An Enemy to Civil Liberty: Unicorns

 

Where I grew up everyone believed in unicorns. The only people who didn't were Soviet Communists who wanted to infiltrate and destroy our American way of life, the bastards. I can honestly say I never heard a single person I knew even suggest that unicorns were not real until I was actually in high school. By that time I'd seen people on Donohue deny the existence of unicorns. I believe it was a taping in a huge auditorium in Dallas or somewhere and I was astonished the disbeliever wasn't lynched there and then. On reflection I'm not at all surprised. The audience was being watched, so they responded the way all unicorn-loving folk do, with acrid condescension and pity at the woeful and fallen state of man and the sure knowledge that someone was never going to get to ride a beautiful horned horse across rainbows in the sky, etc. The average American follower of the unicorn almost never meets disbelief with overt violence, at least when being recorded. Derision, bullying, sarcasm, tears, even screaming rage, but seldom physical violence; unless it's late enough, dark enough, isolated enough, and you know, maybe a very special day in the unicorn calendar.

That's the thing about the unicorn lovers. They will tell you straight up that they are all about the rainbows, peace, and pretty ponies. They are shocked and horrified that anyone has ever done violence in the name of unicorns, any and all unicorns. Shocked. And horrified. If pressed, most good unicorn lovers will admit that there are folks who follow the wrong unicorns and that they do all sorts of unspeakable things, and the most progressive unicorn folk will insist that any true unicorn believers are fundamentally sweet natured sweetie-pie cutie-patooties and no one should judge unicorns or the genuine believers therein by the behavior of just a few bad horse-apples, as it were. 

And really, it is the unicorn lovers who are oppressed nowadays, if you hadn't noticed. The unicorn haters have an agenda you know. It's Soviet Communism all over again! Corrupting the innocent love of unicorns in our children with their perverted anti-unicorn talk and describing their filthy non-unicorn sex practices in classrooms and those unisex bathrooms and putting secret messages against unicorns in their fancy children's books that they hide in our libraries. 

I don't believe in unicorns myself. Simple as that. Never seen the slightest evidence of 'em. Don't find I need 'em, never really think about 'em, could not care less about unicorns if they played golf or danced on the head of a pin or vomited skittles because unicorns don't exist. You want to believe in unicorns you go right ahead. You do you. I've had my run-ins with the unicorn crowd, and so I generally just avoid the topic altogether. None of my business, really. You "know" unicorns are real because you walk with unicorns, not with sight and so on. Okay. I know that's nonsense, but I don't want to fight. You enjoy your unicorn stories and your unicorn art and your unicorn stickers. Wear your unicorn shirts and crocs and trot on, unmolested by me, to frolic in happy meadows. Would that we could all just get along.

I personally almost never bring up unicorns. Maybe when I was younger and still finding my way in the world, but now? Trot on. I see your unicorn lawn flag, or your unicorn post on Facebook, I don't have to like it, right? That's how this is supposed to work in a democratic plurality. 

But some of you unicorn people just can't help yourselves, can you? You just have to talk shit about us nonbelievers. Oh, I don't mean the hardcore unicorn fanatics of my rural American childhood. Those unicorn ladies are still out there burning books and takin' names, I know. No, I mean my unicorn loving friends, some of 'em anyway, acquaintances really. Not all. Never all. Some of these just can't help speculating about just what would make some poor, benighted soul like me reject the Truth and Beauty of unicorns. Not the old school, western unicorns you understand -- how vulgar! how stupid! -- no, these more sophisticated, meditative unicorn believers follow altogether different trails; up and down the Himalayas for instance, or into ayahuasca retreats deep in the rain forest. I've just been sucked into a series of these unicorn conversations on social media, all of 'em with terribly smart folk, who just can not frame an argument without a unicorn or address my disbelief without being exactly as smug, pompous, humorless, and narrow as any of the unicorn ladies of my youth. Worse, by way of justification for all this wrong-headed twaddle about we who do not believe in unicorns, these believers only bring it up because (you guessed it) the anti-unicorn people are just so mean to the unicorn people!

And why am I getting so angry? Doesn't that just prove I need unicorns in my life? Do admit.

It is just so depressingly familiar, isn't it? 

