If the most good you can do is keep breathing, then do it and do it with pride.
If today the life you can save is your own, then save it and consider yourself a hero.
Tomorrow you will do more good, if you are there. Tomorrow perhaps you will be able to save someone else.
But today, you stay alive. Not just because someone else will need you tomorrow. Because you need you today. You matter, by yourself. You are a person and that is enough.
Tomorrow I will write the post I intended to write today about helping as wisely as possible. Tomorrow I will fix my CV. Tomorrow I will help people.
I will have fedoras and never apologise to anyone
[content warning: scrupulosity triggers abound. Also discussion of scrupulosity, oppression, religion, atheism, suicidal ideation, sympathy with both mean sj and mean anti sj]
[Epistemic status: low-blood-sugar rambling]
EDIT 30/05/2015: I clearly haven’t communicated as well as I intended to I this post. I will write a follow-up post at some point, but for now just let me clarify that I don’t condone being gratituitously unkind, and I don’t think that the average person who expresses sexist views is doing so because they are triggered by feminism. However people triggered by feminism definitely exist and (because I am an extremely lucky woman) in my personal life I run into them more often than I run into people who are simply opposed to feminism because they wish to harm women.
If you say “die cis scum” you have my sympathy. Even though I am cis.
If you say “kill whitey” you have my sympathy. Even though I am white.
If you say “fuck feminist bitches” you also have my sympathy. Even though I am a feminist.
“But trans people and poc are oppressed groups! Anti feminists are just idiots, Esther! Why are you giving them the same empathy as oppressed people? Aren’t you just supporting the oppression of women and nonbinary people?” says an imaginary interlocutor.
Because I think I know how they feel. You probably feel something similar to what I feel when I say “God is evil. Hail Satan!” And I am not against suffering because it is caused by oppression. I am against opppression because it causes suffering.
So, I’ve rewatched this video a bunch of times:
Relevant quote:
If I hadn’t come out of religion like I did, I guarantee you I would be dead right now. I would be dead. I would have been pushed to the point of killing myself because of how miserable I was feeling with the guilt.
Same, buddy. Same.
I want to be absolutely clear: I have much better parents than the cruel parents this guy had. In fact, I have wonderful parents. They were never anything but kind to me, they were saddned but not angry at my loss of faith and they have never deliberately harmed me in any way. I both love and like my parents and I am absolutely certain they both love and like me.
But I still made excuses to avoid spending Christmas Day with my family because every time I think about Jesus I feel physically sick and start shaking. I don’t hate Christians, but I hate Jesus because Jesus hated me first.
(I upset my parents more than I realised by spending Christmas away from them, and I won’t do it again. I need to be significantly less crazy by December. But that’s beside the present point.)
Also, I have really lovely freinds who are Christians, although my closest Christian friend is somewhat atypical for not believing in Hell. I also know a couple of atheists who alieve in Christianity, and although I find this hard to understand, I don’t object to people using helpful metaphors.
And I get on pretty well with some non-Christian theists.
But sometimes, I still just need to say “Christianity is terrible” because the alternative is feeling unbearably sad.
Ozy Frantz has a wonderful post about how you should not bully people for venting.
I used to work retail. (It turned out I’m too mentally ill for retail work. Oops.) Sometimes, when I finished a shift and someone had yelled at me because I couldn’t take their expired coupon even though if I’d done that I would have lost my job, I would come home and say to my girlfriend “ugh, I hate customers.”
It would probably have been optimally virtuous for me to say “I am frustrated with this one customer that I interacted with, although I recognize that they probably have understandable reasons for behaving the way they did and I am only seeing a tiny slice of their lives and they could be a really nice person otherwise. Also most of the customers I interact with are pleasant individuals and I shouldn’t generalize.”
Frustrated people are very rarely optimally virtuous.
