277. affable

The spring semester started up again last month and thus I haven’t had much time to write recently.

First, to my readers outside the United States, things are truly surreal here.

For the 74+ million citizens who did not (and will not) support the toupéd fucktrumpet our sketchy and antiquated electoral process installed as President, every day brings new, increasingly frightening portents that the government is run by truly incompetent, dangerous people.

So, in addition to school and work, the news has me constantly stressed out and anxious.

Yay.

Just over a year ago I started writing about identifying as demisexual. My views have evolved significantly since then, partly thanks to the work I did with my therapist last year to start pulling back the curtain on the machine of lies and bullshit my parents raised me with as fundamentalist evangelical Christians.

I did get some pushback from one reader who commented he didn’t understand my decision to stop identifying as gay. “I could acknowledge strong similarities with you on almost all of the points you made and I’m gay as a goose,” he wrote.

Another friend wrote to ask why I couldn’t identify as demisexual and gay, while another asked if “demisexual” wasn’t an adjective that could be applied to gay.

Still another wrote to express confusion at how I could discard a label he had fought for years to claim for himself.

In part, I want to address some of these comments and share some of the work I’ve been doing.

AVEN’s definition of demisexuality is “a person who does not experience sexual attraction unless they form a strong emotional connection with someone.”

While I knew demisexuality was on the “sexual” end of the asexual spectrum, I didn’t fully grasp how true it was for me.

As I’ve thought back over my teen years and sexual awakening, I realized that my sexual feelings have rarely been directed outward. They’re there, and I did (and still do) experience sexual arousal, but I don’t recall it being directed at anyone. I had crushes on guys, but the desire to do anything sexual was almost always absent.

My sexual fantasies were abstract—in hindsight, more about intimacy than sex.

I’ve been trying to determine if this was some kind of coping mechanism. That is to say, because I’d been taught those feelings were forbidden, my mind found a way to block them since they were inaccessible.

This might be the case. I’ve compartmentalized so many other feelings, so why not this too?

However, I’ve never been terribly interested in sex. I was always more focused on writing, practicing piano, or reading. Even today, I’d rather be cataloging than hooking up.

When I was having sex, whether with a boyfriend or some random from an app, I felt nothing. It was disorienting and alienating. The sensations were okay, but there was no connection.

As harsh as it sounds, frankly, I don’t think I was much attracted to any of the guys I dated.

I may as well have been masturbating.

This process of deconstructing my sexual upbringing has also resolved some issues with being externally defined.

When I was growing up, my sexuality was defined for me by my community and what the Bible supposedly said about it, which meant that I was defined as a heterosexual male.

Obviously that did not work.

When I finally came out in 2008, it took some years before I really started having sex, and when I did, I did what I thought I was supposed to do—seek out strangers and friends to bang.

I assumed the feelings of emptiness that resulted were from lingering internalized homophobia that I needed to fuck out of my system.

I was doing what I’d been raised to do: suppress my feelings (no matter how miserable it made me) and do what I perceived was expected of me.

It still felt forced though. I didn’t really understand what guys were doing when they checked each other out, or ogled some hunky god from afar. Some of that might have been posturing or trying to impress each other, but I didn’t get it.

This has also helped explain ambivalence I feel about things like kink, or gay identity markers like hairstyle, fashion, or speech mannerisms. That’s not to say there’s any universal identity marker. Each community has its own set.

However, I figured out where the disconnect is for me: namely, that those identity markers (hair, dress, etc) are ways gay men telegraph their availability to each other, whether for flirting, dating, or just sex. From an anthropological view, the majority of humans do this, whether deliberately or not. It’s how our brains work.

Life, uh, finds a way.

On a subconscious level, I have been telegraphing my lack of interest for years. If I were interested, I might have adopted a more “gay” haircut, tried to dress more like other gay men, or adopt their mode of speech.

I prefer to march to my own beat, and have always been happiest that way.

The third thing I’ve just recently been able to articulate is that demisexuality best describes the manner in which I experience sexual attraction, while “gay” describes its direction.

One blog post from The Asexual Agenda helped put this in perspective. It’s about overlapping circles.

From https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/visualizing-demisexuality/ — Source: QueenieOfAces. “Visualizing demisexuality.” The Asexual Agenda. September 05, 2013. https://asexualagenda.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/visualizing-demisexuality/

The author writes, “‘Homosexual’ defines the ‘direction’ of the sexual attraction… while ‘demisexual’ defines the manner in which that sexual attraction is experienced–only after forming an emotional connection.”

The model also works for someone who is heterosexual but is capable of homosexual attraction after emotionally bonding with someone of the same gender.

In this sense I am both gay and demisexual. Putting my cataloging hat on, my pseudo-LC subject heading would be:

Homoromantic demisexual cisgender male androphile.

While my dating life is a lot more complicated, finding myself on the asexual spectrum just feels more aligned and true.

That’s what matters.

240. cavort

Looking at the title for this entry (which, by the way, I typically pull from Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day), what immediately came to mind is some advice from my birth chart (that I did on Astrolabe):

Give yourself the freedom to look awkward or silly once in a while. The relief you feel will be quite therapeutic and the embarrassment (whether it is real or imagined) will pass quickly.

