Greta Christina's Blog

Greta's Largely Unsolicited Advice on Blogging

Every now and then, I get an email from someone who's starting a blog, or is considering starting a blog, and wants advice from me on how to go about it. I'm not quite sure why -- my blog is moderately successful, but there are many others that are much more so. But asking advice is the sincerest form of flattery, and I'm always happy to be flattered.

So I thought I'd write up my advice on blogging here, so the next time I get one of these inquiries I can just send them the link. This advice isn't meant to be definitive, btw; it's just what's worked for me, and since some people have asked I figured I might as well answer. Other readers -- especially other bloggers -- please feel free to add your two cents in the comments.

1. Be a good writer.

You'd be amazed at how many bloggers skip this step. But it's essential. You can hustle and plug your blog all you want, but if you're not a good writer, people won't come back. (Quick and dirty advice on how to be a good writer: Write as often as you can; don't worry too much about the wording on the first draft, just spew it out and come back later to polish it; do as many revisions and rewrites as you can stand; trust your instincts but also get feedback from people whose opinions you respect.)

2. Blog regularly.

You don't have to blog every day, or even almost every day. Many of my favorite bloggers only blog once or twice a week. But you do need a semi-regular schedule, and you need to stick to it unless you're sick or traveling or dealing with an emergency or just need to take a break. (And if you are taking a break, say so on your blog.) Personally, if a blogger isn't posting something new every week, I don't visit very often; if a blogger hasn't posted something in over a month, I assume that the blog is dead.

2a. On the other hand, don't just blog for the sake of blogging.

I'd much rather visit a blog with something thoughtful and funny and insightful once or twice a week, than a blog with something thoughtful and funny and insightful once or twice a week and a bunch of pointless filler three times a day. If you don't have anything to say, don't say it.

3. Keep it brief.

It's a shame, but people simply do not have the same patience to stick with a long piece online that they'd have with a book or a magazine article. There are different theories about why this is: some people say it's the light from the computer screen; others say it's the lower resolution of a screen as compared to the printed page; others say it's just a different set of expectations that people have about the speed of the electronic world.

But whatever the reason is, it's still true. Even I give up and move on if I see that a blog post or online article is going on for pages and pages. And I should know better. I'm a writer who often likes to write long-format pieces, and recognizes the value of them. And I still groan and hit the Back button if I see that an online piece is very long. So keep it brief. If you want to write a longer piece, consider breaking it up into a multi-part series. (Also, make your paragraphs shorter than you would if you were writing for paper. Long stretches of unbroken text on a computer screen are very daunting.)

4. Use images.

I'm a bit reluctant to share this piece of advice. The extensive use of images has become one of my blog's distinctive signatures, and if everyone started doing it I'd lose my edge. But honestly, I don't know why more bloggers don't do this. Especially the bloggers who are writing longer pieces (see #3 above). You don't have to go as crazy with the pictures as I do... but the use of images can liven up a text-heavy medium and keep people reading. And this is especially true in a longer piece. With a long piece of online writing, images make it much easier on the eyes, and much easier to stick with it to the end. (You can get copyright- free images from Wikimedia Commons and Stock Exchange.)

5. Be prepared for it to take time.

I guess this is just another way of saying what I said in #2. But what I'm really trying to say here is: Make a plan for how you're going to find the time to blog. Think about what you're doing in your life that you can drop. Do you really need to read the whole Sports section every day? Watch "Law and Order" reruns? Go shoe-shopping? Get eight hours of sleep every night? See your friends and family?

Blogging take time. Blogging well takes more time. If you don't figure out a way to set aside time for it, you're going to find yourself either fucking up your life or writing a half-assed blog. Or both. (I personally was going the sleep- deprivation route for a while, and am convinced that it contributed to my getting pneumonia.) If you're going to blog well, you have to make blogging something of a priority... and that means giving up something else. Think now about what that's going to be.

6. Participate in the blogosphere.

Your best source of readers, other than your immediate circle of friends and family, is (a) other bloggers, and (b) people who are already reading blogs. So visit other blogs and comment on them. Mention other blogs in your own blog posts, and link to them. Keep a blogroll, and keep it up to date. The number one way that I drew traffic to my blog in the early days was simply to go into other blogs and write comments. (I wasn't doing it on purpose to draw traffic, btw; it just turned out that way.) Most blogs give you the option of including your URL with your comment, and if people like your comments, they'll come check you out.

And take part in blog carnivals. Some of them are weak, but the good ones are widely read and are a good way to get your blog on the map.

6a. Do NOT, however, write comments in other blogs that are transparent efforts to draw traffic to yours.

This is a big breach of blog etiquette, and will turn people off very quickly. Your comments in other blogs should really be about, you know, whatever's being discussed in that blog. Obvious self-linkage is like spending an entire party handing out business cards: you won't have much fun at the party, and everyone's going to think you're a jerk.

If you really have no better choice but to link to your own blog in other people's -- if, for instance, something you've written really is the best illustration of a point you're making -- have the decency to be a little sheepish about it. (When I self-link, I usually write something like, "Sorry about the self-linkage, but it really is relevant." And I make damn sure that it really is relevant. And I still hardly ever do it.)

And don't be a comment hog. Other people's blogs are not all about you.

7. Be willing to engage in conversations with commenters... but also be willing to drop pointless arguments with trolls.

I have a very hard time with this one. Engaging in discussions and debates with readers is one of the great joys of blogging. It gives you a direct relationship with your readers that few other formats offer you as a writer. And more than once I've found myself clarifying my thinking or changing my mind based on conversations and arguments with commenters.

But I've also more than once let myself get sucked into stupid, pointless arguments with people who weren't worth arguing with; bigots, sloppy thinkers, people who were just trolling for a fight. It's hard to let stupidity and injustice go by without responding to it, and it's easy to fall prey to the "someone is wrong on the Internet" phenomenon. But sometimes you have to bite the bullet.

Here's the thing. Comment threads are part of the time commitment you make to your blog. But part of your time management involves deciding which threads are worth pursuing and which ones need to be dropped. I'm not a very good role model in this department, so this is sort of a case of "do as I say, not as I do"... but I'm working on it.

8. Have a theme -- but don't stick to it like glue.

This is probably less important than my other pieces of advice. But personally, I'm not a big fan of the "What Pat thinks about everything in the world" mish-mash sort of blog. Unless Pat is an astonishingly good writer, that is (or a friend or family member I just personally want to keep up with). I can come up with my own thoughts and feelings about everything in the world, thank you very much. I don't have much motivation to read someone else's random musings.

On the other hand, if a blog is too focused on just one topic -- just atheism, just sex, just politics -- that can get a little repetitive. So mix it up a little. Even largely single-topic blogs like Daylight Atheism and Friendly Atheist get into side topics: politics, pop culture, philosophy, life in general. Some blogs get away with a very single-minded focus -- Cute Overload, for instance, does great with "just photos and videos of cute animals" -- but in general, a little variety is very helpful.

The blogs I like best tend to focus on one or two main themes -- science and atheism, for instance, or sex and politics -- and explore them in depth. But they also stray into other topics near and dear to the blogger's heart, like sewing or cephalopods. (I think of my own blog as being primarily about atheism and sex, with a fair smattering of politics and occasional forays into whatever's on my mind that day.) A primary theme or two offers readers a hook; variations away from those themes keep both you and your readers from getting bored.

9. Be patient.

When I first started blogging, I was getting, I don't know, maybe 100 hits a day. Maybe less. I'm not sure, since I didn't figure out how to check my stats until embarrassingly late in my blogging career... but it was very slim, and for several months I felt like I was whistling into the wind. I got almost no comments, and the ones I got mostly came from my ICFF (Immediate Circle of Family and Friends).

So be patient. Keep plugging away, and give it time. If your blog is good, and you do a decent job of getting it into the blogosphere, people will come. Stick with it, and have fun.

I'm sure there's more I should be saying. Stuff about Technorati and Digg; stuff about using feeds; advice on giving your blog a snappy name (which I'm clearly not competent to give); pieces of netiquette that should be obvious but often aren't. But I'm going to take my own "Be brief" advice and leave it at that. If anyone else has anything to add, I'd be very interested to see it.

The Last Taboo: The Blowfish Blog

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog. It's on a phrase that's commonly used when talking about unconventional or marginalized sex: "the last taboo." The piece is titled, oddly enough, The Last Taboo, and here's the teaser:

You might have heard that homosexuality is the last taboo. Sadomasochism. Incest. Bestiality. Necrophilia. A very quick Google search on the phrase “the last taboo” adds scatology, pedophilia, sex among the elderly, and even virginity to the list (along with a wide assortment of non-sexual topics, including atheism, abortion, cannibalism, menstruation, death, consciousness, anti-Palestinianism, money, mental illness, and the discounting of business-class seats on airplanes).

Okay. Reality check number one: Not all of these things can be the last taboo, can they? At the very least, doesn’t one of them have to be the next- to- last taboo, and another one the next- to- the- next- to last, and so on? Unless every one of these taboos is miraculously falling at exactly the same time... in which case I suppose they could all be the last taboo. But that doesn’t seem very likely, does it?

Reality check number two: Does anyone actually believe that any of these sexual preferences and practices is the last taboo? Does anyone really think that the taboo against, say, sadomasochism is truly the last sexual taboo in our culture? That if the taboo against it fell and we completely and casually accepted SM, our society would then, for better or worse, be a sexual free- for- all, entirely devoid of any sexual taboos whatsoever?

Have any of the people using this phrase taken a look around them? At, you know, the world?

To read more about why the phrase "the last taboo" shows a gross misunderstanding of human sexuality, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Happy Blogday To Me... and an Exhortation to Writers About Blogging

Happy blogday to me!

I started blogging three years ago today. Loki H. Thor on a raft. I had no idea. What started as an attempt to publicize my writing career has turned into the centerpiece of it. It has totally taken over my life. Who knew? (You can look up that first post if you want to, but it's not very interesting -- it basically says, "Hi! I'm blogging!" My second one is a bit more interesting -- it's a review of Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow." Funny how certain themes of the blog have been there from the beginning...)

A few quick self- aggrandizing stats before I get on to the meat of this piece, since self- aggrandizing stats seem to be traditional with a blogday post. As of this writing: 553 total posts, including this one. 4,832 total comments. 613,626 total hits. Average traffic: right now, between 1000 and 1500 hits a day. Whoopie for me! And I have to give a huge, grateful shoutout to Susie Bright, who convinced me to blog in the first place. Susie, you were so right. I never should have doubted you.

Which brings me to the actual, substantive, non- self- aggrandizing point of this piece.

I want to talk to any writers out there who are reading this but who don't blog.

You have to blog.

Don't look at me that way. I get it. Really, I do. Yes, it's an enormous time-suck. Yes, you're giving away for free what you're trying to make a living at. Yes, it's not worth doing unless you're going to do it right -- and yes, doing it right is hard work. I felt exactly the same way, and made all the same arguments, when Susie first tried to convince me to blog. And I'm not going to lie to you. All of that is true.

But here's the thing. If you're a writer in the early 21st century, and you don't blog? It's like being a pop musician in the mid 20th century, and refusing to let your songs be played on the radio. You're denying yourself what is probably the single most powerful outlet currently available for publicizing your work.