But the thing is, if you’re going to not require frutrated people to be optimally virtuous, that means not requiring any frustrated people to be optimally virtuous. Including the people you think are oppressive or irrational or over sensitive or stupid or evil or all of these and more. Even if you are correct in thinking they are oppressive. Because people who hate themselves have a right to get better. Sacrificing one stranger’s mental health on the altar of your idology, whether that ideology is feminism or anti feminism or atheism or anarcho capitalism or LW-style rationalism or banning daylight savings time, is pointlessly cruel. Go convert someone who’s not triggered. (If you believe not converting the triggered person is gonna get them tortured eternally… well. That’s awkward.)
Now, I want to be absoltely clear. My anger at what Christianity did to my brain does not justify me doing any of the following:
- Harrassing or bullying individual Christians or sending them mean messages (confession: I have sent a mean message and subsequently apologised. I won’t do it again.)
- Denying Christians employment on the basis of their beliefs if I am ever in charge (unless I am the director of Atheist Organisation Which Is For Atheists, in which case it would be just as reasonable as insisting that the secretary of the Vegetarian Society does not eat meat.)
- Turning up to churches, or Christian clubs, or Bible study or any other specifically Christian places and being loudly atheist (unless you’re being forced to go to Church against your will. Then piss on the floor on purpose and people will be reluctant to force you to go again. Unless pissing on the floor puts you at risk of violence, in which case you should say safe.)
- Pretending to be more objective than you are (obviously, no human is totally objective about anything, but you should be as honest as you can about bias levels.)
- Outright lying
- Being rude or intellectually dishonest when participating in public debates of your own free will (ideally, don’t voluntarily engage in debate unless you can pass the Ideological Turing Test.)
- Failing to provide trigger-warnings for blasphemy in situations where trigger-warnings for blasphemy are appropriate (if you can’t remember trigger warnings for disability-related reasons, that’s OK, but probably some blanket “I can’t remeber trigger warnings so people with triggers may wish to stay away from this blog” blanket statement would be a good idea.)
Also, I think there is a difference between venting in a personal space and venting in a public space. It’s obviously okay to say “ugh Christianity is terrible” in a private conversation with an atheist friend. It’s obviously awful to say that to a Christian friend apropos of nothing, or to put it on a T shirt and walk into a Church wearing it, or to send a Christian blog random asks about how Jesus is a manipulative asshole.
Saying that Christianity is both harmful and factually incorrect in public is obviously fine. But rants born from triggers are a harder matter. Ther’es a difference between “I assign a marginal probability to God’s existence and I think Christian ethics encourage pointless suffering and the doctrine of Hell in particular is both incredibly psychologically damaging and untrue” and saying “fuck you Jesus, fuck your hate for all huamnity, you non existent bastard, I wish you existed so I could punch you in the face.” There’s a difference between “trans people are systemically mistreated and even killed in our society and cis people need to stop doing this, immediately and forever” and “cis people are the fucking worst.” There is a difference between “The feminist movement is routinely ableist and really needs to sort itself out on this issue” and “why the fuck are feminists such unsympathetic evil bitches every time a disabled man does anything including exist.”
The internet, however, blurs the lines between venting in public and venting in private. Is it Ok to type the second thing about Jesus on a personal tumblr? I think so. How about this blog? Well, I hope so! A blog with a large audience? A twitter with hundreds of thousands of followers?
I don’t know. I just think that what I do is try my best to be optimally virtuous and fail. And assume, unless I have massive evidence to the contrary, that everyone else is trying their best to be optimally virtuous and failing. So I try not to yell at people for venting, even when I think they crossed a line. And I ty not to yell at people who yell at people for venting, even when I think they are being insufficiently compassionate. I am writing this partly because it’s easy to write and I want to blog more, but mostly because I just want everyone to remember that being alive is really hard and when people make mistakes it is usually the result of pain.
Recently I’ve seen various people I like and respect venting uncharitably against things I think are beautiful and important, then various other people I like and respect yelling at them for it. And I find the venters more sympathetic than the people yelling at them. How much of this is actual ethics, and how much is my personal triggers, remains a mystery to me. One is always more biased than one thinks one is, even after accounting for the fact that one is always more biased than one thinks one is and trying to correct for it.
