Misanthropic Californian

Lately I’ve been seeing a good amount of stories about what amounts to women’s reproductive rights. More often than not reading about this kind of thing gets me at least a little irritated. However, I’m of the opinion that my opinions on the matter, like those of people of the male persuasion in general, shouldn’t count for much here. If I were a woman, I might go beyond irritation and be sorely tempted to start writing hatemail to, say, the guys saying that a woman shouldn’t be able to get an abortion even if she’s been raped. So, while I think anyone reading this should be listening to the opinions of women instead, I’ll write a bit more anyway.

I wouldn’t call an abortion a “good” thing by any means, but it’s asking an awful lot of a woman to tell her to take an unwanted pregnancy to term. Nine months is a long time, and from what I remember of my mother being pregnant with my youngest sister, a big chunk of that 2/3 of a year is hell. And there are considerable after-effects even after the baby is born to boot. Needless to say I think no one should be so stupid as to think of abortions as a form of birth control — I figure women should have the choice, but if they’re smart they’ll consider it a last resort — but the idea that the child’s life begins at conception is a bit much to swallow.

The thing that really gets my goat (yeah, I used it) is the whole thing about pharmacists — and doctors — refusing to provide certain kinds of medication or treatment on “religious” grounds. As others have pointed out in Reddit’s comments multiple times, if your religion is going to interfere with your line of work, then you shouldn’t be in that line of work. If you can’t handle the idea of women having access to birth control or the morning after pill, don’t become a doctor, or if you do, become say a pediatrician, podiatrist, surgeon, endocrinologist, or any of the zillions of specialties that aren’t gynecology and don’t involve being put into that kind of situation. Instances of this kind of thing are fortunately pretty rare from what I’ve heard, but a doctor who refuses to prescribe the morning-after pill to a rape victim has, for that moment at least, failed as a doctor in my opinion. Pharmacists are even worse since they’re specifically not supposed to have that kind of oversight. They get to double-check prescriptions in case, say, the doctor accidentally wrote the wrong number of zeroes, but anything more than that is overstepping their authority. All of this is doubly true when it takes place in a small town, where refusing treatment can mean that you’re in effect not only telling the patient that you’re putting your religion ahead of their health and free will, but can mean forcing them to drive 3+ hours to get any kind of alternative.

It gets twice as idiotic when doctors use their authority to find ways to prevent people from adopting. One woman went in for what amounted to a routine physical in order to be certified to adopt a child. When it turned out that she was single, the doctor refused to sign the paper. Never mind that she was indeed physically sound in all the ways the adoption people wanted, as would ultimately be proven when she went to another less bigoted doctor. As I’ve said before, it may well be that having a mother and father is the best route to a healthy child, but these days kids can and often do have much worse than a loving single parent or a lesbian couple. This doesn’t even have a basis in religion as far as I can tell; it appears to be just a mixture of 1950s Leave It To Beaver ideals of family life backed up with a smattering of pop psychology. Not that discriminating against someone on the basis of your own religion is okay.

Ultimately, a lot of this seems to stem from the Christian notion that sex outside of wedlock is sinful. People want sinners to face consequences for their actions (as though being tortured in hell forever after death would somehow not be enough), even when we have the means to remove those consequences, or when the sin never had any tangible consequences to begin with. All of this ignores the basic fact that human biology, like that of animals, doesn’t line up with anyone’s religious ideals. Even in the animal kingdom, where it would seem to serve no purpose, there are instances of recreational sex (dolphins), and homosexual activity (too many to count). The Bush administration was very, very quiet about the study showing that the abstinance education programs they were so proud of had zero impact on whether teens were having sex and whether or not they did so with protection. To paraphrase a stand-up comedian whose name I can’t remember, people view contraception as a license to have sex, but if people are going to be driving anyway I’d much rather they did so with a license.

