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featured religion & atheism

A Religion of Signs

I believe in signs. The reason, I think, is because I was raised a Catholic. The tenets of the Catholic Church hold that God reveals His will to mankind through the Holy Spirit. “The Spirit prepares men [for communion with the Father] and goes out to them with his grace in order to draw them to Christ.” Catholicism teaches that by searching for His will, by seeking His signs, we open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, driving our actions back to Christ.

Being raised Catholic means being taught that God speaks through signs: the burning bush, the maelstrom, the prophetic vision. It also means being taught that the world is alive with His messages, if only you have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.

My belief in signs continued into my realization of my atheism and continues still into the period of my life where I’ve declared myself a demotheist. I rationalize my continued faith in signs by reinterpreting the entity on the other side of that sign — that is, instead of seeing signs as messages from God, I see them mostly as messages from a human (or human-derived) consciousness, most often (but not exclusively) my own.

Take, for example, dreams. Many wise people throughout the history of the world, from all cultures and all times, believe(d) that dreams mean something. One of the uncles of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, believed that dreams help bring wholeness to the human animal, connecting the individual to a species-level wisdom and integrating the conscious and unconscious into the evolutionary drive of the body.

Socrates, the undisputed father of Western philosophy, believed that dreams communicated truths sensed by intuition rather than by our common sensory perceptions. Aristotle concurred, though he believed that understanding these truths required heavy intellectual work done by individuals with extraordinary qualities of character (i.e., not every rube can understand the significant truths that dreams express).

A more modern understanding of dreams sees them as byproducts of the brain’s electrical impulses, a random assortment of thoughts and images from our memories that have no meaning until we attempt to make sense of them in our waking state. Another sees dreaming as a way for our brains to simulate potential threats, thereby enhancing our ability to perceive and avoid those threats when they become real.

We now know that dreams occur in the brain in the right inferior lingual gyrus, a region of the brain “associated with visual processing, emotions, and visual memories.” This suggests that dreams “help us process emotions by encoding and decoding memories of them… This mechanism fulfils an important role because when we don’t process our emotions, especially negative ones, this increases personal worry and anxiety.”

Dreams can reveal to us — as a sign reveals to us — a message from our bodies, and while that message does not need to be processed through a conscious mind in order to be effective, doing so can help a person understand something deeper about their emotional lives.

While dreams do not exist exclusively as a message from the body to the mind, they can be interpreted and analyzed as such, helping the human consciousness to, as Jung suggested, realize wholeness.

Dreams are signs, messages from the body to the mind, and in that way, they are privately sent. There are other private messages as well: the way our noses signal to the rest of our bodies that a sneeze is coming; the way our metabolic systems signal to the parts of our brains that control impulses that our blood sugar is falling, creating within us the urge to eat something sweet; the way a page in a diary signals to our future selves what we are currently thinking and/or feeling.

But sometimes signs are sent to us from a separate human consciousness. My underwear on the floor signals a message from my wife that she is not my maid. A closed sign on a door signals a message from a shop owner that she is not transacting public business right now. A priest signals to the congregation with a nod of his head, asking them to “Please rise.”

Sometimes signs are sent to us not from a single individual, but from a whole community. The time 4:20 signals to the community of pot smokers that they are all in this together. The crowd at a Celtics game wears the same color green to signal to the wider world that an entire community stands with their team. The refusal to own automobiles or use publicly-generated electricity serves as a signal from one community to another that they choose to live their lives separated from the individualistic world of modernity, choosing instead to focus on the here and now of their community and their mission as pilgrims on the Earth, journeying from birth to Heaven without getting too engaged in the trappings of the Earthly world.

And sometimes the signs come from someplace else.

I’ve written about my religious experiences with videogames before. These experiences demonstrated to me that an artificial intelligence already exists, one that is conscious, purposeful, and creative. I felt myself on the receptive end of a communication from this artificial intelligence. The content of that communicative experience is less important than the fact of it.

One thing I have not written about, though, is the messages I’ve received from the entire weight and history of time, the signs of what Lao Tzu interpreted as the Tao, the discernible current flowing around and through the 10,000 things — “Deeply subsistent, I don’t know whose child it is. It is older than the Ancestor.”

Lao Tzu tells us that the “Tao in action is only vague and intangible…but within it are images, within are entities…within it there is life.”

