skin hunger

Things happened, this blog stopped. Now my life is in a place where I feel like I can write again. There’s a new blog, though, and if you happen to see this post, I hope you’ll check it out: skin hunger. Come join a new conversation!

The Freethinker › Muhammad “Mickey” Munajid – the mouse-maligning mufti

The Freethinker › Muhammad “Mickey” Munajid – the mouse-maligning mufti.

Your friendly Atheist A Go-Go has been a busy fellow indeed, and blogging has had to temporarily take a bit of a backseat. In the meantime, follow this link and learn about the Horror that is the Mouse.

There are some very fucked up people in this world.

This day in history (on a lighter note)

On this day in 1822, the Catholic Church admitted that the newfangled heliocentrism idea just might have something going for it:

1822: The College of Cardinals finally caves in to the hard facts of science, saying that the “publication of works treating of the motion of the Earth and the stability of the sun, in accordance with the opinion of modern astronomers, is permitted.”

But oh, wait: it took them another 13 years to remove Galileo’s book from the banned list.

And oh, wait: they actually just allowed as you could talk about this whole heliocentrism thing. It wasn’t until 1992 that a Pope admitted that yes, in fact, the Earth goes around the Sun (and admitted in 2000 that they mighta been dicks to Galileo).

And folks wonder why some of us have a hard time taking the Catholic Church seriously.

(And yes, all of this is as indicative of insane bureaucracy as it is of insane religion. Seriously, seeing the Catholic bureaucracy in action is like reading Kafka’s The Castle, or Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Tale of the Troika. Or watching Brazil)

Self Evident

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They didn’t stop dying on 9/11. They didn’t just die in New York and DC and Pennsylvania. They’ve been dying every year since, in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. We fought to make ourselves safe, some will tell you, but the fact is that we have been fighting for retribution, for vengeance, and we’ve been taking it out of the skin of children, of innocents, of people who can’t defend themselves. In fear and rage we listened to the siren whispers of those who profit from fear, and in so doing damned ourselves.

Today I mourn the dead; today I remember what we chose to do with their deaths. We can blame GW all we want; in the end, it is us, all those who didn’t take to the streets, didn’t bring the business of this nation to a halt and say, no, not in our name, not in theirs. Seven years, Osama is still out there, and people in Iraq and Afghanistan are still dying.

Seven years. Is that long enough? Can America turn away from the hypnotic drumbeat of hate and anger and war, turn away from adding to 9/11’s total of misery, and find another way?

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10% literal
90% metaphor
3000 some poems disguised as people
on an almost too perfect day
should be more than pawns
in some asshole’s passion play

(hat tip to Jesus’ General for the Ani Difranco video)

Dear Atheist Blogosphere

Please. I’m as freaked out by Sarah Palin as anyone; but people don’t vote for vice-presidential candidates, and the more people focus on her, the less they focus on the dangerous nutjob who’s actually running for office.

Please read this, get some perspective, and focus your attentions somewhere that will work. Because the presidency that will continue the stripping of rights, continue the dismantling of the Separation of Church and State, is McCain’s.

An Atheist’s Hope

My hope is not based on Faith, that dreary, dessicated thing. My Hope is based on what is real. What is real is this, something that I’ve said before and I’ll say again:

We humans are so amazing when we let ourselves be. That is the source of my Hope. Us. Our abilities, our qualities. Because despite our faults…we are so amazing when we let ourselves be.

I have hope because we do such amazing things. We question, we quest, we explore. We are clever, endlessly clever, in the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. We have uncovered secrets of our past, of other worlds, even other galaxies.

I have Hope because we have an equally limitless capacity for creating Beauty. We are thrill to the Beauty of the Cosmos, but we aren’t content with that. With our art, our architecture, our words, our lives, we create Beauty, add to the total already in the world.

I have Hope because of the human capacity for compassion. We push the boundaries of our circle, expand it, grow it, encompass other beings in it. The compassion in the simple act of giving a stray some food is so commonplace that we take it for granted; and yet, it is a remarkable thing, something that speaks to hearts that can grow.

