Category Archives: religion

What “Being Gay Isn’t Natural” Actually Means

Every time you say “people say being gay isn’t natural, but [insert case of animal homosexuality here], which proves that it’s natural, and anyway we use [insert technology here] which isn’t natural” an angel gets lit on fire.

Okay, probably most of the Christian people who say “being gay isn’t natural” actually mean something along the lines of “being gay doesn’t exist in nature.” That is because most people don’t know what they’re talking about when it comes to Catholic theology. (Also, every time they say that? Two angels.) (If they’re Catholic, anyway. Protestants can say any damnfool thing they like. Damn schismatics.)

“Being gay isn’t natural” is not actually a statement about nature, it’s a statement about natural law. Basically, St. Thomas Aquinas ripped off Aristotle’s idea of the telos, which is basically a thing that any given thing is supposed to do (for instance, knives are made for cutting). He argued that God made everything with a telos and that through reason we can discover the telos of things and then use them in accordance with the purpose God made them for. This is called the “natural law” because you can deduce it from nature, as opposed to the law God revealed.

Catholic theology of the body argues that the genitals have a twofold telos: the unitive purpose (i.e. the bonding of lawfully wedded spouses) and the procreative purpose (i.e. making babies). Every time you have sex, you have to fulfill both teloi, or it violates the natural law. It is, in most circumstances, impossible to have children from homosexual sex; therefore, homosexual sex is immoral. (This is also why the Catholic church opposes birth control. Now You Know ™.)

Now, there are lots of arguments you can make against this thought process, started with “the telos doesn’t actually exist” and moving on from there. “Gay animals exist” is not one of them. Now stop using it, because I have a flamethrower and those angels are fucking trembling.

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Why I Am A Moral Nihilist

Really, if you want to understand what moral nihilism means to me, you should just watch this video:


[Transcript below the cut at the end of the post.]

But apparently I am not allowed to outsource all my blog posts to Terry Pratchett, as much as that would improve my writing style. So now I must go about explaining my nihilism. Please note that I am strictly talking about moral nihilism here, which I’m going to refer to as “nihilism” for the rest of the post because I like saving on the typing. There are lots of other kinds of nihilism, and most of them make my head hurt (I am down with the existential nihilism though). I am not the person to ask about mereological nihilism.

When I say I’m a nihilist, I mean that I believe that there is no such thing as objective morality. All morality is just a kind of preference– when you say “X is morally right” you mean “I would prefer to live in a world where there was X.” It’s erroneous to think that there is an objective system of morals Out There, the same way that it is erroneous to think that, just because I prefer lima beans to microwave popcorn, there is an objective scale of tastiness with lima beans at the top and microwave popcorn at the bottom.

When I say I’m a utilitarian, I mean “I really like happiness, and I really don’t like pain. In fact, these feelings are so strong I want the most possible happiness and the least possible pain!” But I believe that there’s no way I can convince you to like happiness unless you already like happiness. If you believe that gaining honor through war is the highest goal of human life, or (like many medieval Christians) that suffering is good because it leads to the purification of the soul, the closest thing I can come to an argument is “look at all this unnecessary pain you’re causing! You monster!” Which is not really a good argument, because if they primarily cared about minimizing human pain they’d be utilitarians and we wouldn’t be having this argument.

When I argue for assisted suicide after counselling, I say “assisted suicide lets people die if the rest of their life would contain too much pain, which is good because pain makes people unhappy, which is bad because happiness is good, which is good because… I don’t know, it just is.” Similarly, someone else might argue “if people commit assisted suicide they will die, which is bad because they could have lived longer, which is bad because life is good, which is good because… I don’t know, it just is.” And a third person might argue “assisted suicide should be available upon demand, because that way people can die when they want to, which is good because people can control their own bodies, which is good because freedom is good, which is good because… I don’t know, it just is.” I see no reason to prioritize my “just is” over other people’s.

(Of course, you can value freedom or life as a means to happiness. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Many people do, in fact, view both of the above as ends in themselves.)

