The Horrible French vs. One Poor, Delicate Muslim Beachgoer

burkha eyes copyA constant for those of us on the left is our “rage against the machine” vibe. When it comes to the power of government or the rights of the individual, we’re totally tuned in to those individual rights.

When a story floats across our attention about a kid sent home from school for wearing “inappropriate clothing” — a provocative blouse, for instance, or a t-shirt with a comically dirty picture on it — we’re right there swinging, often screaming that the teacher should be fired, or the principal should be fired, for assaulting the fragile psyche of each of these embattled children.

Yet it’s rare for me to leap to spitting hate at teachers and school administrators when I hear these stories. For one thing, I feel strongly that the purpose of school is education, and everything else should come second. The deal is: You come to school and pay attention and we’ll hand you the keys to life.  But the deal is also: You’re required to act in such a way that you don’t distract the other kids trying to absorb those keys, and don’t make it harder for the teachers — who already have a damned difficult job — trying to impart them.

You have a RIGHT to education. But you have a DUTY to not interfere with others’ enjoyment of that right.

Too often, it seems to me, in our avid clamor for our rights in society, we miss the point that we also have these attached duties. We on the left forget that waaaay too often. We scream and leap rather than take a moment to think, deeply and thoroughly, about each issue as it arises.

One of the hazards of that sort of reaction is that we’re easily manipulated. On issue after issue, our knee-jerk scream reaction makes us easy marks for clever opponents. I watched this happen when I was a political activist: Developers in my small town would present this plan for a vast, elaborate development with all sorts of environment-destroying bells and whistles. We would predictably scream and leap, writing letters to the paper, speaking up angrily in city council meetings, drawing up petitions for people to sign. And the developer would back down! But he would back down to his real, original plan, which was to build condos in a delicate meadow and major viewshed area of the town.

If he’d proposed that real plan in the beginning, we would have worked against that, and maybe blocked the development entirely. But because he tossed out the equivalent of radar-foiling chaff, we saw only the chaff and missed the bombers coming through. At the end, we sighed with pride at our efforts. Sure the condos got built in that delicate meadow but, by god, we stopped him from building the touristy blacksmith shop along that one delicate creek.

I saw it time after time, enough to finally realize that the developers KNEW US. They knew what we’d do. We’d go for the red cape — EVERY TIME — and miss the fact that there was a bullfighter behind it with a killing sword.

I came to understand there was something like a bull session where the developer would get his whole crew in and say “Okay, kids, here’s the plan. Now let’s add on some bait for the idiots, stuff we know they’ll hate, so they can fight that while we get the main project approved. Come on, what can we put in here? Let’s have some ideas, the goofier the better!”

We won and won and won the small battles, but lost and lost and lost the big ones.

We on the left are suckers for an obvious pitch. Time after time, we’ll leap for the shiny lure and miss the fact that there’s a fisherman on the other end of the line.

So: France.

They’ve been catching holy hell for the recent ban on burkinis on some French beaches, which was even more recently overturned. The online community practically burned up the Internet with outrage at that hideous transgression onto individual liberty and the misogynistic assault on women. FRENCH POLICE FORCE WOMAN TO REMOVE BURKINI!!!

Meanwhile, over in that bastion of women’s rights (and Islam), Saudi Arabia, women are forbidden to drive cars, or try on clothing in stores. Forbidden to wear body-defining clothing or makeup that “enhances beauty.” Forbidden to open a bank account without their husband’s permission. Forbidden to go for a swim, compete in sports, or interact with men while out and about. FORBIDDEN TO APPEAR IN PUBLIC WITHOUT A MALE ESCORT.

Hell, I saw stories saying women in Saudi Arabia were forbidden to buy Barbie dolls, or visit cemeteries!

So you’d expect an equal or greater amount of outrage over all that, right? I mean, considering the horrified reaction with France? Because, hey, talk about assaults on individual liberty and pure-dee misogyny!

I mean, dayyum — Saudi women LIVE UNDER HOUSE ARREST for their entire lives. Just because they’re women.

Our reaction? … Crickets.

To be fair, I’ve seen plenty of stories in the atheist community about Islam-the-religion. We oppose it as avidly as we oppose Christianity. But when it comes to Islamic culture, which contains Islam-the-religion as an inseparable foundational element, we seem fairly blind to it. Too many of us have even adopted the word “Islamophobia” — which seems to be defined as “blind hatred for poor, innocent Muslims” — and used it to flail at everyone in sight, passionately defending both Muslims and Islam with the same cannonade.

Something we’re almost not permitted to say on the Left is that some cultures are superior to others. Considering its treatment and subjugation of women, I consider Islam — as practiced in predominantly Islamic countries — to be an inferior culture. Anyplace that forces women to walk around in burkhas, to cover themselves head to foot, aside from anything else, that’s UGLY. Any country or culture that confines women (hell, anybody!) to their homes — with the right to leave dependent on having a MAN, and only a close relative at that — is a culture that should not qualify as even minimally acceptable to the modern world.

Yes, I’m sure there are plenty of women there who are happy with their burkhas (cough*StockholmSyndrome*cough), who would defend to the death the wearing of the burkha. But in my view, some things are an offense against freedom and equality themselves, against womanhood itself. The burkha is one of those things.

In France, it’s currently estimated that 5 to 10 percent of French residents are now Muslims, with a full 25 percent of French teens being Islamic. The Muslim population is growing, and most French citizens can clearly see the coming radical demographic and cultural shift.

If you focus only on the rights of poor, embattled women to wear burkinis on the beach, you’d have to conclude the French are horrible and hateful and even racist. The idea! Sending armed thugs to force a poor little woman to remove her burkini! My god, what is the world coming to?

But if you see the bigger picture of an invasive — and inferior — culture using such controversies as manipulative bait to win more and more of the cultural ground, things look a bit different.

In that bigger picture, France is trying to preserve French culture.

Do they have that right? I mean, if it means this poor, poor woman has to face public humiliation?

I have to say they do. Hell, I think they have the DUTY to push back with everything they’ve got.

Not because they want to hurt this one innocent woman, but because they want to protect the rights of ALL French women, the freedom of ALL women to move confidently and freely through the cities and towns of France, indefinitely into the future, against a real trend toward Islamic majority that would — will! — diminish those rights and freedoms.

