This Kind of World

Tatsuya Ishida is the talented author/artist behind Sinfest. Sinfest has been around for an extraordinarily long time in webcomic terms - it's one of the first few that started in the pioneering age and went on to be successful. We don't know an awful lot about Ishida - he's pretty quiet about himself, even his artist persona (his blog/newspost updates are even fewer and far between than my own).

But we can look at his work through the years - this was his 5th posted comic:

As far as offensive/racist/punch-down humour goes, it's not egregious - you can see that he's taking the piss out of blaxploitation movies and not particularly glorifying black stereotypes.
But it's still racist. I'd measure this as Not Helpful to society at large - the good (including humour) does not outweigh the bad.

But his more recent work has taken on a decidedly more "preachy" tone (whilst still maintaining "teh funny"):

Perhaps some of the humour I took from this is coming from the reality I can (now) see - it wasn't so long ago I had the young/white/male privilege blues. This comic reflects the kind of bullshit I can literally read on the blogs I frequent (particularly tales of MRA douchebags from FreeThoughtBlogs) every couple of weeks or so (or more often).

Ishida's own journey - communicated entirely through the comics he publishes daily - resonates with me.

Whereever possible, I try to see the unthinking, unseeing, silencing creepiness that goes on in the world for people don't come from my position of privilege. I like to think I already had a reasonably solid foundation of social justice (in part due to my liberal-Catholic upbringing and a mother who adopted generally sensible views), but there's more oppression in the world than just rich over poor.

So I can look back and see my perspectives change (even the perspectives on religion/atheism when I first started this blog) - yay for me.

Here's the rub: I'm going to be a father before the year is over.

It's pretty damn exciting. But I'm terrified of the idea of having a child. Why?

Like all people, my own father had good and bad traits - but one very major drawback to his effectiveness as a father is the fact that for almost my entire life he has usually been absent. Divorce will certainly go some way to explaining that, but even when he was still married to my mother (up until I was around age 4), he wasn't terribly present in our lives. By all accounts, his own dad wasn't exactly father of the year either - apparently he was a Good Man (if your baseline is providing for your family and not doing anything terrible to them), but WWII and the culture of his time left him reasonably fucked up.

I don't plan on being absent in my own kid's life. So that's a start. But not being absent and being a good parental role-model are two different things.

With a daughter, I can see myself sharing the responsibility with her mother - there are things about a girl's life growing up that I can't possibly be expected to know, and I'm cool with learning and playing by ear.

But I feel like I'd have a responsibility to take the lead with a son to make sure he didn't end up like one of those MRA assholes, or a horrible racist, or standing outside an abortion clinic hassling people who really don't need that shit right now or ever (obviously, I wouldn't want a daughter to be like that either. This doesn't have to be a rational fear, it's just the fear I have).

I want to raise a kid who can see the things that I can see now.

Which is fine - the apple doesn't usually fall far from the tree, so I shouldn't be too scared.

But it also got me thinking - what kind of bigotry is still invisible to me? Will there be social justice issues that my kid/s will see and just shake their heads in embarrassment whenever I ignorantly espouse some backward-thinking cause?

It's possible. But I can see plenty today that I can teach them to get them on their way. I used not to want kids, but now I kind of feel obligated to raise someone capable of thinking for themselves, seeing injustice where it is, and giving their old man what-for when he's blinded by his own privilege.

I can only hope.

Religion as a Force for Good

I'm beginning to see religion as less and less of a general force for good. The difficulty, I think, lies with the uncompromising conservatism of its caretakers. At their inception, each religion (by necessity, usually) reflects the values of its culture - or possibly even reforms them. Arguably, early Christian teachings in specific geographic places gave women the freedom to refuse to have sex, sex that would otherwise have been forced upon them. Those same teachings have been maintained and twisted over the years to discourage sex - when our own secular culture alongside has become more accepting and tolerant of individual choice. It is the current cultural climate, not the religion, which has carried on the legacy of those original teachings, teachings which now are used to oppress instead of free. Does religion do good in this day and age? Sure. Does it outweigh the harm? I'm not as convinced as once I was: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2012/05/30/real-scientists-dont-let-the-evidence-get-in-the-way-of-the-theory/ The difficulty with the apologist's argument here is that religion no longer reflects or reforms a culture as it once did, it simply holds it back. Each progressive move in the faith is simply giving ground to something that a culture is already getting on with. Feminism, civil rights, even social justice - once the bastion of church work - all seem to be more efficiently acted out as secular movements. Religion for at least the last hundred years - and often at various times in the past - has not been allowed to reflect or reform our culture. It has only held it back. I can't, on balance, support the idea that religion is, or can ever again, be a force for good.

Hooray for Morally Justified Bigotry!

Legend Condemns Gay Marriage

She was good at tennis, so we're listening to her views on an unrelated topic.

I have a beef with people who believe that we should maintain the "traditional definition" of marriage.

My beef is not with their belief, it's with what they think that belief is based on. When you say "traditional marriage", what does that mean exactly?

Does it mean that the woman becomes the man's property?
Does it mean that the woman's family has to pay a dowry to help offset the cost of the man having to maintain her?
Does it mean that, should the marriage fail to produce children it is null and void?

Let's go back even further - as I understand it, the Old Testament definition of marriage is that it's a sacred relationship between a man and each of his many wives.