It’s true that human morality tends to share certain traits cross-culturally, which at first blush is evidence for some kind of objective moral system. But– well, first, I’m disinclined to accept that argument because I’d suddenly have to start believing that obedience to authority and maintaining purity are morally good instead of two of the largest sources of evil. And second, all of the moral beliefs found cross-culturally are things that have obvious evolutionary advantages for a social species. Is it more likely that there are objective morals that we have developed a “moral sense” for, or that humans who were loyal to their friends tended to survive better than humans that weren’t? And if the former, do vampire bats have a moral sense too?

Whenever I say I’m a nihilist, someone immediately concludes that I’m contradicting myself because I have a moral system and do things like “only buy ethically made clothes” and “eat veganish” and “give a tenth of my income to charity” and “blog about social justice.” This makes no sense to me. It’s like saying “saying you like lima beans is a fact about your brain, not a fact about lima beans. Therefore you should like lima beans and microwave popcorn equally!” My morality is an arbitrary preference I have, I arbitrarily happen to prefer happiness to unhappiness, and I act to increase the amount of happiness in the world. Where’s the contradiction?

There are also people who believe that, since I don’t believe morals exist except as human preferences, I shouldn’t judge other people’s morals. This makes no sense to me either. There is only so much happiness I can cause! If I want to maximize human happiness, I need to get other people on board with Happiness and the Maximizing Thereof. Social shaming is an excellent method of convincing people of things, particularly things that are fundamentally arational. (To put it another way: my arbitrary moral preference does not include an arbitrary moral preference for not shaming other people’s arbitrary moral preferences. Nyeh.)

(Arbitrary moral preference has stopped looking like words.)

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On Mourning

[This is written to participate in Forward Thinking, which is a blogging series about Values and the Making Thereof. Since, despite being a nihilist, I am basically the hugest fan of values, I've decided to participate! The current prompt is about developing ways of collective mourning.]

Like Fincke mentions in the prompt post, it’s very easy for people to say “everyone should mourn as they want!” That would be the easy default for me, too. Social norms smack of People Telling Me To Do Things, and my entire political philosophy basically boils down to this:


[Pissed off movieverse Loki saying "I do what I want Thor!" Original artist.]

Nevertheless, I think that rituals are important. For one thing, people who are mourning often don’t want to have the entire weight of planning the mourning process themselves. For another, a shared ritual offers a way of resolving conflicts like “Pat thinks the appropriate way to mourn is to get really really drunk” and “Robin thinks the appropriate way to mourn is tearing your hair out and covering yourself with dirt.” For a third, humans often find shared rituals beautiful and comforting, which is particularly important in a time of grief. The loss of ritual is actually one of the things I worry most about in a more secular society– possibly because I really like ritual myself.

So what are things we’d include in a secular funeral?

If I were designing it, the core of the ritual would be an opportunity for everyone to share their memories of the deceased. I’m not sure what to do about honesty: sharing only the good memories is dishonest and might rob people of the complexity of their feelings towards the deceased, while sharing bad memories might be rude to some of the others who mourn. One’s speech may be preplanned or improvised, short or long, and those of us who are afraid of public speaking are welcome to have someone else read.

In addition, there would be certain things that are repeated every funeral. My family has someone recite Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night at the end of each funeral; other people may have other suggestions. Probably most traditions would be unique to each subculture, group of friends or family, or belief system, because nothing is going to be meaningful to every group of people. Some people don’t even like Dylan Thomas! Bizarre, I know.

I think you’d need to incorporate things that remind you of the deceased. Favorite songs is an obvious one, as is the deceased’s favorite flowers or a slideshow of pictures. If the deceased knows that they’re going to die, they can plan this ahead of time with their loved ones. (Public announcement: when I go, you assholes better put a quarter under my tongue for Charon.)

Finally, I think you’d end with a dinner, potluck, drunken party, or some kind of social-group-appropriate celebration and opportunity for socializing. The end of the funeral has to reaffirm life and the fabric of the community united by grief.

