Mainstream social taboos

While reading a recent post on the always excellent Friendly Atheist blog, I was interested to see a guest blogger writing about the polyamory lifestyle. The article opens as follows:

As atheists, many of us have faced some level of negative reaction from those around us, on account of our deviation from our culture’s expected norms. I’ve found that atheists, in general, tend to support GLBT rights and other civil rights issues despite opposition by an offended religious majority. After all, atheists have no religious inhibitions that lead them to view certain deviations from the norm as anything immoral or harmful to society. Atheists know what it’s like to be demonized and hated by those who fear us for our differences. I’d like to call your attention to another group of people — a group even deeper in the “closet” than atheists — who could use your support: polyamorists.

The rest of the article can be found here: In Defense of Polyamory

Part of what interested me about this article was that I was unaware polyamory was a lifestyle movement outside religion (e.g. Muslims or Mormons) and hedonistic stereotypes (bored marriages, bohemian students or artists, etc). Another interesting point was the author’s comments about deviations from cultural and social norms, which I suspect is most likely the crux of religious and conservative problems with those who don’t fit into the God-fearing, husband & wife, missionary position, change-is-bad, tradition-is-to-be-trusted, meat & 2 veg pigeonhole.

It seems that most old law-giving religions were borne from tribal groups where certain laws and behaviours were established to keep the (relatively small) tribe fit and healthy, with transgression being met with brutal punishment as the survival of the tribe was at stake. (We still do the same thing: consider the penalty for treason in your country). Hence, non-procreative sexual activity was distrusted and, when it let to same-sex relationships, the tribe had lost two potentially viable sources of children and mates for two other people. No more children means no more tribe, and we recognise that concept today in our perfectly correct “children are our future” mindset. It doesn’t matter that the argument is a false dichotomy.

It’s not inconceivable that the tribal prohibition against same-sex relationships could have, as the law gradually became more conservative over time, been extended to include other relationships outside the “proven to work” formula (choose a mate or have one chosen, betrothal and binding, breeding and offspring; rinse and repeat). This simple linear progression has worked since Prehistory but, when enshrined in law or even cultural expectation, it doesn’t allow for what engineers call a corner case: people who don’t fit into the expected behaviours. We see this in both animals and humans, so it’s not people just “choosing to be different.”

However, what struck me the most about the article was that although I have reassessed my opinion on homosexuality — which has naturally expanded to include the LGBT umbrella — polyamory and polygamy are two concepts that I had not yet reassessed. By reassess I mean the thoughts and opinions that we all gather over time, initially as children through young adulthood and into mental and emotional maturity. Some people are constantly re-evaluating their perspective on things as they encounter them, some reach old age without adjusting many opinions formed in childhood, and I suspect the majority fall somewhere in between — perhaps leaning one way or the other based upon our liberalism and conservatism. But especially pronounced if we are religious.

As I’ve blogged about previously, I had minimal formal religious instruction (though various notable influences) until I was 17, then a few years of intensive fundagelicalism during which everything I knew about just about anything was re-forged and realigned into a specific way of thinking — a kind of mental aquaduct designed to funnel everything along a certain route to a certain outcome. When I was eventually spat out of that homogenous situation, every opinion I had was filtered through that lens and my rational self knew almost none of it could be trusted. These opinions were not mine and they had not been formed through critical analysis; they had been overlaid to match the party line. Deconstructing one’s own mind is no trivial undertaking.

So this article has got me thinking about two aspects of life that I haven’t had cause to reassess in 17 years or more. That’s not to say that I will automatically find a way to accomodate acceptance of it, as that is not the application of critical thinking. The way I have managed the deconstruction of my mind is to treat just about every contentious topic as a blank canvas — I have no opinion on many things, allowing me to consider and think about them properly before forming my own opinions.

Those opinions may turn out to be wrong, but they’re mine. From there it’s relatively straightforward and clear sailing…

Russell’s Cosmic Teapot

Continuing with the Bertrand Russell theme, here is his excellent illustrative analogy of the burden of proof when it comes to religion and other belief systems:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the Sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes.

But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Once you get past the automated, unthinking supposition that any given religious book is immutable fact, it’s easy to see Russell’s point.

This point was then further elaborated upon over 50 years later by Richard Dawkins, in his book A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love (2003):

The reason organised religion merits outright hostility is that, unlike belief in Russell’s teapot, religion is powerful, influential, tax-exempt and systematically passed on to children too young to defend themselves. Children are not compelled to spend their formative years memorising loony books about teapots. Government-subsidised schools don’t exclude children whose parents prefer the wrong shape of teapot. Teapot-believers don’t stone teapot-unbelievers, teapot-apostates, teapot-heretics and teapot-blasphemers to death. Mothers don’t warn their sons off marrying teapot-shiksas whose parents believe in three teapots rather than one. People who put the milk in first don’t kneecap those who put the tea in first.

