January 6th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
(Religion)
In a review in Pharnygula of the Will Smith movie I Am Legend, PZ Myers notes that when atheists are depicted in popular movies they are either villains or stereotypical candidates for conversion.
The acceptable atheist is the one who has faced so much tragedy, whose life has been damaged by cruel fate to such a degree that his declaration that there is no god is understandable. . . . .That’s the standard trope: the atheist is a broken man, a nihilist, a cynic, someone who has come to his disbelief as a consequence of a devastating emotional experience.
This “acceptable atheist” almost always reconsiders their atheism by movie’s end. Myers notes that although “this is the kind of atheist theists are comfortable with” it has nothing to do with why most atheists today do not believe in any kind of god. “New atheists” have embraced a natural, scientific worldview, whereas the “movie atheist” still yearns for the supernatural underneath their anger.
I love Myer’s summary,
There are atheists who look on a tragedy and cry, “There is no god,” in despair. But we are atheists who look on beauty and complexity and awesome immensity and shout out, “There is no god!” and we are glad.
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December 30th, 2007 at 7:49 am
(Prose)
In Cosmopolitan there is a regular section ““Understanding His Baffling Behavior” purporting to “explain” to the magazine’s predominantly female audience why men behave as they do.
Recently they asked, Why do men sit with their legs splayed? Their answer,
Women are taught to keep their legs together as a way of not inviting sex,” says Helen Fisher, PhD, author of The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are Changing the World (Ballantine, 2000). “In contrast, a man is saying, ‘Come and get it.’
No, no, and no. As one male blogger stressed, “It is a comfort factor.” Sitting with legs together squishes your balls between your thighs — certainly not comfortable, any man can tell you. The blogger is right, but missed the bigger picture: there is more to it than comfort. As a matter of fact, it is all about maintaining the testes at the right temperature.
Did no one ask, during sex education class in school, the obvious question of why men have balls hanging outside their bodies? What do balls — the testes — do? Why is the male anatomy the way it is?
The testes are not inside with the rest of the body’s organs for a well-known reason: sperm reproduction needs to occur at a temperature about 2 degrees cooler than basal body temperature. The wrong temperature leads to increased DNA replication errors, and it leads to sperm with poor motility or even semen with mostly “dead” or damaged sperm.
So men, like the males of many mammals, have ballocks or ball-sacks which suspend the testes outside the body so they can be maintained at the right temperature. It is a flexible solution. The cremasteric muscle can contract to draw the balls up into the crotch to be warmed by contact with the rest of the body, or relax to suspend the testes in mid-air to be cooled by air convection (this is known as the cremasteric reflex). If necessary the male can also open or close his legs to change testes temperature by increasing or decreasing contact with his warmer body.
Civilization complicates the natural cooling of the testes by imposing pants and underpants on men. These add unwelcome warmth to the testicles, both due to the normal warming effect of clothing and due to pressing the balls tight against the crotch. This defeats nature’s purposes, reducing sperm count and motility, increasing DNA copying errors, and consequently leads to more birth defects and increased infertility. Healthy spermatogenesis is thus one of the most important benefits of male nudity.
Still, even in societies petrified by the thought of nudity, men can at least open their legs wide to reduce the surface area of testicular contact with the crotch and increase exposure to the cooler temperature outside the body. Men do this because it feels more comfortable, but it feels more comfortable because cooler testicles are what men need.
When our legs are opened wide, men are not saying come and get it (though if a woman wants to come and get it, why not?). Rather we are merely doing our appointed job as males: attempting to generate healthy sperm to make healthy babies.
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November 6th, 2007 at 12:17 am
(Featured Prose, Prose)
Instead of worshiping God, which we see as a fictitious intermediary inserted between us and life, atheists worship life direct. We prefer our tonic strong, not weakened with sweet lies. We want to drink the truth about life, not willingly fall for obfuscation. We refuse to abdicate common sense.
And what common sense tells us is that we are bodies, that we were conceived not as a result of some spiritual enterprise but because our parents had sex. (Or otherwise joined an egg and a sperm cell.) We came into being not as a result of the mingling of souls but as a consequence of the mingling of cells.
And common sense tells us that eventually we will die.
