Dinesh D’Souza: Ontological Douche Bag.

Never one to pass up the chance to exploit a national tragedy for his own twisted agenda, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest diatribe lambastes atheists for being unable to find meaning in the Virginia Tech shootings. He says atheists simply can’t explain that level of ghastly horror. Well, I’m going to take him up on his challenge by examining a source of awfulness a little closer to home: The douche bag that is Dinesh D’Souza.

Impossible you say, there is no way to find meaning in D’Souza’s contemptible shtick. Damn it, this is an important experiment, just hear me out.

You see, I have a theory that Dinesh’s mind bogglingly repulsive behavior is actually part of a heroic plan to sacrifice his own human decency to prove the existence of God through his version of the ontological argument.

As far as I can tell the argument goes something like this:

Premise 1. I can imagine the most perfectly reprehensible vindictive douche bag there is.

Premise 2. Dinesh D’Souza actually is the most perfectly reprehensible vindictive douche bag that it is possible to imagine.

Premise 3. Only a perfect creator could create such a perfect douche bag.

Premise 4. Dinesh D’Souza exists.

Conclusion: God must therefore exist because of the utter perfection of Dinesh D’Souza’s douche baggery.

Sadly, the ontological argument actually doesn’t prove anything other than the contents of one’s own mind, so the only thing D’Souza ends up proving is that, in his mind, God is as big a douche bag as he is.

Easter is Creepy

Okay, now that we've established that Atheists are people too (my next bumper sticker) I must elaborate on some of the unique challenges atheists face when they attempt to navigate the corporate infested waters of the Religious/Holiday Celebration complex. As an atheist parent, how can I participate in making sweet childhood memories for my family marking certain seasonal celebrations without indulging in the religious aspect of such occasions? I know many people suspect that atheists gather their children together ceremoniously draped in a black robes, stirring a potion made from puppy blood chanting "Another year lost" as we toss a candle into the "meaningless void" of our lonely material existence.

There has always been something disturbing to me about Easter. Christmas always seemed like the more harmless cousin. Christmas is about a Baby (a magic baby surrounded by smelly farm animals) and young children intuitively understand babies and birthdays. Celebrating a baby's birthday is something they love and it doesn't take much for them to make the intellectual leap to "sharing" gifts with others on a special day. Easter as a Holiday is complicated by the whole Jesus Crucifixion, dying for our sins, rising from the dead culminating with his "resurection" up into the clouds and getting to live for fucking ever. Immortality.

Explaining how Santa and his reindeer fly, live at the North Pole, and manage to travel across the world in one night is nothing compared to trying to explain immortality to a 5 year old. Coward that I am, I contemplated sinking to the depths of actually reading my child the Easter story but gave up after glancing through some prominently displayed illustrated "Children's Bibles" in Barnes and Noble where every image of Jesus made him look an aging Soap star with a "Buddy Christ" grin.

As I tried to imagine myself reading the Easter story out loud to my child, I couldn't get past how ridiculous the whole thing sounded. Reading a bed time story about flying unicorns, slaying dragons or swimming with mermaids is more palpable to me because those fantasy creatures and fantastical scenarios are not worshipped or regarded as "real" by 90% of the American public. However, I'm also not comfortable letting major Holidays pass without some sort of activity for my child, and I've searched for secular gatherings that give my kid a sense of wonder without the heavy gravy of Christian guilt.

The Unitarians are the closet thing I can find that meet my criteria, because they appear to be Atheists with some minimal organizational skills. So, twice a year I make an appearance at my local Unitarian church to try to provide my child with some resemblance of the enchanting childhood rituals that I actually enjoyed as a child myself.

Last year I took my 4 year old to a the Unitarian children's Sunday school where we were treated to a stage play with teen actors titled: "The Inevitability of Mortality" - for kindergarteners. A combination of "Waiting for Godot," "The Seventh Seal,"
and "Alice in Wonderland" on acid, the play revolved around a lost circus Bear being stalked by the Grim Reaper. Seriously.
The Bear tries to avoid Death, but no matter what he does or where he goes Death finds him. Finally the Bear has to face the music realizes he has to die, and finds a successor in a young bear cub to whom he passes on his circus unicyle.
(I'm not kidding).

When the curtain dropped and the horrified adults turned to each other too stuned to clap, the sound of crying children filled the foyer. My daughter sobbed and buried her head in my lap and cryptically kept asking me "Where did the Bear go? Mommy what just happened?"