Blogging gives you something that no other publishing medium gives you: a direct line to your readers, in which you can reach them directly and without any intermediary -- and in which they can reach you back. You don't have to deal with lousy editors who muck with your text without understanding your nuance (a mixed blessing, but a blessing); you don't have to deal with publishers with an insultingly narrow vision of what The People want to read.

You can say what you want, when you want to say it.

Opinions, memoirs, political commentary, fiction, movie reviews, philosophy, recipes, conspiracy rants -- anything. If you have archives of old work that you want to get more widely read, you can put it in your blog. If you have work that you like but never managed to get published, you can put it in your blog. If you want to say it, you can say it (assuming it's legal, of course). And if people are reading your blog, they'll read it.

Blogging does something else, too, something very important. Blogging gets you writing. You know how the single most important thing you can do to improve your writing is to just write, a lot? Blogging gets you writing. Every day, every week, three times a week, however often you do it: if you keep to any sort of semi-regular blogging schedule, you'll be writing regularly. And you'll be writing better.

Blogging did something for me that I absolutely didn't expect it to. Blogging turned me into a real writer. Blogging turned me from the kind of half-assed, semi-pro writer who does good work infrequently and erratically...into the kind of writer who writes almost every day, who actually wants to write, who makes writing a priority and makes sure she has time for it in her schedule, who resents the fact that she has to eat and sleep and shower because they're an annoying time-suck away from her beloved computer, who would rather write than do almost anything else. And all it took was doing it several times a week, for an appreciative audience that was able to to give me direct feedback.

It's a nice non- high- pressure format, too, one in which a certain degree of casualness, lack of perfect polish, and thinking out loud is expected and accepted. You don't need to limit your publishing to the works of genius you've spent months rewriting to a perfect gleam. A few hundred words on whatever you're thinking about that day is just ducky. It's like a journal, but with an audience. For someone like me, who's never seen the point of keeping a journal (what's the point of writing if nobody's going to read it?), blogging is a perfect balance between an exquisitely wrought essay or story, and a scratched- in- a- noteboook- to- keep- your- hand- in journal entry.

And it can, in fact, lead to actual paying work. Example: I'm currently getting paid to write for the Blowfish Blog -- a gig I probably never would have gotten if I hadn't been blogging on my own. Blogging gets your name and your work recognized in circles that they wouldn't have otherwise. If your blog gets enough traffic, you can even start to take ads if you like, and that brings in a little money. If you have books, you can advertise them on your blog, and hopefully you'll sell some. And, of course, bloggers sometimes get book deals. If you blog with that sole intention, you'll probably be disappointed, but it does happen.

But that's really not the point. Even if I didn't get paid a dime for blogging, I'd still do it.

The point is this: Blogging gets you writing. And blogging gets your writing read.

And that's why you're writing, isn't it?

Tomorrow: unsolicited advice on how to do it.

P.S. If you're worried because you're not a techie, don't be. Blogging software is specifically designed to make it easy for the layperson to do. You don't have to be a web designer or an IT genius to do it. You just have to not be afraid of a computer.

P.P.S. This applies to musicians and visual artists, too. If you're recording, or taking photos of your work, you should be blogging. You don't have to write if you don't like to -- music and art blogs are cool, too.

The Sameness of Imagination, The Astonishingness of Reality: Thoughts on Science and Religion

There's a really interesting new piece up on Pharyngula: it's gotten me thinking about science and religion in an interesting new way, and I wanted to link to it and talk about it a bit.

It's the piece titled A pleasant, smiling apologist is still lying to you. Now, I don't agree with everything he says here. For one thing, as is often the case with PZ, I think his tone is a bit more harsh than is really called for in the situation. And I don't think "lying" is the correct word to use when someone genuinely believes the mistaken idea they're passing on.

But a lot of the piece is good. Excellent, even. And one bit in particular made me think in a completely new and different way about religion and reality. This was the bit that jumped out at me:

One other word I must criticize in all these defenses of religion: imagination. I often hear that religion is all about using the imagination to see something beyond the literal and mundane, and imagination becomes a virtue in itself that is presented as something special to religion. It is not. It is also overrated. Imagination is essential, don't get me wrong; we need this kind of cognitive randomizer that pushes our thoughts beyond what we already know. However, one thing science has taught us is that our imagination is pathetic. The universe is more vast, more complex, and more surprising than anything our minds can conjure up. Imagination is not enough.

I hadn't thought about it this way before. But PZ is absolutely right. The things we've discovered about the world through science... they're mind-blowing. They completely eclipse anything our puny human imagination could have come up with on its own.

For just one example: Take atomic physics. Take the fact that everything around us, all the material world, is mostly empty space, a huge yawning gap between the nucleus of the atoms and the electrons whizzing around it. Everything -- not just air, but iron, wood, flesh, bone, the very Earth under our feet -- it's overwhelmingly empty space. This is an idea that we would never in our wildest imaginings have come up with just with our brains. We needed to take a close look at reality to even consider the possibility.

Right now I'm reading "The Canon," Natalie Angier's excellent book explaining the most important basic concepts of science to the layperson. And I'm in the bit about physics and atomic structure, so right now that's what's blowing my mind. But there are plenty of other examples.

Take biology. Take the fact that every living thing is directly related to every other living thing. We're all cousins: you, me, pandas, tangerines, slime molds, squid, cactus, algae, the bacteria that laid Ingrid up with a head cold a couple of weeks ago -- all of it. Every living thing shares a common ancestor. Every living thing has the same great- great- great- to- the- 10,000th grandmother. What a weird idea. Who would have thought of it if we hadn't found a mountain of evidence telling us that that's how it is?

Or take astronomy. Take the fact that we, living our boring little lives and paying our bills and watching The Simpsons, are doing all this while we're sitting on a round rock that's whizzing around a gigantic ball of nuclear fire at 90 miles a second -- a ball of fire that is itself whizzing around at 40,000 miles an hour in a spiral mass of billions of other nuclear fireballs. (In a universe, I might add, comprised of billions and billions of other masses of fireballs.) And we act as if this is normal. It is, of course. But it's also profoundly weird. There is no way we would have imagined it if we hadn't discovered that it was true.

I could go on and on. And on. Virtually every field of science has shown us things about the nature of the world we live in that completely surprised us, that took us aback, that made us completely rethink and re-imagine everything we thought we understood.

Now.

The visions of the world that the religious imagination has come up with?

Compared to the realities we've discovered about the world around us, they're kind of pathetic. In every religion I'm familiar with, God is (or the gods are) pretty much just like people, only more so. Stronger, wiser, nicer (in theory, anyway), more powerful, but still basically just this guy, you know? A character, with personality quirks, things that he wants, decisions that he makes, stuff that he does.

Even in the more modern, abstract conceptions of God, God is still an invisible collection of essentially human qualities: goodness, knowledge, the ability to make stuff happen. Sort of like Mary Poppins. Practically perfect in every way.

Ditto the afterlives. Heaven, Hell, the Celestial Kingdom, whatever: it all reads like a version of this life, with certain bits amplified or diminished for dramatic effect. It's like life, except you get to be invisible and have no body and never argue with anyone and walk around singing all day. (Singing with no body? It's just now occurring to me how nonsensical that is.) Or it's like life, except there are folks whose job it is to make you miserable forever -- and no, not just the annoying guy in the next cubicle over. It's not all that imaginative. It's just like life, only more so. It's not really anything new.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I'm not sure if I have a point. I think I just want to say this, something I've said before: Reality is more interesting than anything we could make up. And when religious believers critique scientists for being mundane, close-minded, unable to imagine anything beyond the puny reality of the physical world, then they need to shut the hell up. The reality of the physical world is wilder and weirder than anything in their religion, and science has come up with many more things, in the skies and on the earth, than they ever dreamt of in their philosophy.

What Do You Want, Anyway? An Atheist's Mission Statement

So what do I want, anyway?

What do I expect to get out of all this atheist blogging? (Apart from stress reduction, I mean.) What's my ultimate goal? When it comes to religion and/or the lack thereof, what kind of world do I want to see?

I think it's important for atheists to think about this. Atheist writers and activists especially. Otherwise, we're just arguing for the sake of arguing, a form of mental exercise done at the expense of annoying people. And the kind of world we decide we're trying to make is going to affect the kind of action we take about it.

I have a couple of different answers to this question. One is my ideal, perfect-world scenario, the Religious World According To Greta. The other is the world that, while not perfect, I would be pretty much entirely happy with. The world where, if it somehow magically came into being, I would probably quit blogging about atheism almost entirely and turn my focus back to sex and politics and food.

So let's take the Greta's Perfect World scenario first.

In my perfect world, I would like to see religion gradually disappear from the human mindset. "Gradually" meaning over the next, say, one or two hundred years.

I do think religion is a mistaken idea, and I do think it's an idea that does more harm than good -- if for no other reason than because it is a mistaken idea. I think it does harm, not just to atheists, but to believers themselves. And I think it does harm even in the absence of overt religious intolerance. I think it encourages gullibility, vulnerability to bad ideas and charlatans; I think it discourages critical thinking and the valuing of evidence; I think it supports people in prioritizing their personal beliefs and feelings over the reality of the world around them. I think it does more harm than good, and I think the world would, on the whole, be a better place without it. Not a perfect place, by any means -- I'm not deluded enough to think that the disappearance of religion would somehow eradicate all social ills -- but better.

But even in my most utopian fantasies, I can't imagine religion disappearing overnight, or even within my lifetime, without massive social upheaval creating tremendous suffering around the world. It's too central to too many people's lives. Hence the "one or two hundred years."

So yes, I would like to see religion eventually disappear. I would not, however, like to see this disappearance happen in any sort of coerced or enforced way. I would not, for instance, like to see laws passed against religious beliefs or practices. I don't even want to see social pressure exerted against religion or religious believers, except insofar as "arguments against the ideas" constitutes social pressure. I would like to see religious believers be completely free to practice their beliefs however they choose, as long as that practice doesn't unreasonably impinge on my life and the lives of everyone else around them.

That should all go without saying. But there are plenty of idiots in the world who think that any atheist who wants to see an end to religion must want that end to come at the barrel of a gun. So it seems like a good idea to spell it out. I don't want to see religion ended by force. I want to see it ended by -- insert barely-suppressed, self-deprecating guffaw here -- persuasion.

No, really.

I told you this was idealistic.

So let's move on to the more scaled-back, more pragmatic vision.

I would be perfectly happy to live in a world in which:

(a) religious believers respected other believers and their beliefs -- including atheists and our beliefs;

(b) religious believers understood that their beliefs were, in fact, beliefs and not facts, and didn't try to make laws and public policy based on them;

(c) people -- especially kids growing up -- understood that there were lots of different options when it came to religion... including the atheism option;

(d) religion didn't get the privileged, free-ride status it enjoys now, but instead was treated as simply another hypothesis about the world, one which had to defend itself in the marketplace of ideas just like any other idea.

If all that were true, I still wouldn't agree with religion. I'd still think it was mistaken. And I'd still probably debate it with people now and then. But I wouldn't be spending more than half of my precious writing time trying to argue against it. There are lots of mistaken ideas in the world. The urban legend debunking sites are full of them. I don't devote my blog to their eventual disappearance.

You wanna know the weird thing, though?

I actually think my first vision may be more plausible than the second.

I think it's actually a lot more likely that we'll someday see a world without religion, than a world in which religion is widespread but entirely tolerant and ecumenical.

Because, in my experience and observation, tolerant and ecumenical religion is the exception, not the rule.