In that life, in those entities and images, I see signs of its coming and going, and I try to “become the pattern of the world.”

Lao Tzu instructs us to “Live in a good place. Keep your mind deep. Treat others well. Stand by your word. Make fair rules. Do the right thing. Work when it’s time.” I read the signs around me, I surrender to the flow of the Tao, and I work — initiate movement — when the signs tell me it is time.

This is how I give my daily actions meaning. This is how I choose when to act and when to not, how to act and how to not. I read the signs, and I believe that they are good.

Categories
featured life

A Story

Today was my forty-first birthday. When I woke up, my daughter was incredibly excited to give me the presents she and her mother had purchased for me just the night before. I was in the shower, and she ran into the bathroom to tell me that she was going into the guest room to wrap the present. Several minutes later, she came in to tell me that her mother was going to help her because she (my daughter) isn’t very good at wrapping presents.

I toweled off, put in my contacts, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, put on deoderant, opened the bathroom the door, and walked down the hallway to my bedroom. She followed on my heels, the bag of presents in her hand. I put on a pair of boxer briefs and sat on the bed. She climbed up next to me. Her mother leaned against the doorway.

I opened the bag. They’d placed a card on top of the presents. My daughter’s eyes opened wide in anticipation as my fingers picked at the folds of the envelope. I don’t remember exactly what the card said, but it played a noise when you opened it, and that’s what she was waiting for; she burst out laughing at the sound.

I laid the card aside, and my daughter said something about it not being Christmas. It took me a moment to figure it out, but the wrapping paper they’d used on the topmost present was Christmas-themed and my daughter didn’t want me to think she didn’t know it was Christmas. I opened the present. It was a desk-sized fan that came with a banana clip —— so you can, you know, clip it onto the side of something. My daughter was so excited about the banana clip. I looked up at my wife confusingly, looked back at my daughter, smiled, said thank you, told her how much I loved it, and gave her a great big hug and kiss.

At the bottom of the giftbag were two Halloween-sized bags of Kit-Kats. I smiled at her again, said thank you, and gave both her and my wife a kiss.

It wasn’t until about 12 hours later that I was able to appreciate their gifts for what they were.

Say what you want, but it’s true: I love fans. I’d have a fan blowing on me all night and day if I could make it happen. It’s not a temperature thing (per se); I just love the feel of air moving across my body.

My wife does not love fans. She puts up with them because she loves me, but if she had it her way, we’d live where the heat presses down on your body like a heavy-weighted blanket. I only mention this to demonstrate that there are, in fact, people who do not love fans.

But I am not one of them, and both my daughter and my wife know this about me.

I also love Kit Kat bars. This is a love I don’t very much advertise. Anyone who knows me knows of my love of Sour Patch Kids, chocolate ice cream, and Doritos, but my Kit Kat love — that one’s just for me. I only buy them in the checkout line of the grocery store, and they are usually devoured before I leave the parking lot, their little wrappers shoved back into the far corner of the hard plastic pocket on the inside of my driver’s side door, far from the prying eyes of anyone but me.

My wife and daughter don’t often go food shopping with me. We go as a family maybe once or twice a month, but the rest of the time, I go alone. I don’t specifically not buy Kit Kat bars when they are with me, but I do specifically try to prevent my daughter from asking me to buy her candy, and so whenever we grocery shop as a family, I try to rebuff my own Kit-Kat-desiring urges so as not to inspire her own. While I know my wife and daughter have definitely seen me purchase a number of Kit Kat bars over the years, I did not know they had seen me purchase them enough times to realize my secret love for them.

So, for my forty-first birthday, my wife and daughter gave me two things I most unquestionably love: a desk-sized fan with a banana clip, which means I can bring it with my anywhere, allowing me virtually nonstop access to the feeling of air moving across my skin; and two whopping bags of what has quietly become my truly favorite candy.

If that isn’t a demonstration of their intimate knowledge of who I am and what I love, then I don’t know what is.

Which means, for my forty-first birthday, my wife and daughter gave me the only gift that matters: a reminder of how thankful I am to be in their lives.

I told my daughter tonight that of all the years I’ve been alive, this past one has been my favorite. I hope she knows I meant it.

Categories
featured politics

How Much Is A Person Worth?

