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Friday, October 30, 2009

When I was an atheist

...I really didn’t care what religious people thought about life, the universe, and everything, and I didn’t understand why so many of my fellow atheists were obsessed with the matter. I would go to the homes of my atheist friends and see them sitting in front of the tv glaring at some religious spokesperson like Tammy Faye Bakker or Sister Angelica, or see them pouring through newspapers reading articles about the Pope’s latest pronouncement, or fizzing in fury about some ruling some church group laid on its members (like the Southern Baptists and the dust-up about making husbands the “heads of the household”—remember that? I think a bunch of gay groups decided to demonstrate against some Southern Baptist meeting in Orlando one year because of that, and no I don’t know why gay groups would be so upset over what the Southern Baptist Conference was telling its heterosexual married members to do), and I would be puzzled, because to me being an atheist meant not having to worry about what religious groups did amongst themselves. I kept a wary eye out for what they wanted to do to non-members, of course, but otherwise I couldn’t care less about what the Pope was doing.

You probably have noted that I haven’t mentioned any religion but Christianity. That’s because as far as my circle at that time was concerned, that was the only religion making any trouble. Buddhists were cute and exotic and you could pretend it was a “philosophy” instead of a religion. Judaism was taken for granted, at least in Miami where I lived then, as an ethnic group—people who converted to Judaism were considered weird by Jews and non-Jews alike. And most Jews in Miami thought the Hasidic Jews (i.e., the religious ones) were weird. I knew a lot of Jews who ate bacon and pork. As for Islam, we knew about crazy fanatic Muslims and wanted nothing to do with them but we only felt physically threatened by them, not mentally or emotionally. Only Christians were the real deal—monsters! Stay away! Like vampires to the cross we were to the… cross. Well, not me so much—and by the time the years went by and I began to see that my atheist friends were in a rut about the issue of religious people. I wanted to move on, to more interesting things than whether Mother Theresa was evil or whatever was up their butt that week, but my friends were still fuming because some Bible thumper somewhere said something about this being a Christian country as if saying so made it so and meant we’d all be rounded up by soldiers and forced to go to Sunday school. I just got bored with the paranoia and complaints. And that’s how I became an ex-atheist.

(Via Five Feet of Fury.)

Posted by Andrea Harris on 10/30 at 07:13 PM
Of Interest • Permalink


Saturday, October 24, 2009

Don’t Think Pink

Ann Althouse is sick of the pink breast cancer obsession. You know what? So am I. It’s all of a piece with the nation of neurasthenic hypochondriacs we’ve turned into. It’s not good enough to know about a disease, each disease has to have a “campaign” the purpose of which is to make us “aware” that somewhere someone has this disease and you could get it too! So wear this ribbon to signal your awareness! Like the problem of people not knowing about diseases is so huge and urgent. And they’ve run out of single-color ribbons, I do believe, and are probably by this time going into patterns.

But the breast cancer “campaign” is special, because it’s considered primarily a disease of women (though men have breasts too and they can get cancer in them—my ex-fiancé was one of them, he had to have some pre-cancerous things removed from his moobs a few years back), and thus a variety of pseudo-feminist canards have been tacked onto the business, which means we get people believing things such as were trumpeted by one of her commenters here:

Yeah! It’s TERRIBLE that a disease that was ignored and shunned for years would receive any recognition!!!

I’ve been hearing this about breast cancer for years now, and I’ve come not to believe it. So I countered with:

Breast cancer was “ignored and shunned”? Since when? Sorry, the whole “breast cancer victims were treated like crap until our new Enlightened era of non-stop talking about it because men hated women” sounds like so much propagandistic crap. I’m pretty sure that breast cancer was always considered a serious problem just like every other cancer, and that no one “shunned” anyone, even back when no one knew what to do about people with cancer except to give them laudanum for the pain. People just didn’t used to make as much fuss about themselves and their ailments as we do today. And since we are all now supposed to be attention whores, the idea of keeping one’s problems to oneself is looked upon with horror.

I mean, I know that back in the bad old days, doctors did dismiss some womens’ complaints of illness with “it’s just hysteria because you’re a woman,” but they didn’t do that because they thought women were useless or deserved to suffer, they did that because they didn’t know any better and they sincerely thought that many illnesses were actually manifestations of mental or emotional problems and that a variety of treatments for such, from stern talkings-to to sedatives, were the proper solution. Also, early detection of cancer was impossible then—by the time most cancers can be detected by non-high-tech methods it’s pretty much too late. In any case, I’d like to know where the idea that breast cancer was ever considered such a demerit to a woman that she was “shunned” came from. People with leprosy were famously shunned, but leprosy isn’t cancer. It’s probably a mishmash of half-digested knowledge about past medical practices combined with high school memories of reading The Yellow Wallpaper.

Update: I forgot to add a note about my current funding campaign! It’s for my Emptywalletitis, which is a side effect of Funemploymentosis, a very serious disease that people are afraid to talk about because they’ll be shunned! It’s time to be Aware! But this disease has a cure—all you have to do is click on the Paypal button on my sidebar! And you don’t even have to wear a ribbon, though if you want to go right ahead. My personal favorite colors are forest green, royal blue, deep violet, and wine red.

Next day update: Kathy weighs in. You know, I had forgotten all about that episode of All In The Family. In fact, I have blocked most of the later seasons of that series out of my mind—you know, when it stopped being a funny show where the “lessons” on racial prejudice and so on didn’t get in the way of the funny stuff about Archie ranting at Meathead and telling Edith to stifle herself and became a Concerned Television Program About Problems In Our Society. All I remember is that one where Archie half-reluctantly joins a white supremacist group and Michael won’t let him hold the baby.