I did try to crack a few jokes, lighten the mood. I tried to frame the whole thing as a friendly disagreement. I spoke from personal experience. I tried very hard to be respectful of other people's feelings, but I could not convince these otherwise intelligent, thoughtful, indeed creative men (all men, always men) to maybe not be such complete dicks about people who don't believe in unicorns. That was it. That was the whole deal. I wasn't trying to talk anybody out of their unicorns. I wasn't calling anybody names or saying that unicorns are responsible for an unspeakably awful and unrelenting history of violence and oppression and war -- though they absolutely are, the freaks. No. I was just telling these guys to ease off explaining me to myself and others from the enlightened unicorn point of view as if that was not only the best way to do that but the only way, which is just insufferable. I don't believe in unicorns, any color, stripes or no stripes, virginal white or midnight blue, so no, I do not see the point of your insistent invitation to ride yours. It's not there. That's all. Can we talk about something else?!

This morning I came perilously close to calling a online friend a pompous ass. Instead I deleted the conversation, my part anyway. I mean look at the problem logically for a moment. If he is, nothing I say is going to change that. I actually like the man and respect his work. He seems genuinely kind and he is a very clever fellow, if a bit stiff and occasionally humorless. I've been way worse. I wish he wasn't talking -- we'll say "through his hat" shall we? nicer -- but why go on when it's clear there's nothing to be accomplished beyond hurting one another's feelings?

That would be the point. 

Fucking unicorns. Ruin everything. 

Un-Churched

 

I could begin with an anecdote about some lovely old Methodist ladies I knew growing up. It's true, I knew 'em and they were nice -- mostly. Likewise the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Catholics, the Episcopalians, and a few of the Baptists. The Church of Christ were pretty quiet back in the day but about as close as we came to charismatics. That was pretty much the Sunday menu in my hometown. There were options though. There were at least three different Methodist scrums in the area and two Presbyterian, one rich and one poor, likewise the "nice" Baptists and the ones with the roadside sign on a wheeled trailer. There was certainly nothing new in the way of church then; no big-box mega-dudes, no non-denominational services outside of a Kiwanis meeting. Evangelists were on the Sunday morning tv or in tents. Most people you were likely to know were affiliated, however lax in attendance. And if you were new to them, people asked. Not if but where you went. If they knew your grandma they didn't have to ask. If you got the denomination you could pretty much guess the congregation by either the person's shoes or a rough idea of their address. Hilariously, "mixed marriages" tended to be described as such for pairing unalike Protestants, i.e. of different denominations, or even congregations. Catholics married Catholics, so far as you could tell. There might have been a Christian Science reading room somewhere. Never went in. Amish sold us our eggs and cheese. Mormons were as exotic as Marduk -- or atheists. Of Jews I knew not a one until high school.

I might also describe Bible Summer Camp as I went to more than one, or I might write about the night I answered an altar-call during a revival. I was probably twelve at the time, eleven or twelve. I could talk a bit about helping the Gideons hand out New Testaments to unsuspecting Cub Scouts, or describe the house and yard in town completely covered in Biblical quotes on hand-lettered wooden signs, or try to reconstruct my treasured conversations with a Presbyterian minister who was a lovely man, a history buff, and the father of a friend. (We talked about Churchill mostly, not God.)

When I think about it, and I do still think about it, my time amidst the Christians was by and large not an unhappy experience and I suppose I must say now that I still count Christians, active Christians among my oldest friends. So far as I can say, religious faith is for me no bar to friendship and affection. One can be as I am and still love some of God's people. 

The problem here is how to get in without making a scene. Holidays are best, but Easter isn't good. Too high, too holy, too near the cross. It ain't just chocolate bunnies and egg hunts. I almost hate to say it, but Christmas is about the only way to do this without undue fuss, so with apologies to the churched and the unfaithful equally for going to Bethlehem maybe one time too many, Christmas it is.

Nobody's made to feel funny at Christmas Eve Mass. As I understand it, this was often the one night, or one of two that Father saw one's actual father in church. Same in my grandmother's congregation at Blacktown Balm Methodist, membership more than one hundred, attendance more usually fewer than fifty. But come the Christmas Eve pageant and farmers nobody'd seen outside the feed-store or the auction-barn cleaned their boots and put on a starched white shirt. Oh, there were men who went every week, mind. Retired fellows, lonely, men of a specially pious nature, coupled mostly but a few single, some even of a marriageable age. We'll get back to the last directly, but for now it's worth mentioning just how a rare a single man was at church. Considering the to-do that was made about them, it's clear why the shy ones might have avoided being regularly on the Sunday rolls. Come Christmas week though and you'd have thought church was as popular as a dog-race or a dice-game. Christmas, everybody's welcome. Put it another way, come Christmas there's nearly no way to put anyone out.