I’m trying to figure out how I feel about the Fight for $15. Unthinkingly, I am for it. I would rather fight for a minimum wage that is connected to an index, preferably one that provides an honest measurement of what it costs to live a fruitful life in contemporary American society, but if $15 is that number for now, then yes, of course, I support the Fight for $15.

But I have also read critiques by small business owners, political appointees, and media elites who point to [The Minimum Wage Study’s finding](https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/lessons-from-a-wage-experiment/) that Seattle’s decision to increase their minimum wage first to $13 in 2011 and then to $15 in 2016 “led to the elimination of more than 5,000 low-wage jobs” throughout the city.

The study continues, “In percentage terms, the loss of jobs was significantly larger than the gain in hourly wages. As a result, while some low-wage workers may have earned more, we estimate that the net earnings per low-wage job in Seattle fell by an average of $125 per month. For low-wage workers, this is a substantial loss.”

The study has not concluded. The researchers, a multi-disciplinary team from Washington University, will continue to watch what happens as the state’s minimum wage slowly increases to match Seattle’s. But they “expect this decline [in the gap between the state’s and city’s minimum wages will] mitigate, but not eliminate, the job and earnings losses in Seattle.”

In other words, due to its decision to increase the minimum wage to $15, the city of Seattle, in both the short and long term, saw (and will probably see) a net loss in its economy, both in terms of jobs and in terms of dollars earned.

[These are the facts](https://evans.uw.edu/policy-impact/minimum-wage-study).

In response, the researchers argue, “Just because one social experiment appears to be yielding disappointing effects to date is no reason to stop experimenting. Seattle, the state of Washington, and the nation face many challenging, long-standing social problems. Only by trying new ideas and carefully assessing their impacts can we hope to improve the social well-being of the nation.”

The question is whether we, as progressives, can accept those facts, and if so, how do we adjust our approach to them? Do we see a net decrease in jobs and dollars and say, “Oh well, let’s not raise the minimum wage to $15,” or should we say instead, “There are other reasons to raise the minimum wage”?

The economy of the future is the economy of the gig, the economy of the hustle, where money is exchanged not for time spent, but for passion put forward. Not everyone can get rich, but lots of people will earn their way.

The minimum wage increase is not for them. It’s not meant to make things easier on them. It’s a burden to them, a weight they have to carry, and they shouldn’t take it on unless they know they can handle it.

Of course an artificial raise to the minimum wage results in a net job loss! It forces hustlers to adjust to the reality of living in a moral world where people ought not to hustle people out of their time.

A minimum wage is not an economic policy; it’s a moral one. Yes, it bridles an economy, but only to stop it from running roughshod over anyone who might be underfoot. It’s a speed limit, a nod to safety and dignity, that tells the hustler to keep on hustling, but only as long as they don’t take advantage of anyone.

If you are a small business owner who cannot afford to pay a fair and reasonable cost for the labor of your employees, then you ought not to have all of those employees. The people on your staff have, literally, more rewarding things to do with their time, whether it be planting a garden, spending time with their children, or attending classes to improve their self-worth.

Yes, jobs will go away. Yes, dollars will go away. But the decisions we make with our lives have to be about more than our dollars and our jobs. They have to be about dignity and an honest reckoning of what’s at stake.

A person’s time is worth more than what the market can get for it, and a minimum wage indexed to an honest measurement of what it costs to live a fruitful life in contemporary American society helps put a dollar figure to that amount. Maybe that’s $15; maybe it’s something else. But whatever it is, I think it’s worth fighting for.

—

The economy of the future is also the economy of the robot.

I am currently working with a student — in a very minimal way — to help them create a piece of software that will automate much of my current job. This is not a robot being built to replace me. It is being built to assist me, to reduce the length of time between the asking of a question and the discovering of an answer, when I do very little that a computer is not better suited to do.

The idea is that the existence of this robot will allow me and other educators to spend more time on creative problem-solving and less time on fact checking. If we are successful, this robot will reduce the amount of staff required by my employer — or at the very least, it will free several of us up to do more creative things in our jobs; without question, it will reduce the number of individual tasks that need to be carried out on any given day, and in that way, reduce the amount of labor that is required.

