navel gazing

Popular Tastes Frighten Me

jacob3 Comments
I took some time away from the blogging to mess about with Project Playlist and my Amazon recommendations. The results have been instructive.

First off, it disturbs me that Amazon thinks I want Madonna CDs just because I bought Duran Duran and U2. They need to develop a smarter program, one that can look at the totality of purchases and say, “While Dana might appreciate a few cheesy pop bands, things like Madonna are right out. Let’s not make her want to projectile vomit this evening.”

Second thing, I can pretty much tell just from the search results if I’m going to like the music. If the artist search returns more than a few selections, it’s probably not my cup o’ tea.

It’s an interesting aspect of my psychology. There are a few things that take the culture at large by storm that I adore – take Batman, for instance – but my tastes usually run to the obscure. I don’t usually run with the pop culture crowd. When I worked for a bookstore, I was able to determine which books would make me want to flick a Bic by the number of people salivating over them. That helped me avoid a lot of utter crap. Like John Gray. *Shudder.*

Music’s no different. People love to ask me what I listen to, and when I tell them they’ve never heard of it, they get all puffed-up. “I have eclectic tastes!” they announce. “Bet you I’ll know it!”

After I’ve bludgeoned them with Emperor, Dimmu Borgir, Nightwish, Operatica, Epica, Sirenia, and Blind Guardian, they usually give up, eyes glazed and neurons fused. There’s only so many times you can ask, “What kind of music are they?” before you realize you owe me a dollar.

Thanks to Amazon and Project Playlist, I’ll now have a new batch of fun. How many here have heard of Delain? Combichrist? Helium Vola? Estampie? Jon Oliva’s Pain?

I thought as much. But that’s okay – my tastes aren’t your tastes. Understandable.

The thing that really climbs up my nose is when people who listen to every pop phenomenon that hits the airwaves, watch every episode of Survivor, and read whatever tripe Danielle Steele’s spewed out now try to claim they’re eclectic. Loving everything everybody else does doesn’t make you eclectic – it just means you’re a trend slave. Which can be fun and fulfilling, I’m sure, but for fuck’s sake, know your limits. Don’t try to go head-to-head with a black metal chick with a heavy appreciation of the symphonic who didn’t pass out when read Chuck Palahniuk’s story “Guts.”

It’s an accomplishment:


While on his 2003 tour to promote his novel Diary, Palahniuk read to his audiences a short story titled “Guts”, a tale of accidents involving masturbation, which appears in his book Haunted. It was reported that to that point, 40 people had fainted while listening to the readings.[13] Playboy magazine would later publish the story in their March 2004 issue; Palahniuk offered to let them publish another story along with it, but the publishers found the second work too disturbing.

Yup.
And if you want to know the truth, Chuck’s works disturb me a lot less than pop culture. I just don’t get pop phenomina. And it frankly terrifies me that millions upon millions of people’s imaginations get captured by such things as Brittany Spears.

Paris Hilton.

American Idol.

Chicken Soup for the Soul.

Excuse me, please. I suddenly feel faint…
Popular Tastes Frighten Me
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Don't Start a Religion in My Name!

jacob12 Comments

Every novel comes with a standard disclaimer:

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.


The disclaimer itself is a brilliant work of legal fiction. I think everybody knows by now that authors filch shamelessly from real life. Resemblances are far from coincidental. Everybody just pretends otherwise when it comes time to go to court.

That disclaimer shall have to be expanded when I publish my magnum opus:

This work of fiction is entirely made up (aside from those bits the author filched from real life, like the entire city of Seattle, WA), and should not be used as a manual, scripture, handbook or other guide to live your life by. No matter how much you make like and/or agree with the gods, spirits, xenospecies, characters, ideas, faiths, worldviews, etc. contained herein, any attempts to start a religion in the author’s and/or characters’ names is strictly prohibited. Willing suspension of disbelief should only be employed within the pages of this book. Critical faculties
should be fully utilized once the cover is closed. The author is not responsible for the havoc wreaked by over-enthusiastic fans and their inability to separate fictional reality from actual reality.

And if you attempt to name your children after the aliens, planets, offworld locales, ships, or other completely made up shit contained within this book, the author reserves the right to fetch you a right ding round the earhole on behalf of your humiliated offspring.


All right, so I’ll need a lawyer to couch that in legalise, but you get the idea.

I seriously worry about this stuff, and with good reason. I’ve heard of the spate of Galadriels and Arawens that occurred after people read too much Lord of the Rings. I’ve seen the lines of folks dressed up in Star Wars gear, camped out for days waiting for the next giant turd George Lucas serves up. I knew a man who regularly wore his Star Trek: TNG captain’s uniform and knew how to say “Take your ticket and get on the damned boat” in Klingon. The fact he worked for a boat rental outfit on Lake Powell and thus had good reason for learning that particular phrase is beside the point.