Christmas pageants proper have had their day in American literature and deservedly so. Who doesn't feel for the kid who has to be a sheep? Shepherds in bathrobes, towels tied on their heads, three kings in paper beards, angels in wire-hanger-wings? A real baby in the manger sounds better than it ever proves to be and Sunday school classes aren't generally known for their production values, but there is certain magic to any dress-up involving little ones, just as there is real charm in children's voices raised imperfectly in familiar song. And then there is the text:

"And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed..."

 Great lead. Good stuff.

In my time I have been to Christmas services, not counting straight-up concerts, in probably two dozen different churches of various denominations and in at least four states. It's true that I haven't set foot in a church save for funerals for a decade or more, but there was a time when I made a point to wander into one church and another, famous and not, and I counted myself specially lucky if I hit a holiday service; fewer questions and reliably better music in my experience. Generally I'm a Gospel fan but not much for hymns and nothing is so likely to make me pray for death as the feeble wheeze of contemporary "praise songs." (If Gospel is greens, think unsalted kale chips.) Christmas music I love.

Yes to the secular -- the novelty numbers excepted -- but much as I love my chestnuts roasted on an open fire and my sleigh-bells ringing, I also love sacred music and the Christmas calendar. Sing-along Messiahs have rather ruined some of the fun, but generally everything is better in Christmas robes. Choral glories, boy soloists, women's choirs, pipe organs, here a Gay Men's Chorus and there a full orchestra & Handel or Vaughn Williams, and I am made happy. Not a snob. I also love kids at the railing trying to keep time with the piano and an unsuspected Irish tenor in the back pew belting gesu bambino over the congregants cowed heads. Sacred music of nearly every stripe is better somehow in a crowd. There is a freedom in numbers, a sense of occasion and anonymity that loosens inhibitions. A crowd can communicate and amplify joy as well as drown out the sharp sopranos. 

This would be why I've avoided Easter here, as the solemnity of The Passion quite rightly colors even the most innocent, most sincere exuberance in The Resurrection. Church Easter is adult. Christmas is simpler. 

So here's my thought. If you are unchurched, like me and or an atheist or LGBTQ+ or in any other way -- like me -- outside of Christianity, consider attending a Christmas or a Christmas Eve service. Depending on the size of the congregation, and the location, no one or nearly no one will question your presence there. And if they do, for the most part all you need to do is not explain yourself over-much. Say you're just glad to be there. Tell whoever is asking how much you appreciate the atmosphere, compliment the pastor or the priest, wish every one well and a Merry Christmas. Worse comes to worst, all they can do is ask you to leave, but I bet they won't -- not at Christmas. 

Now, why would you want to do any such thing as go to church at all let alone Christmas Week? Because we all of us need to understand something. We need to know, to be reminded what it is to be safe in church. That's it. Just that. One cannot know from just the one visit what it is that makes someone we either do not know or the people who may choose not to know us go to church. We may remember church fondly or not, may have once been a part of rather than apart from the religion around us. We may think we understand what other people see in it. May not have a clue. For some of us even crossing that threshold may be braver than we are prepared to be or it may be something we have vowed to never do again. We may have tried entirely too hard for too long to either conform or to understand and make others understand why we cannot. One may have been tested too much, lost too much, or we may simply not much care. I get any and all of that. Frankly I am weary of trying to understand the people who do not try to understand me. Too much of my life has been wasted on the extension of sympathy to those who are overtly hostile to my happiness and well-being or who would deny my very existence. My general rule nowadays is, sadly, fuck 'em. But to be and to feel safe in a place that does not really welcome you is powerful. It isn't about them.

Doesn't much matter where, to listen to music together is powerful. To listen to poetry together is powerful. To be in community is human. Sometimes it is good to be in someone else's. But specifically to be with other people who do not know us as we know ourselves, who would reject us, who may have hurt us, and to be in that moment with them anonymously but without dishonesty can be liberating. To find them as near to their best as you are likely to get and to see them happy and even happy to see you, and then to go back after into your own life unharmed re-establishes the possibility of safety elsewhere. I could tell you that this is a chance to appreciate your common humanity but that's as maybe. If you grew up in anything like the same America I did and you go to church at Christmas time, you may find you will have a good time, and you may also find as I did that you need never spare these people another anxious thought. You may disagree. 

