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.

[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.

[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.

[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'.

[nineweaving]

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

Nine