But the worst, absolute most horrifying, moment was when a college roommate perused my map of Athesea, plunked her finger down on it, and said, “If I have a son, I’m going to name him Daneth!”

I explained to her in no uncertain terms that no, she bloody well would not name her son after a valley on Athesea. No child should have to suffer the massive bullshit a name like that would bring down on him. After I explained the taunting, teasing, and incomprehension that poor child would likely endure, she agreed that Daneth was probably not a very good name for a boy after all.

But I can’t be there for every fan. I can’t tell each of them personally that while I’m flattered they loved my story so much they want to dress like my characters, learn their language, follow their gods, and destroy children’s lives with names that sound wonderful in the book, if they do any of the aforementioned things, I shall be forced to beat some sense into them.

Some of it would be harmless, yes. We all have fun playing someone else for a while. It’s just that I don’t know how the hell I’d react at a book signing if faced with some poor dipshit dressed to the nines with two fake swords swinging from his or her hips, bubbling over with enthusiasm about how utterly awesome the Xtaleans are. And what people might do trying to imitate my Unicorns doesn’t even bear thinking about. I’m either going to burst out laughing, sobbing, screaming, or all three.

I don’t mind folks taking inspiration from what I write. Some of the issues I write about, I’d love it if that’s the way the world worked. If my book inspires some people to give up their fear of teh gays, stop killing each other over religion, and treat the planet with more respect, that’s fantastic. That’s part of what I’d like them to think more about. Fiction is, after all, a way of telling the truth through lies. You can learn a lot about yourself, fellow humans, and the world by approaching it through the eyes of fictional characters.

However.

Comma.

I do not, repeat not, want to hear that the Church of Scientology suddenly has a rival based off a novel by Dana Hunter.

I don’t want to hear about people worshipping Tarlah, because a) he’s a construct of my mind and b) he’s not even a bloody god nor c) a bloody he, when it comes right down to it.

And there’s going to be at least one person who swears up and down they’ve heard my message and they’re prepared for the secret war against Sha’daal. I can see that one coming ten thousand miles away. After all, I hung about with a guy in high school who thought Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series wasn’t so much excellent fantasy as concise history. OMFG. Shoot me now.

So I’m putting this out here now, so that I can refer the wankers who can’t separate fantasy from reality back here before I try to bash some sense back into them with a three-pound hardcover book. I want them to read the following sentence carefully:

Do not under any circumstances mistake fiction for reality.

My characters can and should seem real. My worlds can and should seem like actual places. That’s what the willing suspension of disbelief is all about. But they aren’t bleeding real.

And it shall go very hard for any reader who believes otherwise.

Do any of you other fiction writers in the audience ever worry about this kind of shit?

Don't Start a Religion in My Name!

The Consolation of Faithlessness

jacob3 Comments

PZ Myers recently posted an email on Pharyngula that reminded me of all I left behind:

I’m tormented.

I appreciate the struggle many creationists are having about evolutionary science. I find myself tormented as I observe the world around me.

Quite the cri de coeur, isn’t it? I recognize it well. Now mind you, I was never tormented over evolutionary biology – even in my very brief period of true belief, evolution didn’t bother me overmuch. Thought God was great, didn’t I? Clever enough bugger to have used evolution to create lil ol’ us. My problem with evolution was exactly the same as it is now – I don’t know half as much about it as I’d like.

But trust me when I say I was tormented.

Hard not to be, really, when you’re a thinking person. I observed the world around me, and found a lot of fuckery that tended to disprove the notion of a loving, personal God. Awful lot of killing, raping, stealing, and so forth going on. Too many Christian sects fighting each other tooth and nail over ridiculous bits of doctrine. Too many other religions out there that had good ideas and good people believing in them. Too many contradictions between the evidence of the Bible and the evidence of my eyes.

Those pat answers about things all being part of God’s plan, sometimes the answer to a prayer is “no,” bad things happening because of some kind of sin, none of that sat well with me. I couldn’t swallow it.

One of the reasons was that my paternal grandmother died in terrible pain. And the more religious I got, the more it didn’t make sense. Live a good life and you’ll be rewarded. God will take care of you if you only believe. Well, she lived a good life. Never smoked, never drank, never blasphemed. A kind, generous Christian woman got eaten alive by breast cancer. I remember one of her arms swelled up to grotesque proportions because her cancer had metasticized. I remember her pain and hot flashes. And yet she bore it all, and as far as I know never wavered in her faith. How to reconcile that with a God who can perform miracles? I know others manage to explain it away as part of a mysterious Plan, but when I thought about it, I couldn’t put my faith in a God who would allow a good woman to die hard.

