In reply to this post from the other day and subsequent discussion in the comments section about the ways that religious belie can interfere with both reason and love, George writes,

For the past year I have been trolling blogs and websites trying to wrap my brain around religion in general and evolution denial in particular. This ironically enough ties into the post you just made. A good friend of mine whom I fell out of touch with for a few years suddenly stumbled back into my life about a year ago. We had spent most of our early twenties together and I considered him an intelligent and thoughtful person.When we got to catching up I found out he out of nowhere believed that evolution was a “great lie” designed to undermine faith in Jesus and that the earth is in fact 6000 years old (every scientific proof of an old earth is completely wrong). This revelation completely floored me and I spent the next several days arguing with him over coffee in a attempt to find holes in his logic. I quickly realized I was over my head, logic was countered by “facts” to which I was sorely ignorant of a rebuke. So I then spent weeks researching every angle of the debate to prepare myself for a “throwdown” on the subject. You cannot win with these people; and even when you win, you lose. I lost a good friend, had a major crisis of faith, and left Christianity myself shortly after.

So the point is that to me this opinion he held so dear was an intellectual vice, I tried so hard to come to terms with it and I could not. My faith was eventually lost as well because I could not resolve the “sins” of a christian worldview with my personal relationship with Jesus.

I still talk to this guy often but he is now more of an aquaintence than a friend; we now talk out of ritual rather than regard. I am as atheistic now as I believe I can be, becoming more so every day. I still find myself reach into the religious vocabulary; referencing fables, myths, dogma.
The hardest habit to break is finding meaning in simple things that truly have no meaning. Like running into a friend you haven’t seen in years.

I totally empathize with your experience and agree with your interpretations of it—especially when you put your finger on the problem being one of intellectual vice. That’s exactly it. Faith is an intellectual vice. And part of the problem with an intellectual vice is that it corrupts the very intellect to which we are inclined to appeal. We want to reason with people and yet they flagrantly advocate their supposed intellectual right not to have reasons, their supposed to right to show outward hostility to the demands of reason and to adopt prejudices.

So when you are dealing with a corrupted intellect which not only has different reasons than you (which would be rationally just fine) but instead wants to attack reason itself, merely reasoning with such an intellect is not enough. And this is incredibly frustrating for a rationalist who does not believe in emotionally twisting people into changing their minds!

So what is most important to me is that we understand where people are coming from and engage them individually, in the terms of their own psychological, emotional journey—to use the convenient self-help language.

I think it’s crucial that we be relentlessly logical and informed. Especially since, faith makes people endlessly unscrupulous rationalizers. No matter how many fundamentally irrational beliefs you expose or contradictions you highlight, reality will be further distorted to accommodate them. So, the challenge is to keep building more precise accounts of epistemology to more clearly zero in on the flaw of believing on faith. And then the other challenge is to stay patient with the fact that disagreement will remain in most cases and resolution will be impossible.

To your other points thought:  I am not sure though that I would say that events like running into old friends have no meaning. In fact—I’m just guessing and don’t presume to know of course—I would imagine that you don’t want to think it had meaning because the outcome was painful. But it was painful and had this major effect on your life and thinking precisely because it was a meaningful thing. The myth that “meaning” is something that only exists in a divinely guided universe is a relic of a Christian attack on atheism that’s only a couple centuries old and is not grounded in truth, no matter how many atheists internalize the claim and feel like they’ve lost meaning.

There is most certainly meaning apart from transcendent meaning conferral by a deity and the attempt to convince us otherwise is the attempt to deny the very meaning soaked existence in which we live. There is not intention behind coincidences. You didn’t bump into your old friend because God scheduled a meeting for you two without your knowing it. But that also does not mean that when you bump into him you, it is not an event with inherent connotations to it which are meaningfully structured both by the structures of psychological and sociological factors and by the idiosyncrasies of your own personal psychology.

Two other quick points to note: to this day some of my closest friends are devout believers. Some of them have remained close friends since my believing days and some have been made in the intervening time since I left the faith.  One’s views on God are not the whole of people’s lives—even for devout Christians and outspoken atheists—and there is hope for reasonable people to overcome their abstract disagreements to have deep and meaningful inter-personal bonds with each other. It’s possible when you put people above the need to be right all the time.

In certain forums and at certain times we must debate. But in others, we must remember the greater importance of love and friendship over the abstract truth. And in the context of such friendships, where there is genuine mutual respect and good faith between each other, debates about truth can wind up being their most productive—far more productive than would have been possible were we to have burned every bridge rather than consort with an enemy. Some people are intolerable to disagree with and so friendship will simply be impossible. I won’t dispute that such situations exist(and yours with your old friend may just be such a situation). But there are possibilities for friendships that are stronger than disagreement and my own life would be impoverished greatly were I to lose those bonds.

