a room of one's own (how to be chinese for a day)

Four or five years ago I found myself walking through the Chinatown section of Flushing, Queens with an Asian friend of mine. While I used to work near Chinatown in Manhattan nothing prepared me for this. Sure, it looked very much like its Manhattan counterpart. Throngs of Asians, all sorts of Asian restaurants and shops, signs all written in foreign alphabets, and no one speaking anything remotely resembling English. The only things missing were tourists and skyscrapers– the two things you found in Manhattan’s Chinatown that managed to anchor you to the good old United States of America.

None of that in Flushing.

At one point we were waiting on line at a grocery store that, again, featured Asian products sold by Asian staff, marked with Asian price tags. When it came our turn to check out, the Asian woman at the register looked at me, looked at my friend, and said something to her in Mandarin. My friend responded then looked at me with this devilish smile on her face.

"Al, don’t you feel like you’re getting to be Asian for the day?"

To which I responded, "Actually, I’ve never felt less Asian in my life. I’ve never been more aware of the fact that I’m NOT ASIAN!"

This experience stuck with me for a long time. Particularly, I thought about how disoriented I felt at the time. I didn’t understand a single thing written on any of the signs, and I couldn’t make heads or tails over anything I heard anyone say. I felt like an alien.

This got me thinking about high school. I went to an all boys, overwhelmingly white Catholic prep school in Westchester County. What few minorities in my class included a few Asians, maybe a few more Hispanics, and not many more African American kids. Myself, I always felt like I fell somewhere in between as a white Hispanic. On the one hand I came from a culture far more like the ethnic minorities in my class, but, on the other, as a white guy, I knew I didn’t suffer from the disadvantage of being immediately identifiable as such.

I recall a heated discussion in my junior year religion class on morality and social justice. The African American kids in the class were trying to explain to the rest of us why they felt out of place walking down the halls of a school among a see of nothing but white faces. Many of us in the class had a very difficult time understanding why. What difference did it make? In all honestly, I don’t think any of us looked at these guys as anything other than our peers– at least we didn’t think we did. When we walked down the hall, we didn’t think anything special one way or the other about them, so why should they feel self conscious or out of place? We were, in fact, quite alright with them and didn’t feel their presence warranted any more attention than, say, and Italian kid.

Walking through Flushing that day totally smacked me in the face. Just being there, surrounded by folks who looked nothing like me, speaking a language I could not understand, made me overwhelmingly conscious of how different I was from everybody else. I felt as though I was walking through a foreign land, without any of the comforts or emotional anchors I’ve grown to rely on to maintain a feeling of safety and competence in my environment. And that night, as I went to bed, I thought about high school and how it must have felt for a small number of kids with skin much darker than mine to walk down a hallway surrounded by privileged white kids.

This was a real eye opening experience for me, and, over the last few months, I’ve had a similar sort of re-awakening, courtesy of the Chaplain, Ordinary Girl, and Sacred Slut regarding gender issues. All of this culminated in reading this month’s Non-Believing Literati selection, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. It’s tempting to think that, as neither a writer nor a woman, this book has little or nothing to say to me. Indeed, the book rather openly addresses aspiring female writers and not white male lawyers. But I nonetheless feel like it’s very important to read stuff like this particularly because it wasn’t written for or by someone "like me." Any experience that takes you out of your element is uncomfortable precisely because it makes you more conscious of yourself, more conscious of your differences with others, and challenges you to bridge the gap.

So thank you, Virginia Woolf, ladies of the Atheosphere, and, of course, in a very special way the Wifeguard to Be. Thank you for taking me on a guided tour through your room and helping me see the view from your window.

Swim safely,
The Lifeguard

leave of absence

No kidding?

I know.

I haven't posted in quite some time. Work has buried me under two upcoming trials that start this week, so I have had neither the time nor the inspiration to write anything, although I have continued cruising the atheosphere and enjoying much of what I have read.