And a friend dragged me to see Footloose in the theater because she was nuts over Kevin Bacon, and all I remember thinking is “why did the town ban dancing? Since the action that precipitated the ban was one of those teenage car crashes, why didn’t they just take away the car keys from everyone under twenty? The kids could have been going on a fishing trip…” If you thought too hard about that movie, it fell apart like a paper bag in the rain. John Lithgow’s preacher dad was much too nice and cultured to come up with stuff like “dancing is of the devil” or whatever it was he said, and he had no control over his daughter, who was sleeping around. And banning dancing would seem to contravene the Third Amendment, especially the “right of the people to peacefully assemble”—because the dancing ban extended to the stock uptight adults the movie was populated by. And so on. And now I can’t get that goddamn Kenny Loggins song out of my head.

Posted by Andrea Harris on 10/24 at 05:59 PM
Of Interest • Permalink


Monday, October 05, 2009

The Stand

It occurs to me that there are two basic kinds of ways of being in life. It’s not liberal vs. conservative or leftist vs. rightist. It’s like this:

There are people in the world, currently mostly to be found in positions of authority like the professional news and entertainment media, government, and academia, who are all about power and status and who’s in the “inner ring” (as C.S. Lewis called it), and who’s out. These people have no real friends or family as those terms have traditionally been recognized—they have associates and acquaintances (the way they talk about their friends—“she’s such a deeply spiritual person,” “he’s brutally honest”—“brutally honest” is powerspeak code for “rude and obnoxious and can’t be counted on to keep a secret”—“she’s so talented,” “he’s the most intelligent person I know”—the constant affirmations of the wonderfulness and specialness of them, is a clue to how shaky the relationships really are; real friends don’t need to blather on to everyone and sundry like this); and their intimate relationships are notoriously feeble and apt to break at the most trivial of pressures, such as the significant other leaving the toilet seat up or down, or voting Republican, or something. They are always waiting for the “right” moment—that is, the moment where it either won’t interfere with their incessant status-seeking or will enhance same—to have children. And so on.

Then there are people who don’t seek status or power, and it’s true that what you don’t seek you basically don’t have. They try to support themselves, by working and making money, but they don’t equate having a lot of money with being important in the larger scheme of things like the power-seekers do. And when it comes to friends and family, they don’t have an interchangeable set of bodies designed to get them further up the status ladder. They consider their friends and family to be both separate, individual people and part of the “team,” so to speak, and thus due for a certain amount of support no matter what they get into as individuals. I’ve vented frustration a few times at conservatives who put up with all manner of political nonsense from friends and family, but putting up with a certain amount of nonsense is seen as one of the normal conditions of life.

Anyway, the difference is brilliantly spelled out by Ann Coulter here in a response to high-status harpy Joyce Behar:

There is a liberal obsession with “tell us who your leader is.”  And you realize why liberals want to know is because this is how they argue: they find who the leader is and they destroy him…. We’ve decided we’re not going with a leader this time, so you’re going to have to argue with us on the facts.”

Status-seeking liberals can’t function without someone over them both to tell them what to think (not so much what to do) and to try to drag down so they can replace him with another, “more perfect,” leader. Conservatives these days—or not so much conservatives but the people the powerful hold in contempt—have been making the mistake of trying to find a “leader” in this mold, but once that is done he becomes one of the powerful and gets sucked into the status-seeking maw and thus becomes useless. (That’s the other way they get you, see—if they can’t beat you, they’ll get you to join them. The only way back from this fate is to relinquish the power, but power is very alluring—only a few people in my lifetime have voluntarily relinquished it before it ate them up; Sarah Palin is one of these.) The only way to deal with this routine is to treat each other like a family or a team, and neither make celebrity leaders nor help the opposition drag them down. With all their talk of “the masses” and “the people,” the liberal Powers That Be can’t stand against an entire group.

Anyway, that’s why I won’t jump on the Glenn Beck-bashing bandwagon. I don’t listen to him—I don’t listen to talk radio—but he is entitled to his opinion as anyone else. And he’s one of us—you don’t throw family members under the bus.

(Via Kathy Shaidle.)

Posted by Andrea Harris on 10/05 at 08:51 AM
Of Interest • Trapped In The Mirror Universe • Permalink


Thursday, October 01, 2009

Self-Hatred Is Tiresome

And Michael Palin is awesome. I think he’s always been my favorite Python. He’ll be condemned as a racist, of course, but that term became meaningless quite some time ago so hopefully he won’t be compelled to make some sort of PC “apology.”

Anyway, I’m going to say it now: if British civilization hadn’t existed, then “democracy” would be an obscure, mostly-forgotten custom of ancient Greece. Think about it.

(Via Five Feet of Fury.)

Posted by Andrea Harris on 10/01 at 10:25 PM
Of Interest • Permalink


Monday, September 28, 2009

Announcement announcement announcement

Hey, kids, I’ve just found out something cool. Remember Kim Du Toit and how there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth when he and his wife Connie Du Toit decided to retire from the internet? (Except for occasional tantalizing appearances in comment threads here and there.) Well guess what—they’re baa-aack. And this time they are going to have a radio show on Blog Talk Radio. You can get a little preview show right now if you go to their site; the debut is October 3rd. Weep no more!

Posted by Andrea Harris on 09/28 at 06:50 PM
Of Interest • Permalink


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