Greta Christina's Blog

I Got Yer Intelligent Design Right Here, Baby...

This is the funniest thing I've seen all week. (And it's about both sex and atheism, which makes it an extra-special treat.)

No, it's not the video. Although the video is hilarious, in an appalling "Holy crap, do people really believe this?" sort of way. But you have to watch the video to get the joke. (It's only about a minute, and it really is quite entertaining. Video below the fold.)

How I Became an Atheist, Why I Became an Atheist: Part 3

This is the third and final part of a three part serial. When our story began, our heroine had gone from the deep-rooted but unexamined agnosticism of her childhood, through a credulous hippie woo-woo bullshit phase, to a general belief in some sort of animating spirit that inhabited all living things and that survived in some form after death. When we last left her, she was beginning to question even this broadest, most general belief in some sort of soul that might survive death...

...when the accident happened.

That makes it sound a whole lot more dramatic than it was. It wasn't a very bad accident: I fell off my bicycle, I broke my arm, and I had to have pins put in the bone. Fairly painful, but nothing life-threatening, or even very dangerous. I was only under general anesthesia for an hour, maybe an hour and a half.

Have you ever been under general anesthesia?

General anesthesia is nothing at all like sleep. When you sleep, you have some feeling of presence even while you’re asleep, some sense when you wake that time has passed and you were there when it did -- even if you weren't aware of it.

Anesthesia was completely different. When I came out of it, it felt as if the time I'd been under had simply been erased. I had no idea if I'd been under for an hour, or six hours, or twenty-four. If the nurses had told me I'd been out for days or even months, I would have believed it. All my sense of self, of having had a self during that time, was utterly absent.

It didn't feel like I'd been asleep. It felt like I’d been obliterated. It felt like death, and coming out of it was like clawing my way out of a grave.

Not so surprisingly, this was a profoundly upsetting experience. And not just because it was scary and freaky. It was upsetting because it destroyed the last remaining shreds of the idea that I might possibly have a soul that would survive me after my death. After all, if just a small amount of some drug injected into my bloodstream could wipe out my sense of selfhood so thoroughly, merely by altering my brain chemistry a little bit... then why on Earth would I think that this selfhood could somehow survive the total decay of my flesh and my brain?

So I had to face the fact that this is what death would almost certainly be like. I had to face the idea of my own non-existence -- not just intellectually, but with a visceral and immediate experience of what that might be like. I had to face the idea that, when I died, I wouldn't be going to Heaven, or getting reincarnated as a lazy housecat, or resting peacefully in an eternal afternoon nap. I had to face the idea that, in all likelihood, I simply wouldn't be.

And now I had a very bad few months indeed. It's one thing to believe, in some abstract sense, that death is the real and final end of your existence. It's another thing entirely to get a taste of that non-existence. I went into a fairly serious depression, and the memory of my non-existence experience -- or to be more accurate, the “crawling out of the grave” experience afterwards -- would spring out at me unexpectedly like a mugger with a knife. (To be fair, this wasn't the only thing triggering the depression -- a lot of bad shit was happening right around then -- but it was definitely a major contributor.)

I knew that I had to rethink everything. I knew I had to come up with some way to deal with the shortness of my life and the finality of my death, some philosophy that would let me come to some sort of peace with the idea of my non-existence, without making me feel like I was lying to myself.

So I wrote Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do With God.

And it worked. It was a hard, bad time, and I spent months at my computer with tears running down my face while I wrote. It was an extremely scary piece to write: I went into it without any real idea of what conclusion I was going to reach, and I knew I was getting into treacherous emotional waters without any clear sense of how I was going to get out. But I got there. I got to a place where I could contemplate the finality of my death, and the death of the people I love... not without sadness or grief, but without panic and despair, and with a reasonable degree of acceptance and peace.

And once I got there, I didn't need to believe in the soul anymore. Or the World-Soul. I didn’t need to hang on to a belief that I was finding increasingly implausible, just because I wanted to believe it.

I think I probably would have gotten there without the accident. But it sure speeded things up. And it definitely started a sort of cascade effect. The more comfortable I felt with the idea of the absence of the soul and the finality of death, the more willing I was to see the soul as an unnecessary, needlessly complicated hypothesis, one that doesn't really explain anything and doesn't fit with what we know about how the self and the mind works. And the more willing I was to see all that, the more comfortable I got with the idea of the absence of the soul and the finality of death.

Which takes us to the more recent place in this little saga:

1. thinking that God or the soul, while theoretically possible, are not only unproven, but extremely implausible -- about as implausible as Zeus, or fairies, or the invisible hand guiding the Tarot cards, or any number of other beliefs that I now feel entirely comfortable discounting as hypotheses;

2. thinking that, while I disagree with people who have religious beliefs and think that they're mistaken, it's really none of my business what they believe and isn't a matter of earth-shaking, deal-breaking importance -- as long as they respect my atheism, don't treat their faith as if it were fact, don't act as if the fact that they believe something they have no evidence for somehow makes them virtuous people, don't try to shove their faith down other people's throats, and generally act like decent people;

3. at the same time also thinking that, in the larger sense, the question of religion or the lack thereof is not merely a personal issue of faith and opinion, but a political issue of enormous importance for this country and for the world -- and becoming radicalized about the need to speak and act about it;

4. becoming increasingly aware that there is a growing movement of atheists and other non-believers -- a movement that's becoming more outspoken on an almost daily basis -- and wanting to be an active part of that movement;

5. deciding to call myself an atheist instead of an agnostic, not because of a change in my beliefs or lack thereof, but because of a change in my thinking about the language;

6. blogging about it ad nauseum.