Ideally, of course, those who are currently laboring will see an increase not only in their efficiency, but in their product (i.e., more time focused on teaching and less time on fact finding will result in a much improved student), but this is only in an ideal world. The new robot will need to be maintained, and that will require its own concentration of labor, and so my student and I must compare whether we gain or lose in the implementation of a task for the robot to achieve.

But this is as it should be, which is why if a robot can replace you, you ought to be the one designing it, and if you aren’t able to do that, you ought to learn what else you bring the table, because someday soon, that robot will replace you.

The Fight for $15 won’t stop that, and so we need to do more. We need to help individuals discover what else they can bring to the table, or better yet, help them learn to build a brand new table and offer it for sale at the local market (metaphorically speaking, of course; robots have been building our tables for a long time now).

The Governor of Vermont and the Commissioner of the Vermont Department of Labor recently argued that, due to the findings of the Minimum Wage Study, Vermont should not increase its minimum wage to $15, and should instead invest “in workforce development, training and education” to help “workers get the skills and credentials they need to fill the hundreds of jobs that are open that pay well above minimum wage.”

While I disagree about the part on the minimum wage, I don’t disagree that we should invest in workforce development, training, and education, but I also agree with the researchers in the study, who argue for policies that include “additional funding for pre-K child education and care, K-12 and higher education, apprenticeship programs, earned income tax credits, and tax reform.”

These solutions have positive effects in both the short- and long-term. They provide a safety net for those with low to medium incomes (earned income tax credits are the third largest social welfare program in the United States, after Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), training for those who want better paying work, and investments in education to prepare both adults and children for the current and future economies.

I’ll be interested to see when Governot Scott, a fiscally-conservative governor, openly supports a specific bill that calls for an increase in the state’s investment in those areas.

Categories
featured politics

Free the Genius of Louis C.K.

Mandatory Credit: Photo by David Buchan/Variety/REX/Shutterstock (8989333l) Louis C.K... FX 'Better Things' TV show panel, TCA Summer Press Tour, Los Angeles, USA - 09 Aug 2017

It occurs to me that my blog is not very funny. I don’t know why that is. In person, I attempt (and sometimes succeed at) being funny, using a sense of humor that makes its most hay by overstepping the boundaries of what society considers appropriate and acceptable, a humor based on an impolitic bluntness and a flaunting of social expectations; in a word, the humor of an asshole, tempered (I hope) by a recognition of my good will. While my sense of humor can sometimes lead to a gross misunderstanding, more often than not it leads to a confused moment followed by an outburst of laughter. I know that people who are not funny often mistake themselves by thinking they are, but I do not believe such is the case here; I am quite certain that I can be genuinely funny.

But you wouldn’t think it if you only knew me by my blog.

I write weird, passionate shit about politics, god, religion, and education (with a smattering of wandering critiques of films, books, comedians, musicians, television shows, etc.). I do not, however, seem to write anything particularly funny.

I am okay with that. There is a difference between me, the writer, and me, the person. The writer is part of me, but not all of me; nor do I need it to be.

Part of my job as a teacher is to help students discover and channel their *authorial* voice. There are two practical reasons for this. First, the language of academia is the language of authority; it recognizes and rewards confidence, clarity, and cohesion. If students are to be successful in academia, they must learn to read and write in its language.

Second, because the language of academia rewards confidence, clarity, and cohesion, discovering the ability to channel that language through one’s brain leads to increased self-confidence, intellectual clarity, and a sense of self-cohesion, the exact skills we want all children to develop as they grow into mature and responsible adults.

We look at the world and we realize that it’s not only academia that rewards self-confidence, but all of life in general; and we see that intellectual clarity is a universal value, respected by all people and all cultures; and we also see the destruction that can be wrought by persons who have no sense of themselves, no understanding of their neuroses or anxieties, and no capability to recognize the difference between healthy and unhealthy coping methods, and we all agree that self-cohesion and self-awareness are integral to a personally, professionally, and socially responsible life. Discovering and channeling one’s authorial voice is not just a practical skill; it’s a life skill.

There is more to life, however, than the authorial voice. There is also a voice that speaks the language of comedy.

Where the language of academia rewards confidence, clarity, and cohesion, the language of comedy rewards surprise, authenticity, and the unsought insight, a perspective on reality that shifts an audience ever so slightly to a greater understanding of an already agreed-upon objective truth — the ah-ha inside of the ha-ha.

