One of the problems I had while my faith was fading is that I've always had issues with depression. And if there was no forever, no galactic memory card, no ultimate score board, I was, quite frankly, afraid I would lose all hope and drive to do better. What point could there be in a finite playground? And after watching Christian/Atheist debates, I've come to understand that however shortsighted that feeling was, it was not uncommon. In fact it was a founding principal in at least one of the monotheisms. Isn't that the precise thrust behind Matthew 6:34, "Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself"?
Fortunately this is a faulty paradigm.
Often times it seems the message of atheists, especially online, is overtly aggressive and/or sarcastic. This is to combat the extreme-conservatism of religious strongholds, not to convert the idling near-free-thinkers. I often wonder if I, the oft-contrarian that I am, would have realized my own atheism had I only been exposed to this intellectual climate.
Instead of an online community (or onslaught,) I was fortunate enough to have found the place where dialogue happens between the standpoints. From there, I turned in. Undoubtedly this is why the internet is dubbed in pop-culture as the place where religions go to die. And their end will, hopefully, be as final as our own.
When the individual turns inward, reflection is inevitable. Upon further reflection, I realized that though this life may be fleeting and capricious, there is value in it. In fact, it is because of the impermanence of our experience that these moments must be lived fully. And not only must they be pursued, captured, and engulfed with purpose, but on purpose. This is living.
This is the tender triumph which is often lost in the Pro v. Anti argument. But it is not something which the converted atheist will ever purposely devalue.
And so; to those about to live, we salute you.
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
Also By The Secular Superhumanist:
Coming Out
Humanist, All Too Humanist
Hitchens-Jefferson Day An Atheist/Humanist Holiday
Gay Marriage, God Willing
Showing posts with label humanism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humanism. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Hitchens-Jefferson Day, An Atheist Holiday
Sure, I can kill a Reeses' Easter egg like few others, and I know all the words to "Baby it's Cold Outside" and it takes me a full 31 days to talk myself out of dressing up as a Naughty Nurse every October, but working retail for over a decade has never let me forget what all those holidays are really about: Margin.
And what they certainly are not about: Free Thought.
So, why not have an atheist holiday to propagate that? My suggestion is that we dub 13 April as Hitchens-Jefferson Day. It is, of course, the day that both of these Free Thought icons (is that oxymoronic?) were born. Instead of mulling the change of Christmas to Newton Day among ourselves and friends, in a Yankee-Doodle type of protest, I suggest this date for more than the one reason, First, making our claim on a previous holiday is a combative answer when we should be aiming at peace for this move. Second, Spring is the season of birth. Of beginnings. Third, Easter is wishy-washy with it's date. We'll set our claim and let them work around us.
Of course, drug stores across the nation will be in no hurry to clear 100 square feet from their Easter Aisle to sell the Jefferson Bible or "Letters to a Young Contrarian," and while it would make a good deal of symbolic sense for tobacco to factor largely into celebrations, perhaps we should shy away from that.
So, I propose, we shift our concentration and efforts of the glamorous aisles of Wal-Mart and take them deep into the dark recesses of your local book store.
Yeah, I'm suggest we continue the act of gift giving. Sue me. What could possibly be more fitting for a Free Thought holiday than an exchange of books? Book s represent the most complete single thoughts that our species is capable of producing.
There are two "Also's" which make a more compelling case to perpetuate this behavior.
Also #1: A massive and diverse book exchange will directly assail the practice of certain individuals who claim to only need "One Book."
Also #2: The publishing industry is far from healthy. There will always be Bibles and Korans and Torahs published. Always. It's sort of on us as a community to guarantee that authors not named god stay in print too.
One last thing, instead of "Merry Christmas," or "Thoughtful Hitchens-Jefferson Day" or even "Here, read a fucking book," maybe each Hitchens-Jefferson Day gift should come with the phrase, "I'm an atheist and a free thinker."
Corny? Sure. But think how corny "Merry Christmas" really sounds. Yet it gets uttered billions of times per year. And the effect is that it normalizes the idea of Christianity. It is a type of branding for Christians which conjures thoughts of family gatherings and Christmas trees and gifts.
If we do our work, "I'm an atheist and a free thinker" will conjure thoughts of books instead of, well, whatever it is that the phrase conjures now.