For the record, I’m an Aquarius, with both rising sign and moon in Libra. And something about being a triple air sign?

Do I believe the stars and planets align themselves in the heavens to provide little old me here on planet Earth with sage wisdom? Of course not. But I do enjoy the moments when general observations such as those in astrological charts or tarot readings happen to intersect with my personal reality.

And there is a perverse part of me that enjoys activities like tarot or astrology precisely because they were at one time forbidden and demonic. So getting my chart done or doing a tarot spread is a bit like giving the finger to that part of my past.

However, the truth from that reading is that I do tend to take myself too seriously. I think too much, analyze too deeply, and ultimately lock up and consequently look awkward and weird… which is precisely what I was hoping to avoid in the first place.

And it has the tendency to create problems for everyone else, too, in that it can create the impression of my being standoffish or rude, when in reality I’m just feeling insecure and uncertain about how I’m supposed to behave.

A few weeks, ago my friends Erin and Matt got married, and that got me thinking (yet again) about my own prospects for romance and partnership, and whether it’s something that’s even realistic for me. The day of the wedding I also left for a two-week hiking and camping trip to the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma, and the Davis Mountains and Big Bend National Park in Texas. The trip gave me a lot of time to digest some of what I’ve learned over this past semester, and to deal with some of the issues that I just haven’t had the mental space to process because of grad school.

Something that I heard on Minnesota Public Radio the other day also caught my attention. They were talking about why millennials aren’t getting married, and one of the guests, Ann Meier, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, said something that resonated with me. They were talking about marriage as a status marker, and she said this:

“I think it’s marking an achievement that you’re able to achieve a certain level of education and an income where you feel like [marriage is] the culmination, the icing on the cake, instead of, as Brigid [Schulte] said, a step in the transition to adulthood. It’s the thing you do when your life is set. And people are taking longer to get their lives set these days.”

I think this part of the sense that I’ve been trying to articulate the past couple of months, that it’s difficult watching my friends getting married (especially my gay friends) because it feels like I’m getting left behind. Everyone else has their lives together and, as Ann said, “set” and I’m still trying to achieve a basic level of emotional and psychological subsistence. And it makes me feel incredibly old at 32, watching people younger than me who have been together for almost a decade and seemingly much further ahead than me.

So articulating this view of marriage, that it’s a marker of a certain status achievement, is helpful, because it still doesn’t feel like I’m there. I’m working, I’m working toward a graduate degree in a field I’m actually excited about working in, but I’m also aware of how much further there is to go. Especially when I’m surrounded by couples and married people.

But there’s something else that I recently became aware of.

I had a conversation with a co-worker yesterday who said that even though she’s been very successful at work, it’s not something that she’s excited about, and that what she really loves, the thing that gives her the most satisfaction in life, is being a mom to her three kids. She’d been asking about my library science degree and what I plan to do with it, and I shared that for the first time in my life it feels like I have a calling, something I was just born to do.

… not that I believe in destiny or anything, but rather that I’ve finally found a field that aligns almost perfectly with my personal values and what I’m naturally good at. I am absolutely in love with librarianship and science, and cannot wait to get into archiving and special collections.

She said (and another friend of mine recently said) that she doesn’t feel about her job the same way that I’m articulating it, that the work I am planning to do gives my life real purpose and (dare I say it) joy. Will there be days when I hate my job? Probably.

But it brought home for me the reality that I do have things going for me right now.

Another astrological birth chart I looked at for myself said that people with their moon in Libra (lunar Librans) “have a strong need for partnership. Without someone to share their lives with, they feel utterly incomplete.”

I do hope (against hope) that one of these days I’ll find someone about whom I feel the same way that I feel about librarianship… that it’ll be a fantastic match. The older I get, of course, the less confident I am that I’ll even find someone.

In the meantime, I’ll continue rebuilding my life post-Christianity and getting to know myself better so someone can also get to know that person.

217. indelible

While driving to work this morning, I had a rare moment of lucidity. I was thinking about the day and everything ahead. On that list of things to worry about is whether or not I’m going to have to take my former landlord to court to get my security deposit back.

Then one thought came to the forefront: You don’t have to give him any more bandwidth in your headspace. I asked myself: Will worrying about this influence the situation one way or other?

Probably not.

I’ve also been thinking in general lately about expectations — what I expect from my family, friends, potential boyfriends, myself, my career, my future.

In fact, most of the disappointment I’ve experienced, and currently experiencing, seems to stem from the failure of reality to live up to what I consciously or unconsciously imagine it should be. Sometimes I don’t even have a clear idea of how it is that I thought things should turn out — I’m just dissatisfied with the result.

In a piece for The Guardian, Julia Sweeney writes that in the first few months of being a parent, she rewrote her entire childhood. “Turns out it was probably not nearly as bad as I once thought it was. In fact, my newly revised attitude about my mother is that she did the best she could.”

I don’t know why it’s so easy to resent our parents for committing this unforgivable sin. That’s not to say there aren’t some horrific parents out there who truly fuck up their kid , nor that there aren’t childhood wounds to deal with and heal from. But how much should we expect from flawed human beings who find themselves tasked with taking care of and raising a tiny, helpless, blank slate of a human being?