Christians can still hurt you. Some of them, in some places the majority of them intend to. Just today they have undone fifty years of established precedent and reverted to an interpretation of the law and of the nation that refutes the autonomy of women's bodies. A sitting Supreme Court Justice in 2022, a black man, felt empowered to suggest that states have the right to go even further backwards and undo my marriage, deny access to contraception, and restore sodomy laws. Privacy is not recognized in the Constitution these people read. The enemies of progress, of science, of the separation of church and state, the enemies of federalism and of secularism won today and they did it if not in the name of Christianity then in defense of their personal religious beliefs and at the expense of reason, compassion, and the majority opinion in this country. The only rights that matter to these Justices are the right to make money and the right to impose their vicious, thoughtless, ugly religion upon the faithful and the heathen alike. The angrily, proudly churched, if not The Church, won, and we are reminded again that we are all of us at the mercy of their wrathful, rigid, and angry little god.

I can't say that I've lived through worse, though I am old enough to have lived through Bowers vs Hardwick in 1986, which said I was not safe in my own home from being prosecuted for having sex with another man, but I also lived through Lawrence vs Texas in 1996 which overturned that ruling. 

Personally I have survived the junior high school teacher who told me that "people like that" meaning people like me killed themselves to spare their families shame. I've survived the churches that told my friends I was satanic and told parents that their gay children are abominations. I survived the bullies who put me in a trash can and rolled me down a hall, who regularly shoved me into lockers and called me a faggot and once drove my bike off the street and into a metal fence. I survived the gang of kids who threatened to throw me off of the Tenth Street Bridge for being gay and "against god."

I saw friends get secret abortions and others struggle to escape their abusive homes, churches, parents, partners. I've seen the damage done by the churched at every level of our civil society and I've been told, time and again that the fault was mine for not trying harder to understand why they hate me and wish my friends dead so as to save imaginary innocents.

For every Christian I've seen do a good deed from faith, I've seen movements rise from those same churches intent to do me harm, to deny my rights as a citizen, to control and oppress women, to expel the exile and the refugee, to laud the rich and reward the greedy and to perpetuate racism, violence, and ignorance. For every kindness that came from faith, I've seen the same pieties warp, and cripple, and confine. I would today be done with the lot. I would be grateful to escape for good and all the frame in which this hateful, hypocritical mob will insist that I see my own country, my place.

 So why on earth should I be thinking about Christmas? Because I am trying to cede these people as little of my country, my history, and my own autonomy as possible. I don't need to be told again that not all Christians are this or that many Christians are that and that I mustn't judge these because of what those do. I know all this. I no more need my Christian friends to justify their faith to me than I still feel the need to talk any of them out of it. Believe just as you like. Talk about it or don't. Apologize or defend or argue just as you feel the need. I am not your enemy. See to your own house. Maybe don't argue the prejudices in my atheism or try to dissuade me of my anger or calm my outrage and you'll have more time to fight your fellow Christians for the truth as you see it of Christ Jesus. Maybe you can wrestle the Cross from those who use it as a bludgeon. Maybe not. Not my fight.

Once when I was in college I went to a mass at a Russian Orthodox church. Their Christmas falls on a different day and I didn't go knowing this but instead just followed a crowd into a service. I was dressed okay. No intention of causing offense. Not there to mock but to watch. It was all very moving and beautiful. The music was simple and wonderful. Only time I remember priests singing well. It smelled wonderful, everything glittered and shone. Everyone was incredibly nice to the boy who only spoke English.

Years later, in San Francisco I went one Sunday to Mass at a famous Mission church. It wasn't Christmas time, but not long after and there was still something festive in the decorations and the atmosphere. I heard Mass in Spanish for the first and only time, which frankly made it sound lovely, and heard contemporary church music which was just as disappointing in Spanish as in English. Everybody was nice.

I went once with my Grandmother to a Christmas service at her church long after I knew I had no need of it nor any church of my own. The service was much as I remembered it. The minister was shockingly a woman and more shocking than that, clearly of my own tribe, though no one would say so. Kids still sang at the railing. It was very much as it had always been. I felt fine while I was there and grateful when it was over, just as I remembered. I saw at least one single man there still of a marriageable age, not coupled, with what appeared to be his parents. He made rather a point of not making eye contact with me and I felt for him.