It tells us something more, something truly profound: death is final. With the loss of the body, life is no longer possible. Frightening as this may seem, it is just common sense. Without our bodies we cannot have sensations, cannot feel, cannot see, cannot hear, cannot emote, cannot think. Without body, there is no way to do anything.
All our experiences are the body’s doings. Existence is unavoidably body-based.
Common sense also tells us that we can’t be switched to another body. Not even to an identical body. We know this because identical twins are nevertheless separate people. The death of a twin is no less a death simply because there remains a clone still alive. And this tells us that we are our particular body, not some other; makes it clear that our identity is our body.
Because this is so, even the highest God can not preserve us after death. Even if such a God could create a clone of me and instill it with all my old memories, it would not be me. It would just be a clone being tricked. Any new memories the clone formed would be its memories, not mine. Were God to proceed to punish the clone, it would be the clone being punished. Its pains and memories of punishment would not be my pains or memories.
Once we die, our existence is extinguished, our unique identity broken, and even God is incapable of bringing us back. Not even for divine retribution.
All this follows because the soul is but the body in its aliveness. That is, soul is a quality bodies have at birth and lose at death. It is not something with independent existence. If the body dies its aliveness disappears, unreturnable. And the soul can’t be anything else, it can’t be extra-corporeal, because without body it has no way to be or to do. Disembodied aliveness is simply an existence impossibility.
So when the body dies, it is specifically the soul/aliveness that has ceased to exist. The body still lies there in the casket, and in fact the body will be resurrected into the bodies of other organisms as they break it down and devour it. The soul ceases, and the body is resurrected.
It is just a matter of common sense. And strangely, it enriches life to know the truth.
It is good to be able to cease and non-exist. It makes life incalculably valuable—something to cling to for all we are worth.
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September 10th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
(Death, Prose, Religion)
I was born naked, without belief in gods or God. I believed only in what I could touch and hear and see: the breasts I suckled on, my mother’s cooing voice, the funny faces my father made, the lullabies my grandmother sang. I believed in what was palpable and real.
Almost from my birth adults attacked both my nakedness and my atheism. They wrapped me in clothing. They filled me with talk of imaginary beings — Easter bunnies, tooth fairies, Santa and his tiny reindeer (who never seemed tiny in my imagination — or Santa either). King of all these imaginary being was the one even my parents believed in: the God who, they cooed, created and loved us all. With God came angels who were (so they told me) thoughts from God, But try as I might, I could never imagine angels as “thoughts.” I had to imagine them with wings and bodies and faces. God too, had to have a body and a bearded face — or he couldn’t be imagined either.
It seems that to be imagined — much less be visualized doing things — even imaginary beings must have bodies of some sort or another. Though we are told that God is pure spirit, bodiless and eternal, the truth is we can’t imagine spirit without imagining body. Thus even adult Christians must imagine their God transformed into bodily Jesus in order for their deity to seem real. It is a truth every baby is born knowing: real things have substance. Soul requires body for its expression: otherwise it is static and absent. Official definitions notwithstanding, bodies are necessary for existence.
The established definition of God says he is bodiless — yet no one can imagine him without imagining something. Him, did I say? God cannot be him. Embodied in human form, imagined as Jesus walking the earth or hanging on the cross, God can have a penis even if he never uses it. But take away the body and you take away God’s penis, his maleness, his masculinity, all. Nor can God be feminine, since the disembodied cannot have a vulva either. God must be sexless and genderless, forever “it”.
Note that if a theist insists on masculinizing God, turning it into he, they are not taking their theism seriously. Any pronoun other than “it” is just the infant’s intuition that real beings must have a body reappearing in the grownup. The infant is right. No matter how much intellectual brainwashing the adult theist has undergone, they can never quite escape the infant’s truth.
Let me repeat that: whenever anyone refers to God as “he”, they are failing to take the concept of God seriously. If your God is bodiless nonetheless very real, then you will readily concede that the God you believe in must be an it. On the other hand if your God is merely an imaginary fancy of yours — like Santa and his tiny reindeer or like the tooth fairy — then impossibilities don’t bother you, and you will have no hesitation in insisting on God’s bodiless masculinity.
If God is merely a fantasy, incoherent details don’t matter. Pretend doesn’t have to make sense. But if your God is not pretend, then it can be neither masculine nor feminine.
