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The Freedom of Vanished Ripples

I Carried the Stone the first time when I was 3 years old.

I don’t remember it, of course, but my father was so proud he filmed it and I watched it years later. There I was, all 35 pounds of me, carrying a 10-pound Stone. I managed to carry it almost all the way across our living room before I fell with it and chipped one of my baby teeth. In the movie, my mother picked me up and inspected the broken tooth, glancing angrily at my father, but of course she stayed silent. A chipped tooth is nothing compared to devotion to the Stone. Since I shed the tooth later anyway, it didn’t really matter.

When I was 5 years old I started Catechasm classes and began carrying a Stone in earnest. By the time I was in regular school at 6, I carried the Stone all the time. I could set it down when I was in private by myself, but anytime I was out in public, I carried it.

Like all in my family did. Like all my people did. We’re Lithians, you see, and that’s what we do. We Carry the Stone.

All through elementary school, my Stone sat in the center of my desk as I did my schoolwork, and I showed proper reverence by working and writing on the small corner of my desk the Stone didn’t cover.

By the time I was 15 years old and in middle school, I carried a 45 pound Stone in my arms all day long. My brother at 15 had carried an 80-pounder, and some judged me as less devout, but it was all I could manage for an entire day. Better to carry a lighter Stone than to drop one, or to falter.

I could see the other kids playing sports, riding bikes, or just walking carefree in the hallways, and I envied them. But I never said anything. Eventually I understood: We Lithians are proud of our difference. Carrying the Stone is our strength, and our purity, and all the other children were weak and impure compared to us.

I had a couple of friends for a while who were not Lithians. We all used to walk home along the same streets, and eventually we became friends. Some days we went under the bridge at the river and sat and talked. The two of them would throw flat rocks into the river and sometimes make them skip three or four times, but I had to hold my Stone and couldn’t throw. But one day it started raining heavily just as we reached the bridge, and we ran under it to get out of the rain. We were stuck under the bridge for almost an hour, and in that time, Tom and Freddy skipped rocks and talked about TV shows that I was forbidden to watch because they were blasphemous.

Tom gave me a flat rock. “Just throw one. What can it hurt? I know you have to carry the Stone, but if you sit here with it on your lap, that’s carrying it, isn’t it? Then you can use your right hand to throw the rock.”

I was reluctant, but eventually the two of them talked me into it. I threw the rock and made it skip three times! I tried another and another, but I was never able to get another one to skip. I wanted to, really badly, and both my friends could see it.

“Okay, get up right now,” Freddy commanded. “Give me your Stone and take this rock. Look, it’s just for two minutes, max. I probably can’t carry the thing more than a couple of minutes anyway. Besides, this is what friends are for. They help you out. Tom and I aren’t gonna tell anybody, and nobody else is coming out in this rain. Nobody will know. Just do one or two.”

I felt strange without my Stone. It was scary, but also a little exciting. Freddy stood right next to me, so I could reach over and touch my Stone if I wanted. I held one of the rocks in my right hand, swung my arm and threw it 50 feet! I didn’t even care that it didn’t skip – it was amazing just to be able to throw it like that.

But just as I reached for another rock to throw, my older brother came around the edge of the bridge abutment and saw me standing with a rock in my hands, rather than my Stone. He saw my Stone in Freddy’s arms and stood there with an expression of horror on his face, trembling with the effort of supporting the huge Stone he proudly carried.

When I got home, I was forbidden to talk to Tom and Freddy again, and my brother began driving me to school and back. Worse, during the holiday dinner a few weeks later, my grandmother began crying in front of everyone. Crying about me.

She came around the table and clutched at me around her light Stone, sobbing. “I wanted your Stone to rest with mine someday in the Chasm! My favorite little grandson, what if your Stone is lost to us? My Stone will be without yours for all Eternity!” She broke down into wordless sobs while the entire family stared at me, angry for hurting her this way. I vowed I would never again put down my Stone.

And for three more years, I never did. I discovered a way to sleep sitting up with my Stone in my arms, and despite the fact that I slept badly and it affected my schoolwork, and I sometimes even developed pressure sores on my forearms from my Stone lying on them all night, I almost never did it any other way.

Seeing my devotion, my parents permitted me to go off to college. There are only certain jobs my people can do – my father was a truck driver, for instance, balancing his Stone on the steering wheel of his truck as he drove – but many of us are unable to work out in the world with the non-Lithians, and my family needed the money I could bring in once I graduated.

I went to college to learn accounting. As long as the Stone rests in the center of my desk as I work, and my forearms constantly touch it, I can do my duty to my people and our customs, but also learn a skill to make a good living.

My second year in college I met Anya, from the Lithian colony in the next town. She dressed modestly, as we Lithians do, and carried a Stone almost as big as mine. We started dating. We began going to the local pizza parlor, sharing a pizza across one of the large tables built for serving Lithians. Our Stones rested in front of each of us, with the pizza platter between us, and we ate and talked and laughed.

We both won a place in the collegiate Regional Honors Contest, and were allowed to travel to the big city to compete. We stayed in a hotel, both of us sharing rooms with non-Lithians, a boy and a girl who were also a couple. All four of us were eliminated from the contest on the first day of competition, and Melody and John decided to head to the hotel pool together to swim.

“Why don’t you two come with us?” begged Melody. “Come on. Nobody will know.” She looked at me slyly. “I know you’re not going to tell on Anya, are you, Lamiel?”

I clutched my Stone, embarrassed, and muttered, “Well, no. I’d never tell on her.”

“And Anya, you’re not going to tell on Lammy are you?”

Anya laughed and grinned at me, excited. “No, I’d never tell. Lammy, let’s do it! I’ve always wanted to try it! Let’s go swimming!”

We borrowed suits and towels and trooped down to the pool. Melody and John leaped into the pool with whoops and splashes, but Anya and I just stood there, holding our Stones.

She looked at me and bit her lip, then looked shyly down at her Stone. “I will if you will.”