How much of this is sexism, religious dogma, or legitimate concern for human life is hard to say. As usual, it’s a complex question for which people are demanding simple answers. Personally, I think that a living breathing woman should get priority over a collection of cells that could become a human being some day, but my opinion shouldn’t count for all that much. If a bunch of women went around saying that men must or shouldn’t get vasectomies, I’m betting men would be every bit as offended, but that isn’t going to happen.

Finally, here’s a thought (from someone else): Why aren’t the people who bomb abortion clinics called terrorists? As far as I know they fit the bill in every way possible. They’re thankfully far fewer in number than the Islamic extremists we hear so much about in the news, but the fact remains they’re using cowardly methods to murder people on the basis of ideology.

This morning BoingBoing posted this, a fun game called “Hitler or Fallwell,” where you look at quotes and try to figure out which of these two men said them. I don’t even know what to make of the guy, because he was just that out there. He was like a culmination of all of the worst kinds of bigotry and hate ever perpetrated in the name of American Christianity. The Wikiquote page on him has plenty of icky quotes.

Also, yesterday at Borders I made the mistake of looking at the new releases section (a mistake in that there are lots of political books mixed in with the rest), and I saw a book called “Freedmnomics.” The book presents itself as a rebuttal to Freakanomics. I thought “fair enough,” but then the bullet points inside the book’s jacket were ALL standard Republican talking points, except for “Why the controversial assertions made in the trendy book Freakonomics are almost entirely wrong.” Lott’s main specialty has been putting together research (which many, including the authors of Freakonomics have questioned) that indicates that higher gun ownership leads to less crime. (Though according to this blogger, Freakonomics’ citations of such aren’t quite right). The fact that Freedomnomics came out after his lawsuit against Levitt makes it even more suspect. The real problem, however, is that it’s part of a huge genre of books that are written to be read only by people who are firmly at one side or the other of the political spectrum. I know these books make money, so the problem is not so much the books themselves as the cultural factors that allow them to exist, but either way it’s a problem, and the profitability of publishing these books leads to more and more of them coming out.

This blog post, which includes a clip from 20/20 about a girl who was ostracized, harassed, and falsely accused of all sorts of things just for publicly being an atheist, helped me articulate something I’ve been trying to put into words for a while now.

A comment by shalimar says “I, for one, do not know how atheists are not sad, depressed horrible people.” This comes back to what I mentioned before about how the idea that some Christians can’t conceive of morality without religion scares the hell out of me.

The second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative says: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” Human morality is based on the idea that human beings have an inherent value, and as a human being I have no problem agreeing with that statement. If enough people act this way, everyone benefits. This principle exists independent of god, and works from one god to the next. (Except for the ones with which it doesn’t work at all, but those are best avoided).

In Buddhism, the Eightfold Path includes “Right Action” and “Right Intention.” In the Buddhist view, virtuous behavior is a means to becoming a better person — part of the path of self-refinement that leads to enlightenment and cessation of suffering. (Buddhism has a specific meaning for “suffering,” which is a very rough translation of a term from Pali). However, the Buddha was clear that it wasn’t enough to merely act in a moral fashion. Being good just because it would provide you with some reward in your next reincarnation (he was also critical of the Hindu notion of reincarnation, but didn’t discard reincarnation outright) is not enough.

So, my views on morality in the absence of divinity:

1. Moral behavior is inherently beneficial to mankind.
2. Virtuous behavior is an end in itself, both for oneself and others.

What constitutes moral behavior is probably going to be the hard part.