Which pretty much brings us up to date. If you've been reading the atheism rants on my blog for the past few months, you pretty much know the rest. (If you're a newcomer to this blog, may I suggest Oh, The Believer and the Skeptic Should be Friends, Why Are We Here? One Agnostic's Half-Baked Philosophy, The Unexplained, the Unproven, and the Unlikely, Atheist or Agnostic?, and Defending the Blasphemy Challenge. (Or you could try A Dyke’s Defense of Blowjobs, or The Aging Slut, or Broccoli or Tofu? Sexual Differences in Relationships... which don't have anything to do with atheism, but are funny and dirty. Or you could even throw your hat into the Harry Potter versus Lord of the Rings debate...)

And I don't know where I'm going with this in the future. I'm curious to find out myself. I'll keep you posted.

How I Became an Atheist, Why I Became an Atheist: Part 2

This is Part Two of a serial. In our previous episode, our heroine had gone from the deep-rooted but unexamined agnosticism of her childhood, through a credulous hippie woo-woo bullshit phase in her college and just-post-college years, to a general belief in some sort of animating spirit that inhabited all living things and that survived in some form after death. We now return to the story.

And then two things started to happen.

First: I began to get interested in books about science, and especially the science of the brain and the mind.

Which was a problem.

It's not that the science of the brain and the mind actually disproves the existence of the soul. It doesn't. That wasn't the problem.

Here was the problem: Reading books about the science of the brain and the mind made it very clear to me -- unmistakably, unignorably clear -- just how easy it is for the human mind to deceive itself. From optical illusions, to auditory hallucinations, to wildly inaccurate memories that are remembered clear as day, and so on and so on and so on… the human brain and human mind are tricksters. They fool themselves. They see and recognize faces, whether there's a face to see or not. They're far more likely to see what they expect to see than what they don't expect to see, regardless of what's actually there. They eagerly embrace evidence that fits their theories about how things work, and just as eagerly reject evidence that doesn't. And they see patterns, and intention, and cause and effect, EVERYWHERE. Absolutely everywhere. For very good evolutionary reasons, this is all part of how brains work.

All of them.

Every remotely functioning human brain.

Including mine.

And once I knew -- in some length and in tremendous detail -- just how easy it is for the mind to be fooled, just how possible it is that the faces and patterns and intentions it's seeing really aren't there, it became impossible to believe something simply because I personally experienced it. Or rather, it became impossible to believe something about the external world, with no question or room for doubt, simply because I personally experienced it. I could look inward to decide if I really wanted to quit my job, or get involved with Ingrid… but I couldn't look inward to decide if the World-Soul was real, or my mother was really visiting me in my dreams. If I was walking down the street and suddenly felt the presence of a beloved dead person wash over me, I could no longer assume that I was really experiencing a visitation simply because the experience was vivid and powerful.

Which leads me to the second thing that happened. The second thing that happened was that, somewhat by accident, I started reading the Skeptical Inquirer.

Which was a problem for three reasons.

Reason One: I had believed for a long time that spiritual beliefs were beyond questions of evidence or proof… and that therefore, except for the obviously wacky ones (how I defined "obviously wacky" wasn't clear to me even at the time), pretty much any spiritual belief could reasonably be held by any reasonable person.

The Skeptical Inquirer -- and its mission of applying rigorous scientific methods to testing claims of the paranormal -- made it brutally clear that this was not the case. At least some claims about spirituality -- such as astrology, or faith healing, or speaking with the dead -- could be tested. And while they couldn't definitively disprove (for instance) the existence of life after death, they could show that, every time a claim of speaking to the dead was rigorously tested, it utterly failed the test.

Every single time.

That's daunting.

Reason Two: I've always considered myself someone who cares about truth, more than almost anything else. I've prided myself on being someone who was willing to face reality, even when it was harsh; who believed that understanding the world to the best of my ability was the foundation of deciding how to act in that world; and who was willing to change my mind and admit I was wrong when the evidence demanded it.

Reading the Skeptical Inquirer made me feel like I was being challenged to live up to that principle.

Reason Three: Reading the Skeptical Inquirer made me aware that there was a community of people who felt the same way I did about Reason Number Two -- a community I respected, and admired, and wanted to be part of.