I walked over to a lounge chair and just looked at it. Then, taking a deep breath, I bent over and sat my Stone on it. Anya gasped when she saw me take my arms away from it. She stared into my eyes in shock, and I had the terrible feeling I was in trouble again, but then she did something exciting and strange. She DROPPED her Stone on an adjacent chair and stepped back from it. She stood rubbing her hands together for a moment with an odd expression on her face, as if she’d never felt them touch together before, and I could see the calluses and scars on her forearms from the years of carrying her Stone.

Then she RAN and jumped into the water. I watched her for a moment, feeling naked and strangely light without my Stone. I couldn’t bring myself to run, but I walked to the edge of the pool. I looked down into it while Anya watched me expectantly. Then I smiled uncertainly at her and slid in.

Melody and John taught us a game called Marco Polo, and we played it for almost two hours, laughing and splashing, swimming and gasping, while our two Stones lay on the lounge chairs, completely forgotten.

When we returned home from the competition, I avoided Anya for days. I was both excited and ashamed by what we’d done. But eventually I began seeing her again, both in class and out of it. We never spoke of the afternoon at the pool, though several times she almost said something to me, and I thought it might be about Marco Polo, and swimming.

I began having dreams of walking on the street in the daylight, of swinging my arms freely, of hurrying, of running, of JUMPING – all without my Stone. I dreamed of playing baseball with the other young men, of batting a ball over the fence and running the bases, then holding my arms over my head with hands clasped together in triumph.

During the day, though, I carried my Stone ever more fiercely, even trading up to a heavier Stone. I began to berate Anya for her lack of devotion, telling her she should get a heavier Stone too. We started arguing all the time, and our relationship deteriorated. One day I told her I was sorry we’d ever gone to the competition, and I wished we’d stayed home instead.

Anya and I broke up, and she began seeing another young man, a non-Lithian. She began sitting as far from me in class as possible, and we stopped talking altogether, acting like each other didn’t exist. I heard things about her and her new boyfriend, about places they’d been seen together, and her occasional lack of a Stone. I refused to listen to such stories, though. She and I might no longer be friends, but I would never believe her a traitor to our People, and our customs.

One day when she came to class, she did not have her Stone. I was dumbfounded and could only stare at her. She caught me looking and glared back, rubbing the calluses on her arms and flipping her hair angrily.

For the remaining months of the school year, I never again saw her with her Stone.

One day I woke up and looked at the Stone in my arms. “Why am I carrying this? I mean, it’s stupid, isn’t it? Nobody else does.” But I was suddenly scared, and clutched my Stone to me. “No,” I whispered fiercely. “This is who I am. I’m a Lithian and we Carry the Stone.”

I met another girl, a gum-chewing non-Lithian named Lilith who worked at the pizza parlor, which I now went to alone. She served me a pizza one day when there was nobody else in the place, and when I asked for the Parmesan shaker, she came from behind me, pressing her chest familiarly into my shoulder as she placed the shaker on the table next to my Stone. She snapped her gum and winked at me when I looked up at her, and then lowered her eyelids. “You know, you should totally go out with me. I really like Stoner boys. Besides, my name’s Lilith, and that’s practically Lithian with the letters rearranged.”

We started dating. Soon we were making love every night in her apartment, with my Stone resting on her abdomen or chest. I caressed her body intimately around my Stone, and was both excited and disturbed by the feel of the Stone as we made love. I loved the way her breasts looked when they were free and natural, and I came to hate the way the Stone pressed them flat.

One night a few weeks into our relationship, I suddenly put my Stone to the side. She raised up on her elbows, concerned. “What are you doing?”

“I … I want to see you, touch you,” I answered. “Without my … without that stone in the way.” I paused for a moment in surprise as the phrase “that stone” echoed in my head. I’d never referred to it in any way but MY Stone, and suddenly I’d called it THAT stone, as if it wasn’t an intimate part of me.

But I did it more and more often after that, leaving the Stone on the side of the bed. One night near the end of the school year, I put the Stone back on her chest, and it looked strange and ugly there. I took it off and put it on the nightstand.

Lilith looked at me with raised eyebrows, and I grinned at her. “I don’t think we need that thing, do we?” She laughed and grabbed for me.

One night when I was studying, I took a break to walk down to the store for ice cream. It was only after I came back that I realized I hadn’t been carrying my Stone. I was scared. I had forgotten – forgotten! – my Stone. Who had seen me without it? What if word got back to my parents? Or my grandmother?

It happened again. And again. There came a night when I got back to the dorm with the ice cream and saw my Stone sitting on the side of my desk, next to my open notebook and computer. I moved it to the end table next to the sofa, and then to the floor under the table. I turned away from it. I was amazed at how much room there was on my desk.

I studied that night with my Stone under the table, and when I went to bed I slept lying down, hugging myself with my callused arms and rolling freely from side to side, feeling deliciously ALONE in my bed. I drifted off with a smile on my face, and woke up several times during the night, just feeling of my chest and arms without the Stone, and smiling.

I called Lilith the next day. “I need you to do something with me.”

We drove down to the big walking bridge over the river.

“You sure you want to do this?” she asked.

“I … I think I’m sure. If I go back home, I might never do it.”

“What will they do when they see you without it?”

“I’m not sure.” I paused. “Wait. Yes I am. They’ll throw me out. They won’t … they won’t be my family anymore.”

“That’s a big deal, Lammy, believe me, bigger than you know.”

“No, I do know. But I know I can’t carry the Stone anymore. I can’t.”

“Oookay,” she said, snapping her gum. “I’m here with you, kiddo. If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it.”

I walked out onto the bridge, carrying my Stone. We got to the exact center, and I leaned out over the railing, looking at the water below. I rested the Stone on the flat-topped railing and stepped away from it.

I looked at my forearms, at the scars and calluses from long years carrying the Stone. I looked at Lilith’s forearms, smooth and soft.

I searched her face. “Why … why do they make us do this? I mean, why? It’s not …” I started crying.

Lilith gathered me into her smooth, beautiful arms, caressing me and kissing the top of my head. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay to cry. Let it out.”

“Why does anybody do it?” I sobbed. “I mean, there’s no REASON!” I shouted the last word. “THERE’S NO REASON, DAMMIT!! IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE!!”