And, finally, I know what you mean about recurring back to religious vocabulary. A dear atheist friend once told me something to the effect that my language was more saturated with religious vocabulary and allusions than that of any one else he knew. And another close friend who is by most categorizations an atheist and anti-religious (though he would dispute such labels I think) teases me all the time that I’m still a Christian in some ways.

And I simply am still a Christian in my guts in many ways.  Regardless of my vehement disagreement with its propositional claims about the world and with much of what it teaches about how we should habituate ourselves to think and act, Christianity nonetheless shaped and conditioned me over at least the first 21 years of my life in ways I will never completely shake. And some of those ways, I probably shouldn’t even want to shake.

I learned to treat the questions of what I thought about ultimate matters as crucially important from that Christian training. I learned to consider what other people think or what the good life was not to be matters of indifference but issues worth arguing about with them for the sake of truth from those days as a Christian. Of course, as a Christian it was a distorted view of what “truth” meant—a view which entailed assenting to my faith community’s arbitrary assertions about reality for which there were no rational justifications.

But nonetheless, I unapologetically still care enough to be willing to debate people and challenge their thinking. That was ingrained in me by my Evangelical upbringing and I think it’s a good thing. I don’t agree with the emotional manipulation, the conscienceless willingness to lie and rationalize to protect a faith, the commitment to irrationalist ethics, the group-think, or the hatred and slander of the body, reason, the world, and human nature, etc. that characterizes Evangelicalism (and other strains of Christianity).

But I’m grateful for the zeal it created in me and the ways that it taught me to believe that things like love, healing, reconciliation, kindness, hope, and community were real possibilities for people.  While I think some of the Christian prescriptions for those things are actually poisonous, I retain the belief in these ideals when they are not wed to all the corrupting dogmas and narrowing of allegiances along dogmatic lines.  For all its corrupting influences, there were these real trainings in real virtues of thought and heart that I got from Christianity.

Those virtues needed some correction of course, in that I needed to take down many of the Christian limtiations on what terms like truth and reconciliation and love meant.  And I needed to limit its excesses of hope, etc.  And of course other people can get these various virtues and habits of idealizing without Christianity and at the same time spare them all its vices and I hope that for everyone.   But, in personal terms, I don’t need to entirely disavow everything I was or dualistically relegate everything from my Christian days to the bin of shame.

Christianity has indelibly affected my character for ill but also for good. And many of its myths and tropes—when properly recognized to be simply myths and tropes—can still have evocative literary power for me in certain contexts.  So in that spirit, here is one of my very favorite songs of all time. It’s the song through which I discovered one of my very favorite artists, the incomparable Nick Cave.

His fusion of atheism, religious imagery, and passionate love resonates with me in a way that at least one of my lifelong atheist friends simply doesn’t get. And that’s okay, I’m not exactly like my lifelong atheist friends. I’m an apostate and my heart responds in a deeply ambivalent way to the Christian tradition in which it lived for so very long and so very passionately. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as the affections of my heart never corrupt the inferences of my mind:

UPDATE:  Only after posting this post just now did I remember that today is the 20th anniversary of my baptism as a born again Christian at 11 years old.  A fitting day to air some of these personal ruminations of my complicated relationship to the formative faith of my youth.  The end of October will mark 10 years since I rejected the faith as a matter of intellectual conscience.  Expect a special post then too.

Your Thoughts?

I don’t believe in an interventionist God but I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him, not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head, to leave you as you are and if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms, into my arms, oh Lord, into my arms, oh Lord,
Into my arms, oh Lord, into my arms.
And I don’t believe in the existence of angels but looking at you I wonder if that’s true
But if I did I would summon them together and ask them to watch over you
To each burn a candle for you, to make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love and guide you into my arms, into my arms, oh Lord,
Into my arms, oh Lord, into my arms, oh Lord, into my arms.
And I believe in love, and I know that you do, too,
and I believe in some kind of path that we can walk down, me and you.
So keep your candlew burning and make her journey bright and pure
That she will keep returning always and evermore into my arms, oh Lord…

To my parents:

My first valentines. You held me and made me feel worthy. You love each other with visible enthusiasm. You love your children and grandchildren with vigor, unrestrained. To follow your example makes me a better wife to my husband. A better mother to my son. Because you’ve shown me how, I try to choose love over less meaningful things every day.

