HOW DOES AN ATHEIST EXPLAIN DEATH TO A CHILD

This is in response to Cormac James on Aeon, who worries about what to tell his five year old son about death because Cormac is an atheist.  Big deal.  What’s God got to do with it?  There’s a particular irony in this man being named “Cormac,” a writer whose accounts of evil, suffering and death has hypnotised the whole field of Western literature profs.

Cormac says “Sigmund Freud’s belief that ‘in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality’”.  I think not.  I think everyone is convinced of their own consciousness being THEM and that their consciousness can escape their bodies and endure somehow out there in some form with no body.  But if all consciousness AND unconsciousness has left the body forever, that’s the definition of death.  That’s when someone can note the “time of death,” certify a “cause of death,” and dispose of the body since there’s no more use for it.

The idea of God is really an identity with no body -- nobody, nobadaddy.  Indefinable.  Can’t kill it because there’s nothing. It’s an idea, one that transforms and disappears.

The best lesson -- and a five year old should by now have had a pet that died -- is simple before-and-after.  Bob’s first wife was working in a nursing home that cared for an old woman who was only living because a machine breathed for her.  This caretaker was not “churchy” but she protested to the head nurse that she thought it was cruel and simply making money for the institution.  The old woman didn’t even have any living family.  The head nurse said,  “Okay.  Turn the respirator off.”

“I don’t have the authority,” said the hapless CNA.  

“I give you the authority.  YOU turn the machine off or you’re fired.”

Hapless needed the job.  She turned off the respirator.  The old woman died in a moment or two.  Hapless felt very strange and she never forgot.  Figuring out death is only a task for the living.  

It’s the EXPERIENCE that can only be felt.  The brain-dead are body-dead, identity-dead, GONE.  It is the living who know it and ONLY the living.  Everyone knew that once in the days when there was chicken for dinner on the farm and someone went out and killed it.  You can’t eat it alive.  Have you no culture?

On my cat post a few days ago I talked about reducing the size of a kitten litter by “human intervention.”  I drowned the extras.  (Cat litters can go as high as 13, though it is “normal” for there to be three or four.)  Three.  I cannot catch this feral female, Patches.  If I could, I would get her spayed -- if I had money or could find help.  Men here have offered to shoot her, but it's against the law to shoot in town.  

There are pop-up cat spay clinics on the rez, but not advertised off it.  If I COULD catch her and her kittens, I could take them to the nearest humane society (thirty mile drive), where they would be killed by plunging a needle into their hearts, because they are untameable and because all the kittens on the planet are born about the same time in a great wave of synchronicity.  Many of them will die soon, because this is the crushing wheel of life that creates thousands of beetles or whatever, and then kills most of them.  Kill death by reducing fertility.  Predators have to eat, too.  There are no vegetarian predators.

I asked the veterinarian for cat tranquilizers so I could catch them.  He was shocked and horrified.  “Just stop FEEDING them,” he said.  They’d find a way to eat, but it wouldn’t be as nice.  He charges several hundred dollars to kill a cat.

My bathroom sink is rather splendid.  I knew within an hour when the kittens were born.  Patches came for breakfast much thinner. I carried them gently, used warm water and it took only a minute or so.  It was not that different from a womb.  I wept.  I did something I can’t call prayer because who would I pray to?  Call it mindfulness.  Call it poetry.  

Then I took the little bodies out to the trash roll-off.  “Been gopher huntin’?” asked the old rancher unloading his pickup.  

“Had to drown some kittens and feelin’ bad about it,” I told him.

His wife said,  “A terrible job, but sometimes it has to be done.”  

What’s so privileged about kittens that it’s okay to kill gophers but not kittens?  Kittens are domesticated, meaning if they are tamed (ie: form a bond with a human, like the fox in “The Little Prince”) they are different, in a different category.  We’ve attached, or at least find them useful.  Owned so we protect them.  Give them individual names.  We tamed a gopher once.  It drowned by jumping into the toilet when someone left the lid up.