I broke gently away from her and looked at the Stone I’d lugged around for all of my conscious life. I wiped the tears off my face and reached for it, but then drew back away. Lilith only stood and looked at me. I leaned back and KICKED it off the railing. It made a loud splash. “I am never touching another of those damned rocks, the rest of my life. They’ll understand or they won’t, but my life is MINE.”

The two of us leaned over the railing to look for the ripples of my vanished Stone, but there was nothing there but river.

 

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Beta Culture: Patheos Intro, Part 3

[ See Beta Culture Intro Part 1, Part 2 ]

So if we’re talking about culture, let’s talk about culture. From Wikipedia:

“In the 20th century, ‘culture’ emerged as a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of human phenomena that cannot be attributed to genetic inheritance. Specifically, the term ‘culture’ in American anthropology had two meanings: (1) the evolved human capacity to classify and represent experiences with symbols, and to act imaginatively and creatively; and (2) the distinct ways that people living in different parts of the world classified and represented their experiences, and acted creatively. Hoebel describes culture as an integrated system of learned behavior patterns which are characteristic of the members of a society and which are not a result of biological inheritance.

Distinctions are currently made between the physical artifacts created by a society, its so-called material culture and everything else, the intangibles such as language, customs, etc. that are the main referent of the term ‘culture.’

What the hell does that mean? Just this:

Culture is what people do. What they wear. What they eat, what they say and the language in which they say it, how they cut their hair, the teams they cheer in their chosen sport, how they act toward each other, and toward outsiders. The books they read … if they read books. How they marry, how they have children, and what they teach those children. How they deal with death. Sometimes it includes such obscure things as where they vacation, and what they do there – or even the underclothes they wear, the sexual positions they allow each other!

And by the way, there’s an important point here: Religion itself is a subset of culture. If culture is the things people do and the way they do them, and religion is one of the things they do, religion is contained within culture. For most of us, religion is only a part of – by no means all of – our culture.

But culture is also the people themselves. It’s how they think of themselves, how they define themselves AS a people in the act of doing all their distinctive cultural things.

In a circular and self-referential way, the people within a specific culture are defined as a People by the culture they inhabit, and their culture is defined by the fact that they are within it, doing what they do.

Every New Yorker can recognize a Hasidic Jew (the ones with the long, curly side-locks). Hasidic Jews are the people who look and act like Hasidic Jews. But also, Hasidic Judaism is created by the acts of the people within it doing the things – dressing and acting and thinking certain ways – that Hasidic Jews do in order to identify themselves.

Likewise the Amish culture both defines and is defined by its people. Amish is not just Amish people, it’s what Amish people think and say and DO to be Amish.

Cultural stuff need not be written down. But it is passed along from person to person with a certain conservative definiteness. Culture preserves and propagates itself, or it passes out of existence. Hasidic Jews teach their children to be Hasidic Jews, Amish people teach their children to be Amish, and even, apparently, White Southern Ignoramuses teach their children to be White Southern Ignoramuses (here in the U.S., that is; and don’t go sniping at me about bringing them into this — I grew up among them, and I still know a few).

Here’s an example from my own life of both cultural propagation and the obvious benefit of culture:

I grew up in an East Texas rodeo cowboy culture, and I could have recognized one of “my people” in a crowd a hundred yards away. There’d be the hat, the jeans, the belt buckle, the boots, the shirt, the way the man (or woman) carried him-(her)-self. Somewhere nearby would be a mud-spattered pickup truck with a gun rack, possibly a horse trailer with a horse inside. Get closer to the guy and you’d pick up certain attitudes, certain specific interests, political and religious convictions, the way he sounded when he talked, and so much more.

There were the places we lived, what we did on Friday and Saturday nights (went to the Circle 8 Rodeo Arena, or one of a half dozen other rodeo grounds within a couple of hours’ drive) the stuff we talked about, the way men and men, and women and women, related to each other. The way men related to women, and vice versa (with a considerable amount of unabashed magnetic vigor on both sides, undeterred by literally skin-tight jeans). The things we ate and drank, and the things we didn’t (even today, don’t even try to suggest sushi to one of my people).

There were even the things we allowed – or didn’t allow – each other to do: I rolled up at a friend’s house one day in some soft comfortable shoes I’d just bought. I wasn’t out of my truck for two seconds before he looked incredulously down at my feet and asked “Where’d yew git them pimpy shoes?” In my culture of cowboy-boot wearers, I was not allowed to wear those shoes … not without a certain amount of unspoken threat of social ouster. I could be an accepted member of my cowboy culture, or I could wear those shoes, but not both.

As to the benefits of culture: By walking the walk and talking the talk – and wearing the right footwear! – I could be guaranteed a certain measure of instant acceptance anywhere in the country my people live. And so I was, in Texas, California, Nevada, Arizona, and even to some extent here in New York. Moreover, by being emphatically ourselves, my cowboy culture people have an undeniable place in the world.

That bit about acceptance — both among ourselves and in the larger world — is one of the many things I want with Beta Culture. I envision a worldwide family of atheists and rationalists, looking out for our own interests by growing a safe, friendly place for people like us to live, to work, to learn, to socialize, to enjoy the freedom to be ourselves.

Most especially, I want our own avenue into the future – a future we have some say in creating, and in which we have an undeniable place.

One of the first questions that probably comes up in your mind is “Why do we need this Beta Culture thing? As far as having our own place in the world, aren’t we already there, or at least getting there?”

After all, we’re making progress, we’re free to be atheists in public now, right? There are all sorts of books on the subject, sold right out in the open, and we even have conventions now, too many to go to, in North America and Europe. These days, nobody has to listen to the Pope, or go to church. And from all reports, people are flocking from organized religion in droves.

But let me tell you what I think we’re facing: A future that looks especially dark, with no real social mechanism for stopping it.

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[ Continued in Beta Culture Intro Part 4 ]

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Beta Culture: Patheos Intro, Part 2

[ Start with Beta Culture: Patheos Intro, Part 1 ]

Pretty much every civilization and culture on Earth so far has had religion somewhere near its heart, and even those today not overtly religious are colored with it in some deep and not-always-noticeable ways. In every previous age, we would call the span of recorded time encompassing all those religious nations, city-states, cultures and tribes simply “history.” But in THIS moment, for the first time, it’s possible to imagine something different, and give names to two very different ways of living.

