5. Killing
(Post 5 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
10:00 am EDT
When I saw the photo above, it made me deliriously happy. It probably makes you happy too. For the full effect, click to enlarge it. Go on, I’ll wait.
…
Mirror neurons are partly responsible for our reaction — monkey see happy, monkey be happy. But I have an added reason to like it: these fine people are responding to something I said. Something I said made them all feel like that.
It was at the Freethought Festival in Madison a few weeks back, and the line that slew them so nicely is also found in this blog post from 2008. What makes me happiest of all is that I was making an actual point at the time — not just killing, but educating them as they die. It’s my favorite mix. So I’m only mildly ashamed to admit that this photo is now my computer desktop. The big-ass version.
One of the most perfect moments in Julia Sweeney’s stage show Letting Go of God captures the (literally) intoxicating thrill of getting a spontaneous laugh in real time:
All of our brains are on drugs all of the time. We give ourselves hits: dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and vasopressin. The next time all of you laugh, I’ll get a hit of adrenaline through my veins, and if you don’t when I expect you to, I’ll get cortisol instead and I’ll feel anxious.
I always thought I was a person in my family who escaped addictions, but now I realize that I am up here on this stage right now partly because… I am an addict. [Audience chuckles.] Ooh, thanks. [Big laugh.] Oooooo!!!! [Insanely big laugh]
I started my writing career 11 years ago with a satirical novel and followed it up with another. When I started my blog in 2007, I tried to keep weaving comedy and education together, and I did pretty well a lot of the time.
Then in 2009, I started Foundation Beyond Belief. Running a charitable organization that’s trying to make the world a better place and give humanists a positive way to express their worldview is incredibly satisfying. I can’t begin to describe how much. But it’s also pretty earnest work.
When you’re writing to entertain, you run each word and sentence through a quick filter — How can I make that funnier? But for most of the projects I’ve done in the last three years, including the Foundation and Voices of Unbelief, my filter has been set to a nearly opposite setting: How can I make that clearer?
Humor introduces ambiguity and plays with it. As often as not, it looks for a less clear way to say something, and the ambiguity opens the laugh. Clarity is the kryptonite of humor. So it’s not surprising that I’ve recently started to feel the funny part of my brain atrophying. And not just on the page — I’m not even as silly in real life as I was a few years ago. That’s begun to feel like a real loss.
Then something terrific happened. A project has come along, out of the relative blue, that doesn’t just allow the combination of humor and education I love but demands it. And sure enough, since I’ve been working on it, I can feel this part of my brain coming out to play again. It’s the best thing that’s happened to my head in long time.
I’ll announce the project when I start getting a hint that somebody is out there and awake with me this morning! Time to break the silence, you lurkers. Note that I’ve added FB comments as an option.
4. The first blogger
(Post 4 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
9:30 am EDT
I can’t believe it’s been almost five years since I last mentioned my favorite blog: “The Essays of Montaigne.”
Don’t Google it. This blog was created in the 16th century when French nobleman Michel de Montaigne decided to write down his thoughts on whatever popped into his head. If that isn’t a blog, I don’t know what is.
Fortunately a lot of worthwhile things popped into that head, like the nature of greatness, human vanity, lies, laziness, thumbs, birth defects, the passing of gas (and the closely-related topic of smells), anger, cruelty, cannibals, laughter, solitude, drunkenness, and how it could be that children resemble their fathers. And death. He wrote a lot about death.
But these weren’t abstract essays. Montaigne’s goal was to describe human life with absolute honesty, and he ties each Essay into his own life and the lives of those around him in a way that makes the reader bolt upright in recognition again and again. There’s something so unique and incredible about hearing 400-year-old thoughts so close to my own. The most common reader reaction seems to be, “OMG, he’s talking about my life. It seems like it was written yesterday.”
If you haven’t read Montaigne, get a good translation — the Penguin edition is good — then pick an essay and go. If it doesn’t grab you in a page, pick a different one. Be sure to let me know how it goes.
Currently reading, and also hugely recommended:
How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
3. Hiding in plain sight
(Post 3 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
9:00 am EDT
Q (from South Africa): Because of my demographics (female, 40, white, Afrikaans speaking) people automatically assume that I’m a Christian. So my usual tactic is just not to say anything and let it pass, but I’m increasingly uncomfortable with this as it feels hypocritical. Comments?
A: This is a great question, and I’ve seen it answered several ways.