Anyhow, here are the books I bought and the thought process behind each of them.
 |
| For a fellow atheist. A delectable morsel of Hitchens. It is readable, quotable, and off the beaten Hitchpath (God is not Great, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America) |
 |
| For a fellow reader who has dabbled in Palahniuk. The book is far from flawless, as many of the characters are indistinguishable, but the scope and ambition of the project should classify it as required reading. |
 |
| For a friend who is aiming at becoming a stronger reader. Sure, he probably won't get the full depth of Hemingway at first read, who does? But Hemingway is exceedingly smooth to read, and upon returning to Hemingway, you always notice more. |
 |
| A bit of a different look than the other books, but the giftee in question has quite a bit of reading to do for school already. One of her interests is fitness, so this book should get some use even while she is doing her imposing readings for school. |
 |
| Don't question the worth of comics. This is for a local film-maker who is looking at making an adaptation of Hamlet. Therefore I believe this is going to be a helpful tool for him when entering the visualization portion of production. |
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
Sunday, March 8, 2015
Gay Marriage, God Willing
Even so recent as ten years ago, the gay marriage debate was not nearly so prevalent in the public sphere, let alone was it gaining success. At the time, one of the arguments used against the "gay lifestyle" by bigots with enough tact to try to avoid citing god was that "they" are so promiscuous. The gays, you know, they just sleep with every one. AIDS, it serves them right, no?
In the wake of the gay marriage tidal wave, this argument of promiscuity evaporated. Poof. And the bigots all lost their tact. Poof. After all, if the gays can be proud, why can't the Christians? (Besides the whole persecution-complex, that is.) So they are proud, and they argue strictly from their religious texts for the same type of society that Islamic states have.
Care to dispute that? Here is my challenge to anyone arguing against gay marriage: You must answer the following question, "Why not?" The moment you mention a god that those whose rights are in question may or may not believe in, and that they are in no obligation to respect, your argument is dismissed.
There will be no argument. None. Nothing.
So let's play their game for a bit. Pretend there's a sky-daddy to throw curveballs into the design that he himself created. Because of this concession, we'll go ahead and pretend that homosexuality is unnatural (a claim for which there is [like the sky-daddy claim] no evidence.) Further, in this world, the act of homosexuality is sinful. Sounds like a pretty compelling case against gay marriage, yeah? Don't suppose we could shoot that down...
Free will.
Done. Argument won. Otherwise the act of murder is less egregious to Christians than two men marrying.
But, the argument can be made, that murder is against the law. So how can I say that?
Because the state (a secular institution, mind you) is not required to authorize the legitimacy of a murder. The question of murder is proven as a matter of fact, or it is not.
Under god's design (plot hole?) of free will, the Christian who tampers with an individual's ability to sin without victim is, simply, doing it wrong.
So we are left where we started-- with the naked act of bigotry.
I just hope they are sure not to lay with each other while naked-bigoting. It would be an abomination to see them getting their irony all over one another.
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Walking Un-theist
One thing that strikes me, and did even when I was a Christian, is just how little god happens. How seldom does the supernatural sit upon our shoulder? He is a distracted god if you sit and listen to the vast majority of conversations which happen in the course of daily happenstance. Part of this is the banality of the any-moments which we have a habit of stringing together. Is the divine, the creator of all things, the beginning and the end of totality, really there when I'm brushing my teeth? And did that cavity happen despite Jesus, or because of him? You know, it's no wonder my wisdom-teeth were such trouble, they weren't faith-teeth. (I'll leave the "faith has no teeth" arguments for you to make or dispute.)
But you don't have to be a voyeur or a dentist to take notes on the secular tilt to actual popular society. Just turn on the radio. Take thirty minutes to tally the number of sins or sinful things you hear wailed across your favorite FM station. How many Honda Civics full of seventeen year old girls are barreling down the highway at this very moment "singing" right along? And how many guardian angels are there too?
In short, we operate as if there were presently no lord-savior-ghost in an overwhelming number of instances. During these times, the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, the Jain, the Buddhist, the Hindu, and the Sikh alike are not atheist, but neither are they theist. During these moments of mundane, we are all un-theist. And for the religious, whose god is ever present, this must be accounted for. But it is not.
And that is what makes it so maddening when and why god does get the credit.
They are the extreme cases, not the regular cases, for which god gets the worm. The times people are emotional and that they will remember later. No one worth talking to thanks god that they got to the bottom of the cup while the coffee was still warm.
There's an old lesson you probably remember from your high school psychology class about dog torture. You put a dog in a cage, or maybe someone else does it, that bit doesn't matter much. Then, every so often, you play a little bit of terrible music. Also, you course some electricity through the floor of the cage. The dog, yeah? She'll yelp and hop around, she'll dance until the combination of pain and exhaustion is simply too much and she collapses. Eventually when she hears the music, she'll just lay down and take it. There is, after all, nothing she can do. Then you divide the cage in two. One half electrified, the other half shock-free. And when you play the music, Spot will lay prone until the terrible music dies. There is, after all, nothing she thinks she can do. This is called learned helplessness. She has apparently become numb even to the electricity which was the initial cause of her distress.