The foregoing array of religion-tainted cultures I call, collectively, Alpha Culture.

Beta Culture is its obvious opposite – as I say it, “Beta not because it comes second, but because it comes NEXT” – a consciously designed, crowd-sourced, reality-based culture that would serve both as a cultural lifeboat for atheists and other social-justice activists and a broad-scale social counterweight to the goddy and otherwise irrational nonsense that confronts us every day.

(The name is somewhat problematic, as you’ll discover if you Google it. But as I joked at Eschaton, pretty much any phrase you can come up with already has some meaning attached to it. Playing around on Google, the best original wordage I’ve come up with so far is the four-word phrase “scuba diving laser cats.” Given the choice of Beta Culture or Scuba Diving Laser Cats, I reluctantly gave up the concept that would have us all in fantastic spacy costumes and went with the dull one. I’m open to renaming it, but I’d also argue that if we were to really go at this, in three months the front page of Google hits for Beta Culture would be the ones with OUR definition.)

I wrote a short piece about Beta Culture back in 2010 (I think it was), and wrote at least one earlier piece about COWs – Citizens of the World – that sort of touched on the whole-world aspect of the concept, but for the most part I only thought about it.

Atheism Plus came along, and I was supportive but not overtly so. (Asked about it by a friend, I said “Hey, my blood type is A-positive — I’ve been A+ since 1952!”)

I knew right off it was both a good idea and one that would face enormous resistance, a resistance predictable because of the narrow definition that “atheism” carries. Any attempt to recast it as this larger thing – to bring feminism and other social justice subjects under the definitional umbra of atheism – was going to face a storm of criticism. And did. I didn’t think it was a good use of time to fight that uphill battle – a battle that would be not with the external forces of religiosity, but one internally divisive to the atheist community.

The A+ people had one very good idea, that it’s time for something larger, something more socially embracing. The mistake, if there was one, was one of approach.

A better approach, it seemed to me, was to come up with something new, something larger, that could CONTAIN atheism … and all these other things. Something that can include atheism as a solid foundation, but that can also encompass other values of the growing atheist and rational and social justice communities … without causing a problem for atheist definitional purists. Something that can easily include Feminism. Environmentalism. Economic justice. Reason itself. So much more. And something that would imply more than just individual convictions privately held; this new thing would speak of a way of life – and demand recognition – for an entire People.

What can do that? And maintain its existence over the long term?

That last bit is crucial, I think. One of the things atheism has faced as a movement is that it periodically dies out. I think the reason that happens is that … well, it’s not really a thing on its own. It’s the resistance to a thing – religiosity – and it exists, even today, mostly in private individual minds.

Any “movement” identified as atheist has traditionally been a loose collection of people working to achieve their own personal mental freedom. Because of this focus on individuality – hell, I’d bet most atheists STILL think it’s wrong to proselytize, to seek converts – the desire to create a something-or-other with larger social goals and mechanisms has gone wanting.

Even the current atheist movement is somewhat vaporous, less rock-solid and more like a cloud. Though it might appear from outside as a solid – a firm, cohesive community – from inside it’s often a mist of separate particles, closely associated only because of temporary conditions of social pressure and temperature. Today’s atheist “movement” exists largely only as a counterpoint to invasive religion. We might march together in the goal of being free of religion, but broader social goals seem to most of us more like personal convictions, not necessarily shared even with our closest atheist friends.

Considering that we’re still capable of heated arguments over what the word “atheism” means, the mildest forces can divide atheists into opposing factions.

It makes us weak. Ignorable. And certainly less than cohesive when it comes to connecting with people driving these other social issues.

That lack of connection sabotages our own interests. Which, in my view, at this moment in history, poses a threat to civilization itself.

Throw some strong forces into the broader social mix – say another 9/11 type event, or something even larger (Nuclear explosion in a city? Asteroid strike in a populated area? Pandemic? World economic collapse?), and atheists, environmentalists, feminists and social justice advocates will be shoved off the public stage faster than you can blink. Our voices will be drowned out by Christian statists – no time to notice the petty concerns of squabbling traitors! God help us, we’ve got to save the world! – and there will be nothing we can do about it.

Because atheism as a distinct movement exists only as long as individuals keep that movement alive by actively resisting religion, there’s the further factor that if we make peace with religion and decide to “work together” on social problems, the reality-based thinking of atheism ceases to exist as any sort of real social force. The godders win by default.

In recent history, the birth and death cycle of atheism has happened several times: Atheism springs up, dies back. Springs up, dies back. Religion and churches, though, just keep on trucking.

Why? Two reasons, I think.

First is that the godders have something atheists don’t have. Churches go on and on because the social impulse within them represents something more than individual convictions in the moment. Churches PLAN for multi-generational continuance, both of themselves and the mindsets within them.

Second is a flaw in atheism itself, something recognized by the Atheism-Plus crowd. The definition problem is part of it: If your “thing” is nothing more than “not that other thing,” you don’t really have a “thing.” But mostly it’s the problem that atheism focuses on churches and religion rather than this larger, more central social problem: Powerful, broadly-arrayed, firmly-established, INSTITUTIONAL irrationality – a force that impacts and diminishes every aspect of our lives.

The opposite of god-belief might be atheism, but the opposite of this larger thing, an established culture of malignant craziness, aggressive ignorance and a never-ending tsunami of lies, something that goes far beyond mere churches and holy books, is something else entirely.

That opposite is, in fact, another whole culture. Which – and here’s the problem – doesn’t exist yet. Has never existed.

But … you know, it could.

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[ Continued in Beta Culture: Intro, Part 3 ]

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Hawking T-Shirts at Funerals (More or Less)

If I die and somebody shows up to sell “Hug Me – I’m an Atheist!” T-shirts at my service, it would tickle me to death. (If I wasn’t already dead, I mean, and was, you know, capable of being tickled.)

[ Note: If you do this, you have to donate the money in my name — all of it — to a black bear rescue operation or sanctuary. ]

But if it happened at any other funeral, I would expect the family to be furious.

