Saganday(belated)

Yesterday was, or would have been, Carl Sagan's birthday. I think church never really had a chance with me because "Cosmos" plus some illustrated science books had sparked a sense of wonder that the stark walls and bad music at the local Mormon ward could never hope to match. (Who knows what the interplay would have been had our family gone to a more aesthetically evocative church?)

What always stuck in my head as the "Cosmos music" isn't actually the main theme of the show, and first turns up in episode 2 (youtube excerpt that starts partway in with that music, embedding's not quite the style here). This episode has what is still one of the best popular science explanations of evolution available. (If you prefer your explanations from books, I'd suggest Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale or Greg Graffin's Anarchy Evolution which pulls double time as a punk rock biography.)

Americanvalues

America was born in Rebellion. America was born On the Verge, where ideas, ethnicities, philosophies, religions, languages, histories and narratives from around the world came together in the cities, salons, pubs, coffeehouses, courts, churches, lyceums, presses and public squares, to mix, intermingle, and radically transform.

In all of the great moral conflicts that have defined American freedom, there have been those who sought justice and greater human dignity for all, and there have been those who defended established hierarchy and social restriction. The struggle between cosmopolitan embrace of all humanity versus the provincial, factional, traditional and powerful was old in our republic's youngest days.

Ending the rule of kings is a fundamentally radical concept. Abolition, free speech, women voting, civil rights, labor rights, freedom of conscience, have nothing traditional or conservative about them. The truly American spirit is Speaking Truth to Power.

Freedom is the freedom of dissent, disruption. Freedom is not merely freeing the businessmen. The untrammeled right of men of wealth to do as they please and influence decisions without concern for democratic participation is not the radical gift of the American experiment, but rather the ancient way of dominion and empire. Freedom is not merely freedom to live a comfortably unexamined life in one's steady cultural tradition, regardless if that culture is Bantu, Persian, Scandinavian, or the much mythologized and over-marketed American "heartland." Freedom obligates one to engage the world, doubt oneself, and see all cultures as sources anyone might draw from to grow and change themselves.

Goodness is not America's essence but its aspiration. No one gets to assume they're the good guys, especially not trying to justify something they would condemn from anyone less good than they. There never was a Shining City on the Hill, and a city presuming itself to be that one is guilty of pride. That City is not yet built and will never be completed.

This is the "liberalism" I learned from the example of many, and is nothing like the Strawman "liberalism" pundits on the right sneer at, nor the counterfeit "liberalism" focus-group technocrats in the Democratic Party might offer, nor the empty "liberalism" the compromised media occasionally name-check when they need to say something about "both sides."

This is America as I know it and love it.

restatement

Liberals are stupid. Conservatives are evil. The pattern holds true.

Liberal stupidity plays glaringly in the delusion that there is anything like a convicted, stable Middle to be picked up. Were such a thing true, the conservative ploy of stepping further to the right every time would never work. It has worked very well. Therefore, there is no vast unrepresented Middle committed to centrist or moderate positions. There is a vast biconceptual majority who can be persuaded to think more liberally on some issues and more conservatively on other issues, and who will side with the better persuader, not the most centrist position-player.

twobarswhamyagottacross

I don't think there is any being in charge of the whole universe. I also have not been inclined to align with the organization American Atheists. This does not prove to be an exception.

Jon Stewart Mocking American Atheists for Opposing Cross at 9/11 Memorial

If someone were specifically constructing and installing a cross to "represent the faith of the people here," that would definitely be a First Amendment violation, using a public memorial to grant favorable status to a particular religion. In this case, it's a found object among the ruins, which some people have taken as meaningful. It's an emergent part of the narrative. If you go to many monuments or National Parks here around the West, you'll find Native American sites or religious artifacts, as well as historic churches or artifacts of settlers, displayed or pointed out on hiking/driving maps, because they're a significant part of what's there in the story of the area. I don't see that as violation of the First Amendment so long as it's not emphasized in a way to privilege a particular religion or culture in the story.
It's a question of how it's displayed, not whether it's displayed.

communitynotdeity

You've probably heard, every couple months or so, of some town in the U.S. with atheist-themed billboards or bus signs, and angry people reacting with protest, stonewalling, or vandalism. Nontheists tend to see this reaction in terms of "see, they're so crazy even a completely inoffensive sign that we exist sets them off."

Here's another way to see it. If you've told anyone about a regular nontheist meeting or group somewhere, someone's probably asked "What do atheists need group meetings for, isn't that just like church?" In a way it can be; a competing community.