In any event, I will continue my current leave of absence for at least the next two weeks or so.

Thanks, happy blogging, and as always...

Swim Safely,
The Lifeguard

profiles in humanism: margaret sanger

Until a few months ago the name Margaret Sanger wouldn’t have meant a thing to me. Maybe that made me some sort of philistine who cares little too nothing about gender issues, but I can’t really help that now. My education started when I decided last month to make a concerted effort to profile more women in my monthly humanist version of Butler’s Lives of the Saints. I try not to focus too much on biographical facts on these posts, because I’d rather try and weave them into an essay about how an individual’s biography impacts on me personal. That way, if you find yourself interested, you can go ahead, follow some of the links, and learn a little more on your own.

Margaret Sanger pretty much defined the debate on reproductive rights for women. She became interested in sex education after working as a visiting nurse and started writing her own newspaper column entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." Having seen first hand the impact of unwanted pregnancy on young, working class women, she became convinced that educating women on birth control could significantly increase a woman’s independence and financial freedom. She also argued that birth control gave women the liberty to enjoy their sexuality since they no longer had to fear the consequences of unplanned pregnancies. Her controversial views and confrontational style quickly earned her a reputation as a troublemaker, and she had numerous run ins with the law for so called violations of obscenity laws as well as laws prohibiting the distribution of contraceptives. Among her many accomplishments throughout her career, we can count the founding of the Birth Control Federation of America in 1939– currently known as the Planned Parenthood Foundation of America.

Back when I believed, I held typically Roman Catholic beliefs about sex and birth control. Of course, also typically Catholic, I didn’t always practice what I preached, but I always had the sense that having sex before marriage or using a condom or other form of birth control constituted a sin. More importantly though, I always held fast to this idea that God had given us our bodies as a gift and that, somehow, we owed him our sexuality for that reason. As I look back now I can see the serious consequences these doctrines had on my view of women and their role in the reproductive process. Although I focused a lot on how my body belonged to God, in an unconscious way a woman’s body, as I saw it, constituted a special case of this divine ownership ideal. If God entrusted women to carry life, then women had to bear the burden of their sexuality with even more responsibility than myself as a man.

That thought process took hold in my mind so subtly that I honestly wasn’t even aware of it until I started reflecting on what Margaret Sanger’s life was all about. Namely, a woman’s sexuality and body belong to her. To argue that by virtue of her womb a woman has some special calling, that the biological privilege of childbirth necessarily commits her to some higher responsibility when it comes to sex, denies a woman the same right as a man when it comes to her personal autonomy. Religious attitudes about sex amount to little more than a cheap attempt to purchase a woman’s independence with a mixed bag of eternal damnation and antiquated platitudes about the sanctity of her body. It literally blows my mind that I used to think of myself as a fair-minded, unbiased person when it came to gender issues, but remain completely incapable of understanding this point as dramatically as I do now.

In the interest of avoiding hagiography, Margaret Sanger’s life and ideas were not without the kind of controversy that might strike some of us as ugly even by today’s standards. In my research I found references to her advocacy of racial purity as well as eugenics and euthanasia aimed at perfecting the health and fitness of the human race. Today, some consider her not unlike the Nazis at her worst and at best coldly insensitive to the needs and dignity of the disabled. Perhaps the truth falls somewhere in the middle, but, in all honesty, I'm inclined to think she probably fell closer to the latter. I don't defend those beliefs, but I don't think they diminish the good she did as much as they round out her humanity.

Everyone, even humanists, can be undeniably dead wrong.

My point, however, is not to tell you the Margaret Sanger, or anyone else I profile, is some species of humanist saint. We don't have saints, because we know that no one is perfect. Rather, we take their good ideas and jettison their errors to history's junk heap. For that reason, I'd rather dwell on the paths and minds she opened.

Swim safely,
The Lifeguard

knottie or nice?