I feel the same way about selling religion at funerals. Even at second hand, it offends me. I mean, if people are religious, and it’s a family member, I have no problem with the local pastor comforting them in religious terms. But to USE the funeral to SELL religion to the other attendees, that bothers me more than a bit.

Rev. Randy Campbell apparently did just that, using the funeral of Buckwild star Shain Gandee to hawk God to the younger crowd.

The Rev. Randy Campbell told the many young people in the crowd he understands that life bombards them with difficult choices. But he urged them to follow Shain Gandee’s lead and embrace their faith now, while they are energetic and engaged.

“This life will hand you a lot of things and call it pleasure, but there is nothing that brings greater joy to a person’s heart than serving the Lord,” Campbell said. “You may think at this point, you’re having fun, but those days will pass.”

When they do, he said, God is all that matters.

I could give you half a dozen reasons this irritates me, but mainly it’s the bullying nature of selling religion in this way. Campbell is preying on Gandee’s young friends and neighbors at their weakest, using the death of a good buddy as a lever to pry open their heads and pour in his religion.  Already shocked by his death, they’re getting a big heaping serving of “If you don’t go to church and believe in God, this could happen to you. You’ll also be betraying the memory of your friend.”

I’d rather see T-shirts.

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Atheism In The News

Columnist Lee Dye made the front page at ABCNews.com yesterday, with a book review titled

Do We Need God to Be Moral?

Are we moral because we believe in God, or do we believe in God because we are moral?

Frans de Waal argues in his latest book that the answer is clearly the latter. The seeds for moral behavior preceded the emergence of our species by millions of years, and the need to codify that behavior so that all would have a clear blueprint for morality led to the creation of religion, he argues.

Most religious leaders would argue it’s the other way around: Our sense of what’s moral came from God, and without God there would be no morality.

But this is a column about science, not religion, so it’s worth asking if de Waal’s own research supports his provocative conclusions, documented in the newly released book, “The Bonobo and the Atheist.”

Only a year ago you would not have seen such a story, and certainly not worded in this “we’re sure it’s not God” way.

Much as I detest ABCNEWS.com for their Freak of the Week stories, this was a nice sign that atheism, the open doubting of god-belief, is no longer off-limits to mainstream media.

This bit also caught my attention:

[de Waal] is an atheist, although he disparages the efforts of other atheists to convince the public to abandon all beliefs in the supernatural. Religion serves its purpose, he argues, especially through the rituals and body of beliefs that help strengthen community bonds.

“Religion serves its purpose” — if it does — only because most people throughout history haven’t had a choice. My own thinking on Beta Culture convinces me there’s another way to strengthen community bonds — or at least there’s going to be — and one that doesn’t require you to give up your critical mind by giving in to religion.

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Beta Culture: Patheos Intro, Part 1

If we lived in a society where there were stiff penalties for not going to church – say getting beheaded, or flogged in the public square and being cast out of the community  – I’d go to church.

But I’d still be an atheist.

Beyond my strong conviction that it’s better to believe true things, there’s a whole raft of benefits to the individual. See Because I Am An Atheist.

Even aside from punishments for unbelievers, some still in effect today in various parts of the world (including places in the U.S.), we atheists have traditionally been at a thundering disadvantage. Goddy people have always gotten MUCH better treatment. More leeway. Friendlier reception. A long, long list of advantages that have not been available to us unbelievers.

I can walk two blocks from my house and behold a literal castle devoted to the enjoyment of Christians. The First Reformed Church, built of warmly beautiful red stone in the early 1800s by stonemasons the likes of which may not even exist in the United States today, and all for nice Christians.

Oh, I get some benefit out of it. It’s where I go to vote, after all. And it is admittedly a scenic addition to the neighborhood.

But it’s also offensive. For one thing, it’s where I HAVE TO go to vote. For another, its very existence serves as a reminder of the extreme favoritism toward religion on the part of government (which means DISfavoritism toward people like me). There’s been a church on that spot since the 1600s, and not a cent of property or income tax has been paid in all that time, nothing at all in return for the hundreds of years of fire protection, police protection, all sorts of government services and allowances flowing into it in obvious deference to the fact that it’s a religious outlet rather than a secular one.

Yes, I get the argument that there are some social advantages – charity and so forth – supposedly flowing out of it. But … a few years back I mapped the number of churches and church-owned properties within a 2-mile radius of my house in central Schenectady, and there were close to 80 of them. In that same area, I doubt there are that many schools, convenience stores, hardware stores, pharmacies, supermarkets and libraries COMBINED.

If the number of churches somehow correlated with charitable acts, you’d think there would be a goddy sob sister on every street corner, begging to drag in every last wayward alcoholic and drug addict, orphaned child, homeless family and lost puppy for charitable assistance. But that does not seem to be the case. The orphans and families get state and local government assistance, the puppies get private volunteer and donor assistance (or killed), and the alcoholics and drug addicts get arrest records and squalid jail cells. If the churches are involved in this stuff in any big way, they’re damned subtle about it.

There does seem to be a certain occasional presence outside the local Planned Parenthood office, the Fetus Patrol valiantly saving beating hearts from pregnant teens bent on murder, but these may be volunteer bleeding-heart conservatives rather than church-affiliated ones.

But other than that, hmm. I don’t see it. I see castles. This being one of America’s older cities, growing up in a time when Jesus needed big free-standing buildings and not these upstart boutique churches shoved into strip mall storefronts, I see castles, and plenty of them.

Here, I’ll show you a few pictures from my neighborhood so you can judge for yourself. Bear in mind these are all within a 15-minute walk from where I live. (Click and click again to enlarge photos.)

What do the local atheists have? Don’t know about where you live, but around here we have a Meetup group that rents the back room of a local pub every month or so. And nothing else.

I went to the Reason Rally in Washington DC a while back, and I can’t tell you how AT HOME I felt, for the first time in my reasoning life. I also got invited to speak at Eschaton 2012 in Ottawa last November. But generally, the society in which I live offers friendly events and services for my type about as often as Great Comets appear in the sky.