I really like the idea in some religions of an annual remembrance of the deceased on the day of their death, although I’ve never had someone die who was close enough to me that I would feel obligated to. I might come back with further notes on that when I have more experience of death.

The Thrill of the Chaste: Or, Why Dawn Eden Should Not Have Casual Sex

I just read The Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden. I agree with the message of this book entirely. I am 100% behind Dawn Eden not having sex before she gets married. I don’t think words can express how much I am in support of Dawn Eden’s abstinence lifestyle choice. Judging from the evidence in The Thrill of the Chaste, I am more certain that abstinence is the right lifestyle for Ms. Eden than I am of evolution, atomic theory, and the theory of gravity. Combined.

I am just slightly confused why she is generalizing from herself to all women. (No, I’m not.) So I will now present a guide to how to know if you, like Dawn Eden, would benefit from not having sex until you get married.

1) All you want is marriage. I mean, there are less effective husband-finding strategies than casual sex. Joining a nunnery. Complaining on Reddit that there are no good men left. Axe murder. And it’s certainly possible to find a spouse from casual sex (in fact, that’s how one of my boyfriends and his fiancee met). But most of the advantages of casual sex are things like “having sex with lots of attractive people.” If you’ve never daydreamed about a zipless fuck with the hot guy on the bus, you will probably not enjoy casual sex. Might I suggest a book club? You could meet lots of guys at a book club.

2) You don’t quite get the ‘casual’ part of casual sex. If you tend to have casual sex with people, make up personality traits about them, fall in love with the imaginary them in your head, and then be heartbroken when it turns out– surprise!– the casual sex was casual… yeah, Dawn Eden, you really shouldn’t have casual sex.

3) You can’t have casual sex without objectifying people. Ms. Eden says that casual sex is, to her, inherently objectifying. I am like “buh?” because I have had lots of casual sex and I do not generally treat my sexual partners like objects. You can treat someone like a person with desires and agency and a rich inner life, and still only see each other once a week for two hours of torrid fucking. In fact, that’s what makes casual sex better than a session with your favorite sex toy. Not even to get into the issue of “sex with friends” (which, by the way, is highly recommended). Turns out, you can hang out, get Chinese, talk about what sins the Slug God would damn slugs to the Pit of Eternal Salt for, and then fuck! Miracle of miracles!

4) You feel sick and bad and violated after sex. Life rule: you should absolutely never ever ever ever ever have sex that makes you feel sick and violated afterward.  If you feel sick and bad and violated after any sex that isn’t with your life partner, because to you sex is something special and sacred and romantic, then you should absolutely not have sex with anyone other than your life partner. I and the rest of the Sex-Positive Mafia have your back here. (I was going to put something like “as long as you admit that other people don’t feel sick and sad and violated after casual sex” but you know what? Fuck that. Everyone has the right to not have sex that makes them feel violated. Even dickheads.)

The necessary corollary: any person who tries to get you to have sex that makes you feel sick and violated afterward is, at best, so much of an asshole that it is a wonder they manage to spew words instead of fecal matter. (In the worst-case scenario, of course, they’re a rapist.) Secure adults recognize that other people have different opinions about sex and that doesn’t mean that they’re bad, wrong, uncool, or somehow threatening to the validity of your sex life.

5) Casual sex makes you more attracted to players and less attracted to nice g… okay this point doesn’t even make any sense. I know lots and lots of people who have casual sex! All of them are nice people! I do not know why Dawn Eden finds it so difficult to find nice people who have casual sex. Are they all hiding in Florida? Maybe geeks are better at casual sex? (Ms. Eden does not like geeks very much: she reassures the reader that not every guy you meet at trivia night will be a geek and defines “fanboy” using Wikipedia as if fanboys are these strange exotic creatures normal humans never encounter.)

