Why not loosen your tie for the park?

[sovay]

I did not get out of bed until after noon. Hestia was curled at the foot of it to make sure. It was the first real sleep I'd gotten all week. Outside in breezy contrast to the last couple of days of November for May, we seem to be having a kind of spring-rinsed, sunshowery day. I have eaten a peanut butter granola bar. Hestia has wrapped her tail possessively, temple-cat-fashion, around my mug.

Because the internet is hazardous to the human condition, within the same five minutes I read some evolutionary psychology on atheism and ran into a reminder of the persistence of ace discourse and experienced a similar resurgence of antipathy. Any discussion of atheism predicated on a framework of faith would always fail to find purchase on me, but even when expounded by a self-identified atheist it grinds my gears to find the state explained only in terms of lack: an inability to imagine, a disaffection with religion, a failure to be socialized to it, a decision against it, all negative paths of arrival, no neutrally variant initial condition. Basically just replicate most of that complaint for discussions of sexuality, since if there is one thing the human species does seem to be majority-wired for, it's sloppy othering. It has occurred to me before that I was shielded from a lot of damage by coming at so-called normality from such an angle that not only did it make too little sense to me to feel aspirational, I didn't recognize for years what much of it was supposed to look like. But I'm also just kind of starting to have it in for the alpha privative. Defining by not still lets the thing it isn't set the terms.

WERS has been playing Jesse Welles' "Horses" (2025) on a near-daily basis for weeks now and because I too belong to this conflicting species, I feel that generally I agree with its message of letting go of self-defeating hatreds and divisions in the bigger picture of stellar time and at the same time the government of my country is pursuing policies of active harm to just about everything which seems to limit the degree to which I should be reasonably expected to let down my guard. Now I suppose I get to worry that finding a popular folk song naive means I have just flipped into the last verse of "Love Me, I'm a Liberal."

Comments

[selkie]

Normal. *grekkh*
Your point about the problem of The Disk Horse being applied in terms of lack is a very good one and I think it’s what has always been my problem with discussions of atheism! Thank you! (I am described more and more often as the most religious person X other person knows, so I cannot weigh in on atheism much, but I begin to wonder if that’s just code for Wearing a Moral Compass in the Current Administration.)

[gullyfoyle]

Harlan Ellison once said in an interview "I'm so far beyond atheism that they don't have a word for it." I'm with him.

[sovay]

Harlan Ellison once said in an interview "I'm so far beyond atheism that they don't have a word for it." I'm with him.

What does that mean for you?

[sovay]

Normal. *grekkh*

It can be hard for me to credit some of it even now. I was having a conversation recently about the pitfalls of a digust-based morality, but some of my ethics are definitely influenced by confusion.

Your point about the problem of The Disk Horse being applied in terms of lack is a very good one and I think it’s what has always been my problem with discussions of atheism! Thank you!

You're welcome! It really bugs me! In this case I blame the author being culturally Christian, whatever he realized about his personal null state in college.

(I am described more and more often as the most religious person X other person knows, so I cannot weigh in on atheism much, but I begin to wonder if that’s just code for Wearing a Moral Compass in the Current Administration.)

(Could also have to do with knowing the Jewish calendar professionally inside and out.)

[alexxkay]

"Defining by not still lets the thing it isn't set the terms."

Truth. In my youth, I was aggressively "weird". And then one day I realized that doing so was still letting "normal" control my life.

[sovay]

Truth. In my youth, I was aggressively "weird". And then one day I realized that doing so was still letting "normal" control my life.

Understood. Did you discover things in your aggressively weird phase that were native enough to you to keep?

[selkie]

(Could also have to do with knowing the Jewish calendar professionally inside and out.)

"I act like I have faith and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends."

[umadoshi]

Hestia was curled at the foot of it to make sure.

Excellent beastie taking excellent care of you. *hugs*

[asakiyume]

Yeah, there are things that can be defined as the absence of something, but when they're things that have to do with people's beliefs or self perception, it probably would be a good idea to see how those people, themselves, describe the thing.

I feel that generally I agree with its message of letting go of self-defeating hatreds and divisions in the bigger picture of stellar time and at the same time the government of my country is pursuing policies of active harm ... --Quite! I heard a very wrongheaded homily last week: the homilist (a deacon) was talking about how we're all called to love one another and then talked about families being fractured, and said, "And over what? POLITICS?!?!" --as if politics were as inconsequential as choice of nail polish or something. And I was thinking to myself, Yeah dude, POLITICS. Loving one another doesn't mean smiling benignly as you watch someone dismember someone else. Sometimes the things that are tearing people apart actually ARE worthy reasons. It's no good to say earnestly to one side, "Hey hey, maybe a little less torture and killing, okay? Maybe only 20 minutes of beatings instead of 45?" and to the other "Hey hey, maybe a little less complaining about torture and killing, okay? Maybe just let it happen a little, huh?" IT'S INSANE

... okay, now I have to take some deep breaths. Because it drives me nuts.