Daniel Dennett talks about this a little bit in his book "Breaking the Spell." He argues that the essential baselessness of religion -- the fact that it's unsupported by solid evidence or logic, the fact that it's essentially a shared opinion rather than a body of knowledge -- actually makes people cling to it more tightly, defend it more vehemently, get more upset and angry when the ideas are questioned. And it makes people more likely to build elaborate cultural defense mechanisms around it: from the tacit understanding that questioning religion is ill-mannered, to the codification of religious beliefs and practices into harshly- enforced law.

You don't need to build an entire mental and emotional and cultural suit of armor around an obvious fact, after all. If strange people come from over the hill and insist that the sky is orange and that it rains Jell-O, you probably won't go to war with them. But people do go to war when the strange people from over the hill insist that God is named Allah instead of Jesus, or vice versa. The idea that the sky is orange is easy to dismiss. You can clearly see that it isn't. The idea that your whole concept of God might be mistaken... it's less easy to dismiss. And it's therefore, psychologically, much more important to defend.

When I look at the history of religion in the world -- and at religion in the world today -- it seems clear that the groovy, accepting, "we're all looking at the same God in our own way" form of progressive ecumenicalism is very much in the minority. Hostility to other beliefs -- and super- duper- hostility to no belief at all -- is much more common... so common that it seems to be, not a foundation of religion exactly, but one of its defining characteristics.

So while, on a practical, day-to-day political level I'm going to fight for tolerance and ecumenicalism -- creationism out of the public schools, evangelizing out of the military, public health policy not being written by fundamentalists, that sort of thing -- I'm also going to keep fighting against religion in general. I'm going to keep doing what I can to keep atheism in the public eye, to make sure that more and more people every day know about it and see it as a valid option... so that in a few generations, my ultimate Utopian ideal of a world without religion might someday, long after I'm dead, be realized.

Because I think that it's actually a less Utopian goal than my other one.

I Do -- And Why: The Blowfish Blog

Remember about a week ago, when the California Supreme Court same-sex ruling came out? I was all a-twitter with girlish glee and didn't know what to say, but said I'd say more later?

This is later.

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog. It's about why we want to get married -- not civil- unioned, not domestic- partnered, but married. It's about why we'd want that even if all the legal and financial and other practical questions were a moot point. And it's about what same-sex marriage in California will change for us... and what it won't. It's called I Do -- And Why, and here's the teaser:

But I want to talk about something else today. I don't want to talk about the legal and practical benefits of marriage. I don't want to talk about hospital visitation rights, child custody rights, inheritance rights, tax benefits, all that good stuff. That's all important, but it's also well-covered ground. I want to talk about something more intangible. I want to talk about why we're getting married... apart from all that.

To find out why, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

The Necessity of Humor: Battlestar Galactica

As insanely observant readers of this blog may have noticed, I've recently started watching "Battlestar Galactica." (I haven't seen any of this season yet -- I'm midway through Season 2 on the DVDs, for once I'm going to watch a TV series in order -- so please don't give anything away.) I like the show a lot so far. It's everything the critics and fans say it is: it's smart, imaginative, well-written, richly detailed, emotionally and morally complex.

But as much as I'm enjoying it, I can already tell that it's never going to be one of my all-time favorite TV shows. It's never going to be, say, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," or "The Simpsons," or "The Office." I'm not going to watch it again and again; I'm not going to read books on its philosophical/ sociological/ political perspective; I'm not going to watch every director's commentary, or indeed any of them. I'm not even 100% sure that I'm going to watch the rest of the series. I like it, I respect it... but it's lacking something that I find essential in a long- running narrative.

It's lacking humor.

The problem isn't that it's dark. Some of my favorite TV shows have been very dark indeed. "Buffy" is dark. "Six Feet Under" is dark. And while it's technically a comedy (and is in fact very funny), I think "The Office" is one of the darkest things that's ever been put on television. But all of these shows brought the funny as well: sometimes in the form of comic relief, sometimes woven into the darkness so closely the two were indistinguishable, but passionately, and skillfully, and in generous doses.

And to me, that's essential.

It's not just that humor makes a dark story bearable, offering relief and making it easier to watch. That's true; but other things offer this as well. (Sex, for instance... which "Battlestar Galactica" has in trumps.)

It's that humor is a central part of life.

Humor is one of the main pillars that supports us; one of the main nutrients that sustains us; one of the main threads running through our lives. Even in dark times. Heck, especially in dark times. The ability to laugh and make jokes in a sad, frightening, terrible time is crucial. It gives us strength. It gives us perspective. It reminds us of why the bad times are worth getting through. There are times in my life that I can't even begin to imagine having weathered without my sick, morbid, fucked-up sense of humor.

To spend literally years telling a sprawling, wide-ranging, ensemble-cast story without exploring humor is overlooking a fundamental reality of what makes us human. It's like overlooking love, or conflict, or fear, or friendship. It's not just a disservice to the audience. It's a disservice to the characters. Humor doesn't just make a dark story easier to watch. It makes a dark story ring more true.

I'm not saying that every narrative -- every novel, every film, every ballad, every graphic novel -- has to have humor. They don't. I've read/ seen/ heard some wonderful, completely satisfying ones that haven't. But a long-running television show is different. If your show is an hour-long drama, you have about twenty hours a year, and you have it over the course of (hopefully) several years. It's a unique art form, with a uniquely large scope. To spend that much time telling a story and still leave out the humor is like, I don't know, spending all day cooking Thanksgiving dinner and leaving out dessert. It can be a delicious dinner, but it still leaves you feeling like you aren't quite full... even if you ate for hours.

What's Your Story?

So what's your story?

Whenever I read about psychology or the structure of the brain and mind, this theme keeps coming up. Human beings seem to have a deeply-rooted need for narrative: a need to structure our experiences as stories. It seems to be hard-wired into the way our brains and minds work. (I remember once overhearing a very pompous filmmaker explaining to his crew, "I don't want to give my audience the bourgeois comfort of a narrative structure." As if narrative structure were a stuffy, outmoded invention of the Victorian middle class. I fell into gales of laughter and immediately told an artist friend about it, who went into an aw-shucks routine about, "Heck, naw, the missus and me don't need no narrative structure. Nope, the avant-garde was good enough for my Pappy, and it's darn well good enough fer me.")

Anyway. I've been thinking a lot about what my stories are. Because our stories are important. Our stories shape how we experience our lives. Certain narrative themes seem to come up over and over again in our lives -- different ones for different people, of course -- and those themes affect how we feel about the things that happen to us. It's commonly understood that the same event can be experienced by different people in radically different ways. And I don't mean that in a Rashomon way. I mean that the exact same event can be experienced as positive or negative; exciting or frightening; supportive or critical; affirming or alienating... depending on the stories we tell ourselves about them. And of course, our stories affect how we behave, the choices we make and the ways we respond to our experiences.

Or, as Joan Didion so famously and succinctly put it, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live."

So I've been thinking about my stories... and I've been getting curious about everyone else's.

One of my main stories is, "Plucky in the face of adversity." And it's not a bad story, as stories go. It sure beats, "Falling apart in the face of adversity," or, "Totally negative and pessimistic in the face of adversity." Its plusses are so obvious that I won't bother to enumerate them.

But it has its downsides as well. For one thing, if a central narrative theme of your life is, "Plucky in the face of adversity," it doesn't give you a lot to work with when there's no adversity and your life is going smoothly and well. "Plucky in the face of adversity" has an unfortunate tendency to turn into "Restless and bored and looking for a fight in the face of calm good luck." It can make you feel aimless and vaguely dissatisfied during peaceful stretches of your life, and can even give you a tendency to create adversity where none exists. And I have had a problem with this in my life. I've definitely created drama where no drama was called for; and I've definitely been drawn to people who created a lot of drama in their lives, just so I could experience it vicariously. It's a tendency I've had to pay careful, conscious attention to.

In fact, even though my life for several years now has been largely happy and stable with really not that much adversity, I think I'm still very much governed by this narrative. I've just transformed my definition of "adversity," to mean "creative challenges" rather than "pointless interpersonal drama." Trying to get a book contract; battling with editors; trying to write something interesting in my blog four or five times a week... this is the adversity that I'm plucky in the face of now.

Another narrative of mine is "Wise, emotionally intelligent woman with a unique and worthwhile perspective on life." Again, not a bad story: a bit cocky and full of itself, perhaps, but it's given me the self-confidence I've needed to pursue my writing. Any artistic career needs a fair amount of arrogance -- the arrogance of believing that anyone outside your immediate circle of family and friends would be even remotely interested in what you have to say. And again, as stories go, "Wise and emotionally intelligent" sure beats "Lost in her own little world" or "Never does anything right."

But again, this story has a downside. And not just the obvious one of occasional self-delusion, being prone to believing that you're being wise and perceptive when you're actually being an idiot. It's also a story that can easily turn into, "Person who gives a lot of unsolicited advice and likes to tell people how to run their life when they really just wanted a sympathetic ear." I have to watch this tendency very carefully, and I fall into it a whole lot more than I'd like.

And then, you have your standard, embarrassingly self-serving narratives, the source material for your most ridiculous fantasies, the stories that make you cringe when you catch yourself at them. "Nobody understands my unique genius." "I'm the only honest one -- everyone feels the way I do, if only they'd admit it." "Who is that striking, strangely compelling woman over there in the corner?" "They'll all be sorry someday, but then it'll be too late." But I think you get my point.

So what's your story? What are the narrative themes that shape your life? How do they work for you; how do they screw you up; how have they changed as your life has changed? One of my other stories is, "Curious and interested in the lives of others and the workings of the human mind" -- it makes a great cover story for "nosy" -- and I want to know how this works for people other than me.

To HTML OR Not to HTML? A Reader Poll

A number of people have mentioned this in recent comments, so I wanted to take a reader poll about it and test the waters.

As a number of you have noted, I don't have HTML enabled for my comments. This means people can't use italics, or boldface, or create their own live links, or do:

blockquotes.

There is, in fact, a reason for this. With a Typepad blog, you have a choice. You can let HTML be enabled, so people can do italics and live links and all... or you can have URLs that are posted in the comments automatically get converted to live links.

When I was first setting up the blog, I decided to go with the second option. It seemed more friendly to your average guy or gal who might not be up on HTML or know how to create live links. My general instinct in matter such as these is to be beginner-friendly, and I wanted people who weren't tech-savvy to be able to include links in their comments without having to learn HTML. And at the time, a lot of my blog readers weren't addicts of regular visitors to the blogosphere.

But I'm getting an increasing number of cranky complaints about this in my comments. The last time I did a reader poll on this, there was no clear consensus, so I decided to keep things the way they were since that's what people were used to. But that was almost a year ago: my blog traffic has tripled since then, and I have a lot of new readers that I didn't have back then. So I figured I should take another poll.

So what do you think? Is it more important to you to have HTML enabled in the comments here? Or is it more important to have URLs automatically converted to live, clickable links? I don't promise to go along with the vote -- this isn't a democracy -- but if there's a clear consensus, I'll probably go with it. So speak now, or forever hold your peace.

"A Different Way of Knowing": The Uses of Irrationality... and its Limitations

There's a trope I've noticed in debates about atheism, about skepticism, about science. And the trope goes something like this:

"Logic and reason isn't everything. Not everything in this world is rational. Not everything that we know in the world is known through logic and reason. Sometimes we have to use our intuition, and listen to our hearts. There are different ways of knowing than just reason and evidence."