The lure to gain our knee-jerk reaction of sympathy and support is the picture of this one poor woman. Thanks to us, Islam wins another public relations battle.

But meanwhile, something hidden, something bigger, goes on.

 

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Postscript 1: Oh, that brutal murder of the Charlie Hebdo staff by an Islamist? No, no, that was one lone individual. A total aberration. Islam is the Religion of Peace™.

Postscript 2: Aside from individual rights, the Koran is pretty clear that alcohol is satanic. What happens to the French wine industry — third largest in the world — when Islam becomes the dominant culture? Hey, probably they’ll just switch over to Prophet Muhammad Wine, right? Riiiight.

 

 

When We All Grow Up

adults2Every major change in life — and probably a lot of the minor ones — is accompanied by something I call Turbulence.

New job, turbulence. New baby, turbulence. Loss of a loved one, MAJOR turbulence.

It’s that period of discomfort and confusion that happens between one steady life state and another. Eventually you get used to new conditions of life — the new job is as familiar and comfortable as the old one — but meanwhile, you suffer the bumpy ride of the necessary transition.

I bring up Turbulence because I think we’re in it, society-wide, worldwide, right now. I suppose the people of every era feel their discomforts, but this one is a one-of-a-kind, first-ever-in-history discomfort, the sign of a BIG transition.

I’m thinking about Humanity on Planet Earth, and the changes in store for us, major ones, some of which are already taking place. What will be the end result of those changes? Where are we going?

Up til now it’s like we’ve been living through the human species’ childhood, where we could explore and play and fight and kill and burn and break and do pretty much anything we pleased, without any very serious repercussions. We could reproduce without limit, experiment with weird beliefs, exotic ways of living, silly fantastic ideas, and see what happened. All the while, we were rich enough in room and resources that our failures made only local differences. We could try out this thing and that thing and the other thing, and no matter how much we broke or burned, we could just walk away from the wreckage and try something new.

But there’s that time to come when we won’t be doing that stuff anymore. The time when we will practice restraint and finally become grownups, comfortable with ourselves and with life on Earth, living more or less gracefully and successfully, into the indefinite future.

I don’t say we’re GOING to make it. But if we do, it will be because we did this other thing, and so became able to survive. It’s like our doctor has said “Your heart is laboring, your liver is shot, your cholesterol if through the roof and your diabetes is getting worse. You’re going to lose 100 pounds or you’re going to die in a matter of months. There is no third choice.”

In the only good future imaginable, in the single survivable scenario, we change. Non-change, or half-assed change, will bring either extinction or something few of us today would want to live through.

The in-between time, the turbulence-riddled NOW, is our teen years. We’re still experimenting, playing and fighting and stumbling and living our rich fantasy lives, but with global warming, Peak Oil, so many other real-life realities being forced upon us, we’re discovering we can’t do just anything. Not forever. We’re finding out some things have uncomfortable, even deadly, results, both to ourselves and to the planet. We’re living in the midst of the transition from carefree childhood to … something.

I’m thinking about that “something” — the full adulthood of humanity, hanging out there in some hopefully not-too-distant future.

What will things be like when the human species is all grown up? What will be necessary? What will be necessarily avoided? How will we live? How will we relate to Planet Earth, and each other?

Humanity’s adulthood is a way off, sadly, and none of us will live to see it. It’s going to require generational changes; more than a few generations will be necessary before a critical mass of grownups appears on the world scene. The lot of us are unfortunately stuck back here in adolescence.

Doesn’t mean we can’t speculate. The fine details of that era are impossible to guess at — there will be arts and careers, entertainments, technology, unimaginable to us today — but I think we can predict something of the bigger picture, because some conclusions are pretty much unavoidable.

There’s a lot of stuff we simply can’t afford, or afford to do, anymore. For instance, we won’t be using fossil fuels in that future, because most of them will just be gone. Used up by we human children in a burning, partying, indulgent spree.

And some things, we just have to hope will be a part of the picture, because otherwise, that future won’t be anything those of us today could enjoy.

So here are some of my guesses about what it will mean for us to be sane and successful grownups on Planet Earth.

Population and Energy

First, like I said, we’re going to give up petroleum, and maybe even nuclear energy. Solar’s the way to go. Everything in our adult future will be powered by the sun.

Or yes, some “might be” futury energy source. But having gotten to 2016 with no sign of widely-available flying cars, which I’ve been reading about since the 1950s, I’m not counting on the rescue of out-of-the-blue science-fictiony solutions. I’d love to see fusion power perfected, but a question I’ve asked myself over the years is: What if it’s just not possible? What if it takes an actual star to keep a fusion reaction going? I’d like to see the research continue, but I don’t think it’s something we can count on.

There are going to be a lot fewer of us. Idiot optimists notwithstanding, Planet Earth just can’t support 7 or 8 or 12 billion humans. My guess is that somewhat less than a billion humans, maybe only a few hundred million, can live on the planet without eventually eating it down to bedrock. And why would we want more? If there are resources enough to allow 500 million people to live like royalty, or 12 billion people to live like slaves, cramped and poor, what good argument is there for NOT living comfortably within our means?

The question for me — and I think grownups in the human future — isn’t “Do people have the right to have as many kids as they want?”, it’s “Do children have the right to be born into a family, or a world, that can support them?” Note that I’m not saying some draconian governmental edict will come along and nix human population growth. I’m saying the real world will enforce some sort of solution, either voluntary on the part of Homo Adultus, or involuntary via any of a number of mass die-off scenarios.

There will be fewer of us.  How we get there is up to conscious decisions by us might-be grownups, or due to the already-in-progress default course set by the equivalent of idiot teenagers refusing to accept responsibility in a world of real consequences.

Education and Equality

We have to have full equality of every human, everywhere on the planet. Everyone has to have the right to vote, to medical care, to an education.

Speaking of education, we’re going to stop treating our kids like they’re children, and start treating them as if they’re going to be fellow adults expected to shoulder the load of making the world work. We’re going to give every one of them a full, free education — which we will expect them to actually work at and benefit from — up to and including college or trade school.