This is why, during tumult or joy, we evoke religion. We feel either that there is nothing we can do, or that there is nothing we have done, to deserve the high or low which is happening. We simply lay down and take it, knowing that the status quo will return.
But is that any way to navigate your sole existence? Is it really the banal which we wish to debit to reality while we credit the meat of the worldly experience to something otherworldly?
Get up, walk around, enjoy life. The terrible music is dead.
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
But you don't have to be a voyeur or a dentist to take notes on the secular tilt to actual popular society. Just turn on the radio. Take thirty minutes to tally the number of sins or sinful things you hear wailed across your favorite FM station. How many Honda Civics full of seventeen year old girls are barreling down the highway at this very moment "singing" right along? And how many guardian angels are there too?
In short, we operate as if there were presently no lord-savior-ghost in an overwhelming number of instances. During these times, the Christian, the Muslim, the Jew, the Jain, the Buddhist, the Hindu, and the Sikh alike are not atheist, but neither are they theist. During these moments of mundane, we are all un-theist. And for the religious, whose god is ever present, this must be accounted for. But it is not.
And that is what makes it so maddening when and why god does get the credit.
They are the extreme cases, not the regular cases, for which god gets the worm. The times people are emotional and that they will remember later. No one worth talking to thanks god that they got to the bottom of the cup while the coffee was still warm.
There's an old lesson you probably remember from your high school psychology class about dog torture. You put a dog in a cage, or maybe someone else does it, that bit doesn't matter much. Then, every so often, you play a little bit of terrible music. Also, you course some electricity through the floor of the cage. The dog, yeah? She'll yelp and hop around, she'll dance until the combination of pain and exhaustion is simply too much and she collapses. Eventually when she hears the music, she'll just lay down and take it. There is, after all, nothing she can do. Then you divide the cage in two. One half electrified, the other half shock-free. And when you play the music, Spot will lay prone until the terrible music dies. There is, after all, nothing she thinks she can do. This is called learned helplessness. She has apparently become numb even to the electricity which was the initial cause of her distress.
This is why, during tumult or joy, we evoke religion. We feel either that there is nothing we can do, or that there is nothing we have done, to deserve the high or low which is happening. We simply lay down and take it, knowing that the status quo will return.
But is that any way to navigate your sole existence? Is it really the banal which we wish to debit to reality while we credit the meat of the worldly experience to something otherworldly?
Get up, walk around, enjoy life. The terrible music is dead.
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Spider-Man, the Sexist Pig
Some time late last night Marvel Studios regained cinematic access to one of the three most popular comic-book characters of all time. They moved swiftly to employ him into their plans, plans which already included movies that fit Spider-Man both thematically and as timelines/story lines which are true to the comics. There was also nary a fan who didn't clamor for the Webslinger to be included in the fold at Marvel. Because Marvel is moving immediately with Spider-Man, the Thor, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Inhumans movies were bumped a bit later in the timeline. In short, almost everyone was elated.
I barely need to tell you what happened next.
If you've ever been on twitter, or tumblr, or reddit, or any of a number of other time wasting sites, you know that this clearly means-
SPIDER-MAN IS A SEXIST AND A RACIST, BUT MAINLY A SEXIST!!!!!
This is the latest "feminist" rallying cry from people who don't understand what feminism really is. Captain Marvel, for those who don't know, is a woman. And Black Panther is a Black man.
I pointed out to several of these "intellectuals" that Spider-Man's popularity is unparalleled in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was promptly told that my gender afforded me little or no opinion on the matter.
Upset that my gender was addressed and not my argument, I point out that this is actually a sexist take.
Pop Quiz, what happens when you point out obvious sexist tropes in a "feminist" argument?
You get accused of "playing the reverse-sexist card." This is a statement which means less than nothing. First, "reverse-sexism" insinuates that the mechanism which necessitates the sexist act is inherently masculine. This is an obvious self-defeating argument, if it is an argument at all. Second, and perhaps more contemptible, is the fact that "playing the X card" is a cliche. And a bad one. But matters of taste aside, dismissing/denying someone's opinion/argument based on gender is sexist. Guess what happens if you point that out?
Well, I was talked down to, called uneducated, and told that I should "get a liberal arts education." I don't think I need to relay the shame that my Associates in Arts, my Bachelor's in English Literature, and my Master's in Creative Writing felt that I had let them down so forthrightly.
Now, apparently, I've been added to some type of internet list which was clearly so important that it warranted capital letters. Which I must say is truly terrifying as I have never been to the website. The worst part of these types of exchanges is that the troglodytes remain completely oblivious that they are instituting the same type of ignorant and boorish behavior that they claim to be combating.