For any of you who may not know, I'm getting married in a little less than four months. As a sensitive, Generation X male, I naturally want to do whatever I can to help out my lovely Wifeguard To Be (hereinafter referred to as "WTB") with whatever planning issues come up and even take on a few of those tasks myself. In addition to being a Generation X male, however, I also happen to fall within the category of male. This means that while I attempt to remain attentive to my WTB's needs at this most chaotic time, I am apt to fall short of the mark at times, mostly because I do not understand such things as (1) colors, (2) fabrics, (3) flowers, (4) how to word invitations, (5) formal etiquette, and last but not least (6) women.

That's not to say I've been useless. Even she would have to agree I helped out with finding a band and putting together our honeymoon. More importantly . . . how shall I put this? Some in the atheosphere have accused me of a certain over-politeness in demeanor. They say that I am far too willing to make nice with theists in debates, ever hopeful of reconciliation, and constantly looking for common ground and opportunities to make peace with those whom I disagree with. To this charge, I submit a simple plea: nolo contendere. Well, you see, opposites attract, and, while the Lifeguard has a soothing, mild mannered approach, his lovely WTB is a spicy little Italian firecracker. So, sometimes, she has gotten into tussles with some of our wedding venders and Lifeguard has had to come in and smooth things over-- right up my alley. I'm like a wedding planner's Jimmy Carter or something like that.

On just about all other issues, however, I am not able to help much, and I fear more often than not I am a hinderance. How do I know whether the flower girl dresses match the bridesmaid dresses? Do the save the date cards have to match the invitations? Why do we have to put everyone's name on the envelope for the invitations? Can we just print up address labels? What's wrong with serving hot dogs at the reception?

Okay. That last one was a joke, but you get the idea. It's not that I don't care about these things. I do. The little details can turn an ordinary day into something even more special. It's just that (1) I care about my WTB more than any of that stuff, (2) I don't like to see her stressed out over it, and (3) as a male, I just don't have the sophistication to appreciate some of these things on a level that allows me to offer her a truly helpful opinion. So she, feeling completely overwhelmed having to plan all of this herself, turns to me for help, and I'm not familiar enough with all the wedding gadgets and gizmos to effectively give her a hand.

Fortunately, she has found a kind of impromptu internet support group of sorts at TheKnot.com. She, and other brides to be like her, can cruise this web page and find all the information they need about different vendors, bridal shops, printers, bands, you name it. The only thing it doesn't help you do is find a man as far as I know. The site even gives her access to bulletin boards where she can post questions and reviews to and for other brides to be on a whole array of wedding issues. Indeed, a whole online community of "knotties" has sprung up where women can turn to each other for the kind of practical and sometimes even emotional support they need as they navigate the tempestuously commercialized waters of the modern wedding experience.

Where does that leave us though?

The whole point is we're getting married, we're supposed to be going through all of this stuff together, and I want to help. She certainly gives me opportunities, but, given my limited understanding of "this wedding stuff" I sometimes know that I'm less of a help than I'd like to be and certainly less of a help than she needs. Again, it's not so much about my wanting to make the decisions about anything as I want to make life a little easier for her and communicate to her that she's not stuck doing this all alone. But where do I go for help? Who can give me advice on some of these finer points of wedding etiquette and what not? Who are my "knotties?" Where can I find a group of people online who might be able to help me with questions about the wedding?

Hmmmm . . .

I know, I know, the last thing you want to do is get bogged down helping me plan a freaking wedding on my atheist blog, but help me out, okay? I need you guys to be, like . . . knotties. At least for right now. You can call yourselves "Naughties" or "Nutties" if you want, whatever, but I'm looking for some thoughts on our latest dilemma. You are free to laugh when you read it, especially those of you who have been married and know how small a piece of the pie this kind of issue is when it comes to spending the rest of your life with someone. I totally respect my readers as intelligent people on a wide variety of subjects, and I'm only asking for your preference and your reasoning, so that I can sort out my own thoughts on this.

