What a week...

It's been a deeply emotional week, and I actually feel rather exhausted because of it.

Last week, I did something that, from what I've heard since then, may have led to some undesirable consequences for someone who was, up to that point, a close friend (and for one or two of her friends as well).  It was unintentional, and if it hadn't been for the written equivalent of a slip of the tongue, I might not have caused any damage at all.  But I did make that mistake, and I still feel terrible for it, though I'm no longer in the state of self-loathing that consumed me for several days after I was informed that I'd made a severe and potentially harmful misstep.  I did what I could to fix the mistake, and I apologized as much as I dared to, given how upset my friend was, and knowing that I was quite possibly the very last person she'd want to hear from at the time.

I've consciously kept away from her—and to a certain extent, our mutual friends as well—since then; I'm terrified that she's still angry with me and I'm afraid that I've done our friendship irreparable harm both by doing what I did and then keeping such a low profile afterward.  But for a few days I was in absolutely no shape to talk to anyone if it wasn't totally necessary.  Experience has taught me that when I'm that upset, it's best to shut off my more social inclinations for awhile.  I ultimately end up truly hurting fewer people that way.  The person I am when I'm depressed, or even when I'm just somewhere on the outside edges of depression territory (as I was last week), is not a particularly pleasant person to be around; I don't become cruel, but I do become very gloomy, and people tend not to appreciate the company of someone who is that negative.

And then, a few days ago I heard from another good friend, a person upon whom I've come to depend perhaps a little more than I ought to, that he had the opportunity to leave our mutual hometown to work somewhere else.  There were several reasons why going elsewhere would probably have been a good decision, as well as several reasons why it might have been a mistake, but it's not my story to tell, so I can't say much more than this.  But I can say that I encouraged him to go; as much as I'd have missed him, I truly believed that he'd be most content with the decision to leave.  However, he eventually decided that he'd be staying here for a while yet after all; he says that he's at peace with that decision, and as for me...well, it was quite possibly the first good news I'd had in a week.

That these things happened more or less all at once was an interesting coincidence, if not an easy one to deal with.  And it's got me thinking about the importance of social interaction.  You see, although the friend whom I accidentally hurt last week is someone I've known for somewhere between eight and ten years (we had a couple of classes together in university), and one of our mutual friends is also an old university classmate of mine, the other people I've come to think of as particularly good friends are of a much more recent acquaintance. I met two of them last May, and the other late last September.

Given that it's usually very difficult to earn my trust, it's rather remarkable that I let all of these people become so close to me, most in a fairly short period of time.  Because of them, I've become more social in the past year than I had been in years.  And it's changed me.  Although I still maintain that nobody can make other people happy, and that looking for another person to complete oneself is foolish at best, because of these friends I feel more more alive than I did at this time last year.  Because of them, my mind and my heart are more full than they were, more engaged, and even healed from some of the more significant hurts in my past.  My life is better because of them, and I hope that I've been able to be at least a little helpful to them as well in some way, in spite of the problems I might have caused last week.

I don't use the word "friend" lightly.  And my faith in myself was severely shaken by the mistake that I made; I felt that I could not be trusted and that I wasn't fit for human company.  I'm out of that initial shock of self-loathing now, but the results of my mistake last week are still somewhat unclear to me.  Perhaps in a few more days I'll be able to muster the courage to ask my friend if she's still upset with me, but for now, I remain a coward.  Perhaps it's for the best; if what happened after my mistake did happen as a result of it, I suspect that I might still not be the most welcome person in her life at the moment.

So, yeah.  This has all been fairly exhausting, and I hope that the week ahead doesn't hold any more unpleasant surprises.  I still need some time to catch my breath from the ones I've already had!

For the record...