[sovay]

Excellent beastie taking excellent care of you.

She is an excellent kitten. Today she fell asleep on my computer bag in an effort to prevent me leaving the house.

[alexxkay]

Oh, lots! I still was largely the same person, with the same interests. The most immediate, symbolic change was that I stopped being too embarrassed to choose vanilla ice cream when out with friends :-)

[anna_wing]

I've talked to Western and Western-influenced atheists before and run into the shoals of the difference between "belief" (whether 'belief in' or 'belief that') and practice, which for some reason does not register with a lot of people as a distinction of substance. As in "no, I don't worship anything", usually results in increasingly puzzled questions about what I actually do or do not 'believe'.

[sovay]

Yeah, there are things that can be defined as the absence of something, but when they're things that have to do with people's beliefs or self perception, it probably would be a good idea to see how those people, themselves, describe the thing.

It's part of what puzzled me so much about the author being an atheist themselves! Even they seemed to start from the position that it is puzzling to have atheists in a religious species! I am not even sure I agree with the premise that humans are a religious species! Or that even if I granted the premise, I would mean the same thing by it as the author! It was weird.

... okay, now I have to take some deep breaths. Because it drives me nuts.

*hugs*

It is not like sports teams. I don't think it has been like sports teams for my entire life. Longer. It is maddening when people behave as though it is.

[sovay]

"I act like I have faith and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends."

*hugs*

[sovay]

As in "no, I don't worship anything", usually results in increasingly puzzled questions about what I actually do or do not 'believe'.

Condolences. Judaism is much more based in practice than belief, to the point where it's not even necessary to be a secular Jew to be a Jewish atheist; it's kind of an orthagonal question, which did nothing to help me in not bouncing off this book.

[nineweaving]

I admire your usage of "the alpha privative." I dislike assumptions that all humans are X.

Nine

[gullyfoyle]

As has been discussed here (and a few other places!), a-theism starts with the premise of theism, and then just says "not that." But who wants to be defined by a negative? I want a "that" that starts with the premise of a mechanistic (yet quantum-based (probably)), spontaneously self-created universe which has evolved through physical processes to its current state: no creator, no divine hand on the wheel, no supernatural. "Supernatural" I consider an oxymoron: if something exists, if something happens, then that something is by definition, by existence, part of nature. There is nature, and we understand parts of it; if there's something we don't understand, then that doesn't mean that it's not part of nature. I'll grant that the tendency to come up with supernatural explanations for something with unknown (at the time) causes must have conferred some evolutionary advantage to individuals or groups at one or more points in human evolution, since that tendency is baked so deep into our behavior and beliefs. And it's that supernaturalism/theism/religion that's always set the terms of debate about itself. Now, like Harlan, I'm way past debating on those terms. Unfortunately, I guess, no one has come up with the apposite opposite, and I'm not sure "opposite" is actually apposite for what I'm trying to get at. I suppose the Bright movement of twenty years ago was an attempt, but not a very good one. Like the man said, they don't even have a word for it. But I've been living it for a long time, as long as I can remember. I'm not an apostate; theism (for lack of a better word) never took in me, not even as a small child. Whatever it was that did take, remains, for now, nameless.

[sovay]

I admire your usage of "the alpha privative." I dislike assumptions that all humans are X.

Thank you. They are unhelpful assumptions. So many people turn out to be J or Q.

[sovay]

The most immediate, symbolic change was that I stopped being too embarrassed to choose vanilla ice cream when out with friends

Oh, good. One should not be deprived of a decent vanilla.

[sovay]

Whatever it was that did take, remains, for now, nameless.

Is it important for you to have a name for it? I had not heard of the Brights movement, but I was familiar with the concept of naturalism, which seems to fit the view you articulate above, but may not be a meaningful term for you. Coming from a mixed family of self-identified, primarily Jewish atheists and agnostics (and one pantheist), I am not uncomfortable with the language, but it is more useful for me to say that my universe is not oriented with relation to faith, which in keeping with the previous terms of the conversation is akin to the way in which I am comfortable identifying as bisexual, but the most accurate thing is that I am interested in people.

[gullyfoyle]

Is it important for you to have a name for it?

No, not anymore, and I didn't expend a lot of intellectual calories over nomenclature back when I spent time pondering "Why are so many people that way but I'm not and never have been?" I've lived in these territories long enough that I no longer require maps. "Secular humanism" is as good a tag as any, but I've been called weird, godless, and "one of the most Christian people I've ever known" -- that last by a Lutheran theologian, no less -- and I can consider those all compliments.