The thing is?

I actually think there's a lot of truth to this.

And I still think it's a terrible argument to make against atheism, skepticism, and/or science.

Let me explain.

There are absolutely areas of life in which logic and reason don't apply. Or don't predominate, anyway. Love, of course, is a classic example. The classic example, probably. Nobody decides who to fall in love with by making a cool appraisal of the pros and cons. Nobody decides who to fall in love with, period. It's an emotional, irrational, impulsive, intuitive, largely unconscious act.

Personally, I think a lot of people would benefit from a little more rational, evidence- based thinking in their love lives. It might stop them from making the same damn dumb mistakes over and over again, for one thing. But ultimately, decisions about love are made with the heart, not the head. And I wouldn't want it any other way.

Or take art. The part of us that loves music, images, stories... it's not a logical part. Not entirely, anyway. A huge amount of it is personal, emotional, visceral. And it should be. Scientists and art critics and philosophers can analyze why different people like different things in art, and they'll come up with useful observations... but the actual experience of art isn't mostly analytical.

Sure, there are some commonly-accepted criteria that can be applied to art. Plus, the degree to which we appreciate art emotionally or rationally can depend on the art... as well as on the appreciator. And certainly our appreciation of art can be increased by a better understanding of its history or structure. But ultimately, art either moves you or it doesn't. And when it does, the experience of being moved is not a rational process. It's subjective.

And most artists will tell you that an essential part of the creative process is getting the rational part of their brain to shut up for a while. While the editing or modifying process often involves a critical, rational eye, the actual creation part of art comes largely from a non-verbal, non-linear, non-rational place. The experience of art is not primarily a rational one... for artist or for audience.

I can think of oodles more examples. Humor. Sexual desire. Friendship. Sentiment and nostalgia. Tastes in food. I think you get my drift, though. Many of the most central, most profound experiences of human life are things we experience emotionally, intuitively, irrationally.

But have you noticed a pattern to these examples?

They're all matters of opinion. They're all matters of subjective experience.

None of them is concerned with trying to understand what is true. Not just what is true for us, personally, but what is true in the external world. The world we all share, as opposed to the ones in our own heads and hearts.

And these questions -- the questions of what is true in the external world -- are where logic and evidence leap to the forefront.

This is why. We know -- as well as we know anything -- that the human mind can be fooled. It is wired, for very good evolutionary reasons, with some interesting distortions of reality. Among other things, it's wired to see what it expects to see; it's wired to see patterns even when none exist; it's wired to see intention even when none exists.

And intuition, especially, is a deeply imperfect form of perception and understanding. Yes, it can often be a powerful tool for making leaps and seeing possibilities we couldn't even have imagined before. But it can also be a powerful tool for showing us exactly what we expect to see, and telling us exactly what we want to hear -- regardless of whether what we expect or want are actually there to be seen and heard.

Now, for subjective questions, these imperfections aren't particularly important. If you think you're in love, then you are in love. If you think you like Radiohead, then you do like Radiohead. If you think broccoli tastes like fermented essence of evil, then it does. To you, anyway. With subjective questions like these, there's not really a difference between "what you think is true" and "what really is true." Or if there is, it's not a crucial one.

But when we're trying to figure out what's true in the real world -- not in the subjective world of our own feelings and experiences, but in the external world -- there is very often a difference between what we think is true and what is true. An important, measurable difference.

And if we want to understand what's true in the real world, we need to acknowledge, recognize, and correct for that difference. When we don't, it's disastrous. Think of all the people in history who "intuitively" knew that black people were mentally inferior to white people; who "intuitively" knew that mental illness was caused by demonic possession; etc., etc., etc. The human race's track record of trying to answer non- matter- of- opinion questions about what is and is not true in the external world by "listening to our hearts" is a pretty abysmal one.

So if we're trying to understand the external world, we need to be very, very careful to screen out bias and preconception as much as humanly possible. And the best way we have to do that is with logic, reason, and the rigorously careful gathering, examination, and analysis of the evidence.

In other words -- the scientific method.

Which -- with its double-blinding, careful control groups (including placebo controls when appropriate), transparent methodology, replicability, falsifiability, peer review, etc. etc. -- has specifically developed over the decades and centuries to do one thing: eliminate bias, preconception, and human error, as much as is humanly possible, in order to get the closest approximation of the truth that we can.

It's true that the history of science is full of stories of scientists coming up with important insights and breakthroughs in irrational ways: through dreams, sudden revelations, etc. Yes, irrational inspiration can be an important part of the scientific process. But it's an important first part. After all, the history of science is also full of scientists coming up with ideas through irrational inspiration that then turned out to be full of beans. (Nikola Tesla comes to mind.) You just don't read about them as much.

Inspiration gives scientists ideas, points them in new directions. But they then need to test those ideas and directions. And they don't do that intuitively. They do it using the scientific method: rationally, logically, and rigorously.

So what does all this have to do with atheism?

Suzanne

As promised a couple of weeks ago. But first, a shout-out to my old friend Max on this one, since it was really his idea.

Back in college, a bunch of us were hanging out, and I was playing "Suzanne" on the guitar (non-ironically, even -- was I ever so young?), and Max started ad-libbing this incredibly mean-spirited, very funny parody of it. I can't remember any of the words to it anymore, but the spirit has lived on in my brain ever since, and I finally stopped trying to remember his words and just came up with my own. (The last line of the chorus is actually Max's -- it's the only one of his I could remember.) I wrote the first verse and the chorus years ago; I wrote the final verse last month.

So here it is: my mean-spirited, hopefully funny song parody of "Suzanne." FYI, I'm skipping the second verse. Yes, I know it's the one about, "And Jesus was a sailor/When he walked upon the water," and it would seem ripe for my evil tongue/ pen/ laptop. But I think song parody is a dish best served in small portions, and two verses plus a chorus seems like oodles already. Enjoy!

Suzanne

Suzanne takes you down
To her place in the Village
You can listen to Bob Dylan
And that goddamn Ravi Shankar
And her Indian print bedspread
Catches dust and makes you sneezy
And she feeds you tea and oatcakes
That come all the way from Brooklyn
And she'll drive you to distraction
With her half-assed Eastern wisdom
And you think she's really batty
But she makes you really horny
And you know you'll get some off her

Chorus:
And you want to shake some sense into
That ditzy spaced-out brainpan
And you think she's really batty
But still you're very sexually attracted to her

Suzanne takes your hand
And she leads you to her bedroom
She is wearing tie-dye headbands
From this little shop in Chelsea
And her tea tastes just like seaweed
From the stinky New York Harbor
And she shows you all her pottery
From when she went to Hampshire
There are vases shaped like Buddha
There are bongs with little peace signs
She is asking if you like them
And you make your lie convincing
'Cuz you know you'll get some off her.

Other posts in this series:
Joe Hill
Super Geek

"Does (X) Count?" What Sex Is, And Why The Question Matters: The Blowfish Blog

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog. It's about the question of how we define sex... and why that question has serious, real-world consequences. It's titled, Does (X) Count?" What Sex Is, And Why The Question Matters, and here's the teaser:

It was a letter to Scarleteen, the “sex advice for teenagers” website. It’s a longish letter, and a longer response (both are well worth reading in their entirety), but the title will immediately tell you what’s going on and why I think it’s important.

The title:

“We’re abstinent, but we had anal sex and are scared to death.”

?

The story is almost exactly what you probably think it is. Two teenagers, who have decided to be abstinent until marriage, are playing an extended game of “everything but,” avoiding penis- in- vagina intercourse but otherwise engaging in activities that would make Larry Flynt blush. Including, as you may have guessed from the title of the letter, anal sex.

But because they’re not having what they consider Sex — namely, penis- in- vagina intercourse — they’re not taking responsibility for the fact that they’re in a sexual relationship. They’re not practicing safer sex, and the things they’re doing could easily result in the passing on of sexually transmitted diseases, and even pregnancy. (As the Scarleteen advisor points out, unprotected anal intercourse can result in pregnancy, since semen isn’t very good about staying put.)

To find out more about this notion of the One True Sex and how it screws up people's sex lives, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

They Said Yes!

They said yes!

The California Supreme Court said yes.

Ingrid and I can get married now. Legally. (Or we can in 30 days, when the ruling takes effect.)

I kind of don't know what to say about this. I'm still processing it. And it still could be overturned: it looks like there's going to be a ballot initiative in November to amend the state Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, and it could pass. And of course, all of this is going to affect the Presidential election, and I have no idea how that's going to play out. So part of me is freaking the fuck out.

But the other part of me is so thrilled I can't speak. We've been waiting for this for so long. And -- how shall I put this? -- we've been not waiting for this for so long. When I first came out (over 20 years ago now), same-sex marriage wasn't even on the table. It never even occurred to me that it would be an option.

I don't yet know what to say. I'm sure I'll have more to say in the coming days, weeks, and months. But I know I want to say this now:

Things change. Don't ever let anyone tell you that things don't change.

Sexual Perspective, Or, How Can You Eat That?

Please note: This piece discusses some aspects of my personal sex life -- not in a lot of detail, but it may be a bit too much information for family members and others who don't want to read about my sex life. This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

"Nobody in their right mind would want to do that. You'd have to be desperate/ damaged/ strung out on drugs to do that."

This argument gets used a lot by people who are against porn, prostitution, other kinds of sex work. And those of us who have actually been in sex work and not loathed it (or who know people who have) tend to counter simply by offering counter-examples: raising our hands, pointing to ourselves and each other, saying, "Me. Over here. Did sex work. Liked it (or didn’t hate it). Not a basket case. Case closed."

But I think there's a core assumption underlying the argument, one that makes it hard to argue against merely by offering boring old evidence. And it's an assumption that doesn't just apply to sex work. It's an assumption that gets applied to all kinds of sexual variation... and not with very happy results.

The assumption is this:

"Everyone must like -- and dislike -- the same sexual things I do."

"If other people do sexual things that I don't enjoy," the thinking goes, "they must not be enjoying it either. And there must be something dreadfully wrong with them for them to do sexual things that are so obviously not enjoyable. They must be troubled, crazy, under coercion."

(And let’s not forget the parallel notion: If other people don't enjoy things that I do enjoy, there must be something wrong with them as well. They must be repressed, uptight, out of touch with their bodies. The sex-positive world can fall prey to these assumptions, too. I certainly have. "Everyone is basically bisexual, if they would just be honest with themselves"... Loki in Heaven, was I ever really that young?)

I don't think this is always a conscious assumption. But I think it's a common one. And it's led to a lot of trouble: misunderstanding and conflict at best, outright hostility and oppression at worst. I think it’s at the core of the "women don't really like anal sex/ giving blowjobs/ getting spanked/ whatever, and if they do it it's because they've been brainwashed by the patriarchy" argument that's so deeply enriched the lives of so many sex-loving women. And more seriously, I think it was a major factor behind decades of putting homosexuals in psychiatric wards. "I find the idea of sucking another man's cock repulsive... therefore, any man who likes to suck another man's cock must have something horribly wrong with him."

It's a terrible argument. Stupid, illogical, harmful.

But I actually have more sympathy for it than you might imagine.

I think it's always hard to really, truly grasp that other people’s tastes are different from your own. Especially when it comes to strong, emotional, visceral experiences. Myself, I am utterly baffled by the fact that anyone on this earth would voluntarily eat broccoli. The stuff tastes like concentrated essence of vileness to me, and the thought of people voluntarily putting it in their mouths makes me recoil.