There is actually a third thing that happened as well: something that doesn't quite fit into the same category as the other two, but that was powerfully important anyway. And that's that I fell in love with Ingrid… and started hearing her sad and awful stories about her fundamentalist grandparents, and the terrible rift that religion had caused in her family, and her anger and grief about it. This wasn't something that forced me to question my own beliefs, exactly. But it brought the whole question of religion front and center in my life, in a way that it really hadn't been before, not with my agnostic parents and my lukewarm-Protestant grandparents. Being with Ingrid took this from a somewhat abstract issue to one that was immediate and personal.

At this point, my ripples of belief hadn't exactly disappeared. But they'd definitely become more shallow. The level of my certainty was dimming: whereas before all this reading and thinking, I'd probably been about a 3 on the Dawkins 1-7 scale of faith (not certain, but leaning towards belief), I was now at least a 4 (thinking that the existence and non-existence of the soul were about equally likely), and maybe even a 5 (not certain, but leaning towards non-belief). The whole "substance that enables us to have consciousness and free will" idea began morphing into "a substance -- or maybe just a quality -- that enables us to have consciousness and free will."

And --

most importantly --

I began to realize that I didn't really believe in the immortal soul because I actually believed it.

I never had.

I believed it because I wanted to believe it. I believed it because I found the idea of permanent death to be dreadfully painful, and I found the idea of some sort of afterlife -- even a nebulous afterlife in which my soul dissolved into the world-soul -- to be a comfort.

But this realization pretty much shot the comfort to hell. This realization made me pretty damned uncomfortable. And when it came right down to it, I wasn't willing to believe in the soul -- or anything -- simply because I wanted to. I wasn't willing to be that sort of person. Self-delusion is human, forgivable, none of us escape it. But willful, conscious self-delusion… that, I believe, is a serious character flaw, and one that leads to an enormous amount of suffering in the world. ("The Iraqi people will greet us as liberators!") I couldn't do it.

So I was already teetering on the brink, already leaning towards "I really don't know what happens when we die, and it's entirely possible and even likely that death is forever"… when the accident happened.

This is a serial story in three parts. To find out what the accident was and why it mattered, visit this blog again tomorrow for the exciting conclusion.

How I Became an Atheist, Why I Became an Atheist

I realized recently that, in all the stuff I've written here about atheism, I've sort of been taking my atheism as a given. I've been writing from a perspective of, "Of course Greta's an atheist... so what does she have to say about that?" And that's actually somewhat misleading. I have had spiritual beliefs in the past. Not that long ago, even. I've never belonged to any organized religion, but I haven't been an atheist all my life, and it didn't happen overnight.

So it seemed like a good time for me to talk, not about why I think my atheism is right and you should all agree with me, but about the story of how I became one, and why.

*****

I wasn't brought up atheist, but I was brought up agnostic. Both my parents were agnostic when I was a kid, and they let my brother and me make up our own minds on the matter. I remember when I was about ten or so, they asked us if we wanted to be baptized... and when we looked at them like they were high, they explained that they hadn't baptized us as babies so that we could decide for ourselves, but now they thought they should check with us about it. (If memory serves, we continued to look at them like they were high even after this explanation. It just seemed like such a random, out-of-the-blue question, like asking if we wanted to learn Swedish or paint all our shoes bright blue. No, thank you, and why on earth would you ask?)

In general, religion just wasn't discussed that much in our home, and I didn't think about it a whole lot when I was growing up. I went through a brief phase of being fascinated by Bible stories and "Jesus Christ Superstar," but it wasn't out of belief -- just curiosity, which in retrospect I think was somewhat morbid. All that pain and death.

So then I went to college, and started smoking a lot of pot and dropping a lot of acid, and I started picking up a whole passel of woo-woo spiritual ideas and beliefs. Tarot cards, reincarnation, synchronicity, the idea that subatomic particles must have free will since their behavior isn't predictable... you know, the whole hippie drill. I read a bunch of Aleister Crowley, a bunch of Robert Anton Wilson. I wrote my senior thesis on Gurdjieff.

I should make it clear that these were not metaphors to me. I genuinely, literally believed that there were mystical forces intentionally guiding the Tarot cards as I shuffled them. I literally believed that I had been a king in some past life (although, to my credit, I never believed that I'd been a very important or famous king). I literally believed that I had a practical but passionate nature because I was a Capricorn with Scorpio moon and rising. I literally believed -- so help me -- that trees taught birds how to sing; that drawing energy from the moon while we were hitch-hiking would make a ride appear; and that the joint we mysteriously found in our apartment had been placed there by some sort of friendly spirit. (As opposed to, say, rolled by us or one of our friends, and then forgotten about.)

What can I say. I was young. I was high. So sue me.

When I left college and stopped taking quite so many drugs, most of the more absurd of these beliefs faded away. An example: My belief that mystical forces were consciously guiding the Tarot cards faded into a belief that I didn't know exactly what was happening when I read the cards, but it sure was spooky, and there must be something supernatural going on, even if I didn't know exactly what... which then faded into a belief that the cards worked because they were designed to work, that they were made with potent symbols that applied to people's lives, and were basically a useful peg on which to hang a conversation about life. (I was, I should point out, uncannily good at reading Tarot cards. I felt kind of sad when they began to slip out of my life.)