Speaking of medical care, we’re going to live a lot longer than we do now. Think about it: What’s the real goal of the field of medicine? To cure everything. Pretty much every disease is going down, and life extension will become a major focus of research. Because what is aging but just another disease? The end result of that research is going to BE life extension. How much? I like to think it would be well into the hundred-and-somethings.

Environment

We’re going to learn to live on Planet Earth without damaging it. Our smaller population will allow us to abandon large areas and allow them to go back to nature. We’ll have a reverence for life, with absolute protection of endangered species with no regard to national borders. Those mountain gorillas, for instance, are not Africa’s mountain gorillas, they’re everybody’s (and nobody’s) mountain gorillas, and we’ll feel they must be protected no matter what.

Society

We’re going to stop tolerating lies. One of the things we haven’t yet understood is that Freedom of Speech has to have this other freedom attached to it, Freedom From Lies. Every person (and corporation) has the right to say whatever they want to say, but that freedom is limited by every OTHER person’s right to hear the truth.

I can lie to you in person and you and I will deal with that privately, but on public airwaves or wires, where millions might hear and be adversely affected by it, there can be no “right” to lie, to incite others to believe falsehoods, and the penalties will be severe.

Lying is a form of pollution, when you think about it. Lies are a poison that destroys human understanding of the truth. It’s like secondhand smoke — when the lies flow over your metaphorical property line and into my life, your right to lie has ended.

(In my view, there is already no right to lie to a child, about any subject or for any reason.)

We’re going to have a common language. English? Probably. Doesn’t mean all the others will go away. Does mean we’re going to talk to each other, all over Earth, in this common language.

We’re going to have a LOT more public transportation, a lot fewer cars. We’re going to spend a LOT less money on wars and weapons.

We’re going to end racism and sexism. Skin color is about the stupidest, most superficial way of judging people, and we — all of us — will eventually realize that. As to sexism, we’ll eliminate the prejudices and limitations based on gender, but we’re also going to accept that men and women each have their own specific needs, and figure that more into the balance.

Our lives are going to be a lot more transparent, but we’re also going to become a lot more comfortable with our own nature and the inevitable foibles which attend it.

We’re going to come to understand that not all cultures and cultural practices are equal. That some are good for human freedom and dignity, some are simply not, and we’re going to abandon the not-goods. Speaking of which:

Religion

We’re going to do away with religion and mysticism. Goodbye Islam — don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. But also: Goodbye Christianity — don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Schools will teach evolution with gusto, and every kid will grow up knowing he’s connected as family to all life on Earth. The idea of the universe being poofed into existence by a great big guy in the sky is going to seem like a fairy tale straight out of the Dark Ages.

We’re going to end genital mutilation of babies. Sorry Jews and Muslims, snip off the end of your own dick if you want, cut out your own clitoris once you’ve achieved the age of choice, but you can’t do that to kids anymore. They don’t BELONG to you, they belong to the adults they will one day become, and it’s that adult — and only that adult — who has the right to choose to make permanent changes to their bodies. You would no more cut healthy body parts off a baby than you would install garish permanent tattoos on their bodies. In both cases, it’s a trespass on THEIR right to choose.

We’re going to stop being ouchy about sex education for young people. Every kid on Earth is going to receive the full, unaltered Handbook of the Human Body in classes taught from kindergarten onward.

Business and Politics

We’re going to push corporations out of the driver’s seat of government. We’re going to end tax evasion by corporations and the wealthy, and the huge income inequality that flows out of corporate culture. In the coming era of transparency — particularly in international banking — I suspect most organized crime is going to go away.

Science and Technology

We’re going to use space, but probably not move into it. The minimum necessary life support system for humans is probably the size of a planet, and we only know of one. We’ll have robots out there, or humans for short periods, but we’re never going to have humans like you and I living on other planets.

Every person on Earth is going to have full, unfettered access to the Internet, and they will carry it around with them.

It’s almost inevitable that we’ll tinker with our own genes, improving ourselves in countless ways and ushering in an age of transhumanism. Not everyone will change, but everyone will have the chance. Overall, average intelligence is going to go up — we’re going to be a lot smarter.

Speaking of intelligence, we’re going to have Artificial Intelligence. It’s not going to be just like us, but one way or another it’s going to exist. It’s also going to be friendly, an intellectual partner rather than some horror-story master or adversary.

How?

I doubt that nations will go away. Local units of government are better at handling local issues. But a worldwide community of individuals — and yes, I’m thinking Beta Culture — who agree that certain things must happen can make those things happen. Not by undercutting government, but by convincing a critical mass of people in each country that certain things — women’s equality, for instance, but also all this other stuff — absolutely must happen.

Here’s hoping.

Saying Goodbye to the 100-Year-Old Man

Today I went to the funeral of a friend, someone I’ve only known for about 5 years, but who was one of those quality people who brightens the life of everyone he comes into contact with.

Ed lived just shy of 100 years. He saw 100 Christmases, 100 Halloweens, 100 summers and winters and falls. And up until a couple of weeks before his death, he was still driving his own car, still — IN INK — working crossword puzzles. A mere three days before he died, he was traveling country roads with a friend, riding and enjoying the warm springlike day, laughing and making bad puns.

After the lengthy opening by a priest, his two sons stood up to speak, and one of the stories they told tickled me greatly, as it was both funny and warmly, completely ED:

In his early years as a math professor, Ed had a math-faculty friend who didn’t have a car. Ed readily volunteered to help out, giving him rides to and from work, day after day. One day as Ed and his wife Barbara were having dinner in a local diner, the guy happened in and saw them. “Ed! I just got a new car! I can start paying you back for how kind you’ve been over the past year. You have to let me give the two of you a ride home!” Ed and Barbara happily accepted the ride home, thanking the man warmly as he deposited them on their doorstep, waving as he drove out of sight.

After which, the two of them walked the mile or so back to the diner to pick up their own car.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a religious memorial, and I had forgotten how utterly odd they are. It may be the ritualistic ceremony really does give comfort and peace to the friends and family of the departed, but they’re still, to an atheist, distinctly strange.

The opening I mentioned consisted of a retired priest / friend of the family welcoming everyone and asking all to be seated. He waved a program (there’s some more devout name for it, but it’s not coming to me at the moment), making sure everybody had one so they could follow the ceremony. The program is 15 pages long, and it consists of long sections to be read by the priest, but also included call-and-response sections where the priest reads one line and the celebrants read a line back to him, with lots of Glory to Thee-ing and Amen-ing and bowing-and-praying along the way.