To my husband:

No gift. No card. I offer merely myself. To love you more today than yesterday. Our life may not be filled with extravagance or non-stop action, but there are so many moments that you shine. I hope that you are happy, that you always know I’m proud of the man you are. I love that you’re my best friend, you keep my heart and my toes warm, and you sometimes even read my mind. Thank you for marrying me, for giving me this family. I did. I do. I will.

To my son:

Valentine’s day has probably gotten a bit out of hand with the commercialism and the pressure to create an air of romance in the most grandiose way possible. But at the heart* of this holiday is a celebration of love. And love celebrates life. I have loved you for your whole life so far, from before you were born. And I will love you for the rest of it. I’m new at this love, still finding the words. It is so pure, so primal, so strong that strong is not a strong enough adjective to describe it. You amaze me. You cling to me and run from me. I scoop you up or follow, out of breath.

_______________
*pun totally intended

Oh. My. God.

If you are not already aware of the genius that is Nick Cave (and the Bad Seeds) then must have been walking around with aubergines stuffed in your ears. I can imagine this is very inconvenient for you, not only because you have been missing out on the genius that is Nick Cave, but also because you can’t hear anything and look like an idiot.

Anyway, let’s assume that you have heard of Nick Cave, heard his music, have possibly seen him in the incarnation of the Bad Seeds or Grinderman…or if not you are about to chuck those aubergines and slip in some headphones instead.  

Perhaps you even saw him at the Troxy last Sunday. I did and it was amazing. My friend scored us both free passes to the show and the afterparty – sweet enough already, on the guest list, no line at the door - and then to top it off, they played a cracking set. You know when you’re so excited about a gig that you’re practically bursting, but a little bit of you is somewhat apprehensive in case they just play new stuff, or go all experimental, or the sound is shot, or whatever it might be? That was exactly how I was feeling. But I needn’t have worried. It was like a catalogue of bandspam’s favourite songs. A greatest hits inventory. A live audio affirmation of why I love the genius that is Nick Cave.

The encore was about five songs long and was led with ‘Into My Arms’. Words cannot describe how perfect the moment was.

We weren’t sure if they were going to show up to the afterparty. When we got there it was like a school disco -nervously expectant people  hanging around in knots, looking at acres of wood floor. Lots of Hoxton trendies. Kate and I carried on drinking, and then dancing. Thinking back now, I wonder if we were supposed to be dancing.

Then our heroes entered (we had passed Nick Cave earlier a couple of times on the stairs – pretty damn amazing). To calm ourselves we carried on drinking. And then some more. And then offered Warren Ellis (who had played in the set as well) a Cherry Ripe bar – Kate had kindly brought me back a funsize pack from a recent trip to Australia, where I used to live. He was quite bemused by this, but hopefully he appreciated the gesture. Then Mr C walked over. We nearly passed out with adulation. But he spirited Warren away to the other side of the room. So we get back to dancing, all the time looking over in nervous anticipation. Finally I got to the point where I had to say something but didn’t want to interrupt, so tapped him on the arm to say ‘hey’ – but did it just as he was leaving! dammit!

He waved goodbye and swanned off, leaving us with empty wine glasses, a still empty dance floor, and a slight sense of frustration.

However, he can safely remain idolised now, without ruining the illusion – and I can honestly say that I touched Nick Cave.

Yesterday, there was no coming home early. For various reasons, James had to work from 9:00am to about 1:30am. He’s had to do double shifts before, but at least during the week, the store closes at 11:00pm instead of 1:00am. It makes a difference.

So because I’m, like, the best wife ever (and stuff), my Sunday morning routine usually involves leaving him as alone as possible between the time that M wakes up and I have to leave for work. And since M has a regular nap time that should leave me enough time to shower, get dressed and get out of there, I shouldn’t have to wake James until the very last possible moment before I’m out the door. Ideally.

Realistically, however, even though M napped at 9:00am like clockwork for the last two or three days straight, today he decided he wasn’t having any of it and took an hour to almost finally fall asleep. And then he still didn’t. During the pre-nap proceedings, I tried to relax and figured if I was a little late to work today, I wouldn’t mind because I would be giving James a very deserved extra hour or so to sleep in.

But I failed. And not only that, I totally lost my cool. I left M in his bedroom to cry a bit and went to open the bedroom door. Locked. Because someone likes to bang doors open, and when certain doors have push button locks, those buttons tend to get pushed into the wall on a fairly regular basis. And though we usually remember to make sure the doors don’t stay locked, sometimes we don’t.