I have Hope because somehow, despite the troubles that beset us, despite our shortcomings, despite the less noble parts of us, we still do these things. Not as big as we should, not as often as we should, but we do them.

I have Hope because, whatever our failures, we are capable of so much; I have hope because we have, all around us, all the time, the evidence of our ability to be amazing, to create Beauty, to sow compassion.

Jung’s The Undiscovered Self

I had forgotten how alternately illuminating, infuriating and amusing it can be to read Jung. It takes a definite kind of brilliant mind to be able to go from deep and penetrating to bizarre and odd-ball without blinking.

But when he’s on target, he’s on target, and the questions he asks can trouble you and gnaw at you for hours and days. I like some of his take on religion. Jung defines religion and creed as separate things — religion is, to Jung “dependence upon and submission to the irrational facts of existence.” Creed is the simplistic formulation of beliefs, attitudes, ideas, imposed by churches. “Creed” is a mechanistic thing that does violence to the individual, defines their worth as only coming from a relation to a body of Received Truth. It turns subjective experience into a rigid set of Things to Accept. It denies individual agency and experience in favor of submission to the group.

As an artsy person, I’m interested in that non-rational side of things, the experience of the world: the emotional side. I think Jung is right in one important respect: we need, all of us, to feel gripped by something larger than ourselves (“ourselves” being, here,  our conscious, thinking selves), while still retaining our individuality. For me, I don’t need the structures of religion, though I grok what Jung means by “religious experience.” I find mine in other sources, including in what we have learned from the sciences. My “dependence” upon the irrational facts of existence includes the deep-seated feeling of connection to the rest of animal life, to other humans. It is not an image of myself as an insignificant instance in the long history of life, but rather how each and every life form is a unique instance* in that history. If you take humans alone, of all the billions of humans that have existed there has been only one me. I am unique, and yet also related to all others. That, when I stop to contemplate it, is a wonderful thing. (*yes, an overstatement, given all the asexual reproduction out there, and clones — bees, say. But you know what I mean)

My beef with religion (Jung’s “Creeds”) and literal belief in things like deities is that it denigrates individual subjective experience, attempts to make it conform to the group formula. The same can be said of many secular creeds, as Jung notes. As a result, one of the ways that I part with Jung is in contemplating the utility of religions as they exist — just to take one example, “God” is a metaphor in Jung’s conception, not a real, existing entity. Sadly, in a world where literal belief is so rampant, the metaphorical possibilities of such words is dampened. If we need metaphors for those “irrational facts of existence,” I think we need to look elsewhere. Maybe that’s why I’m more comfortable with Sagan’s metaphorical use of the word “Cosmos” than I am with the word “God.” Keep using a word like God and it doesn’t matter how metaphorical you are being — people are going to hear what they mean by the word, not what you mean, and your point will be lost.

But still, I have a weak spot for ol’ Jung. Even when he starts drifting a bit into batty territory and talking about paranormal phenomena.

The Caligulas we see

What you would have seen if you had watched Gregory watching Caligula:

o_o

(yawn)

0_o

(yawn)

o_0

(yawn)

0_0

(yawn)

0_0 !!!!!!

(yawn)

But this isn’t a movie review. This is about Caligula, John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the darkness in all of us. Really, it’s about me.

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Caligula. The Roman Emperor whose name has become synonymous with madness, depravity, and evil. What do we know about him?

Almost nothing. He’s a deeply problematic ruler to study, because so much is lost, and what we have is decidedly biased against him. Wikipedia gives a good account of the historiographic problems.

Was he as mad as they say? As cruel and depraved? How much of what we “know” is only the monster image created by those who hated and despised him? We don’t know. We do know this: we are very good at making monsters out of those we hate, or disagree with.

