I think the reason that the social norm “it’s fine if you’re an atheist, but don’t make a point of it” rubs me the wrong way is that it discourages atheists from trying out religion-like social structures / practices / searches for transcendence / etc.

I have never managed to find a way to make myself have god-type beliefs, so I am pretty much resigned to being an atheist, at least in the narrow “what truth claims do you believe in” sense.  Nonetheless, there are many aspects of religion that might be good additions to my life.  But because I’m still an atheist in the narrow sense, I can’t just, say, go to church and expect it to do anything for me.  Any religion-like experience that works for me is likely to be some sort of “religion, but for atheists!” type of deal.  Once you involve yourself in such a thing, you are making a point of your atheism, and the social norm is not OK with that.  (“What, do you think you’re too good for ordinary religion? You have to have your own special version?”)  While if you just go around ignoring the part of yourself that wants religion, the social norm is OK with that.  (I don’t talk about being an atheist much, even though I am one, so you probably don’t think of me as someone who “thinks he’s too good for ordinary religion.”  If I were into Alain de Botton or Auguste Comte or [insert transhumanist here], you might.)

Something seems wrong with this.  A jump from totally non-religious atheistic life to atheistic life with some sort of pseudo-religious element isn’t an increase in atheist arrogance; if anything, it’s a concession that religion cannot be simply done away with at the drop of a hat.

(And, don’t get me wrong, I think most [all?] of the existing attempts to create “religion, but for atheists!” are gigantic failures.  I’m not saying one has to approve of any of them in particular.  But it seems like a basically good cause.)

the punchline

Since we have been going down this road lately I feel like I need to say this: it’s funny how I was friends with Worst Person for two years, I was clearly her type (as she indicated to me in numerous hints I was usually too clueless to get) and she was – horrible to say but impossible to deny – pretty much mine, and nothing ever “happened” between us in any sense

That is nothing if not proof, I declare to myself from 7:18 PM, that we actually live in a just and loving universe

New York hipster telling his freshman roommate the first time they met that he “didn’t believe women should be allowed in the academic sphere”

Not because he actually thought this, but because he thought that “observing people’s reactions to statements like that” was a good way to learn about their personalities

He only gave up the ruse of being an explicit, as opposed to implicit, misogynist near the end of their first semester living together

God there’s so much of this stuff, and I spent so long trying to treat it it as though it were neither hilarious nor horrifying

i did not find the characters believable

I just have so many memories from college that are so ludicrous it really would explain a lot if they turned out to be fabricated in some way

The aforementioned person who didn’t like Lolita getting into an argument with her friend, said friend immediately cutting her off with the phrase “but what about the brilliant prose?” and then loudly, droningly reciting the entire first few paragraphs from memory, which took several minutes

New York hipster, son of an old-school psychoanalyst, grabs a huge stack of napkins at the dinner table.  His dorm-mate says he should maybe use fewer napkins, “for the environment,” and hipster counters that he does not believe in ethics so he has no responsibility to do anything, ever

One of the hated girl’s faults was disliking Lolita – evidence in W.P.’s mind of an unforgivable and female-coded philistinism

W.P. loved Lolita and would unironically quote Humbert Humbert in the course of rhapsodizing over guys she liked, who tended to conform to a physical type: skinny white guys who looked really young – like, really young

OKAY I’M DONE

Remembering Worst Person’s relationship to feminism sure is a trip

E.g. she once “explained” to me her feud with this other girl by saying that, see, that girl was setting back the cause of getting men to respect women by doing cute girly stuff, like running around greeting people in an excited and high-pitched voice

While she, Worst Person, put great effort into acting “seriously” and speaking “articulately,” not only so that she would be respected but so that all women would be respected, and this teenage freshman she hated was undoing all of her work, by being cute, and girly

Meanwhile: Worst Person literally did things like sitting down at a cafeteria with several male science majors and saying, by way of greeting, “hi, I’m a girl, so I don’t get science!  so can we talk about something like feelings or poetry instead?”

This was kind of facetious but completely in keeping with her personal aesthetic and self-image.  Men who did Science were baffling aliens, who were unable to express their emotions; she, through her complementary girl powers, would write (without permission) roman a clef stories about them in which she would evoke the emotions they didn’t have the words for; she would show them they were more beautiful than they ever realized; etc.

Sometimes I have trouble believing that some of the people I met in college actually existed.  Waiting for my life to become a science fiction story in which someone asks me “so, Rob, why are you so sure your memories are true”

I think there’s a recurring feature in my life where I encounter charismatic, controversial people who tend to inspire very polarized reactions, and end up feeling conflicted about them, which doesn’t put me in sympathy with either of the poles

Yudkowsky is an example: I give him a lot of shit, but I’d be lying if I said his writing didn’t resonate very intensely with me when I first discovered it.  A lot of his more mundane posts about “rationality” were essentially saying things that I believed but had resigned myself to thinking no else did.  I write about him negatively now because I wish there were more people who had the qualities I like about him without the many, many qualities I dislike about him.  It’s different from the perspective of someone who just sees him as a risible dweeb.

One of the reasons I like The Instructions so much is that it is about one of these kinds of people, and depicts him as both compelling and scary, and just kind of assumes that the reader will be endlessly fascinated with him.  It’s not lauding him, it’s not satirizing him, it’s not making some point about how he’s good or bad or even somewhere in between, it’s just presenting some personality traits and rhetorical styles that really exist and saying “I hope this stuff is as fixation-worth for you as it is for me”

It’s not like the author is holding back and suspending judgment … more that his judgment of his creation is largely “wow, holy shit”

And I really get that.  I relate to that “wow, holy shit” a lot more than “this person is clearly wrong” or “this person is clearly right” or “the truth is always somewhere in the middle” or “ah, what a complex issue” or etc.

okay, *one* more post about this stuff

I know this is a powder keg and a lot of you are already arguing, but I want to post about it because I can’t stop thinking about it.  I’ll put most of it under a cut

There is clearly something that really irks me about the combination of “being trans is a choice” and “cis people shouldn’t weigh in on trans issues.”  I don’t think this is just because I disagree with this combination (at least in the form espoused by e.g. moneycat).  It irks me in some additional way that most ideas I disagree with don’t, which I think has to do mainly with the abstract form of the argument

Keep reading

To fill in the other blank, this is also why physical science is so emotionally appealing to me

Force equals mass times acceleration, predictably, no matter how you feel about it – even it would be more poetic and ironic and cynical and in tune with God and literature and moral law for you to be wrong that Force equals mass times acceleration

The laws of physics don’t care about hubris

This, by the way, is why I’ve always been most partial to religious thinking in which God / gods are presented as horrible assholes

The closest thing I have to a godlike voice in my life (emotionally resonant, irrational or beyond rational, difficult to argue with) would be, if personified, a horrible asshole who thinks extreme, grotesque punishments are justified for highly specific and oddly minor-seeming offenses

What did I even think I was doing, anyway, building that Golden Calf