When people get upset with someone for expressing anger at cis people (even hyperbolic and uncharitable anger) it frightens me. Because I worry that when someone describes my bisexuality as objectively disordered those same people will expect me to provide a logical, emotionless essay on the flaws inherent in a telelogical understanding of human sexuality instead of crying and hitting myself in the face.
When people get upset with someone for expressing anger at feminism (even hyperbolic and uncharitable anger) it frightens me. Because I worry that when I hear people talk about how Jesus Loves Me those same people will expect me to calmly refute the cosmological argument instead of having a panic attack and throwing up. (If you leave a comment on this post about how Jesus Really Does Love Me you will be banned.)
“So you’re a feminist who thinks it’s okay to say die feminist scum? Isn’t it also Ok for some feminists to say ‘die anti feminist scum’ if that is so?” asks the imaginary interlocutor.
Yes. Obviously. It is absolutely OK.
Andrea Dworkin was repeatedly raped by a man as a child. Andrea Dworkin was later brutally sexually assaulted by police after participating in anti war demonstrations. Andrea Dworkin became, in her own self-description, a prostituted woman in order to survive and was abused further by many of her male clients. (I understand that many many sex workers object to the phrase “prostituted woman” but I want to refer to Dworkin with the terminology she chose herself. I will continue to refer to you as sex workers, or whatever other term you prefer.) Andrea Dworkin married an utter scumbag named Cornelius Dirk de Bruin who beat the shit out of her. Even accounting for the fact that all women face some risk of physical and sexual violence from men, Andrea Dworkin was astonishingly unlucky in all the men she encountered (except John Stoltenberg) and, well, if you were Andrea Dworkin, would you have an accurate availability heuristic about men?
Andrea Dworkin would have had to have been superhuman not to be filled with rage against men. I would very strongly advise scrupulous or self hating men against reading Dworkin, but I also think anyone who thinks that it is reasonable to expect Dworkin to be more charitable to men is either ignorant of Dworkin’s life or requires unattainably high moral standards.
Of course, Dworkin wasn’t merely venting. Dworkin was theorising, in a public forum. And some of the things she said actaully made sense (some really didn’t.) People have a right to criticise the theories she came up with. But I believe it is better to start from a place of empathy than a place of anger.
And just to be clear, I’m not saying that you have to have suffered as much as Dworkin did to earn the right to anger at anti-feminists. If someone has done something bad to you, you are allowed your anger. You do not have to compare suffering. Many, many women, nonbinary people and gender-non-conforming men have been made to feel unworthy and feminism has helped a lot of those people [ETA: where this said people, it originally said women. This was a typo but I apologise to anyone hurt by it.] feel worthy again. If you’re a person whose sense of worthiness depends on feminism, you don’t have to be charitable to angry anti feminists. (Although you probably should be listening to marginalised people who feel excluded by feminism, especially since their critiques are usually not “feminism is intrisically awful” but “feminism could be so much better than it currently is.”)
What about a person harmed specifically by atheism? Would I be happy to hear “die atheist scum!” from someone if those three words were the price of their sanity? Well, I would strongly suggest that this person and I avoid each other due to incompatible triggers. And I think this person is factually incorrect about God’s existence. But I think their right to be happy and sane is far more important than factual correctness about God. So yes, absolutely say “die atheist scum” if that’s what it takes for you to feel like you deserve to exist. I want this to be clear, nobody should restrict the right to vent to those people whom they agree with.
If anyone or anything has made you feel worthless, whether it’s feminism or sexism or theism or atheism, you don’t need to have suffered x amount to ride the vent-a-coaster. You do what you need to stay sane.