For the last couple years, and probably before, I’ve resented my parents for failing their young gay son. Of course, they didn’t know that this was the situation. Frankly, I’m not sure what the outcome might’ve been if I’d come out as a teenager; said that I didn’t want to be heterosexual, nor that I needed “therapy.”

So what should I really expect from them now, as an adult? A few months ago, my mom told me (again) that, should I ever get married, that the family would not attend my wedding. I’m not sure about my sisters. My youngest sister probably wouldn’t. The younger one might. She’s the only one who has seemed at least outwardly accepting.

It is hurtful, to say the least, to have the memory of how big a deal they made over my younger sister’s wedding in 2008. I even played piano and wrote a piece for the ceremony. I suppose my expectation is that family might trump their narrow religious views; that they would be happy just to celebrate with their only son over his finally having found love and commitment.

What I suppose that means is that I expect them to be different from who they are, which seems as unfair as their wishing that I were heterosexual — which is to say, cease to be me. Of course, their religious identity is not written into their DNA. They do have a choice in their belief system.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I feel judged by virtually everyone I come in contact with, especially people who I perceive to be better off than me. I recently had a realization about that: namely, that really the only person who’s judging me is me. I’m projecting my negative thoughts about myself and my perceived lack of worth on to everyone else.

Like Julia, I’ve been rewriting my childhood as of late. I wonder now if it wasn’t my parents who were super critical of me, but rather that it was me all along. That’s not to say that the religious views of my home and church didn’t influence me. In Christian fundamentalism, we’re taught to view ourselves as broken, flawed, perverted, dirty. “But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.” (Isaiah 64:6)

We’re taught to search ourselves for wicked thoughts, and to assume that anything we think or do is sinful and evil: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9) If you’ve seen documentaries like Jesus Camp, children are pressured into making confessions, even to point of manufacturing sins just to be forgiven and avoid hell.

My parents didn’t always do the best job of making my sisters and I feel loved and accepted, just as they likely didn’t always feel loved and accepted as children. They’ve asked forgiveness from us for past mistakes, so we’re all trying.

I’m not entirely sure how my sisters internalized our early upbringing. For me, it made me hyper self-critical. I’d get angry with myself before anyone else could, sometimes for things that even my parents weren’t angry or disappointed over. I wanted to prove to everyone that I expected nothing but perfection from myself. Consequently, I grew up hating and despising myself for failing to be all that I expected myself to be.

When I get angry over mistakes or losing a game, I’m really angry at myself for failing to be perfect — to catch on to the rules, to notice patterns, to develop strategies. In essence, in those moments I wish that I could be someone else. To cease to be me.

So why is it so hard to stop? I suspect it’s partly that I’m so used to this that I’m afraid of any positive change, unsure how to live without the negative voices and energy, even though it’s psychologically and emotionally draining. It’s the same reason why I’m struggling to let go of my feelings for Seth. I haven’t felt anything like since then. Feeling something is better than nothing.

One step at a time.

137. fugitive

It’s a cold, wet day in Minneapolis. I was greeted upon leaving the house today by a disgusting, freezing mixture of rain and snow. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to turn around, call in sick and go back to bed.

This morning I was going through my email inbox and decided to clean out some subscriptions that have been cluttering things up. At some point I signed up for the Google and Amazon offers, but for some time I’ve just been deleting them as they tend to be things that most of us never end up using.

The cruelest offers for me are the ones for “couple weekends” or “____ for two.” It’s egocentric, of course, to assume that the universe would conspire against me in this way. It’s my subjective experience superimposing a narrative over arbitrary events and happenstances that causes the bile to rise in my stomach at the thought that Google is mocking my continued and miserable single existence. But I have a hard time not taking it somewhat personally.

A few months ago I cleaned out my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house, shortly after the events of Christmas day when I cut ties with them completely. They were going to be out of town for a few days and asked me to come by and finish moving all of my stuff out while they were gone. The results were about eight full paper shopping bags of recycling, four large trash bags, several bins that I took to the local Goodwill, and a large box of Christian fundamentalist books I’d amassed over the years. It made me realize just how much stuff we hold on to for purely sentimental, irrational reasons. There were magazines I still have memories reading and enjoying; notebooks of math homework and past assignments; papers I wanted to store for future reference that I hadn’t looked at in years. These were things I had no reason to keep and was just taking up unnecessary space, but felt uneasy and even defensive about getting rid of. It’s anal-retentive, yes, but it still felt comforting to know that a record of my past was in a box somewhere. Needless to say, feeling the weight of nearly twenty-five years-worth of paper and finally putting those bags in the recycling bin was surreal. But it felt good to be free of it at the same time.

The same could be said of my religious beliefs. This past weekend we had a bi-monthly former fundamentalists gathering at a coffee shop near Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis, where part of the gathering is going around and telling our stories of how we left religion. Part of the reason for that is because we generally have someone new at the meeting every time, so we want to give them an opportunity to tell their own story and have their own experience affirmed, as well as to hear our stories. It helps to hear these stories as it reminds us that we’re not alone, even though it often feels like that in a culture where one of the most-often-asked questions is, “Where do you go to church?” and where references to god or to prayer are too common.