Why does the United States kill five-year-olds, not entirely by accident?  Sometimes with malice and enjoyment.  So long as they’re not OUR children.  Only Other.  Only Feral.  Meaning, no identity, no attachment, no duty to protect, no value.  Unless there’s a use for them, which use might not be sitting at a kitchen table eating Cheerios, without names.

And why does Cormac worry about what HIS son thinks when feral children have already found out about dead things, sometimes human -- call CSI.  The domestic children get up in the night and search the Internet to look for pictures of death, torture, suffering, to understand what it’s about that it’s so secret, a big door on the front of the subject marked “GOD,” who is purported to be unkillable, at least if you accept the proper definition.  Otherwise you’ll notice that God is dead.  ALL the gods are dead.  They’ve lost their identities except for poetry.  (Actually, by age five most American kids have seen a LOT of death portrayed, heard a lot about it.)

My mother's mother in the center,

Her sisters second in from each end.

My mother took the photo.

When my mother was dying, she asked me what I thought the “other side” would be like.  I said,  “It will be like where ever you were before you were born.”  She pondered that as a good Presbyterian, then moved over to science.  “I hope the next planet will be as much fun as this one!” she said cheerfully.  She was acting.  For our sake.  Her cousin knew.  “What were her last words?” she asked.  But can you count the muttering of a comatose person without their dentures?  I told her the “next planet” thing.

My mother’s identity was not lost.  Neither was her mother’s nor her grandmother’s.  Her identity was genetically and culturally blended from those of the people who raised her.  She was lucky.  Neither catastrophe nor drugs tore those identities out of her.  Some  people have to leave a hole in that place or invent a fiction or just not think about it or -- the worst, to regret the identities that created their own.  I knew that early and therefore refused to have children.

It didn’t do any good.  There are still people whose identities are in part derived from mine: students, readers, people I so dearly loved and tried to be like even if it meant damage or suffering.  Still, there a little part of me that remains feral.  I think it came from my mother.  Or maybe from books.  It makes me risk -- like telling you this.  I can already feel the hands slipping over my mouth.

"Hop"

My mother used to say, “All cats are gray in the dark.”  I would agree.  Except that sometimes a little gray half-kinkajou invades us despite resistance and now sleeps behind my knees. I’ve finally decided Hop is NOT related to any of these yard ferals -- in fact he’s not feral, just unfed.  Sometimes some cat like that will come busting onto the scene and his identity will be so loud, messy, stinking, and otherwise vivid that you end up tolerating the beast -- even though it just flipped my computer mouse on its back for the third time.  Can I help it if he gets comfort against my throat?  Makes it vibrate with his purring?  His song.

Double in size and still growing.

Very messy eater.

SEARCHING FOR VALUES

Obnoxious as a value (Avril Lavigne)

Sometimes new ways of finding value depend upon the collapse of the old ways and sometimes they are pressed into our lives because so many phenomena are upon us that have no names and aren’t well-enough known to fit them into the old categories.  Consider music videos, which began as a sort of kids’ entertainment and has now become not just an art form, but a whole new genre of “writing.”  Some colleges have hastened to teach people how to make them, but what do you do with them?  They are often too ecstatic and chaotic to mean anything traditional, particularly since we are used to making the oldest people judge the work of the youngest -- which is nonsense in this case.  I’m 76 and can’t even “see” fast enough to follow the tachistoscopic contents, much less any context in sex/drugs/rocknroll -- which some people consider demonic.  But I'll figure this out.

Consider the emptying of Ph.D.’s to the point where the letters after one’s name mean little unless one knows the institution, the specific discipline, the reputation of those professors, and the current status of the field.  A gray area has formed around people who have finished all but their thesis, but find it impossible to get the actual thesis past a committee formed of rivals and graybeards.   The past has become a burden.  But is that worse than awarding Ph.D.’s for the equivalent of “basket-weaving,” which is code for something worthless?  Something similar has developed with professional journal acceptance, to the point where a contingent simply accepts everything online in “open” journals.  We end up resorting to “cloud curation”, basically a popularity contest.  Or turn to money, the great shared value system.  No one asks "is the movie any good"?  Instead we ask what was the gross?