Again, I mention these examples not to reassure any one of us that we are really welcome there. I do not believe that we are, not as we are, even if you might believe as I no longer do. You may feel differently. You may know better. I only want to share my own experience and to suggest what I learned which is this: not only did the roof not fall in, and I did not catch fire but I found to my surprise that I could enjoy being there as myself and be unchanged in both my convictions and my person. I was safe even there just as I am. I could be touched and untouched, in their company but not of it. I could appreciate the occasion, the music, and even the company and then walk away. That is what I learned -- finally -- in church.

Maybe it would have been different on any common Sunday. I might have heard a sermon again on my sinful nature. I might hear another homily defending unironically the suppression of birth control and abortion as a holy mission to save lives. I might be asked why I was there with the same suspicion of heresy that forbade me from entering a beautiful little wooden church in Orange County, California. All of those experiences I have also had, and today they feel far more representative of the churched than my more pleasant memories of Christmas Eves past. Both I know are true. 

I would like to say that the churched have no power over me but that is not true. The truth confirmed again today is that they maintain a power disproportionate to their numbers and their right. It is a power I am confident that they plan to exercise again. They must be resisted. They are wrong in fact and in law. They hate me, and probably you too if you are reading this. They will shake your hand and then cut it off. I am reminded today just how conditional is their much vaunted love.  

I want nothing more to do with them, just as they have repeatedly shown they want nothing from me save my obedience or failing that, my nonexistence. Today I wish not one of them well, these churched and churlish bigots. Not one. More than ever I wish them and all their works, their churches and little god gone. Allow me my anger. Unlike those six pious liars I can and will do no one harm for the sake of my personal feelings. Again unlike them I will not pretend to neutrality. I cannot forgive them. Remember? I am not a Christian. I am not obliged. 

Maybe by Christmas I will want to sing again rather than scream. Maybe by then I will again feel the urge to wander into a church. Maybe not. Maybe by then I will feel strong enough to walk among the churched and feel safe within myself and among them. Maybe not. They are again doing their level best to make me unwelcome. Should I not judge them by their deeds? Ought I to take them at their word?

Perhaps they have finally taught me how to hate. Wouldn't that be a pity? Come Christmas we'll see.

Unabashed

As an atheist I have to ask, why are we invariably "unabashed"? Seriously, ought I not to be? Surely the implication of calling anyone an "unabashed atheist" is to suggest that I, as someone who does not believe, either ought to or at the very least should have the good grace to be ashamed that I don't.

Need I say I am not?

A friend on social media posted a link today to an essay online (-- and for anyone interested, I put it here.) The title, "Is There a Better Way for the Left to Talk About American Christianity?" told me straight away I had some work to do. It seems "people are talkin', talkin' 'bout people," as Bonnie Raitt so wonderfully sang in another context altogether, and once again it seems, "we laugh just a little too loud," etc. Well, let's give 'em something to talk about.

I am less interested here in the author Marie Mutsuki Mockett's well-intentioned if imperfectly made argument in this essay for civility, than I am in who she thinks needs the talking to. I bet you can guess. If you can't, let me just point out some clues; like the opening quote being from the brilliant novelist and unabashed Calvinist Marilynne Robinson, and the inevitable resort to the unabashedly "loud" evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins. See where this is going? Now, the "unabashed atheist," to whom she refers specifically in the essay turns out to be Ta-Nehsi Coates, but I feel pretty safe in assuming I'm also somewhere to her Left, maybe right there behind that other unabashed fellow, Colson Whitehead. She's talking to me. My question is, why?

It seems we -- the Left with the capital "L" and specifically we "unabashed atheists" thereof -- are not trying, or at least not nearly hard enough to not only talk respectfully about American Christianity, but more importantly as it develops in the piece, we aren't trying to talk with American Christians. 

Problem, or rather the first problem, as clearly I'm going to have more. To assume an organized, let alone a uniform response, to anything from "the Left" in America is to already be walking a chimera onto the stage. As my Dad might have said had he ever heard of the beast, that fire-breathing female monster with a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail won't hunt. Organization above the community level, and uniformity of any kind, ain't really our thing. Whatever one might think of the most recent innovations of a younger generation, and I wish them nothing but well, experience has taught me it will always be easier to open a discussion on the left -- little "l" -- than it is, for example to close a bridge or keep a protest moving in the same direction. (Goddess help you if you think you are going to keep to the agreed speakers-list or a time-table. Good luck with that. It's all about process, people.)

