Faking it

Dear Carolyn: 

In the mid-1990s, when I was 22 and my brother was 18, our family took a Caribbean cruise. It was fun, but not so much fun that I cared to go back again.
Now that my parents are in their late 60s and retired, my mom has gotten it in her mind that all four of us should take another cruise together as a family. They have even offered to pay. 
 
Aside from not having an interest in the cruise, I am also not interested in taking a family vacation. I am single and in my late 30s, and a family vacation smacks of desperation, a way of saying, “Oh, how sad, he didn’t want to go by himself, so he went with Mommy and Daddy.” Also, traveling anywhere with my parents is never a simple process (I suppose that can be said of a lot of people, though). In short, a cruise might be a vacation for my parents, but it would be anything but one for me.

I have repeatedly explained that neither a cruise nor a family vacation (wherever the destination) interests me. Nevertheless, the badgering continues. 

For the record, I take my own vacations, usually by myself. I also see my parents about once a month, so it is not as if I ignore them and am being “guilted” into a vacation. Any thoughts?

 I was surprised to see not only Carolyn, but also a huge number of people in the comments, suggest that LW would regret not going on the cruise after their parents die, because they'd feel bad about missing an opportunity to spend time with their parents.

This surprises me because if you asked me in a vacuum "What if they die and you don't get to spend any more time with them?" my immediate visceral answer would be "Then it's even more important not to spend what time we have left together doing something that makes me resent spending the time with them."

This also makes me wonder if there are people who actually enjoy spending time with their loved ones doing something that their loved ones don't actually have interest in doing.  Because I hate it!  It makes me feel so awkward and just want to run away and go home.   When I was a kid, my parents would sometimes on their own initiative try to take me to something that I was interested in but I knew they had no interest in, and it just felt awful and cringey and dreadful, and generally not worth doing at all.  Even when I invite my friends to do something that I'm not completely sure if they're into, and they accept my invitation of their own free will,I still find myself worrying in the back of my mind that they might not actually be into it. So, in this context, I just can't fathom how someone can enjoy an activity if their loved ones don't actually want to be there and are going along just to humour them.

Actually, I wonder if there's a correlation between this group and the people who want others to go through the motions of being religious?  As someone who takes religion seriously (which is why I left the church and started living as an atheist in the first place), I've always felt it's terribly insulting to the deity to go through the motions and not mean it.  But if there are people who genuinely enjoy having their loved ones go through the motions of things they actually hate doing, maybe they'd think their deity would feel the same way?

Theory: insecurity in one's own philosophy is the root of all evil

I blogged recently about how various patriarchal cultures are operating suboptimally essentially as a result of the patriarchs' insecurity in their own philosophy.

It occurs to me that many of the evils of the world are the result of powerful regimes being insecure in their own philosophies.

I was recently in a conversation with someone who felt the need to expound at length upon why communism is bad. But none of the examples they gave had anything to do with the actual social/political/economic practises that constitute actual communism. Instead they were on about stasi and gulags and propaganda - things that communist countries did because they were insecure in their philosophy. If they had trusted their philosophy, they wouldn't have needed all this stuff that they used to hurt people and ruin people's lives. And if they weren't pouring so many resources into assuaging their insecurity, they'd have had more to put into making their actual social and economic model work.

The evils that result from religion are similar. The problems happen when religions try to force themselves on people who aren't interested, start wars with other religion, and try to colonize countries and impose their values upon legislation. If they truly were secure in their dogma, they could just quietly go about life, letting the benefits of their religion speak for themselves. And if religions didn't go around trying to force themselves on others, there fewer people would perceive other religions as threats. Even I, as a recovering catholic, think I could appreciate the beauty and history of my former religion if it would stop trying to infringe upon my life as a private citizen.

Why do religious people want other people to say grace?

Ken Gallinger's ethics column in this Saturday's Star (which, weirdly, hasn't been posted online) has a letter from someone whose friend has recently become religious and now wants to say grace before every meal. But rather than saying grace herself, she says to the assembled group "Who's going to say the blessing?", trying to bully someone else into doing it.