Start with the fact that being out, to whatever degree you can be, makes it easier for others to be out, which in turn makes it harder for religious folks to stereotype nonbelievers as a cartoonish ilk they’ve never met, which in turn causes attitudes to evolve. It has worked precisely this way for gays and lesbians, and it will work for us. Being out and normal is the most important and powerful element in changing attitudes.
Some respond to this idea by essentially sewing the Big Red A on their lives, framing their every gesture, message, and wardrobe choice in terms of atheism. I have no problem with this, but it’s not for me. Sometimes I’m interested in going boldly into the fray for positive social change, and sometimes I’m more interested in having a beer. And sometimes these overlap.
A perfect example: When a new acquaintance asks what books I write, I often say “nonreligious parenting books.” But sometimes, like when I’m getting my hair cut and not looking for a big conversation, it’s just “parenting books.” Maybe it has something to do with the scissors by my ear.
I think we have to give ourselves permission to come out to the degree and to the people we choose in the ways that we choose, and to not be bullied into more. At the same time, we should constantly remember that it’s the way to positive change, and that it almost always goes better than we think it will.
Specific ideas:
1. When someone says “I’m praying for you,” say, “I’m not religious myself, but thanks for the very kind gesture.”
2. Wear a Foundation Beyond Belief T-shirt. If someone asks, tell them about nonreligious people coming together to work for a better world.
3. Wear a Happy Humanist or similar pin or earrings. Someone will ask.
4. Post and comment on Facebook in ways that gradually reveal your perspective.
5. Offer a nontheistic “grace” at a family gathering.
Aaaaand, I’m out of time. Add in the comments!
The lazy atheist
Not doing something is usually easier than doing it. Not taking out the trash burns fewer calories than taking out the trash. Forgetting to run a marathon, not getting a Ph.D. in physics, declining to write a novel—each of these non-doings is easier than doing any one of them.
So it should be easy to be an atheist, since all you have to do is not believe in God. But here’s the thing — it’s really hard.
The not-believing isn’t the problem. There are a thousand good reasons for deciding that God was created by humans, not the other way around. But like not breathing or not stopping at a red light, the problem isn’t the act itself — it’s what happens next.
Tell your mother-in-law or boss or boyfriend that you don’t believe in God and suddenly everything becomes complicated. The eyes get all shifty and hands go to wallets. You are quizzed on arcane bits of Sunday School knowledge by people who are sure you missed something. And you’re asked how you can be sure God doesn’t exist when everyone else on Earth but Richard Dawkins and his cat is absolutely sure He does.
Okay, you say, fair questions. Time for a bit of homework. So you read the Bible, cover to cover, and take a good run at the Koran, and toe-dip the Talmud and the Bhagavad Gita. You continue by reading everything that popped into the head of a theologian, only to learn that the arguments for believing in God have enormous names like Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological. Most believers don’t know these reasons, but if you’d like to claim disbelief, you have to know them, and refute them, one by one by one by one.
You turn for help to the recent surge in atheist writing, only to find another long shelf of 600-page books written by, and apparently for, people with advanced degrees in Philosophy and Neuroscience, not to mention Sentence Structure and Footnoting. You clear your busy social schedule and dig in anyway, finally mastering the complex and nuanced arguments against the complex and nuanced arguments of the theologians.
But when at last you find those believers again, the ones who were sure you’d missed something, and share your newfound knowledge, they shake their heads and smile. It isn’t that kind of a question, silly. It’s not something you can look up in books. It happens in your heart.
And they wonder why atheists are cranky.
Most of the people I know and love are lazy Christians—people who technically believe, but haven’t given it much thought or effort. Some go to church, some don’t. Few of them have cracked a Bible, much less a Koran or the Vedas. I’m more likely to know the stated beliefs of their denomination than they are. Just slap a Jesus fish on your bumper and you’re in. Nobody asks you to list the Ten Commandments (well — not usually), or which two fabrics Leviticus 19 says not to combine, or even how you know there’s a God. It’s easy. Just believe—or at least say you do.
There are lots of lazy Christians. It’s time to clear off the couch, pop open a beer, and make room for the lazy atheist.
(Remember the reason for the Blogathon — donate in the sidebar!)
1. Naked
(Post 1 of 33 in my 16-hour shift for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon.)
8:00 am
Here’s the first of 33 consecutive posts in 16 hours — about the same number I’ve done in the past six months. I do this NOT because I think I have 33 things to say, but because Jen McCreight told me to. I am nothing if not obedient.