For years I held on to my religious beliefs for largely the same reason as I held on to all that stuff. It was comforting and familiar, and I had strong emotional attachments to it. It was my past and my present; my family and my community. But they were gathering dust, and I hadn’t really looked at them in years, and if I had to be totally honest with myself it wasn’t likely that I was going to look at them again any time soon. I hadn’t truly believed in years, even when doing all the research to prove that the bible wasn’t really incompatible with homosexuality—that it was the religious leaders and translators who were prejudiced and bigoted. In reality I was just trying to find reasons to continue pretending that I was a Christian after all. In retrospect, I’m not sure if I ever believed at all, even as a child.

After a couple of moves, my attitude towards “stuff” has changed radically. Whereas ten years ago I couldn’t imagine being able to let go of anything, now I look at all of my possessions with the knowledge that someday I’m going to have to pack all of this stuff up into boxes—and do I really want to lug this downstairs to the truck, haul it across country and then lug it all the way up into my new apartment? It’s just not worth it.

As an atheist now, I view my beliefs largely the same. Knowing that we are finite beings, with an afterlife highly unlikely and this life being all there is, I now treat my beliefs with the same economical thriftiness as I do my belongings. Belief in god and all of the suppositions that go along with that when there is little to no evidence for belief in such a being now feels like lugging a heavy box around.

One of the tenets of Buddhism is renunciation of possessions and the hold that they have on the self. While I don’t believe in any sort of universal consciousness or spirituality, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It takes work and energy to hold on to things, and they inevitably weigh us down through upkeep and the effort it takes to retain them. One website I looked at said this about Buddhist philosophy: “The quest for comfort is also futile as it is the nature of our mind that the feeling of happiness when our desire is satisfied is only temporary… Thus we spend our lives in the vain and futile quest for possessions, experiences, relationships and more and we are never satisfied. We are forever projecting outward.”

If we’re ever going to be free, our perception towards “stuff” needs to change.

83. love

“Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt.”
– Tony Kushner, Angels in America

One of the things I find most offensive about Christianity is the doctrine of Original Sin. In case you’re fortunate enough not to be familiar, this is the doctrine first developed by 2nd-century Bishop of Lyon Irenaeus, and then more fully by Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century, describing the tendency for all human beings to sin as passed down to us like the clap from good ol’ Daddy Adam and Mama Eve, eons ago In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida (baby).

As the story goes, God finishes with creation and plops Adam (the first man) on the earth, then creates Eve (the first woman) for him since apparently God forgot that he’d given Adam a crazy sex drive that needed… umm, tending to. And (for some reason known only to God) there were also these two trees in the Garden – the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil – that they were not to eat from. So one day Eve is walking through the garden when this talking snake pulls her aside (yes, a talking snake) and makes the casual suggestion that perhaps God is holding out on her with this Tree of Knowledge thing, so she eats the fruit, then gives some to Adam; then they realize they’re naked and put some clothes on. Then, short of jumping out from behind the tree and yelling, “Gotcha!”, God throws a temper tantrum and takes everyone to task (including the talking snake) like an entitled teenager in a scene that might be straight out of the O.C.

The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
– Genesis 3:14-19

This is the basis for the whole doctrine of original sin, and the biblical writers worked under the assumption that it was a historical fact. For those with the stomach for it, there’s also a compendium of scriptural references that support the doctrine on the website of John Piper’s church. And here are a few choice gems:

Psalm 14:2-3 – “The Lord has looked down from heaven upon the sons of men, to see if there are any who understand, who seek after God. They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one.”
Psalm 51:1 – “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.”
Ephesians 2:1-3 – “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air [oooh, Satan!!], the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience [yup, that’s you and me, scum that we are]— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.”

My favorite bullet point is where the author of that page argues that since infants die, they are not innocent and therefore born into sin and are sinners. And going to hell.

Yup. Babies are going to hell.

So, original sin. On the surface you might say that I just don’t like it. And I don’t. Yes, I am gay, and the bible has been used to teach that homosexuality is a sin, and that gays are sinful perverts living a “chosen” and perverted lifestyle. However, I know for a fact that I was born this way and therefore it makes no logical sense why I could be abomination. Now, I would be remiss in leaving out that there are Christians who do not believe this—my friends at SafeHouse Church, for example. However, I also don’t think that swearing is a sin. Or drinking. Or having sex. Or… well, take your pick (see below).

The fact is that the more I looked at “sin,” the more I recognized the problem as being not with people but with religion itself.

Case in point, several months ago my family and I were having lunch and my one-year-old nephew was dropping things off his tray, as young children often do. My younger sister (his mother) rolled her eyes and commented on how this was his “sin nature showing up already!” I quickly commented that this is perfectly normal behavior from a one-year-old. They’re experimenting with their surroundings, like mini-sociologists running behavioral experiments on the adults around them. But my sister and her husband (with the full support of my parents – his grandparents) saw his act as deliberately malicious behavior, and jumped to label the child “evil,” in effect saddling him with a mountain of future guilt and emotional terror at living amongst the ranks of the damned unless he prays a magical prayer to Jesus to save him from his supposed sins.