And if you’re reading this post and this post made you hate yourself, then you have every right to say “fuck this post! It’s conflating totally different things! Esther is an idiot, how dare she make me feel like my venting about x is as bad as someone else’s venting about y!” then, good for you. Maybe one day we will both grow to the point of optimal virtue, but to get there, you have to not hate yourself. If this post makes you hate yourself, ignore it completely!
You are a good person. You are a good person. You are a good person. And if it takes you hating a group I belong to, or even hating me personally, for you to believe you are a good person, then I accept your hate with a joyful heart. Hate me as long and as hard as you need to in order to be happy. Just don’t tell me Jesus loves me in the comments unless you like being banned.
Satisfice Literally Something
Do not make the perfect the enemy of the good.
Do not make the good the enemy of the adequate.
Do not make the adequate the enemy of the tolerable.
Do not make the tolerable the enemy of the “Well, at least nothing’s on fire”
Do not make “Well, at least nothing’s on fire” the enemy of “Well, at least not EVERYTHING is on fire.”
Do not make “Well, at least not EVERYTHING is on fire” the enemy of “OK, everything’s on fire, but at least there aren’t any killer bees.”
Do not make “OK, everything’s on fire, but at least there aren’t any killer bees” the enemy of “at least the killer bees aren’t flame proof robots”
Do make yourself the enemy of the flame proof robot killer bees. We should all be enemies of the flame proof robot killer bees.
Some strategies for helping friends who hate themselves
Note: This was originally posted on tumblr in reponse to an anonymous ask, but I’m taking a break from tumblr and trying to actually use this blog which I’ve had for almost 6 months and posted on twice. So I thought I’d cross-post here.
Anonymous asked:
How can I respond helpfully to people who are expressing self-hate? I experience (I think comparatively minor) self-hate sometimes, so it’s not that I don’t understand what it’s like; I just don’t know what to do about it. Like, I know what kind of things would be helpful to me, but I don’t want to assume they universalize and end up making things worse. Do you have advice? (Is it okay to ask you this kind of thing?)
You are right to avoid assuming that what helps you will generalise to other people. It’s hard to know what will help someone. Probably the best thing you can do, if someone regularly talks to you in self-hating moods, is to ask them what would be helpful. However, they might not always know what this is.
Here are some things which I know help me and/or people I am close to. Followers can add anything they feel is helpful. I can’t guarantee that this will work for everyone in every scenario, and I am not an expert on anything, but this is stuff useful in my experience.
- Concrete Reassurance
Reassurance is often but not always helpful. Often a person on some level knows their self-hating thoughts are not true and they want “permission” to not believe in them. Sometimes “you are not [list of negative adjectives] you are [list of positive adjectives]” is sufficient but I can be more helpful to give them reasons why you think they are [positive adjectives]
Example
Bob: I am such a fucking idiot. I can’t do anything right, and I’m going to fail my finals.
Alice: Well, you thought you were going to fail your exams last year and you didn’t. And you aren’t an idiot. You make really insightful blog posts.
Downsides: The main problem with reassurance is that people will sometimes start playing the “yes but” game. They are so deep in self-hate that your arguing against it feels like a threat. I’ve been on both sides of this conversation. It’s not fun. This is an example of how it can look.
Carol: I’m so incompetent, I’ll never get a job
Dave: But you’re really competent at the charity you volunteer at
Carol: Yes but last week I spilled tea on the desk, I’m more of a liability than an asset, I should just quit because I’m not even helping them.
Dave: But you also reorganised their filing system and cleared out all the cupboards, that’s a big deal. Spilling tea isn’t a big deal.
Carol: Yes but volunteering isn’t even that good, if I was really good at anything someone would be paying me to do it
Dave: It’s normal for finding a job to take a while, you have lots of skills. You’re really good at organising things and you’re really friendly
Carol: Yes but that won’t help me get a good job, I got bad grades and I went to an ex polytechnic. I’m completely stupid and there’s no point in trying.