We often get ourselves into unproductive arguments about how much good or harm religion and atheism do. I think that community is the good religion does, the only real good it does, and that the realization that it's not an exclusively religious good but a general human good provokes defensiveness.

If people can fit you into their comfortable worldview, they won't have a problem with your existence even if they don't like you. Unbelievers as iconoclasts offering criticism and overenthusiastic blasphemy fits fine with a conservative religious community's collective worldview. Cold bitter intellectuals writing letters to the editor and occasionally filing lawsuits with the hated ACLU are no threat to them. The question "why are atheists so angry?" is not a simple misunderstanding of your nice intent, but a defensive reactionary attempt to fit you into a category that's comfortable.

But friendly neighbors who invite people to meet and feel welcome, organize charity work, and plan outings with their children, that's a potential replacement. It poses an existential question to a religion, whether the mystic and supernatural part of their religion is as essential as they've assumed. There are communities not specifically religious, but they can tell themselves it's a core of religiosity in people that makes such communities possible. A community that by is core constituency denies the relevance of devotion to the supernatural forces an expansion of their idea of what the community is.

pure

Of course, an interest in heritage, culture, even ethnicity, is neither racist nor fascist. However, an interest in the purity of that heritage or culture or ethnicity, a desire to keep it from dilution and free of anything foreign to it, is the very substance of racism and fascism.
Purity is a corrosive antimoral value that reliably leads people to evil conclusions. Whether in matters sexual or spiritual or cultural, unless you're talking about refining chemicals and ores, purity is not a value or goal worth having.

I'm thinking of two otherwise unrelated things here. One, wishing an easy way to navigate the musically compelling but politically volatile pagan- folk- and black-metal scenes. Another, clashes over the immigration issue. At that debate (three months ago) between United for Social Justice and Utah Minutemen, the assertion there's no American identity to mold oneself to (sorry, forget the exact words) struck me as a good one. Of course one of the Minutemen vocally disagreed. I'm sure they think themselves just normal people wanting what's right (that's what's so insidious about cognitive frames), but their idea of what it is to be American is arbitrarily limited. I align more with Naomi Wolf who identifies being "American" with the attitude of speaking truth to power and willing to free all people from authorities and systems of control. By her account Americans need not have ever trod the soil of this continent beneath their sandalled feet, and probably not even lived while the place bears that name. It's an excessively idealistic, slightly sappy notion, argued specifically to lure those with narrow views of America to expand their horizons, but it's a desirable one that manages to embrace a broader humanity.

kantyousee

Logical corollary to the categorical imperative: Anything you try to justify doing to anyone else, you implicitly grant everyone in the universe permission to do to you. Your only refuge is in highly specific circumstances or in confessing to having chosen to do ill.

absenceofleaders

Haymarket Affair, May 4

"Anarchist" is a term that was generally adopted with some sense of irony. Apologists for status quo hierarchic government and business domains, sincere or self-serving, generally attacked any attempt to improve the lives and restore the rights of underclasses as bringing on "anarchy" in the chaos-brutality-and-riotous-destruction sense. If bringing about genuine freedom, opportunity, voice, and participation for laborers, women, ethnic outsiders, and the poor is "anarchy," many people reasoned, then let us be for anarchy. If institutional power of the wealthiest few dominating the impoverished many is civilization, then let civilization burn. "Anarchist" has acquired a long list of hyphenated adjectives, as visions of just how to build up a better civilization vary, but what many anarchists have actually envisioned is a very loose federalism, built up of otherwise independent local community organizations and labor unions.

I'm about as (un)comfortable with the label anarchist as I am with liberal, socialist, libertarian, or progressive. In some contexts, I even count as conservative. I also am dubious of the value and virtue of violent revolution. I like to place a bit of hope (not faith) in the Arab Spring, and also in open communication, strikes, building occupations, mass demonstrations that block ordinary business of government and trade, and other instances of badass pacifism.

(The last is a TVtropes link; hope you've got three hours to kill if you click on it.)

coolbeans

Imagine you're looking at a normal jar of jelly beans of assorted flavors and colors. Then someone less clever than they think they are tells you it couldn't possibly have just shaken out that way, that getting that exact arrangement of colors and shapes must have taken a greater-than-mortal power carefully planning and sorting to get that exact jar of jelly beans.

definition of 'order' = arbitrary
analogy = weak