I say supposed because it’s only according to the bible that “sin” exists at all—and there are over six hundred of them listed, ranging from being angry with your brother (Matthew 5:22), not working (2 Thessalonians 3:10), stealing (Exodus 20:15; Mark 7:22), not praying in Jesus’ name (John 14:13), tattooing (Leviticus 19:28; Deuteronomy 14:1), having mischief in your heart (Psalm 28:3), kicking a man in the balls (Deuteronomy 25:11-12), gossiping (John 6:43), to murder (Exodus 20:13; Matthew 19:18) to even pitying a murderer (Deuteronomy 19:13). And the mother of them all, homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22; Romans 1:24-28; 1 Corinthians 6:9). Add to this list dancing, drinking, gambling, playing instruments in church, and enjoying sex. Or having fun that isn’t directly related to Jesus. Or thinking about sinners burning in hell for eternity.

I’m going to backtrack again and say that not all denominations or Christians adhere to this list, or even believe in original sin. Or sin at all. It isn’t fair to lump all Christians in with the fundamentalists, who the above list largely references. There are some liberal and even mainstream denominations that take a much broader and generous view of sin and human nature, urging non-judgmentalism amongst their congregations. And this is precisely the sort of mature thinking that ought to be congratulated and encouraged.

I’ve written previously about the existence of a historical Adam & Eve and the inherent problem with the doctrine of original sin to their being mythical rather than literal. Essentially, without this first sin having taken place and God foisting responsibility off on the creatures he endowed with free will and therefore the potential to make their own (and, presumably, the “wrong”) choices, “sin” is a moot point and Jesus dying on the cross for those sins is utterly pointless. If what we call “sin” is really just human nature (i.e., how God “made” us), what was he sacrificing himself for? The general imperfection of humanity?

Julia Sweeney puts it this way in Letting Go of God: “I thought, ‘Why would a God create people so imperfect, then blame them for their own imperfections, then send his son to be tortured and executed by those imperfect people to make up for how imperfect people were and how imperfect they inevitably were going to be?’ What a crazy idea!”

In the Old Testament (the first thirty-nine books of the bible, not counting the apocrypha) we have two examples which supposedly “pre-figure” this supposed atoning sacrifice by God of Jesus. The first is found in the well-known story of Abraham and Isaac, wherein God tells Abraham to take Isaac out and sacrifice him as a burnt offering to God. Abraham does this, and just at the last minute God seemingly changes his mind and sends an angel to stop Abraham and bring him a ram to kill instead. This is generally interpreted as a test of loyalty on the part of God, who was apparently satisfied enough that Abraham was going to kill Isaac and let him off the hook.

Second is the lesser-known story of Jephthah found in the book of Judges. In this story, Jephthah is a military leader who promises to sacrifice to God the first person who comes out to meet him as a burnt offering if God helps him win this battle with the Ammonites. He wins, goes home, and (you guessed it) the first person to meet him is his daughter. Rather than bargain with God or try to get out of his vow, Jephthah allows his daughter to go up into the hills for two months to “mourn her virginity,” after which she returns and he carries out his idiotic promise. (Incidentally, Jephthah is later mentioned in the New Testament book of Hebrews as a “man of faith” (Hebrews 11:32).)

While the story of Jephthah is usually held up as a warning against making rash vows, the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis is typically held up as an example for us to follow: for us to be as open-handed and willing to obey God as Abraham was to kill Isaac and Isaac was to obey his father and be murdered. And both are examples featuring fathers offering (or intending to offer) their children as sacrifices. What are we to make of that? Apart from these being grisly tests of loyalty set up by a bloodthirsty god, why wouldn’t Abraham or Jephthah offer to die instead? What loving parent wouldn’t do that to save their child?

Judaism is a religion that fetishizes sin and guilt to the point of sado-masochistic, neurotic obsession, and Christianity takes it a step further (via the aforementioned Augustine via Irenaeus via Paul) by shackling every man, woman and child ever born with the sins of their ancestors and then having Jesus incarnate as a human in order to be tortured and killed to pay for those sins—past, present and future, whether anyone wanted him to or not. This obsession with blood! Dawkins comments in The God Delusion:

Paul, as the Jewish scholar Geza Vermes makes clear, was steeped in the old Jewish theological principle that without blood there is no atonement. Indeed, in his Epistle to the Hebrews (9:22) he said as much. Progressive ethicists today find it hard to defend any kind of retributive theory of punishment, let alone the scapegoat theory – executing an innocent to pay for the sins of the guilty. In any case (one can’t help wondering), who was God trying to impress? Presumably himself – judge and jury as well as execution victim. To cap it all, Adam, the supposed perpetrator of the original sin, never existed in the first place: an awkward fact – excusably unknown to Paul but presumably known to an omniscient God (and Jesus, if you believe he was God?) – which fundamentally undermines the premise of the whole tortuously nasty theory. Oh, but of course, the story of Adam and Eve was only ever symbolic, wasn’t it? Symbolic? So, in order to impress himself, Jesus had himself tortured and executed, in vicarious punishment for a symbolic sin committed by a non-existent individual? As I said, barking mad, as well as viciously unpleasant.

