthanized.

Son of a bitch, shit almighty damn.

Anyway …

When you grow up in manure, even with the best of influences on the sunny side of the dirt – teachers and mentors who want something better for you – you might be well fertilized but you still end up reeking, possibly for a lifetime, of shit.

Example: Not long back, I tossed this phrase into the post When Coyotes Danced:

I’ve never even asked a biologist about it — maybe for fear I’d get a Skinnerian dullard who’d make them out to be biological drones, mechanically responding to some chemical urge with no hint of choice or joy about it.

I got an email from a reader, who gently corrected me on the “Skinnerian dullard” bit, saying, in part:

Just thought I’d let you know that I actually am a Skinnerian—or rather, a radical behaviorist (like Darwinists, Skinnerians don’t so much exist in reality as they do in mythology).  I’ve never seen coyotes dance, but it is precisely the astonishing beauty of such scenes that leads us to study what we do.  The stereotype (and, for the record, it is an actively propagated stereotype, such that education is not a sure cure for it) of robotic behaviorists could not be further from the truth, as often is the case in anti-science stereotypes.

And then not long ago I poked fun at terrorist beard-cutting among the Amish — Warning!! Vicious Hate Crimes Described Herein!! — joking that I’d like to have those people for neighbors, if that was the meanest they got.

A few readers laughed at the joke, many more pointed out that the Amish lifestyle has its share of brutality and even sexual abuse. And that none of it was funny. Most were gentle in the correction:

I strongly disagree that this is humorous or trivial. No physical assault is ever funny, least of all one intended to humiliate the victim.

… but one was quite a bit more intense.

The whole package together made me want to write this, a post on … well, How to Be Wrong.

Because it seems to me there’s a need for it.

Most of us hate to be wrong so much that plenty of us can never admit it, even after it’s been pointed out to us repeatedly and in no uncertain terms. Those who CAN admit to being wrong are usually somewhat clumsy about it. They don’t always apologize for it or fix it, possibly because in today’s world not all of us know that it takes more than a politician’s weaselly “I take full responsibility” to actually heal a breach we’ve created.

And even those on the wronged side (as Ellen Degeneres says “Not us, but … others.”) can be heavy-handed in response.

So: How do you ‘be wrong’?

Let’s start with this generic slice on the subject of wrongness – my take on the nature of an apology.

[ CONTINUED:  Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3 — Part 4  ]

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Short Stack #6

They’re organizing the Fundamentalist Christian Olympics for this coming summer. The Gay Bashing semi-finals are already under way across the nation, and the TV Evangelist Healing Decathlon is just now about to start the preliminaries of the Bible Forehead Slam event. Shortly before Christmas, the Roadside Aborted Fetus Poster Flashing event will begin, with the Planned Parenthood Clinic Sidewalk Blocking Drill Team along for morale. Continue reading “Short Stack #6”