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Beta Culture: The Necessity of Change

This is a bit more heated than I’d say the thing …

Burn the Fucking System to the Ground

… but there’s one quote I view as absolutely accurate:

The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.

I don’t see “burn it to the ground” as a workable solution. This is more a cry of impotent rage — the same thing we did in the 60s that changed pretty much nothing. But I can see this other approach as a real solution:

Step away from the system and do your own thing. Do it so well other people, more and more of them, join in. Do it so well and so long that it becomes the new system — more reasonable, more humane, more fair, more livable.

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Yeah, About That “Atheism as Intellectual Luxury” Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, about that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Judgmental pot, meet faith-based kettle.

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Beta Culture: Self Defense in the Medical Arena

So you go into a hospital and it looks like every other, right? Doctors, nurses, beeping monitors, an overall air of concern for patient well-being. And for most of us, it’s probably even true.

But for one targeted class, women in need of emergency, or sometimes even routine, reproductive care, one in ten hospitals in the U.S. take a radically different approach to medicine.

Read this paragraph from Miscarriage of Medicine – The Growth of Catholic Hospitals and the Threat to Reproductive Health Care:

With the rise of Catholic hospitals has come the increasing danger that women’s reproductive health care will be compromised by religious restrictions. The Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (the Directives), issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), govern care at these facilities. The Directives prohibit a range of reproductive health services, including contraception, sterilization, many infertility treatments, and abortion care, even when a woman’s health or life is in danger. Moreover, they often restrict even the ability of hospital staff to provide patients with full information and referrals for care that conflict with religious teachings.

That highlighted bit means that not only will they not provide certain “sinful” medical services, or even give you correct medical information on which your health may depend, they also won’t tell you where you can go to GET that information and those services.

They will lie by omission, even when your life and health hangs in the balance.

Why is this important? Because the number of Catholic-owned hospitals is rapidly increasing.

While the number of secular non-profit and public hospitals fell by 12 percent and 31 percent, respectively, in the ten years of 2001-2011, the number of Catholic hospitals grew by 16 percent. In that same period the total number of hospitals in the U.S. declined.

The real scare quote for women needing emergency reproductive care is this:

  • In 2011, one in ten acute-care hospitals were Catholic-sponsored or -affiliated.
  • That same year, 10 of the 25 largest hospital systems in the country were Catholic-sponsored.

This is understandable, of course. Hey, souls hang in the balance, right? And what are your annoying little rights, your petty little health and safety, compared with that?

Doesn’t matter that you’re not Catholic. Doesn’t matter that it might cost you your life, or the life of your wife. What matters is THEIR set of moral rules, enforced on US.

Considering that the Catholic Church appears to be actively acquiring more hospitals and hospital systems, it’s hard to say any of this — the enforcing of their moral rules, at times when patients are most defenseless and frightened — is unintentional.

Yet another reason why a new social engine — Beta Culture — is needed. If there are people in positions of influence over you who fail to consider one of the most basic social promises — that in a time of desperate need, your medical care will not be compromised or sold short — it’s time to get out from under and go your own way.

—————

Lest we forget one who died from this this kind of “care”: Savita Halappanavar

 

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Things I’d Like to Take Home on the Eve of Christmas

The impulse, I suspect, is in all of us.

Put a 5-year-old on a beach with his mother, and he will spend some large part of his time picking up shells, one by one, over and over, running them back to her, proclaiming in awe and delight, “Mommy, look at THIS one!”

You find a great new eating place, you go back and TELL everybody. You discover a beautiful little waterfall on a hike, you take pictures and go back and SHOW people. You hear some juicy, or sad, or amazing, bit of news, your first impulse is to find a friend and SHARE it

So there are some things I’d like to take home. Things I’ve done. Things I’ve seen. Things I’ve discovered, out here in the wide world.

And though I don’t exactly think of the place I came from — that house, that neighborhood, that school, that town — as Home anymore, there are people back there who are home-y, and whom I’d enjoy sharing things with.

Because I’ve seen so much.

I don’t doubt that every person back there, and every person reading this, has lived a life as rich and full as mine is to me. But I’ll bet there are some things, maybe even a lot of things, that I’ve done that none of them have experienced. Because I left home, made my way in a somewhat larger world than the one we all grew up in, while some of them are still living right there, right in their home neighborhoods, right in the same part of town. With those same middle-class, white, Christian, English-speaking, Houston, Texas, CITY people.

Hey, I grew up with people who’d never been on a plane before. People who would never get on one. People who thought (think?) wildlife is for shooting, and nothing else. People who thought tacos were exotic foreign food. People who thought tea came in one style – iced – and to whom the very idea of hot tea was silly and foreign.