What the hell just happened indeed. I understand now why some ancient parents invented stories about heaven and angels, golden harps, and living forever in paradise. See what happens when you try to level with toddlers about Death!

So, this past Sunday was the Unitarian's annual "Easter Egg Hunt" for children 3-7 years old. Despite our experience with what my daughter dubbed the "scary play" we persisted and decided to show up again for Easter. Last year, the Unitartian children's program director decided that the kids should participate in a food drive for the homeless shelter with no overt symbols of anything Pagen, Christian, or commercial sugar products.

After being greeted with organic coffee (for Mommy) and vegan muffins the children were encouraged to scamper about the church grounds holding recycled brown paper bags hunting for cans of food instead of colored eggs and chocolate bunnies. The Program Director seemed genuinely hurt and perplexed as to why the children were not enthusiastic about searching the bushes for cans of Del Monte string beans. Needless to say my child thought the activity was "not very fun."

And she's right. Hyper contrived secular P.C. bullshit is "not very fun". Not for toddlers, and often not for adults.
Something was lost in the translation attempt, despite the program director's best intentions. It wasn't magical.
Childhood should have a little bit of magic. Children will find out the world is a scary shitty place soon enough -so why rush it?

There are precious few years of your life where you are innocent enough to believe in a large rabbitt laying edible luminesent eggs in brightly wrapped baskets. Later on in this culture you'll be expected to believe that the world was created 6,000 years ago while Adam and Eve rode Dinosaurs through the Garden of Eden - so really it's just a matter of picking which ridiculous poison you are most comfortable with, and want your own child exposed to early on in the hope that they will then develop some sort of immunity.

Wary of our previous Unitarian Easter experience we showed up on Sunday anxious about what we would find this year.
To my surprise, the new children's program director coordinated an actual Easter Egg Hunt - complete with colored easter eggs, decorated baskets, candy, competition, and prizes. And the response was overwhelming - the kids went nuts!
They were thrilled that even their skeptical/ hippie/progressive/vegan/ tattoed parents had let their guard down, just long enough to let them indulge in tradition simply for the fun of it.

" Mommy, I liked church today - can we do it again?" my daughter asked as we left the church with her hoard of Easter eggs and candy. "Of course we can, honey." Death may be stalking us, but damn it he's not going to take away our chocolate bunnies.

Myths about atheism

I feel the need to respond to Ryan's comments because one of the purposes of this site is to de-mystify atheism or at least my own personal brand of atheism which is pretty far removed from Dawkin's. So let’s take them in order

Myth #1. Atheists “know" there is no God.

This is the most common mistake people make about atheists. Because they seemingly claim to know the unknowable, atheists are easily characterized as arrogant and condescending. The problem is that assumes a premise (knowledge of a negative) and a burden (proving a negative) atheist don’t have. People confuse the positive belief in a negative claim (I know that there isn't something) with the lack of belief in a positive claim (I do not believe something). This may seem like splitting hairs but the difference is very important. For example, say I buy a lottery ticket. I don’t know that I won’t win the lottery. But at the same time, it’s perfectly rational not to believe that I will win the lottery. Being an atheist doesn't mean I know that God doesn't exist. It's a big universe and I'd have to be God himself to know that he's not hiding around there somewhere. It just means to me there is a lack of evidence to prove the claim "there is a God".

Myth #2. If you can’t know God doesn’t exist, doesn’t that make you an agnostic not an atheist?

It's often claimed that agnosticism is the only rational position because the existence of God cannot be known one way or another, and therefore one has no choice but to suspend a decision. I'm going to have to call bullshit on that one. If that's true you'd have to be an agnostic about far more than God. After all, no one can "know" for certain that Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Atlantis don't exist. It is impossible to prove that there isn't a 1978 Dodge Dart orbiting Saturn. No matter how wildly implausible a proposition was, you'd have to give it equal weight as long as it couldn't be disproved. If you were truly agnostic you would lead a pretty interesting life.

Atheism really isn't that complex a philosophy: If you claim something exists, let's see your proof; if your proof isn't very convincing, than I probably won't believe your claim. Sounds nutty I know, but it's worked pretty well for me so far. The mistake that people continually make is to assume it is the burden of the skeptic to prove a negative claim, and if they fail to meet that burden then they have “lost” the augment and we are justified in believing the claim or at least in suspending judgment. This is actually a very dangerous way of thinking.