As for me, I was born a naked atheist and I will die atheist and — God willing! (that was a joke) — I will die naked. If nothing else, when I die it will be me, my body not my clothing, which does the dying. Only naked me can die. I was born naked and I will die naked and my profound wish while alive is to be allowed to be naked me. It is the profoundest wish any of us can have: to be fortunate enough while we breathe and live to be our naked selves. Me and you, meeting as we are despite the cultural smokescreens of clothing and religion. Naked me and naked you in naked life — from beginning to end and everything between.
5 Comments
September 28th, 2006 at 8:46 pm
(Death, Featured Prose, Graduation, Prose)
First: I’m only a beginner at life. I’ve never been alive before — this is my first time. That means I’m going to make mistakes. That’s ok. Understand that it’s only inexperience. I’ll try to understand your mistakes if you’ll try to understand mine. You forgive me and I’ll forgive you. After all, we are only beginners.
Second: Life is perishable. I will only live a short time — like a squirrel for its season or a fly for its day — and then I will die. Human life is fragile and temporary, like a sparkler arching though the night, briefly illuminating the darkness. Then it’s over. Life, vulnerable as it is, is all we’ve got. And that makes it valuable, as nothing else can.
Third: Life is enough. Quick, tempestuous, brief; over way too soon, and yet my life is enough. Some believe that there is more to it than we see here, that after we die our lives will somehow continue on. If so that’s a plus. But even if this is all there is, life is wonderful. Being alive is the whole show. Despite its briefness, life is enough for life.
Fourth: I will never know a time when I’m not alive. We only know what we experience, and if death is the cessation of experiencing, then death is something which can’t be experienced. I will never know that I ceased to be. Others will experience my death, but I cannot. So, even though it’s temporary, life – as actually experienced – has a strange eternal quality. There is an eternity in the moment.
Fifth: We are all in this together. I know I’m unique, but also I know each of you is unique. Yet, despite our uniquenesses, we have common feelings, common fears and pleasures, common pains and desires, common dreams and common failures. We share this human body between us. Driven by the same needs, felled by the same diseases, we are all in this together.
Sixth and final: This one flows from the first five, “Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You.”
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September 8th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
(Death, Featured Prose, Prose, Religion)
Religious atheism can be seen as an attempt to fix religion’s flaws and eliminate its untenable assertions. Most of those flaws revolve around the concept of a spiritual world separate and remote from the physical world of bodies we inhabit here on earth. Out of this mistake spring Gods and miracles and afterlife.
I can paint the religious revolution I am proposing in a few broad strokes.
Religion is not a spirituality-based enterprise, but a body-based one. Its proper object of worship is here and now, for what is bodily is inherently sacred, mysterious and—as we experience it—eternal.*
In order to understand this new religious orientation, it’s necessary to abandon the dichotomy of soul/body and replace it with a new dichotomy: experiencing/behaving. Importantly, it is necessary to declare both worthy of worship. If we do so, it follows that the sacred is right at hand, not separated from us by the chasm of death or lost in the distance of some kind of spiritual realm.
Such realm is at best an illusion of thought, the result of incorrectly drawing the categories of our existence.
By using the dichotomy of experiencing/behavior instead of mind/body, we get a clearer picture of our nature. Experiencing is easily understood as something bodily, created by the brain, and this makes our mind comprehensible as a bodily phenomenon. If a word like “spiritual” refers to something beyond or transcending the body, it becomes an unnecessary fiction. We can now see it as a fundamental misunderstanding of our existence. Pertinently, it follows that religion needs to be body-based, not hinged on the fiction of spiritual entities.
We must never forget that to refer to a beyond devalues life and ruins religion. How much better a religion real and palpable, than a fiction in the stars.
Even heaven is a stillborn vision. A “paradise” without sex or food or body is more akin to death than to life. To be worth anything, life must be bodily. The alive body is the annunciator of our existence.
Now as we all know, the objection to bringing religion down to the body, to imagining life bodily, is that we die. Our bodies die.
We don’t want to die. So we invent afterlife, we imagine heaven or summerland or nirvana and populate it with bodiless souls. Bodiless us, as if that were somehow possible.