I've been looking at my stats page again.  While I'm a little amused because my blog apparently showed up in two different sets of search results in response to two separate queries about interviews conducted by Jian Ghomeshi (probably because of this post), I also saw a search term that started me thinking again:

"what does christo pagan say about homosexuality"

I don't know about other Christo-Pagans, but once again, this Christo-Pagan is going to go on the record as saying that as far as I'm concerned, there is nothing wrong with homosexuality.  Furthermore, I'm bisexual (though I prefer the term "heteroflexible"), I have a cousin who is gay, and I have friends who variously identify as bisexual, heteroflexible, lesbian, and queer.  So this matters to me because homophobia has the potential to affect me and it does affect some of the people I love.  Homosexuality is not wrong.  It's a natural variation on the theme of human sexuality—and sexuality in general, in fact.  Homosexual behaviour has been documented in hundreds of other species.  And regardless of anything that any translation of the Bible might say, I cannot believe that it is any more evil for two women or two men to be sexually attracted to each other and act on it than it is for a woman and a man to do the same.

Not everybody thinks, acts, or loves in the same way, and it's about damn time that society in general accepted that as long as nobody is genuinely being hurt or exploited, this is a perfectly normal, natural, and right thing.

The Power of Stories

We all have stories that we tell to ourselves.

"I would be so much happier if I had a million dollars."

"Someday I'll meet the right person and they'll be so perfect and I'll never be sad or lonely again."

"Everything will be so much better when I lose all that weight."

"People aren't animals."

One way or another, we all have our myths, whether they take the form of ancient stories, religious narratives, tall tales, rumours, urban legends, or common wisdom that may or may not actually be wise.  Among other things, I have my faith, and I do believe that I have good reasons to have it.  But I'm also willing to entertain the notion, if only as a mental exercise, that the atheists may have it right.  I don't believe that we should take anything as absolute truth just because it makes sense to us or we've been told by someone we trust that it's absolutely true.  We should never let anyone else take responsibility for our own thoughts and beliefs. (Even atheists shouldn't, in my opinion, but because of the nature of my spiritual life, I suspect that I may not be the best judge of this.)  In fact, I would argue that to let that happen is a little lazy and extremely irresponsible.

Whether or not our everyday myths stand a chance at being true, and whether or not there actually are Gods, angels, demons, faeries, etc., it just seems like most humans need something bigger than ourselves to believe in.  It doesn't have to be supernatural.  It just has to be bigger than we are in some way, or more important, or something that convinces us that we're right in spite of whatever doubts we might have (regardless of whether we'll admit them), or at least something that gives us the promise of a better life than we currently have.  Something that promises enlightenment, or power, or the possibility of getting what we want.

The power of the stories that we tell to ourselves is immense, and I often wish that it wasn't so frequently misused.  Stories can do tremendous good; they can inspire us to be better people, comfort us when we're sad or lonely, give us hope when we despair, and give us entertainment as well.  But when they're misused, stories can do tremendous harm as well.  They can inspire, or at least be used as an excuse for, some of the worst impulses in human nature.

Never underestimate the power of stories.

Sometimes Christians do bad things. Deal with it.

This post isn't directed to the people who object to the harm that certain Christians cause to other people and to the world in general.  This is directed to the people who don't accept that Christianity is composed of a number of different large groups of HUMAN BEINGS, and, like any other group of human beings, is going to be composed of many different types of people. Some will be good, some will be bad, some will be neither, and most will be varying degrees of both, leaning one way or the other, but nonetheless both capable of great goodness and great evil.  That's part of being human. And this post is especially directed to people who claim that anyone who does something wrong isn't really a Christian.

Newsflash: sometimes Christians do bad things.

Sometimes Christians persecute members of other faiths.  Sometimes Christians kill in the name of their God.  Sometimes Christians enact pieces of legislation that will make it next to impossible for women to access medical treatment (and no, I'm not just talking about abortion; states in which funding for Planned Parenthood has been cut or eliminated have also made it difficult, if not impossible, for low-income women to access affordable health care at all; Planned Parenthood was never just about abortion).  Sometimes Christians lie, steal, cheat.  Sometimes Christians rape.  Sometimes Christians murder.

And whether or not you like it, they're still Christians.

It doesn't matter that you don't believe that they can be real Christians.  As long as they believe in Jesus-as-aspect-of-God, and as long as the collection of writings we know as the Bible is their holy book, they're Christians.  Their ideals and models for behaviour aren't the same as yours, and their priorities are different as well, but that doesn't mean that you get to say whether or not they're part of the religion they've chosen.  Regardless of whether you approve of what they do, and certainly regardless of whether Jesus himself would have approved of their actions, they are Christians.