It wasn’t just her.

I had Hindu friends. Fantastic people whom I loved very much. And according to my church, God would condemn them to everlasting torment for worshipping the wrong gods.

My life was suddenly constricted to a list of outmoded moral prohibitions that made about as much sense as putting child rapists in a position of authority over alter boys. Set a foot wrong, and I’d piss off God. And really, who knew what pissed God off? It seemed God was awfully fickle in what was allowed and what wasn’t.

We’re told to pray about things, and God will provide. Let go and let God. Put your trust in the Lord. Well, that works better if you’re getting unequivocal answers. Was it coincidence or God’s will that what I prayed for happened? Was it God’s will or just the way of things that what I prayed for didn’t happen? How the fuck was I supposed to know when the bastard didn’t have the decency to tell me outright? Why speak to some people, but not all of us?

I could go on, but any of you who’ve ever flirted with being a true believer knows exactly what happened. It was probably my writing that saved me from years of torment and cognitive dissonance. You see, I had to study up on science for the worldbuilding, and the more science I read, the more rational my thinking became. Answers I couldn’t find through prayer, I could find through science.

It wasn’t just science. I wasn’t writing a Christian series, and it wasn’t like aliens were likely to have heard the gospel of Christ anyway, so I had to study comparative religion to get an idea of what their faith might look like. And a lot of those religions made more sense to me than Christianity. Many didn’t claim an omnipotent Creator who liked to poke his nose in and occasionally cock the finger to smite. The Divine suddenly seemed a lot bigger than expected, a lot more remote, and a lot more comfortable.

So some of the torment vanished when I became agnostic. It still didn’t go completely away. All religions make claims that you can’t prove, many of which don’t make any sense. And the more science I read, the more I started seeing that every religion was a set of human ideas. Neurobiology explained a fuck of a lot about why we believe what we do. And that prepared me to finally let go of the need for the Divine.

It’s amazing what happened next.

When I lost my faith completely, when I stopped looking for something supernatural behind the curtain, I stopped feeling tormented. The faint worry that I’d earned myself a ticket to a place hotter than Phoenix went away. The conflict between a benevolent Divinity and a harsh world vanished. When there was nothing in my world that wasn’t natural, when there wasn’t a single thing people did that couldn’t be explained by how the brain functions (or doesn’t, depending on who you’re talking about), things were suddenly easier to take. The evil of the world isn’t down to an angry deity or some variety of sin, but is simply a result of humans being humans. And if it’s humans, not demons, not Satan, doing the evil, it’s humans that can stop it.

We don’t have to rely on a deity. We can rely on ourselves.

Some people find that terrifying. They can’t take responsibility. But I’m not one of them. I’m fine with it all being down to our own choices. I think we’ll do a hell of a lot better doing for ourselves rather than expecting God to do for us. It’s too easy to give up when you have a god to rely on. It’s too easy to act the child and expect your deity to take care of you when you should be taking care of yourself.

I got to grow up when I accepted the fact that not once scintilla of evidence proved that some sort of Divine Presence existed. I got to take responsibility. It doesn’t always work out, but at least I have only myself to blame. It’s far, far easier than trying not to blame God.

Not relying on magical thinking gets me to solutions a lot faster. I could do a ritual something to ensure the result I want, or I could take the concrete steps to make it possible. Concrete steps, it turns out, work a fuck of a lot better than magical thinking.

I’ve discovered a confidence I’ve never had before, being an atheist. I’m not constantly pestered by a niggling fear that God doesn’t want me to know, do or understand something. The limits are gone. Since I no longer believe anything’s possible as long as my faith is strong enough, I don’t end up doubting myself half as much. Some things aren’t possible. Some things are vaguely possible. And some things are probable, especially if I take steps to make them so. If something doesn’t turn out the way I wanted it to, I’m not doubting the strength of my faith: I’m

laughing at the ineptness of my planning, or the way that life throws up variables that you never even considered, but which turned out to be rather important. There’s no faith to be shaken, so I’m not asking “Why?” There’s no angry god behind the whys and wherefores, just the vagaries of life.

You can get irritated and angered by, but not at, vagaries of life. Makes it a lot less personal and a lot easier to let go of, that. “I’ll know better next time” has become something of a mantra. There’s a lot more laughter involved with that way of thinking. A lot more confidence that what fucked up my cunning scheme this time won’t happen the next.

There’s no more torment. I’m not locked in to a single path with no alternative routes if something goes wrong. That’s liberating, that is. And that’s why I laugh when people try to tell me I have to have faith.

What possible reason would I have to give up the consolation of my faithlessness? I haven’t found one yet. I doubt I ever will.