Even if Christianity provides a framework for so-called “moral” living, or at the very least a positive view of the world, how is this different from any other “positive” philosophy—say, Buddhism? What does it matter if it isn’t entirely true (or even straight-up mythical)? It matters because if there was no Adam to commit the “original sin,” then there is no “sin” to begin with and no reason for Christ to die to save us from that “sin.” The Eucharist is an act of awful systematic self-flagellation wherein Christians remind themselves how awful we are that Christ had to die to placate God – a God, by the way, who trussed Jesus up on the altar of his own failure as a Creator. And “Eat my body”? “Drink my blood”? Protestants may view this as symbolic, but it’s still deeply disturbing.

Believe what you like yourself. Believe, as in the Bertrand Russel analogy, that a teapot orbits the sun between Mars and Jupiter. But if you believe that the bible, God, Jesus and the crucifixion aren’t absolutely true, then it’s unconscionable to teach others to believe it and to base their lives around it as if it were true. It’s even more unconscionable – yes, even criminal – to teach young children such toxic nonsense before they are able to think and decide for themselves.

As I suggested previously, it’s not entirely bad to believe in God if it brings you comfort—say, if believing in God helps more than the psychiatrist. However, as Dawkins writes in the last chapter of The God Delusion, “Religion’s power to console doesn’t make it true.” Nor is it “true” because it works. If it brings meaning to people’s lives; if it makes them better, kinder and nobler; and if it gives them hope in dark times—that still doesn’t make it “true.”

Original sin is an evil, toxic and dehumanizing doctrine; but without it, what’s the point of Christianity? Christianity is the glorification of Christ for his coming to earth to die for our sins. At the core of some of Christ’s teachings are some progressive and humanist principles: Don’t just take revenge when you’re wronged. Treat people as you want to be treated. Everyone, regardless of class or social status, has inherent value.

82. grace

What I’m suggesting is that Feng Shui and an awful lot of other things are precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we know how to do, but don’t necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed and instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, ‘how would a dragon live here?’ We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic creatures live. We’ve never seen a dragon but we’ve all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, ‘Well if a dragon went through here, he’d get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn’t see that and he’d wave his tail and knock that vase over’. You figure out how the dragon’s going to be happy here and lo and behold! you’ve suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.

So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it’s worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it’s worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move further and further into the field of digital or artificial life we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn’t an actual god there is an artificial god and we should probably bear that in mind.
– Douglas Adams, speech, Cambridge U.K., September 1998

As a burgeoning agnostic atheist, I’ll be the first to admit that in my newly-found “belief” can be almost as dogmatic as the fundamentalist dogmatism that I supposedly rally against. Tonight – or this morning, which ever way you look at it –my best friend Emily challenged my quasi-extremist views on religion and faith, which made me think more carefully about what it is that I actually “believe.” Yes, atheism (even my agnostic atheist variety) is a religion in its own right; and she also pointed out that not all atheists are of the Dawkins variety. Atheism is merely the belief in the non-existence of God.

And not all atheists care about religion, or wish to see an end put to it. Richard Dawkins is essentially a secular humanist of the rationalist school of thought; but his view and that of Christopher Hitchens, Michael Shermer, P.Z. Myers and the like is hardly typical of all atheists. Some are more extremist in their views, while others are more laissez-faire.

Personally, having come out of fundamentalism, I will (again) be the first to admit that I emerged deeply wounded by the teachings of the Church and some of the people within the Church who, even if they were well-intended, still contributed to the wounding. So it stands to reason that my anger towards Christianity is partially fueled by that.

On the other hand, I also have a unique perspective on the inner workings of the church and its teachings that some atheists who have not “passed through the experience of Christianity” can’t appreciate. They may understand the problems with the teachings of Christianity, but just as a prisoner of war understands the experience of having been in a concentration camp and having seen the brutality of humanity firsthand, I understand Christianity for having been raised in it and still living with the ghosts of its abuses.

“Is there an artificial god?” was the title of Douglas Adams’ speech that he gave at the Digital Biota 2 conference in September of 1998. (I’ve quoted from it here before.) In it, he basically ponders what harm believing in God can really do. If you believe that an all-powerful deity created the universe and everything in it, what’s the harm? If you’re not hurting other people, what does it matter? He compares it to fung shui, in that it’s an architectural system that uses a metaphysical narrative to achieve more simply what a PhD in engineering does with all of its theories and architectural principles. Instead of painstakingly working out the psychological impact that putting a chair here or a window there has on people… well, here’s Adams again:

Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it. So, if a dragon wouldn’t be happy in the house, you have to put a red fish bowl here or a window there. This sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense – there aren’t any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can tell you how to build your house?