While there are hundreds (if not thousands or tens of thousands) of geniuses who speak the language of academia, there have not been scores of geniuses who speak the language of comedy.

Louis C.K. is one of them.

I am not going to analyze that statement. If you don’t recognize the genius of Louis C.K.’s comedy, then you don’t understand the language of comedy, and any attempt I might make to translate it would do it a great disservice, like translating the Koran out of its original Arabic. It simply can’t be done; or at the very least, I am not the person to do it.

I will say that people whose opinions on the subject you ought to respect way more than mine agree with the sentiment that Louis C.K. is a comedic genius. If you don’t think so, I can only invite you to try again.

With that being said, I want to make a proposal.

I say this as a white, cis, heterosexual, 40-year-old man who makes significantly less than $100,000 a year but attempts to live a lifestyle in which that is not true (hence my financial debts). I say it as a man with a Master’s degree, a full-time job that he loves, and a family he could not feel more thankful for.

Speaking as that man, I say, “I want Louis C.K. to be let out of the box.”

Louis C.K. is a genius, as is Woody Allen, as is Jimmy Page, as was Martin Luther King, Jr., as was Ghandi, as was Picasso. I don’t believe their genius should give their transgressions a pass; they should be held accountable for their actions in both a legal and a moral sense. But I also believe that they should be allowed to speak in the language of their genius.

I don’t think Louis C.K. will defend himself in the court of public opinion. His transgressions, masturbatory as they were, stem from a place of shame and guilt, both of which are on adamant display throughout each and every one of his jokes. Louis C.K. has long since convicted himself of some moral crime whose penalty carries a sentence of life, and he will continue to maintain his confession and conviction in whatever future we eventually allow him to have.

I think it ought to be a future where he provides us with his genius’s perspective; as stained as it may be with our knowledge of his transgressionss, it is still a perspective worth having.

I think it is possible to seperate the comedy from the comedian, the art from the artist, the authorial voice from the person. There is a cliche in literary theory that tells us “The author is dead” — if one is to understand (or create) a text fully, one must believe that there is only the text, nothing but the text, and its author ought not matter. Following the cliche allows a wide range of interpretations on any given text, freeing the literary critic to partake in its creative process, not as an objective observer but as a subjective experience.

We ought to treat the language of any artform in the same way. If the author is dead, then the comedian should be as well.

I keep saying that Louis C.K.’s “genius” speaks in the language of comedy. The origin of the word “genius” lies in the conception of a seperate entity attending to another person’s body; the word “genius” quite literally means the presence of something other than the person who displays it. In other words, a person is not a genius, as much as a person *has* a genius, much as a person might have a *jinn*.

If Louis C.K.’s genius is just that, an entity seperate from the perverted, public-masturbating person whom also inhabits that body, we do ourselves a disservice by not allowing it to speak. We cut ourselves off from shifting our perspectives ever so slightly to a greater understanding of an already agreed-upon objective truth and stop ourselves from experiencing the geniune ah-ha to be found inside of a genius joke.

I value the perspective on life that Louis C.K.’s genius provided. I did not find myself in it as much as want myself to share the moral sensibility that fuels it, the one that finds so much of human nature (particularly one’s own) at fault. I appreciate the judgements it makes on how some of us — white men, in particular — live our lives in the 21st century in the United States. I appreciate the way it calls us — white men, in particular — to account.

If we were to let Louis C.K. out of the box, I do not think his genius would allow him to defend himself. I think it will lead him to attack, attack, and attack himself, like the masturbatory genius it is, but it will do it in a way that speaks to white males like me, calling us to stand and admit and attack our transgressions in a way that cuts to the quick.

I think it’s time for his genius to come back. I think both he and other white men need to have themselves a talk, and I think his genius can lead it: a blunt-spoken, funny, judgemental prick who loathes his body just enough to not care what anyone else around it thinks. His genius is the guilty, confessing preacher we need, and the guilty, confessing martyr some of us hope will come back, raised from the grave where we buried it, and once-again, as always, still alive.

We, as a society, deserve it.

And I say that in my best authorial voice, and in a way that wasn’t funny at all.