Let us take the example of the missing WMDs. Bush’s defenders claim he didn't lie when said he stated Iraq had WMDs because he didn’t know that there weren't any WMDs. But of course he did lie because he said there were WMDs when in actuality he didn't know whether there were WMDs one way or the other. In their never ending quest not to appear “biased” the U.S. media got trapped into being agnostic about the WMDs (we don't know he doesn't have them) and fell for the administration's line that it was therefore the burden of Saddam Hussein to prove he did not have WMDs. It was a beautifully ridiculous argument that helped make war inevitable. After all, Saddam could have turned his whole country inside out and that still wouldn't prove he had no WMDs. He could always be accused of hiding them in some new unknown location. In fact, it was the Bush Administration that was making a positive claim (Iraq has WMDs), one that they had the burden to prove, and the proof they had was easily exposed as utter bullshit by anyone willing to do a little digging. If the U.S. media had been "atheist" (show me your proof) rather than "agnostic" (who can know?) this world would be a lot better off

Myth # 3: Atheists reject spirituality.

Far from eliminating mystery and uncertainty from life, atheism treats mysteries with the respect they deserve. Life is full of the unknowable and unexplainable. But rather than try to force fit a solution that doesn’t make sense to me, I simply acknowledge them for what they are; things that I don’t know and can’t explain. Rather than giving you all the answers, atheism enlightens you to exactly how much you don’t know. The hardest part of atheism is embracing a level of ignorance that at times can be terrifyingly overwhelming. However, in the words of Socrates at least you know that you don’t know much of anything, and that is a very valuable form of knowledge.

Myth #4: All atheists are materialists

People often assume that if you are an atheist, then you must also be materialist (you are nothing other than the biological functions of your brain). Certainly there are plenty of atheists who do believe exactly that, but not all. I don’t believe in a literal soul, but I absolutely believe that human consciousness transcends biology and physics. I believe in the inexplicability of love, joy, passion, grief, and heartbreak. While they may be biological in origin they are also far more than simply the sum of their physical causes: they are the most existentially real experiences we have, and are what make human beings the weird little evolutionary quirk that we are. However my belief in that transcendence maybe not completely justified from a logical or scientific perspective. In fact it might even be characterized as an act of faith. This leads directly into my next point.

Myth #5: Atheists think everyone else should be an atheist.

Remember all I claimed was that to me there is a lack of evidence to prove the positive claim "there is a God." Some people may have experiences vastly different than mine. Maybe prayer, or meditation, or personal experience leads them to conclude there is a God when they examine all the evidence. I’m fine with that. My two favorite thinkers in the world, people far smarter me and whose influence on me is enormous, were both passionate believers. Atheism is my answer to that question. It’s not the answer for everyone and I personally have no desire to convince anyone else that their belief system is wrong. I’m a firm believer that actions speak louder than words and as long as you’re a good person I could care less what your personal beliefs are.

Manifesto of a radically boring atheist

I'm going to let you in on a secret: most people are boring. I do not mean this as an insult. In fact, it is a complement. Our boringness is something that we all share, something to unite us, and something to make us proud. Still, who wants to celebrate boringness even it does bring us together? Isn't discussing tedium itself tedious? God, you people are impatient. Our boringness is important. It is the key to transformative social change. Seriously. Let me explain.

The easiest way to understand the virtues of boringness is to first examine the pitfalls of non-boringness. The most powerful example of the dangers of over stimulation is that most sinister of ridiculous bugaboos: "The Gay Lifestyle". The religious right is so fond of this phrase, you almost wonder if they are part of a secret viral marketing campaign for "thegaylifestyle.com".

As silly as the phrase is, its manipulation and purpose are quite serious. The message of “the gay lifestyle" is that it is first and foremost, not your lifestyle and the further from yours the better. The James Dobsons of the world use "the gay lifestyle" to create the impression that the average day in the life of a homosexual consists of nothing other than constant cocaine fueled sex orgies aboard Elton John's yacht, filmed by a leather clad Hillary Clinton, stopping only when everyone gets tired of performing abortions and commits suicide.

Of course the purpose of such language is to portray homosexuality as perverse, foreign, and "other". But another purpose is to portray it as exciting, glamorous, and interesting, especially as compared to James Dobson. The message is not only that these people are morally wrong, but that their lives are more stimulating than yours is, and that discrimination against them is a good way to even the score.
This combination of fear and envy is most potent weapon in the gay baiting arsenal, which is why they are constantly hammering away with it.