I've heard of this happening quite a number of times in different contexts. Religious people put their non-religious guest on the spot by trying to get them to say grace. Even my own loss of faith was triggered by the fact that my parents suddenly wanted me to say grace. It wasn't that they wanted grace to be said, it's that they wanted me to do it, despite the fact that I didn't feel good about the idea. Desperate to be able to explain why I felt so strongly about not doing it (with adult vocabulary, I can articulate that the display of false piety made me feel hypocritical and rather dirty, and I was convinced that we would go to hell for trying to trick God by lying to Him, but as a kid I couldn't articulate this) I started thinking critically, long and hard, until I ultimately came to the realization that I'm an atheist.

So why do they want people who aren't interested in saying grace to say grace? If thanking the deity for the meal is so important, why aren't they eager to do it themselves? Why do they want to make their guests uncomfortable and have their deity get lied to rather than simply expressing their own genuine gratitude with quiet dignity in accordance with their faith?

This is not an episode of Scooby Doo!

The OED Word of the Day was Holy Ghost. In the Catholicism of my era, we called it the Holy Spirit. I have seen Holy Ghost in older schoolbooks (I strongly suspect they were Catholic schoolbooks from my parents' era, but I'm not 100% certain about this because I saw it before I was aware of different denominations), but I've never heard it in Catholicism in real life.

I can see how the same (currently unknown to me) word might be translated as both Ghost and Spirit by two different translators, but I wonder which is more accurate? Spirit makes better sense to me just logically, but I'm not fully up on my catechism, and I'm not sure if an atheist's idea of logic is applicable when translating such a religious concept.

The OED etymology only went as far back as Old English, at which time the concepts of Ghost and Spirit overlapped more than they do today. But I wonder which word more accurate reflects the original (Greek? Aramaic?) source text?

Things They Should Invent: relativistic requirements for salvation

Picture this: the most moral 10% of the population goes to heaven. Everyone else goes to hell.

That would be a good motivator for ethical behaviour, wouldn't it? It would also be a good way to get people to butt out of other people's business and work on improving themselves.

Now all we have to do is get the church to embrace moral relativism.

How to decommercialize christmas without sacrificing anything

But after a disastrous Christmas last year and lacklustre sales most of this year, many retailers are desperate to make up the shortfall in the final four months.

Holiday sales can account for as much as 40 per cent of annual sales, more for those who specialize in giftware.

So that's the problem. That's why retailers are so aggressive with the music and the decorations. They've associated huge sales with this season.

So what we as consumers have to do as consumers is make xmas sales unremarkable, and this without fucking up the economy.

Here's how:

In 2010, don't give your xmas presents on xmas. Instead, give your xmas presents (to your family and friends, as well as any employees and service providers to whom you give a xmas tip) on your own birthday. To dissuade retailers from responding by instituting year-round xmas decorations, do not purchase any xmas presents from retailers who have decorations up before November 28, 2010, which is the first day of Advent 2010. Because people tend to give you presents on your birthday, the result will be multiple opportunities to exchange gifts and good wishes throughout the year.

Santa will bring kids their presents on their half-birthday. Q: Why not their birthday? A: As people born in December and early January can attest, when your birthday coincides with xmas you tend to get less than your rightful share of presents (rightful share being determined by observing siblings and peers). This will maintain the common standard of two annual gift-receiving occasions, which is particularly important when you're a kid and can't just buy stuff for yourself. This will also enable Santa to have more consistent workflow management, with elves specializing in different parts of the production process being more steadily employed year-round, and to save in overtime costs. Mrs. Claus also looks forward to spending a quiet Christmas at home, drinking eggnog in front of the fire and reflecting on the true meaning of the season, for the first time in over two millenia.

Santa assures all good little boys and girls that they will receive their presents on their half-birthday regardless of whether a tree and/or stockings and/or milk and cookies are present in the home.

December 25 (or 24 or January 6 or whichever day you use in your particular culture) can, of course, still be used as a religious feast day, a family gathering, and/or a statutory holiday. But the only socially mandated gift-giving that will occur on or marking that day is xmas gifts from and birthday gifts to individuals whose birthday is December 25, and xmas gifts from Santa to children whose birthday is June 25.

In summary, in 2010:

- Give your xmas gifts on your own birthday
- Santa brings kids their xmas gifts on their half-birthday
- Don't buy xmas gifts from retailers who have decorations up before November 28
- Your religion's, culture's, and/or family's customary celebrations can continue to be held on the customary date, but without the exchange of gifts.

Let's all work together to decentralize xmas 2010 and bring some sanity back to what should be a happy occasion.