Prizes and promotion are susceptible to our great interest in gaming the system and our dependence on friendship or convenience circles can replace serious literary recognition with Oscar award night.

Oscar.

Ideas are insidious.  The construction/deconstruction/post-construction thought system that was once as hard to figure out as non-Euclidean geometry, has now slid into our language and assumptions.  They have been particularly effective in undercutting status that depends on precedent, dominance, elitism, meritocracy.  Our professionals -- doctors, lawyers, theologians -- are now joined by professional manicurists and mechanics while others -- for instance, public school teachers -- get no longer get respect nor a decent paycheck.

In a world where kids are schooled at home, publishing is done by oneself, and music is mostly free, we can often see lasting value only in retrospect.  Not very helpful.  And yet uncertified, unqualified, off-the-wall, individual nonconformity can be the most effective strategy for value that there is.  Follow your star.  (It's not on Google.)   People talk about passion.

“Value” in the sense of practical usefulness, something that sustains life (food, water, shelter), is a separate matter from what I’m talking about here.  But even in that case there are different views.  Moral relativity.  For instance, few things have more felt value to individuals than their pets, since attachment gives them almost the value of another human life.  But the law finds dogs of negligent value unless they can be leveraged into some kind of money through popularity or uniqueness or usefulness. 

Competitions and awards supposedly based on absolute value do not just enhance the reputations of those receiving them, but also lifts up the importance of those awarding them.  These factors can depart cruelly from what is good for life.  Consider prize-winning pugs and bulldogs who have been distorted by breeders into walking sufferers, barely able to breath and unable to give birth without human intervention -- partly because this distortion is seen as desirable in fancier’s terms and partly because a dog with a shoved-in face looks like a human baby -- it’s “cute.”

But this essay is about the values of behavior -- best action, ethics, moral standards.  Here’s a list of factors that make “values” problematic and a source of conflict.

God in the cloud.  No longer an old man -- and what has He done with His robe?

1. Value is emergent from experience and tradition, not imposed from above (an authority figure or god) but it is often "felt" as a powerful entity said to have the ability to punish or reward humans.  This point of view usually assumes the Power controls all human lives, not just believers -- but non-believers might not agree. 

2.  The values of the group and the values of a sub-group or individual may be in conflict, even between siblings.  By definition, one’s values emerge from experience and two children in the same family might be treated very differently.  Sometimes a family is so chaotic that no rules can emerge except the ones the child deduces, which may be pretty negative in terms of consequences.

3.  For a child, values have sharper edges than for an adult.  Shop-lifting candy might seem dubious but barely okay (if you apologize), or cute.  Even for an adult, shop-lifting food in order to survive means something different from stealing food as a political statement, maybe not even eating it.  Acting in a political way that prevents food from sustaining starving people in a famine might not feel like stealing food at all, but righteous participation in punishment from God.

4.  A feeling of entitlement always interferes with justice.  If any separate but allied group can feel they are exclusive (because of either superiority or inferiority like drug gangs), that will affect their understanding of ethics.  For one thing, the signals they perceive as signs of value -- special clothing, jewelry, privilege of access to social events, identification with beloved people -- become values in themselves.  Kindness, generosity, political effectiveness, membership in religious groups, are all value signals as much as tattoos are.

5.  Strangely, not caring about value signals is often a value signal in itself!

6.  One might not be seen as valuable in one’s own time, either as an individual (a teacher, an artist, a religious leader) or as part of an admired group later.  (Consider Vietnam-era veterans.) but not seen as very admirable until after time has passed.  So that means that social value is shifty and one might struggle to reach the heights, only to discover that social change means no one thinks the achievement is admirable anymore.  Even in practical terms of money value, we are on the verge of respecting plumbers more than philosophers.

7.  Even as values shift, some people are left behind with an earlier generation’s experienced feelings, while the youngsters don’t even think the same qualities exist anymore.  Think of the deep and consequential changes in our ideas of valued sexual behavior.   Marriage is ignored here, yearned for there, irrelevant other places, made into an expensive social marker, seen as a form of capture, or clearly enacted as a violent act of war.