But that's not the assumption I resent. I'm just old enough that the idea of "the Left" is still thrilling, if unrealized. Again, why me? And just who do you think I am?

Marie Mutsuki Mockett's essay also put me immediately in mind of Toni Morrison's question regarding Ralph Ellison's classic novel; "Invisible to whom? Not to me." Can anyone assume that I don't know Christians? Have Christian friends? Talk to people not entirely of like-mind? Where is this place the author seems to think I live? This wholly secular Left? I mean, I live in Seattle, people. Seattle, and I've never been to the place her essay assumes. I lived in San Francisco for a dozen years and you know what? Nope. not there either. (And to assume that that is the Utopia to which all we "unabashed atheists" aspire is to again a WAY bigger assumption than any I may make about the generalized Christians to whom the essayist seems to think I need to learn to talk.) In my case at least, disbelief is something I came to, arrived at, stopped worrying about. I wasn't raised in it, and in contemporary culture it is still nonsense to say we live in a wholly, or even majority secular society. At least according to regular polling and pearl-clutching in the media, while church attendance in most of America continues to decline, the number of people who describe themselves as Christian still constitute a majority. And just as I am constantly being reminded, sometimes by my friends, that that majority is far from monolithic and that communion made up of very diverse beliefs and values, so I have grown more than a little tired of being told that I really need to learn not how to talk to my friends and neighbors, but rather to my actual enemies.

Nope. Not my job.

Because that's who I'm being asked to understand. I personally don't need to be told not to call someone stupid for not thinking the way I do, or not, in short, being me. I wasn't raised by monsters, thank you very much. But it isn't really my manners that are ultimately in question here, however the essayist has framed the discussion so that it might seem so. No one raised in a society where that old cudgel "hate the sin, but love the sinner" has left a mark can seriously be expected to not recognize that as a dodge when it comes directly after a blow. I know what it is to have and to be a friend. I understand respect, earned and offered and withheld. I have learned to recognize hate as well, however and from wherever it comes at me. Don't tell me it's because I don't try hard enough to understand the language with which my oppression is expressed.

It's very like being LGBTQ when someone other assumes we somehow sprang from the earth like so many gloriously variegated tulips. Not how that works. We come almost exclusively from straight people, even now. Nature. To be in any significant way other, to be of a minority by birth, is not to be unaware of who else there is in the world. Quite the opposite. To be in a minority is sadly first and foremost to learn the hard lesson that I am required more than most to accommodate if not accept the potentially violent rejection of the majority, in whatever ironic or seemingly well meant way it may be initially expressed. (It is with a heavy heart that I must admit that being of any minority does not automatically or necessarily extend our sympathies or commit any of us to understanding or supporting any other in their struggle. We all have work to do. Heavy lifting, even now. It didn't end when I came out. I still need to do more than I have and that will not end because I say so here.)

So, Christians.

Faith may indeed be a perfectly natural, perfectly beautiful, perfectly human response to existence. I personally do not accept that its only function in human history has been to explain the natural world before science took up that task with better tools. That's a straw man you will meet again in the essay that has set me off, that as an unabashed atheist that is my only thought on the subject. I don't dismiss that explanation, and I don't think anyone ought to, as there's truth in it, but it isn't the only thought I've ever had on the subject of faith. Lord knows people keep telling me I have to think about faith more than I might if left entirely to myself. I will say that faith may even be enviable when seen from outside, without being required in my personal understanding of the world. But let me reassure the reader, even or especially any reader of faith, it is not something I seek to overcome or escape or out of which I now feel the need to argue anyone. (If I once did, I can only say my reaction was to my own isolation and estrangement from the people of faith I then knew. Yes, I remember the long and ugly rhetorically florid jive I once preached to some harmless high school classmates late one night, after play-practice, when we were sitting at Mr. Donut. My apologies. Far from their fault.  I was trying to survive the place in which we were raised, and yes, maybe to hurt them if I'm being honest, but then I had been hurt first, if not by those kids. Doesn't entirely excuse the behavior, but it might go some considerable way to explain my motivation, don't you think?) Faith has indeed made art, great art. Christianity specifically has framed and taught me much of my own sense of morality -- how could it not have done growing up where and when I did? 