Our government might have just set a record

They've offended both the queer community and the catholic church in under 24 hours. I wonder if anyone else has ever done that?

(Random thoughts on the communion thing: 1. In the eyes of the church, is it worse to take a host and put it on your pocket, or to accept communion when you aren't catholic? 2. It seems to me that if you're a political leader whose primary strategy is to accuse his opponent of being out of touch with ordinary Canadians, you'd brush up on the protocol of Canada's largest religion before attending a state funeral in that religion's church. Especially since you have access to the services of a protocol office.)

Popes' names

Popes' names translate. Emperor Popeatine is Benedict in English and Benoît in French. John Paul II was Jan Pawel in Polish.

I wonder when they started doing this? It's hard to figure out, because we translate them retroactively. Pope Benedict XVI is Benoît in French, and we also call Pope Benedict I who reigned in the 500s Benoît in French. But I seriously doubt they translated his name in the 500s. I don't think they were quite so very concerned about localization at that time. So when did this convention begin?

Perhaps I need some real problems

I am currently feeling guilty for not having been aware of Tiananmen Square when it first happened. I was 8 years old.

I'm also feeling guilty for using the fact that I was 8 years old as an excuse, because I did look at newspapers at the time, although I didn't have the focus/attention span/discipline to read most of the articles.

That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight

When I was 10 years old, my parents came up with the idea that we should say grace before Sunday dinner, and that we should all take turns - every week a different person says grace.

I was really uncomfortable with this idea. It seemed random and out of the blue. Why start now? Why only Sunday dinner? If they thought saying grace was so important, why didn't they ever do it when they were sitting down to eat themselves?

In retrospect, looking at it from an adult perspective, it seems likely they read one of those parenting articles on the importance of creating family rituals. This also might have been related to a tragedy that occurred in our extended family around that time. But to me that wasn't how religion worked. You did it - or you did your best to do it - because you believe in it, or because it's what you're supposed to do. You didn't just arbitrarily start doing other bits of religion for no particular reason!

I thought long and hard trying to make sense of this, and couldn't get past the feeling that my parents were trying to put on a show to trick God (written this way because that's how I thought of Him at the time), trying to impress Him with what I then didn't have a word for but would now describe as false piety. I was not comfortable with that. No way we could trick God. We were totally going to hell for that.

This would ultimately be the catalyst of my loss of faith.

I'd never really thought about whether my prayers and other religious acts were sincere. It was just how life worked, it was just what you did to be good. Say please and thank you, 7x9=63, I believe in one God the Father Almighty, don't pick your nose. But because I was uncomfortable with my parents' attempts to apparently trick God, I started thinking critically about this whole saying grace thing, and I arrived at the conclusion that I wasn't thankful for my food. I know, I know, you're supposed to be even outside Catholicism in life in general, but the fact is I wasn't thankful for it. I just took it for granted. (Still do, actually.) So now I'm not only trying to trick God, but I'm trying to trick God by specifically lying to him. Our family never really did every single piece of Catholicism, but generally my failures were benign neglect, and any religious acts were sincere. They were often automatic and had not been thought about critically, but, apart from my first confession (I made up plausible stuff because I couldn't think of anything to say - I've since learned that tons of people did that) I was never lying or outright faking it.

So I decided I didn't want to lie to and trick God, and told my parents I didn't want to say grace when it was my turn. I couldn't articulate my reasons very clearly, so I told them it's because I wasn't thankful for the food. They told me I had to anyway. We were all sitting at the table, with food on the table, and no one was allowed to eat until I said grace. So I said grace and felt dirty doing so.

For the next 10 years, there would be a monthly battle for me to get out of saying grace and my parents to try to get me to say grace. This cause me to be constantly questioning and thinking critically about my religion, and to ultimately conclude that I cannot be Catholic. (It wasn't until well into adulthood that I realized I'm congenitally incapable of religious faith - my brain just doesn't bend that way.) I could have either accepted it unquestioningly or as not-particularly-meaningful ritual, but putting on an intentional show false piety was a dealbreaker and drove me to a life of sincere sacrilege.

Open Letter to the wife whose husband lost his religion

Dear lady who posted this on PostSecret:



Even if he does see the connection, he can't just start believing again. Yes, he could go through the motions, but he'd just be attempting to trick you and your god. He wouldn't actually believe in it. Religious faith is not something you can turn on and off on a whim; as you know from your own faith, you have to truly believe in it.