Honestly, I think the problem is that Ms. Eden’s definition of “nice guy” is entirely unrelated to actual niceness. Being a “nice guy,” in Ms. Eden’s world, seems to mean paying for dates, giving flowers, opening doors, and not wanting casual sex. It’s true that people you’re having casual sex with very rarely give you flowers and usually want casual sex. But I am unclear on why I should prefer that definition over the “treats people well and respects boundaries” definition.

I have a final two points that aren’t connected to anything but I’m just going to say them:

1) Dawn Eden really sucks at Christianity. She seems to view it as a sort of dating service. If she prays enough and is a good enough Christian, God will give her a husband. Apparently the Fruits of the Spirit got mistranslated and they actually ought to say “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and a really hot husband who’s sensitive yet also manly.”

Also she seems to think of volunteering as something Dawn Eden does to improve Dawn Eden’s own personal soul as opposed to, you know, the lives of people in need. While generally I’m in support of any motivation to get people to help people, Jesus is pretty clear on the “help people for its own sake” thing. Besides, people who help people to improve their own personal souls have a bad habit of doing things that make them feel warm and fuzzy rather than things that actually help.

2) OXYTOCIN ABUSE! That’s right, it’s time for everyone’s favorite game, the Hot Showers Game!

When a man or woman [takes a hot shower], a hormone called oxytocin is released into their bloodstream. In women, oxytocin is known as the “cuddle hormone,” because women’s oxytocin levels go up when they’re simply cuddling. For that reason, and also because it’s released in nursing mothers, oxytocin is believed to facilitate emotional bonding. If the hormone is released during [hot showers] and there’s no one with whom to bond, then of course one is going to feel bereft.

Bonus points to the first commenter who guesses what I replaced with “hot showers.”

Against Asshole Atheists

Religious people: This post mentions the nonexistence of certain things the majority of religious people believe exist, such as God, an afterlife, the supernatural, and any nonhuman force that rewards good and punishes evil in the world. If your form of religion doesn’t believe in those things, that’s very nice for you and I’m not talking about you. If you are upset at the suggestion that these things don’t exist or that the majority of religious people do believe they exist, I suggest you look at Cute Roulette instead, because this post will not make you happy.

Today I would like to complain about the phenomenon of Asshole Atheists. Let me be clear here: when I talk about Asshole Atheists, I’m not talking about people who are loudly atheist. While some people have a tendency to consider you an asshole if you say, loudly and without caveats, that God doesn’t exist, I don’t think that’s true. Of course there are times in which it’s inappropriate to bring up the topic of God’s nonexistence, ranging from small talk to funerals. But

Signs that you are an asshole atheist: If your description of the deity involves the words “invisible,” “sky,” “daddy,” or “fairy.” If you make pedophile jokes about Catholic priests. If you appropriate the struggles of Christian queer people and Muslim women to prove that religion is always and everywhere terrible, without acknowledging the queer people and women who use their religion to defend their liberation. If you believe there is absolutely nothing good that religion has ever done ever, no good moral teachings in the Bible or Koran or Torah or Bhagavad Gita, no Dorothy Day or Oscar Romero or liberation theology (can you tell I’m an ex-Catholic?). If you describe religious people as stupid, blind, deluded, or sheep. You get the idea.

Some people seem terribly smug about being right about one thing. It makes me wonder if this is, in fact, the only thing they’ve ever gotten right in their whole lives.

Atheists are not necessarily any more right than other people. There are atheists who believe vaccines cause autism, homeopathy has any benefits other than the placebo effect, alien abductions happened, the stars control our destinies, alternative medicine is superior to regular medicine because it’s natural*, sexism is over, “I’m colorblind, I don’t see race,” mentally ill people are monsters, and if poor people just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps they would stop being poor. All of those things are factually wrong statements that huge numbers of atheists believe!

Religion is a result of the same cognitive biases that affect every human everywhere. Do you think you’re free from confirmation bias, you who get all your news from fifty people on Twitter who agree with you in every particular? Do you think you have never assigned a mind to something that doesn’t have a mind, you who constantly plead with your computer or your car when it isn’t working right? I’m sure you don’t believe in the Just World Fallacy, which means you’ve never said that with hard work and sacrifice anyone can get ahead, or that cheaters never prosper, or that if that horrible thing happened to someone they must have done something wrong to deserve it.