Food, music, sex: all of these are powerful, visceral, intensely personal, even overwhelming experiences. And it's very hard to step back from them and have perspective on how other people might feel about them. Our own feelings about them can be so intense, so all-encompassing, that it makes perspective difficult, even counter-intuitive.

But when it comes to food and music, we have years of experience to teach us perspective. People talk about their musical and culinary tastes loudly, proudly, in great detail and at great length. You often can't get people to shut up about it. We’re exposed to a wide variety of musical and culinary tastes almost every day of our lives.

So unless you're pathologically stubborn, you eventually learn perspective. You figure out that, as much as you may personally dislike broccoli or blue cheese, Wagner or Western Swing, people who eat it/ listen to it are not mentally deranged. (Or the reverse: that as much as you may personally enjoy these delights, people who don't like them are not pathologically cut off from the one true source of pleasure and meaning.) People still do sometimes make personal judgments about others based on their tastes in food and music; but those judgments don't usually result in people being sent to the county jail or the loony bin.

But when it comes to sex, most of us don't get that kind of training. People don't come back to work on Mondays and chat about how they tried spanking over the weekend, they way they'll chat about how they tried a new Moroccan restaurant or went to see a German funk band their brother told them about. They don't go to parties and share a funny story about the new buttplug they just bought, the way they'll tell a funny story about trying to make a salmon souffle for their in-laws or the weird harpist who opened for Radiohead. (Well, they sometimes do at my parties... but you know what I mean.) Most of us haven't been regaled with myriad and varied stories about exactly what kinds of sex other people like, and why exactly they like it.

It's better now than it once was, by a long shot. The amount of sexual information that's easily available today far surpasses anything I had when I was young. But most of us still don't get exposed to a widely varied range of sexual tastes... not the way we get exposed to a barrage of different tastes in music and food, simply as part of everyday life.

And I think that casual barrage is exactly what we need to break through the intensely personal, intensely visceral nature of our sensual experience and give us perspective on it. It's what we need to teach us that other people really and truly feel differently about sex than we do.

What's more, it's what we need to teach us this, not just with one or two specific examples, but as a general principle. People will often get it about one particular sexual variation, without getting it about sexual variation in general. I mean, plenty of straight people genuinely understand that gay people actually do enjoy their gay sex... but still have to start from scratch when it comes to SM or blowjobs or sex work.

Which brings me back to sex work, and the counter-examples, and the sex workers raising our hands all over the world and saying, "I'm actually pretty okay with this."

Because while offering "Don't tell me what I like! I do so like that!" counter-examples may not work in any particular argument over any particular sexual variation, I think that in the long run, it's exactly what we need to make these arguments eventually go away. I think if we want a world where people have perspective on their own sexual likes and dislikes, a world where we treat varied tastes in sex the way we treat varied tastes in music or food, we need to talk more about what we do and don’t like in bed. We need to give each other counter-examples, and plenty of 'em. We need to give each other a world where the basic fact of sexual variation is commonplace, familiar... and unsurprising.

Blog Carnivals!

Blog carnival roundup!

First, there's a nifty new blog carnival in town: Carnival of Sex and Sexuality #1, at Homo Academicus. Read it, link to it, send in your sex-related blog posts to the second edition. Let's keep this thing going!

Also:

Carnival of the Godless #91 at State of Protest.

Skeptic's Circle #86 at Skepbitch.

Carnival of the Liberals #64 at Sir Robin Rides Away. (BTW, the next Carnival of the Liberals has an -- optional -- theme of skepticism and critical thinking in American politics. Skeptical bloggers, be sure to get in on this one!)

Carnival of Feminists #58 at Be a Good Human.

And finally, always my favorite blog carnival: Humanist Symposium #19 at Letters from a Broad.

Happy reading, everybody!

The Harm Reduction Model of Life

Due to both chance and temperament, I have a lot of friends who work (or have worked) in public health. (Including, of course, my darling wife.) As a result, I hear a lot about the concept of harm reduction. And once I started learning about harm reduction, I found that it isn't just a useful model for public health and public policy. It's an unbelievably useful model for life in general.

It's a concept that I think a lot of people would be interested in. Humanists especially, but not just them. So I thought I'd take a moment and gas on about it for a bit.

Let's talk about public health for a moment first. For those who aren't familiar, here's the basic idea. When dealing with a public health problem, the harm reduction model says that you don't necessarily have to completely solve or eliminate the problem in order to make important improvements. It's a worthwhile goal to simply reduce the degree of the problem, reduce the harm done by the problem, and improve the quality of life for people experiencing the problem.

In fact, harm reduction proponents often don't see "problems" the way society as a whole typically does. Rather than making moral judgments about drugs or sex or whatever, the harm reduction model accepts these things as basic human behaviors that have been part of life for as long as we've been around. It doesn't see these things as problems per se, but as elements of human life that can sometimes cause problems. And rather than passing judgement on where people need to be in their lives before they can use or deserve help, it aims to "meet people where they are" -- whether that's regarding drug use, sex, or whatever -- and to give everyone who wants them the tools they need to reduce harm in their lives.

(It's essentially the opposite of a "zero tolerance" or "abstinence-based" model. If you're curious, the Harm Reduction Coalition has a more detailed explanation -- as it relates to drug use, which is where the concept originated, but the principles can be applied to many other public health and public policy issues.)

In other words, you don't have to make problems disappear. You just have to make them better. (And in some cases, trying to make problems disappear can actually do more harm than good.)

The classic example of harm reduction is needle exchange. Needle exchange programs are a response to the high rate of HIV transmission among injection drug users: they give clean needles to users in exchange for used ones, so users aren't sharing dirty needles. Now, a "zero tolerance" policy would say that illegal drugs are, well, illegal, and bad, harmful to the users and to society, and society can't condone their use in any way -- including giving clean needles to users.

Harm reduction, on the other hand, says that:

a) it's good to reduce HIV transmission in injection drug users, since that will reduce HIV transmission in the general population;

b) it's good to reduce HIV transmission in injection drug users, so that more of them can have healthy lives when and if they do get sober ("you can't get clean if you're dead" is a classic needle-exchange saying);

c) it's good to reduce HIV transmission in injection drug users, because they're, you know, human beings. Their lives have value. The fact that they're injection drug users doesn't change that. It is worth helping them stay alive and stay as healthy and happy as possible... as much as it is for anybody.

Another example is sex education. Zero tolerance says that underaged sex is an unequivocal evil that cannot be tolerated by society, and the only appropriate response is to try to stop it entirely. The harm reduction model says that, even if you don't love the fact that minors are having sex, you not loving it is not going to stop it from happening... and we therefore need to find the most effective ways to stop its harmful effects, such as teenage pregnancy and STIs. (Abstinence- only sex education is a zero- tolerance approach... and it's a classic example of zero-tolerance not only being ineffective but actually doing harm.)

Take a wild guess which model I support.

Okay. Enough with the public health. What do I mean by the harm reduction model of life in general?

What I mean is this: Even if you can't completely solve a problem or make it go away, it is still worthwhile to work on making it better. Sometimes better is enough.

Voting, I think, is a good example. And the coming Presidential election is an excellent one. We don't have to elect a perfect candidate, or even one we're wildly enthusiastic about. We just have to elect a President who's a whole lot better than the current one. It won't make things perfect... but it'll make things better.

And the harm reduction model can be applied to all sorts of political and social problems. Can you personally solve the global warming crisis? No -- but you can help reduce its effects (driving less, buying energy-efficient appliances, voting for candidates who support strong environmental policies, etc.). Can you personally stop the waste and poor health caused by industrialized food production? No -- but you can buy more of your food from local sources, and push for the same in your schools and restaurants. Can you personally eradicate racism, sexism, homophobia? No -- but you can try to be conscious of it in your own life, and speak out against it when you see it, and pay attention to it when you vote. Can you personally halt the spread of obscene American consumerism? No -- but you can cut back on the amount of pointless crap you buy. Etc., etc., etc.

And if enough people take enough of these steps, it'll make these problems better. It won't eliminate them, but it'll reduce their harmful effects. And it may even help change the culture that cultivates them. Especially if you apply the harm reduction model, not just in your personal life, but in political and cultural action.

But the harm reduction model doesn't just apply to politics and social change. It can be applied to almost any area of life.

Diet, for instance. I have long ago given up on trying to have a perfect diet, or to lose a significant amount of weight. Instead, I'm focusing on having a better diet, a good enough diet, a diet that most of the time consists of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat proteins with minimal animal products. I'm trying to have a diet that keeps me reasonably healthy and still lets me relax and enjoy life. And instead of trying to lose weight, I am instead trying to not gain weight... and to stay as healthy as I can at the weight that I am.

Ditto exercise. I don't need to get the ideal recommended amount of exercise in order to feel obvious improvements in my life and health. I just need to get more exercise than I'd been getting before I started working out.

Or take housecleaning. Savings and money management. Not reading enough. Watching too much TV. If there's an area of your life that you're not happy with, you don't necessarily need to completely re-structure your life so that you can perform the task in question to your complete satisfaction. You just need to moderately re-structure it, so you can do more of what you like and think is important, and less of what you don't.

So that's the idea.

And here's the thing I really like about the harm reduction model of life, the thing that transforms it from a helpful hint into a defining philosophy:

It lets you be both an optimist and a realist.

I hate the idea that optimism is somehow a form of delusion, and that pessimism and cynicism are somehow equivalent to realism. And I don't just hate it because I enjoy being an optimist. I hate it because I think it's bullshit. I think pessimism and cynicism are often just a weak-ass rationalization for being lazy or cowardly, irresponsible or selfish. Realism doesn't just mean being aware of problems and limitations and obstacles. It also means being aware of what can and cannot be done about problems and limitations and obstacles.

And that's where the harm reduction model of life comes in. It gives us room to be positive about life and hopeful about the future, without being deluded or willfully ignorant about limitations and harsh realities. It transforms the Sisyphian experiences of life, the rocks that get constantly pushed up the hill only to roll back down again: it keeps them from feeling frustrating and pointless, and instead lets us see them as positive accomplishments. It doesn't let us off the hook about doing what we can for ourselves and for others -- IMO, it does the exact opposite -- but it lets us feel okay about not doing it perfectly.

Realism doesn't give us an excuse for irresponsibility and inaction. It gives us the moral obligation to be responsible, and to take whatever action is possible. And the harm reduction model gives us a model for doing exactly that. It gives us a framework for dealing with problems that seem appalling, enormous, and fundamentally unsolvable... without succumbing to apathy, cynicism, or despair.

Now, the big downside of the harm reduction model of life is that it can easily become an excuse for doing a half-assed job. It can act as a justification for doing the least you can do; for taking only those actions that don't inconvenience you; for making token gestures towards personal improvement or social responsibility while still being fundamentally lazy and selfish. "Hey, I changed all my lightbulbs to fluorescents -- I don't have to get rid of my SUV!"

And believe me, I speak from personal experience here. I've spent fifteen minutes picking up the tornado of books scattered all over our living room and piling them into neat little piles, as a "half-assed harm- reduction" form of housecleaning. I've given twenty bucks to political causes or candidates as a "half-assed harm- reduction" form of political action, when I was too busy or lazy to write letters and make phone calls and go to demonstrations. And more seriously, I've used the fact that I recycle and use fluorescent lightbulbs as a "half-assed harm- reduction" rationalization for the fact that I don't really do that much about global warming, even though I think it's by far the single most pressing problem facing our generation.