The Consolation of Faithlessness

The Story Behind the Name

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By way of having a wee bit o’ fun before I dive back into the substantive stuff, and because one of our Brians has expressed a desire to know more about me and our most excellent George W. said very sweet things about my pen name, I shall now tell you the story behind it.
I realized early on in my writing career that if I wanted to avoid the urge to thump people on the head with hardcover copies of my book at book signings, I’d have to choose a different name. My legal surname lends itself to a single ridiculous joke that gets repeated ad nauseum. Many poor buggers wouldn’t resist the urge, and thus would end up with lumps. This is not a recipe for good public relations.
There was also the small problem of one of my characters filching my first name and refusing to give it back. And just try explaining to people that, although one of your characters shares your first name, she is a) most definitely not you, meant to represent you, or really anything like you and b) this isn’t an ego trip or the author playing stupid writer tricks on innocent readers.
So, a pen name it would have to be.
Choosing a pen name is not easy. You can’t just snatch the name of your favorite Star Trek character and run with it. You can’t use something snarky and pithy if you’re writing Serious Speculative Fiction. The damned thing has to have a little gravitas. It has to roll off the tongue, so it’s easy for people to remember when they’re asking after your latest work of profound genius. It should have a little hidden meaning and symbolism to give it some cachet. It, above all, has to be easy to sign 42,000 times in a row.
I went through pen names like I go through toilet paper. Should I do initials? T.N. Mordecai sounded good, until Mordecai started sounding too religious and silly. And what the fuck did T.N. stand for, anyway? I can’t remember most of the others, and I probably haven’t got the list anymore. Just know that there were a lot of very ill-conceived names in the running, and a few good ones, and they all got dumped in the recycle bin when I at last achieved the Perfect Pen Name.
“Dana” comes from Celtic mythology. The ridiculous little book on Celtic Magic I was reading in order to understand the character who had pilfered my actual first name claimed that Dana was the Great Goddess, and patron of many things, writing and intellect included. I suspect the author pulled most of the symbolism out of her ass, but it worked for me. Dana had a nice ring to it, belonged to an Irish goddess who shared my interests, and incidentally also belonged to Dana Scully, the World’s Greatest Skeptic. What X-Files fan could resist? Dana worked. Dana I would be.
Insert long period of trying to come up with the right surname here. And we won’t even go into the great debates I had with myself over whether my pen name should come complete with middle name.
We turn now to C.S. Friedman, and her delightful anti-hero, Gerald Tarrant. Most anti-heroes turn out to be heroes in tarnished armor. Not Tarrant. He started the Coldfire Trilogy as a bastard, and he remained a bastard, despite a few great sacrifices and some revelations that made his bastardry entirely understandable. He was smooth, suave, ruthless, and infuriatingly likable even though you knew he deserved to be brought down like a rabid dog. Friedman did a masterful job with that character: he never changed, not fundamentally, but your perception of him certainly did. I wanted to write an anti-hero that brilliant. I’d finally seen proof it could be done.
And in him, I had the second half of my pen name. You see, Gerald Tarrant is known as The Hunter.
Not bad, eh?
The Story Behind the Name

Random Musings on Becoming Dana Hunter

jacob4 Comments

I’ll be posting a write-up of my two (count them, two!) events with PZ Myers later on Saturday for your reading pleasure. He’s a fascinating speaker, a lot funnier and interesting than he’ll admit to. He’s also a genuinely nice guy. Being nice doesn’t mean he’ll compromise his values, though, and that’s certainly given me food for thought.

Right now, though, I’m coming down from an extremely eventful week, and I’m going to chew over some of the more personal ramifications. Feel free to skip. It’s all navel-gazing from here, I’m afraid. Well, aside from the shameless praise of my readers, so maybe there’s something in it for you after all.

Those of you who’ve been around here long enough, or gotten curious enough to click over to me website, know that Dana Hunter is a nom de plume. Possibly even a nom de guerre, the way things are going. I’m assuming the Seattle Skeptic’s group I just joined this week is also aware of this fact, as I gave them a wee bit o’ a clue in my profile (i.e., explained the above).

I’ve been introducing myself as Dana Hunter all week. It’s the name folks know from online, ye see, and seeing as how I was meeting PZ Myers as well as a fair number of Pharyngula readers, I figured it would be simpler that way. And damn it, I like my pen name. Those of you who know my legal name know exactly why that is.

The strange thing is, I’ve become Dana Hunter. I’m sure every author who writes under a pseudonym goes through this at some point: moving from awkward to perfectly comfortable with the alternate identity, finding that it doesn’t matter which name is given because the underlying person is the same. It’s just that one name is recognized and the other’s not. I’m sure this is going to get a lot more common – I already have friends I wouldn’t dream of referring to by any other name than the one they use on the internet. And at least this time, I didn’t have a cautious dad doing a double-take when his son introduced me under one name and he found out I was born with another.