I’m going to take just a moment to argue for religion. Fundamentally, if believing that God created the universe and cares about you in particular, and it’s a “gorgeous myth” (as a friend of mine recently called it) that you can build your life around in the same way that we order our houses by how a dragon would be happy in it, and it brings you some degree of happiness, peace and contentment, then good for you. Go on believing that if it literally helps you sleep at night. And I mean it. There are some people who have had such horrific or painful experiences in their lives that, well, maybe believing in God is going to do more for them than slugging it out in years of psychoanalysis.

Some things science has no answers for, like why children are recruited as child soldiers, forced to commit atrocities and become victimizers themselves; why priests are allowed to go from parish to parish, abusing children seemingly without impunity and leaving them emotional wrecks; or why earthquakes level entire cities, killing millions in the blink of an eye, as though they were flies or ants. We can explain it sociologically, psychologically, geologically. But maybe believing that there is a God who hears your prayers and sympathizes with your pain is simpler for getting through the day.

I’ll leave it there because there’s a lot more I could say about the subject, and I’m making a concerted effort to be nice.

69. immortality

*I posted this comment to an article on my friend pantaloondescendo’s blog this afternoon, and (narcissism aside) thought it was beautifully phrased and wanted to share it with anyone reading this*

To quote Douglas Adams (via Richard Dawkins): “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”

At the same time, I’m rather intrigued by the Jewish idea that God will hold each of us accountable for every legitimate pleasure that we denied ourselves in life (this coming from Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks). We are sentient beings capable of thought, feeling and understanding, so for one of those beings to live a life wasted and full of regret is probably the most supreme tragedy there is in the universe.

I heard Rabbi Jonathan Sacks speak about this idea of a sort of “spiritualized hedonism” (to paraphrase slightly from John Piper and his “Christian Hedonism“) on American Public Media’s On Being (formerly Speaking of Faith) on the show “Pursuing Happiness” which was a conversation with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Jonathan Sacks, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church, and Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr at the 2010 Interfaith Summit on Happiness held at Emory University.

Sacks was responding to Schori, who in turn was responding to a question about “our physical selves in this condition of happiness.” She outlined the two traditions of ascetic approach and an incarnational approach (which I won’t post here but is in the show transcript, in the second section of dialogue). Then Sacks had this to say:

Judaism has a certain approach to the physical dimension of the spiritual life. It’s called food. In fact, somebody once said, if you want a crash course in understanding all the Jewish festivals, they can all be summed up in three sentences: They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat. But I think that part of our faith is that God is to be found down here in this world that God created and seven times pronounced good. And I find one of the most striking sentences in Judaism — it is in the Jerusalem Talmud — is the statement of Rav that in the world to come, a person will have to give an account of every legitimate pleasure he or she deprived themselves of in this life. Because God gave us this world to enjoy.

I must say that quite apart — and I mean, absolutely, Judaism has taken — I think we share this, but Judaism has said there are three approaches to physical pleasure. Number one is hedonism, the worship of pleasure. The number two is asceticism, the denial of pleasure. And number three is the biblical way for sanctification of pleasure. And that, I think, is important and very profound. And I must say that sometimes the best kind of interfaith gatherance — I mean, theology is extremely wonderful. It’s very cognitive. That is a very polite English way of saying boring. And sometimes the best form of interfaith is you just sit together, you eat together, you drink together, you share one another’s songs. You listen to one another’s stories and just enjoy the pleasures of this world with people of another faith. That is beautiful.

I would add just one other thing. If there is one thing I find beautiful beyond measures — there in my own tradition in what we call hakhnasat orhim, hospitality, very real element of Christianity and Islam and Buddhism — it’s a super element in Sikhism, what’s called langar. You know, it’s not just my physical pleasures. It’s giving physical pleasure to those who have all too little. One very great Hasidic teacher once said, “Somebody else’s material needs are my spiritual duties.” And that, I think, is where we join in sharing our pleasures with others.

This is very different from the normal conservative Christian views that say you can’t (or shouldn’t) drink, smoke, swear, have sex outside of marriage, be gay, etc., ad nauseum. After all, if God created it (and he did… didn’t he??), why is it wrong to do? The smoking thing I can understand since it’s harmful to your physical body and to others; but the rest seem based on cultural norms and even personal preferences as supposed to a divine ban on said activity. Alcohol is fine and even healthy in moderation. Swearing’s probably not good, but it’s damn good fun. Premarital sex is in the Bible, so this whole “saving myself for marriage” doctrine is complete nonsense. And don’t even get me started on homosexuality.

In short, any religion or system of belief that starts becoming more prohibitive to experiencing life in its fullest on the basis of “God said so” is one that should probably be re-evaluated.

55. rococco

The past few months have been… busy. I was temping at a small company in Minnetonka that I fear was possibly engaging in unethical business practices. Originally the assignment began in October and was for only a few weeks, but then stretched out to the end of the year and then indefinitely until I was told last week that they’d hired someone full-time for the position I was filling in for. That’s the reality of temping though, and I really didn’t want to commute to Minnetonka every day, especially now that gas prices are climbing again.