They're not just horrible people using Jesus' name as an excuse to do terrible things.  They are Christians.  And denying that they're Christians isn't doing anybody any favours.  True, along with the damage that they do to the people they hurt, they also give the rest of us a bad name.  But you then make that name even worse every time you assert that people can't have morality without Christianity, and that all Christians are good people.

Christianity doesn't have the stranglehold on morality that you think it has.  It doesn't necessarily make you a good person; it doesn't automatically fill people with love and light.  Christianity is a system of belief.  It doesn't remove the impulse to harm other people, and under the right (or wrong) circumstances, it can even fuel that impulse.  That doesn't make them not-Christian.  It makes them dangerous, because they believe that they can do no moral wrong, because their anger, their hate, and their harmful actions are backed up by their God.  Saying "Oh, but they're not real Christians" is neither true nor helpful.

Sometimes Christians do bad things.  Don't deny it.

Deal with it.

(By which, of course, I mean "do something about it.")

Musings Upon Finding My Missing Rosary

I found my rosary a few days ago. It had been missing since shortly after my grandfather died in late 2010; as I discovered, it had somehow slipped into a drawer in my dresser that I don't really open that often. For lack of a better explanation, it's what I call my "memory drawer"—a drawer that I set aside for small keepsakes, photos, newspaper articles, and the like when I was about thirteen. I've been thinking of putting some of those photos and articles into a scrapbook, and was going to go through some of it that night, but then, there it was, right on top of one of the photos.  I consider that to be simultaneously amusing and appropriate.

It got me thinking, of course. Several months ago, I threatened to post about the reasons why I chose to make use of certain prayers when Grandpa was in the hospital, and I think that this is going to be that post, though (as usual) I also have a feeling that it's going to be awhile before I actually get around to writing directly about that.

Anyway...

I haven't considered myself to be Catholic in nearly fifteen years. The Roman Catholic Church, of course, would say differently; according to them, once they've got you, you're theirs for life, regardless of whatever you might say on the matter. (Naturally, this is one of the many things about which I disagree with them.) But at the same time, those early years of Catholic belief, or at least of Catholic thought, have left a mark.  Perhaps it speaks to the power of early conditioning; I have a friend who was at one time an evangelical and charismatic Christian, but who has since become an agnostic, who nonetheless is currently the organist at an Anglican church and who has been known to admit that despite now being an agnostic, Anglican hymns and the Book of Common Prayer are "in [his] circuits."  Obviously there are people who are raised in one religion or another who do completely get out of that mindset, but for some of us, at least, it's not necessarily going to happen.

Some of my Roman Catholic mental residue is actually good; for example, despite my disagreement with Catholic teachings on the subjects of birth control, abortion, sexuality, homosexuality, transubstantiation, and the ordination of women, among other things, the early exposure that I had to the ideas that we should actually love each other and help people who need it laid the foundation for my present political and social views. Perhaps I'd have come to similar conclusions if I hadn't been raised in any sort of religious framework, but as it is, I was raised Catholic and the experience did convince me that we ought (as one of the hymns we sang at practically every Mass says) "to act with justice, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with our God."   (Though of course that last bit is negotiable, since not everyone believes in any kind of deity.  But the first two are certainly important.)  Furthermore, it's probably the biggest reason why I'm able to be so comfortable with Anglican liturgy. (The Eucharistic service from the Book of Alternative Services in particular is very, very close to the form that Mass took when I was growing up.)  And as I've said before, as much as I sometimes still can't believe that I, of all people, am a member of a church choir, my experiences at my church and with my church choir have proven to be enlightening in their own way, and I wouldn't want to have missed that.  And if I hadn't had my Catholic background, or if I hadn't been born to a family with Anglican heritage, I'd never have been so comfortable on the trips that my community choir took to sing at the cathedrals in Winchester and Lincoln, and I'd certainly never have been able to join the my church choir and adjust as easily to it as I did.