This is also the first time I’ve been recognized by strangers. When I started this blog, I had no idea that was going to happen. Eventually, people coming up and saying, “You’re Dana Hunter, aren’t you?” will become common place. Right now, it’s a novelty. And a flattering one at that. Thank you!

I’m going to take some credit for that recognition – after all, I’m the one who writes most of the shite for this cantina – but a huge chunk of the credit is down to the readers. An author is nothing without readers. Some authors forget that, and take the appreciation as their due. I never will. I may not always have the time to respond to each of you individually, but I hope I’ll always manage to get across the fact that I appreciate each and every one of you. I’m constantly amazed that I managed to attract such an amazing community of readers. Writing is something of a reward in and of itself, but what I’ve always wanted is you – intelligent, engaging, and wonderful people who actually enjoy reading what I write. It’s overwhelming to realize that’s happened.

On top of that, I’ve roped in some truly brilliant co-bloggers. They keep this blog from degenerating into What Dana’s Pissed About Now. I hope you all enjoy their perspectives as much as I do.

So, I’ll go back to work on Sunday a different person than when I left. I’m one co-blogger, one Skeptic’s group, two PZ lectures, and one phenominal Carnival of the Elitist Bastards linked to by Pharyngula richer. I’ve become Dana Hunter. None of that could have happened without you.

Don’t you forget it.

Random Musings on Becoming Dana Hunter

I Was a Victim of New Math

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Efrique has two posts up that I’m certain are a tour de force of mathematics. I deduce they are not because I understand the math, but because I know that Efrique is a genius and his logic in other areas has never failed me.

I don’t understand the math because of this:

Back when I was in school, I sailed through English and foundered on mathematics. My brain looks at numbers, screams, and flees. I blame the way math is taught.

I struggled with basic math for many years, until I hit a point in early middle school when things went “click.” My sails filled with a good wind. I skimmed the waves of numbers. Each new concept slotted perfectly into place: we were plotting a good course, and there seemed nothing ahead but open ocean and the shores of Calculus sometime after a pleasant journey.

As soon as I reached 5 knots, my teachers, in their infinite wisdom, decided I could skip the rest of the basics and move right on to pre-algebra. For some children, this might have been a good move. They’re the ones who “get it” intuitively. For me, it was a disaster. It was like telling a sailor that since he’s so good at navigating by sight, he’s ready to strike out across the open ocean.

And then, there was the Book.

I can’t really describe my pre-algebra book. I remember very little of it. I just remember the look on my father’s face when, disappointed by his daughter’s inability to understand the simplest algebraic concepts, he sat down one night and lectured. Couldn’t understand why I didn’t understand, why I was failing, math is the easiest thing in the world, it’s simple and obvious and –

-then he opened the book, looked at a problem, and stopped mid-rant.

And stared.

His forehead creased. A little thunderhead formed above his eyebrows. He turned red. He opened his mouth, closed it, looked at a few more problems, and looked at me in utter disgust as I quailed.

“No wonder you don’t understand math,” he snapped. “What is this shit?”

We then spent a delightful hour wherein he ripped the book a new one, while I watched his wrath in awe. He hated that book with a passion.

I never did recover momentum. The wind had been sucked from my sails, the hull staved in, and not even my father could right the ship. Part of that was because he worked 16-hour days and just didn’t have the necessary time. Part of it was because we couldn’t find any sane math books. And the rest was because I’d already taken a berth on another ship, and was starting to chart a literary course.

I would have focused all of my energy and attention on comprehending math, however, if I’d known that as an SF author, I’d someday need the bloody stuff for incidental details like planetary mass and gravitational force, orbits, and a billion other things that go into making a story universe work. I can’t do even the simplest calculations.

One day, I keep telling myself, I’ll take the time to rebuild the ship. I’ll start with regular math and follow every iteration until I finally reach the promised land of calculus. Only, there’s never time. And that impoverishes me. There’s a whole world described in math that I’ll never see and only vaguely comprehend.

When it comes for the math underlying my books, I’ll just have to fake it.

Good thing I can cuss like a sailor, then, eh?

I Was a Victim of New Math

Dancing on Top of the World

jacob2 Comments

You know that giddy kind of excitement when you can’t sit still, your eyes start to tear up, you randomly squeal, and your face is twitching?

Yeah. That’s me. Right now.

Lots o’ reasons.

For one, this blog has attracted an amazing group of truly incredible people, and a whole passel of truly incredible people joined the incredible people already here over this weekend. That would have been enough to set my feet a-tappin’.