Here goes: Which of the following options do you prefer for printing our wedding date on our invitation, and why?

1) Saturday, July 12, 2008

2) Saturday, July twelfth two thousand eight

3) Saturday, the twelfth of july two thousand eight

I won't get into why this has become an issue and you probably don't want to know, but, before I play the last dance on this post and send you off with your party favors, I wanted to address the whole Bridezilla thing. It's easy to look at this kind of stuff and just assume that brides have simply gotten into the ugly habit of making mountains out of mole hills and that this results from the simple fact that they are nothing but brats spoiled by too many fantasies about fairy tale weddings.

Having watched the WTB planning our wedding over the last several months and doing my best to help her out and keep her sane, I think Bridezilla characterizations are unfair. The WTB hasn't turned into a monster since we got engaged. She's been doing her best trying to plan a big day while all the while dealing with the pressures of a job, expectations of both our families, and the wedding industry's out of control attempts to turn every wedding in America into the Miss America Pageant, New Year's Eve, and Valentine's Day all in one. It's the wedding that's turned into a monster, and she's just trying her darndest, like every other bride to be in America, to get it under control so everyone can have a good time.

Even if I can't always give her the help she needs, I hope she at least knows that I love and admire her a lot for that.

Swim safely,
The Lifeguard

gazes also: not the end of the world

And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

How do we go about solving puzzles? I'm not talking strictly about jigsaw puzzles but, rather, any kind of puzzle be it a riddle, a chess game, or a crime scene. If you want to go about it sensibly, then you'd start by having a long hard look at the puzzle from every possible angle looking for the best way to approach it. Once you have gotten a thorough idea of the nature of the problem, you begin trying different solutions in your head. More likely than not, you start with the simplest approaches and only cast them aside when you determine that they won't get you anywhere closer to your goal.

Why?

Because throughout our lives we have learned that no better way exists for solving problems. Use your senses. Gather information. Trial and error. When something goes bump in the night, we get out of bed, turn on the lights, and take a look around. We don't automatically assume the Boogey Man has stopped by, and we don't call the cops right away. Usually, we think it far more likely that something fell from the shelf, the cat knocked something over, or one of the kids got up to pee than that someone has broken into our home. Over our lifetimes we develop a common sense which tells us that most unfamiliar phenomena can be adequately and rationally explained through investigation, than allowing ourselves to fall prey to our worst fears.

That's why I love Larry Freeman.

From the moment he sets foot onto the Gazes Also we see him systematically brush aside anything but the most sensible explanations for what the evidence shows him. Does he have some amazing intuition? No. Does he allow himself to speculate? No. When faced with something he cannot explain, he refuses to either indulge his imagination or abandon what a lifetime of police work has taught him about conducting an investigation. What evidence do we have? What is the most likely explanation for the evidence as it presents itself? Anything else is just a distraction.

Contrast this with the conversation between Luther and Corby as they interpret God's will in allowing Corby to survive his botched attempt at bombing an abortion clinic on behalf of a radical pro-life group (unfortunately named, ahem, Life Guard). Here we have two men trying to make sense of an accident. An accident that took place within the context of an attempted murder aimed to stop others from committing what he perceives as mass murder. Corby and Luther struggle to understand what God wants from such a situation where all the rules appear to conflict with each other. Sure, thou shalt not kill, but does that mean allowing others to kill? Yes, God allowed me to survive, but so that I could repent, or that I could learn something from this and live to bomb more successfully? Their refusal to abandon a ready made system for interpretting their world catches them in a web that, ultimately, deprives them of the one thing that makes them human-- reason itself.

Is it any wonder that such people would leap to the conclusion that a woman, a victim of incestuous sex abuse, who later found herself working in the porn industry is anything other than a victim, much less the biblical Whore of Babylon? Wouldn't looking closer, investigating, and not making such wild assumptions have revealed her for who she truly is? Or is it just easier to live without discovering or resolving the ambiguity we find in life even at the sake of your own and others' humanity?