So here are some things I’d like to take Home and share with my people:

Sushi. Lagavulin single-malt scotch and George Dickel whiskey. A sip of apricot brandy after dinner.

Sitting in a natural hot spring and watching the full moon rise. Seeing the Great Sky River from the slopes of a 10,000-foot mountain. Lying on rocks at Yosemite National Park and watching a meteor shower. Walking outside and seeing the Aurora Borealis overhead, shimmering, flickering, dancing in the night sky. Rainbow rings around the full moon. Sunrise over the mountains. Sunset over the ocean.

Coyote song. The distant music of the bull elk. The roar of an African lion. The unearthly call of a mountain lion in the night. The bark of a red fox. The quork of a raven. The group howl of a pack of sled dogs under the full moon. The sight of a pika with a mouthful of harvested grass. The slick feel of a dolphin’s skin, and the pebble-grain roughness of a grizzly’s paw. The boom of a blue grouse taking flight overhead.

The smell of a Jeffrey pine. The crisp scent of falling snow. The smell of rain on mountain trail dust. The taste of water cupped from a trailside creek.

Bathing in an ice-cold mountain waterfall on a hot summer day. The view from 3,000 feet, under a parachute. The sound of the wind against the skin of a sailplane. The feel of a steady trail horse under you, patiently plodding along, and the view as you crest a rocky pass and see a mountain lake spread out below you. Waking to pre-dawn firelight, and coffee, and camaraderie on a wilderness horseback expedition. The feel of bone-deep weariness as a day of ranch work ends. The splashy spectacle of a mountain-bred rainbow trout snatching a fly from the surface of a creek, and the taste of it minutes later fresh from a campfire frying pan.

The rush and thunder of a wild river under a rubber raft. The this-is-where-I-belong comfort of a mountain hike with two good dogs.

You people back home, I know you’d love all this stuff. Oh, it might take an effort to get you to try sushi, but if you did try it, I’ll bet you’d like it. The rest of that stuff, even if you never get to do it, I could describe it to you, and if you’d listen, you could enjoy it vicariously.

There’s one thing more I wish I could bring home to you. Something I know most of you wouldn’t believe, wouldn’t accept. But if you trust me just a little bit, if you find any of the rest of this stuff interesting, or alluring, or just thought-provoking, I promise you this thing is a LOT better. Or at least as good.

It’s just this: The freedom you feel when you break away from religion. The cool comfort you get when you understand that the entire world is this honest, trick-free place with no hidden powers, no demons, no eternal torment. The fact that the only person in your head is you, and you can think anything you want; there is no lightning-wreathed fist waiting to smash you for your independent, irreligious thoughts. That there is no such thing as SIN, and that WE get to decide how to be good. That church-inspired charity – bargaining chips for your own selfish eternity – can be replaced by acts sparked by true compassion. That you can put the Bible down and never again worry about what it says … about anything.

That evolution is real, that we are risen apes, kin to every other lifeform on the planet – every bonobo and bear, every redwood and rhino, every dolphin and dingo and dragonfly – and that there is warm, radiant glory in knowing that.

That the fate of our neighbors, and ourselves, and our planet, is in OUR hands, and not those of some disembodied supernatural superbeing.

If I could bring that home to you …

It would be the best Christmas ever.

 

 

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Cross-Posting Frank Schaeffer

Not a HUGE fan of Patheos co-blogger Frank Schaeffer (“Why I Still Talk to Jesus”) but this is worth reading: The Slow-Motion Lynching of President Barack Obama.

Go over there and take a few minutes with it. For me the title alone was an eye-opener; “slow-motion lynching” opened doors in my head, giving me an A-Ha! that had been 6 years building.

One of the comments:

This president is as good as it gets. And more. I am with you ALL the way—he is part of the 99% but when it comes to character, ethics, compassion, intellect, and personal behavior, to name just a few attributes, President Obama is in the top 1% of this country’s presidents as people around the world easily see. But his backbone is yet another reason why he is beloved by most healthy and honorable Americans…

Tell you what, I’m amazed by the guy. I voted for Obama twice, and I have very few regrets. Because I saw what we had before, and because I looked at all the candidates since (Sarah Palin? Rick Perry? Rick Santorum? Michele Bachmann???). But also because of what he’s done, and tried to do, and said, and tried to say.

I’m amazed at a great deal of what he’s accomplished, and doubly amazed at how little traction those accomplishments continue to get. (If Bush had gotten Bin Laden, we’d be carving his presidential likeness on a mountain by now. )

Hell no, I don’t like everything government’s doing right now. But behind the noxious smoke being cranked out 24/7 by FOX News, and Congress, and the GOP, and the slithering tangle of beer-bellied trailer-trash shitheads who sat grinning and waving flags through 8 years of Bush but who now think they’re political experts who deserve deep input into how government operates … there’s a bright, calm, decent guy trying to do his job.