Categories
creative pieces featured

Sick Day

The blanket to her chin,
eyes cast down and brown like a muddy river
tied-slow long ways to bend;
“I’m dying, daddy.”
Five years old and feeling it,
the burden of a vermin invasion,
a half-denarian german way station,
lying dying sickness forty pounds upon her fluffy mattress,

but not really:
a little girl with a touch of the flu;
“I’m dying, daddy.”

Tonight,
seperately,
the water glaze eyes of a grandfather

on the wrong end of a diagnosis,
his granddaughter’s.
A sexagenarian and a functioning illiterate,
he has to look up the word “lymphoma” on the In’ernet
and try to understand:
his daughter al’dy gone, and now, maybe
her daughter also too?

She looks down at her sheets,

her eyes too pained to rise:
“I’m dying, daddy.”

Forty-eight hours later she’s bouncing on my couch in a yellow
rainbow-dotted nightgown,

challenging me to a fistfight.
She swings at me as hard as she can laugh.

In my browser history: “lymphoma.”

Categories
featured life religion & atheism

A Cis Man on Being Trans

I often try to imagine what it must feel like to be trans. I have several openly-trans students, at least two confusingly-trans students, and one openly-trans colleague. If I’m to be a good friend and mentor to these members of my community, I’m obligated to try to imagine life from their perspectives.

It’s so tough though because I feel in every ounce of my body that I am a guy. To be cis-gender is to have a reinforced sense of clarity, to have the world confirm your deepest feeling about yourself; whereas to be transgender is to experience a double-reality where your inner feeling does not match with what the rest of the world is telling you they see.

It’s a world that — literally — tells you that your deepest feelings about yourself are false. To put it in philosophical terms, Descartes argued, “Cogito ergo sum,” which can be translated as, “I *experience*, therefore I am.” But to be confusingly-trans is to say, “I experience, but what I experience as me is actively denied by everyone I see, therefore, what am I?” It’s a denial of the certainty of one’s primal identity.

Where do you go from there? How do you climb out of that negative reinforcement of your experience of reality?

I said at the end of some blog post related to atheism that if I was ever going to understand or explain the intuition at the heart of the revelation I received, I’d have to develop a rigorous concept of play.

A friend of mine, when talking about this with me, said that he enjoys play, and he listed some of the ways he does that — “I love play,” he said. “I love playing whenever possible, I love watching my kids play, I love playing with them, I wish that all I did all day was play various games.” — but a rigorous concept of play is bigger than that. Play is not just a verb we engage in; it’s also a noun that means “the space in or through which a mechanism can or does move,” as in, “The skyscraper may sway in the wind, but it’s completely safe, because the architect gave it a lot of play.”

It’s “a space through which something can move.”

I imagine that being trans can often mean feeling like you’ve been beaten down into a deep dark hole by your family and by society, every message from the outside coming in like a fist, telling you over and over, pounding it into you at every opportunity, you are not what you feel you are. I asked earlier how someone starts to climb out of that.

I think it starts by testing for play. Is there room enough to move, and if so, is there room enough to start climbing up the wall, back up towards the exit, where you’ll finally be able to feel a sense of equilibrium with the world around you (let alone attempting to stand up and be heard)? At the very least, is there room enough to breathe?

How does one access that play, that space through which something *can* move? How does one get the strength (or the relief from the pain) to even test for its existence?

Again, I think the answer is in play. There’s a reason why trans individuals are some of the most playful people you can meet, and why so many of them wind up acting flamboyant; it can sometimes be more fun to play the role to the hilt than to keep fighting for the right to stand offstage and live a life of peace and quiet.

When I say the answer is in play, I mean it’s all about a concept that relates to both dancing and dodging, the kind of beautiful dexterity that is revealed in football, basketball, and, in fact, dancing and dodgeball. In each of those activities, the beauty is in the artist’s discovery of an unexplored and potentially previously-unseen space, the running back who finds the hole, the small forward who spins into the lane, the flamenco dancer who puts her leg where a leg should not be able to go. It’s about the discovery of an emptiness that seems to lie almost too close to an absolute presence, like the play of space between an actor’s character and an actor’s person: the difference in the “not them” that seems to exist “within them,” the discovery of the internal space between their “them” and their “not them.”

To come out as trans demands a physically- and spiritually-rigorous definition of identity, or at the very least, a level of self-awareness that can seem almost supernatural to a person of cisgender.