Lately I’ve been seeing lots of articles on atheism on the news aggregator sites I frequent. I’m not an atheist myself, but I’ve been leaning closer to it lately, and I have atheist friends as well. They are among the most decent human beings I know. The army officially considers prejudice against atheists to be okay, and the President thinks that atheists can’t be patriots. These arguments always annoy the hell out of me, and they tend to be obfuscated by the existence of examples of profoundly bad behavior by supposed representatives of either side. Not a few anti-atheists like to cite the regimes of Stalin and Hitler as examples of atheism being the basis of tyrrany and slaughter. This to me is intellectually dishonest, on par with equating Christianity with Fred Phelps. The influential atheists today are at least as compassionate as any Christian you’d care to name, and I think it’s safe to say a distate for religion is the only thing they have in common with those historical villains. I wouldn’t hold a Dawkins-style atheist accountable for the actions of oppressive communist governnents any more than I’d hold a modern-day Lutheran responsible for the crusades (or abortion clinic bombings). This analysis of statistics of nonbelief in various countries draws a very sharp distinction between “coercive atheism” of a totalitarian regime and atheism that has emerged naturally in a democratic post-industrial nation.

Atheists are distrusted by most Americans, and at times are even targets of bigotry. My personal experience has been that how far you can trust a given person has absolutely nothing to do with their states faith or lack thereof. Whether we’re talking about theists or atheists, there are people who are jerks about the contrast between their beliefs and those of others, as though the world that already holds more than 6 billion people is somehow too small to hold multiple philosophical views. I for one base how much I trust someone on their actual conduct.

I’ve been wondering why it is that theism of one sort or another is basically the default. People have reasons for their faith and even incentives (the role of a church is far more social than people seem to realize, for one thing), but there is no proof per se. When Christians argue against atheism they seem to either beg the question or try to pick apart the opposition (which for them usually means evolution) rather than doing anything to substantially prop up their own views.

While I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being agnostic, so far the religion that makes the most sense to me is Buddhism. While there may well be some part of the world where you can find a Buddhist yelling at people that they need to accept the Four Noble Truths, it has a (percieved) lack of shouty jerks in its favor. It also plays nice with science better than any other religion I know of. Buddhist views of the nature of existence (“emptiness“) and self (as an aggregate of processes) are very compatible with our modern understanding of how the cosmos works, and the Buddha himself largely regarded “supernatural” matters to be secondary to the pursuit of enlightenment/happiness in the here and now. And, incidentally, morality (“right action,” “right intention,” “compassion for all beings”) are of paramount importance in Buddhism.

Why can’t we all just get along? Seriously, why the fuck not?

Religious people worry me sometimes. Not all religious people of course, but there are a lot of scary ones out there. From my parents I got the idea that respecting other people’s religions is a moral imperative, but some people make that really, really hard. Like when I go to a rock concert and there’s those guys with signs, and when you get close one of them is saying things like, “You know there’s a barbeque! And you’re gonna be there! Cuz you’re going to hell! Cuz you’re a sinner! And you don’t love Jesus!” And everyone who’s just there to hear some music either avoids making eye contact or mocks him (“Ha ha! He called me vile!“), and Christianity seems just a little more retarded each time it happens.

Which is stupid. The basic idea of Christianity, as I understand it, is that there’s a benevolent, omnipotent creator who loves everyone. I really wish I could bring myself to believe that, because it would be really, really comforting, and it would make me that much more inclined to be nice to everyone. That’s why when guys like Pat Roberts and Jerry Falwell say things like, “Well, that liberal supreme court justice is getting kinda’ old, so let’s all pray that he has a heart attack!” I really wonder, if there is a god, what he thinks of that. My Christian friends say they’re reasonably sure that god is not anyone’s hitman.

Your average Christians, I can deal with just fine. But there are some that scare the absolute crap out of me. On Penn & Teller, they did a show about the existence of God, and there was a Christian anti-evolution guy who was saying that, without a God to provide moral guidance, he had no reason not to kill people. The expression on my face is hard to convey, but this emoticon captures a little bit of it:

:-O

Even Christians are supposed to have a concept of virtuous behavior that springs from within, not from a fear of punishment, but some preachers are evidently not competent enough to instill morals into their flock without resorting to hellfire. I’m agnostic and I have lots of friends who are agnostic and atheist, and we don’t go around killing people at all. This is because (1) spending the rest of my natural life behind bars just doesn’t fit in with my long-term goals, and (2) if enough people don’t go around killing people, then no one has to worry about random people coming to kill them, and you can relax and actually, you know, live.