The past month also saw a long bout of depression that has been off and on since the middle of December. Part of it is that I feel adrift spiritually now that I officially no longer belong to either fundamentalism or evangelicalism. I went to a Christian college, took courses in the Bible and theology, grew up in the church, attended a mainline fundamentalist congregation for several years; but now I just can’t take any of it as seriously as I used to. I don’t believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God (though I still think it’s inspired to an extent); that everything is as black and white as I was taught growing up; or that God is keeping your permanent sin record and on Judgement Day will weigh your heart before the Ammut-like maw of Hell. I just can’t buy it anymore.

However, the implication of this new strain of though is that most of what I’ve believed most of my life is invalid. I guess you could say I’m grieving the death of this old “fundamentalist” me, and wondering what it is that I do believe. It’s all very dizzying.

Another aspect of the depression is the sheer loneliness I’ve been feeling, along with the series of disastrous dates I’ve been on lately. I’m nearly 28, and starting to wonder if I’ll ever be truly loved or understood by another person. Yes, my friends and family love me, but I want to adore and be adored by the guy I spend my life with. And I’m starting to fear that may never happen.

Thus, the trend of sadness.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy 2011.

54. lightning

Came across this quote yesterday while reading some Eve Sedgwick at lunch (it should be briefly mentioned that in the following Sedgwick defines “homosocial” as referring to social bonds between persons of the same sex):

The diacritical opposition between the “homosocial” and the “homosexual” seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men. At this particular historical moment, an intelligible continuum of aims, emotions, and valuations links lesbianism with the other forms of women’s attraction to women: the bond of mother and daughter, for instance, the bond of sister and sister, women’s friendship, “networking,” and the active struggles of feminism . . . Thus the adjective “homosocial” as applied to women’s bonds need not be pointedly dichotomized as against “homosexual”; it can intelligibly dominate the entire continuum. The apparent simplicity . . . would not be so striking it if were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males. When Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms get down to serious logrolling on “family policy,” they are men promoting men’s interests. (In fact, they embody Heidi Hartmann’s definition of patriarchy: “relations between men, which have a material base, and which, though hierarchical, establish or create interdependence and solidarity among men that enable them to dominate women.”)

So that got me to thinking: that the patriarchal, ecclesiastical power structures of the Church are essentially a homosocial “bromance”—men looking out for the interests of men; and that since the Church was founded as a patriarchy, therefore any theology written under its auspices will mirror that. (Well, much of it then. It’s unfair to generalize.) We have to ask ourselves whether any particular theology is one of love, or of patriarchy; whether it’s about God, or about men (consciously or unconsciously) creating a hegemonic construct for the domination of women and minorities (including homosexuals).

Now, I fully realize that it’s not so simple, making grand sweeping statements about something so broad and complex as theology. Perhaps it would be best to narrow this down to theologies of sexuality, but this seems to get at the core of our understanding of Scripture. Is the Bible itself a patriarchal text? Do we have to read the Pauline epistles through that lens/filter, and can we do so without completely undermining the authority of Scripture?

I guess the real question I want to get at is whether the problem is with Scripture, or with the evangelicals and fundamentalists who seek to co-opt the texts for their political ends, as in the case of the “moral majority” or the more recent movement on the part of religious conservatives to defend the “Biblical definition of marriage” (i.e., “one man, one woman”)? And can we apply ancient Judaic customs to present-day relationships? Is the Bible even a book on sexual ethics?

However, the thought that stuck with me all day was that the theology that allows Christians to oppress homosexuals and try to block the anti-bullying legislation comes down to their frozen gender construct, which colors their view of Scripture and thus of the world. They’ve built an entire Church modeled on this theology, and an entire political movement, so they desperately have to be right. Otherwise, there could be some other gaping holes in their beliefs.

45. monologue

He’s a very smart Prince.

He’s a Prince who prepares. Knowing this time I’d run from him, he spread pitch on the stairs. I was caught unawares. And I thought: well, he cares.

This is more than just malice! Better stop and take stock while you’re standing here stuck on the steps of the palace.

You think, what do you want? You think, make a decision. Why not stay and be caught? You think, well, it’s a thought. What would be his response? But then what if he knew who you were when you know that you’re not what he thinks that he wants?

And then what if you are what a Prince would envision? Although how can you know who you are till you know what you want, which you don’t, so then which do you pick: Where you’re safe, out of sight, and yourself, but where everything’s wrong? Or where everything’s right and you know that you’ll never belong?

And whichever you pick, do it quick, ’cause you’re starting to stick to the steps of the palace.

It’s your first big decision, the choice isn’t easy to make. To arrive at a ball is exciting and all– once you’re there, though, it’s scary. And it’s fun to deceive when you know you can leave, but you have to be wary. There’s a lot that’s at stake, but you’ve stalled long enough, ’cause you’re still standing stuck in the stuff on the steps…

Better run along home, and avoid the collision. Even though they don’t care, you’ll be better of there where there’s nothing to choose, so there’s nothing to lose. So you pry up your shoes.

Then from out of the blue, and without any guide, you know what your decision is, which is not to decide. You’ll just leave him a clue: for example, a shoe. And then see what he’ll do. Now it’s he and not you who is stuck with a shoe, in a stew, in the goo, and you’ve learned something, too, something you never knew, on the steps of the palace.

– Stephen Sondheim, from Into the Woods