How fucking traditional do you want to get? Because if your traditional view of marriage only stretches back about a hundred years or so, then you should come clean and just fucking say that - instead of suggesting that the present form of heterosexual marriage has been somehow preserved, unchanged, from the moment that God produced 2 genetically related humans circa 6000 years ago.

For the love of God, does Court have any idea how she sounds?

Quoth the Tennis Player-cum-Reverand:

"The fact that the homosexual cry is, 'We can't help it as we were born this way', as the cause behind their own personal choice is cause for concern," she said. "Every action begins with a thought. There is a choice to be made."

Really? You guys are still beating the "it's a choice", drum? Tell me, heterosexual people, could you ever conceive of being sexually attracted to people of the same sex? No?
Then there's a fundamental difference between you and someone who does. This isn't a case of, "it's wrong, therefore it's tempting" - this is just not tempting to people who aren't gay, which possibly suggests that the element of choice doesn't really come into it.

Unless you pull a Catholic Church and say that, yes, they are born that way, God made them that way, but they can't ever have sex. In which case, fuck you too. That's still ridiculous.

We really need to move on from this as a people.

A friend of mine also recommended I read this:
Traditional Marriage Perverts the Tradition of Marriage
...it was good back then, and it's still good now.

A Rational God

Technically I'm agnostic; I can't say for sure that there is no god, and am therefore open the existence of one.

The distinction is uselessly pedantic, however - I am only open to the existence of a god because I can't be certain that a god doesn't exist. I still choose to believe there is no god.
I feel it's an important point to make, since it's effectively the same application of faith everyone else makes - nobody knows they're believing the right thing (which is a significant facet of faith), and so technically, they're open to the existence of a different god, an additional god or no god - but it's the choice you make that defines your faith. Otherwise we'd all be agnostic.

What is agnosticism then?
We could clumsily refer to it as being a personal choice to not apply a specific faith - you're open to any of the possibilities, but choose not to select any of them.
I have, in the past, uncharitably described agnostic friends as being "faith lazy", but really not allowing one's faith (or atheism) to be a defining characteristic of oneself doesn't lift any of the human responsibility to convey oneself in a moral and ethical way throughout the world.

Note that each person's definition in this area tends to differ - terms such as "strong atheist" or "gnostic atheist" (that is, one who knows that there is no god), weak atheist, and agnostic tend to be used to mean different things to different people. I guess it's enough to say that the above are my definitions, and I'd like to think I've described them enough for people to get the gist, as opposed to just saying "I am an atheist".

All that rubbish aside, I thought I'd take a moment to flesh out why I've chosen to believe in no god, rather than to simply refrain from making a choice.

I guess for myself, at this point in time, I have some qualifications for god - I require god to be omnipotent (that is, effectively capable of doing and knowing anything), which is probably a non-controversial attribute. I also require god to be rational, in a way that is at least understandable in a human capacity. This is not necessarily so non-controversial.

A theologian will probably take issue with the concept of restricting god to human rationality, but it might help if I mention that this restriction is for the good of simplicity - if god is beyond human rationality, then what good is it arguing the finer points of what such a god wants from us?

Put another way - if god is beyond human reason or rationality, then god is beyond the ethical and moral constructs that many of us are so quick to assign to his will.

Consider this scenario - bear with me, because I'm going to lay into the CARM people a bit, and they probably don't deserve it.

Let's say a man is the chief of police, and he knows a gang will be headed to some honest citizen's house with intent to destroy and rape. Let's also assume that said chief of police has a window overlooking the action. He sees the gang threatening the owner of the house and he sees the owner of the house toss out his own daughters to be raped.

Such a chief of police is a dick (to say nothing of the father). By human standards - of almost any period of history - someone who has the knowledge and power to prevent something like that from occurring and doesn't has failed in their humanity.

But wait! CARM has the answer for these kind of things - people are dicks, but god tolerates it.

This fails the test for my requirements for god one way or another: if you subscribe to the "god knows better than us, and it's part of his plan" philosophy, then god is still a dick; he needs to have a better plan than one where people get raped. He is not rational by human standards, and is as at fault as our hypothetical police chief.

There is another possibility, and that is that god is bound to operate in this way - it's part of his plan, because he can't execute it with no injustice. In which case god fails the omnipotence requirement.

Certainly it's still an oversimple argument, and anything like this becomes complicated by discussions of free will and so on and so forth. But the fact remains, we can imagine a world better than the one we've got, so as far as I'm concerned, an omnipotent god could have delivered that world. And if an omnipotent god did not do so, then such a god is a dick, and I refuse to even bother to give him my faith - what's the point?

So there it is - I can't see, based on the evidence available to me, that a god can exist who fills both my requirements, and I therefore choose to reject all possible gods, opting instead for the mild absurdity of atheism.

What would it take to change my mind regarding my belief in god? Is there some evidence that could be provided to help me reconcile a rational and omnipotent god with one who would allow injustice and suffering?

Well no - but that said, I am as yet unable to imagine such evidence, and if I could even think of it, it'd probably soften if not alter my view. But at the present time, I cannot.

This is, of course, entirely human - the concept of evidence when applied to faith is, rather perversely (and, somehow appropriately) irrelevant - it'd be hard to imagine some kind of evidence which would change the faith of any of the world's theists, and to be honest, I'd be disappointed if it could. That's sort of the point.