Dave: Lots of people with no degrees or worse grades than you get jobs
Carol: Yes but…
When people are playing “yes but” they will keep on and on finding reasons why their situation is hopeless, they are an Objectively Worthless Human, et cetera. There isn’t any amount of logic that will convince them that their self-hate is inaccurate. It’s often a good idea to try some of the other things on the list, especially Distraction, when this happens.
Reassurance is also not good when a person has done something unambiguously unethical (like cheating on a partner or shoplifting purely for kicks) but is hating themselves too much for it. Obsessively hating yourself is not good, even when you have genuinely done something bad. See step 6 for more helpful tips for that scenario.
- “Even if you’re [thing which you think is bad] that’s not so terrible.”
A lot of people will beat themselves up for things which aren’t actually bad. E.g. they might think they are unattractive, have a low IQ, don’t pass as a member of their own gender, have childish hobbies, etc. (This is not an exhaustive list by any means.) Sometimes their perceptions about these things are accurate, sometimes they are not. But that is not the point. The point is they hate themselves for a thing which isn’t harmless.
Example:
Evelyn: I’m fucking hideous, I don’t know how anyone can stand to look at me.
Fatima: Well I don’t think that’s true, but even if you are, so what?
Evelyn: I am ugly, that’s what so what
Fatima: Ok, I really don’t think that’s true, but even if it was true, that doesn’t stop you being an awesome person.
Evelyn: But I am fat and I have weird teeth and my eyes are too close together and…
Fatima: Would you bully someone else because they were fat and had weird teeth and eyes too close together?
Evelyn: Well… no…
Fatima: Don’t bully Evelyn then
Downsides: People can also play the “yes but” game with this. Also, this doesn’t work on “I hate myself because I’m a bad person.” Convincing a person that it’s OK to be a bad person is both wrong and unlikely to work. (Although if they think they are a bad person hate themselves for not destroying themselves to help others, consider trying this to convince them it is OK to do self care.)
- Sarcastic “agreement”
This is really, really great for some people. People who know me, do this more often.
Example:
Greg: Ugh I am completely useless, I have done nothing productive all day.
Hilda: yeah, you’re the worst. Hitler has nothing on you. You are the most terrible human being ever to walk the planet. All the murderers in the world are better people than you, because they only killed people, whereas you spent a day looking at cat gifs instead of studying. I’m going to call Interpol right now and they’ll come round to your house and arrest you for crimes against humanity.
Downsides: The first is that some people are sufficiently self—hating that “you are worse than Hitler” genuinely seems like a reasonable proposition. If you’re online you can fix this with emoticons and [/sarcasm] tags. I almost typed the sentence “I don’t know how you manage the equivalent for irl situations, speech is really toneless compared to text” then realised that human voices have tones (although you should be careful when talking to people with issues parsing tone.)
You can also make it look like you don’t think their self-hate is a real problem. This is hard, because self-hating thoughts are often ridiculous in the cold light of not being in the middle of an emotional breakdown, and sometimes laughing at them is really, really helpful. But if it makes the person feel invalidated, then stop and explain that was not your intent.
Finally, mentioning murderers, Hitler etc is obviously gonna be a trigger for a lot of people. So obviously don’t mention Hitler and murderers in that scenario.
- Distraction
Sometimes it’s not possible to talk people out of hating themselves. Often they may recognise that their thoughts are untrue, but that doesn’t change how they feel. In that situation, it’s often best to help provide them with something happy to focus on. You can do this directly, especially if the person knows that they are being irrational and need distraction rather than actually believe the sad thoughts.
Example:
Ingrid: My brain says I am the WORST I am the LITERAL WORST I should just DIE because I am the WORST
Jamal: Wow you sound really sad. *hugs*
Ingrid: I am sad because I am the WORST. Why am I the WORST?
Jamal: I think you’re pretty great actually.
Ingrid: My brain says I am the WORST THOUGH.
Jamal: You sound like you’re not thinking very clearly. Would it cheer you up to talk about the Starchild Universe?