Many people use some form of the “Golden Rule” as a marker for value.  Was it Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw who pointed out that such a principle is all very well unless one is a liver fluke -- all situations are not equal and not everyone wants what you want.  I think of my favorite counseling joke:  “Hurt me,” said the masochist.  “No,” said the sadist.  In some contexts, NOT being hurt is the same as being hurt.

Dinosaur ethics.

The problem is ambiguity.  And the time-context.  What is done to a person now might be painful, unwanted, and controversial -- but result in a few years in something beneficial.  Or it could be the opposite.  

So value systems, besides being emergent from experience, are often a gamble really.  They can pit the individual against a group.  They can change over time, for the better or for worse.  They can be enforced with violence or simply ignored until they are useful.  They can make you rich or get you crucified.

"Corpus Hypercubus" by Salvador Dali

"BAD-ASS NUNS"

When I say I’m an a-theist, I do not mean it as a rejection of theists or pantheists or non-theists or un-theists or anti-theists (which is what people generally think a-theist means).  I mean it as a rejection of ALL such categories altogether.  There are and always have been times and places where the distinction doesn’t exist.  To insist that religion be defined only by the term "Theos," “God,” is not different from insisting that white, male, prosperous Euros are the STANDARD for humans.  Theists only constitute a part of the planet’s variety of religious positions.  They exclude all the non-theists, but the non-theists do not necessarily exclude theists.  They just see them as a locally dominant group that arose from the Middle East a few millennia ago and spread across Europe, then America.  (What is it with those guys?)

In short, “atheist” has become an epithet for the “other,” like “commie.”  I suppose "a-us" is a silly word, but a-theist where theist is the mainstream is the same thing.  Anti-theist becomes "anti-us."

I include theists in my understanding of religion along with people who seem to have no 

“religion” at all.  There’s just “our way.”  “What we do.”  No one writes anything down, no one runs a fund-drive for construction -- there might be a shaman but he doesn’t perform weddings.  In that primal sort of situation there is no government either.  People know each other and do not need paper proof of status as one does for strangers and travelers.

So I’m an ordained but retired Unitarian Universalist minister. (Certified and on the list.)  Boring category.  Some say UU is contentless, a way-station between Methodism and the golf course.  Most of the clergy have a lot more money and live nice civilized lives. Likely to be married, maybe to the same gender.  At least pretend to have a little acquaintance with sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.  Have an incomplete novel stashed somewhere to reassure themselves that they're sensitive and atypical.  Not me.  I don’t drink.  I don’t smoke.  I have diabetes so I have to watch what I eat.  I don’t dance.  I don’t play cards.  I “publish” (make public) here daily.  WTF.  

Even myself I’ve had a little trouble figuring out what I am now but I think I’ve found a phrase that might explain me:  a secular nun, celibate.  Don’t need a long black habit these days.  Jeans will do.  A phrase going around is “badass nun,” an oxymoron intended to be funny, which I suppose means mostly nuns who might use force, who keep bad company, and color outside the lines.  Often social activists.  Some of them are a little too “bad” for me.  So maybe I’m only a “kickass” secular nun.  That is, I cuss, I think about forbidden topics, and -- most of all -- I question authority.  I don’t respect leaders unless they make sense.  Otherwise, I fight bullies.  

Oxymoron?

The military has been trying to figure out a way to test spiritual fitness.  J.H. Hammer, R. T. Cragun, and K. Hwang (note those NAMES!!)  discussed “measuring spiritual fitness” among Atheists in a journal called “Military Psychology.”  The idea is that if the questionnaire they used were phrased in Christian or theist terms, valuable people had bad scores.  In fact, some would just cross out all Christian terms or terminology about “spirituality.”  They were hard headed, sharp edged, absolutely dependable and highly moral.  They even practiced something rather like prayer, but they did not put up with religious dogma.  So what paper-and-pencil instrument would identify them?  (Why must paper and pencil be relevant in the first place?)

Obviously, a soldier is not necessarily like all the other soldiers any more than one nun is like all the other nuns.  I would like to see a comparison between the so-called “religious” fitness scores of different categories of soldiers:  standard army, Marines, Special Forces, and free lance private armies.  A whole lot of potential for exciting movies in there.