So I started thinking about that “something” we atheists COULD have. You know, if we worked to create it. What I came up with, I dubbed Beta Culture.

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[ Continue with Beta Culture: Patheos Intro, Part 2. ]

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An Undropped Red Shoe

I’m not actually supposed to be writing this.

More than two years ago I signed all sorts of documents demanding strict adherence to the embargo date of the information. But since the embargo date has come and gone, and there has been no public announcement – and especially since the recent news story of the entire Vatican science team being killed in a bus crash in Argentina – I don’t feel bound by those agreements.

I suppose there might be some danger in this for me, either legally or via some darker threat – frankly, the bus crash worries me – but maybe that’s all the more reason I should write and post it here. If this post vanishes, or even if I vanish … well, hopefully someone will look into it. But it’s time people knew.

In February of 2011, I received an email inviting me to a private audience with an unnamed official at the Vatican. It was so out of the blue that at first I thought it was something like one of those Nigerian scams. But when the plane tickets arrived with a confirmation letter – on gold-embossed Vatican stationary! – I had to accept it was a real invitation.

Naturally I assumed the interview, if that’s what it was, would relate in some fashion to the uproar over priestly child molesting which had been recently so much in the news. I assumed that my position as a known atheist was in some way related. If there was to be an announcement of radical new policy bearing on the controversy, perhaps the announcement would be given some measure of weight if it was first reported by a neutral, or even hostile, reporter such as myself. Plus, I figured I’d be one of dozens, and that the media pool would include a number of more-friendly reporters in other media.

The subject at hand was something quite different, however, and I was the only writer there. To this day, I honestly have no idea why I was picked. Maybe it was simply a way to judge the reaction of the skeptical public before holding a more formal press conference.

I was ushered into an interview room at half past five on a Thursday, a few weeks before Easter. Literally ushered, I mean – there was an actual young man in uniform, carrying a flashlight and wearing white gloves, which I thought peculiar. But even I was awed by the overall experience – hey, I was in The Vatican! – and found it difficult to question the details.

Plus, my head was still whirling from the surreal fact of first being whisked through the Pope’s private apartments, where His Holiness was just getting out of the bath. I’d been allowed to kiss His ring while a crowd of blond altarboys held discrete towels to protect His Holiness’s dripping private bits from view as he stepped out of a sunken tub of hand-carved Italian marble.

Save for being naked – I politely averted my eyes – and being briskly rubbed by young men with plush, gold-embroidered towels, His Holiness was exactly as I pictured him: A wrinkled, saggy-assed elderly man with – in addition to the dark, almost black circles around his deep-sunken eyes – an air of almost madly sinister gravitas.

My interview, as the Pope weightily informed me while sniffing a bouquet of roses held up for his approval by an obsequious imp in a crimson toga, would be with Vatican metabiologist J. Noble Random. The flick of a gold-ringed pinky dismissed me, and I was swept out by my guide.

I almost laughed out loud when I was shown into the office of Random, who appeared to be waiting for me. In addition to being very British, as I could tell from his first words, Random was a dead ringer for John Cleese in his early Monty Python days, and I instantly thought … well, that that’s who he actually was, and that this whole thing was some sort of staged joke.

Recovering quickly, though – I could conceive of no possible way in which Cleese or any other Python could gain access to the inner recesses of the Vatican, especially not after The Life of Brian – I simply smiled as I shook Random’s hand.

Even so, I suffered throughout the interview with what could only be called cognitive dissonance. So much so that I was unable to think of good questions, and fell back on simply recording what Random said:

“I know you’re simply bubbling over with questions, but I’ll just tell you what I’ve been asked to tell you, and we can get to the questions later.

“As I’m sure you’re aware, the Vatican maintains a small but highly qualified staff of researchers. Most of the work is philological in nature, engaged in translations of ancient documents such as the Dead Sea scrolls and things of that order, but there also is a team of researchers engaged in more weighty scientific matters – biologists, physicists, and most especially archeologists and even paleontologists.

“I, as you have no doubt guessed, am one of that team.”

He paused, staring for a moment at the lavishly decorated ceiling of his office in apparent preoccupation, then seemed to come back to himself.

“Well! To the matter at hand: This most recent project basically grew out of the realization that human fecal material contains countless cells shed in the normal metabolic process.”

That was so out of left field, I was dumbfounded by it, and it was only by listening to my recording later that I was able to catch what he said next.

“Average people like you and I shed these human cells in our daily ablutions and simply flush them away, with no thought to the significance. But some of us here at the Vatican Metabiology Lab realized that this simple fact held great significance when the individual in question was in fact our Savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

“We immediately understood that obtaining a sample of Our Savior’s Holy Excrement from his years of wandering would be next to impossible. But one of my research team – it was I, if you must know – floated the idea that Our Lord spent his childhood in only a few places.

“There must exist, within those ancient communities where the Baby Jesus lived, 2000-year-old kitchen middens and rubbish dumps. Any modern mother will tell you that babies are virtual gushing fountains of near-liquid fecal matter” – here he waggled his eyebrows unconsciously but comically, which unfortunately reinforced the John Cleese impression – “producing anywhere from four to a dozen soiled diapers a day. The simple fact of it is that Mary, the mother of Jesus Our Savior, must have disposed of her firstborn’s cast-off diapers in some fashion.

“Of course, this is based on the assumption, by no means automatic, that Jesus had a normal human metabolism and ate and excreted as you and I do. Pemberton, an unfortunately youthful member of the team, gave a great impassioned speech providing numerous citations from the Man of Steel Canon, in which Superman receives his powers, and presumably a certain amount of nourishment, from exposure to Earth’s yellow sun. The good man insisted that Superman eats, if he does, only as a courtesy to friends and coworkers, and perhaps as a theatrical prop to his Clark Kent identity. Likewise, Jesus the Son of God may not have needed to eat.

“However, at some point you have to simply accept – on faith, as it were, ha-ha! – that Jesus the man, being born of an earthly mother, had some human traits in addition to his godly ones, at least in his early life.

“Although some members of my team thought it possible that these diapers may have floated up to Heaven, possibly surrounded by a glowing aura of holiness, some of us reasoned that the most likely scenario was that Mary simply tossed them in the garbage with the chicken bones and whatever passed for pizza boxes of that time.

