Greta Christina has been writing professionally since 1989, on topics including atheism, sexuality and sex-positivity, LGBT issues, politics, culture, and whatever crosses her mind. She is author of
The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life, of
Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God, of
Coming Out Atheist: How to Do It, How to Help Each Other, and Why, of
Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless, and of
Bending: Dirty Kinky Stories About Pain, Power, Religion, Unicorns, & More, and is editor of
Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients. She has been a public speaker for many years, and many of her talks can be seen on YouTube. Her writing has appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers, including Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer, and numerous anthologies, including
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong and three volumes of
Best American Erotica. (Any views she expresses in this blog are solely hers, and do not necessarily represent this organizations.) She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Ingrid. You can email her at gretachristina (at) gmail (dot) com, or follow her on
Facebook.
I’ve had that shining sense of wonder wash over me only a few times in my life. The last was in reading The Ancestor’s Tale; there was a bit about imagining the line of mtDNA across space rather than time, with me holding my mother’s hand, she holding her mother’s, and so on, back up the line of my ancestors. I envisioned them lined up beyond the horizon, past the convergence point of my local ethnic group, my species, and so on. I imagined my cousins near and distant making it not just a line, but a tree, a tree encompassing, if not all life, then most of the eukaryotes that ever lived, including everything from my cranky cat to the flies by the dumpster.
I’d never imagined anything quite so intense. Later, I thought to myself that this, then, must be what a religious experience feels like.