While I don’t always agree with Dawkins’s approach — I think his behaviour is sometimes counter-productive as it seems to simply raise the hackles of those with opposing viewpoints, discouraging further discourse — I completely agree with his message. That’s also true in the case of the above quotation, as it is also an excellent illustration of Russell’s original premise.

Unreasonable people have access to cars and guns?

One of the humanist bloggers I read quite regularly posted a blog entry entitled The Most Inhuman Statement Ever?, in which he’d posted about how he couldn’t understand how someone could post an incredibly ignorant, hateful and hurtful response to a poll. While having a conversation via the comments to the blogpost, he asked (and I hope he doesn’t mind me sharing it here):

If we want to reduce the number of criminals in the world, shouldn’t we be screening for this person, early in life and finding a way to reach their humanity?

I started to respond with another comment that again I realised was large enough to both make an unwieldy comment and a useful blog post of my own. So here we are, with a reply that became a standalone blog post…

I completely understand your despair and the reasons for your questions. But as a fellow humanist, you probably recognise that part of the nature of humanity is varying beliefs, approaches to problems and ways of dealing with situations. For us secular humanists, and therefore typically atheists, there rises the popular statement:

Whenever there are 2 atheists in a room you will typically find at least 3 opinions.

And of course what we may allow ourselves to think or say — particularly on the Internet with its (mistaken) assumption of anonymity and no risk of being smacked in the mouth for it — does not necessarily relate to the actions we allow ourselves to take. There are exceptions, of course, to every rule.

It’s been my experience that up to a certain age most people are simply spouting the beliefs and bigotry of their parents, and aren’t reasonably and rationally responsible for them. Then they reach an age where they are forming their own view of the world and those beliefs and opinions are either challenged and replaced, or solidified. It’s at that point, I think, that a person truly becomes liable for their beliefs and opinions. However, you still have the gap between thought/speech and action.

After all, I may think that all religions and their apologists/colluders have deliberately retarded the development and progress of mankind, and have in many (but not all) cases been immense forces for harm, but other than words it’s extremely unlikely I’d take any direct action — except whenever those people regularly try to use the system of government to force their religious dogma onto me. My inaction is not because I’m cowering in the corner, but because I recognise that Homo sapiens babies are born completely dependent on their parents — due to brain size, early development, motor skills, etc — and therefore to unquestioningly accept whatever our parents tell us, and is an instinct that enables us to survive long enough to reach young adulthood. And the things our parents typically tell us include, but aren’t limited to:

• Don’t touch that fire!
• A fat bloke on a sleigh visits each year.
• That animal is dangerous!
• The sky wizard will take us to heaven if we’ve been good.
• This is how we make a shelter.
• The sky wizard will evilly torture us forever if we make a mistake.
• This is how we hunt for food.

And so on. But unfortunately some of us never re-evaluate those stories, as many people do not truly attempt to think for themselves. Perhaps because that is a deliberate attempt to question what we’ve already been told is fact, and constitutes a thought-crime or doubt of the established authority?

Looking at my own background, I’ve gone from a credulous child to a fervent believer to agnostic and have now settled as a secular humanist. I may or may not be representative of humanity as a whole, but I’m pretty certain that had someone with a well thought out rationale tried to foist reality onto me in the middle of my fervent believing, I’d have laughed in their face. (As I did with the many poorly thought out rationales). And today I recognise that arguing with true believers is ultimately a futile exercise until they reach the point in their journey when they begin to realise that the questioning voice in their head isn’t Satan (as most are taught to regard the voice that questions religious authority), but rather their natural curiosity demanding to know why it’s been shut away while the believer rides the emotionally-intoxicating roller-coaster addiction that is fervent belief.

Every believer comes to that point somewhere in their journey, and it’s then that those of us based in reality need to be there to provide support and establish dialogue. Not least because they’ll have also coincidentally realised that there is no reason for their being — they are purely a cosmological accident whereby a few billion cells have collectively agreed to be them for a while — no more and no less. And that’s another reason why religious belief is so popular — it makes us feel warm and cosy in the belief that we are special. This also explains why early scientists had such a hard time of things when their discoveries were made: they represented a gradual understanding that neither mankind (and their religious leaders), Earth nor its Solar System was in any way remotely special, except that there is life here in the Goldilocks Zone. The much later realisation that there were other galaxies beyond our own was another nail, and then the discovery that our Solar System was far out on an unimportant arm of our own galaxy simply sealed the coffin.