Some of the residue isn't so good, of course. I mean, I was a narrow-minded little twit for a good chunk of my life because of it, even after I converted to Paganism, and sometimes I still struggle with the difference between what I know is right and what I was taught is right. Among other things, the fact that until my mid-twenties I was unable to acknowledge, even to myself, that I'm bisexual probably comes from that. I never had any problems with the existence of gay or lesbian folks—it's kind of a long story, but by the time I was eight years old I had come to the conclusion that some kids had two mothers or two fathers who loved each other and lived together and that was perfectly OK—but at least among my peers, bisexuality was considered to be undesirable at best, thanks to the promiscuity, infidelity, and perceived denial (or mere experimentation) that are so much a part of the bisexual stereotype. And of course the Roman Catholic Church isn't generally a particularly friendly place for people who aren't strictly straight, which (because I remained in the Catholic school system until I graduated from high school) gave me an additional incentive to ignore that part of myself even as it was beginning to reveal itself.

And some of that Roman Catholic residue is just plain weird, like feeling a little strange every time I make beef vegetable soup during Lent (Catholics are supposed to abstain from eating meat during Lent—and, strictly speaking, on Fridays throughout the year, even if not a lot of people pay attention to that these days—though fish is inexplicably OK). Or the fact that I automatically remove my hat, if I'm wearing one, as soon as I enter a church, regardless of the reason why I'm there; everyone at my school walked to a nearby church for Mass at least twice a month when I was a kid, and even the girls were told to remove our hats when we got to the church (traditionally, girls and women are supposed to wear something to cover our hair at Mass, though again, these days not very many women actually do except in the more conservative Catholic churches), probably because the boys tended to object when they were told to remove their hats and the girls weren't, and it was easier just to tell all of us that it was disrespectful to leave our hats on in church. And I admit that my fondness for the more theatrical aspects of ritual—Pagan or Christian—largely stems from that period in my life as well.

And perhaps the oddest part of the Catholic residue in my mind is my enduring fondness for the rosary.  But it's something that I consider to be one of the good parts of this residue anyway.  Which brings me back to the prayers that I chose to whisper when my grandfather was dying.

I never actually prayed the whole rosary while Grandpa was in the hospital. Sometimes I'd take it out and go through a decade or two of it when I felt I needed to calm down (a "decade" on the rosary is the "Our Father," ten repetitions of "Hail Mary," and then the "Glory Be" once).  Because it's so repetitive, I find the rosary to be a good way to calm myself down.  Other times, I'd just hold the beads in my hand, feeling their weight and concentrating on what I was feeling, trying to reconcile myself to the knowledge that my grandfather was going to die, probably very soon.  (The fact that the Hail Mary includes the words "now and at the hour of our death" probably helped.)  But the prayers that are traditionally used for the rosary still come as naturally to me as breathing (though admittedly, I do add another prayer near the beginning, I change the wording of a couple of the prayers because of my current spiritual path, and I omit the various Mysteries associated with the rosary because I find them to be unnecessary, so I actually deviate more than a little from the "official" method of praying the rosary), and though I rarely actually make use of my rosary, I do find it to be useful from time to time.

For one thing, it's extremely repetitive, and it takes a long time to get through it all. (There are five decades on a traditional rosary, plus the medallion and the five beads and the crucifix at the bottom of it; fifty-three repetitions of Hail Mary, seven repetitions of Glory Be and Our Father, and once through the Memorare—this is the prayer that I add—and Hail Holy Queen and the Apostles' Creed take quite a lot of time to get through all at once.) Because of the way that my mind works, sometimes I find that it's best to occupy myself with something like that to re-focus my mind, or sometimes just to give myself something to concentrate on when I'm trying to work through something that's bothering me. I'm not quite sure how to explain it except that the sheer repetitiveness of the rosary gives my conscious mind something to focus on while my subconscious mind wanders down whatever paths it has to in order to sort out whatever I'm trying to deal with.