Think of it this way: could you truly stop believing in your god if you thought it would bring you luck to do so? Could you truly believe in, say, Allah or Ganesha or Athena or Gitche Manitou? You could go through the motions, sure, but would you actually believe in it?

Analogy for why I didn't convert to another xian denomination

In the past, people have suggested that my leaving catholicism for atheism was rash and closed-minded, and that I should have tried other denominations of xianity first.

As I've blogged about before, I view catholicism as an abusive ex. I view the other denominations of xianity as his brothers. Now we all know that siblings don't always have a lot in common. We all know that's it's very possible for one sibling to be a complete asshole while all the others are perfectly nice guys. And there is room for the possibility that your abusive ex's brother might be a perfect match for you. However, that doesn't mean that your first step should by default be to date your ex's brother. Most people would agree that the reasonable step at this point would be to spend some time being single, or to date someone who is completely unlike your ex. Even in a Jane Austen matchmaking-über-alles world, it is by no means closed-minded or judgemental or indiligent to move on to someone completely else rather than systematically trying out every brother.

If you don't see the fallacy of this xiancentric approach, look at it from the other perspective. Suppose you have a real asshole of a brother who is abusive to his spouse. His spouse finally leaves him. Do you expect the spouse to start dating you? Do you feel personally dissed if they don't automatically start dating you to see if you're a better match than your brother?

The problem with moral absolutism

Whenever I say or do or think something particularly distasteful or soul-destroying, my reaction is to comment to whomever is in earshot "I am so going to hell for that!" If this comment is overheard by someone who has never been Catholic*, they tend to reply by trying to convince me that I'm not going to hell. I then feel the need to mention, just as a point of order, that barring some deathbed recantation, I'm going to hell anyway. Which is absolutely true under the Catholic doctrine of moral absolutism. At any given point in life, if I get hit by a truck or a piano falls on my head and I don't get a chance for deathbed absolution, I'm going to hell, and there's nothing I can realistically do about it.

And people wonder why I'm a nihilist.

*The Catholics and ex-Catholics already know I'm going to hell, so there's no need for any further discussion. If they're in a small-talky mood they might comment that they'll see me there, but that's really just chitchat to fill up space.

I should have paid more attention to Alanis in high school

If I had, I would have realized much sooner that my former religion was an abusive relationship.

Get rich quick scheme

So apparently someone is suing someone for loss of faith.

So if this lawsuit works and the legal precedent is set, let's have a class action suit against the Vatican! They're insanely obscenely indescribably rich, and they're the world's largest producer of atheists. It's totally the next logical step!

Open letter to religious people trying to say nice things to atheists

Telling an atheist that you're sure they'll find god soon is a dis. I know it doesn't sound that way to you. I know you think you're saying "This great and wonderful thing that changed my life will happen to you soon!" But to an atheist whose atheism came from careful thought (and I don't know any whose didn't, although I'd imagine it could also be the result of growing up in a household without religion), it sounds like anything from "Soon you'll see that I'm right and you're wrong!" to "Soon you'll come to realize what a wonderful man your abusive ex is and go crawling back to him!" Just...don't say it.

Edited to add the most obvious analogy in human history: religious people, how would you feel if smiling and enthusiastically told you that I'm sure you'll lose your religion soon?

How the Catholic church can get me to respect it

It would be a lot easier to respect the Catholic church if they'd stop trying to influence the politics and behaviour of the whole world, and instead just pay attention to teaching and guiding their own people. Then they'd be a nice quaint religion with strong morals, a lot of history, like Hutterites, but with a kind of cool mystical thing on top, like Kabbalah (before it became trendy). I could respect that. And if someone said that they, personally, can't use birth control because they're Catholic, I could respect that the same way I respect that Muslim and Orthodox Jewish men can't shake hands with me.

But the instant they start getting political, the instant they start trying to influence people who are not willing members of their church, they become The Enemy. If you can't grok this, try thinking about how you'd feel if the Amish suddenly started lobbying for the elimination of the internet, or FLDS was trying to make polygamy and old-fashioned hairdos mandatory for everyone.

The religious argument against opening the legislature with a prayer

...is in Luke 18:9-14, if you're interested.