I think it’s this realisation of the total and utter insignificance of mankind that represents the biggest fear of religious believers. It’s not that we’re not the centre of the universe — as our monstrous, primitive egos would have us think — but that we just don’t matter. Once that is truly understood, it creates both an existential dilemma for those who are new-to-thinking and puts all our petty tribal wars and power-mongering into perspective. We’re not fighting for Right or Wrong, Good or Evil, the side of God versus his Enemy… we’re just angry little ape-descendants flinging increasingly-advanced forms of dung at each other.

But that’s not cause for despair.

Whenever I step outside to watch the International Space Station pass by overhead (see the ISS section at Heavens-Above), I feel intense awe and pride at knowing that in that shiny sardine tin flying 190 miles overhead sits a number of those angry little ape-descendants on the baby steps to exploring and populating the Solar System and — given time and the chance to mature as a species without an advanced-dung-induced catastrophe — we may even survive long enough to explore and populate our nearest neighbouring Solar System, and perhaps beyond that.

Isn’t it amazing?

Isn’t that enough?

Another blog?? And here’s introducing…

Welcome to Hurtling Through Space.

Why this particular name? I wanted to call the site something like “Pale Blue Dot” — a reference to the legendary Carl Sagan‘s awesome use of NASA’s Voyager I spacecraft in 1990 to take a photograph of earth from almost 4 billion miles away, the pale blue dot…

…to illustrate how mind-blowingly insignificant the angry, self-destructive little bipedal species we call Homo sapiens are in the greater scheme of things, but as with all things in the realm of free (or cheap) Internet names… it was taken. So I thought to paraphase a stand-up line I heard many years ago into something that approximates the awe of the pale blue dot:

Earth is moving at 67,000mph around its star, and still people insist there’s no such thing as progress!

My main aim was to convey my awe at everything around us: the earth and everything on it, our solar system, our galaxy and what we can and understand of our universe, but I wanted to do it in such a way as to make it clear that we, as humans, are both special and insignificant. Special in that we are the only sentient, self-aware beings that we know of — at least in our neck of the galactic woods (or perhaps in our understanding of nature around us) — and insignificant in that this planet, this third rock from the Sun, is not the centre of anything meaningful or important. We have no special place in the universe, the universe does not revolve around us, neither physically nor metaphorically. It’s not a matter of belief; in fact, it’s the complete absence of any belief or dogma. It’s simply stating what we know as fact so far. This may sound paradoxical, or even insulting, especially if you are from a religious background, as indeed I am, and you may immediately recognise where I am going and wish to move along to a less challenging site. But I hope you don’t.

I am, among other labels, an atheist, but note the lowercase ‘a’ — I consider it important. It is a device that I use to simply illustrate that I am non-theistic but am understanding and compassionate of the billions of theistic people on the planet which, if statistics are anything to go by, you are probably one of them. I used to be, too, but that doesn’t really matter here — I’m not trying to convert you, and I’ll thank you to treat me with the same courtesy and respect.

Before I begin, let me make one thing clear: I might speak of various theistic and non-theistic positions, but they are my take on the particular topic. I do not speak for anyone other than myself, and nor do I pretend to — not even for atheists or other labels with which I identify. I am representative of me. This is a clarification that may come up in the future — as many debates and arguments often include the “You don’t speak for…” line, or variants of it — so don’t be surprised if I either point you to this post or ignore the attempt. I’ll also be mix-and-matching “God”, “god” and “gods” not in an attempt to inflame, but rather to neutralise any partisan positions, point out that one man’s God is another man’s Satan, and of course to illustrate that ALL theists are going to whatever hell you believe in as you are ALL heretics to someone else’s faith or interpretation of it — even sects within the same religion — and they ALL claim to be the final authority on such matters. Think of it as an exercise in humility or, preferably, a level playing field.

Some time ago I was trying to determine where my position was on religion and the hornet’s nest that surrounds it. For some time I called myself an agnostic (claiming that I didn’t know whether there was a God or not, so the only logically-correct position was neutrality), but gradually came to the realisation that an agnostic is someone who hasn’t really thought about it enough. By this I mean that I’d been avoiding the ‘a’ word: atheism. To many it is a subjective word that conjures up images or memories of iconclasts, god-deniers and intolerant, red-faced angry-shouty people who think that anyone who believes in fairy tales of any sort should be hanged, drawn and quartered. It’s true that those people do exist, I can’t and won’t deny it; however, I call those people hard atheists — or in moments of pedantry, just Atheists (note the capitalisation).