But although the goofier details were fading, the broader and not so goofy underlying concept remained. Most notably, I still believed in some sort of soul that survived after death. I'd be walking down the street and suddenly feel the presence of my mother, or my friend Rob Tyler, and it just seemed obvious that they were there. It didn't feel like a memory -- it felt like a visitation.

So now we enter the third phase of my spiritual journey: from the deep-rooted but unexamined agnosticism of my childhood, through the credulous hippie woo-woo bullshit of my early adulthood, to the general belief in some sort of animating spirit that inhabited all living things, a spirit that survived in some form after death.

As the years went on and I thought about it at greater length, this notion sharpened and crystallized, into a fairly specific belief:

1. that people were not merely biochemical stimulus-response machines, but had some sort of substance that enabled us to have consciousness and free will -- a substance I called the soul;

2. that other animals besides people also had souls;

3. that probably plants had some sort of souls as well, and maybe some non-living objects like mountains had them too;

4. that these souls didn't disappear when the body died (although whether the soul stayed whole and got re-incarnated as itself or simply dissolved into the World-Soul the way the body dissolves into the Earth, I was willing to leave as an open question);

5. and finally, that the sum of all these souls formed a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts; a whole that had some sort of selfhood… a whole that I was willing to call God. Although generally I didn't -- I usually called it the World-Soul. I didn't think this World-Soul was perfect or anything -- I didn't think it was all powerful or all-knowing or all-good. I just thought it existed, that it was part of us all and we were all part of it, and that participating in it and helping it learn and grow and be happy was a big part of what gave life meaning.

As spiritual beliefs go, it's not totally unreasonable. Certainly not the most unreasonable one I've ever heard. (Although of course I'd think that. It was mine, after all.)

But -- and this becomes extremely important later -- throughout all of these phases, the essential agnosticism I was brought up with never really left me. (Except maybe in the hippie woo-woo phase; but even then, I hung onto it in theory, in a sort of, "Well, if I'm going to be intellectually honest, I have to admit that I don't really KNOW that a mystical spirit is moving my Tarot cards into place…") During my whole "sum of all souls combined into one being" phase, it was very, very clear to me that this belief was... well, a belief. Something I believed -- not something that I knew. I even codified my agnosticism, in a sort of series of concentric circles: I felt pretty darned sure about the first proposition in my list, and increasingly less certain about each successive one, like ripples in a pond fading as they fan out.

And then two things started to happen.

This is a serial story in three parts. To find out what the two things were that happened, visit this blog again tomorrow.

Defending the Blasphemy Challenge: A Reply

Okay. First: Laura, I get that you're upset and hurt and angry about this, and I want you to know that I don't want that. So I'm going to try to say what I have to say, as best as possible, in a way that doesn't exacerbate it.

How can I do this?

Let me start by making a comparison. You're a grassroots progressive Democrat, and a pretty ardent, practicing one. You probably see and hear people making fun of Democrats and progressives on a daily basis, calling you (among other things) stupid and crazy, and worse. And I'm sure you get ticked off at this sometimes, especially when you think the jokes are inaccurate or mean-spirited.

But you don't get angry at the very idea that people would make fun of Democrats and call them stupid or crazy or other bad names. Not this angry, anyway. (At least, I assume you don't. We’ve talked about politics many times, and I've never heard you get as angry or as hurt as you seem to be about the Blasphemy Challenge.) You accept that that's part of the public conversation about politics.

I'd like to ask you to look at religion in the same way.

Religions are (most of them, anyway) an idea about the world: a theory about how the world works, and a philosophy about how the world should work. And as such, it should be part of the public discourse, part of the marketplace of ideas -- no different than any other ideas about the world, and treated with the same level of respect and/or irreverence.

Right now, this country is having a public conversation about religion, in a way that, as far as I'm aware, it never really has. And part of that conversation is going to involve people making mean, snarky jokes, both about the ideas and about the people who hold them. I personally wish more atheists would be more careful about aiming their jibes at Christianity rather than Christians… but you know, I'm not always careful about making fun of Republicanism rather than Republicans, and I don't think it's the crime of the century.

And I don't think it's fair to be more angry at people who are childish and insulting about your religion than you would be about people who are childish and insulting about your politics.

Or, for that matter, people who are childish and insulting about the politics you oppose. Speaking for myself, some of my favorite pieces of social commentary are sometimes childish and insulting. South Park, Beavis and Butt-Head -- very often childish and insulting. The Simpsons, Monty Python -- not infrequently childish and insulting. The Daily Show, The Colbert Report -- yeah, sometimes. I think if we're going to accept this type of social commentary when it works in our favor, we have to accept it when it's aimed at us.