When staring at the abyss, at all of those things in life that don't make sense, the abyss does sometimes gaze back at us. But what does it see? And how do we respond? For me Not the End of the World, raised some really interesting questions about how we deal with the world around us and the potential consequences of a world view that sacrifices our very human faculties of reason and skepticism in favor of the "certainty" of belief. Ironically, the certainty itself turns out to be an illusion which creates fertile ground for extremism and the abdication of one's humanity. When one doesn't know how to think for him or her self, they put themselves at the mercy of anyone who claims to make sense out of the abyss.

In a time when those kinds of people have access to technology that can kill millions and endanger our whole life on then planet... well it just might mean the end of the world.

Swim safely,
The Lifeguard

no excuses ii: how do you spell sartre?

"Why am I here? Why are you here? Why are any of us here? I believe it was Jean Paul Sartre who said... how do you spell Sartre?" – Chevy Chase, Spies Like Us

Does an atheist necessarily commit him or herself to nihilism?

I don’t know, but I have a few thoughts on the debate itself.

First, I know many atheists immediately respond to the nihilism charge by stating they lead perfectly content, meaningful lives even though they don’t believe in any god(s) or any formalized meaning of life. This argument misses an important distinction– most importantly, just because your life means something to you, does not mean life has a meaning, and, therefore, your atheism commits you to nihilism. In fact, you live in a state not entirely unlike the state you accuse a christian of living in, except that, on some level, you acknowledge the meaninglessness of your private meaning.

What kind of meaning is that? What purpose does it serve other than to distract us from the dread of confronting a meaningless life punctuated by an equally meaningless and final death? If meaning amounts to nothing more than a useful fiction, a distraction, then can we call it meaning at all?

There lies the rub.

Indeed, when reading Evo's latest post, I could not help but feel that some of us experience similar bouts of depression because we know, on a very deep level, that any meaning we supply to our lives amounts to just that– a supplied meaning incapable of justification by measure to some external third thing that gives life itself meaning. We’ve built our houses on sand, and we know it. Deep down, the specter of nihilism gnaws away, like so many termites, at whatever foundation we have used to construct the meaning of our lives.

But how much does that differ from faith? Faith rests upon the idea that we believe things based, not simply on the evidence, but upon either revelatory experience, authority, or trust. One’s knowledge that a god exists, or that a god became man, does not rest so much upon personally verifiable facts as it does on the willing suspension of the requirement of definitive proof one way or the other. Doesn’t that define it as faith as opposed to knowledge? Logical proofs of or physical evidence for god’s existence do not so much logically compel belief in god as provide ancillary support of one’s faith. Wouldn’t anything more obviate the need for faith? Wouldn’t we all simply agree that god exists?

I’m aware many christians might claim that such logically compelling proof does exist and that they believe in god because of these proofs, and I take them at their word insofar as they describe the strength of their belief. Personal experience, however, leads me to suspect that such protestations of proof probably come closer to the kind of personal meaningfulness I described a few paragraphs above than with a rock solid conviction based upon incontrovertible evidence. I can claim all I want that a ghost taps on my window at night, because I hear the tapping, but that does not mean that tapping in fact logically proves the ghost’s existence. Mental conviction and the adequacy of proof remain two completely different things.

Please don’t take this as my passing judgement on the merits of any arguments for or against the existence of god, although you can probably guess which way I lean. Rather, I want to get at a reasonable description of the psychology of belief and how this impacts on questions we all have about meaning in life. Namely, I think faith, while it provides certainty, ultimately ends up in the same bind as any atheist world view regarding questions of meaning the moment it acknowledges itself as faith as opposed to knowledge. In other words, the proverbial crisis of faith involves the same termites, the same culprits, as the atheist depression I described several paragraphs above.