And making a pretty good go of it, in spite of it all.

Years back when I was involved in small-town politics, I watched the local power players control the town council and the water board, sometimes literally winking and laughing when they pulled off dirty political shenanigans in full view of an enraged and fully-aware public. Now I see that scaled up and on the national stage.

We have a seriously twisted public square right now, something that scares the hell out of me. I’m just boggled that things can be this crazy, this out-in-the-open insane. I mean … FOX News can really DO this crap? Congressional Republicans can wreck the government at will, just for grins? And walk away smiling? And we LET them? Knowing some of what’s at stake?

It’s like we’re all stuck inside this weird media force field where nothing of outside reality can get through, where the only truly critical feedback we get is through comedians. And we’re okay with it. We’re letting it go on.

After all the smoke dies down, and assuming the country survives this — that what’s happening is not already a sign of unstoppable disintegration — I believe Obama will be seen as a truly great president.

I like to think he’s the herald of an extended period of reasonable government, an accidental statesman who got through a system created to filter out statesmen, and who helped shift things back toward sanity.

Rather than, say, a figure known to future history as the last dying gasp of working Democracy.

——————————

BTW, I wouldn’t mind talking to you Frank. The — well — SANITY of this piece impressed and surprised me, and also gave me a little wake-up regarding preconceptions about religious people. It would be interesting to talk about possible preconceptions about atheists from the goddy side.

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Atheist Christmas Present from William Lane Craig

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

He starts out, annoyingly enough, with this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to Craig and his 5 reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just as William Lane Craig does:

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

 

 

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Actual Proof There Is No God

Probably the best banana-eating, beer-drinking, nose-harmonica player in the world today:

This is actually pretty cool, don’t you think? Kudos to the gentleman for developing the act!

And I’m sure he got there — just as do all the skilled surgeons and rescue workers, nurses and firefighters who come second to Jesus when the thanks get given out — with a lot of mundane, absolutely non-mystical, very hard work.

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Don’t Eat This.

Okay, pretty much anything with a dog on the label is going to make me think “Not food.” You don’t really have to go any farther with lots of descriptive verbiage on the label.

But this …

No.

No, no, no.

.

.

.

That’s the last time I send the roommate shopping.

 

 

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The Forcing of Bad Choices on Innocent Bystanders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Answer: Anywhere. Everywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Bullies With Four Legs, Bullies With Two

This video has come up a lot lately, posted or referred to by people who think it’s hilarious.

I have a rather different view of it. But  then, I’m the guy who thinks it’s mean to dress up pets in Halloween costumes:

I have an advantage over most people in that I had an extraordinary dog named Tito the Mighty Hunter, someone — and I deliberately say someONE and not someTHING — who managed to get it across to thick-headed me something of what goes on in dog heads. He did that by … well, I couldn’t begin to describe the process to you. But mainly he was just being himself, subtly encouraging me to stop TALKING AT him — which is what most of us constantly do with pets — and one day start LISTENING TO him.

What’s taking place in this video is bullying. The cats are bullying the dogs. And no, I’m not kidding.

And the people are letting it happen. Which means they, too, are bullies.

Tito the Mighty Hunter

Picture any one of the dogs in this video as a two year old, and the cat as an older child threatening to hit him in the face if he tries to pass. Now imagine the dog’s owner as the parent, gleefully beckoning the kid past the bully, laughing at how funny it was that he was afraid to pass.

On a feeling level for the dog, THIS IS WHAT’S HAPPENING. It’s not funny. Not the least bit “cute.” It’s mean as hell, and the dog knows it. But his stupid owner is unable to read the dog’s VERY CLEAR expressions and body language.

Now add this into it: If the incident DID involve kids, any decent bystander would stop it, maybe even call Child Protective Services. But these animals have nobody like that in their corner. They’re stuck with people who think it’s funny, people who are not just willing to let it go on, but who WANT it to go on, so they can laugh at it, so they can film it to show to others.

Think about it: If the dog actually did defend himself, he really might face getting kicked out of his home. A 70-pound dog who bites a 12-pound cat? Which one is the bully? Gotta be the dog. Gotta get rid of that vicious dog. But it would be the owner’s fault, not the dog’s, for allowing the situation to take place, for egging it on and not doing anything about it.

Question: How many dogs get adopted by prospective owners who already know that this animal will attack and possibly kill other household pets? Answer: Zero.

Pets are not toys. They’re conscious beings with feelings at least as intense as ours. It disturbs me that so many people, even plenty of pet owners, are either unaware of this or willing to ignore it.