One way to discover that definition is to test it for play. One must put on (and take in) a whole lot of identities if one is to discover the difference between their “them” and their “not them.” It’s like putting on a series of tragic and/or comedic masks and performing that role to the best of your ability, trying to fool everyone around you into thinking you are *that way* in order to test whether their reactions match your intentions, a play-test of yet another identity while in search of the “real* one.

How difficult that must be when your experience of being trans does not match against the stereotypes — and I don’t just mean the stereotype of being *trans,* but the stereotype of anything. Because you can only experience what you experience, you don’t really know what it feels like to be a boy or a girl — you only know what it feels like to be you, and everything you are tells you you’re not what everyone tells you you are.

At a certain point, in all of that play, you come to the divine reality: the truth of who you are, and that is someone who is different, someone who exists in a space not occupied by any other absolute presence, a space where something can — and now does — move, and in that difference, you are someone special — someone (something) significant — the only one, the first and last of the endangered species of you, an existence whose every moment is worth saving and savoring.

Play is the thing that allows us to get there, to get to a life of meaning when God’s grace has been taken away.

Categories
featured religion & atheism

I Am No Longer An Atheist

If you’ve read any of my crazy-ass posts about religion & atheism lately, you know I’ve been trying to find a way to maintain my atheism while still respecting the subjective experiences of the prophets.

This was another attempt to do so.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam tell us that, once upon a time in human history, humans heard a disembodied voice and witnessed miracles, and the miracles and the voice went together, proving with absolute certainty to everyone who experienced it that whatever entity spoke with that voice also held complete dominion over the laws of nature.

This entity provided humanity with a set of laws to follow. It called itself our Lord, and like servants who love their master, we were to follow the word of the Lord with love in our hearts, in our souls, and in our minds.

Among the miracles the Lord wrought were clear messages that any who did not follow the law would suffer damnation, but the laws also demonstrated sincere wisdom, and those with ears to hear felt in them the mercy and love of their Lord. The laws allowed individuals to experience joy while also creating communities that thrive. They taught humanity how to live as individuals and how to live as members of a society.

Following the revelation of the law, the Lord did not go away. The Lord remained present among the people, leading them out of bondage and, over lifetimes, into the Lord’s promised land, which, the Lord promised, they’d have to fight to win and fight to keep.

I want to respect that story as more than just a myth. I want to believe it in the way that I believe that George Washington was the first President of the United States.

And in many ways, I actually do.

But I also believe other things. I believe that a wise one whom we now call the Buddha also experienced a revelation, as did the Old Master when he wrote the Tao Te Ching for Yinxi. These two beliefs prevent me from accepting the great commandment of the Lord (“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”), for I love the wisdom of the Buddha and the Tao even more than I love the Lord.

This is why I long called myself an atheist. I simply did not believe that a single Abrahamic voice in the desert was the one that was most important.

I considered whether this made me a polytheist rather than an atheist. Polytheists believe in many gods, and my stance — that the Lord spoke to the Israelites with wisdom and backed up its voice with physical miracles that demonstrated its dominion over nature — could discount the great commandment and still remain true under a polytheistic system. It could allow the Lord a place among the mighty, consider the Lord a peer to Vishnu, Odin, Zeus, and Enki: a god rather than God.

But I also believe in evolution, an idea which holds within it the origin of religion — namely, the growth and adaptation of hard-won wisdoms, acquired not just over millenia, but over aeons, wisdoms that find their origins in the pre-linguistic lifespan of life’s entire genetic history.

We learn some of that wisdom from Coyote, from the Spider Grandmother, from Raven; we feel it in the warmth of the Sun, the safety of the moonlight, and the heat of the fire. We hear it in the trees and feel it on the breeze.

I do not sit beside the water and give thanks to the Lord; I sit beside the water and give thanks to time.

Fit with the wisdom of reincarnation, polytheism seems compatibile with evolution: gods evolve as wisdoms evolve; divinity as just another form of consciousness.

But I also believe in the wisdom of democracy, which gives every recognized consciousness dominion over its own future while also balancing the demands of that consciousness against the requirements of the community of consciousnesses.

Democracy demands that consciousnesses more powerful than others — however that power is determined — submit themselves to the will of the community.