“Fortunately funds were available to do the actual research. An American billionaire had recently donated $30 million to mount yet another expedition to Mount Ararat to look for Noah’s Ark, but we were able to divert the funds into this project.

“And a good thing too! The rich bastard was initially incensed over the diversion of his donation. But I ask you! Does a mere layman know the best use of donated funds? No! We are the Vatican, after all. We sent the local Bishop over to explain that the preliminary expedition to Ararat was turned back by a burning wall of fire, probably because the money was tainted by the sin of the donor. That shut him up right quick, you can imagine!

“Anyway, using Biblical citations and records surviving from the time, we undertook excavations in a half dozen sites, mining the kitchen middens and stable dumps of area villages and towns.

“We ended with something like 70 tons of raw material, which we shipped, for security purposes, in a number of individual boxes, each weighing less than a pound, to the Vatican. It was expensive as hell, of course, but as the Vatican owns a substantial interest in the shipping company, the whole thing balanced out fairly well.

“Using a sophisticated extraction technique involving the Vatican ultracentrifuge – it’s quite proprietary, old chap, no need to even ask! – we extracted progressive samples of a substance which our official records refer to as Extract 390, but which I and certain members of my team waggishly call Jeezium.” He looked alarmed for a moment and added quickly, “You won’t tell His Holiness I said that, I hope.”

“However! No doubt you’re eager to see it, eh?”

Stepping over to a wall safe hidden behind a Caravaggio painting depicting the Sacrifice of Isaac, he keyed the combination and the safe door swung silently open. Inside was a single item resting on a black velvet box, a faceted glass sphere something like the one that Harry Osborne gave to Doctor Octopus in the second Spider-Man movie, the one with the deuterium sample needed to power Doc Ock’s disastrous fusion generator.

He pulled the sphere out reverently. “And here it is! Imagine! Almost 60 grams of pure Jeezium!”

I stepped closer to observe it. Floating within the sphere was a blob of what looked like something you’d see in a Lava Lamp, or possibly the Red Matter from the  Star Trek reboot featuring the two Spocks. It was a liquid-appearing mass, less than an inch in diameter, and it gave off a gentle glow of pearly pinkish light.

“Eh? Eh? It’s something, eh? Fair takes your breath away, doesn’t it? The actual immortal and Holy living cells of the Baby Jesus!

“And look at this!” he exclaimed excitedly, pointing at the back of his thumb. “See this spot, here? I had a huge wart there, not two days ago. Had it since I was a child growing up in Brighton. It simply fell off yesterday, leaving only this reddish spot! Amazing, eh? And this! I slammed this finger in a drawer while I was at seminary as a young man, hastily hiding away a copy of Sorority Vixens 2 when the dorm counselor came through, and the nail hasn’t grown right since. But look! Today it’s perfect!

“Even without the actual conscious presence of Our Lord and Savior, his full healing powers are still present in this Holy tissue!

“Think of what could be done with this in hospitals all over the world! It could revolutionize medicine, jerking it out of the hands of doctors and scientists and placing it …” – here he sighed blissfully – “back into the prayerful domain of the Church, where it rightly belongs!”

“Why,” and here he leaned over and fixed me with a piercing look, “it might even be the answer we’ve sought to the amputee-healing controversy you unbelievers blather on about.”

He leaned back in his chair and gazed at the glowing sample cradled in his hands in deep reverie. “The nights I’ve lain awake pondering the question! And now at last, we may be able to silence that glib insistence that mere severed limbs disprove the Kingdom of God! Ah, well. Ah, well …”

That was basically the end of the interview, as Random trailed off into blank silence. A moment later a security guard herded me from the room, and I was escorted to the main entrance. The whole thing was a bit surreal, and it was only later as I was transcribing my notes on the flight home that I really believed it had all happened.

I never heard from the Vatican again, either about the interview, the embargo, or the supposed announcement. And after the bus crash that killed Random and other members of his team, I don’t dare attempt to contact anyone.

However, I do notice the recently-retired Pope looking fairly youthful of late.  The dark circles around his eyes are almost gone, and his normally cadaverous yellow skin is looking unexpectedly pink.

I have to wonder …

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Drum Roll, Cymbal Clash, Fanfare of Vuvuzelas!

picture of red fox

Hey there! Say hello to another FreethoughtBlogs alumnus, moving over to further infiltrate Patheos with steely determination, pointed wit, and violent, wanton godlessness.

For those of you discovering Hank Fox (me) for the first time, an intro:

I’m the author of Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith. I’ve blogged as the Blue Collar Atheist at Freethought Blogs and elsewhere for a couple of years, but I recently changed my blog banner to A Citizen of Earth to reflect some new conceptual territory I’m venturing into.

[ Shameless self-promotion: I have two other books upcoming – and hopefully even a third one I’ll mention later in this same post. The first should be out in late May, early June: “BrainDrops: The One and Only Ungodly Bathroom Reader – An Astounding Compendium of Wit, Wisdom & Complete Goddam Nonsense from a Complete Goddam Atheist.” The second, “Saying Goodbye To Dan: An Atheist Deals With Death,” should be out sometime in early 2014. ]

In case it escapes you, yes, I’m an atheist. More than that, I’m an antitheist. I started calling myself that way back in the last century, before I’d ever heard anyone else use the term. I still pronounce it in my own peculiar way: An-TITH-ee-ist, rather than the upstart modern an-tee-THEE-ist.  To me it means “Not only do I not believe in gods, I don’t think you should either.”

As the book title and former blog name indicate, I got into atheism from a slightly different direction than most: I grew up in Texas with rodeo cowboys and hard-core religious types, working as a truck driver, roofer, carpenter and a lot of other blue-collary and outdoorsy jobs. The cover of my book sports a picture of me riding a bull (my brief dalliance with rodeo included getting on – and coming off! – eight of them) but cowboying was also one of my formal professions: For years I worked with riding horses, draft horses and mules in the wilderness of California’s Eastern Sierra mountains.