Come to think of it, it's almost like crocheting (well, when I'm not crocheting as I'm socializing, anyway) that way. :)

And for another thing, although the Lord's Prayer and the Glory Be are, strictly speaking, prayers dedicated to an aspect of the Divine that is usually thought of as male (though I hear that at one time, the Holy Spirit was considered to be female), by far most of the prayers involved are addressed to someone who's female, who lived a human life, and although these prayers only ask for intercession rather than any direct miracle working, even when I was young I found it to be very satisfying to be able to address a prayer to someone with whom I might have a chance at identifying.  Surrounded by a culture of strict gender essentialism, I felt that God-as-male seemed to be unapproachable, but Mary had been a human woman, and was by far more easy to relate to.  Later on, when I first converted to Paganism, that early fondness for Mary became the reason why I was prepared to accept the idea of a feminine aspect to the Divine.

Regardless of the reasons why I like the rosary, it is almost surprisingly good to hold mine in my hand again.  I'd missed it.  And while I don't plan to actually make use of it anytime soon, it's good to have the option again. :)

Shame on the people who thought this was a good idea.

There are no words, but I'm going to try to find them anyway.

Blackface.

Blackface on a cake, of all things, depicting the head and torso of a naked Black woman.

A terrible racist caricature of a Black woman used to protest an act of violence against women.

Red velvet cake, obviously meant to symbolize blood, carved up by White people.  Every time a slice was cut, the baker, also a performance artist, whose head was poking out from under the table, would scream.

That's just wrong.

This is a world in which Black people's lives are frequently held to be less important than White people's, and as a result, they die.

Trayvon Martin was killed for doing little more than walking through a gated community (and he had every right to be there, as he was visiting his father, who actually lives in that gated community) while talking on the phone with his girlfriend and carrying Skittles and iced tea.  His killer was only arrested a few days ago, though there was never a question of who did it.

Anna Brown was arrested for trespassing on hospital property for trying to get treatment for the condition that killed her soon afterward; she died in prison that day.  The hospital claims they thought that she was just looking for drugs; after all, not only was she a Black woman, she was a homeless Black woman.  (An autopsy was performed; no traces of any kind of drug were found in her body.  However, they did find numerous blood clots in her lungs and in her legs.)

Kenneth Chamberlain was shot to death by police in his own home when he'd accidentally triggered his medical alarm in his sleep.

These are only the stories that have gotten enough press that I've heard about them.

And now this.

Racism is evil.  It kills.  It destroys lives and families.  Even if the intentions of the people behind this racist act were good—the cake was apparently supposed to protest female genital mutilation—that doesn't erase the harm that it's done.  It doesn't matter that Makode Aj Linde, the performance artist who baked the cake and did the screaming, is Black himself; it doesn't matter that he claims that the cake, and the cutting of it, were misunderstood (his work has in the past involved putting Blackface into new contexts in order to criticise it).  Blackface is innately racist and even attempting to subvert it, considering the immense damage that racism does worldwide, results in more harm than good.  Especially since most of the people who attended this party at Moderna Museet were White.

I'd say it's even worse that Makode Aj Linde participated in this racist act because it's now given White racists an excuse to say, "Hey, this isn't so bad after all.  A Black guy did it, so why can't we?"

This cake was an act of violence, and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.

I am disgusted and heartsick.

The evils of religion?

Of all the things that one might have expected me to be contemplating on Easter Sunday, somehow I doubt that atheism would be among them.

Not that I'm thinking of becoming an atheist, mind you.  Regardless of whether the Gods exist, my mind doesn't seem to have the wiring for atheism.  As I am now, the closest thing I could probably get to total non-belief is a sort of curious agnosticism.  And despite normally being a logic-oriented person, I do not consider this to be a problem in any respect.  My belief-and-skepticism system works for me; it inspires me to be a better person.  It reminds me that it's possible to be a thoroughly flawed human being and still manage to do a bit of good in the world.  It reminds me that prayer is all very well, but you've got to help people in practical ways as well.  (I can say this no better than it's already said in my favourite passage from the first letter of John: "Little children, let us love, not in word and speech, but in truth and action.")  It even keeps me from taking myself too seriously.