The terrible secret that Pat Robertson is desperate to keep from his flock is that most gay people are in fact, pretty boring. Many have never even met Elton John. For most gay people, their “lifestyle” consists of working hard, paying the bills, trying to find or maintain loving relations, and attempting to find meaning and community where they can. The same shit the rest of us struggle with every day.

My theory is that the strides in acceptance of homosexuality have happened in large part because the boring gay masses have increasingly begun to live their lives openly and proudly. Of course living openly and honestly is not easy. In addition to facing discrimination and violence, gays often risk being disowned by their entire families after coming out. It often requires courage and very real sacrifice to live boringly, and this is why I want to introduce the concept of “Radical Boringness.” “Radical Boringness” means living the hum drum every life in a way that's open, honest, and dignified. It means being willing to fight for your right to simply be treated the same as any other schmoe.

As controversial as it has been, the fight for gay marriage is perfectly in tune with radical boringness. In fact the biggest problem is that those fighting for equality haven’t realized they are sitting on an absolute gold mine of dull. This is marriage we’re talking about people, how exciting can it possibly be? My advice to gay marriage advocates? Turn up the tedious. Emphasize the drab. Explain that you are fighting for the joy that is filing a joint tax return, the thrill of arguing over whose turn it is do the dishes, the non-stop party that is legally enshrined monogamy. Not to mention the most gloriously mind numbing aspect of gay marriage: gay divorce! What could be more tiresome that having to hire a lawyer if your relationship goes sour? Once people realize how profoundly uninteresting your demands really are, how can they help but be swayed to your side?

Still, one does wonder if gay rights are a uniquely boring phenomena or can “Radical Boringness” be successfully applied to other minorities? Well, I'm not gay, but I am an atheist and I think atheists could learn a lot from the boring aspects of the gay rights movement. Atheists are kind of a weird minority. We don't stand out from the crowd in any way. We don't have any real leaders or spokesmen. We haven't suffered any real oppression. I’m pretty sure we’re allowed to marry and nobody really believes atheism is a disorder anymore. Yet we still have still haven’t managed to get a single unbeliever elected to Congress (we thought we may have had one last week but he turned out to be a Unitarian). Polls show we are by far the most distrusted group in the nation and atheists are one of the few remaining minorities that it is still acceptable in polite society to openly mock and dismiss.

Atheism has been in the news lately mostly due to the recent books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Consequentially, atheism is gaining a notoriety that is far from boring. Dawkins in particular has been getting attention mostly because of his antagonistic and condescending attitude toward people who are not atheists. He has been enough of an arrogant prick, that he raised the ire of the boys over at "South Park" and was the recipient of their trademark scathing satire, involving ass fucking and murderous sea otters. This was extremely concerning to me. To see my own belief system suffer the same hilarious take down as Scientology, Mormonism, etc., was hard to take. But Dawkins had it coming for committing the only two sins that Matt Stone and Trey Parker refuse to tolerate: thinking that your beliefs make you superior to everyone else, and attempting to convince everyone that your way of thinking is the only way.

What people like Dawkins fail to grasp is that most people don't really warm up to you when you are constantly belittling the things they hold most dear, no matter how logical and compelling your argument maybe. I've argued with far too many believers in my life to conclude attempting conversion is anything other than spectacularly pointless. Dawkins' attempt to seize the mantle of atheist leadership has hopefully failed (Once your cartoon alias has slept with Mr./Ms. Garrison your credibility is pretty much shot). Atheists need to ask themselves “What now?” We've got some attention so what should we do with it? My answer: we should be boring, Radically Boring.

I’m not advocating atheists give up any traditional causes but we need to do a much better job of explaining what we’re fighting for and why. When atheist battle to fight prayer in school, it’s not because we want to eliminate God from public life or exterminate religion; it’s because we want to be treated like any other religious group. Would Christians accept a public school that required their children to pray toward Mecca five times a day? Would Jews tolerate pledging allegiance to a nation "under Jesus"? Of course not, no self respecting religious group would allow the state force them to participate in the rituals of another religion. All atheists should want is that exact same consideration. It's not religion were fighting, it's discrimination. It's not power we want, its equality, nothing more, nothing less. And that is a radically boring idea.