Doubt and despair may plague any of us regardless of our view about god-- we just run from it in different directions. That explains, for me anyway, why some christians would rather not confront an atheist in a debate and why some atheists might turn a blind eye to the problem of nihilism.

I believe it was Jean Paul Sartre who said... how do you spell Sartre?

Swim safely,
The Lifeguard

in defense of aquaman

After my last post several bloggers, including JP and T. took me on for my childhood veneration of Aquaman. Philly jumped to my hero's defense describing his appeal to shy folks who just want to hang around under the ocean, away from pesky people and all of their problems-- a kind of reluctant, antisocial man's superman. T., however, felt that Aquaman's relatively impractical superpowers make him more Wonder Twins material than anything else, and JP voiced his opinion that these guys were the true monarchs of the sea:



The Snorks.

Nice, JP.

Anyway, all of this got me to wondering what, exactly, Aquaman's story was. He doesn't really get the attention or respect some of the other superheroes get, and I'd bet most kids these days haven't even heard of him. Superman? Batman? Spiderman? These clowns have their own movies, their own TV shows, and a whole cult following. Other guys like the X-Men and the Fantastic Four still sell comic books and pack'em in at the theatre every summer. But what about Aquaman? Doesn't anybody care about freaking Aquaman anymore? Where did he come from? How did he get his superpowers? Tarzan is one thing. He was raised by apes in the jungle, but Aquaman breathes underwater. The man is an unexplainable miracle of modern evolution, and nobody cares! What gives?

So, after digging around the internet for approximately ten seconds (just long enough to type "Aquaman" into google and click the link for his wikipedia entry), I found the following passage written by Aquaman himself from an early edition comic:

The story must start with my father, a famous undersea explorer — if I spoke his name, you would recognize it. My mother died when I was a baby, and he turned to his work of solving the ocean's secrets. His greatest discovery was an ancient city, in the depths where no other diver had ever penetrated. My father believed it was the lost kingdom of Atlantis. He made himself a water-tight home in one of the palaces and lived there, studying the records and devices of the race's marvelous wisdom. From the books and records, he learned ways of teaching me to live under the ocean, drawing oxygen from the water and using all the power of the sea to make me wonderfully strong and swift. By training and a hundred scientific secrets, I became what you see — a human being who lives and thrives under the water.

See, this is what I'm talking about. Science. Empiricism. Nature. Okay, we all know this is a bunch of malarkey with Atlantis and stuff, but at least within the whacky world of comics, we're talking about a guy who's dad studied history, understood nature, and sought to uncover the secrets of the sea. Aquaman's dad was a naturalist, really, and Aquaman himself, it could be argued, did not so much possess supernatural powers as he understood the workings of the natural world around him. He became what he was, not through some freak accident that made him more than a mere mortal, but by studying and learning about the sea and it's inhabitants. Knowledge set him apart, not invulnerability to attack or anything supernatural.

Plus... get this... HE'S the guy who invented the original "A" that Dawkins has been trading in on. Do you think he wore that "A" because he didn't remember he was Aquaman? Because maybe the fish might be able to read it? Or maybe some humans hanging out in the ocean might think the guy swiming underwater talking to dolphins was someone other than Aquaman? Heck no. I think, given his naturalist and scientific origins, that Aquaman is the first atheist superhero.

So what do we have here? A superhero who is a feat of modern evolution, a scientist, a naturalist, and quite plausibly an atheist to boot. Ha! For these reasons, I am pleased to announce that Aquaman is now the Official Patron Superhero of the Meme Pool. I don't expect anyone to get down on one knee and pledge allegiance to the guy, but keep in mind that he has a special place in the Lifeguard's heart and now he's out there helping me keep the waters of the Meme Pool safe. Say what you will around here, but, please, show a little respect for Aquaman.

Swim safely,
The Lifeguard