You're upset because many of the Blasphemy Challenge people treat Christianity as a joke, make fun of it -- sometimes disrespectful, mean-spirited, not very nice fun. I'm not sure how to say this in a nice way… but this is kind of what I'm talking about when I talk about religion getting a free ride in the marketplace of ideas. Making fun of people is a respected, time-honored form of public discourse in this country. Making fun of big, powerful institutions -- of which Christianity is most assuredly one -- is an even more respected, even more time-honored tradition. I'm sure Republicans and other folks get upset when Jon Stewart makes fun of them and calls them stupid and crazy. Tough beans. That's life in the big city.

And I really think we need to start looking at religious ideas the same way.

So that's the big issue. Now a couple of somewhat smaller, more specific points.

John McCain on AIDS: "Gee, I Never Thought About That!"

Over on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, Ed Brayton has an excellent piece about a recent interview with John McCain on his "Straight Talk Express" tour bus, where he was asked whether the U.S. should fund condom distribution in Africa and elsewhere around the world to help prevent AIDS. You can read the whole transcript (much of which is appalling) on Ed's blog, or on the New York Times blog he was citing. I just want to point out the comments that really jumped out at me:

"I never got a question about it before."

"You've stumped me."

"I've never gotten into these issues before."

So let me get this straight.

He's been in Congress since 1982. He's been in the Senate since 1986. He ran for President in 2000. In other words, his national political career dovetails almost perfectly with the emergence of the AIDS epidemic in this country.

And this is the first time he's considered the question of what the U.S. government should and should not do to help stop the spread of HIV?

That, just by itself, makes him grotesquely unqualified to be President. Heck, it makes him grotesquely unqualified to be in the Senate.

Of course, I don't think that's really what's going on. I don't think this is the first time he's considered this question. I just think it's the first time he's considered this question since he decided that, if he wants to be President, he has to start sucking the dick of the religious right. (The more I read about McCain, the more I realize that the whole "free-thinking maverick who'll fight for the little guy" schtick is one of the most successful snow jobs in the history of American politics. You can read more about him in the Culture Wars archives and on Making Light.)

But look at it this way. The very fact that he thinks "Gee, I never really thought about this before" is a remotely valid response to the question "What should the U.S. government do to help stop the spread of HIV?" -- that, just by itself, proves beyond any doubt that he is not qualified to be dogcatcher... much less a Senator, and much, much less a President.

Greta Christina Takes the Blasphemy Challenge

"Truly I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin."

This is from the Bible. Mark 3:28-29. It's not from the Old Testament; it's not from Paul, or someone else interpreting Jesus's words. It's the words of Jesus himself. It's not late in the narrative, either, when some scholars argue Jesus was starting to lose it. And I'm not quoting from the beautiful-but-wildly-inaccurate King James translation, either; I'm quoting from the Revised Standard.

As far as I can tell, it says what it says. According to Jesus, as quoted in the Gospels, there is one sin that will not be forgiven, one sin that is eternal -- blaspheming against the Holy Spirit.

(FYI, here's the context for the quote: Jesus has been casting out demons, and the scribes respond by saying "He is possessed by Beelzebub, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons." [Mark 3:22] Jesus replies by asking "How can Satan cast out Satan?" [Mark 3:23], talks in that vein for a bit... and then lets loose with the "never has forgiveness/guilty of an eternal sin" stuff; "for they had said, 'He has an unclean spirit.'" [Mark 3:30] In other words, they'd denied that the Holy Spirit was how the demons had been cast out, and had said it was Satan instead.)

I've actually read a fair amount of the Bible. I was a religion major, for goodness' sake. But until recently, I somehow managed to miss this bit. And obviously, it's not a verse that gets much attention called to it... what with it totally contradicting the central message of Christianity.

So some people have put together this Website (boy, do I love the early 21st century -- of course some people have put together a Website) called The Blasphemy Challenge. On it, they're encouraging people to deny the Holy Spirit, videotape themselves doing it... and post the videos on YouTube. (And I say yet again: I love this century.)

It's become kind of a big deal. There've been news reports about it, including on Nightline, and hundreds of people have made these videos.

Here's mine. (Click the link, or else view it below the fold.)

Come For the Atheism, Stay For the Sex! (Or Come For the Sex, Stay For the Atheism!)

Or come for the atheism AND the sex, and stay for the politics! Or the weird dreams, or the pop culture analysis, or the arcane discussion of the finer points of grammar, or the recipe for grilled peanut butter and chocolate chip sandwiches...

We were talking about my blog at a party a couple of weeks ago, and someone suggested that I split my blog up into two blogs: one about atheism, and one about sex. They said that single-issue blogs are easier to market and publicize, and that I might get more traffic and keep more readers if I had different blogs devoted to my different interests.

It's an idea I've considered before. I sometimes worry that people who find my blog through the porn reviews and blowjob discussions get put off by the lengthy faith/evidence conversations. And vice versa.

But I also think this blog's eclecticism is one of its strengths. I personally enjoy blogs that are largely focused on one or two topics I'm interested in -- sex and politics, politics and literature, science and culture -- but that also surprise me with facts and ideas and news stories I might not have run into.