It is 12 pages before the name of the deceased gets mentioned, which in this case was some 32 minutes into the ceremony. To my atheist ears, the entire show up until that time seemed to be an extended arm-twisting, moment-of-grief commercial for God.

Again, if it gives people comfort, I can’t knock it TOO much. And if that’s what Ed would have wanted, I’m entirely at peace with it.

But … when I did the memorial ceremony for my Cowboy Dad, the entire thing was about the man. Not only did I read his entirely non-religious eulogy, everybody at the event was invited to share stories and memories of him. There was a single Bible verse — “To everything there is a season” — read by one of his cowboy friends near the end, but most of the ceremony was meant to focus on the life and happy effects this tough, good man had had on all of us. The purpose of the event was to celebrate a man’s life, not to send a tidal wave of religiosity over the attendees.

I often wonder why African-Americans and Native Americans can be Christians, as the religion was so obviously used to bludgeon them into line, but I can appreciate that if you grow up with it and never examine any broader context, it feels good and right to you.

Looking around me at this funeral, I could see that THIS ceremony felt good and right to the people there with me. But it still put me in mind of, oh, a tiny little sandwich in the middle of a heaping platter of garnish, or that friend who does you a 5-minute favor, and then spends ten times as long telling you what a nice guy he is for doing you the favor. It was a lot of goddy STUFF and only a little of Ed, and I would much rather have heard more about Ed.

 

The Sly Accusation of Islamophobia

COE SquareI think we’re all making a big mistake in defining “Islamophobia” as “hates Muslims.”

OF COURSE it’s wrong to hate people. But it’s not wrong to have serious reservations about a religion, a philosophy or a culture. It’s not wrong to judge IDEAS, and to find them wanting.

Because there really are inferior cultures and beliefs, cultures that deserve to be hated and stamped out. I grew up in one of them — a racist Southern culture which insisted that skin color should be the decider for acceptability, and which wasn’t above using extreme violence and terroristic threats to make the point.

Islam, in my view, is an inferior culture. For the way it treats its women. For the way it creates a one-way door — you can step into Islam, but you can’t leave it. For the way it brainwashes its people, stifling creativity and innovation. For the way it reacts violently to harmless humor.

Muslims themselves are victims of that culture. Most of them are trapped permanently within it — lacking the freedom to marry whom they want, to wear what they want, to observe or not observe their traditions. Lacking the freedom to LEAVE.
Having reservations about Islam — even hating it — is not the same thing as stomping down on some group of poor, downtrodden people who only want to live and love like everybody else.

And yet we’re being taught, every darned day, that it is. On some level, I’m pretty sure this is deliberate. To the extent that we unquestioningly accept this, I think we’re losing an important argument — allowing our natural compassion to be used against us. In an avid desire not to be seen as haters, we back away from inspecting Islam with open eyes, fairly judging it, and we end up welcoming it in, allowing it to invade our own culture with its lesser ideas and philosophies.

As for myself, I’m actually in favor of accepting — of WELCOMING — the Syrian refugees. Aside from anything else, the United States helped destabilize the Middle East.

But I’m not going to blindly assume that everything they’re bringing over with them is good. If they’re coming here, I expect them to have first allegiance to America, and not to Islam, or to Syria. I expect them to fit in with US, rather than insisting that we have to adapt to THEIR beliefs and traditions, or that they can permanently maintain a separate culture. And yes, I expect them and their children to learn English.

For the rest of us, you wouldn’t buy a horse or a car without the chance to look at it, to judge for yourself whether it was something you wanted to welcome into your life. And you definitely would judge it. Treat Islam — which is not a group of downtrodden, helpless victims but an IDEA, a philosophy, a religion and culture fully equipped to defend itself — with the same clear-eyed honesty.

Finally, it’s not enough to say, as some are, that the extremists in Islam are no different than Christianity’s KKK. When’s the last time the KKK openly rioted and burned and shot people? If the KKK burns down a black church here in the U.S., we have no doubt that the people who do it are criminals and racists who deserve to be caught, prosecuted, and treated harshly. Not one honest Christian would celebrate the burning of a black church. Our extremists are on their own – with no support from moderates.

On the other hand, the Islamic murder of staffers at Charlie Hebdo, the French humor magazine, came in the midst of violent demonstrations all over the Muslim world. People were assaulted and killed, churches and schools were looted and burned, death threats were made. All out in the open – as if the people involved had every right to be doing it – with no white hoods or secrecy in sight. And eventually, a couple of guys walked into the Charlie Hebdo offices and shot 11 people dead. Because of cartoons.

Never let anyone make that comparison. The KKK and Islamic extremists are in no way equivalent. Even if they were, we stopped tolerating the KKK more than 50 years ago. They wear those hoods because even their own neighbors would reject them if they showed their faces.

We should no more tolerate the threats of Islamic extremists than we do violence – or the threat of it – by anybody.

And we should JUDGE Islam for its content, for the acts carried out in its name, and for the effect it has both on the people caught within it and those forced to live with it in the larger world.

Starbucks Cups: Yeah, Get Angry … Suckah!

starbucksAnd so the annual “War on Christmas” begins — the viral claptrap that comes out every year like Christmas lights, earlier and earlier. Here’s this year’s volley.

A number of articles from mainstream news sites — New York Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, New York Daily News — say “some Christians” or “Christian evangelists” take exception to Starbucks’ new plain red cups … but they never actually name the “some Christians” they’re talking about. Is it the Catholic Church in all its might? No. The Southern Baptist Convention? No. It isn’t even Pat Robertson.

Apparently it’s this one guy, Joshua Feuerstein, a “public figure” who does stuff like this to promote his own video rants on Facebook and elsewhere. Obviously Starbucks is getting massive amounts of free publicity, which makes me wonder if Feuerstein is getting paid to play out this song and dance on screen. But mainly, Feuerstein is an instant media celebrity on CNN (CNN MYSTERIOUSLY CUTS AUDIO WHEN FEUERSTEIN SAYS >>THIS<< ABOUT OBAMA!!!) etc., and will probably go on to write books and scam his way into lots and lots of money through the empty fame machine. He’s now famous for … well, for being a loud and insistent ass, with no real point other than artificial — MANUFACTURED — outrage.