Besides, the Thor movie was pushed back as well. Did these social justice warriors bash Marvel for being Norse-ist? The Inhumans movie was delayed as well, clearly this means that Marvel is Inhumanist. But the inclusiveness of those arguments does not match the internet "feminists" M.O.
Also, Batman will be rebooted in the D.C. Cinematic Universe and appear either concurrently or slightly before (he does already share a title card...) Wonder Woman, and a probably Black character in Green Lantern. Does this draw cyber-"feminist" ire? No, the information is too nuanced.
Though I do have testicles, I dare say that true feminists would be disgusted with such disorganized, malformed garble, and especially that it was shot-gunned into the public sphere under the banner which they labored to erect. In fact, perhaps the true argument here is that these characters should get their films when the characters and their directions fit thematically, and not in order to meet some imaginary quota. As that type of shoehorning is both degrading and self-congratulatory in a white-man's-burden sort of way, no?
But perhaps my testosterone is effecting my thinking as I have been doing extra pushups and drinking more beers and catcalling at an inordinate rate recently.
It is that type of situation that makes me claim humanism rather than feminism. What was once known as feminism has been hijacked by individuals who are careless with their words, unfocused with their anger, and simply unskilled in the art of criticism.
The self-congratulatory nature of these "feminists" is a far cry from the mettle of intellectual warriors that sparked a revolution.
When individuals enter the arena of public discourse with an "education" that outweighs their critical thinking skills and observational faculties the argument can only suffer.
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
I barely need to tell you what happened next.
If you've ever been on twitter, or tumblr, or reddit, or any of a number of other time wasting sites, you know that this clearly means-
SPIDER-MAN IS A SEXIST AND A RACIST, BUT MAINLY A SEXIST!!!!!
This is the latest "feminist" rallying cry from people who don't understand what feminism really is. Captain Marvel, for those who don't know, is a woman. And Black Panther is a Black man.
I pointed out to several of these "intellectuals" that Spider-Man's popularity is unparalleled in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I was promptly told that my gender afforded me little or no opinion on the matter.
Upset that my gender was addressed and not my argument, I point out that this is actually a sexist take.
Pop Quiz, what happens when you point out obvious sexist tropes in a "feminist" argument?
You get accused of "playing the reverse-sexist card." This is a statement which means less than nothing. First, "reverse-sexism" insinuates that the mechanism which necessitates the sexist act is inherently masculine. This is an obvious self-defeating argument, if it is an argument at all. Second, and perhaps more contemptible, is the fact that "playing the X card" is a cliche. And a bad one. But matters of taste aside, dismissing/denying someone's opinion/argument based on gender is sexist. Guess what happens if you point that out?
Well, I was talked down to, called uneducated, and told that I should "get a liberal arts education." I don't think I need to relay the shame that my Associates in Arts, my Bachelor's in English Literature, and my Master's in Creative Writing felt that I had let them down so forthrightly.
Now, apparently, I've been added to some type of internet list which was clearly so important that it warranted capital letters. Which I must say is truly terrifying as I have never been to the website. The worst part of these types of exchanges is that the troglodytes remain completely oblivious that they are instituting the same type of ignorant and boorish behavior that they claim to be combating.
Besides, the Thor movie was pushed back as well. Did these social justice warriors bash Marvel for being Norse-ist? The Inhumans movie was delayed as well, clearly this means that Marvel is Inhumanist. But the inclusiveness of those arguments does not match the internet "feminists" M.O.
Also, Batman will be rebooted in the D.C. Cinematic Universe and appear either concurrently or slightly before (he does already share a title card...) Wonder Woman, and a probably Black character in Green Lantern. Does this draw cyber-"feminist" ire? No, the information is too nuanced.
Though I do have testicles, I dare say that true feminists would be disgusted with such disorganized, malformed garble, and especially that it was shot-gunned into the public sphere under the banner which they labored to erect. In fact, perhaps the true argument here is that these characters should get their films when the characters and their directions fit thematically, and not in order to meet some imaginary quota. As that type of shoehorning is both degrading and self-congratulatory in a white-man's-burden sort of way, no?
But perhaps my testosterone is effecting my thinking as I have been doing extra pushups and drinking more beers and catcalling at an inordinate rate recently.
It is that type of situation that makes me claim humanism rather than feminism. What was once known as feminism has been hijacked by individuals who are careless with their words, unfocused with their anger, and simply unskilled in the art of criticism.
The self-congratulatory nature of these "feminists" is a far cry from the mettle of intellectual warriors that sparked a revolution.
When individuals enter the arena of public discourse with an "education" that outweighs their critical thinking skills and observational faculties the argument can only suffer.
ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)