And even from a purely marketing/publicity standpoint, I think keeping it all together might be a good idea. I don't want to be pigeonholed as just a sex writer, or just an atheism writer, or just an anything writer. I'd like to be recognized as, you know, a writer, who can get her brain and her fingers around a wide variety of topics.

Besides, if I split this into a Sex blog and an Atheism blog, where would I put the political rants? The movie reviews? The dream journal? The grammar debates? The recipes?

So I'm taking a reader poll. Not that it's necessarily going to affect what I do -- I'm probably just going to keep on doing what I want to do -- but I'm curious. What do y'all think? Do you think this blog would be better if it were two blogs, one on Sex and some other stuff and one on Atheism and some other stuff? Or do you like it better the way it is? Inquiring minds want to know.

"Fundamentalist" Atheists and Squabbling About Language

I've been getting into a debate in Julia Sweeney's forum -- and it's been so ironic it's making me laugh out loud.

It's over the phrase "fundamentalist atheist." And the irony is that I'm taking the exact opposite of the position I usually take about language. Normally, I fall very far on the descriptivist side of the descriptivist/prescriptivist spectrum. I tend to think that language changes; that language should change; that words mean what people understand them to mean; and that arguing "X doesn't mean Y, it really means Z" is like arguing that the tides shouldn't change or species shouldn't evolve.

But in this case, I'm arguing the other side. Very uncharacteristically for me, I'm arguing that the word "fundamentalism" means something quite specific; that this original meaning is useful; and by gum, that's how people should use it.

And since it's a question that's come up in this blog, I thought I'd gas on about it here.

*****

Yes, I'm normally a descriptivist, or a usagist. But there are changes in language that I'll argue against -- not because I resist the general idea of the language changing, but because I have a specific objection to a specific change. The best example is the changing meaning of "literally" to mean "very." My problem isn't that "literally" doesn't really mean "very." My problem is that the original meaning of "literally" is extremely useful… and we don't have another word to replace it.

And I feel the same way about the word "fundamentalist."

"Fundamentalist" has a pretty specific meaning, and I think it's a useful one. Let's take a look at the dictionary, and see what it is. According to Merriam Webster Online, fundamentalism is:

1 a (often capitalized): a movement in 20th century Protestantism emphasizing the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Christian life and teaching b: the beliefs of this movement c: adherence to such beliefs
2: a movement or attitude stressing strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles

It's this second meaning that I assume people are getting at when they talk about "fundamentalist atheists."

And in my experience, it's flat-out not true.

I have never known -- or read -- any atheist who has strictly and literally adhered to a set of basic atheist principles. Heck, one of the whole points of atheism is that there is no set of basic principles -- no Bible, no Koran, no Book of Mormon -- to which one could strictly and literally adhere. One of the whole points of atheism (and the passionate respect for science that typically comes with atheism) is that beliefs about the world should be adaptable, and taken in context, and open to question.

There are atheists who are intolerant. There are atheists who are pig-headed. There are atheists who are contemptuous of people who don't agree with them. There are atheists who are, in a word, assholes. Not as many as people sometimes think -- as I've written before, atheists get called intolerant and contemptuous of religion for saying things like "I don't agree with you," "I think you're mistaken," or "What evidence do you have to support that?" -- but there are some.

But I have known not a single atheist who believed in a set of basic atheist principles to which they felt they should strictly and literally adhere. And I mean none. Literally zero.

So why does this "fundamentalist atheist" thing bug me so much?

Because I think it's unjust. It's part of the larger picture of myths, misunderstandings, and deliberate misrepresentations of atheists in our culture. It bugs me for the same reason that comments like "oh, science is just your religion" bug me -- it shows a basic misunderstanding of both fundamentalism and atheism, in the same way that "science is your religion" shows a basic misunderstanding of both religion and science.

Here's an analogy I drew over in the debate on Julia Sweeney's forum:

What if I were to go around talking about, say, "religious Nazis" or "Christian Nazis." (Sorry to use the N-word -- I generally try to avoid it in online discussions, but I can't think of another that means what I'm trying to get at.) You would probably respond -- and rightly so -- that the word "Nazi" means something very specific, and that however terrible the beliefs and actions of intolerant religious believers are, the word "Nazi" does not even come close to accurately describing them.

And if I replied, "Well, that's just how I define 'Nazi,'" you'd probably get very angry. You'd probably reply something like, "You can't just make up your own meaning of a word -- especially such an emotionally loaded word." And again, you'd be right to do so.

That's how I feel (although obviously not on the same level) about the phrase "fundamentalist atheists." It's not that it says something about atheists that's critical. It's that it says something about atheists that's completely untrue and unjust.

*****

Okay. Regular readers of my blog may be getting puzzled right about now by how adamant I am on this topic… given my previous rants on both sexual identity and the atheist/agnostic debates, and why it's so important to let people use whatever language they like (within reason) to define themselves.

But there's a difference -- and it lies in the word "themselves." There is a HUGE difference between mutating the language to define yourself… and mutating it to define other people. The former is about identity, and thus about freedom; the latter is about labeling, and thus not so much about the freedom.