So I jiggled the door handle. A loud rattle startling my poor husband awake. I dropped an F-bomb and got my trusty screwdriver to open the door. I crashed into the room in enough of a tizzy to incite James to ask if I was okay. I was frustrated and curt. I moved like a blur into the shower tossing apologies back over my shoulder at him through clenched teeth. I was frustrated and upset that I would be going into work frustrated and upset. I was certain that this tiny little bit of a morning would color my whole day.

What I had meant to do if my nap efforts failed, which they sometimes do, was to sneak calmly into the bedroom and embrace my loving, hard working man, tell him sweetly that I did my best, and I hate to have to wake him, but ask him to please go tend to the baby and if he wanted to, climb back into bed after the deed was done. I meant to say it all so gently, with hugs and kisses and cuddles, even if M was still in the other room crying. I meant to wake him happily and lovingly. I failed at that, too.

But as we moved through the rest of our brief morning moments together, I saw how my husband understood. How he appreciated the effort I had made before I hit that breaking point, which I’m pretty sure was the locked bedroom door. How he offered to help get me ready for work, even though I didn’t need him to. He is the best. And I actually did leave for work with a happy feeling.

I’m not really a fan of weekends. Because James is usually working all night. Both Friday and Saturday. Sometimes, though, he gets home early. Like just when I’m thinking about going to bed. Like 11:00pm.

It’s on these nights when he gets home “early” that I remember how we used to be night people, and maybe we still are. Because when he gets home after a night shift, he’s more energized, more talkative than he is on a lot of other, regular early evenings.

So even though I was sleepy and so close to tucking myself in last night, I found myself fighting off the drowsiness as I sat on the floor and connected with my love like I hadn’t in a little while.

We didn’t talk about major big life stuff, though it was one of those times when the timing probably would have been right enough to do so. Instead, I talked feelings, and we talked about making the most of our limited time together.

A few weeks ago, before my parents came to visit, I was vacuuming the living room. I moved the couch away from the wall to really get every corner of the carpet, and I found my husband’s fancy glass chess board. It was covered in a thick layer of dust. As I picked it up and moved it onto the desk in the office, I thought about how playing chess has got to be pretty good for the brain. And as a bonus, playing on a board with someone else is a chance to engage, to interact, to focus on the person across the table instead of random words floating around in cyberspace or a guy running around with a gun on the PlayStation.

So we decided that we’re going to try to pull out the chess set every once in awhile. My husband plays a good game. He claims he’s not that hot, but he has always managed to impress me with his tactics. I would say strategy, but in our conversation last night, he was telling me that he’s not much of a strategist. As for me, I couldn’t tell you much about either.

We don’t play a lot of games, in fact, I’m not sure if just the two of us have sat down to play much of anything since we played cribbage on our honeymoon during the hurricane. Because though I expect it most of the time, the novelty of losing wears off pretty quickly. So I figured if we’re playing chess, a game I know very little about beyond how the pieces can move, I could treat it as a learning experience, which will lessen the loser feeling when I inevitably lose multiple games in a row.

I’m looking forward to getting out the fancy glass chess set and sitting down across from James and exercising my brain with him. He thinks we should just use the plastic and cardboard set, but I’m all about aesthetics, so now we just have to figure out which glass is white and which is black. It seemed to be a big deal, and the main reason for reverting to the plastic and cardboard. Because the frosted glass pieces look white, but the clear squares on the board also look white. And we wouldn’t want to improperly set the board, now, would we?

This is my husband, James. It’s his birthday today. Happy birthday, James!

Many years ago, James came to visit me in Boston for his birthday. I wanted it to be special, so I drew him a drawing and baked him a cake. I didn’t have a lot of money when I lived in Boston, so I did something I normally wouldn’t do, that being the baking.

I thought I’d read and followed all the instructions on the box (I didn’t have the tools nor a world-wide-web quite wide enough to figure something from scratch), but when I pulled the cake pans from the oven, the cakes parts looked kind of funny. Deflated. And when I tried to flip the cakes out of their pans, they stuck. A lot. I realized I’d forgotten a key ingredient that holds cakes together and makes them not stick to pans or crumble to bits. Eggs.

I made a new cake before James arrived that time. But I told him the story about the eggless cake and showed him the remains the morning after. Almost every year since then, I have baked a cake for his birthday. And every year that I do, even though all the rest of the cakes to this day have come out perfectly (except that one that got chocolate cake crumbs all over the vanilla frosting during the frosting process), we laugh about that first attempt. That disaster of a crumbled pile of cake, which my roommates and I actually did eat by the handful during our various daily passings through the kitchen, and really, it kind of tasted fine.

