A couple of years ago I went on a business trip to Asheville, NC. When I got to the rental car counter, the very good looking southern gentleman there said, “Oh, I just know you’re going to love Asheville.” I inquired as to why and he said, “Well, it’s basically the only bastion of art and liberalness around here, right in the middle of the Bible Belt.” I smiled, wondering, “How did he know? Was it my clearly Yankee accent that gave me away?” And then I remembered that I was wearing by Muppets/Battlestar Galactica t-shirt and it all made a little more sense.

I had the evening to kill, as my business obligations were scheduled for the next morning, so I took the guy’s advice and drove into town and had a wonderful evening checking out the local fare, including a local brewery where I ended up schooling a bunch of other out of towners with my uncanny knowledge of classic dystopia novels. The man was right. For the most part I didn’t feel like I was in the South at all and it felt very much like the parts of Philadelphia that I like best.

I have also been to Portland, OR for business.  Portland and Asheville are considered two of three of the great art towns in the country.  They are places where music thrives and weirdos congregate because they are places of very little judgment of strange lifestyles and interests.  Austin, TX is the third.

I haven’t learned yet why Portland is considered one of these because I don’t know much about the state of Oregon.  However, Portland and Seattle are often compared (and rightly so, as they have a lot in common).  I don’t get the sense that Portland is situated in a particularly hostile environment for liberals, but perhaps because it evolved from the logging towns of the Pacific Northwest, there’s an excess of “frontier spirit” there or something.  I’ll take “their” word for it.

Asheville and Austin though are very much in the middle of hostile states for liberally minded people.  I was not in Asheville very long and mostly came into contact with a bunch of other tourists when I was there (most of them Northerners at that), so it was easy to forget where I was.  It was easy to forget that there are certain things that the rest of the state never wants to forget.

Let me say first that I really like this town.  Shaun and Ginny are staying at a wonderfully funky hotel just outside of the downtown area.  The are near the hotel is really quite awesome.  Everywhere is a burst of color and art.  There are sidewalk sales everywhere, stores selling all kinds peculiar things, and a copious amount of high quality food trucks.  What is most fun for me is that there is live music absolutely everywhere.  Every bar has some form of a stage and some kind of band playing.  There was a duo playing bass and guitar on the top of a van.  You can get good drinks for pretty reasonable prices at many places.  Happy hour here starts at 3pm.  Shaun and I spent a good portion of our afternoon yesterday checking out a couple of bars and enjoying the bands.  The place was hopping.  We had dinner plans with Ginny so we didn’t stay out too long, but we are planning on picking up where we left off today.

Shaun joked that he was secretly a millionaire and was going to buy a big sprawling house in Austin and that none of us would ever have to work again.  He asked what I would do if that was true and I said, “Well, if I could convince Wes and Jessie to move to Austin, I guess I’d just come here and be a musician”, because this is really the place to do it.  It already has what Philadelphia is working on.  Music everywhere you look and people loving it.

So, yeah, there’s a lot to like about Austin.  But it didn’t take long for me to be reminded of where Austin is.

Before heading to the bars, we wandered downtown towards the state capitol.  What we found when we got there was that we had just missed some kind of protest.  Of course, Shaun was wearing his “Atheist, Polyamorous, Skeptics” t-shirt and his bag straps had an atheist and a secular button on each shoulder.  We tried to figure out exactly what the protest was about.  Some people had signs that said, “Stop the HHS Mandate” and other signs said, “Stand Up for Religious Freedom”.  I looked up the protest on my phone and found that these rallies were being held all over the country yesterday in honor of the 223rd anniversary of James Madison, our Founding Father, introducing the Bill of Rights to the Constitution.

Apparently, the whole rally was designed around the idea that President Obama is infringing on people’s right to religious freedom by mandating that all health organizations (Christian or no) must provide birth control and other contraceptive services.  There is a religious exemption, but, according the site, it is so narrow that not even Jesus and his Apostles would qualify for the exemption.

I could go on about the various absurdities of this.  I have certainly come out in the past year publically in the blogosphere in great support of positive sex education, birth control knowledge and options for all, and abortions when people want them. I lost a couple of friends over this.

One of the people at the rally was holding a sign that said, “Women DO regret abortion”.  I looked at her awestruck.  Like, no shit, Sherlock.  Of course some women regret the decision to abort. It’s not a decision that people make particularly lightly.  And because I don’t view a mass of cells as life that much be protected at the risk of ruining a woman’s life, I don’t have a problem with the people who don’t torture themselves about the decision.  It is an option that we have and should always have.  To bring a life into the world that you do not want is not better.  I could go on and on.

And I could go on and on about how wanting people to be refused birth control goes completely against the attempts to stop people from having abortions…but…you know, everyone who reads this probably knows that.

What struck me most about the whole thing is that people who were at the rally brought their kids to it, their young kids.  And for the kids, it was like a happy-go-lucky picnic or something.  At one point, a mother gave each of her children one of the signs I mentioned above and took a picture of them in front of the capitol, grins and all.  I don’t think I was able to keep the look of disdain off of my face.  In my mind, I wanted to go ask the kids if they knew what those signs were really saying.  I had no intention of actually doing this and Shaun reminded me that this would cross some kind of line, which I completely understand…but I was so curious.  I wanted to know if they knew what they were doing.

It reminds me of the episode of South Park where the boys get pulled into an anti-Bush rally somehow and they don’t even know what their signs are talking about (specifically that Cartman didn’t know how to pronounce the word Nazi, “Boosh is a Nay-zee…”  That’s what I envisioned here.  “Stop the HHS Mandate…because…um…what’s a mandate?”

That’s a kid running around the capitol with a bunch of pro-life balloons.  Yeah.

We didn’t talk to anybody and no one seemed to pay us any mind…likely do to Shaun’s apparel.  We decided to take in the local monuments while we were there.  So I innocently walked up to one and it was this one:

Before I actually read the thing, I, for whatever ignorant reason, thought the dude on the top was Lincoln.  But, obviously, that is a statue of Jefferson Davis.  I guess the common hair styles of the 1860’s threw me off or something, but I done learned.

We wandered around the park and found that half the monuments there were memorials for people who had died for the Confederacy.  I was…astounded.  I live in such a liberal area that I forget periodically that this is a thing.

In addition, I was asked to remember the Alamo and appreciate the “Rough and Romantic Riders of the Range” by a couple of other statues.  The rough, romantic rider statue had a horse with ridiculously huge balls.  I guess what they say about everything being bigger in Texas is true.

Or something.

Shaun has been remarking about how active the atheist community is in Austin.  I asked him how he thought we could make it like that in Philadelphia and he reminded me that in Texas, you have to be out and proud and active to make life livable for the differently minded.  We are very lucky in Philadelphia to be able to, for the most part, be who we are, what we are, without a specific community to help us to do it.

I had forgotten all that before arriving at the Capitol.  At the Capitol, there is always something to remind you that you are, in fact, in Texas and that, as progressive, non-Christian, liberal people with tendencies towards slutdom, we are in a minority here.

But for now, I should get off this computer and go check out the parts of the town I feel at home…namely, bars with awesome sound systems and hilarious bartenders.

When I was going to Drexel, everyone was required to take three Humanities classes.  The classes were Humanities 101, 102, 103 and they were relatively stupid.  101 and 102 were the same for everyone.  They covered things like basic composition.  Actually, that’s all they were about.  They were boring and having come from a highschool where the writings of everyone I ever read there were at least coherent and relatively well crafted, workshopping the pieces of people who could clearly speak English but couldn’t seem to write it down was quite aggravating.  I became known for bringing a red pen to class and decimating the drafts of people’s essays.  I was nice about it in that I often rewrote people’s thesis paragraphs and such, so, you know, less work for them.  I think they all got A’s so no particular bitterness ensued.

Anyway, the third Humanities class ended up being a wild card.  This class was more specialized and each teacher had a different focus.  I was unaware of this and the class descriptions were the same regardless of time slot, so I picked whatever class was most convenient schedule-wise.  This was a mistake.

I ended up in a humor in literature class.  I suppose that this could have been interesting and entertaining.  I mean, I love laughing, love writing humorously…and apparently I think that everything is funny, so this should have been a win.  However, talking about humor is only entertaining if you are talking about it with someone with a sense of humor.  You would think that someone really interested in humor would be funny themselves…or perhaps only I assumed that…but as it turns out, this was not the case.

It was taught by a woman who wrote a giant paper with her husband on the subject of humor in literature.  Her thesis was that all humor could be broken down into four specific categories and that each of these categories could be assigned to a specific season of the year.  Satire, being old and cynical, was winter humor (when all the trees were dying or whatever) and fables, being young and ignorant, were spring.

I hated this class very, very much.  The woman teaching it was completely humorless.  It was astounding how incredibly unfunny she was.  I would spend entire classes pondering how this was possible.  I didn’t laugh ONCE in that class in the entire 10 weeks we were subjected to it.  One of the reasons is that while we were talking about humor classifications the whole time, no one was ever cracking jokes or anything.  In addition, our text book was a collection of “humorous” stories and poems from throughout the centuries that our teacher compiled.  Everything in it also happened to be public domain (advantage being that it kept the cost of the book down), so the most recent thing in there was from the 1920’s or 30’s.  Our daily assignments were to read passages from it and then explain why they are funny, assigning specific qualities that make things funny.  For instance: Is this story about being getting drunk and getting into craaaazy hijinks?  Then that gets a 2. Debauchery.  Is the story about stupid shit happening because someone mistook a person for someone else? That’s 3. Mistaken Identity.  What was worse was that because everything in the book was completely dated, I found that nothing in there rang as funny to me.  Some of it was a language issue (the fables, for instance, were written in some kind of dialect and I wasn’t entirely sure what was being said all the time), but clearly much of it was “you had to be there” humor, in that it would have perhaps been funny if you were around at the time it was written.  If you are amongst the culture, you have the context to “get it”.

My teacher was seemingly frustrated that we were too dim or something to find anything we were reading hilarious.  What she failed to recognize was that humor changes through the years.  The taste of the population shifts with time.  Also, the things that are deemed “appropriate” change.  For instance, black face used to be hysterical, apparently, but now it’s just gross…unless the joke is that the character in question is a big fucking racist.  Something that current people find hilarious today would make no sense to someone from a hundred years ago, and likely, they also wouldn’t understand why things from back then might not be particularly hilarious now.

So, as I may have explained previously, the people I work closest with at my job are pretty inappropriate in general.  I have grown to like this about them as I enjoy working in an environment where I can drop F-bombs to my heart’s content .  I am never particularly inclined to making “inappropriate” jokes here…unless you count all of my chemical safety related jokes as inappropriate…which you might since I’m on the safety committee and all.  I remember making a joke at school once about dissolving someone’s face with acid and someone who had gotten a very bad chemical burn informed me that this wasn’t funny.  Yet later I made a decapitation joke and she laughed, so I guess it’s all contextual.  I got massive amounts of solvent in my eyes once and STILL make eye melting jokes, so maybe I’m twisted.  Also, I’m not blind, so I’m not bitter…not too much (bastards in the lab who didn’t help me when I yelled for help!).

However, there are still a lot of types of jokes I don’t appreciate, unless it comes from someone who I respect as an intelligent, progressive, critically thinking.  For instance, I don’t appreciate any kind of sexist joke from any of the sexes (I dislike “Women are all smarter than men” jokes as much as “Women are all stupid, crazy, and obsessed with shopping” jokes).  The only time I think that’s funny is if it’s being said quite sarcastically or ironically, with clear understanding that the reason it’s funny is because assholes think that way.  I feel similarly about racist humor or anything like that.  I find it funny if it’s some kind of social commentary.  I do laugh if you clearly are a racist or a misogynist and it is usually quite easy to tell.

In gaining a place at work, I had to endure a lot of bullshit in this regard.  I was never sexually harassed (well, not in the traditional sense.  I got hit on by plant employees and it could be a little uncomfortable at times, but they weren’t in a position of power and, if I felt uncomfortable enough, I probably could’ve had them fired), but I was uncomfortable a lot about the type of jokes that got thrown around…simply because I know that many of the people were/are homophobic, racist, sexist, ableist…you name it.  I sensed greatly that the humor came from a place of great ignorance.  My presence as a “Capable Woman” helped to keep the sexism at bay.  If there was ever a “You know how woman do X” comment, I would quickly say, “No, tell me what I do.”  And that would be it.  But everything else?  I can only point out that what they’re saying is bullshit, which doesn’t really do anything.  And there have been times when I have felt that I was fighting a one woman battle.  No one else fights against this crap.  They either laugh or stay silent.

And yet, I feel guilty for many of the things I do laugh about that in a politically correct world are frowned upon.  For instance, I find the word “retarded” hilarious.  The word itself just is funny to me.  Much in the way that people hate the word “moist” just because of the sound of it, the word retarded rolls off the tongue and seems to be the perfect thing to describe something that is screwed up.  I don’t say it myself often, but it always makes me snicker when I read or hear it.  I’m not really thinking of mentally challenged people when I hear it, but I know that’s where it comes from and can’t really be separated from that.

The people close to me are very smart, very anti-ignorance, very inquisitive and progressive.  I feel OK sitting there with them making terrible jokes because we know that they’re jokes.  If you make an off-color joke that offends no one that hears it, does it make an impact?

I make a lot of jokes about things that aren’t super relevant anymore.  For instance, I make a lot jokes about communism, Russia threatening to bomb us, and Joseph McCarthy.  The reason for this is that known Communists don’t get black listed anymore.  People’s lives aren’t exactly torn asunder for being socialist.  I am distant from the time when these fears were real and entrenched.  Looking at it from my modern perspective, that entire period in history is so absurd that I can’t help but find it hysterical.  The Russian space program of the 50’s and 60’s cracks me up due to how very much of a death trap the entire thing was (this links in with my science safety humor trigger I guess).  But perhaps if I was living in the 50’s, I wouldn’t find McCarthy to be the comical idiot that he was but instead of loony monster hell bent on destroying lives.

I admit that I likely don’t have the reverence for various things in history that I should.  I am distanced from historical atrocities by time and circumstance.  I view the world as a most absurd place and this is on the same wavelength as my sense of humor.  Part of it is likely a coping mechanism.  I laughed a lot about the idiocy that was the “War in Iraq”.  I laughed quite a bit about how ignorant and nationalistic Americans are.  I laugh about the concept of the “Homosexual Agenda”.  I laugh about it all.  I make jokes about it all.

But in moments of quiet when I find myself thinking about the difficulties going on for so many, I don’t laugh.  I simply wish that there wasn’t anything to make fun of.  And often I take a minute to remind myself of the reality of the history I mock.  I read an article about the brutality of the Russian space program back then and was upset reading it.  I was so moved by it that I wrote a song about it (a bluegrass number called “The Cosmonaut’s Wife”…I can’t keep my sense of humor completely out, people).  I try to remember.  I want people to educate me when I make a joke out of ignorance.  I’m trying, always trying.

This whole thing was inspired by reading Jason Alexander’s apology to the gay community for calling cricket a gay sport.  It was a heartfelt, very real (seeming anyway, I can’t be in the guy’s head) apology.  He made a stupid joke and some people got offended and instead of simply saying, “I’m sorry that you were offended”, he didn’t offer up an apology until he really thought about WHY people might be offended and, upon understanding that, decided that he had been, in fact, wrong.  When I think about all the dark stuff I laugh at, I sometimes fear that I’m not feeling enough, that I don’t care enough.  In a society where the disenfranchised have a much louder voice than before, I wonder if I should be laughing at anything at all.

I have been amused lately in watching shows like Star Trek and Babylon 5 that all the alien cultures on there make statements about how humans are so unique, that they’re wild cards, so unpredictable.  Humans laugh and do crazy shit because they’re emotional and passionate…as opposed to all other humanoids apparently.  I, at this point, don’t have any alien life forms to compare us to, but I will say that humor is something very important to us as a species.  If we can’t laugh at the ridiculousness, we will just cry instead.  Perhaps I laugh at some ignorant humor, but I won’t stop laughing.  If I laugh in a way that is remiss, the best I can do is approach it like Alexander and think about it critically and if I come to the conclusion that I was wrong, I will apologize.  But offending someone doesn’t automatically mean that you are wrong.

I think that’s my point…I knew I’d get there eventually.

I am a Professor of English, and though that means that I get to teach literature, creative writing, and even an occasional course in public speaking, my bread and butter is first year composition (i.e. English 101 at most colleges/universities). The thing I emphasize most in composition courses is critical thinking. It’s more important than perfect grammar, good organization, and even a strong thesis. Thinking critically is what allows one to write effectively. It’s far and better to struggle to find the proper words for one’s excellent thoughts than to express vapid ideas quickly and easily, even if they’re expressed eloquently. On this I assume we can all agree.

One of my favorite lessons in critical thinking is the lesson on logos, pathos, and ethos. A key part of that lesson involves identifying logical fallacies. I suspect that I’ll talk often about logical fallacies in this blog, since they’re not only one of my personal areas of interest (and frequent perturbation) but are ubiquitous in our mass culture. One of the most common logical fallacies is the false analogy. A good analogy, of course, compares two similar things, usually using “like” or “as,” and the comparison is often striking, thought-provoking, or entertaining. A false analogy fails because it purports to compare two similar things but does not adequately consider their dissimilarity/ies.

I recently came across this image on my Facebook feed:

I think the logical first question is: how is faith like WiFi? The image claims that they’re both “invisible” but that they have “the power to connect you to what you need.” Is that so? Let’s break this down.

We should probably start by examining the word “invisible.” WiFi is invisible in the sense that we can’t actually see radio waves move through the air. Faith is a subjective state of mind, so we cannot fairly say it is visible to the naked eye (perhaps we could quibble about whether evidence of subjective states is literally visible via something like a FMRI scan, but I’ll concede the point here). But I’m not sure “not perceptible by the eye” is the best definition of “invisible” in the context of this slogan. More likely, its author meant “withdrawn from sight,” or perhaps even “not perceptible or discernible by the mind.” But that’s where the analogy begins to fail. WiFi is not imperceptible/discernible by the mind. We know exactly how it works. We can’t actually see it working (in a manner of speaking), but it’s not mysterious in any way. Faith, by definition, is a belief in something unknown. We don’t have to believe in WiFi. It simply exists.

In addition, there are ways in which faith is very visible. Outside of an atheism convention or meetup, one would be hard pressed to find a room full of people who did not show their faith outwardly. Christians wear crosses around their necks, some Jews wear yarmulkes, some Muslims wear the hijab, etc. WiFi can also hardly be said to be invisible. When was the last time you were in a public place that didn’t advertise a nearby WiFi hot spot?

But the second part of the slogan is equally fallacious. I suppose if we “need” the internet–would it be hypocritical of me to post on a blog about our use of the web as a want rather than a need?–WiFi connects us to something we need. But even that is probably giving the WiFi too much agency. We connect to what we need. WiFi is just a mode of obtaining that access.

In what way, then, does faith connect us to “what we need”? In the context of this slogan, it’s a hard question to answer because the referent of “what we need” is absent. I think we’re meant to assume that some sort of god is what we need. But does faith connect us to that god? I don’t see how it does. Faith might be said to allow us to conceptualize the notion of a god/gods, but believing in something (or someone) doesn’t actually connect us to it. If we assume that the deity of the Abrahamic religions exists, and if we assume that the scriptural texts of those religions are true, we could argue that Yahweh/Allah/Jesus/etc. demand that we have faith in them in order for us to get to heaven. Getting to heaven would be one way to connect with the deity. If that’s how we’re meant to interpret the slogan, though, we have another problem: it begs the question (which is a logical fallacy for another blog post).

In short, then, WiFi may be invisible and aids in our connecting to something we want, but faith is often visible and only connects us to something we need if we make a ton of assumptions. It’s actually a pretty awful analogy, pithy though it may seem at first blush.

Now you may wonder why I’d spend so many words (approaching 1000) on a silly internet image. The typical reader/viewer would probably have a quick reaction (positive or, as I did, negative) and move on. The slogan is certainly not meant to invite deep analysis. But that’s precisely why we must examine it deeply. Often the things that resonate the most with us are the things that seem to be “simple” common sense. We respond quickly/viscerally when a new idea/image either slots easily into an existing schema or confounds us by not fitting anywhere into our existing way/s of thinking.  We must resist the temptation to put new ideas into either category too hastily. That’s the only way for us to do the hard work of separating propaganda and dogma from ideas that are worthy of debate and serious consideration. It also allows us to see new ideas in all their nuance and complexity, when those things are present.

Yesterday I uploaded a picture of Jerry DeWitt starting his talk at the Austin History Center, here in Austin, TX.  I was mobile, and wanted to listen to the talk, and promised an update.  Well, here it is.  I was unable to update yesterday due to being caught up in socializing, sitting in studio for the Atheist Experience, and then socializing again after.

You know, like vacation stuff!

Well, now that I have a bit of time while Ginny catches up on some reading for school, I thought I would talk about the day’s events from yesterday.  Let’s start with Jerry’s talk.

I had not met Jerry before yesterday, but had followed his coming out through the Clergy Project and his position at Recovering from Religion.  Jerry wanted to talk about what he called “laughing through the apocalypse,” which is his way of saying that he is quite enjoying his experience as being an out atheist, perhaps in ways he could not have foreseen a few years ago.

He said that in a time which was supposed to have been the lowest point in his life, he discovered that other people–other preachers, that is–were going through the same thing.  The bottom line is there are many priests, pastors, ministers, and other leaders of Christian denominations (there was no mention of non-Christian leaders that I remember now) who are secretly non-believers.  But because their position, both professionally and socially, is tied to the church, they are reluctant to come out.

Slowly, more and more are working on coming out.  Jerry mentioned 25 or so people involved, and about 100 new applicants for the Clergy Project.  Who knows how many more there are out there that either don’t know about the Project or who are not ready to step forward, even behind the anonymity which the Clergy Project offers.

And Jerry has something to say to the atheist community.  While we talk a lot about creating a community, Jerry DeWitt thinks we already have a community.  He thinks that we already have everything the church has ever had, “plus more.”

Jerry emphasized that he, despite this coming out and all of the consequences of it has had, is the same person he has always been.  He emphasizes that there is a person that we are, and that throughout his ministries over the years he had been trying to figure who he was.  When he stepped into the light of atheism, that search simply evaporated.  He had found that the culture of Christianity As I understand his message) acted as a sort of stumbling block to finding who he had been the whole time.

Christianity had ripped out a Jerry Dewitt shaped hole in his heart, and tried to put ‘God’ in that hole.  The only thing that fits in that hole is Jerry DeWitt.  The only thing that fits in our hearts is ourselves.  I find this to be a wonderful image, and it resonates with me, even though I have never had his Christian background.  Jerry and I both have a deep interest in religion, of truth, and while his is stronger than mine a love of people. I can be, as readers here will know, a bit of a cynic often enough.  Jerry truly cares for people and the truth, and that compassion and care are not christian; they are Jerry DeWitt.

So, now that Jerry does not have to pretend to be somebody else anymore, he hopes, through Recovering from Religion, to help people get out of religion and find themselves.  I find it a noble, caring, and beautiful goal.

Jerry, as I got a chance to see over lunch, The Atheist Experience TV show, dinner, and ice cream afterwards, is indeed “enjoying the Hell out of my life.”  If you have a chance to see Jerry speak, talk with him, or read his upcoming book (still being written), then I urge you to do so.  I would be happy to call Jerry my friend, and am glad that I was in Austin to meet him.

Lastly, I want to thank Matt Dillahunty and Beth Presswood for being awesome hosts, both of the TV show and of us out-of-towners.  Not only have they been an influence on me over the last few years (Matt for longer, since I have known about him longer), but it turns out he, as He has been most gracious thus far in giving us a ride when we needed one, and in giving us a ride to get some Austin BBQ later tonight.  We’re looking forward to it, and may have more stories from Austin later on.

 

Seriously, folks, visit Austin.  I do enjoy this city.



This week, Ginny and I are in Austin, TX.  After crashing early on a Saturday night we are spending a day with events with the Atheist Community of Austion (ACA). 

Forst is Jerry Dewitt’s speech entitled “Laughing Through the Apocalypse.  I will have updates later.

Later today is the Atheist Experience TV show followed by dinner.