Just now we have a color-coded culture clash in Ferguson, Missouri.  The governor sent in “Sidney Poitier,” but now SP turns out to be an Oreo, claiming Christian righteousness for the police and soldiers who are busy suppressing protest witnessed by Amnesty International -- a kind of universal morality -- while both black and white clergy are out there getting gassed and shot with rubber bullets.  The worst thing about this black/white schism is that the color coding is so obvious that the human values get confused and lost.

Earlier the same day, Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson asked the police department chaplain to pray before giving the late night report. One line was particularly stunning: “Again we come here having used all the energy and all the resources that you have given to our residents, their families, and our peacekeeping force, to bring peace—your peace.”  Earlier that day they had closed down a church.

Returning to the nun trope, here’s a “golden” nun for you who is not Christian:

Ani Pachen, warrior nun

“Ani Pachen was born in 1933 in Tibet. When she was 17 her parents decided to marry her off – but she had other plans! She ran away and moved in to a Buddhist Monastery (3 weeks journey away) and became a Buddhist nun. In 1958 when her father died, she became the leader of her family clan. She took up arms and became a warrior nun – fighting to keep the commies from China out of her homeland. She led her people in guerrilla warfare for a year. The Chinese caught her and threw her in jail because she refused to renounce the Dalai Lama. She was beaten and hung by her wrists for a week, spent a year in leg irons and was flung for nine months into solitary confinement in an unlit cell. The last 11 years of her sentence were spent in the infamous Drapchi prison in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa.

“As soon as she was released from Prison 21 years later, she went right back to her warrior ways, leading protests and demonstrations. She found out she was going to be put in jail again so she ran away to the border of Tibet. She walked for 25 days in the deep snow to escape to Nepal. She died in 2002.”

What makes her a nun?  It is a combination of independent thinking and real-world action, both supported by discipline and devotion.  It is NOT Procrustean compliance to an institution like the Catholic church which would press her into teaching or nursing, nor is it obedience to any superior, whether mother or father, except the forgiving and inclusive Dalai Lama.  

http://www.gocomics.com/francis/2014/08/18#.U_ZYk1aFWFI

Pope Francis is in the same dilemma as President Obama: that is, his beliefs are far more liberal and sympathetic than his constituency will tolerate.   He is not directly suppressing nuns, but he is not reining in the zealous lesser authorities who are determined to put them back into habits that quite resemble burkhas.  If people are so angry and suspicious that they won’t let their proper leaders use their consciences, what will change them?  Only a dialectic opposing with force? 

What’s wrong with the picture?  Nothing, but there’s a hole in the canvas:  where are the  Native Americans?  Where are the OTHER indigenous people? (Maori? Inuit?)  Is the price too high for them to pay?  Or do they just not get any press?   I think the latter.  But it is true that living on a reservation makes a person cautious and part of that caution is not showing oneself even to the other tribal people.  Where are the tribal people of Missouri?  St. Louis was once a capital of the fur trade, which brought in Hawaiians on sailing ships.

The other dimension of living on a reservation -- or next to one -- is that spiritual discipline and devotion comes from the land itself.  Step out into the cold wind, watch wine colors blush the east, and your bones will know what is worth risking death.  My church is the horizon.  It cannot be closed down.

Dawn by Smattila  (Deviant Art)

"THE EVOLUTION OF GOD:" A Review of a Review

Assuming that someone who is reading this post also read yesterday’s post about the history of thought and specifically the progression of queer cinema, I would suggest that books like “A Biography of God” and “The Evolution of God” are pretty risky if you’re emotionally attached to your own concept of what the Deity might be like. Terms like biography and evolution imply a beginning and an end, but that’s one of the basic characteristics of the Middle Eastern religious mythology: that it begins in some kind of chosenness and ends in the apocalyptic destruction of all but the (still chosen) few. This is the spine of belonging to a tribe, which was the social organization of the time of the birth of God and Jesus, and is still a concept that haunts our understanding, even in science. We’re forever looking for the “first dinosaur” or the “last dodo bird” instead of seeing the great undulant sheet of being that covers the planet as the real life of it.