All this to say to my husband that I love this birthday tradition, even the part where we remember that dumb thing I did. I love that I get to spend every birthday with you, even if it’s just our little family here together and we only do something small like go to dinner. Even if I can’t afford to buy you a new HD TV like you want, I am glad that the cd and case of beer made you smile. You smiled a lot tonight, and so I guess that means that your son and I did a pretty good job wishing you a very happy 31. We love you.

The golden sunset you created
disappearing swiftly with a thought
When your love becomes dated
can you still remember the dreams you fought?

And when the forest sang of joy
you cared, but I never did
I remained that lost little boy
though my spirit was already lit

And when your heart is lightened
but then again dark
And when your light becomes frightened
will you still remember that sunny day in the park?

And even now it’s distorted
I see your exploding image still
And though it’s nothing to be rewarded
I love you, and I’ll always will

How slow my heart warms
I can’t seem to wake up again
And I cannot picture it to be a sin
To hold you in my arms

Dreams be dreams

5/10/2008 BV

A verdade é que gosto muito de Nick Cave. Apesar de gostar de dizer que não.  Adoro dizer que ele hesita entre ser cantor rock ou pimba e outras tretas maradas.

Mas quando ouço este  Into My Arms, fico momentaneamente sem piadas para mandar.

Uneori un plâns din ţâţâni e bun la casa omului, ăla pe care l-ai tot ţinut de frică. Da’ după aia, cu mucii prelingându-se peste un râset fals, parcă ţi-e mai bine. Şi cu genunchii la piept, aştepţi să ţi se întâmple. Căcat. Ce? Şi cu degetele încleştate înainte de somn, când?

Cântecul ăsta e cea mai frumoasă declaraţie ever.

I don’t believe in an interventionist God
But I know, darling, that you do
But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him
Not to intervene when it came to you
Not to touch a hair on your head
To leave you as you are
And if He felt He had to direct you
Then direct you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

And I don’t believe in the existence of angels
But looking at you I wonder if that’s true
But if I did I would summon them together
And ask them to watch over you
To each burn a candle for you
To make bright and clear your path
And to walk, like Christ, in grace and love
And guide you into my arms

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

And I believe in Love
And I know that you do too
And I believe in some kind of path
That we can walk down, me and you
So keep your candle burning
And make her journey bright and pure
That she will keep returning
Always and evermore

Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms, O Lord
Into my arms

…And I don’t believe in the existence of angels
But looking at you I wonder if that’s true…

Gracias Nick por temas como este.

Este post tem o maior título que alguma vez escrevi e, mesmo assim, tive de o abreviar com um “etc” porque na versão original só o título fazia o post!

Na minha RL ou SL hoje não é nenhuma data em especial, mas aprendi da minha mãe a celebrar o “hoje é hoje”. E para celebrar o “hoje” apeteceu-me fazer este post.

O post é dedicado ao M2 e a todos os descritos no título do post!

From Marga to M2 with all my love…….. into my arms!

I’m starting to get nervous about the labor and birth. So I’m trying to practice what I’ve learned so far, knowing that I just don’t know what this experience is going to be like, but having faith that I can do it anyway, and do it well.

I still don’t think I’m nervous about the pain. It’s other stuff. The details. When to call the midwife. When to go to the hospital. Driving there. Checking in. Getting checked. Being watched. How many people will be hovering around me? Will I notice? Will I care? Will the photos turn out? Will I want them to? What kind of sounds will I make? Will I be able to relax and laugh and release all this anxiety once the moment comes? Will James stay calm? Because if he starts freaking out, I’m probably screwed.

Until now, I haven’t really given much thought to these details. I’ve tried to imagine my ideal birth, and the only people I see around me in that picture are my husband and my baby. So I’m trying to focus on the fact that no matter who else is in the room, watching or speaking or trying to take my focus or control, it ultimately comes down to myself, my husband, my baby. So I’m directing my energy to the most positive images I can, trying to breathe out the fear, the nerves, the anxiety. Because if I don’t, or if I can’t, I’m not going to have the easy birth that I’ve been promising myself for as long as I can remember.

Watching birth videos helps. But not the scary ones. Not the screaming ones. The calm ones. The laughing ones. I’m telling James what I need from him, trying to make sure that at least we are on the same page. Knowing that he will follow my lead is comforting. Knowing that he will be there to lean on, to hold my hand and cheer me on, that he has confidence in my body’s and my mind’s ability to bring our child into the world, it’s an amazing feeling. And his support will surely help dissipate any lingering or limiting issues in my head. I hope.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Into My Arms