By reformulating ourselves as something bodiless, essentially lifeless, we think we can avoid death. Define ourselves as something devoid of life and presto! we are death-proof.
So we think. But it is nothing but the worship of death by another name. The denial of life. The embrace of anti-life, which is the one evil there is.
In embracing death, afterlife, nirvana, heaven, bodiless souls—the religions of the world have betrayed all of us, betrayed the life that we are. They have turned the bow of our human ship toward nonexistence.
They have the gall to call those of us who don’t go along non-believers. When it comes to worshipping what is after life, we are indeed heretics. But their non-belief is aimed at life. Their non-belief is aimed at sex and food and pleasure and everything that is precious and wonderful and worthy of real worship. It is aimed at us.
———
* Since our experiencing of the world began with birth and will end at death, it follows that we have never experienced a time before being alive and will never experience a time after we die. Put another way, we will never know our own non-existence. Others will experience our death, but we will not. Nor does experiencing take place in fixed time, in seconds, minutes, days or years; it occurs in subjective time, moments of indeterminate and varying lengths. Fifteen minutes on the clock may “feel” like an hour; or a clock-hour may seem to whisk by in a flash. In short, our experiences occur in the unexplainable now, and are the essence of what we are; we know nothing but what we experience.
In a valid sense then our experiencing self is us, and it is therefore a remarkable observation that just as we never experienced the beginning of our experiencing, so we will never experience its ending. You can’t experience the cessation of experiencing. Therefore life as we experience it will be eternal. This is surely the source of that iridescent feeling we all have that life goes on forever. It is not untrue. But it is also true that we will die and death is final.
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June 10th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
(Featured Prose, Prose)
Had the gods bodies like men and women, desire would be the elixir, passion the holy sacrament, coitus the zenith of heaven. But the gods are forever bodiless, and so bodily delight — the greatest wonderment of all — became the entitlement of sunny earth.
Naked atheist looked at naked atheist and they smiled.
Sex and love — it was all the same to them. When ungod kissed the first human genitals into life at the dawn of the Pleistocene, the first human erection greeted the first vulva with delight. Sex became their Sunday service. It was the sun’s annunciation of life, and every day was Sunday.
To the naked atheist, living meant accepting death; but it meant also accepting the bodily self and, above all, accepting sex. Eternal God couldn’t do it.
God couldn’t do it because pleasure and desire and sensuality — the body of existence — put Godly existence to shame. Deity was nothing but a faint speck, disembodied, dim, a nullus compared to the bright sunshine of earthly delights.
To the extent that it worships the here and now of living, religion is atheist. But when religion looks to afterlife it casts life aside, and its eternal God strides forth as the lord of death.
Thus heaven and afterlife are euphemisms for death, and stand as the antithesis of the sunny cosmos of the living, of laughing bodies enjoying each other, of delightful sex, of happy conversations in the sun, of pleasant nakedness in the cool of the evening.
For every sun has its annunciation of life; every son too, and every daughter. They draw breath not from on high, but from here among the trees and mists of bodily life.
Naked atheist looks at naked atheist and they smile.
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June 10th, 2006 at 7:20 pm
(Darkness, Featured Poems, Poetry)
The first Sunday
after the first full moon
after the first equinox of the year,
rise early and lean outside
in the spiced air, listen to the bells ringing.
Morning bells, bells
of the far churches
chuckling their delight for the advent of another spring
in a world that has dawned.
Easter
and already the snows have grown weary;
they drop their coats
and troop back into the darkness.
Already the gale, brabbling wind
discards his piercing shrillness
and his iciness;
he bounds forward on us warm and naked.
Already the distant sun, long aloof
forgets herself,
wanders our way, smiling broadly.
Already the crocuses and daffodils,
the jonquils, the dogwoods, the wisteria, even the white iris
alone in the field by my house,
cast off their shyness; vulnerably
expose themselves before the world,
unprotected and beautiful.
And it is spring. It is spring.
I look beyond the empty lot, out past
the steeples that stand like toys on the far street; suddenly
I see earth supple before me like a gardener
like a mother suckling rich seedmouths
and they spring up.
They spring up, they spring up
in eudicotyledon splendor of living,
resurrected in body once again.
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