But as my friend Laura Upstairs (one of my many friends in public health and public policy) pointed out, one of the whole points of the harm reduction model is that a half-assed job is often better than none. Piling the books into neat squares isn't a very good form of housekeeping... but it's better than leaving them lying around everywhere. Donating twenty bucks to candidates or causes isn't the most powerful form of political activism in the world... but it's better than taking no action at all. Using fluorescent lightbulbs isn't really a sufficient response to global warming... but it's a better response than not using them.

And in my experience at least, a half-assed job is often a step towards a more completely-assed job. It can get you started with good habits -- habits of thinking, as well as habits of action -- that can eventually get you doing more than you'd ever imagined.

Here's what I mean. Going to the gym once a week may not improve your health that much... but it can get you into the habit of paying attention to exercise and health, and can be a step on the way to eating better, and being more active in your everyday life, and eventually going to the gym two or three times a week. Recycling may not make a huge dent in our planet's diminishing resources... but it can get you into the habit of thinking about waste and conservation and what the planet can and can't sustain, and thus inspire you to drive less, and not buy as much disposable crap, and vote for funding for solar power and public transportation. Etc., etc., etc. Yes, a harm reduction approach to life can get you feeling complacent and smug when you're not actually doing very much... but it can also nudge you in the direction of doing more.

The harm reduction model isn't always appropriate. There are, for instance, times when perfectionism is exactly what you want. I don't want a brain surgeon who thinks, "Oh, we got most of the tumor, I'm sure that's good enough." I don't want an air traffic controller who thinks, "Well, one crash a week is better than five crashes a week." And when it comes to major public issues like global warming, it is well worth asking whether moderate harm-reduction steps are actually going to make a significant dent: whether they actually will reduce harm enough to keep disaster at bay, or are really just a way of making ourselves feel useful while we collectively walk off a cliff.

So the harm reduction model of life isn't a cure-all. But I've found it to be a singularly useful philosophy. It's given me a way to reconcile my native optimism with my native hard-assed realism, without sending me into a cognitive- dissonance headspin. It lets me be optimistic without being deluded; it lets me be realistic without being a buzz-kill. And it's given me a way to not feel overwhelmed by enormous, seemingly impossible tasks, both personal and political. It lets me do the small amount that I can do in this world, without feeling like it's pointless.

And that rocks.

(Thanks to Ingrid and to Laura Upstairs, for their help with the explanation of the public health stuff. If I made any mistakes, it's my fault, not theirs.)

Multiple Marriage and the Texas Polygamy Case: The Blowfish Blog

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog, about the Texas polygamy case. At first I didn't think I was going to write about it, since I didn't think I had anything original to say about it. (Pretty much what I had to say about it was, "Oh, my god, that is so awful.") But then someone asked me what I thought of the question of legalizing multiple marriage -- in general, as well as in light of the polygamy cults -- and I decided to write this piece. It's called, somewhat unimaginatively, Multiple Marriage and the Texas Polygamy Case, and here's the teaser:

One of the main objections to legalizing multiple marriage is that, in the world as it is today, multiple marriages tend to be abusive. Groovy polyamorous triads aren't the norm, the argument goes. The norm for multiple marriage, in this country and around the world, is coercive and abusive religious cults that effectively imprison women and children. And if we don't have laws against multiple marriage, these abusive cults will be legitimized, and there will no protection for their victims.

I’m not sure whether that's true or not. I don't know if anyone has ever done a good, careful study on the frequency of multiple relationships, either in this country or around the world, to see if the coerced cult variety really does outnumber the consensual free-adult variety. If there has been such a study, I haven't seen it.

But here's the point I want to make.

When the Texas polygamy compound got raided and arrests were made, nobody was charged with bigamy.

The charges so far have all been related to child abuse. And the case seems to be largely in the hands of Child Protective Services.

So how does the illegality of multiple marriage help the victims of these situations?

To read more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

The Big Cheese

My brother Rick, a.k.a. Preacher Jenkins (no, he's not a preacher -- it's a long story, if you get me and my brother drunk enough sometime we'll tell you the story, or at least make one up that's reasonably entertaining, and did we ever tell you about the time that...)

Where was I?

Oh, yes. My brother Rick, a.k.a. Preacher Jenkins, has gotten into filmmaking as a fairly serious hobby, and has finally put a couple of his films on YouTube. This is my favorite of his so far, The Big Cheese. Obviously I'm biased, but I think it's very cool in a non-linear sort of way.

Video after the jump. Or you can watch it full-sized on YouTube itself.

The Texas Dildo Massacre, Or, Reason Number 2,767 Why Gay Rights Matter To Everyone

The Federal court decision that inspired this post happened a couple of months ago, when I first wrote it. But the issues it addresses are very much current and pertinent... not to mention a rare bit of good sex news in this crappy decade. So I'm reprinting it anyway. This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

As you've probably heard, the Texas law banning the sale of sex toys has been overturned.

This is excellent news, for all the obvious reasons. Most obviously, Texans can now buy and sell sex toys. People can now open sex toy stores in Texas, run fuckerware parties in Texas, sell sex toys to Texans through the mail without fear of entering murky legal waters. Woo-hoo! Go, Texans! (Good articles about it in the Austin-American Statesman, and in Dispatches from the Culture Wars.)

But I want to talk about one of the less obvious reasons why this is astoundingly, excitingly, kick-ass good news.

(Please note: I'm not a legal expert, and I'm definitely not an expert on constitutional law. These are simply the opinions of a smart lay person who’s been paying attention to this issue for a long time, informed by the opinions of people who are legal experts.)

The primary reason for the Texas sex toy ruling -- the main precedent cited -- was the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas, which overturned sodomy laws and legalized gay sex across the country. Now, Lawrence was important for sexual civil rights for a whole lot of reasons. Most obviously, it meant that nobody in the United States could be considered a criminal simply for having gay sex. And that has huge implications for things like custody rights, housing rights, employment rights, etc. Before Lawrence, gay people could be -- and were -- denied all sorts of basic rights... because, technically, they were criminals. Lawrence upended all that, and it was hugely important for that reason alone.

But this latest case -- the Texas sex toy case, Reliable Consultants and PHE v. Texas -- makes it clear that Lawrence has even broader implications... for everyone. Gay, straight, everyone.

The Texas sex toy case makes it clear that the Lawrence v. Texas ruling established a constitutional right to sexual privacy in the United States.

And that, people, is HUGE.

Before the Texas sex toy case, we didn't have that. You might have had it in the particular state you lived in -- we’ve had it in California since 1975, when the consenting adults law got passed -- but United States citizens did not have any constitutionally guaranteed right to sexual privacy until February 12, 2008.

And we have it now. Yes, the Federal courts have now said that you have a constitutional right to use a vibrator or a dildo. But so much more than that: the Federal courts have now said... well, let me quote briefly from the decision.

Just as in Lawrence, the State here wants to use its laws to enforce a public moral code by restricting private intimate conduct. The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the State is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification for the statute after Lawrence. (Emphasis mine.)

The Lawrence case didn't just say that gay sex couldn't be criminalized. It said that people -- all people -- have the right to engage in any consensual intimate conduct in their home, free from government intrusion. It said that people's sex lives are not their neighbors' business, not society's business, and most emphatically not the government's business. It said that the fact that the State doesn't happen to like a particular kind of sex doesn't mean they have a right to ban it, or indeed to have any say in it at all.

This case says, "Yup. That's what Lawrence meant, all right."

And that has enormous implications. (Assuming it gets upheld, of course; the decision could be appealed to the Supreme Court, and I haven't read anything yet saying whether or not it will be.)

It has implications for sadomasochists. Fetishists. Swingers. Any other sexual minority you can think of. If you're any of those things... you now have a legal right to it, anywhere in the country. And that's pretty darned important for all those custody rights and housing rights and employment rights and whatnot that we were talking about. It may wind up having implications for porn laws; if we our right to sexual privacy means we can have vibrators, it should mean we have a right to dirty movies as well. (It should have implications for the legalization of sex work, too; but alas, the rulings in both Lawrence and this case made a point of saying that the rulings don't apply to prostitution. Mistakenly, in my opinion.)

So here's the lesson for today. Apart from just, "Hooray for sex toys!" and "Hooray for the right to sexual privacy!"

The lesson for today: Gay rights are human rights.

Gay rights are everyone's rights.

And straight people have a personal vested interest in fighting for gay rights.

This is a point that sex advice writer Dan Savage has made on several occasions. He's pointed out that the right-wing homophobes who want to stop things like same-sex marriage are the exact same right-wing sex-phobes who want to stop things like birth control and sex education and abortion. Gay sexual rights are often on the cutting edge of sexual liberation... and they're often the first on the chopping block when right-wingers try to turn back the clock.

So I want all the straight people reading this to say a big, heartfelt "Thank You" to the people in the gay rights movement who fought so hard for so many years to get the Lawrence verdict. They are the people who, last week, gave you the right to own a dildo or a vibrator in every state in the country.

And I want you to promise to treat the fight for gay rights as if it were the fight for your own.

Because it is.

BTW, does anyone know the current status of this case? Is it being appealed, or is it standing? I Googled it, but couldn't find anything except on the original decision.

*****

Addendum: Important correction to the legal effects of this ruling in Jon Berger's comment below.

Is Religious Faith Irrational?

At the end of yesterday's post, I posed the question, "Is religious faith irrational?"

Well, okay. I didn't so much pose it as answer it. "Yes," I said. I argued that religious faith is irrational, by definition, in a way that secular faith isn't. I argued that religious faith means maintaining one's faith in the face of any possible evidence that might arise to contradict it; in fact, that it means asserting ahead of time that no possible evidence could ever undermine your faith. In other words, it means asserting that your faith trumps reality. I said that religious faith answers the question, "What would convince you that your faith was mistaken?" with the answer, "Nothing -- I have faith in my god. That's what it means to have faith." (Thanks to Ebonmuse for this, for about the fiftieth time.)

And yes, I said: I think that's irrational. Secular faith (and the leaps thereof) often has instances of being irrational: but it isn't irrational by definition. I think religious faith is.

Now, there are many religious believers who would hotly dispute this. There are many believers who think religious faith is entirely rational, that it's based on evidence as much as anything else in life, that faith and reason co-exist nicely and even depend on one another. They write apologetics; come up with complex and elegant defenses for their beliefs; get into debates in atheist blogs. (There are also believers who embrace the irrational and even paradoxical nature of faith... but I'm not talking about them right now.)

But to the believers who insist that their faith is rational, I would ask them to consider this question, the question posed by Ebonmuse and cited at length in my previous post: What would convince you that your faith was mistaken? What conceivable evidence would make you change your mind and decide that God didn't exist after all? Again, if the answer is, "Nothing could change my mind, that's what it means to have faith" -- well, that pretty much proves my point. (If the answer is something other than "Nothing," don't just argue your case here -- be sure to tell Ebon about it. I'm sure he'd be interested to hear it.)

And I've noticed a pattern among religious believers defending the rationality of their faith. They enter into the debate full of logic and counter-arguments; but almost inevitably, they end up the debate by saying things like, "Well, that's just how I feel," or "I feel it in my heart, and that's enough for me."