We’re all talking about those Starbucks red cups, though. I’m sssooooooo proud of us for, you know, CARING so much about the color of Starbucks cups. We may not have a point, but man, we’re ANGRY. We’re INTERESTED. We have OPINIONS. Bully for us, right?

I don’t care about the color of the cups. I don’t care much about Feuerstein. I do care that so many of us are getting sucked into this as if it’s some critical issue that MUST consume our attention.

I care that there’s a mechanism for putting us in this situation of being interested in nothing.

It’s a little bit like a magic act, where the magician does some vigorous waving with his left hand to distract our attention while he does the magicky stuff with his right. Only in this case, there’s no magicky stuff — it’s just that  distracting left hand up there waving.

But hey, Earth People, do your thing.

I’ll just stand over here feeling very alien.

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UPDATE: Oh, good, Donald Trump weighs in. Starbucks has gone presidential!

Beta Culture: The Poison of Stories

Bracket copyI’m having this idea. Haven’t worked it out completely, but … here’s the main part.

First, let’s go back to earlier in the year and look at this post: Beta Culture: Seeing the Brackets. (Its illo is just to the right here.)

This is a sister post to that one, and to me clarifies and expands what I was really getting at back then. So:

A great deal of what we humans do in day-to-day living is creating stories to live by.

Some of them might be stories of personal identity – Faithful Believer, Obedient Daughter, Dangerous Rogue, the Funny Kid, Tough Guy, Wild Girl, Smarter Than You, Scary Biker Dude, Poor Little Mistreated Thing, Compassionate Liberal, Staunch Conservative, or so many other roles to define oneself.

Some of them are ways of viewing the world or the people around us – You’re Wrong About Everything, Barack Obama Wants to Take Our Guns, Everything Will Be Okay Because I Have Jesus, The Bilderbergers Run The World, GMOs are Totally Safe and Anybody Who Doesn’t Think So is a Hateful Luddite, All Men Are Just Waiting For Their Chance to Rape and Abuse Women.

It’s this second one, the bit about ways of viewing the world, I kinda want to talk about.

As a writer myself, I know how to write a story and make it interesting. You’ve got these conceptual elements, or this idea, and you turn it into a story. You emphasize certain parts, leave other parts out. You create a narrative, and carve out everything that doesn’t fit. You embellish it, you add tweaks, to make it interesting. Not true, but interesting. More than informing your chosen audience, your goal is to attract and hold their attention. (Ha. Suddenly FOX News comes to mind.)

You fictionalize deliberately in order to capture interest.

In entertainment-type storifying, you do it for that simple reason: to entertain. But other types of storifying have much less innocent aims.

Storifying is yet another of the things that bothers me about religion. Religion is harmful not just because it’s factually false, it’s harmful because it causes you to accept its STORY. Worse, it conditions you to accept not just its own story, but stories themselves.

And here’s the thing: If I tell you certain things and say they are facts, you may or may not accept that those things are facts. You can reject or critique those items. You might be moved to do your own research to find out if they really are facts.

But if I tell you a STORY and get you to accept it, you will thereafter reject or accept additional information ALL BY YOURSELF — depending on whether or not it fits the story. In other words, you yourself become a defender and supporter of that story and all that goes with it.

You can be presented with information which is verifiably factual, and yet reject it because it doesn’t fit the story. You can discover other information which is easily proven false, and yet accept it because it does fit the story. Once you buy into the story, nobody has to argue to convince you of additional parts of the story – you yourself will include and exclude the facts that fit or don’t fit.

You will reject things, ignore things, that fly in the face of the story. You will step totally outside real reality, which is lumpy and uncertain and chock full of facts that don’t fit, and you will cleave to the story.

Jesus wasn’t born in the middle of winter? Doesn’t matter. No way Noah could have gotten two of every species on the ark? Ain’t important. Geology proves the Earth is billions of years old? Says who?

The Bible is not just dangerous because of false facts, it’s dangerous because it turns the entire universe into this story. And such stories are seductive not just because they’re entertaining and, perhaps, internally consistent (which reality may not always appear to be), but because they’re easy to swallow and understand. And once you accept a story, you can feel like you’re there, you understand, you KNOW.

Because I write, because I’m familiar with the storifying process, I’m probably more aware of stories than the general public. But only recently have I started to understand the hazard. This is DANGEROUS, kids, because it turns you into a permanent ally of people who have a vested interest in lying to you, in manipulating you. Once you get caught by their story, you’re an unwitting team member, pretty much forever.

Because anybody can tell you a story. They may not even know they’re making up a story. And you certainly may not realize you’ve accepted it. But if you buy into it, you’re trapped. You have to accept everything presented to you that fits the story, and you have to reject everything presented to you that does not fit the story.

Is Barack Obama a secret Muslim? Oh yeah. Which means he wants to destroy America. Which means EVERYTHING he does must be inspected for its hateful real purpose.

Is Hillary Clinton a manipulative, murderous bitch? Well, of course. That decency and compassion stuff is all just an act, and the part where she looks presidential, it’s a viciously deceitful pose. Every smile and laugh, every expression of calm confidence, is a poisonous trick.

Is there a “liberal media” that’s out to get all the GOP candidates? Absolutely. Which means every question is a sly attack, meant to destroy this panel of good, honest, Christian men who would all make perfect presidents. Have they made Sarah Palin look like an utter fool? That must mean she’s an intelligent, poised statesman, a rich well of wisdom from which every American could benefit.

Is Al Gore a tool of the secret cabal that wants to enslave and disenfranchise us all? Well, sure he is. Therefore global warming has to be an utter hoax.

But also: Are all men vicious rapists, just waiting the chance to brutalize women? Yes, this is known. Therefore, any man who argues with a feminist about any issue whatsoever does it because he’s a mansplaining hater of women who supports Rape Culture and the Patriarchy.

And also: Are all cops malignant racists, and every shooting of a black man is deliberate murder? Totally. Therefore, all black men shot by cops are harmless victims who cannot possibly have done anything wrong. (And don’t you fucking dare accuse me of not knowing about real racism.)