The thing is, I've been noticing, and hearing about, a lot more highly vocal atheists lately.  And usually they've been the obnoxious ones.  The ones who, being so angry at the idea that anybody else dares to think something that they don't think, might fit in well with certain groups of rigid fundamentalist Christians if it weren't for the fact that atheists believe that the whole God thing is bullshit.  The ones who believe that there has never been anything good whatsoever that came from religion of any type.  The ones who believe that all the world's evils come from religion in general and Christianity in particular, and that we'd live in a perfect world if no human being had ever come up with the concept of one or more Gods.  The ones who look down their noses at people of any religious persuasion, calling us stupid and superstitious.  The ones who speak of us all as if we were somehow simultaneously childlike in our naïveté and hyper-dangerous psychopaths who are just a few social conventions away from reinstating the Spanish Inquisition and shamelessly persecuting and brutally murdering anyone who doesn't agree with us.

Believe it or not, atheism itself doesn't actually bother me.  We've all got to make up our own minds about what we will and will not believe, and I understand that there are people whose lives, and whose treatment of other people, become better once they discard any concept of religion.  We all need to have our own freedom of conscience.  And to a certain extent, I must concede that they have a point or two, even though I doubt I'll ever entirely subscribe to their point of view.  But the common assertion that religion, and especially Christianity, is the root of all evil bothers me on a level that I can't quite articulate.

The thing is, I deeply suspect that even if religion hadn't ever existed, most of the evil things that religion has been used as the excuse for would still have happened.  Religious or not, that seems to be an aspect of certain people's human nature; given great power, and the desire for something that's already possessed by someone else, some people will only need the right excuse to become genocidal.  If it wasn't religion, it might be some other custom.  It might be language or skin colour or some theme in the other group's art or music that the aggressors consider to be unwholesome.  It might be patriotism or some form of insult, imagined or otherwise.  I can't think of a single religious war, even the Crusades, that couldn't also have been fought for other reasons.  Religion made a damn convincing excuse, but as long as there was something else to be gained—valuable territory, access to certain commodities, greater political power, and similar—then religion was nonetheless still little but an excuse.  In its absence, another one would surely have been used.

I will never accept the idea that religion is itself evil; I will certainly never again accept the idea that Christianity is inherently evil.  It's been used as an excuse for evil things, and there are people who use it as a weapon even today.  That, I believe, is evil.  But not religion itself.

If there's evil in the equation at all, it's in the people who use their beliefs to harm other people.

I Want To Believe

I want to believe that I live in a country where, if I should get pregnant (which, I might add, is against my expectations and personal preferences), my very personhood will not be stripped from me in favour of the personhood of the potential person in my womb.

I want to believe that if this hypothetical pregnancy became dangerous to my health, whether the danger was physical or mental in nature, I would have the option of terminating it in order to save myself.

I want to believe that as long as I reside in this country, I will live in a country in which I retain the right to make my own decisions about what happens to my own body.  I want to believe that I will not be reduced to the status of incubator, with no rights over my own self, just because a sperm has fused with an egg.

I want to believe that birth control will not be outlawed in my lifetime, and that the ridiculous (and extremely unscientific) arguments that we've heard in the States about birth control being entirely abortifacent in its nature will not make their way into Canada.

I want to believe that my body's ability to produce life will never be valued more than my own life.

Most of all, I want to believe that in Canada, in the year 2012, we are not seriously going to "re-open the abortion debate," which so far has consisted of little but big-C-and-small-c conservatives' opinion that abortion is evil, never necessary, and something that must be stopped at ALL costs—costs that, in places where abortion is banned, frequently include women's lives.

I want to believe, but I can't.

Not anymore.

Not since the allegedly-honourable Stephen Woodworth, MP for the riding of Kitchener Central, was permitted to introduce Motion 312, the purpose of which is to give full personhood to a fetus yet in utero.  This, predictably, poses a risk to women who are now pregnant, and who will be pregnant in the future.  And not just to the ones who want abortions, either; in places where fetuses have been given full personhood rights, women have been prosecuted for things from refusing a C-section to having a stillbirth.  Early last year, Georgia state representative Bobby Franklin presented a bill that would even have made it illegal (on pain of death) for pregnant women to experience a miscarriage.

