Apocalypse of the Week 3: Waiting Room Battle Royale

2014-10-242022-08-12 Alyssa Gonzalezapocalypse, eschaton, funny, raelian

The Raëlians are close to my heart. One of their subsidiaries, the biotech company Clonaid, announced in 2002 within spitting distance of my hometown that they were growing an army of human clones and were picking out an island off the coast of Brazil to finish their project. Naturally, the clones never materialized, nor did any way to verify that they were not blowing smoke up people’s nether orifices, but this stunt kept genetics at the forefront of people’s minds for another decade and kept my neck of the woods in the news, so I can’t complain too loudly. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the Raëlians are mostly in the news lately for their occasional parades of topless women (in protest of laws that criminalize female but not male toplessness) and advocacy of comprehensive sex education.

For those who don’t know, the Raëlians are a UFO cult founded by former French car magazine writer and teen pop star Claude Vorilhon in 1973. He founded the cult after an encounter in a volcanic crater with a flying saucer, which convinced him to rename himself “Raël, messenger of the Elohim.” This encounter totally did not involve enough LSD to convince a sperm whale it could fly, no really.

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Apocalypse of the Week 2: Omnidirectional Zergling Rush

2014-10-192017-11-21 Alyssa Gonzalezapocalypse, buddhist, eschaton, funny

Hello again! This week’s apocalypse comes from a bit farther in time and space than the Islamic mythos previously explored. In the mountains of 6^th-century-BCE Nepal, the Buddha and his most prominent disciples waxed lyrical about an endworld scenario like no other. As Buddhism would have it, civilization will end as the world suffers a steady increase in “unskillful” behavior.

That’s…remarkably reasonable. Civilization falls apart as a result of an epidemic of incompetence? I’d almost buy it, given the special class of nincompoop that seems to occupy too many government offices, including those armed with the ability to render vast swaths of the world uninhabitable for decades. Apparently the Three Stooges are prophets of slapstick.

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Apocalypse of the Week 1: Taste the Doom of Fire!

2014-10-092019-06-13 Alyssa Gonzalezapocalypse, eschaton, funny, islam, muslim

As part of the lead-up to Centre for Inquiry Ottawa’s Eschaton 2012 conference, Celebrating Reason at the End of the World, I wrote a feature called Apocalypse When, a brief lampooning of some of the many eschatological visions and scenarios that have gained or maintained popularity over the centuries. Eschaton2012.ca is defunct now, so I’m reprising my creation here.

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This week’s apocalypse is the one envisioned in the Qur’an and various hadiths and thus central to most interpretations of Islam. Unfortunately, the details of this scenario are dispersed across numerous suras and hadiths, but a few themes and tidbits stand out.

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Full Faith and Credit

2014-09-292019-07-12 Alyssa Gonzalezatheism, skepticism

Of all the phrases theists use to lull themselves to sleep each night, “atheists have faith just like we do” might be the most obnoxious.

“Faith” is one of several word games believers play with nonbelievers when they’re feeling dishonest, alongside “spirituality” and, beautifully, “belief.” These games bank on how deviously slippery those words are, as they can mean more-or-less whatever the person using them wants them to mean. While all of these games are infuriating, “faith” gets under my skin more than the others, because it is somehow more dishonest.

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Halfwaytheism

2014-09-012021-03-31 Alyssa Gonzalezagnosticism, atheism

One aspect of my deconversion story that stands out to many readers is that it didn’t feature certain accusations that atheists, especially freshly minted atheists, often receive. Partly, that’s because I was secretive about it for so many years, so the people who would have accused me of things simply didn’t know it was an option. More importantly, my culture, like some others, is entwined enough with its standard religion that it tends to forget that members of other religions, let alone of no religion, can be found in its ranks at all. The space filled by atheists in others’ imaginations is filled by communists here, or by sullen nihilistic teenagers whose non-religion is only ever implied, not stated.

So I’ve only rarely had to deal with that stereotyped idea that an atheist is an atheist because xe is “angry at God,” and that if I only quelled, grew out of, or found a “more productive” outlet for my anger, I’d return to the Christian fold. But I have nonetheless had that insulting supposition thrown at me more than once, and I want to silence it once and for all.