I applaud these believers' desire to see their faith as rational. I think the desire to have your beliefs be rooted in reality -- or to not have them be preemptively defiant of it, at least -- is a good instinct, a noble and worthwhile yearning. But when it comes to religious faith, I just don't think it's happening. Again, while secular faith has instances of irrationality -- many of them, even -- it isn't irrational by its very nature. I think religious faith is.

But --

and this is very important --

I don't think religious believers are.

Not all of them, at any rate. Not by definition.

Here's the thing I think atheists need to remember. It is entirely possible to be an overall sane, rational, functional person, and nevertheless have one particular area of irrational belief. Or even more than one.

In fact, it's not just possible. It's damn near universal. To atheists, as well as to believers.

We've all held irrational beliefs, and held on to them irrationally for longer than we should have. Belief in lovers who didn't deserve it; belief in political ideologies that didn't hold up; belief in leaders or role models who let us down time and time again. Belief that all those months you spent perfecting your suntan would be worth it. Belief that taking LSD really helps your pool game. Belief that your mother died of cancer because she was angry about you leaving home. Belief that you can write 90% of your senior thesis the week before it's due. (This one turned out to be correct, but it was an extremely close call.) Belief that those bounced checks must have been your bank's fault. Belief that you can work just fine with the TV on. Belief that getting married would fix your fucked-up relationship, simply by deepening your commitment to it. Belief that you can argue people out of their religious beliefs, if you just make your arguments good enough. Belief that this will finally be the Cubs' year.

Okay, maybe I should use some examples that aren't from my own life. How about these: Belief that nobody will notice that you're totally wasted. Belief that your car can run for another ten miles when the gas gauge says "Empty." Belief that you can't get pregnant the first time. Belief that you'll never regret that Grateful Dead tattoo. Belief that you'll never regret taking physics instead of philosophy... or vice versa. Belief that a new outfit, a new haircut, a new car, will radically change your life. Belief that he/she will come back to you when they realize how much they miss you. Belief that if everyone smoked marijuana, there would be no more war.

Do any of these sound familiar? From your life, or from the lives of anyone you know? If not, I'm sure you can come up with some of your own, from your past, or maybe even from your present.

And none of these beliefs make us fundamentally irrational people. It is entirely possible to have certain irrational beliefs -- even significant beliefs, even stubbornly held ones -- and still be a basically rational person in most other areas of our lives. It's not just possible. It's universal. We all do it. In fact, hanging on to mistaken ideas once we've committed to them seems to be a basic part of how our minds work. And despite that, we're still generally rational people, able to process information and analyze it effectively and make appropriate decisions about how to act on it... most of the time.

It's not like people are either rational or not. It's not like rationality is an either/or quality, an On/Off switch that gets flipped one way in some people and the other in others. It's a spectrum, indeed several spectra, with some of us being less rational in some areas and more rational in others.

Look. I think religious leaps of faith are very different from secular ones, and I'm not going to pretend that I don't. I think religious faith is inherently irrational, and I'm not going to pretend that I don't. But the fact that religious believers hold one irrational belief that atheists don't hold doesn't make them fundamentally less-rational human beings than us. And we shouldn't pretend that it does.

What Would Convince You That You Were Wrong? The Difference Between Secular and Religious Faith

"You have your faith in your relationship. In your friends. In your talent. In yourself. How is that different from my faith in God?"

I want to talk about the difference between secular and religious faith.

I'm irritated by the argument that, because atheists don't have faith in God, we therefore don't have faith in anything. And at the same time, I'm irritated by the argument that, because atheists do have faith in things and can take leaps of faith, therefore an atheist's secular faith in love and whatnot isn't really any different from religious belief.

At the risk of sounding like I'm quibbling over language, I think secular faith and religious faith are very different animals. They're not entirely unrelated, but ultimately they're not the same thing at all. In fact, they're so different, I'm not sure they should even share the same word.

So let's take this one at a time. What is secular faith?

Let's use an example. I have faith in Ingrid. What does that mean? It means that I trust that she loves me; I trust that she'll act with my best interests at heart; I trust that she'll keep her promises. It means that I rely on her, and that I believe my reliance is justified. And it means that I don't need a 100% ironclad guarantee of these things. It means that I know what a ridiculous expectation that would be -- we can never have a 100% ironclad guarantee of anything -- and that I'm willing to trust her anyway. It means that I'm willing to take the evidence that I have, the evidence of her feelings and character that I have from her actions and words, and then take a leap of faith by trusting that they mean what they seem to mean.

Or let's use another, more complicated example. I have faith in democracy. That's a tricky one, as democracy has let me down time and time again. But I have faith in it. I have the conviction that, while far from a perfect political system, it's still the best one we have, offering the best hope we have for a better and more just life for everyone. And I have hope that, with commitment and hard work, its problems can be... not eliminated, probably, but mitigated.

And one more example before I move on with my point: I have faith in myself. Possibly the most complicated of all, as I've lived with myself for my entire life, and have therefore probably let myself down more than anyone or anything else that I've ever had faith in. (With the possible exception of some notable ex-lovers and the Democratic Party...) But I have confidence that, when I set my mind and my heart to it, I can accomplish the things in my life that are important to me: being a good partner, a good writer, a good worker, a good citizen, a good friend. And when I take on a big new task -- writing a book, moving to a new city, getting married -- I have confidence that, if I seriously commit to it and put all my energy and talent and intelligence into it, I'll be able to accomplish it.

So now we have some pertinent synonyms for "secular faith." Trust. Reliance. Confidence. Conviction. Hope.

Keep those synonyms in mind.

And religious faith is... what?

I don't agree with certain hard-line atheists who insist that religious faith is always blind faith; that it always means refusing to question or doubt; that it always means absolute obedience to the authorities and precepts of one's religion. Sure, it often means these things. Many religious and formerly- religious people have said so, in so many words. But I've also known believers who do question, do doubt, do think for themselves, do have their eyes open. For at least some believers, a faith that can't weather questioning is a weak-ass faith that isn't worth having. Faith in honest doubt, and all that.

So religious faith is... what?

In writing this, I didn't want to be a jerk and assume that I know better than believers do what faith means to them. I always hate it when theists assume they know what atheists think without actually bothering to check, and I don't want to commit that error myself.

But it was surprisingly difficult to find definitions of faith from organized religions. I spent many hours looking at websites of different religious organizations -- Islam, Judaism, Hindu, Bahai, and many Christian sects including Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist (American and Southern), UCC, and MCC. And I didn't find definitions of "faith" on any of these. (The Catholics were an exception; see below.) Lots of religions clearly state what it is they have faith in: but what exactly it means to have faith is either ignored, or it's just assumed that everybody knows. "Our faith is in (X, Y, Z)... and what that means is that those are the things we believe. Believing (X, Y, Z) is what it means to be in our faith."

That being said, here are a few definitions of religious faith that I did find.

"Divine faith, then, is that form of knowledge which is derived from Divine authority, and which consequently begets absolute certitude in the mind of the recipient." (Catholic Encyclopedia, www.newadvent.org)

"...since faith is supernatural assent to Divine truths upon Divine authority, the ultimate or remote rule of faith must be the truthfulness of God in revealing Himself." (catholic.org)

"Faith therefore is to believe that which you do not see, truth is to see what you have believed." (St. Augustine")

"'Faith' involves a growing recognition of who Jesus is... It is much more like an intuitive perception -- a kind of 'sixth sense' -- about this person Jesus: an inner prompting which compels us to go after him, to engage with his words and character, to 'relate' to him... But 'faith' is also not just about the intuition to seek. 'Faith' consists in taking Jesus at his word. This story illustrates clearly that 'faith' is characterised by a willingness to grasp what is being offered in the encounter with Jesus... 'Faith' in this story is not primarily some settled and serene conclusion reached at the end of a chain of philosophical reasoning. No, faith is rather the readiness and eagerness to receive what is offered to us in Jesus Christ. It is the hand that grasps the gift of God in Jesus and makes it our own. This is biblical faith." (Revd Dr Paul Weston, ely.anglican.org; emphasis mine)

"Assent to the truth is of the essence of faith, and the ultimate ground on which our assent to any revealed truth rests is the veracity of God." (Christiananswers.com)

"The dictionary definition of faith is, 'the theological virtue defined as secure belief in God and a trusting acceptance of God's will.' For a Christian, this definition is not just words on a page it is a way of life. Faith is acceptance of what we cannot see but feel deep within our hearts. Faith is a belief that one-day we will stand before our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ." (Allaboutreligion.org; emphasis mine.)

"Biblical faith, however, is specific and unique. It describes the person who chooses to believe, trust, and obey God. This principle is vital -- the object of faith determines its value. Thus, it is very important that what we believe, what we have faith in, is really the truth!" (Herbert E. Douglass, The Faith of Jesus: Saying Yes to God's Love)

"Faith means an individual's personal, existential connection with the reality and power of God. Faith is not a 'thing' that is possessed or an 'idea' that is pondered, but rather a relationship that infuses divine power and creates an attitude and a vision for living and acting." (Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, Fire of Mercy, Heart of the Word: Meditations on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew)

"Faith is not a power or faculty in itself which “moves” or “compels” God. It is an attitude of confidence in God Himself. It always points to the One in whom it is placed." (inchristalone.org)

"Faith, then, is like the soul of an experience. It is an inner acknowledgment of the relationship between God and man." (John Powell, A Reason to Live! A Reason to Die)

"Faith saves our souls alive by giving us a universe of the taken-for-granted." (Rose Wilder Lane, The Ghost in the Little House)

"Reason is an action of the mind; knowledge is a possession of the mind; but faith is an attitude of the person. It means you are prepared to stake yourself on something being so." (Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1961–74)

"Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." (Hebrews 11:1)

So let's sum these up, and make it as simple as we can without being simplistic.

Religious faith means believing in God. (Or gods, or the World-Soul, or the immortal spirit, or whatever. For the sake of brevity, let's say God for now.)

And it means believing in God no matter what. It means an unshakeable belief in God. It doesn't necessarily mean an unquestioning belief in God -- again, many believers do ask questions, and hard questions at that -- but it means a belief in God that survives those questions, and any questions. It means having belief in God, not as a hypothesis that so far has stood up to the evidence but might not always do so, but as an axiom. A presupposition.

Now, it isn't the case that religious faith always means faith without evidence. Some of the more fundamentalist religions actually say that evidence is an important part of their faith. But the things they consider "evidence" -- namely, the Bible, and its supposed inerrancy -- are themselves objects of faith. Despite the Bible's historical and scientific errors, its contradictions, its moral atrocities, etc., the belief in its inerrancy is itself, for these believers, an unshakable axiom.

Here's a test that I've found to be extremely useful. Central to my whole thesis, in fact. In Ebonmuse's excellent Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists, he makes this observation: "Ask any believer what would convince him he was mistaken and persuade him to leave his religion and become an atheist, and if you get a response, it will almost invariably be, 'Nothing -- I have faith in my god.'" He then goes on to offer several examples of the types of evidence that he, as an atheist, would accept as proof that a given religion is true.

But only two people have taken up Ebonmuse on his challenge, stating the evidence that would convince them that their religious faith was incorrect. And both replies consisted of either physical and/or logical impossibilities (things like, "Proof that all miracle claims are false," or "Falsifying the resurrection of Christ")... or irrelevancies, non-sequiturs (things like, "If it could be demonstrated conclusively that I was deluded in thinking that life has meaning, I would deconvert." As if the fact that people experience meaning proves that this meaning was planted in us by God... and as if creating our own meaning was the same as being deluded.)