Think of that for a moment.

Lest you think that I'm one of those straw feminists who are so often concocted by conservatives of either "C" who are supposedly out baying for the blood of innocent children and who want every baby to be aborted and who use abortion as a form of birth control—I'm not. I've never even met anyone who was. I love kids. I work with kids. At one point in my life, I did want to have one or two children of my own, before I realized that the choice would be highly undesirable for some very good reasons, including genetics (to put it briefly, I'm fine, but there's a fair chance that my offspring wouldn't be) and personality.

But, you know, even if I wanted to have a family of Weasley proportions, and even though I personally wouldn't have an abortion unless my life was at stake if I didn't, I still wouldn't welcome Motion 312, or any other laws meant to bestow full personhood on fetuses, because I do not want to lose my own personhood—which is what would eventually happen. Not immediately, perhaps, but the way would be paved. Once you grant personhood to a fetus, their life will be held to have more value than the person in whose womb they are growing. We've seen it before. (For more information on the cases cited in the linked video, click here.)

And we'll see it again.

I want to believe that Canada isn't going to go down this same dangerously slippery slope as so many places in the United States have been.  Because if we are, then my beloved home is going to become a very dangerous place to have a uterus.

Atheists learning from theists (and the other way around)

Most weekdays, I listen to the 10:00 AM broadcast of Q* on CBC Radio 1—or at least, most of it, as I generally have to leave the house before the show's over. I'm not sure I could call myself a fan of Q, but I certainly do like listening. I always enjoy Jian Ghomeshi's opening essay; I may not always agree with what he says (RoBu indeed!), but whether he's being silly or serious, what he says is usually interesting, and he often makes me think. (I must say that I particularly appreciated one essay last week which was about International Women's Day and the reasons why, despite the gains made by women in Canada and in the rest of the world, International Women's Day is still a sadly necessary thing.) And I certainly enjoy most of the interviews that are conducted on the show, as well as the debates, and especially Elvira Kurt's hilarious mostly-weekly inductions into the "Cultural Hall of Shame."

Last week, Ghomeshi interviewed Alain de Botton, an atheist who argues that atheists can learn some valuable lessons from various religions. Being a rather eclectically spiritual person with some agnostic tendencies and influences, I'd been looking forward to this interview since Ghomeshi first announced that he'd be conducting it.  It was far from disappointing, and de Botton made many good points.  These points, paraphrased, of course, are the ones that resonated the most with me:

*While we don't necessarily need religion to provide a guide to morality, most of the world's religions have put hundreds of years of thought into defining what's right and what's not, and sometimes it might be a good idea for atheists to pay attention to what they have to say, if only because they've had a very long time to figure out what works and what doesn't.

*People are ritualistic animals, and when it comes to major life moments like coming of age or getting married or the death of someone you love, there's really no one set atheist way to acknowledge these milestones, and without some kind of general idea of how to approach them, they can be a bit difficult to deal with properly.  Looking to how religions deal with them can be very helpful.

*Religions tend to be very good at creating communities, and modern secular society doesn't tend to be quite as good at that.  By and large, atheists need to learn how to connect more with each other and the world in general.

*Religious or not, we need reminders that humanity is not the Superior Pinnacle of All Existence.  Without the awareness that there's something greater than us in existence, whether it's nature itself or one or more supernatural entities, we humans can be egotistical little buggers.  That kind of thinking, the idea that the Earth is ours to exploit as we will because we're the most important species on it, is precisely what's gotten us into so much trouble.  Again, looking at how religion taps into this need for such an awareness can be very useful.

Before hearing this interview, I hadn't really considered that atheists might be able to learn much at all from those of us with religious or spiritual inclinations, though I do now think that it might be a good idea for theists and atheists to have considerably more honest dialogue (as opposed to the usual "YOU ARE WRONG BECAUSE I AM RIGHT" arguments, of course) between each other, because there really is a lot that we can learn from each other.  Of course, I don't necessarily mean that we can learn much from those atheists who consider themselves to be intellectually and morally superior to those of us who aren't atheists and aren't afraid to make total asses of themselves in proclaiming that superiority, of course, because all we really learn from them is that closed-mindedness doesn't limit itself to religion.  But the ones who aren't quite so abrasive and self-righteous—sometimes they do have some excellent ideas.