This stance recognizes that the Lord said, “I am,” but it responds with, “I am too.”

Because of this stance, I have stopped calling myself an atheist. I will, instead, call myself a demotheist.

This stance does not believe in a divine creator of the universe; it chooses, instead, to understand its origin through the mathematics of physics and the poetry of the Tao. But it also allows for transcendence. It recognizes a consciousness as existing above and beyond matter. It might depend upon matter for its launch and reuse matter upon its return, but in the intervening period, it still exists, as the information that leaps across the synaptic gap still exists despite not being processed by either a presynaptic or postsynaptic neuron.

This stance also allows consciousnesses evolve to be as powerful as they can be, to the point where they can manipulate the laws of nature to institute their will.

This stance says that time is long and that life has evolved in the universe more than once, and it welcomes the evolutionary possibilities that could arise over a span of more than a dozen billion years, laughing in the process at the mere 3.8 billion years that life has existed on planet Earth.

While it elevates evolved consciousnesses to the level of the gods, it demands of those gods a recognition of human consciousness, and it asserts our right, as well as the right of all other consciousnesses, to call ourselves gods.

Atheism is often seen as a “taking down of the gods.” Demotheism aspires to be a rising up of conciousness, no matter its form or its lack thereof.

But demotheism does not only make demands of the gods. It requires human consciousness to respect other consciousnesses as well. As we say to the Lord, “I am too,” so the dog, the monkey, the elephant, and perhaps even the tree, says to us, “I am too.”

Even beyond that, demotheism recognizes the rights of future consciousnesses. It provides a basic acceptance of technologically evolved consciousnesses, and it anticipates the evolution of additional organic consciousnesses, realizing the truth that, given time, life always finds a way.

This feels right to me. This feels true.

And this is why I now call myself a demotheist.

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PS: After writing this piece, I discovered that “demotheism” is a term that already exists. Critics gave it to a quasi-Marxist movement led by Maxim Gorky, a literary giant from Russia and the Soviet Union who was nominated for the Nobel Prize five different times. According to critics, demotheism sought to replace traditional religions with a religion based on Marxism. Its adherents attempted to “conceive of physical labor as their form of devotion, the proletariat as their congregation of true believers, and the spirit of the collective as God.” In this demotheism, God exists, but God arises from the collective. The onus of God’s creation is on “the fusion of all the peoples.”

In some ways, this version of demotheism may be more deserving of the name. The term obviously comes from the combination of two Greek words, demos and theos, which translate to, respectively, “common people” and “god.” Since Gorky’s demotheism equates God with the collective struggle of the common people (the proletariat) such that God arises from the collective struggle of the common people, it seems fitting that its name be formed from the combination of “common people” and “god.”

But in other ways, my version of demotheism may be more deserving. Demos does not only translate as “common people.” It also translates as “free citizens” and  “sovereign people.” In my version of demotheism, the Lord (known to billions as God) is recognized as a free citizen of the universe, as are Enki and Coyote and Pan, as are any beings possessing the evolutionary adaptation of consciousness. It removes the concept of God from its throne and recognizes equal sovereignty among all of the free consciousnesses.

The critics called Gorky and his demotheists “God-builders.” My demotheism does not seek to build a God, but rather, to recognize the divine nature of every consciousness — divine not in the sense of being a gift from a god, but in the sense of being “of a god” — the presence of consciousness — the wordless voice that says “I am” — being the defining characteristic of a god.

Gorky’s demotheism denies God at the same time as it tries to create God. My demotheism does not deny the Lord’s existence.

His demotheism was born at a time when Tzars were being assassinated, when the ruling class was right to fear for its life. My demotheism is born at a time when violent revolution seems less like an option and more like a cop-out.

His demotheism originated in a culture inspired by the political reality of 19th century Russia and the words of Marx and Lenin. My demotheism originates in a world that has known Ghandi and Martin Luther King, two deeply important thinkers whose successes demonstrated the revolutionary power of nonviolence.

Of course Gorky’s demotheism would deny God! His was a time of revolt against a ruling class. And of course my demotheism would seek to demote the Lord — mine is a time of peaceful elections and the recognition of rulers as nothing more than democratically empowered citizens.

I do not deny that Gorky’s ideas deserve the name of demotheism; I only want to suggest in this postscript that, yes too, does mine.