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What’s in a TERF?

CN suicide, transmisogyny, violence

To the endless bafflement of people whose sense of ethical behavior does not include driving strangers to self-harm, the transgender community faces intense hostility. What is interesting in our case is that people with extraordinarily different overall ideologies come to equally intense hatred of transgender people in general and trans women in particular, and this makes some words we are tempted to use to encompass all of our detractors a poor fit. This brings is to that famously deadly group, the TERFs.

Continue reading “What’s in a TERF?”

What’s in a TERF?

Apocalypse of the Week 9: Romania Will Rise Again

It’s easy to forget about Romania.  For many North Americans, it’s just another former Communist country in Eastern Europe, and most of what they know about it actually applies to the various countries around it more accurately.  For starters, Romanian is a Romance rather than a Slavic language, so the Romanian people have a lot more in common with Western Europe than most North Americans realize.  Also like Western Europe, Romania’s history is marked by the unification of a number of separate principalities that shared a language, and by a split engineered by the Soviet Union (which created the Republic of Moldova).
What an alarming number of Westerners are apparently certain of when it comes to Romania is that it will bring forth the Antichrist and from there, the end of the world as we know it.
Apocalypse of the Week 9: Romania Will Rise Again

The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of Libertarianism

One of my first exposures to overtly atheistic reasoning was in some required reading for my 7th grade English class.  In the forewords and epilogues of Anthem, a short novel by Ayn Rand, I encountered a primer on Objectivism.  The appeal of a worldview that was not based on any notion of the supernatural and which loudly proclaimed that I was morally obligated to not do anything I didn’t want to do was substantial for a teenage boy who really did not enjoy yardwork.  For a little while, I lived in a frame of mind that would have leapt at the name “libertarian” on hearing it described.  Fortunately, I got better.

For the uninitiated, libertarianism might be thought of as the political outgrowth of Rand’s Objectivism, though it’s actually based on older modes of thought. It is a political philosophy that places personal liberty as paramount, standing in opposition to all forces that would limit or circumscribe that freedom.  At least, that’s what its claimants would like us to think it is.  And that is the last charitable thing I will say about it or them.

Continue reading “The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of Libertarianism”

The Moral and Intellectual Bankruptcy of Libertarianism

“Where Does your Hatred Come From?”

“Where does your hatred come from?”

Really, sir? Really?

I was not able to answer you when you issued this insulting challenge, or answer your wife when she insinuated that my life and the life of my beloved are devoid of meaning for not being subordinated to your preferred cosmic tyrant. You and yours have made a tidy mess of my, and more importantly her, mental state by squatting on the privileged status of “host” to our “guest,” lobbing your assorted insults and imprecations while shielded from all but the most perfunctory defense.

You know what we call someone who uses a position of power to make someone else miserable? You know what we call someone who thinks the way to make someone agree with them is to treat them badly until they recant? We call them “bullies” when we feel charitable and “assholes” when we don’t.

I know you’re not prepared to so much as understand what being an atheist means. You stopped comprehending the atheist position at “doesn’t go to church anymore and lives in sin.” You continue to imagine it as an infantile rebellion against the One True Faith, a self-deception that allows a debauched youthful generation to enjoy various ungodly pleasures without guilt until it falls apart. You’ve made excruciatingly clear that you are not interested in even asking either of us, in even asking your daughter, what this weighty decision meant to her or me, what it continues to mean to us, because you like your assorted prejudices better. You’re quite content to think of us as the joyless, amoral, antisocial monsters your religious leaders have convinced you we are, and think of any reevaluation of our nature based on actually examining us and how we live as a lack of faith.

It’s funny how often this kind of faith leads people to treat each other badly. No, wait, it’s not funny. It’s incredibly, unbelievably sad.

Here’s something that’ll blow your mind:

I’m an atheist because NONE of the truth claims made by any religion, and especially yours, hold together under scrutiny. Not “God exists,” not “Jesus died for our sins,” not “there’s something wrong with having sex with someone before a priest has performed some hocus-pocus over the two of you,” not “there is a component of a human that ‘survives’ after the death of their body,” not even “Jesus existed.”

I’m an atheist because other people’s attempts to convince me that their religion is true, especially the religion with which I was raised, are always a dense pudding of logical fallacies, appeals to emotion (usually fear), appeals to ignorance or irrelevant authority, and outright lies.

I’m an atheist because “I feel it in my heart,” “my priest told me,” and “this is what my culture has taught since shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire” are unbelievably bad reasons to believe anything.

I’m an atheist because “examining the world in a way that takes into account the results of previous such examinations and is systematically designed to weed out human biases” is the ONLY way to gain real, usable knowledge.

I’m an atheist because faith is about ending inquiry and science is about starting it.

I am NOT an atheist because of “hatred.” I am NOT an atheist because some awful thing in my life made me “angry at God.” I am not an atheist out of disappointment or rage or spite. I am an atheist because atheism is a true description of reality and religion is not. The moment you understand that, you’ll join us.

So if you sense a special antipathy in me, in us, for the church in which you were raised, for the Church with a capital C that had the chutzpah to name itself with an obscure synonym for “universal” back when it was a tiny minority of the civilized world, it’s there all right. But it’s not there because we’re atheists.

It’s there because the church you so favor has a record of crimes against humanity that makes make Pol Pot look like an amateur.

It’s there because the church you so favor aids and abets in the murder by AIDS of millions of Africans every year by spreading misinformation about condoms and preventing other people from getting the truth out. It’s there because the church you so favor thinks people dying of AIDS or syphilis or cervical cancer is wonderful as long as it follows non-Church-sanctioned sex.