And again also: Are all homeless people simple honest victims of a bad economy? Yep. Therefore ANY attempt by a city to keep homeless people from congregating in city parks, or sleeping in apartment entryways is a hateful attack on the innocent.

Speaking of my own experience, I’ve had countless run-ins with people who are so caught up in the story of GMOs that they’re willing to say that nobody should be allowed to even know if a food contains genetically modified ingredients, that consumers MUST NOT be given the choice, because otherwise children elsewhere in the world will starve and go blind. And these are people who consider themselves staunch advocates of science and reason. Yes, I know there’s more to the subject. But this STORY keeps them from being able to admit there are rational views on the subject that might simultaneously be critical of GMOs, or pro-labeling, and yet not be coming from hateful screaming-insane luddites.

Every movement that storifies is guilty of trafficking in the same sort of dangerous socio-cultural acts as religion. Hell, we probably learned it from religion.

I know there’s a great deal more that could be said here. I sense that there’s a major field of study that someone smarter than me has already discovered and examined at length. But the idea that stories can be dangerous is new to me. And because of that, damned scary.

Because the real world is not a story. It isn’t even a collection of stories. It’s facts. Real-world phenomena. Data. All mixed up in a confusing, ultra-complex mess that can be bewilderingly deep, scarily unpredictable.

Surfing reality’s swirling patterns is a job for a rational being, not a consumer of stories. For every story you buy into, you become that much less capable of understanding the world around you, that much less able to be a free and independent thinker.

For every story you reject, you become that much more able to see the array of facts hidden behind them, that much more able to reach trustworthy, accurate conclusions about how things really work.

I would want this to be one of the most basic teachings of Beta Culture – that stories exist, that they’re dangerous, and that you have to constantly work to recognize and steer clear of them in order to be a rational being.

Beta Culture: Dealing With Conservatives

Beta-Culture-JPGHad a little epiphany today about the sense of humor, and why ultra-conservatives don’t seem to have much of it.

Humor requires a certain flexibility of mind, a capacity to quickly change mental directions. The lead-in to a joke sets up a certain expectation, then the punchline forces a radical departure from that expectation. The unexpectedness makes us laugh.

A Hasidic Jew walks into a New York City bar with a frog on his shoulder. The bartender says “Where the heck did you get THAT?” The frog says “New Jersey! They’re all over the place down there!”

But if you’re an ultra-conservative, you don’t like unexpectedness. It’s like being an extreme introvert and getting thrust into a surprise birthday party. Ultra-conservatives don’t have that mental flexibility — it’s why they’re ultra-conservatives. It’s not just that they don’t want to learn anything new, don’t want to change, don’t want to try new foods or experiences or ideas, and don’t want things around them to change, it’s that they can’t. They can’t handle it. Can’t deal with difference and newness.

I’ve toyed with the idea of something I call the “adaptive limit” in humans. People who grow up in an environment that encourages adaptability, continued learning and growth and experimentation, they have a high adaptive limit. Those who grow up in conditions of fear or stress have a low adaptive limit. Whatever one’s adaptive limit, anyone who has their limit exceeded by too much stress, trauma or pressure, they shut down and react mechanically rather than creatively or openly. They play out trusted mental patterns or reactions from the past, because they literally can’t come up with anything new.

We beat on Southerners and religious people for being “stupid” and “hateful,” but I sometimes think a better approach would be one of … kindness and understanding. Not acceptance — bad ideas and behavior don’t stop being bad. But an understanding that takes into account their limits, limits unsuspected even by themselves. They’re not bad, necessarily — they’re wounded. They have something like PTSD just from everyday life, and need a more compassionate approach to helping them open back up and begin to grow again.

And maybe a lot of them never will. Maybe — from damage too great to heal or the inflexibility of age — they’re just not up to it.

When you’re facing one of those people — with your own automatic belief that you’re dealing with a responsible adult — it’s tough to step back from their negative reaction and consider that you’re dealing with someone who is probably doing the best they can, and needs compassion rather than reactive anger.

With my impatient nature, I’m probably one of the worst people to tell others to be more compassionate and understanding.  But  strategically, I can see great value in the larger atheist community working out approaches to dealing with certain populations that will take into account their adaptive limits, and reactions they probably have little control over.

 

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And now I’m thinking of certain inflexible and even somewhat irrational people on the liberal end of the spectrum, and it occurs to me there can be liberal-trending people who also suffer from exceeded adaptive limits.

One Billion Atheists

Billion Atheists copyWhen I started as an atheist activist 15 or 20 years ago, one thing was clear to most of the atheists I talked to: Every person had to get here on his/her own.

In other words, it was decidedly wrong to proselytize. The thought was that atheism — the good, solid, workable kind — was this conclusion reachable only after much personal introspection and observation. That merely getting people to say “I’m an atheist” was empty and useless. Such an atheism would be no different from religion — a faith position, without proof or grounding, which said “There are no gods” in the same way the religious position was “There are gods.”

I didn’t always argue, but I never agreed. It seemed to me the thought and introspection one person went through was something that could be conveyed to another person, or thousands of them. That you could tell people, “Hey, why not be an atheist? Here’s why you should, and here’s how it should work in your head once you start that way.” You’d convince them of the conclusion, and then backfill with the reasons, the evidence, the mental mechanics of freethought.

We seem to now know this to be the truth, and we’re becoming progressively more confident in our own style of proselytizing and evangelism. We understand the value of getting people free of religion, getting them out from under that yoke, and that if not every person who says “I’m an atheist” fully understands the path they’ve set themselves on, numbers alone can be important. Once you get a critical mass of people arguing publicly — politicking — for the kind of freedom we work toward, that freedom sets up a safe zone into which more and more of us can feel comfortable moving. And it’s within that growing safe zone the greater numbers of us can imagine and discuss and come to more fully understand what it is we’re doing, where we’re going with it and where we should go with it.

Because “I don’t believe in God/gods” is just the first step, isn’t it? Once you reach your own personal understanding that religion is false and silly, that’s when the really cool stuff starts to happen in your head, and — as a result of numbers — in the society around you.

I’d like us to kick it up a notch by setting a numerical goal for the quantity of fellow atheists on Planet Earth: One Billion Atheists By 2025.