For, lo, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of rationality.

And let’s be clear here: I’m not exempting myself from this. I’m wrong. I’m wrong a lot! I’m incredibly cognitively biased! I’m a regular victim of the planning fallacy, and reactance, and the unit bias, just to pick a few random examples. I have been wrong about things in the past (look through the NSWATM archives if you’re curious) and I am wrong about some things now. (Hell, I might even be wrong about some of the things I said were wrong up there.) I am on a lifelong quest to try to be less wrong about things.

The world is a million-question test. The problem with Asshole Atheists is that they look at the first question, bubble in “No” on “is there a God?”, lie back in their chairs, and are like “I got an A!” That’s very nice for you, getting the first question right. Now it’s time to deal with the rest of them.

*Some alternative medicine treatments have been shown to work for some illnesses; mindfulness meditation is actually part of the standard, evidence-based treatment for borderline personality disorder. In addition, it makes sense to take advantage of the placebo effect for certain illnesses, such as colds or mild depression or pain, and altmed may offer the best placebo effect with fewest side effects. Therefore it is not correct to state that alternative medicine is less effective than regular medicine in all circumstances.

Angry Atheist Rant

I am not saying that religious people are universally stupid. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect. 

I am not saying that atheists are universally smart. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect. 

I am not saying that religion doesn’t provide comfort to and enrich the lives of billions of people. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.

I am not saying that everything in the modern scientific consensus is true. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.

I am not saying that everything that some asshole passes off as science is true. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.

I am not saying that there are no people who attempt to reconcile science and religion. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.

I am not saying that nothing good has been done in the name of religion. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.

I am not saying that nothing evil has been done in the name of science. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect. 

I am not saying that the tradition and community people get from their religions isn’t valuable. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect. 

I am not saying that religion is inherently tyrannical and oppressive. I’m saying that religion is factually incorrect.

There are atheists that say some of those things that I’m not saying. Which is bad, because all of those things I’m not saying are douchebaggy and factually incorrect and also completely unnecessary.

My radical position is that you should not believe things that are factually incorrect. Even if believing them makes you feel nice. Even if it makes you a better person. Even if it connects you to your community and your ancestors. (You can go to the rituals without believing in God, anyway.) Even if some other people over there believe factually incorrect things sometimes too. 

I feel like having to justify why believing things that aren’t true is bad is like having to justify why hitting people who don’t want to get hit is bad. It… is? Duh? But the number of otherwise intelligent people who say “they’re nice and they aren’t hurting anyone, what do you care?” suggests otherwise. 

The doublethink necessary to believe things that aren’t true hurts your ability to figure out what’s true and what’s not. Not necessarily; humans are very good at compartmentalizing and often, say, take “I feel it in my heart” as adequate on matters of theology but not on matters of medicine. But in aggregate turning off your critical thinking and rationality sometimes hurts your ability to be rational. 

If you believe things that aren’t true, you’re going to make decisions based on the false things you believe, and decisions made based on inaccurate information are usually bad decisions. If you believe apricot pits cure cancer, you might skip chemo. If you believe there aren’t any cars on the street when there are, you might cross and get hit by an SUV. If you believe all-nighters improve your grades, you might flunk an exam. If your map says that Disney World is in Michigan, you will never get to meet the Mouse. For that matter, look at basically any atrocity in history, nearly all of which were caused by people believing untrue things (usually “this group of people is inherently evil,” “God said so,” or “our ludicrous political system totally works”). 

As a practical matter, there are a lot of false beliefs in the world, and most forms of theism I encounter in day-to-day life are not actively hurting people and, in fact, might be making people’s lives better. So I’d prefer to try to get people to not believe in untrue things that are also hurting people first. 

This is really just a plea for atheists and theists to stop arguing about religion is good. Who cares? The question is whether it’s true.