It’s there because the church you so favor kidnapped thousands of Spanish, Australian, and Canadian babies from their mothers’ arms because their parents were unwed or gay or otherwise “unclean” and the Church saw fit to redistribute them to “deserving” families. It’s there because the church you so favor was not satisfied with stealing babies from their mothers’ arms and also imprisoned and enslaved “unclean” women in laundries in Ireland. It’s there because the church you so favor is so discriminatory, so hateful, that it thinks that enslaving women and pawning off their babies to the first two-parent house with enough displayed crucifixes is a reasonable response to learning that they had sex out of wedlock.

It’s there because the church you so favor has spent billions of dollars fighting reproductive freedom at every possible turn, from sabotaging sexual education programs to attempting to deny women access to contraception to encouraging the state-mandated rape-by-medical-device of women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies.It’s there because the church you so favor expects people to accept, apropos of nothing, that the most natural of all human activities is a moral outrage unless it has the approval of a clique of old celibates with extravagant hats.It’s there because the church you so favor is so intractably disgusted with the idea that sex is fun, and that there are a LOT of reasons people have sex besides wanting offspring, that it’s determined to attack any means of separating the two developed since the first century CE.

It’s there because the church you so favor has spent billions of dollars propagating the ridiculous lie that permitting same-sex couples to enjoy the word “marriage” and the associated government benefits will have any consequence for opposite-sex couples. It’s there because the church you so favor, the church that’s been so busy making life worse for Africans in other ways, isn’t even raising an eyebrow at its Protestant counterparts’ effort to make being gay a death-penalty offense in Uganda. It’s there because the church you so favor and its assorted descendants have gone out of their way to make sure that people with gender dysmorphia are treated like monstrous aberrations, if they are treated at all. It’s there because the church you so favor encourages gay teenagers to commit suicide by telling them their very undeniable, immutable nature is a moral affront.

It’s there because the church you so favor has managed to make one of its foremost monsters into a universal symbol of goodness because she spent her old age watching Kolkata’s destitute patients writhe and die instead of building them a hospital.

It’s there because the church you so favor has had child rapists in its midst for 1700 years, even making one of them Pope in 1550, and has spent that ENTIRE TIME stonewalling any secular authority who would dare attempt to prosecute those rapes as ordinary crimes. It’s there because the church you so favor has systematically silenced and punished anyone who brought allegations of child rape to secular authorities. It’s there because the church you so favor had a policy in place, signed by the man who is now Pope, for moving pedophile priests from parish to parish, and sequestering them in remote corners of the world, so that their ever-growing resumes of raped children wouldn’t get too heavy in one place or draw the public eye. It’s there because the church you so favor, now that it’s finally being called to task for systematically concealing the rapes of more children than the country of Luxembourg has people, for 1700 years, its response was not to apologize for traumatizing thousands of children currently alive and untold millions more throughout history, or to immediately remit into police custody everyone they knew was raping children, but to keep stonewalling until the last possible second and to blame absolutely everyone else for the actions of thousands of priests sheltered by official policy signed by the Pope, including the raped children themselves.

It’s there because the church you so favor claims its authority from an unbelievably badly written book riddled with genocidal, bigoted, patriarchal horror, whose only redeeming feature is a smattering of moral truths that were old thousands of years before Jesus’s supposed lifetime, and has spent nearly 2000 years paying people to weave elegantly contrived sophistries to either justify or handwave away those monstrosities, as the morals of a given period demanded. It’s there because the church you so favor claims the mantle of moral superiority every chance it gets but has to be dragged kicking and screaming through every social revolution, always at least a century behind. It’s there because the church you so favor has sided with villains as renowned as the Nazi Party of Germany when it proved convenient and discarded those connections whenever they no longer heightened the church’s public esteem. It’s there because the church you so favor has as its top priority, from beginning to end, its own aggrandizement, with the well-being of its laity not even on the list.

It’s there because the church you so favor, and the thousands of others just like it, have defined a god that would eternally torment people for being insufficiently pious as “loving.”

It’s there because people like you—intelligent, thoughtful people like you—see all of those crimes, and keep going. It’s there because people like you claim to be utterly appalled at your church’s crimes against humanity, but you keep putting money in the collection plate, even though you know exactly the evil that money funds. It’s there because people like you are convinced that allegiance to the Catholic Church is a good in itself, despite the FACT that this allegiance contributes to a list of crimes against humanity I have only begun to enumerate, despite the FACT that this allegiance makes the world a worse place for all of us in a thousand terrifying ways. It’s there because people like you see the Church’s charities (universally worse at their job than secular charities) and its role in defeating Communism and think that makes everything else okay. It’s there because people like you look at African AIDS victims and suicidal gay teenagers and enslaved single mothers and people trapped in poverty by an unplanned pregnancy and say with sanctimonious pride that they brought their fate on themselves and should look forward to their eternal torment. It’s there because the church you so favor BROUGHT THAT SUFFERING ON THEM, AND PROUDLY CONTINUES TO DO SO.

It’s there because people like you look at people like us, people like my beloved and me, who refuse under any circumstances to even appear to support that level of cartoonish, monstrous evil, like there’s something wrong with US.

No, sir. My atheism is not behind my problem with the Catholic Church. The Church has that pretty much in hand by being utterly, shamelessly evil and expecting us to thank them for not being even more evil than that. My atheism is merely why I see no need to invent a thousand intricate rationalizations for why the supposed font of all moral truth and mouthpiece of an all-loving supreme being devotes so much of its energy to torturing to death anyone it doesn’t like. My atheism is merely why I didn’t have to choose between being a devout, practicing believer and not supporting the world’s oldest and most successful criminal enterprise.

My atheism is merely why I see this evil so much more clearly than you do.

You remember that next time you look down on us because we don’t respect or share your delusions.
“Where Does your Hatred Come From?”