Then work was slow, and I actually got to catch up on some of my blog reading. Why can’t I find a company willing to pay me to read your blogs? That’s how I want to spend my days. I don’t get enough time with you guys. The fact that I got time today has me ready to jig.

But wait! There’s more.

Got an email from PZ. Seems I’m going to be among the hosts of the Tangled Bank. There’s finally going to be real science in this cantina!!1!11!!

The neighbors are now wondering if we’re having an earthquake. But there’s more:

Next week, I have my best friend flying in from North Carolina. I haven’t seen him in person since 2005.

Plaster falls from the ceiling. And there’s still more:

I get to attend PZ’s lecture at the Pacific Science Center for the Northwest Science Writer’s Association.

Science writers! PZ! My best friend! WOOT!

The building begins to shake. Tibetans reach for some pegs. And that’s not all:

PZ is also speaking to the Seattle Society for Sensible Explanations. PZ! Seattle skeptics! Alliteration! Fine dining! SUPER WOOT!

Dana has now left the building and is headed skyward, Tibetan efforts to nail her down be damned. And as if that’s not enough:

Brian Switek’s book-in-progress is going to have a whole chapter on horse evolution! He’ll write up horse evolution in terms even I can understand, which means I’ll understand enough horse evolution to be able to figure out how the fuck my Unicorns evolved. Triple WOOT!

The air. Grows thin. Limbs. Akimbo. And we’re not done:

Blake Stacey saw Neil Gaiman speak, the elitist bastard. I haven’t seen Neil Gaiman since 2001. I didn’t get my application in for Clarion, and so missed the chance to maybe possibly attend a writing workshop with Neil fucking Gaiman omfg!, but Blake’s writing up the lecture soon, and AND it’ll be out on DVD. Not enough WOOTs in the damned world.

This is the top of the world. This is me dancing on it. Just in case you were wondering what the hell all that shaking was about.

Dancing on Top of the World

An Atheist's Long Ramble About Religion

jacob4 Comments

As I’m about to dive into the night’s fiction work, I’m reminded of one of the bajillion reasons I left church behind.

The attitude of the church I went to so briefly could be summed up thusly: “I don’t know much about God, but I’d say we’ve built a pretty good cage for him.” (Oh, how I wish I’d actually seen that Simpson’s episode rather than merely hearing it described!) Not that the people I went to church with would’ve admitted the first bit. They were absolutely convinced they, and exclusively they, knew everything there was to know about God.

One of the things they knew was that every other religion not only had it wrong, but was pure evil to boot.

I wish I’d had Rowan Atkinson’s delightful A Warm Welcome to quote back then: “And finally, Christians. Ah, yes, I’m sorry – I’m afraid the Jews were right.”

I never could get the niggling sense that nobody had the exclusive claim to the truth out of my head. The life of a bleating sheep was never the life for me. You see, I had this terrible penchant for reading history and thinking subversive thoughts like, “Wow. The flood myth shows up in Ancient Sumeria – somebody’s been plagarizing.” And, “Kung Fu Tzu came up with the Golden Rule before the Jews. Interesting, that.” And, “What’s wrong with Allah? He’s God, too – says so right in the Qu’ran. Look – Abraham and Jesus are even in there!”

Point being, I enjoyed other religions immensely, and it irritated the bugshit out of me when some self-righteous little fucker would tell me that all of those other religions were just myths, or worse, lies told by Satan.

“I’ve read Job,” I’d say. “Satan and God seemed pretty tight. Oh, and did you know that in the Old Testament, Satan means ‘adversary’? That’s all Satan is – not the ultimate evil, just a speedbump.”

They never liked that much. Can’t fathom why.

Even as a child, I’d think unChristian thoughts, such as, “Why is the Bible supposedly true, but all the Greek and Roman religion’s just myth?” No one could ever prove to me the “truth” of one over the other. (Evangelizing Christians in the audience, open your Bibles and find the “shake the dust from your sandals” verse. You’re gonna need it if you start trying to prove the truth of God over all the other gods ’round here. I’ll sic Woozle on you, see if I don’t.)

Religion, as far as I could tell, made smart people stupid. They got so obsessed with proving God literally true and the Bible infallible that they tied themselves into complicated knots trying to explain away the innumerable contradictions in the Bible. It’s amusing, to be sure, but pathetic. Their God, it seems, was incapable of using allegory as a teaching tool. I once saw a thirteen-year old annihilate a Bible literalist. Twasn’t pretty. Someday, I shall tell you that story.

Christians who see the Bible as allegory fare a lot better, and their God looks a lot smarter. Come to think of it, that’s true for just about everybody’s gods and holy stories, isn’t it?