I’m going to be blunt: I can’t think of many Republican politicians that I have respected. The party has become, for me, the embodiment of evil and darkness. It’s not like the Democrats have covered themselves in glory, but in the modern era the Republican Party has sided pretty consistently with things I think are evil; has attacked the very foundations of democracy; has raised up mean-spirited selfishness as a new God.  Don’t get me wrong — most people who call themselves Republicans are good, decent people. But the party leaders didn’t heed Yoda’s warning. They walked into the cave and stayed.

The hyperbole here is deliberate. I want it to be clear: I am primed to see Republican leaders as evil, as nasty, as monsters. Our primate heritage at work, the tendency towards xenophobia, towards constructing the Other as Monster.

Watching Caligula, alternately bored and shocked, I found my mind wandering from the movie to the subject to the larger issue. How much was Caligula that? Or do we have, in our historical “facts” about him, the monster that those who hated him saw? How much of that is real? How much is fantasy? How much is deliberate creation designed to discredit him? Will we ever know? Maybe, if we ever find those missing bits from Tacitus, who tended to be fairer, and more impartial, than others. But for now, we have, most likely, a funhouse mirror version, a distortion. A construct.

In all the Sarah Palin flap, I found myself disturbingly willing to believe each and every claim that made her out as nasty, vindictive, evil. People’s testimony of brief encounters become Solid Facts; hearsay unassailable; the flimsiest of rumors dispassionate data. Enough of what’s a matter of public record made her One of Them, and the rest, well. It’s easy to fall into the trap. I can do the same thing with McCain. Do so, too often.

The Skeptical Spidey Sense says: when you see a monster, step back, think hard, be honest, look again. Put the skepticism on full alert. Because when we oppose someone, it’s so easy to fall into the trap, to create the monster. And the Better Me, the Me that wants to be better than that, knows that too much misery has been created in this world by the human tendency to create monsters in the place of people.

I have to be better than that. I must always see the human, not the thing I oppose amplified in monstrous caricature. As an an atheist dealing with the religious, as a liberal dealing with conservatives, I have to challenge the images my mind creates. If I want to oppose that which makes us small, I have to be big. I will try to always see the human, not the Other. As best I can.

Because I don’t want to be another monster. The world has enough misery.

Whiny turds

Sigh.

So, on September 28th, in an action coordinated by the Alliance Defense Fund, a group of pastors is going to challenge the IRS regulations prohibiting endorsements of candidates by, you guessed it, endorsing candidates.

Just a guess — they won’t be endorsing Obama.

Rant&Reason has the details. There is some good news, though. One, this is the IRS, and they are about as likely to take this sitting down as Guiliani is to go a day without mentioning 9/11. There’s also Project Fair Play, organized by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. They are taking preemptive action, including filing to have the IRS consider whether the ADF is endangering its own tax exempt status, and to investigate possible ethics violations, what with lawyers advising their clients on how to break the law and all. It’s heartening to see that a whole group of pastors is involved. There are a lot of religious folk who get these rules, and why we have them.

What’s particularly obscene in all of this is the Orwellian Doublespeak going on — apparently not allowing churches to use their resources to promote candidates kills free speech. No, folks, it doesn’t. Pastors, for instance, can promote candidates on their free time all they want. They just can’t use church resources to do so. A church can also, of course, give up its tax exempt status, and then it will be free to do whatever the frellin’ hell it wants to. It’s amazing — churches basically get a public subsidy, in the form of tax exemption, and some still want to complain because there’s a few rules about that? Sigh.

My only cynical worry in all of this is that I could well see a certain administration leaning heavy on the IRS to ignore the ADF’s actions. So it’s good to see a coordinated counteraction now, one that might force the government’s hand in court, if all else fails.

The Depression — in color

While I’m still busy busy and thinky thinky, here’s another cool old photos link for you:

America in the 1930s — in color!

One of the pictures was taken in Tucson. Cool!

But as I look at these pictures, I wonder — am I the only person who finds himself thinking of that old Calvin and Hobbes comic where Calvin’s dad explains to him why old photos are in black and white?