Only two responses to the challenge, "What would convince you that your faith is mistaken?" And both those responses are strikingly unresponsive.

Now. In contrast. Let's return for a moment to secular faith. And let's offer one of the examples I mentioned before: my faith in Ingrid.

Is there anything that could convince me that my faith in Ingrid is mistaken?

Sure. Yes. Absolutely.

She could murder all my relatives. She could set our house on fire, purely for the thrill of watching it burn. She could clear out our joint bank account and run off to Brazil with Keith Olberman. She could be revealed to be a Russian spy (or a Cylon agent), who's pretended to be in love with me all these years simply to gain information. She could shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

None of these things is logically impossible, or physically impossible. (Well, except the one about being a Cylon.) They're not very likely, of course... but they could happen. And any of them would convince me that my faith in her was mistaken.

So my faith in Ingrid isn't irrational. It's reasonable. It's based on evidence -- the evidence of her past behavior. It's true that I take a leap of faith with her every day: I can't be 100% certain that she has never done any of these things and never will. And more to the point, I take leaps of faith with her every day that are both smaller than these and more serious. I have faith that she puts the right amount of money into our joint bank account; that the medical advice she gives me is as unbiased as she can make it; that she really is going to dance practice every Tuesday instead of seeing a lover she hasn't told me about. These are all leaps of faith... but they're leaps of faith that could conceivably be overturned by evidence.

And that doesn't make them weaker, or less valuable. Quite the contrary. It just makes them rational. It makes them grounded in reality.

Let's look at those secular synonyms for "faith" again. Trust. Reliance. Confidence. Conviction. Hope. Those are the things that secular faith means. They mean a willingness to move forward in the absence of an ironclad guarantee. A willingness to hang onto the big picture in the face of small failures and setbacks. A willingness to persevere during difficult times.

But not one of these synonyms for secular faith implies a willingness to maintain that faith in contradiction of any possible evidence that might arise. Even when people's secular faith leans towards the irrational -- faith in lovers who repeatedly cheat, faith in leaders who repeatedly let us down -- it still could theoretically be contradicted by evidence. Yes, some people maintain their faiths in the face of ridiculously obvious evidence to the contrary. But I think there are very few, if any, people whose secular faith in their lovers and leaders, their plans and ideologies, could not possibly be shaken by any imaginable evidence whatsoever.

Even if there are some people like that... how shall I put this? That kind of unshakability isn't inherent to the very nature of secular faith. It isn't a necessary and central part of the definition. Even if there are people whose faith in their cheating lovers could never be shaken even if they caught those lovers actually having wild naked sex with another person... I don't think anyone thinks that that's what it means, by definition, to have faith in your lover. I don't think anyone thinks that giving up on your faith in your lover's monogamy when you see them screw someone else somehow means that you didn't really have faith in the first place... or that your faith wasn't strong enough. (An argument that does get aimed at atheists who once had religious faith.)

In fact, when someone hangs onto a secular faith in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we stop calling it "faith" at all, and start calling it less complimentary words. Words like "pigheadedness" or "blindness," "willful ignorance" or "delusion." (Our current President is a prime example.)

And that, I think, is the difference between secular and religious faith. That is why my faith in Ingrid, in democracy, in myself, are fundamentally different from a theist's faith in God. I have faith in Ingrid... but it's not a central defining feature of that faith that nothing could ever shake it, even in theory. I don't answer the question, "What would convince you that your faith in Ingrid is mistaken?" by saying, "Nothing. Nothing could convince me that I was mistaken. That's what it means to have faith."

We all have to make leaps of faith. We can never have all the relevant information when we make a decision; we can never have a 100% ironclad guarantee that our beliefs and actions will be right. So it's not irrational to have secular faith; it's a calculated risk (unconsciously calculated much of the time, to be sure), necessary to get on with life in the face of uncertainty.

What's irrational is to maintain one's faith in the face of any possible evidence that might arise. What's irrational is to assert ahead of time that no possible evidence could ever shake your faith; to assert, essentially, that your faith trumps reality. And what's profoundly irrational is to insist that doing these things is a virtue, an admirable trait that makes you a good and noble person.

Which leads us to a somewhat explosive question: Is religious faith irrational?

And that's the subject of tomorrow's sermon.

(Many thanks to Ebonmuse of Daylight Atheism for his help compiling the "definitions of faith" list.)

The Joy Of Theoretical Non-Monogamy: The Blowfish Blog

Family members and others who don't want to read about my personal sex life, please note: This piece, and the piece it links to, talks about my personal sex life a certain amount. If you don't want to read that stuff, please don't read this piece.

I have a new piece up on the Blowfish Blog. It's about why non-monogamy is important to me and why I think it can be an asset in a relationship... even when, in any practical sense, it's largely theoretical. It's called The Joy Of Theoretical Non-Monogamy, and here's the teaser:

This is probably the single most important lesson that non-monogamy taught me. When you're monogamous, every single person you're even moderately attracted to seems like Shangri-La, a lost city of infinite erotic promise, with genitals made of divine light and chocolate ice cream that would transform your life if only you could have a taste. (It did for me, anyway.) The allure of the forbidden, and all that.

But when you're non-monogamous, you remember that you don't actually want to go to bed with every attractive person who crosses your path. Some attractive people become much less attractive on closer acquaintance. Some attractive people are crazy; some attractive people are dull; some attractive people have appalling political opinions. And some attractive people you just don't connect with. Especially if you have a busy, reasonably fulfilling life, the reality of non-monogamy may well turn out to be that most people who you're passingly attracted to are not, in fact, people you actually want to fuck. They may be perfectly lovely, but they’re just not worth the effort.

To find out more about how non-monogamy can actually make Other People less of an issue in a relationships instead of more, read the rest of the piece. Enjoy!

Onward Christian Soldiers: Theocracy and the U.S. Military

This one scares the bejeezus out of me.

A lot of atheist blogs have had this story. For some time now, actually, But the New York Times has finally covered the story, which seems like a good excuse for me to talk about it.

The Times headline sums it up pretty darned well:

Soldier Sues Army, Saying His Atheism Led to Threats

And here's a few pertinent quotes before I get into my analysis:

When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.

But minutes into the talk, the officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, began to berate Specialist Hall and another soldier about atheism, Specialist Hall wrote in a sworn statement. "People like you are not holding up the Constitution and are going against what the founding fathers, who were Christians, wanted for America!" Major Welborn said, according to the statement.

Major Welborn told the soldiers he might bar them from re-enlistment and bring charges against them, according to the statement.

And:

Perhaps the most high-profile incident involved seven officers, including four generals, who appeared, in uniform and in violation of military regulations, in a 2006 fund-raising video for the Christian Embassy, an evangelical Bible study group.

And:

Specialist Hall began a chapter of the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers at Camp Speicher, near Tikrit, to support others like him.

At the July meeting, Major Welborn told the soldiers they had disgraced those who had died for the Constitution, Specialist Hall said. When he finished, Major Welborn said, according to the statement: "I love you guys; I just want the best for you. One day you will see the truth and know what I mean."

And:

Complaints include prayers "in Jesus' name" at mandatory functions, which violates military regulations, and officers proselytizing subordinates to be "born again." After getting the complainants’ unit and command information, Mr. Weinstein said, he calls his contacts in the military to try to correct the situation.

"Religion is inextricably intertwined with their jobs," Mr. Weinstein said. "You're promoted by who you pray with."

Okay. Do we have the picture now, everybody? Read the whole story if you don't. And this isn't the first time I've seen this story: plenty of atheist blogs have been carrying it for a while, along with many others like it. (More info -- not just on this case, but on an appalling number of similar ones -- at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.)

And here's why this scares the daylights out of me. More than just about any instance of creeping theocracy in our country. More, even, than creationism and other forms of religious fundamentalism being taught in our public, taxpayer-funded schools.

This is the Army.

This is the branch of our government with the big rifles.

And increasingly, they seem to be placing their allegiance to their religion over their allegiance to the country and the Constitution.

There's a story that Ed Brayton (who's been covering this story a lot) had over at Dispatches from the Culture Wars. The whole story is excellent, but here's the truly terrifying part:

One individual, posting under the name "Hidog," suggested Hall put on an orange vest and carry a sign "Bong hits 4 Allah" through the streets of Iraq, "because apparently, your Bill of Rights trump your CO's (commanding officer's) orders."

As Ed pointed out, "Well yes, the bill of rights does trump the orders of a commanding officer when those orders violate the bill of rights."

And it scares the merciful crap out of me to think that the Army is increasingly full of people -- not just mooks with no power, but officers -- who don't understand that. It terrifies me to think of an Army populated by both officers and enlisted men whose hearts -- and guns -- belong, not to the citizens of this country who employ them, but to Jesus.

And it terrifies me to realize these are not isolated incidents. There's so much more to this story that I haven't gotten into, that I don't have time to get into without this turning into an unreadably long screed. It is becoming increasingly clear that this is the dominant culture of the current United States Army.

With support from the Pentagon.

Because that, people, means that we really are living in a theocracy. Right now. The armed enforcers of our Federal government are the defenders, not of our country, not of our Constitution, but of their God and their faith.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Okay. Perhaps I'm being a little panicky, a little overdramatic. The good news is that we're not overtly a theocracy. Yet. When caught in these shenanigans, the perpetrators still have to shimmy and sidestep, deny that it happened or hastily issue regulations to halt the more grotesquely blatant examples of it. And if the Supreme Court hasn't become completely craven, hopefully they'll be spanking the Pentagon long and hard over this. (Military fetishists, take note.)

And the good news is that the story finally got out of the atheist blogosphere and into the New York Times. (CNN has the story, too.)

But this is not a few isolated incidents. This is not a few bad apples. This is, as Mikey Weinsein of the MRFF called it, "the intentional dismantling of the Constitutionally mandated wall separating church and state by some of the highest ranking officials in the Bush Administration and the U.S. military."

The intentional dismantling of the wall separating church and state. By the armed enforcers of the Federal government. By the branch of the Federal government that has the big rifles.

What is that but theocracy?

(P.S. I'm not even going to get into the fact that these are the people who are enforcing our foreign policy overseas, in parts of the world that are primarily and quite passionately not Christian. Except to say: Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. What a colossally, appallingly, mind-twistingly bad idea that is.)

This has been all over the atheosphere; but Susie Bright is the one who sent it to me. So thanks, Susie.

Healthy! Plus Blog Carnivals

Some of you very kindly have been asking after my health in the last few weeks. I'm pleased to let you know that, as of today, I am declaring myself officially recovered from this damn illness.

I've been tentatively going back to the gym for a couple of weeks, doing very short, gentle little strolls on the treadmill, gradually building up to get my strength and stamina back without triggering a respiratory freakout. But yesterday, for the first time since I got sick, I was able to do a complete workout, treadmill and weights both, for a full session. With happy lungs all the way. Yay, happy lungs! Just thought y'all might like to know.

And now, blog carnivals!

Feminist Carnival of Sexual Freedom and Autonomy #2 at Labyrinth Walk.

Skeptic's Circle #84 at Archeoporn.

Carnival of the Godless #90 at No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Carnival of the Liberals #63 at Vagabond Scholar.

Carnival of Feminists #58 at Be a Good Human.