So. The claims to exclusive truth, the pathological fear of other religions and ideas, and the penchant of calling anything that didn’t fit a terribly restricted worldview “evil,” all of those things cemented my determination to never ever again make the mistake of joining a congregation. I felt I was missing out on a lot of interesting shit by letting these silly buggers dictate what I could and could not know, and I was right.

I mean, imagine what the next few days’ research would look like if I were restricted to the fundamentalist Christian view of things? Actually, come to think of it, there wouldn’t be a next few days’ research. I wouldn’t have the Ahc’ton as heroes, now, would I, because reincarnation ain’t part of the bargain.

I wouldn’t be slogging my way through Aristotle’s De Anima right now, and wouldn’t be making a beeline for research on the Tulku next.

I wouldn’t have Shiva Nataraja dancing on ignorance on my shelf. I wouldn’t be wondering just where the bloody hell Green Tara ran off to… shit. Oh, there she is, right beside Shiva. And there’s Ganesha. Hello, you.

Had I stayed with that very restrictive brand of Christianity that I flirted with for a few months way back when, I would still be writing insipid, theologically safe tripe if I was writing at all. Sure as fuck wouldn’t be writing a series of books that draw very heavily on Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, and Norse themes. Would’ve never experienced the pleasure of “Thou art that,” and a thousand other truly breathtaking mythological themes. Good and evil would have been in black and white rather than the fascinating shades of gray I get to wrestle with.

Yes, I have a lot of religious symbols and themes for an atheist. Being an atheist allows me to filch from whomever I like, guilt-free. These ideas are powerful. They’re interesting. They’re frequently fun.

Some religious folks accuse atheists of wanting to do away with all religion, and some atheists certainly lean that way. I’m not one. What I’d like to see vanish from the world is the pig-headedness of religious folks who think their religion is the one-and-only, and want to make sure everybody else thinks exactly the same. That’s a tragedy, to me. That’s an impoverishment and an offence against God. I’d be pretty pissed if I were the omniscient, omnipotent Divinity that kept getting stuffed into little cages, my power and variety denied. After all, if God is all, God really is all: every single human religion, past, present and future, has a little snippet of the Truth.

That’s the conclusion I came to as an agnostic, anyway, before I woke up one day and realized I’d become an atheist somewhere along the way. But I’m an atheist who loves what religious ideas say about life, the Universe and everything, about being human, about the power of ideas. And I’d like to see a world where those ideas have perfect freedom to coexist. Some religious folks seem to feel the same way. They’re just as fascinated by other ways of belief as I am. They appreciate them, welcome them, threaten nobody with hell for preferring one path over the other, and those are the religious folks I’d like to see come into power.

Would certainly be a world filled with a lot less fanatics playing silly buggers, now, wouldn’t it?

No Ray Comfort and his bananas. No DIsco. No Expelled.

…

…..Come to think of it, I’d lose a major source of my daily entertainment…..

Thankee gods I’d still have politicians to bash.

Click on the Ray Comfort link, my darlings. Seriously. Just swallow any liquids before you do so. Trust me, your computer will thank you for it.

An Atheist's Long Ramble About Religion

Adventures with a Christian Desk Mate

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Mellowness has overcome me. I’m thoroughly baked, the breeze is blowing and the frogs are singing, the fountain serenades and – well, I should clean the damned cat box, and this room needs a thorough scrub, but life is still beautiful.

The California Supremes issued a spectacular ruling that put gay marriage ahead by decades and is causing the right-wing radio hosts to blow vessels. FSM has put in an appearance in Tennessee. I’ve read some damned fine submissions to the Carnival of the Elitist Bastards, and, well, it’s hard to work up a good head of steam in these circumstances.

So instead of bashing the stupid, I want to tell you all an amusing story from my callow youth.

I worked at one of the best call centers in the Universe. We offered one of the best paying jobs in Flagstaff, so we had a – dare I say it? – elite workforce. Many of my best friends to this day are the ones I met there: wonderful, wise, witty and wicked folks one could have wide-ranging, intelligent conversations with. The corporate office liked our numbers, so they let us have free reign to do as we willed. That meant that creativity, innovation, and near-autonomy were ours. We used and abused the privilege. Odd people like myself thrived.

One could feel free to stamp their personality upon their desk, and I had done with mine. I’d printed out nice little posters for myself. One was a quote from the Tao Te Ching:

Look, it cannot be seen – it is beyond form.
Listen, it cannot be heard – it is beyond sound.
Grasp, it cannot be held – it is intangible.
From above it is not bright:
From below it is not dark:
An unbroken thread beyond description…

-14

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can known good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy compliment each other.