I subscribe to Powell’s daily email review. Yesterday’s was about “The Evolution of God” by Robert Wright reviewed by Troy Jollimore writing in Truthdig. Robert Wright grew up as a Southern Baptist, cast enough metamorphic skins to get to Princeton where he earned a degree in politics, and became a science journalist who then invented the “diavlog” a form of mp3 at “bloggingheads.tv” that I have not visited but that I deduce is a form of debate. One of his previous books is “The Moral Animal,” which argues that morality has evolved. Obviously all this will affect his notion of God. Besides, he circulates in all the best journalist circles, including the NYTimes.

Troy Jollimore also has a Princeton Ph.D. but he comes down from Canada, Nova Scotia no less, teaches in California, and his book on morality is in terms of friendship. So the review is intended to look at God in terms of morality. But he also writes poetry.

Jollimore’s version of Wright’s key idea is that globalization (which they both equate with evolution) will “push societies toward directing their energies at one comprehensive, universalistic, all-powerful god. This god -- the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- eventually becomes perceived as a just and loving father figure and is associated with modern ethical ideas like universal rights and the equality of all persons.” This will come as a surprise to Buddhists and those who have noted the disintegration of the family, even if you define it as a tribe, which is also a challenged concept. It also assumes that kinship will lead to compassion which will lead to morality based on universal rights and equality. That has not been my observation.

But then Wright is big on game theory and he admits that God is just a head game, though he seems to think that the electrical twiggles detectable in people’s heads are evidence that they’re contacting something real. As a scientist would tell him, it does not mean anything of the kind. It just means something is happening in the brain. Period.

Wright also suggests that the term “God” is like the term “electron” which we simply can’t understand, though we can detect its impact on other phenomena in that context. He doesn’t seem aware that there are a lot of words that refer to things that don’t have any impact or any discernible existence at all, but that are simply ineffable in both the technical and the rude sense. There is no “flesh.”

Here’s the next step: “In part, again, this "moral order" seems to consist in the fact that the world is perceived by humans as having some sort of moral dimension, some sort of "transcendent" purpose. More ambitiously, perhaps, the fact that in the long run certain human behaviors, but not others, tend toward general social cohesion and flourishing is supposed to be what provides evidence of God's existence.” You could interpret this as God makes us good (so why doesn’t he make EVERYBODY good?) or people are only good because they fear God or love God and God gives them the script. Why can’t they just look around and realize that what goes around comes around? But then, no one told Bernie Madolf that was true.

The hidden question behind all this diavlog is “am I the fittest?” and “will I and my kind survive?” The idea is that having the right concept of God will cause one to survive. But survival is impossible to predict: evolution is a hindsight science. Necessarily it is a scientific history of phenomena. Of course, one can do a history of the phenomena of thought or anything else, even queer cinema, but it has little predictive power. Where do we go in the future from teens with video cameras and a YouTube account? No one knows.

The other problem is that “fitness” is constantly confused with “fittingness.” (This is my own point of obsession.) Survival is about fitting one’s circumstances well enough to stay alive and reproduce. It’s almost the same thing as adaptability because, as we’ve seen with cinema, something can come in from completely outside the situation and change the terms entirely. Like pine bark beetles. Those humans who adapt in the future may be those who fit the clearings rather than the trees. But evolution takes advantage of abundances, so it may be that something that eats pine bark beetles will show up. (Those who keep coming back to human overpopulation are very aware of this: the way to trigger a pandemic is to create an overabundance that stresses the edges enough to allow opportunist forces to enter.)

Jollimore takes Wright’s book as an effort to reconcile science and religion but I don’t see it as anything of the kind. Wright is a journalist, a refuter, a term slider, with no training in the history of religious thought that I know of. He’s just grabbing a high profile issue and covering old ground. Making political hay.

Now if Jollimore would decide to write a book about “the Poetry of God,” that would be a lot more interesting. Especially if he were to set it in Hallifax, the scene of a huge explosion that nearly eliminated the town, innocent and guilty alike.