Ingrid: I don’t DESERVE to talk about the Starchild universe because I am the WORST
Jamal: No, you are awesome. The ridiculous introduction of time travel into the Starchild Universe is, in fact, the worst.
Ingrid: lol I guess…
Jamal: They just better not use it to fuck with Melinda’s character development
Ingrid: Melinda is so cool. :)
Downsides: the main one is that this can seem like you’re not listening, or not taking their sadness seriously. This is why I find it helps to be direct, as people if they would like to talk about [subject of interest other than how allegedly awful they are.] And respect if they say no.
- Just exist in their general direction
OK this is hard. But sometimes a person won’t really respond to any words. Sometimes you just have to “be there for them.” If you are in meatspace with them, and you have the kind of relationship where touching is OK, you can hug them etc, hold their hand, generally communicate support through touch. If you’re talking to them online or on the phone, or you don’t have that kind of relationship, it is a bit harder. Basically you just have to be there, communicate that you care about them and wait for things to get better. You don’t argue with their self-hate you just exist at them, not hating them, liking/loving them and not stopping. This does help. Some of the most helpful conversations I have had have just been a person doing this. It is hard though. I don’t think I can do an example conversation (I tried and deleted it; it didn’t seem useful) and I’m sorry this is so vague but maybe followers can help? Or maybe the whole thing is just really anti-inductive idk
- Focussing on practical steps
A lot of self-hate is based on inaccurate perceptions and a lot of people who have issues with self-hate have inaccurate perceptions of themselves. However, sometimes a person hates themselves because they’ve done something genuinely wrong (like being mean to someone.) Self-hate is still bad in this scenario, both because of unnecessary suffering and because it distracts them from making amends.
Example:
Karen: ugh I am such a piece of shit. I screamed at Chris for no reason just because I’m pissed he’s dating my ex.
Louise: Yeah, that was a shitty thing to do, but you are better than the worst things you’ve done
Karen: no I am a piece of shit.
Louise: You’re not a piece of shit and saying that doesn’t help you or Chris. You need to apologise to him. And then stop beating yourself up.
Karen: yeah but why am I such an asshole
Louise: you fucked up once because you were sad. Yelling at yourself won’t make you a better person.
Karen: OK but I don’t even know what to say to Chris…
Louise: Do you want me to help you work out what you’re going to say to him?
Karen: yeah thanks
Sometimes a person hasn’t done something wrong, but they have a problem that needs practical solutions (like being romantically shy, or unemployed, or struggling with a class.) I don’t really have “example conversations” here, I am neither able nor willing to go through a conversation example of every conceivable problem a human might have.
- Remembering to look after yourself
These type of conversations are not easy. Some conversations are exhausting, frustrating or triggering. It’s OK to ask to leave a conversation if you don’t feel up to it, or if it’s pushing your own buttons. It’s OK to be tired and need to go to bed. It’s OK to have to leave because you need to be somewhere. Being in pain does not mean a person owns you. When you’re trying to help other people, don’t forget to take care of yourself.
Now This Is a Story All About How My Life Got Flipped Turned Upside Down
And if you’d like to take a minute just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I gave up Catholicism for Lent.
So it turns out I’m rubbish at blogging and didn’t blog for ages. Well, from now on, this is not an atheology blog. It’s a whatever-I-feel-like blog. And what I feel like is telling this story for the zillionth time.
[epistemic status: Tragic Backstory, also Happy Backstory. Not even pretending to attempt to control my biases.]