Of course, you’d be surprised how many Christians don’t know all that much about Christianity. Getting people to recite the Ten Commandments is a lot like asking them to name presidents or state capitals, only with more guilt. (I would post a YouTube link for that Stephen Colbert clip, but Viacom’s lawyers went rabid) People are being selective about what they take from the Bible anyway. There are very few Christians who think that people who work on Sundays should be put to death, but it’s in there. There are also very few Christians who even know what it means when the Bible says (I swear I am not making this up) “Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother’s milk.” Apparently, if you take a baby goat and boil it in it’s mother’s milk, you’re doing something Bad, and at that something bad that goes beyond getting PETA weirdos mad at you. This was most likely meant to prohibit come kind of pagan magic ritual; in any case Wikipedia tells me it’s from a part of Exodus that people call the “Ritual Decalogue,” what might be called “the other Ten Commandments.”

There are still a lot of philosophical issues I need to work out for myself (like a deep, awful dread of death), but I’m still a big fan of science. I don’t really have the talents or discipline necessary to be a scientist, but the bits of it that I understand are by and large beautiful and consistent. That’s why I get annoyed when some Christians try to pit their religion against science. Since the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal interpretation of Genesis, there are entirely too many people who resort to any spurious logic they can lay their hands on in order to “prove” that the theory of evolution is wrong. This includes conflating the scientific and everyday meaning of the word “theory,” very basic misinformation about geology, and even making up stories about Darwin converting/repenting on his deathbed. I’ll leave the debunking of religious pseudoscience to the experts (i.e., scientists), but it doesn’t take much effort to see that stuff like the “young earth” idea is patently, obviously wrong. If you look at the layers of sedimentary rock in the Grand Canyon, and realize that each layer takes X amount of time to accumulate, then multiply by the number of layers, you get a figure in the millions of years.

Karen Armstrong contends that religion is normally divided into mythos and logos; stuff like the mythical story of how the world was made in seven days (or from the thunder god’s testicles or whatever) was meant to be separate from the practical details of life, even when a holy book would contain elements of both. Fundamentalism, according to her, effectively collapses the distinction between the two, folding the mythos into the logos. Believing that the world was made in seven days becomes as much of a moral imperative as not committing murder, and pragmatic rules like not eating pork obtain divine significance. This is an issue for Christianity not only because it has created a powerful anti-intellectual thread in Christian society, but because both halves of the Bible are fundamentally tied to when they were created. The Old Testament/Torah was the holy book of the Hebrews, a nomadic people who lived in rather harsh conditions, and for whom the book provided origin myths, history, and moral and practical guidance. The New Testament was supposedly put together by Jesus’ apostles and other very early Christians, conveying their new outgrowth of Judaism at a time when they were at once being oppressed by the Roman Empire and gaining many new converts, and Jerusalem itself was under Roman rule. Divorced from context, there’s some good stuff in the Bible, but also things that have little or no relevance to a post-industrial society. Prohibiting homosexuality makes sense in a nomadic society where maintaining a certain birthrate is an absolute necessity for survival. Today, it’s just the latest thing that people think it’s okay to be bigoted about.

The thing that makes all of this twice as annoying is that there are plenty of sane, reasonable Christians out there, whoare being drowned out by the din of the fundamentalists and apocalyptics in public discourse. Part of the problem is that, just like with political affiliations, the sane, moderate people really need to speak out against the loonies who shout so loudly under the same banners. The fact that most of the people speaking out against Islam are conservative pundits makes me inclined to give it a fair shake, but when peaceful Muslims who speak out against terrorism are threatened, it doesn’t speak well of the religion. (Whatever happened to “The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr”?) No faith practiced by functional human beings deserves to have the likes of Pat Roberts and Fred Phelps be its public face, and no one who practices such a faith should stand for their beliefs being made to look like a source of mindless bigotry and an enemy of reason.