I also do it to support the Secular Student Alliance, the World’s Bitchinest Freethought Organization™ and beneficiary of this Blogathon, to which you must donateifyoureachtheendofthissentence. HA! Now go straight to the sidebar and chip in for the future you say you want.
Ideas for ways to pledge (yoinked from Ellen Lundgren):
1. Pledge per word…say 1/10¢ a word.
2. Pledge per post (33 total).
3. Pledge per thing you’ve learned. If a post teaches you something new, you donate your pledge amount. (This may be the cheapest option.)
I’ll post on the hour and half hour until midnight tonight, holy shi’ite. About half will be on topics I’ve been ordered to write about (see? obedient) by Facebook friends and lovers, while the other half will be what I damn well feel like writing about, so OFF me.
Many are drawn from titles on Post-It Notes all over my desk, but none will be written in advance. This is a huge mistake. I usually edit the crap out of everything I write. Today you get it undigested, and it just may look like that.
Between now and midnight I will talk about the part of my brain that’s being born again, convenient monsters, implicit believers and lazy atheists, making Quakers, hiding in plain sight, a 400-year-old secret atheist document, funerals, my disappearing kids, the things that piss me off most when atheists do them, and whether my wife has ever been an idiot (spoiler alert: no). I will make a big, cool announcement and write one post buck naked. I’ll share the one extremely common word in blog names that’s most likely to keep me from reading the blog (sorry), reveal my two degrees of separation from Lisa Simpson, and offer my opinion on the single best intro to freethought. I’ll say nice things about a minister and pissy things about a theologian, introduce you to my favorite blogger (who happens also to have been the first), and wish like hell we would pay more attention to Santa Claus.
I also plan to write off the top of my head about 10-12 hot secular parenting topics (i.e. topics of interest to hot secular parents).
Pray for me.
Blogathon!!!!!!!!!
My usually classy wife made a perfectly sick analogy once for our financial partnership: I’m the anus, she’s the sphincter.
But when it comes to writing, I’m a fully-puckered, Grade A sphincter. I edit the living crap out of everything I write before any other eyeballs get a taste. But this Sunday, June 10, I’ll break my own rules for a good cause: blogging nonstop, live and almost entirely unedited, for 16 hours to raise money for the pure awesomeness that is the Secular Student Alliance.
The spectacular Jen McCreight of Blag Hag usually does this blogging marathon all by her lonesome each year to raise money for the SSA. This year, Jen has invited other bloggers to join her, taking shifts in a massive word dump known as BLOGATHON 2012!!!!
Jen invited me to join the madness, and I’m all over it. It runs June 9-16, and my shift is Sunday, June 10. On that day, I will be blogging the shi’ite out of The Meming of Life for 16 hours straight, 8am to midnight, with at least one new post every 30 minutes, no pre-writing or autoposting allowed.
It’s a really bad idea, this is. I am guaranteed to say something stupid in Hour 14 that I can’t take back once you twits take a screen shot of it. I will say on other things with awkwardly. I will get inscrutable and profane, as I often do when I’m tired. I’m just so glad the Internet is wiped clean once a week.
It’s hard to really capture how brilliantly the folks at SSA do what they do. Just a terrific, fist-pumping, dilithium-crystal-powered force for good. And they are growing at a frankly insane clip, from 42 to 365 campus chapters in ten years. That’s why they need a little cash.
And that’s the best news of all — this can cost you something! Just as someone can pledge money to support a walkathon, you can support this freethought blogathon relay team. The current, ever-expanding schedule includes bloggers like Jen, Greta Christina, JT Eberhard, and many more. Should be a blast, and it benefits my favorite organization. Win-win.
To support the SSA through the Blogathon, donate here or in the sidebar widget. At the bottom of the form is a field to suggest a blogging topic, OR you can put it in the comments below for free. I’ll pick a few of the most interesting. Secular parenting questions are certainly fine, but you don’t have to limit to that, or even to freethought. Ask anything, seriously. I need 33 posts, so I just might bite.
And ooh! The SSA currently has a matching offer going on, so whatever Blogathon raises will be doubled.
Ideas for ways to pledge (yoinked from Ellen Lundgren):
1. Pledge per word (such as 1/10¢ per word).
2. Pledge per post (33 total).
3. Pledge per thing you’ve learned. If a post teaches you something new, you donate your pledge amount.
See you Sunday!