The Christians I know now are not the Christians I knew then, most of them. More importantly, my friends are not the Christians I am now being asked to understand better or to whom I am told I need to learn how to talk. I don't have to try not to confuse the two as they are nothing alike. No. I am being told yet again (and again and again) that what I, as an unabashed atheist need to do is, first, to mind my Ps and Qs, -- and I think I've covered that  -- and secondly, to study war no more and take up again with those who would, in my experience, all too happily tell me to my face that I am not simply in error, but damned.

And, again, why is this my responsibility?

Well, it seems we unabashed types have hurt their feelings, if not actively or aggressively, then simply you know, by ignoring them. It seems, according to one who went among them and studied their ways, my opinions and by extension my very existence has yet again left that population of believers feeling very much put upon. Mind now, it isn't that the religious reactionaries here described feel they have done anything wrong or purposefully injured or impaired my liberties. No, I am the one who has deliberately misunderstood their good intentions and abiding concern for the state of my soul, if not my body, well-being, or rights as a citizen. I owe them a more thoughtful and considerate hearing it seems, and scoffing at this is frankly part of my damned problem.  I've got a chip on my shoulder, a beam in my eye, and I need to see to this before I am invited back to the welcome table.

Recently reading Edward Gibbon's massy work, I was reminded of the foundational problem of the majority, any majority, religious or secular; namely that every majority was inevitably made from something less than complete unanimity of purpose, as almost every majority invariably lacks just that, until they don't. Gotta start somewhere. Where that somewhere always is and from what majorities are made are disparate, quarrelsome, and often as not disgruntled groups. What happens when such find common ground and form coalitions is the bedrock of Republican democracy for instance, no? But I was also reminded that having achieved a majority, any majority, human beings can't help but remember what it was to have not been in power, and to resent the forces that resisted them. Christianity in the body of the historical church has preserved its minority in the record of the saints and martyrs who died defending a new and often unpopular faith. My own experience of Christianity, before and after I was saved at the age of eleven or twelve, has been that the suffering of the church's minority is kept fresh in a constant insistence that the enemies of the faith are ever busy, not just in the theological abstract of temptation from the path, etc., but in the secular, not to say demonic mission to undo the good word and destroy the church. It is never enough to join the elect, as we are reminded there will always be someone shaking the ladder behind us. 

I am not in a position, or of an inclination to argue with the faithful as to any of this, and if my paraphrase is unjust, I admit it as no better than my own. Won't argue, in part because it isn't something to which I am willing to give much more energy.  And that is my point, come to it.

I don't feel the need to engage with Christians, friends or foes, on the level of the truth or history of their faith because it is now, as far as I am concerned, none of my business unless they choose to make it so. Honest. I'll talk about this if you want me to, my friends, but we needn't if you don't. Don't see the good of it myself, this conversation, for either of us, but my offer stands. Don't be shy, but then I am of this, a little. Like I said, not really how I was raised.

But then some well intentioned soul will unavoidably rise up yet again to tell me that as a progressive and an unabashed atheist the fault is mine for seeing a foe in any person of faith, as such, that our disagreement is the result of me not listening to what they say or understanding they way they say it, and I have to tell you, I don't accept that anymore. I think that is just bullshit. Listen to them? How can one not? Where can one go to not hear them constantly and what they think of Black Lives Matter, and the LGTBQ community, of a woman's right to control her own reproductive destiny, of religious and ethnic diversity, of atheism, of the president, of global warming, of every and any damned thing they care to shout and moan and piss endlessly on about, even as they insist that the only legitimate hurt is theirs, as the rest of us will insist on being so very rude in suggesting that they might be wrong, and or not the majority, or ridiculous, or if not evil -- as that's their favorite word, not mine -- then at very least a HUGE part of the fucking problem?

I'm sorry, but I think it is not me who should be abashed in this moment. I have already claimed my shame, as we used to say back in the day. Stop telling me to listen harder. How about you tell your new friends to stop talking for a minute about things they choose not to understand? How 'bout that? Then maybe we'll talk. 

Or maybe not.

Clerihew of Gleeful Anticipation

RICHARD DAWKINS

Among the walk-ins,
Richard Dawkins,
Spotting a priest,
Thought, "The first shall be least."

A Caricature

Daily Dose

From The Reader's Macaulay, edited by Walter H. French and Gerald D. Sanders

SWIFT AND VOLTAIRE

"The mirth of Swift is the mirth of Mephistophiles; the mirth of Voltaire is the mirth of Puck."

From Joseph Addison

The Death of Tom Paine