Sex is a very strange and touchy subject for Americans. We have puritanical fuckwits saying that if you’re having sex that’s not in the missionary position and not between one man and one woman who are married, you’re doing something wrong and you’ll go to hell for it. On the other hand American pop culture says, in effect, if you’re not getting laid all the time, you’re a loser and you don’t count as a human being. Caught between the two are actual human beings with real needs and wants.

I find the extreme Christian approach just plain stupid, and very far removed from human nature in the first place. I’m agnostic, and to the extent that I believe there is a divine, supreme being, I have a really, really hard time with the idea that a being capable of creating such a vast, complex, and beautiful universe would actually care one way or the other about how any given human being gets their rocks off, whether it’s by themselves or with more than one person, or with people of the same gender, or whatever. Sexual behavior clearly arose in the evolutionary process well before any notions of marriage, monogamy, or sexual ethics. Men’s brains are wired to adjust their preferences over time depending on what they’re exposed to, and women’s instincts are to allow for multiple mates. While the main purpose of sex is of course reproduction, it has long been used for other purposes, even among animals. Moreover, it’s a psychological/biological need, and individuals need to come to terms with their own sexuality in some fashion in order to maintain mental stability.

Some people could stand to be more responsible about how they approach sex, but when people say that all masturbation is bad, they’re just not right in the head. It actually has health benefits, and for men it supposedly can help prevent prostate cancer. I’d rather not get cancer at all if I can help it, but I especially don’t want to get cancer in my prostate. It also undoubtedly keeps quite a few people from having meltdowns, and while I think Christianity has done some positive things for mankind, the demonization of masturbation seems one of its worst negative effects.

Likewise, there are people out there who have unconventional tastes, but short of criminal, abusive kinds of sex (pedophilia, rape, etc.), this stuff is mostly harmless. Religion doesn’t particularly have any objections to raise about fetishistic sex, so instead it’s more a fear of things that are different — and fear of being different — that drives people to regard alternative approaches to sexuality with fear and revulsion. Once you get past the initial shock, fetishists tend to be really hilarious, actually, though as I understand it there are a lot of amateurs who need to think more about taking proper safety precautions.

The pop culture view of sex just pisses me off, but then pop culture in general tends to piss me off. Different people have different needs and wants when it comes to sex, so couples get the unenviable task of trying to find some kind of middle ground that makes both partners happy. Except for nymphomania that disrupts one’s ability to function in society, there’s not really any such thing as too much or too little sex. This latter is important for me, because my antisocial tendencies make me more or less asexual. What I mean is, while on a theoretical basis I’d be interested in partners of the female persuasion, in reality I don’t think I like human beings enough to want to have sex with one, and the practical details of intercourse seem kind of nauseating to me if I think about them too much. American pop culture tells me that I’m a waste of skin for being this way.

I used to be generally uncomfortable about sex, basically on account of the guilt and misinformation that was dumped into my head by American society. When I finally did come to terms with the whole thing, I realized that while I had become very open-minded, almost blase, about sex, I hadn’t actually become more interested in doing it myself. Since I’m so open-minded about the whole issue, I have a hard time feeling bad about it, especially since my unusualness is such that it makes me utterly harmless to others. If I were to somehow wind up in a relationship again, this would legitimately be a problem within that context, but otherwise it’s just yet another of my eccenticities. I haven’t really told anyone about this, and I think being gay or bisexual would be easier to explain to people (there are two bisexuals in my immediate family after all). It’s sort of like how coming out as Mormon, even as a follower of Thor or the SubGenius or whatever would be much easier for narrow-minded people to swallow than atheism. It’s a very strange feeling, the certainty that something about you is beyond the pale for most people. Granted, it’s not exactly a challenge for me to avoid having sex, but bery, very few people refrain from sexual activity by choice, and even fewer don’t plan on it being a temporary arrangement.