One Billion Atheists

Knowing us, you have to know the idea is immediately arguable. Less so these days on the basis of proselytizing than on the actual number presented. As Wikipedia says in the Demographics of Atheism:

Studies on the demographics of atheism have concluded that self-identified atheists comprise anywhere from 2% to 8% of the world’s population, whereas irreligious individuals represent a further 10% to 20%. Several comprehensive global polls on the subject have been conducted by Gallup International: their 2012 poll found that 13% of respondents were “convinced atheists” and their 2015 poll indicated that 11% were “convinced atheists”.

The median of those two polls, 12 percent, already would equal 840 million in today’s 7 billion population. One billion atheists — 14 percent, or only 160 million more — might thus be a somewhat uninspiring goal for the ten year future.

But here’s Wikipedia again, on Irreligion by Country:

Irreligion, which may include deism, agnosticism, ignosticism, antireligion, atheism, skepticism, spiritual but not religious, freethought, antitheism, apatheism, non-belief, pandeism, secular humanism, non-religious theism, pantheism and panentheism, varies in the different countries around the world. About 36% of the world population is estimated to be atheist or not religious.

Wait, 36 percent? That’s 2.5 billion already! So, uh, what would be the point of One Billion Atheists?

Without getting into a lengthy definitional debate on a lot of these terms, it immediately strikes me that many of them are nowhere near what I think of when I say atheism. Deism and pantheism, for instance, seem purely religious positions, and what are we to make of “non-religious theism?” It appears this 36 percent more likely expresses the number of people who don’t go to church rather than the number of, you know, atheists.

I’ve known people who didn’t go to church but who were as religious as any Sunday-go-to-meetin’ Catholic. You might not see them in a suit on the Sabbath, but they carried around a church in their heads, applying it in every moment of daily living.

As atheism in my own mind is defined as “no faith-based beliefs at all” — which rules out not just Jesus-God-in-Heaven, but all the sorts of superstition and vague faiths of daily life — it’s a certainty that the 36 percent is inflated beyond any reasonable expectation of reliability.

Ignoring that and setting up our own definition of atheism, and then aiming for one billion of those seems the wisest course.

Of course I’m not the defining authority of atheism but, as I say above, my own view of the meaning of the word is fairly narrow. It includes not just those who have abandoned formal religion, but those who operate in their daily lives solely on evidence-based reasoning. Atheists of the type I’m thinking about thus give no time to ghosts, afterlives, a Higher Power — but also disdain such concepts as luck, karma, fate, all the daily sorts of faithy and superstiony positions that demand a giving up of reason and an acceptance of folksy woo.

Those are the One Billion Atheists I want us to aim for. I don’t think there are anywhere near one billion of them on Earth. In fact, I’d suspect we’re well less than half the way there.

The definition and counting are something to occupy a much larger discussion than this one. But only by setting the goal — One Billion Atheists by 2025 — will that discussion-toward-clarity really proceed as it should.

So yes, let’s do it.  Set the goal, hammer out the details as we go.

If we find no other fully acceptable way to define One Billion Atheists, identifying one billion who have, in the next ten years, taken thought at least enough to depart their local religion or church might be a workable fallback. Hey, if we can’t perfectly  identify one billion atheists, One Billion Fewer Godders would still mark measurable progress on Planet Earth.

Dismantling Christianity

In his recent Boston address, Richard Dawkins said something that particularly caught my attention. I’ll paraphrase, because I don’t have his exact words:

“I worry that if we dismantle Christianity in the West, we will lose a useful ally in the fight against militant Islam.”

As Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world (!), that is no small worry. An article from NPR states:

“As of 2010, Christianity was by far the world’s largest religion, with an estimated 2.2 billion adherents, nearly a third (31 percent) of all 6.9 billion people on Earth,” the Pew report says. “Islam was second, with 1.6 billion adherents, or 23 percent of the global population.”

Those numbers are predicted to shift in the coming decades, as the world’s population rises to 9.3 billion by the middle of this century. In that time, Pew projects, Islam will grow by 73 percent while Christianity will grow by 35 percent — resulting in 2.8 billion Muslims and 2.9 billion Christians worldwide.

In a letter to Dawkins, much altered from the version I posted here not long back (and then un-posted), I suggested it might be possible to create that “useful ally” within Islam itself.  To set up a back-pressure, a resistance to militancy, right in the Islamic world.

The larger goal of One Billion Atheists could contain within it target numbers for different parts of the world. In the Islamic world, that might start with 50 million. Pitch the idea to individuals within Islam that they do not have to be devout Muslims, that they could instead be Muslim-in-culture but abandon the specifically religious parts of Islam for a more open, reasoning understanding of the real world.

Regarding regional target numbers for One Billion Atheists, I could really get behind aiming for a simple majority of atheists in the United States. Of the 300 million or so people in the U.S., why not get more than half of them living and thinking as active, involved atheists? Not just those who have abandoned church-going, but those who understand the larger issue — that religion itself is dangerous, and better off jettisoned, both in their own minds and in the larger country and world.

Religion vs. Culture

Finally, in the pursuit of One Billion Atheists by 2025, we in the atheist community need to expend some skull-sweat in parsing the difference between religion and culture. Though all religion is culture, not all culture is religion. It’s certainly possible to have a defined culture without it being the least bit religious. In fact, as I argue, we in the atheist world are already creating a culture of atheism, and might as well consciously recognize that and begin formalizing it, fleshing it out, creating the Beta Culture I aim for.

We also need to begin to understand that enlightened cultural values and practices can stand on an equal footing with religious values and practices. You can be a member of a culture and be as stoutly definite about your values and the energy with which you defend them as, say, Sikhs are about defending the practice of carrying ceremonial knives. I’m thinking mainly about how we in the West tend to avoid “imposing our beliefs” on Islamics — backing away from openly opposing Sharia law, for instance (and faint-heartedly failing to defend our own beliefs about human rights), excusing it with “Well, it’s their religion,” when we should be actively saying “No, religion or not, here in this place, you really don’t get to do some of that shit.”

 

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Note to religious people: You have absolutely no reason for worry. Once we get that One Billion, we’ll stop there. Totally.