Later I got to be a newspaper and magazine editor, but I have golden memories of my days in the saddle, and still think of myself as more blue-collar and red-neck than white-collar and citified.

Growing up in an East Texas home with a Southern Baptist mother, a Jehovah’s Witness father and later, a Born-Again Christian stepfather, I also had something of an unusual home life. From about the age of 13, I started having my doubts about gods and the supernatural, but after one slip with my stepfather that resulted in years of low-key torment, I kept it wholly to myself for years and years.

Completely on my own, I gradually became a full nonbeliever. Watching myself change, observing my own thoughts on the matter of gods and such, and eventually blogging about it, I realized there was an unfilled niche in the atheist library, a book that spoke not just to the Why of atheism, but the How. So I wrote Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist, a sort of handbook on how to think as an atheist – the kinds of things that do, or maybe should, go through one’s mind as you make the Atheist Journey.

As to the question of the logical defensibility of atheism, I am comfortably and absolutely certain there are no such things as supernatural superbeings – no gods or devils, no heavens or hells for them to inhabit – but also no ghosts, spirit mediums, telepaths, garden fairies, or zombies (although I’m still watching John McCain and Dick Cheney with interest, and would not be surprised to see shambling, lurching brain-tropism at any moment).

For me, the questions don’t even arise. Because I realized some time back that a great deal of each of our lives consists of thought experiments – the proffering of one concept or another as a guiding principle, and then living that idea to see what sort of fruit it bears.

The simple fact is the thought experiment of god-free reality and reason has, in the fields of science and technology, produced true miracles. I’m communicating with you, across an entire world, with a number of them right now. Computers, the Internet, lasers, fiber optics, satellites, microwaves, so many real things working together to produce this seamless technological feat of me writing this blog, and you reading it.

NONE of those things were possible through the thought experiment of religion. As to actual technology that arose from religious mindsets, it consists, unflatteringly, of torture devices that flourished during the Inquisition and the witch hunts of Colonial America. Speaking of Colonial America, even something so apparently primitive as the Native American birchbark canoe comes into being only through a technology undergirded by a mercilessly real-world mindset; faith plays no part in its invention or construction.

The thought experiment of reality and reason bears equally useful results in individual lives, and I’ll tell you some of my own experience of that as we blog along together.

My stock in trade is commentary on current events, ventures into amateur philosophy, and my own doofus-level survey of the state of the world. But it is also very much this new idea I have – that there’s a next step for the atheist community

That next step is probably already being taken without us being aware of it. Which means it is undirected, largely accidental, and probably hugely less effective than it could be.

One of our underlying atheist assumptions is that when you get religion out of your head and out of your life, reasonableness and goodness somehow flows in and fills the hole. But as I know from watching the atheist community, and those on the cusp of abandoning their home religion for something else, that process is never a given. One craziness can all too easily be replaced by another; witness the number of people who become uncomfortable with their sedate hometown church but who think the solution is to join a born-again evangelical megachurch.

I’ve even met a few atheists – not a lot, but some – who have seemed nutty as hell. And certainly the reasonableness we seem to think ourselves blessed with doesn’t make us unfailingly capable of calm communication, even with each other. I’ve seen people who self-identify as godless uber-rationals spit out ad hominem insults like a machine gun, and never notice.

But hey, we’re young. A young movement, a young community and, as I’ve realized, a young culture.

It’s that last I want to focus on in the coming years. I’m convinced that something special is happening right now, something never-before-seen on Earth, and something probably necessary to human survival.

It’s just this: Us. We atheists. Not as individuals, but as this community, and beyond it, this new culture. Something to fill the hole left by dying organized religion.

While speaking in Ottawa at Eschaton in November, 2011, I was on a panel that was asked if we were optimists or pessimists about the future. All the other panelists said they were optimists. In my own answer (which I worded badly, and still flinch when I recall it) I tried to express that the question necessitates a more nuanced answer. Optimism can be misused, I said, because … well, because bad things happen all by themselves, but to have good things happen, you have to MAKE them happen.

Which means a negative future may well be a greased-chute certainty in a very few years, whereas a positive future demands a shit-ton of very hard work and some damned difficult decisions. The optimistic idea that “something good is going to happen” – whether we lay it at the feet of miracle-working Jesus or of miracle-working Science – can be poison to the understanding that we have to put on our big-boy boots and DO things.

I started exploring the idea of an atheistic culture back in 2010. I’ve blogged about it briefly and infrequently, but I’ve done a LOT of conceptual work on it. I have something like 500 pages of notes I want to turn into blog posts, public talks and eventually – after I get input from a great number of people – a book.

More than that, I want to see progress toward that culture. As I say in my first book:

There is a saner, more reasonable future awaiting us, a time and place where a majority of people aspire to see things for what they are and then choose to deal with them realistically. It will replace what we have now, where too many of us can’t get over believing that some eternity-spanning fantasy makes our own lives cosmically important and everything else – distant stars, a broad universe, and even the civil rights of our neighbors – totally insignificant.

More than anything, I’d like to live in that sane future. Failing that, I’d like to think I can help make it happen.

Anyway, here I am. If you’re new to me, welcome, and I hope you’ll enjoy my writing and my ideas. If you’re a reader following me over from FTB, double welcome.

And away we go.

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Short Stack # 20

Cover9 copyIf you’ve liked my Short Stack features, you might enjoy the new book coming out in a couple of months. I hope to have it completed and for sale by the end of May.

Draft cover design to the right (click to enlarge). Note the word “draft.” I think the title is pretty much set, but I reserve the right to radically redesign the cover. I’m certainly open to input on that, by the way, so fire away if you have any criticism, suggestions or better ideas

BrainDrops will roll out on Amazon in trade paperback format, and I’ll do my best to get the digital versions online shortly after.

The book is a collection of quick-to-read shorts, mainly about atheism but also including a certain amount of the nonsense from the Short Stacks. The subtle side-point of the book, which I hope will be noticed by readers, is that one of the things accompanying atheism when it takes hold in your head is an enlarged sense of humor. Atheists are, in a word, fun.

I have some other important news in just a day or so, but you’ll have to wait for it.

Meanwhile: Continue reading “Short Stack # 20”