[content warnings: religion, apostasy, bulimia]
So, let’s go back in time to the distant days of 2013, when I was a Catholic. I was not a very good one, but oh my non existent God did I try. Not as hard as some people, and evidently not hard enough to stay Catholic, but rosary-every-day hard. Mass-every-day-I-wasn’t-too-miserable-to-leave-my-room hard. Hard enough that “Bless me father for I have sinned it has been three days since my last confession” was a thing I said often. Hard enough that I had hellfire nightmares and the wish that I never existed because then I would never have known the risk of damnation. Hard enough that I remember sitting on a train and wondering how many of my fellow passengers would be saved, and fearing for them, and wanting to scream at them “please please please stop doing bad things, God is going to torture you forever” but knowing they wouldn’t listen, and why should they listen when I already knew this and I was still doing the things that would get me tortured. Hard enough that when I sat in the pub with the rest of CathSoc I was confused about why they were all so happy, because didn’t they know that people were going to Hell every day?
And hard enough that I tried to control myself through fasting. And that when the fasting failed I binged and purged. But not hard enough to keep my head out of the toilet bowl.
Hard enough that I was exhausted. Hard enough that I made a page-long list of Lenten resolutions, including that I would give up my Doctor Who tumblr blog for Lent (because I kept wishing that I could pray to the Doctor instead of God, because the Doctor was at least on my side.)
But not hard enough that I kept any of them.
A few days into Lent, I gave in, checked my tumblr and saw a message from one of my favourite doctor who bloggers. She wanted to meet me in meatspace (!)
She was also very cute.
And I was trying hard, but I wasn’t trying hard enough to say no.
But hey, we were just meeting up as super platonic friendly friends. Gal pals! I was going to meet my friend and have a nice friendly chat about Doctor Who and about how everyone who preffered Davies to Moffat was Wrong On The Internet. Timey-wimey spacey-wacey friendly-wendly chastey-wastey innocent fun!
I was not going to do anything bad.
It was just a coincidence that the night before I was due to meet her, I instigated a conversation about the ethics of consensual boob-touching with my best friend (a lifelong atheist, who didn’t realise until he was 10 that people thought the Jesus story was literally true and not “made up like Cinderella”)
I saved the chatlog. I tried to convince us both that God had made sex and made it for a specific purpose and that anything outside that purpose was BADWRONGDREADFULGROSS. It includes gems like “Ok. Well, first we need to know what the universe is for, before we can decide whether I should touch boobies” and “I mean, yes, we have appendices, and we don’t use those to serve God. But appendices aren’t a huge part of being human.”
I tried hard to defend Catholic sexual ethics.
But not quite hard enough to convince either of us.
And then I got on a train and met a beautiful tiny Scottish nerd girl in the station, and I hugged her and I tried not to get turned on, but I didn’t try hard enough.
And we went for a walk, and I tried not to look when one of the buttons on her blouse came undone. But I didn’t try very hard.
And when she noticed me looking, our faces moved towards each others. And I didn’t really try not to kiss her, although a few seconds later I pulled away and said “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
And she asked “says who?”
And I can’t say I tried very hard to think of an answer.
And when we had lunch later that day in a cafe called Sinners (which I chose because my life must contain as much heavy-handed symbolism as possible) I didn’t have to try to not throw up. I just… didn’t.
So, this Lent, I have a piece of advice. It’s terrible advice for a lot of people, but for some it is perfect:
Give up this Lent. Just give up. Stop trying.
Trying hard is great when you are doing something which is worth trying. But sometimes people wear themselves out doing pointless, destructive things.
Stop trying to believe things that you can’t get to make sense in your head. Stop trying to become a better person by hurting yourself. Stop trying to be perfect. Stop trying.
You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve if you just don’t try hard.
You have to believe in things that aren’t real. Otherwise, how can they become?
[content warning: spoilers for Hogfather buy Terry Pratchett.]
A few weeks ago, my partner Ozy* suggested I started an Atheism Blog. Note: please do not expect me to be smart just because I am Dating An Ozy, or because I am Part of The Less Wrong Community. You will be bitterly disappointed.
So, here’s goes nothing. Here’s a two-day late festive post.