Now, if you want to argue that the colloquial meaning of "fundamentalist" is changing -- that it no longer means "strict and literal adherence to a set of basic principles," that it now means something like "intolerant, rigid, pig-headed jerk" -- well, that's an argument that may be worth making. It's an argument I've made many times myself, about other words. (Although interestingly, that's a far more pejorative definition than the "strict and literal adherence" one…)

The problem is that the "strict and literal adherence" definition is an extremely useful one -- and we don't have another word with that meaning.

And until we do, the word "fundamentalist" will, at the very least, carry both colloquial meanings -- the "strict and literal adherence" meaning, and the "intolerant jerk" meaning. And while the latter certainly does describe some atheists, the former really and truly doesn't.

When Art Porn Works: "Ecstasy in Berlin 1926"

Once again, I'm trying to inject a little sex into this increasingly less sex-oriented sex writer's blog, and am posting one of my Adult FriendFinder magazine porn reviews. This is one of my rare straight-up raves -- and as is so often the case with my porn reviews, it's simultaneously a review and an analysis of what makes porn work. Enjoy!

*****

Ecstasy in Berlin 1926, DVD
Produced, directed, and edited by Maria Beatty
Available at Bleu Productions and at Last Gasp.

Yes. Oh, dear Lord, yes. This is what I've been waiting for, what I'm always waiting for and so rarely get. "Ecstasy in Berlin 1926" is art porn that's actually both artistic and pornographic. It's smut that's exquisitely framed and impeccably timed and created with a passionate creative vision... and that is, at the same time, filthy and nasty and explicit, catering to my most perverted and degenerate voyeuristic lusts.

The movie is set in Berlin in 1926. A blonde beauty, sensual and delicate and a bit like Jean Harlow, injects herself with an unnamed drug, and slips into a fantasy about a dashing brunette woman who appears from nowhere and kisses her passionately, a gloved hand at her throat. The fantasy lover takes control with an increasingly firm hand, slicing the blonde's lingerie off with a straight razor, and caressing her breasts with a touch that's both sensual and sadistic.

As the blonde woman sinks deeper into the drug, the fantasy changes scene. Her lover is now clad in a corset and severely high laced leather boots -- boots for the blonde to grovel at and worship with her lovely mouth. At this point, the fantasies become increasingly intense and perverse, as the submissive girl is bound with ropes, flogged, spanked, paddled, caned, whipped, chained up, and more -- all flawlessly pictured in her mind's eye.

The film is the love child of Maria Beatty. Beatty has produced and directed a number of erotic videos for her company Bleu Productions: most of them featuring lesbian SM, and many of them quite extreme. I've been a fan of Beatty's for years, and her kink videos The Black Glove and The Elegant Spanking are among my favorites. She has an eye for the perfect moment, the pose that perfectly captures the moment of submission or pain or taking control. "Ecstasy in Berlin 1926" is a beautiful example. When the blonde is bent over her mistress's lap, or on all fours in front of a mirror, or on her knees with her face on the floor and her ass in the air, the position is always classic, an iconic example of that pose, perfectly blocked and framed to make a delicious picture for the viewer.

But unlike many other "perfect moment, perfectly framed" porn directors (like, oh, say, Andrew Blake), the performers in Beatty's movies aren't merely standing and modeling. They seem like they're really there. The tongue on the boot, the paddle on the bottom, the lash on the back, the look of concentration on the dominant's face, the look of fear and bliss on the submissive's -- all of these feel genuine. The performers aren't thrashing and screaming, to be sure, but they seem very much intent on what they're doing, and deeply satisfied by it. Maria Beatty is herself a lifestyle submissive, and she's clearly devoted to making videos that capture both the intensity of her fantasies and the truth of real SM play. And when she's at her best, her videos are an exceptional blend of artistry and authenticity.

And "Ecstasy in Berlin 1926" is definitely one of her best. Filmed mostly in black-and-white and sepia-tone with only occasional color, the movie's perverse pleasures are expertly filmed and deftly framed, giving it an air of luxurious decadence. Watching it made me feel like a wealthy sybarite in an elegant bordello, with lovely and expensive girls performing a series of degenerate sex acts carefully staged for my benefit. It looks like a German art film of the 1920s, like a dirty movie by Murnau or Fritz Lang, or like vintage porn photographs come to life. ("Ecstasy in Berlin 1926" was, in fact, inspired by a series of vintage girl-girl kink photos, and one of the extras on the DVD is a gallery of those photos.)

There are a few things you need to be prepared for. One of them is the slow pace of the film, the long, lingering buildup before you get to the "good parts." Personally, I think this is one of the movie's strong points: I think foreplay and teasing and excruciating anticipation are "good parts," some of the yummiest good parts, and one of my biggest complaints about mainstream porn is that it rushes straight to the fucking or the whipping without giving me time to get excited about it. But even if you do get impatient with the teasy buildup (which you can, of course, fast-forward through), I think you'll appreciate the movie's patience. Because once it gets to the juicy bits, it stays with them. It doesn't jump from fetish to fetish or from shot to shot like a music video on speed; it finds a groove and stays with it, letting your eyes linger on the leather boots being lovingly tongued, the chains being carefully wrapped around the naked torso, the bare bottom being paddled again and again. When you come to a bit that you really like, you can relax and trust that you'll be able to watch it for a little while.