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Command and Convenience

2014-08-282019-07-12 Alyssa Gonzalezallies, bigotry, divine command theory, ethics, logic, Philosophy1 Comment

It’s easy to deride philosophy classes. Few people have jobs as philosophers, so the entire field is easy to dismiss as esoteric navel-gazing, dooming most of its practitioners to lives of unskilled menial labor. But there are few classes outside my specialization that I found more beneficial than my philosophy courses, because I acquired very valuable skills there. Philosophy courses present difficult problems, problems that require very careful terms and proofs, and set their students on them to flex and build brain pathways. Those problems touch on virtually the whole of human experience, between the various classical branches: What is real (metaphysics)? What is knowledge (epistemology)? What is truth (both)? What is beauty (aesthetics)? What is good (ethics)?

And every time my philosophy courses got around to that last question, one particular lump of nonsense would be treated with vastly outsized seriousness: the divine command theory.

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The Mover Out of Time

2014-08-192022-08-12 Alyssa Gonzalezarceus, dialga, giratina, palkia, physics, pokemon, time

It does not take much to demonstrate the impossibility of many gods. The bigger a god is, the more of the universe its devotees claim is within its sway, the more improbable its powers have to be to make what we do know about the universe compatible with its existence. A river spirit or trickster that hides your socks when no one is looking has a small effect on reality, and can hide in the statistical noise that keeps our world de facto unpredictable. A huge god, though, needs to be simultaneously of massive import, so that its influence permeates many facets and phenomena in the world, and utterly minuscule, so that it has an excuse for when it inevitably doesn’t show. Thus, we get gods defined as controlling the weather, the course of wars, and whether anyone lives or dies, but whose influence is indistinguishable from the sum of the hundred and one worldly factors in and causes of all of these events; gods who can be expelled from their controlling niche by humans having the temerity to document and measure, as if God were mere quantum uncertainty; gods who use mortal movers as their proxies, merely shifting the problem one layer of agents upward with theological sleight of hand.

Christianity, between its native Abrahamic grandiosity and its wholesale lifting of neo-Platonic idealism, offers some of the largest gods. Many versions of Christianity have gods so massive that they not only inflict weather events on people totally unrelated to whatever ostensibly displeased them, but they also, the soothsayers tell us, transcend time and space. This god, even Jewish dreamers like to claim, exists outside of and independent of time, such that past, present, and future are all the same to it. Events at any point in the universe’s progress are like the pages in a book this creature is reading, and flipping backward or forward is as easy for it as the analogy implies. It created the universe and now sits outside it, a cosmic voyeur that may or may not ever interfere with unfolding events, depending on the version.

It will not surprise my readers, I am sure, to learn that this god is incoherent with both logic and the facts of our universe.

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Big Tent, No Flap

2014-07-242019-07-11 Alyssa Gonzalezecho chamber, open mind

Every young association, whether as trivial as collecting fans of a particular author’s writing or as grandiose as an emergent political ideology, sooner or later has to decide how it feels about issues outside its original mandate. Labor unions have to decide how they feel about the food in workplace cafeterias. Book clubs have to decide how they feel about treating gay people badly. Political movements have to decide how they feel about anthropogenic climate change, whether their country should react to the ongoing clusterfuck in Ukraine (and if so, how), and whether they think it’s okay that American political orthodoxy still imagines that preventing pregnancy in the unwilling isn’t part of the healthcare system’s responsibilities.

And the atheist movement, if there is a single thing that can be called such, has had to sort out its sentiments on a variety of issues.

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Answering 10 Questions for Every Atheist

2014-07-212019-07-12 Alyssa Gonzalezatheism, christians, morality, questions2 Comments

TodayChristian.net seems to think they have a set of questions that “Atheist Cannot Truly and Honestly REALLY Answer! Which leads to some interesting conclusions…” They’d better be very interesting to warrant that mess of capital letters and using the word “atheist” like someone who doesn’t know English very well. Let’s see what these stumpers apparently are.

1. How Did You Become an Atheist?

2. What happens when we die?

3. What if you’re wrong? And there is a Heaven? And there is a HELL!

4. Without God, where do you get your morality from?

5. If there is no God, can we do what we want? Are we free to murder and rape? While good deeds are unrewarded?

6. If there is no god, how does your life have any meaning?

7. Where did the universe come from?

8. What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?

9. What’s your view of Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris?

10. If there is no God, then why does every society have a religion?

Sigh. Here we go.

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The Perfumed Void

Research, Feelings, and Life with Alyssa Gonzalez

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