First, it's OK—and I'd even argue that it's necessary—to be skeptical even of your own beliefs.  Unless you're a member of a new religion that's just gotten its start in the past seventy years or so, chances are that you weren't around when the central stories and tenets of your religion were being formed and decided on.  Unless you're a character in Radio Free Babylon's Coffee with Jesus comic strips, an honest-to-goodness physical-world here-and-now face-to-face conversation with Jesus just isn't possible.  No living Muslim has met Mohammed.  No living Buddhist has met the Gautama Buddha.  And so on.  All we have are the stories that are told about them and the things that we are told that they said about life, the universe, and everything.  When belief gets in the way of compassion and logic, it needs to be re-evaluated.  I don't think that this takes away the beauty, meaningfulness, mystery, or comfort that so many people find in their religions; I think it can only add to them because it's a more active way of believing.  It's deciding what you'll accept and what you won't.  It's a matter of consciously choosing what you believe and being truly aware of why you believe it.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: when people feel threatened by the prospect of testing and examining their beliefs, it's often a sign that they're feeling insecure about those beliefs in the first place.  Untested faith cannot be strong.

Second, it's entirely possible to be a compassionate human being without belonging to any specific religion, or any religion at all, really.  Some people do not become better people when they subscribe to religious beliefs; some people become self-righteous, judgemental people who prefer to revel in their own salvation rather than do good works to help those in need, so arguably their religion hasn't done them (or anyone else) any favours.  Religions can and do offer useful moral guides, but they're all far from being the only source of ideas on the subject of morality.

Third, science is as flawed as the scientists who practice it, but it's the best tool that we have for understanding the natural world and our place in it.  To some people, the knowledge gained, tested, and either rejected or built upon, is the only way to understand ourselves and the world—and that's OK.**  The world isn't going to end just because somebody disagrees with you.  The fact that someone believes that science is the source of the only rational and correct kind of thinking does not in any way mean that your faith is diminished.  (Mind, your faith doesn't mean that you have to abandon any and all acceptance of the empirical evidence that science has provided to us about the world either, but that's another matter.)  Without science, the lives of millions of people would be quite a bit worse.  And science, if we're very, very lucky, can provide us with the means to deal with climate change and all that it is bringing with it.  So learn how to read about science, don't undervalue it, and don't ignore it just because acknowledging the knowledge that it brings might be inconvenient to your faith.

And last, even if there is no Heaven or Hell or Everlasting Life, even if the Gods are a delusion and strange phenomena nothing but hallucinations or stories we tell to children, that doesn't mean that humans are free to be assholes to each other or to deplete the planet's resources and pollute it into lifelessness.  If this really is the only shot we get at life (or even if it isn't), we ought to do each other, and future generations of people, the favour of doing our best to leave this world even just a little better than it was when we arrived.

It is, after all, the right, and maybe even the logical, thing to do.

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*Even if you don't listen to CBC Radio or any of the American radio stations on which Q airs, you may have heard of this show and its host before because of Billy Bob Thornton's extremely rude and awkward behaviour during an interview that Ghomeshi conducted with him and his band, the Boxmasters, in 2009.

**Of course, for some people, scientific knowledge is not the only way to understand ourselves and the world, and that's also OK. True to form, I've decided that the best way for me to know and experience the world is through a middle way: a mix of scientific and spiritual exploration, because I have a deep appreciation for science and technology, but I find that I have questions that can't always be answered or even tested entirely through the scientific method. Even then it helps, and I don't necessarily cling to the idea of the existence of Gods and Goddesses—as I said, I do find myself influenced a little by agnosticism—but I also find that sometimes I nonetheless need to consider what the writers of The X-Files sometimes referred to as "more extreme possibilities," even if I may ultimately end up rejecting those possibilities.