Mitchell mentions pretty much all the key elements of Chritmas, except Jesus. He does say the word religion, but not a lot about it. It’s certainly true that early 21st Century western Christmas has very little to do with either Christ or Mass, and a lot to do with Santa. Carols are rare, bland pop songs about Santa on his sleigh are omnipresent. Christmas decorations are filled with robins and reindeer but there are far fewer angels and shepherds. According to the Telegraph, people in Britainare more likely to shop online than go to church on Christmas Day. Almost every adult in the country pours an enormous amount of time and effort into celebrating a visit from a figure they don’t think is actually real.
As a slightly bitter ex-Catholic, I find Christmas a little confusing. Everyone in my nation is celebrating a holy day of my ex-religion, even though most of them don’t believe in it, or even consider it a religious day. I want to join in with Santa Day, because Santa Day is fun and has presents and food and love. I don’t want to join in with Jesus day because… well, how long have you got?
Nick Land at Xenosystems [content warning: EVERYTHING] posits that the tradition of Santa is “a ritualised form of training in disbelief.” Children are taught to believe in an implausible magical figure, for the express purpose of learning to disbelieve in him as part of a coming-of-age ritual. The point of believing in Santa is to stop believing in Santa.
There is, of course, Secular Solstice. (I was on the wrong continent to attend, but I did get together with a friend for some Solstice fun.) But that doesn’t really solve the problem. Everyone is celebrating something they don’t believe in, and I don’t believe in it either, but I used to and I can’t just pretend it never mattered when Jesus was the burning centre of the first 24 years of my life. It’s kind of like the entirety of Western Civilisation giving a whole month to celebrate the birthday of your asshole ex whom they have never met, only more so.
My solution to this was simple. I don’t celebrate Christmas. I celebrate Hogswatch. Of course, I say the word Christmas because that’s what people understand. But in my heart, I mean Hogswatch: the fictional Christmas-like festival from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, where the Santa-like Hogfather brings presents to children, and makes the sun rise again after the longest night of the year.
The basic premise of Pratchett’s Hogfather is that on the Disc, things are made real by people’s belief in them. Anthropomorphic personifications take literal form. When a malevolent Assassin uses magic to prevent the children of the Disc believing in the Hogfather, Death (another walking personification, who SPEAKS IN ALL CAPS) steps in, dons red and white robes and rides the Hogfether’s sleigh, until his granddaughter Susan fights the assassin and saves Hogswatch.
The Hogfather isn’t real, and Pratchett writes about how attempts to make him real are flawed and unfair (poor parents can’t put nice gifts in stockings like rich parents can; a king who gives his Hogswatch leftovers to an old peasant man ends up leaving the peasant embarrassed and upset, retailers cynically exploit the “spirit of Hogswatch.”) But the Hogfather is necessary, as death explains to his granddaughter.
HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY. YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE IN THINGS THAT AREN’T REAL. OTHERWISE, HOW CAN THEY BECOME.
I miss being a Catholic. I don’t miss God, and I only occasionally miss the Church. But I miss being a Catholic. It’s been almost two years though, and I’m done grieving.
A group of LW-affiliated people on tumblr recently coined the term atheology – a theology based on aliefs. A mythology that helps us build the world we want out of the indifferent blocks of the universe. And we’ve been building our own myths, because we need them.
I don’t believe in Christ, and I think Jesus was kind of a jerk. But I at least alieve in the Hogfather. And Elua. And Adam Young. And justice. And mercy. And duty. And happiness. And liberty. And love.
Santa isn’t ritual training in disbelief. Santa is ritual training in making goodness real, even though there is no such thing as goodness.
There is nobody but us here. We have to love one another, because there is no good God to love us. If a good God is going to exist, we are going to have to build him. I am not talking about Artificial Intelligence, which I don’t know enough about to comment on, although it’s possible that this might be one way to build God. But first we have to build God in our minds.
So this is what this blog will be about. Atheology, materialist spirituality, and building good gods in my heart. I don’t know if it will be of interest to anyone besides me and my friends. But in any case, happy Hogswatch.
*edit May 2015, Ozy and I are no longer dating but nobody has done anything mean