Normally I wouldn't cite scripture to back up my position on public policy, but since that public policy is the rote recitation of scripture, this might be relevant.

Happy thoughts

I'm not into the spiritual aspect of yoga, I'm just in it for the stretching. (I know, I know, white people like yoga, but so do my tendons.) Perhaps this is hypocritical, but I'm hoping this is mitigated by the fact that I'm doing it quietly in the privacy of my own home without making any spiritual claims. I doubt even the Vatican would mind if people spent some time going sit-stand-kneel-stand-sit in the privacy of their own homes. At any rate, my point is that when the yoga lady on TV is talking about the spiritual aspects, I'm usually off googling something, waiting for the stretching to start.

But today something she said piqued my interest. I don't have an exact quote because I was only half listening, but she said something to the effect that if you find yourself thinking bad thoughts you should replace them with good thoughts, in order to achieve a state of bliss. And apparently in yoga, pushing away bad thoughts and thinking good thoughts and achieving bliss are all a good thing spiritually.

Now this is interesting to me, because I've been deliberately trying to do this for the past few months. I'm not doing this for any grand spiritual reason, I'm just doing it because it makes my life easier. It was the complete opposite of a diligent virtuous New Year's resolution to buckle down and start living life perfectly - it was a resolution to practically embrace my flaws and in fact live them even more enthusiastically, not even trying to do stuff I find hard. It was an anti-resolution specifically designed to fly in the face of what resolutions usually do. So I was very surprised to see something similar as part of a legitimate religious/spiritual thing.

The thing is though, as I've been aggressively pushing away my bad thoughts, Catholic guilt and Protestant work ethic have been teaming up to make me feel guilty for doing so. (It's amazing what you can do if you put aside your historical differences and work together!) Most of my bad thoughts are the result of bona fide personal failings, so I feel like by pushing them away I'm shirking the deserved punishment for my failings. I fucked that thing up and I should know better so I should be agonizing over it and replaying the most cringe-worthy moments in my head, not thinking about the wonders of the human tongue or laughing at the latest thing on YouTube.

So I was thinking about this and googling around it, and I found that some people actually consider this to be a xian principle too. They tend to cite Romans 12:21, which says "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Now to me this says "Do good things instead of bad things" and if you google neutrally for interpretations of the verse the general consensus agrees with my interpretation, but I did find a number of different sources citing this verse as evidence that when you find yourself thinking bad thoughts you should think good thoughts instead. So this suggests that somewhere out there, there are xians who would applaud me for rejecting my guilt in favour of happier thoughts.

Of course, I think what the ancient yogis (or St. Paul for that matter) had in mind was that I should use the sheer strength of my mental discipline to push the bad thoughts out of my mind and meditate on the beauty of the lily or something. I don't know if they would quite approve of my technique of eating white chocolate and dancing around the apartment singing along to Nugget (warning: shitloads of swear words) at the top of my lungs.

Does anyone get anything out of rote recitation of a prayer?

Apparently they say the Lord's Prayer in the Ontario Legislature? and they're only just now thinking "Hey, maybe this isn't the time or place"?

I've already written what I think about saying it in public school and that applies here too, but now I'm wondering something else.

If you are in fact religious, and you're in a situation like this where you have to recite a specifically-worded prayer in a secular context, do you at all feel it emotionally or religiously or faithfully or however it is you normally experience prayer?

I was once religious so I do grok that prayer is something to be experienced, not simply something to be recited. You think and feel something and then pray it, and then something happens, something that's more than just thinking and feeling it. (I don't know what happens, I never had the experience myself which is why I'm an atheist, but it's supposed to happen.) And I do see how saying a specific prayer could be an experience when done in a church or some other religious context - in Catholicism, all the words and actions of the mass had a specific purpose which served a greater goal of forgiving all our sins so we wouldn't go to hell if we died between the end of mass and our next sin or something (there are big words for all this but they escape me at the moment).

But if you're in the legislature - a completely secular context of no theological significance - and you recite from a given script, are you experiencing it religiously at all? Reciting in a religious context I can see, praying whatever your happen to be thinking and feeling in any context I can see, but does reciting in an irrelevant context actually do anything for you?

Any religious people out there? Or have I already alienated them all?

ETA: Theme of the day seems to be blogging things that other people have already said better. Here's Eddie's take.