-9

I had a quote from the Qu’ran:

When the sun shall be darkened,
When the stars shall be thrown down,
When the mountains shall be set moving,
When the pregnant camels shall be neglected,
When the savage beasts shall be mustered,
When the seas shall be set alight,
When the infant girl buried alive shall be asked
for what crime she has been slain,
When the records of men’s deeds shall be laid open,
When the heavens shall be stripped bare,
When Hell shall be set blazing,
When paradise shall be brought near,
Then each soul shall know what it has done.

I had a poem from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: The Kindly Ones:

All around me darkness gathers,
Fading is the sun that shone;
We must speak of other matters:
You can be me when I’m gone.

And I had this delightful ancient poem Gaiman quoted in The Sandman: The Sound of Her Wings:

Death is before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden
after sickness.

Death is before me today:
Like the odor of myrrh,
Like sitting under a sail in a good wind.

Death is before me today:
Like the course of a stream,
Like the return of a man from the
war-galley to his house.

Death is before me today:
Like the home that a man longs to see,
After years spent as a captive.

I didn’t yet have George the Gargoyle with his red flashing eyes. He came later, and it’s probably a good thing for his sake, considering what my desk mate did to the little 8 1/2 x 11 homemade posters.

The bane of working the night shift in a crowded call center is that you get to desk share with the early morning folk. It wasn’t generally a problem, unless you ended up matched with Gail “OMG You Got a Pencil Mark on the Desk!!1!111!” T. I wasn’t paired with Gail, and so didn’t have to worry about her ever-encroaching collection of kitschy ceramic angels and her penchant for leaving severely obsessive-compulsive notes. But I started to notice a pattern: I’d come in, and my little posters on my half of the cubicle would be crooked. Odd, that. I didn’t think much of it until I noticed the growing collection of tack holes where someone hadn’t been paying attention staking them back to the wall.

Well, I couldn’t well have tattered corners, could I? I left a kindly little note saying to leave the posters alone. The holes continued to accumulate. Dishevelment continued. I left a rather more annoyed and sternly-worded note saying that if I found one more extraneous tack hole, we’d have to have a chat about respecting others’ property.

A few days later, I get called in to an Inquisition.

My desk mate, it turns out, was a rabid Christian, and quotes from the Tao Te Ching and the Qu’ran gave her blessed little heart palpitations. And instead of simply saying so, she decided she needed to bring in the heavy artillery: two managers and the HR supervisor.

She was seriously terrified that if she confronted the evil heathen with her discomfort, I’d do something horrible. Seriously.

The supervisors let her speak. They couldn’t say anything themselves. They were trying too hard not to laugh. They knew me, you see, and they thought the whole thing ridiculous beyond words.

The quivering Christian launched into a speech you could tell had taken days for her to gather the courage for, about how Christian she was, and how it disturbed her to look at my little posters, and on and on. She was pale, sweating, and shaky, with a distinct quaver in her voice, and there I was, sitting there listening to a whole lotta “I’m terrified to even glance at a world view that’s different than mine” schlock with rapidly growing disbelief. I’d never thought anyone could be that fucking terrified of a few poetic words.

As I said, I was young and naive.

She finally wound down. Silence fell. And then I said, “Look, there’s a simple solution here. Get a big poster and put it up over mine every day. I’ll just set it aside so I can have my own stuff when I get in. And I’ll be sure to put the tacks through their original holes when I replace it.”

The supervisors nearly clapped. The Christian looked pole-axed. She’d never expected a heathen to come up with a reasonable compromise. I don’t know exactly what her church told her about people of other faiths, but it must have been richly detailed and completely bass-ackwards.

The next day, when I come in, there’s this ginormous poster up over my wall with the most insipid fucking poem in the universe on
it. You know, the kind of touchy-feely plebeian poem that makes real poets want to vomit. The kind of thing that only offends people with taste, because it’s meant to be as bland and ecumenical and inspirational as possible. Someday, someone needs to explain to me why it is that devout Christians have no fucking taste.

After that day, peace and goodwill descended upon all, except when I’d catch a glimpse of that crime against poetry upon taking it down for the day. Everyone in the call center agreed: my quotes kicked her poem’s ass. And I’d won all the brownie points. My supervisors saw me as the mature one, the peacemaker, while my Christian desk mate had proven herself an immature little git. There’s a certain contempt well-adjusted Christians have for their brethren when the brethren’s acting like whiny little brats that’s worse than any contempt an atheist can show.

That episode was my first introduction to the world of grown-ups who were too God-blind to grow up. It started me on the never-ending quest to answer the “What the fuck are they so afraid of if their God kicks so much ass?” question.

And I pass the story down to you, my darlings, because it’s always useful to know that a good copy of the Qu’ran or the Tao Te Ching will make all but the most determined evangelicals flee upon contact.

Adventures with a Christian Desk Mate