You also need to be prepared for the complete lack of dialog. The movie is silent: there's music, but no conversation at all. Again, I personally think this is a huge plus; most porn actors can't act for beans, and most porn dialog makes me want to crawl under the sofa and die from embarrassment. In "Ecstasy in Berlin 1926," there are no awkward, wooden, ineptly written, clumsily memorized speeches to distract you -- the focus is entirely on the image. If what you like in an adult video is the image, this movie will come as a huge relief -- but if you're a fan of dirty talk, it may be a bit disappointing.

Finally, you should be prepared for the somewhat abrupt finish. This is my only actual complaint about the film. The blonde girl's fantasy scenes follow on one another with grace and heat, expertly edited and overlaid, building from firm but gentle dominance to increasingly intense scenarios of blissful pain and submission. But then they just kind of stop. There's nothing to mark the last scene as the last scene -- nothing but the credits. I don't insist on a classic Big Porn Finish, a final orgy scene with six guys shooting on the star's face and boobs. But I do like some sense of closure, something to give shape and context to all those beautiful dirty images, something that tells me to breathe again, or to come. This video doesn't have it, and it's a bit... well, anticlimactic.

But this is a minor nitpick, really, like ragging on Dickens for having a spelling error. I love this film, and I recommend it passionately. "Ecstasy in Berlin 1926" is that rarest of all rare creatures: art porn that works, where the filthiness makes the art more beautiful, and the art makes the sex more hot.

Copyright 2005 Greta Christina. Originally published in Adult FriendFinder magazine.

Answering Laura: Atheists on Religion, Believers on Religion, Part 3

Laura, thank you.

I think I need to clarify my point about faith. I thought I'd made it clearly in my original post, Well, There's Your Problem; but if Laura -- who does, in fact, try hard to understand what I'm saying and give me the benefit of the doubt -- didn't understand it, than I obviously said it wrong. For which I apologize. I do treat this blog as my "thinking out loud" place, and I'm basically okay with that -- but I'm a writer, and I hate it when I'm not clear, especially about important and sensitive subjects. So I want to clarify. (And I want to do it as a blog post instead of a comment/reply, since it's a little too big for that.)

Here's what I'm trying to say.

I really and truly don't have a problem with people who hold beliefs that aren't supported by evidence. We all do that to some extent -- if not about religion, then about other things -- and it's part of what makes us human, part of what we all have in common. I make a big distinction between people with religious beliefs that they don't have evidence for (what I'll call "unsupported faith") and people with religious beliefs that actually run counter to the evidence, and who deliberately reject the evidence in favor of their beliefs (what I'll call "counter-factual faith"). And while I think atheism is a radically different outlook from the latter, I don't agree at all that it's radically different from the former. I don't personally get it about the God hypothesis, and I happen to think it's mistaken... but I do get it about acting on hunches and gut feelings. (I go into more detail about this in Oh, The Believer and the Skeptic Should Be Friends.)

And as long as someone's particular version of the God hypothesis doesn't flatly contradict mountains of evidence -- and as long as they aren't treating their hypothesis as fact and trying to shove it down other people's throats -- it's not a big deal to me. I don't think unsupported faith -- or to secularize it, acting on hunches -- is a sin.

But I don't think it's a virtue, either.

I think it's common. I think it's human. I think it sometimes results in brilliant inspiration, and sometimes in disastrous mistakes. (Let me tell you about my first several boyfriends sometime...) But I don't think that -- in and of itself and regardless of the actual beliefs being held -- believing things for which you have no evidence is an admirable trait that makes you a good person.

And treating unsupported faith/hunches as if it were a virtue... that's what I think is a problem. That's what I think causes harm. And that's the point I was trying to get at in my original post.

Here's why.

1) Treating unsupported faith as a positive virtue makes people susceptible to other unsupported ideas -- many of which are nonsense, and some of which are dangerous nonsense.

This is a point Ingrid keeps making when we talk about this. When people believe that acting on an unsupported hunch makes them admirable and good, they're more likely to act on unsupported hunches in other areas. They're more likely to, say, believe that magnets in their shoes will cure their arthritis; or that $200 an acre for that Florida beachfront property seems like a great bargain; or that Mr. Amir down the street just seems shady, if you know what I mean; or that capitalism will collapse of its own
contradictions in a glorious workers' revolution, after which we will all eat strawberries and cream; or that the Iraqi people will shower us with flowers and greet us as liberators.

It's one thing to say "Hunches are a part of life and we all have to make them sometimes." It's one thing to honor your hunches and respect the place they have in your life. But when people say "The fact that I act on my hunches makes me a really great person," I think they're more likely to do it more often -- and less carefully.

Which leads me to Number 2: