Category: Culture and Society

Polyamory, self-improvement, and mainstream conservatism (oh my!)


I was pexting (poly texting.  Alternate ‘ptexting’.  All rights reserved.  That’s right folks, I share partners but not patented phrases) with Gina earlier and we started talking about how being in the relationships she is in is providing motivation to be a better person.

Specifically, she was talking about how awesome I am by saying…well, I will let her own words express it:

I know…becoming addicted to you has resulted in me becoming more responsible, more organized and more committed to a positive lifestyle.

And I was all like, that’s awesome.  I like being with people who are into self-improvement and all that stuff.  And I appreciate how being with her has a similar influence on me.  She and Ginny, together and individually, inspire me to persist in my own project to grow and mature further.

She capped it off by saying

My love for you makes me do dishes

Hot!

See, for those of you that don’t know me well, I’m a bit on the tidy side.  I’m not crazy about it, I just do dishes after cooking (the vast majority of the time), put away clothes rather than letting them stay on the floor etc, and do things like organize my various objects.  The other people in our little polycule (I can’t claim that term as my own invention), not so much. 

But that has improved, largely due to my influence as well as their genuine desire to make me a part of their lives.  You see, I clean because to be around significant clutter makes me viscerally uncomfortable and anxious, which they know about me.  And because they want me to be calm and relaxed in the space we share, they (often, but not always) make an effort to make themselves more organized.

As demonstrated by these positive attributes, there is a general sense of wanting to actually grow as people among the people in my life.  There is a desire to actually improve ourselves intellectually, emotionally, and sexually.  It is a result, I believe, of having the right attitudes towards relationships and the world.

These attitudes are not unique to polyamory, of course, nor are all polyamorous people actually good at such things.  But in my experience, having these complicated networks of relationships with people of various strengths, weaknesses, and different levels of experiences exponentially increases your own relationship experience and makes it more likly that we will mature faster.

Either that, or like natural selection it will eliminate those who are not capable of such lifestyles and those people will usually return to monogamy because it is easier and less emotionally challenging.

My experience with polyamory has opened me up to people of quality (and some not so quality who have returned to either normality or to unhealthy poly relationships), circumstances of personal challenge, and the freedom to truly be myself in ways that I don’t often see in mainstream culture because of the conservative and restrictive nature of hetero-normative monogamous culture. 

In many ways, self-improvement is a progressive trait, even if most ‘progressives’ are too conservative in other ways to see what I see as regressive sex and relationship norms.  it’s my belief that the progressives of today will largely be the conventional and mainstream social conservatives of the next few generations.  As the current conservatism dies out, it will be replaced with a less crazy mainstream conservatism.  As gay marriage becomes mainstream, polyamorous marriage will become radical and eventually progressive, for example.  Time will tell if I am right.

But back to today….

Having now surrounded myself with people whom I actually like, as well as a more recent attitude to only spend personal effort with people I think worth the time, means that I will likely find new challenges and see new possibilities for more substantial personal growth.

My polyamorous lifestyle creates motivation to make myself a better person.  It has contributed significantly to this effort that is, frankly, invisible to much of the world.  When you live in abnormal lifestyles and have abnormal opinions, the abnormality is most of what the world sees, even the friends you have had for years but whom you don’t see every day.

I wish more people could understand what both skepticism and polyamory have done to improve my life.  Sadly, most of the people I know and see only rarely have only a superficial understanding of it all, and usually avoid talking with me about much of it.

Its a consequence of being weird, I suppose.  So, thank you, weird people in my life, for getting it.  May we continue to be weird together.

I am no Islamophobe, I am anti-Islam


There has been a bit in the news over the last week or so about Islam.  There was an incident in London recently where a planned meeting was cancelled due to threats by a Moslem with a camera phone, for example (I’m mobile, otherwise I would link that story).  And today there is some talk about what Karen Armstrong has said about Islam, one example can be found at Jerry Coyne’s blog website.

A word which is often used in such conversations is Islamophobia.  It has been a politically charged word for years now, especially after 9/11, and pops up again with the perpetuation of Islam in the news, especially in the context of violence, oppression of women, and issues surrounding sharia law and secular laws.

A few years ago, for example, the lovely man that is Rick Santorum (gag) came to speak at the University of Pennsylvania (at the Hillel building, if I remember correctly) during some “Islamophobia week” (or something like that) in order to speak about the horrors of Islam and the wonderful alternative of the truly peaceful and wonderful Christianity.

(I threw up a little in my mouth while I typed that)

During the Q&A, I challenged Santorum on this distinction by pointing out that Jeebus (I may have actually said “Jesus” as to not confuse him) and Allah were both the God of Abraham, and by pointing out that the god of Islam was so awful, he was ignoring not only that it is the same basic god concept as JHWH/Jesus, but much of the Bible demonstrates the equality of atrocity of his own god.  How could he justify the harsh criticism of Islam given the relatedness to his own god and similar attrocities in his own scripture?

Let’s just say that this question was not received well by Mr. Santorum.  He became visibly flustered and angry and both challenged me to argue such a “ridiculous” case while not really allowing me to do so nor answer the question at all.  He rejected the premise of the question and called me an idiot or something similar  It was pretty much what I expected.

So, back to Islamophobia.

See, I don’t think this is the right word, at least not from my point of view.  I am not afraid of Islam.  I am concerned what Islam may do if it is allowed to influence policy and law in the West (its influence in the Middle East and elsewhere is already problematic).  But I am not afraid of the religion nor its adherents.

What I have is an extreme dislike of Islam, bordering on hate.  I find it an ignorance-perpetuating, women-oppressing (men-oppressing, as well), violence-causing, and ultimately dangerous ideology.  I hate what it has done to much of the world, creating a repressive and restrictive way of life for millions of people.

It is a faith, much like Christianity, which asks people in the age of technology and science to believe ancient superstition on pain of not mere death, which is infinitely more humane than that which it does offer, but on pain of eternal torture.  It is a disgusting and anti-human (anti-life!) ideology not worthy of our reverence nor our tolerance.

Yes, people have the right to be Moslems.  And rather than hate them I feel pity for them.  It too often makes women into cattle, men into misogynists, and all of us into slaves–Islam means ‘submission’ after all.

So no, Islamophobia is not the right word.  We should not fear Islam, we should see it as our enemy.  Not in the way that we make war with Moslems (the Ummah), but in the way that we don’t allow its doctrines, superstitions, or laws creep any closer to the rest of the world.  The people under Allah’s metaphorical thumb are victims, and those who seek to expand Islam are the most affected by this virus.

I am anti-Islam. I fear it not, so I am no Islamophobe.

Where profession and lifestyle meet


The other day I was watching one of the older and more experienced teachers deal with several 3-year-olds with practiced skill.  It occurred to me that the skill of knowing what children are likely to do, how to respond to them in groups, and generally how to work with groups of children has analogues to poly relationship skills.

We, as teachers, can tell a lot about parenting tendencies by watching their children.  And it is clear that some parents surely are taking their responsibility with more or less…let’s call it wisdom.  And I imagine that many parents might make different decisions if they had more experience with children.

Its not unlike us more experienced polyamorous people watching younger and less experienced people in relationships (whether they are learning about polyamory or are monogamous).  We see mistakes, or the seeds of mistakes, arise.  If only they had more experience!  (And if only we could have the experience we will have, but have it now).  We always have more to learn.

I have identified previously the fact that maintaining multiple relationships simultaneously forces you to become better at communicating, dealing with interpersonal and psychological problems, etc.  Well, in many ways working in childcare is similar in that it shows you many ways children can behave, and how groups of them illuminates their character as they learn about themselves and the world.

Just like polyamory.

Its hard to hide your inner demons and imperfections in the more difficult circumstances of your partners and their partners interacting in ways that may irk you or make you uncomfortable.  And spending a whole day (or weeks!), through garious changes in mood and environment, with children is similarly illuminating.

So, people who have children surely know a lot about their own offspring (hopefully, anyway).  But to understand children in general takes experience with groups of them, especially if they all have different home lives from which they draw their worldviews.  Similarly, people with one partner know a lot about how to maintain a relationship with that person (again, hopefully).  But to be good at relationships, that either requires having had many relationships either serially or in parallel.  I have had both.

And, to tie this to religion, having more experience with different ideas about the universe and the supernatural leads you to a perspective where you are able to see the nature of religion and how it interacts with our psychology and society.  Knowing more about different religions leads you to start seeing what makes them all-to-human enterprises, rather than divine.

Inexperience leads to perochial perspectives.  Diversity in experience leads to a broadening of perspectives.  My academic background in religion, culture, and philosophy has lead me to the broader perspective that religion is largely unjustified and harmful.  My experience with my own desires and with relationship leads me to the conclusion that monogamy, at least as a natural and default relationship structure, is a deception and a lie of tradition.

Lamarkian theology


It struck me today that one of the reasons that so many theologically-minded writers are so enamored by teleological thinking when it comes to evolutionary theory—whether it be Intelligent Design, theistic evolution, etc—is that they are so accustomed to thinking teleologically.  What I mean is that because theologians seem to simply make stuff up*, they have the freedom and malleability to fit whatever environment they find themselves in, so they are always thinking about designing their ideology to fit the world.  This, on the surface, might seem like what one should do, except they also hold onto the core nonsensical propositions while doing so—while reinterpreting them!

The very process of doing theology is exactly backwards to how science works, which is part of why the conversation between theologians and scientists often goes so wrong; their methods are in opposition.  The idea of theistic evolution (that god created the world and subsequently guides evolution) is at odds with scientific ideas about how evolution works.  There is no need for guidance for it to work, so (for example) the official Catholic Church’s acceptance of evolution as a fact, though guided by god (an idea shared by many people as well) is not the scientific concept accepted by evolutionary biologists.  Similarly, Intelligent Design, the cultural political attempt to sneak creationism into us with the guise of “science,” has similar themes underneath.  It all is about keeping the idea of design or purpose in a mechanism which needs none in order to work.

And what this reminds me of, this predilection for shaping oneself into the hole it finds itself sitting in, is Lamarkian evolution.  You see, early in the development of evolutionary science, there was some debate about how changes in species occurred.  One idea, which is now rejected by the scientific community since we know how genes, mutation, and other forces work, was that some organism would change according to the environmental pressures it finds itself in and passes along those changes to the next generation.  A common example used to illustrate this is a giraffe that finds its neck too short gets a longer neck (or at least the idea of one), and passes this change onto its offspring.

Natural selection, of course, works nothing like this, but theology does work this way.

If some theological idea does not fit with the world, a newer theologian comes along and proposes a new way to see things; a new way to “interpret” the scriptures or the tradition in order to fit better.  And as the progress of science has marched along, theology has followed and changed its spots to fit to not be too egregiously out of style with the current scientific consensus.  But it is done in such a way as to just change enough to not be noticeable to most people.  It changes slowly, little by little, such that the theological concepts talked about seriously now in universities don’t seem to most people to be absurd or too far from their original tradition (which they define, of course).

But take a sophisticated theologian from 2012 (happy new years, btw) and send him to even a comparatively liberal and open-minded seminary from 1000 years ago, and they would be cast out as heretics, unbelievers, atheists even!

But it isn’t really their fault; they have to change to survive.  It’s just a shame that they can’t get rid of the core absurdities of their theologies.  You know,m stuff like gods and other supernatural crap.

I’ll say it again; theology is intelligently designed, but not intelligently enough.

 

 

*”Some time ago, when Jerry Coyne was preparing for his debate with John Haught, I recommended a book of modern theology in which a number of different theologians explained the very different ways in which Christian theology is done nowadays. The result that I hoped would derive from reading the book is what happened to me when I read it: that it would become obvious that theology in fact makes things up; that there is no basis for agreement between theologians, and that the bases for theological positions are as diverse as the positions themselves. That is, there is no basis for doing theology. Theology is like a mood that people have in the presence of sacred texts and the history of thought about them. It has no rational ground.”  –Eric MacDonald (source)

“And all Religion’s true”


So, I was one of the many people who saw Cee-Lo Green (who I had not heard of until someone named him at the party last night) singing John lennon’s anthem Imagine, which has always been a favorite among many humanists, including myself.

I didn’t notice the change in words mostly because the room was singing the correct words in unison, and the noise overwhelmed the audio from the feed.  In any case, if you are unaware, he changed the words in the second verse from “And no religion too” to “And all religion’s true,” supposedly in an attempt to be inclusive and accommodating.

But seriously, all religion true?

H/T Hemant Mehta

Is Cee-Lo Green not aware that this idea of all religions being true, rather than be all nice and lovey-dovey,  would be a disaster of epic proportions?  Rather than be inclusive and respectful, as his apology via twitter seems to indicate was his itention, this idea that all religions being true is not only dangerous but impossible.

Imagine a world where all the religions were true.  This would not be a paradise of love, compassion, and peaceful diversity.  If the sacred texts of the world were representative of what was real, then it would mean that there are real supernatural powers at odds with one-another.  It would be like the ancient Greeks of Romans, except some of the gods think they are all-powerful and demand that the other gods and their followers be converted or slaughtered.  It would amount to real total warfare on a global, even cosmic, scale.

No, Cee-Lo, this is not a beautiful dream you imagine in your lyric-changing.  It is a representation of your ignorance of what religion is.  We already have a world where, in many places, you can believe what you want and practice your religion as you want.  That is not the same as wishing all religions true, however.  We are permitted, here in the West especially, to believe as our conscience and philosophy leads us, but I hope to the FSM and IPU the that all religions are not true.  I would rather live ina universe which does not implode via logical paradox or by universal supernatural warfare.

That’s why Lennon’s original lyric was so profound; because it saw that religion was a cause for strife, not tolerance and peace in our world.  Next time, just sing the damned song as John Lennon wrote it!

 

The mythology of harmony


Preface

There is an idea in our culture, derived in part from the Enlightenment and many of its thinkers including many of those who helped form the United States, that the universe is fundamentally rational.  The idea is that as we learn about the universe and how it works, the underlying assumption is that what we find to be true is both true in every circumstance (universalization, which is also relevant in Kant’s ethical principle) and coherent with the rest of what we find.

That is, the world is essentially connected and coherent.  The basis for trusting in scientific methodologies as sensible predictions and descriptions of the nature of reality is based upon this view, because if this consistency was not true than using any description of the universe based upon any observation would be useless, since there would be no guarantee that another observation in another place or time would yield the same result.

As a side note, it has been pointed out many times that if such things as miracles, or more generally a supernatural realm or powers, were to be real then this would make this rationality of the universe meaningless, since at any given time a power, force, or being which is supernatural could simply dispense with that rationality and intervene essentially “magically.”  It would make science useless because we could not hope to make sense out of a world that can act essentially randomly or at least without consistent actions leading to theories or laws.

But enough of the opaque philosophical preface, let’s get to what I want to talk about today.

Cooperation

Especially in the more liberal world in which i grew up, there is an ideal of cooperation and striving for practical compatibility which underlies much of our thinking.  We want to get along with not only other people, but their ideas and dreams.  We want our dreams to fit in with the dreams of our neighbors so that when we all dream together, it creates a jig-saw tapestry of diverse and intertwining beauty.

It is a wonderful and beautiful image, especially for this polyamorous man who seeks intertwining in many ways in my own life.  It appeals to even me, the often-cynic and occasional (or not-so-occasional!) grump (or Grinch, as the time of this writing might imply) who is often found to be pointing out where things don’t seem to be cohering or cooperating nicely.

But is it true? I mean, of course t can sometimes be true (right?).  I mean, at least under ideal circumstances people’s beliefs, desires, and ideals will match up quite nicely and they can get along just fine.  And many people believe that if we were to be more tolerant and accepting of others’ ideas then we could all get along nicely.

And, to a certain extent this is true.  If we were willing to accommodate more, to compromise more, and to tolerate more we could all fit our puzzle pieces together and create, well, some kind of image.

But would that image be meaningful?  Would it be even internally consistent or coherent?  Could it be a picture of reality?

Truth and fallacy

The problem is that the best way to find ways to co-exist peacefully with people of different ideals is to re-shape our own in order to fit wither theirs, so long as they are also doing the same thing.  It may imply the occasional forcing of ideological shape into close-enough spaces (which we will politely ignore), but it can work.  I’ve seen it work, among people who are wont to maintain community with diverse opinions.  I went to Quaker school, ok?

The problem is that it sacrifices truth by too easily overlooking fallacy.  Because it prioritizes the coherence of diverse ideas over the question of whether any of the ideas are rationally defensible in themselves, it cannot reliably lead to a picture of what is actually true or real.  Rather than investigate each idea rationally and skeptically, the primary motivation is to fit everything together into a quasi-meaningful whole, which ends up distorted and full of many gaps and bulges where the pieces don’t quite fit.

This is why the skeptic, the new atheist, and the “realist” get such a bad rap around such harmonizing folks.  They are working so hard to find ways to get us talking, agreeing, and peacefully co-existing that they are really not even concerned, and perhaps not fully aware of the relevance, of rational defensibility of ideas themselves.  Such quibbling and nit-picking questions of such as us skeptics is annoying? Can’t we see that they are trying to paint a pretty picture? Why must we insist that it does not look like anything real?

We must be the kind of people that tell 3-year-olds that their picture of a pony looks more like, well, a crude circle and some randomly placed lines! This is not to imply comparison between 3-year-old children and defenders of social cooperation.  Not at all….

And yet, so many people are so enamored with the cooperation of ideas, whether they be science v. religion or otherwise, that they don’t pay attention to whether the larger picture they are putting together contains pieces from more than one puzzle.  They don’t pay attention to the fact that one might be labeled “reality” and the other “fantasy.”

They are blinded, or at least distracted, by the liberal mythology of cooperation and tolerance.   They are biased by the mythological desire for social and interpersonal harmony.  And then they rationalize it as if it were we skeptics and new atheists who are seeing it wrong; they often insist that we don’t understand what the picture is supposed to look like.  They are distracted by the mythological goal, while we are asking questions about the many parts which don’t seem to fit.

The only way to be sure that the image we create will be coherent is to make sure that each piece is the right piece, from the puzzle of reality.  We must each inspect our own ideas, as much as is practically feasible, to make sure that it is the right piece.  If it does not fit with others’ pieces, then we have to inspect both of them to see where the problem may lay.

And if it turns out that the whole puzzle is not coherent, that the universe is not rational, then so be it.  But so far it appears as if the many pieces fit together pretty nicely, so long as we are vetting ourselves–as well as others–before we place them down on the picture of human achievement.

Opinion and objective reality; abortion


Abortion.

If there is any topic more charged than religion (even though it is usually so charged due to religious ideas), that is it.

So, this was posted today on my lovely girlfriend’s blog (http://martinellivarietyhour.blogspot.com/2011/12/value-of-adult-life.html) about a facebook discussion which was itself about some PA legislation which will create problems for women’s health in the state.

I’m mobile, so I want to keep this short.  Everyone is legally entitled to their opinions ad beliefs, but we are not logically or rationally entitled to them.

The reason this is the case is that there is an objective world out there (ok, there is an inter-subjective world which we share and of which we have no direct knowledge–but I risk envoking Kant here so I shall return to the question at hand).

In any case, we share access to empirical facts about the real world, and any proposition, fact, and value we have access to is subject to that world.  We have to test those things againt our empirical methodologies.  We have to test our opinions against reality.

And this is true for all subjects of consideration.  It is true of religious beliefs, moral declarations, facts about the nature of reality, etc.  The certainty we can have about a fact is relative to the amount of empirical information we have about it.

And with abortion, we have access to a lot of information.  Fetuses are not sentient.  They have not conscioussness nor conscience.  They have no souls (whatever those things are supposed to be).  They are not people.  They might become people, but they are not people. 