The ‘a-’ in atheist denotes absence, or not, or without. For example: sexual and asexual reproduction, moral and amoral behaviour (a favourite of ad hominem and pro-theistic arguments), tonal and atonal, social and asocial, chromatic and achromatic, and so on. So you can see that atheist means the absence of belief, not the denial of belief. It is a truly neutral position that contrasts considerably with theists (who insist that the unseen and unproven is real, calling it faith) and the subset of atheists who consider the supernatural (in the literal sense) to be impossible; both are examples of dogma, having chosen a belief or a “side” over the facts. A truly a-theistic position is one that can and will change its view as new facts come to light — not in a “God of the gaps” manner as many religions treat scientific discoveries (i.e. where everything not understood by science belongs to religion, shrinking in size as our knowledge grows) — but objectively, without holding onto anything that has been disproven according to the best yardstick we have at our disposal so far: scientific method.

As an aside — and as an indicator of where the bar is — proof requires more than testimonials from rich, famous, important (or even lots of) people — it requires critical thinking while avoiding logical fallacies and cognitive biases. There is no middle ground on these points.

The other side to the hard atheist coin is what I call soft atheists — they tend to have the same intellectual position as hard atheists about the validity of religion, each religion’s sects and fragments, the actions of its followers, and its place in the world, but they tend to differ in the reaction to those points. A soft atheist is more likely to accept a theist’s position — or, perhaps more to the point, the theist’s right to that position — rather than a hard atheist, who may consider such discussion fruitless as they’re “dealing with someone who believes in fairy tales.” The soft atheist may feel the same about the theist they’re speaking to, but compassion tends to stop that becoming a show-stopper. A hard atheist may wish to rid the world of the scorge of religion, but a soft atheist may understand that it’s human nature to believe in something so, rather than try to beat it out with words, s/he seeks to engage and educate. It’s not so much that “theists are ignorant”, but rather it’s about understanding how much of our lives is affected by the contents or — more often — the interpretation of stories purportedly written anywhere from the Stone Age to the Medieval period, depending upon the religion.

This brings me to humanism (which typically refers to secular humanism). For me, humanism goes hand-in-glove with soft atheism, though there are as many different points or view and opinions within humanism as there are within even soft atheism. It probably varies based upon background (ethnic, family and socio-economic), education, exposure to science and religions, authority figures through life, personality, and individual goals. Humanism provides, among other things, an ethical framework around which non-theists can structure their approach to life. It is not an alternative religion, as that presumes that religion is the source of ethics and morality which, if you have critically examined any religious text, if most certainly not true. Such texts may contain examples and guidelines of such patterns of behaviour, but they also contain many examples of appalling crimes against humanity.

People are people, and neither religion nor the absence of it makes any difference to how we treat people. History has unequivocally proven this time and again.

And this brings me, in a roundabout way, to the various labels I use to address myself, depending upon who I am speaking to. In early 2008 I found an acronym that summed my perspective up almost perfectly: HASSNERS. It is as follows:

Humanist: Try to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs.
Atheist: Affirm that, in all probability, god(s) do not exist, or at best it cannot be proven.
Scientific: Consider science and the scientific method is the best way to understand the world.
Secularist: Work towards the end religious privilege and discrimination.
Naturalist: The natural world is all we know for certain, and events have natural causes.
Ethical: Follow ethical standards worked out by man not by god(s).
Rationalist: Believe truth can be discovered by reason.
Skeptic: Suspend judgement as knowledge is rarely final and absolute.

Even if you are the most ardent theist — let’s say a right-wing neo-con Zionist Christian or a closet jihadi furiously hammering your keyboard every night in a chat room — you will undoubtedly see yourself in some of those points, even if the rest offends you. It’s because not everyone fits into a neat little pigeon-hole. Everyone is at least a little bit like just about everyone else. I’d say think of a Venn diagramme with a set for each individual trait known to mankind in it, but it makes my head ache too — you get my point, I’m sure.

Back to the point of this website. You now know how I view myself and, to some extent, the strength of my position. It’s my intention to post individual posts and links to other posts of interest. I’ll apologise up-front if a disproportionate number of them are posts of outrage or examples of theistic intolerance, and note that I’ll mix-and-match “God”, “god” and “gods”, but I promise I will endeavour to keep the balance. This balance is unlikely to take the form of examples of theistic puff-pieces, as you already know that is not a position I consider realistic or helpful, but I will try to make an environment that encourages your participation and thought.