 

A Dark Tide in Human Affairs

Dark Tide copyI was thinking today about large-scale social motion in a negative direction. Not as some sort of accident, but as the result of some deeper human sociological/psychological tides.

I think of bikers and biker culture. The skull motif so penetrates biker culture that it makes its way onto everything — bikes, t-shirts, leather jackets, bandanas, helmets, face masks, even tattoos. It’s interesting to me that this nihilistic image is of such unquestionable importance, and has no positive-direction counterpoint. (For instance, you don’t see Hello Kitty biker art, with the possible exception of the very rare joke.) And I think of bikers as early-adopters of the sort of darkness the skull represents.

But following in the footsteps of those early adopters, that darkness — the studied opposite of health, respect, sanity, goodness, love — has now entered the mainstream. Politics has it. The news media has it. Style has it. Music has it. We have it as tattoos, saggy-ass pants, piercings, trashy dress, repellent physical condition, the easy bile and bullying of online commenters, the vapidity of entertainment, all sorts of other data points, all a part of a powerful counter-culture that insists whatever majority culture we have had is a hate-filled, freedom-restricting malignancy — hell, even the admonition to maintain a good healthy weight is seen as a violent attack on a helpless victim class — and that everything which is NOT majority culture is good.

Currently, there is almost no human practice, however scary, low or disgusting, that someone will not instantly leap to defend, as if some vital issue of freedom is at stake — “People should be allowed to shit in public! It’s perfectly natural! Only a bunch of hateful prudes would say otherwise!” And one of the defensive weapons is the ever-ready “You shouldn’t judge people!” — an admonition that resonates with the opposition to having social or personal standards.

I actually saw the election of George W. Bush as a signifier of something dark going on below the surface of things, and it appears to me that that whatever-it-is is spreading, solidifying its grip and influence. It was almost irrelevant that it was George W. Bush specifically who got elected; anyone of his sort — intellectually dull, pompous, grandiose, incurious, shallow, self-absorbed — could have fit the bill. Because that was what we unconsciously wanted and needed in that moment.

The hate flowing like a firehose at President Obama — a genuinely intelligent, genuinely good man who has served as a target for spitting spite from the first moment he entered the public spotlight — is another data point. This dark whatever-it-is HAS TO attack a decent person, because it can no more tolerate his existence than disease can tolerate antibiotics.

The thing is, I don’t know where this thing is coming from. Like I say, it feels like something weirdly inevitable in this moment — a necessary product of certain factors arising out a confluence of human psychology and the progression of civilization itself. I feel like we made a wrong turn at some point, or started from poisoned initial conditions, but I can’t see what that turn is or those conditions are.

I worry that this whatever-it-is would be see-able by humans slightly brighter, slightly better, and that we’re missing it because we’re just us.

It also disturbs me to think that just-us is tragically unequipped to stop it, and that it will sweep over the human world, damaging everything, as we stand by and observe in busy impotence, always convinced some less-relevant, flavor-of-the-month factor — racism, sexism, ‘the patriarchy’, teabaggers, underpaid teachers, Republicans, Fox News, liberals, video games, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton — is to blame.

The bright spot, to me — the hope — is a Venn Diagram that overlaps the several circles of atheism, reason and education, and an intelligent activism that spotlights these as the necessary foundation of any kind of real-world solution.

Death & Dying, Unbeliever Style

Comforting-ThoughtsI’m late to the party, but Greta Christina has a new book on death and dying as it relates to unbelievers. So far available only in audiobook and digital versions, ordering links to Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God are listed on her blog.

An earlier post on Alternet covers the ground on  what to say as a bystander to someone dealing with death — When It’s Not God’s Plan: 8 Things to Say to Grieving Nonbelievers.

Finally, one of my own thoughts on the subject, first posted on Facebook. Someone grieving a lost pet remarked on how comforting it must be to think of being reunited with him, and I tried to provide a gentle but realistic response:

It is absolutely normal to want death to NOT BE. Every one of us feels that. And I certainly don’t blame anybody for falling for a comforting just-so story about afterlives and happy reunions.

But in my own case, I can’t allow myself to believe in any such thing. Not only do I believe it to be untrue, and personally destructive for just that reason, I think the belief across all of society and all of history has been hugely poisonous. IMHO, the side effects of it have impacted everything we do, and in a negative way.

One of my personal goals is to live in Real Reality, to attempt to understand and savor it in all its glory and pain. To see what I can learn from it, even amidst the pain of the loss of loved ones. I doubt many people throughout human history have tried to do this, which makes us (I hope it’s not just me) pioneers and adventurers of a rare sort.

I sense that there’s something very important — revolutionary, even — and extremely life-affirming waiting to be discovered, if we can avoid falling into the old, old trap of the mystical. It may be as simple as that the constant consciousness of impending death helps us enjoy the in-the-moment closeness with others, but it may be something much more profound.

I’ve gradually come to understand that losing my dogs and my dad, while horrible, gives me the daily joy that I had THAT, that love, that relationship, that closeness. Nothing can take that away, nothing can change that.

We live in the day-to-day moments and don’t notice how special they are — I think because we CAN’T do both at the same time, live them and notice them. It’s only after we lose someone that we see the Golden Moments for what they were and are — the purest joys that life can offer.

When you think about it, this is a gift that death gives, the conscious appreciation for what we had. We can’t have the moment anymore, but we can have the joy, the realization that something special and wonderful is still a part of our lives, our memories, and that we’re immensely richer for having had that living presence in our lives, and for now having those permanent memories. The time of pain is a doorway to this larger joy.

It seems to me that believing in an afterlife-myth cheapens and blunts this process. We think “Oh, I’ll see him again,” and it slides us away — as individuals and as an entire civilization — from the pain, yes, but also from the fullness of this other understanding.

It seems to me that facing death in full vulnerable honesty should transform you, make you into something bigger and better. And it seems to me that a civilization-wide history of denial, so that few of us ever experience this transformation, has made us small and … terrible.

Facebook friend Dorothy Grasett added: “If you live in the ‘Real Reality’ you also remember that there are no make-overs – if you hurt someone, something, somewhere, you don’t get to go back and be really sorry and get forgiven after you die. (Or they do). I always found that belief to be a cop-out.”