Adult women are people.  They are sentient, conscious, and their consciences are usually in full swing when they are contemplating such a heavy proposition as getting an abortion.  Until the thing growing in them approaches any level of sentience or awareness, she has every right to get rid of it as she would any parasite, bacteria, etc.

There is no reason—moral, rational, or religious—to be anti-choice.   

The atheist community is about more than “does god exist?”


A few years back I was pretty close with the people over at the Rational Response Squad.  They made a little noise, became small celebrities in the early atheist community, and probably helped that community grow in ways that other less-quiet ways could not have helped.

There were revered by some, reviled by many more, and a couple of years ago or so they sort of fell off the map in the atheist community.  I know more about all of that than I really need to know, and I do not care to relate the soap-opera involved.

But in any case they never really disappeared completely.  I have been in contact with some of the members of the RRS over the last few years and have watched them change and move in different directions.  One of those old friends is now blogging about history, and I have continued to read his blog consistently because he is a dedicated and intelligent person with interesting things to say.

Then yesterday I read this:

(A)Theism: A Brief Autobiography with a Word of Caution

For those who I left behind in my journey, I have no words of comfort for you.  I suspect that you are either filled with disgust, with acceptance, or are just noncommittal.  Maybe you’re working up a response.  Of course I welcome any discussion.  But it might be important now to note that I have not even yet ventured at an answer to the question ‘does god exist?’  I have refused to answer.  I do not wish to indulge your egotism, your wish to label me, to place me in some convoluted category.  To hell with that.  If you want to judge me, do so on my positions in other more serious matters.  Do not trouble me with your bothersome rantings about the pointlessness or the value in the exultation of faith.

He says more than just that, of course (read the whole post, for full context).  But this was the paragraph that stuck out to me while I was trying to sleep last night (I was not home, so I could not get up and blog about it then).  I kept trying to figure out what this was all about.

I responded in the comments (currently under moderation) [comment has been accepted], and I would like to have some discussion with Tom about this larger issue, because I think that the atheist community has become so much more than the question about the existence of god itself.  Yes, we certainly still deal with that question, but we deal with so much more.  Readers of my blog should know that, in any case.

We deal with questions of skepticism, science and faith, religion and culture, morality, and so many other things which are not only relevant but also important to deal with.  The atheist community, as well as the larger skeptical and reason-based community, are going to be very important in the formation of our culture over the next 20 years (and beyond, probably).

We are no longer a movement surrounding the (possibly unanswerable) question of “does god exist?”  As Matt Dillahunty says, we want to know what you believe and why.  This goes for questions having to do with gods, science, relationships, and everything else.  I personally love it.

Family


Family is more than the people related to you.  Family is also what you create in your adult life.  Who is part of your family also extends beyond who you marry, especially in a legal framework where marriage is restricted (that is, against our natural rights–and I use that in reference to the founding fathers intentionally) to a man and a woman.  Our family consists of those who we want to be a part of our intimate lives, whether they be sexual partners, friends, or people with whom you share genetic information.

Polyamory is about family.  It is about choosing who is part of your life, to what degree they are part of your life, and what rights they have in terms of access, decisions, and all other legal considerations.  whether these rights will be recognized is not relevant to whether they are moral and rational.  The good [sic] Lord knows that all that is legal is what is moral and rational….

The conventions of our culture, conservative and outdated (but I repeat myself!) as they are cannot contain what family is.  We already have the concept of family extending to the people that matter to us, so why is it so hard to allow this concept to restrict us sexually and romantically? It is, to speak plainly, absurd.  Love who you love how you love them.  Do not be restricted or pushed towards obligation or expectation in the matters of love.

The mainstream is not wise, aware, or right; they are boring and atavistic even in looking forward.

Live your life as if it is the only life you have, because it is.  Gods, assumed monogamy, and accommodation to fear are all poisonous to all of us, and we can do better.  Let’s create families large and open, and let’s leave behind the nuclear family of the conservatives and fading liberals (which will soon be the conservatives).

Let’s be progressives not of substance but of perceptual looking forward to improving ourselves, our society, and our world.  Liberal not just to be liberal, but liberal because liberalism is about the striving for improvement.