I was poking around looking for a nice quote to add to an art project for one of Mom’s Christmas gifts and came across this Spanish proverb:

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

I won’t be using this one on the project, but it’s nice all the same.

I should read her stuff more often. I Trekked out today, and she also wrote about Trek recently, and why people who claim religion is a metaphor are lying through their teeth:

Original Showians don’t treat Next Generationists as sinners and blasphemers; and none of them write editorials lambasting people as immoral sociopaths if they prefer documentaries to any sort of science fiction. And they — okay, fine, we — don’t insist that “Star Trek” is just a story… and then get bent out of shape when people point out that it is a story, and hence that it’s not true. Trekkies have a good time trying to fit the inaccuracies and inconsistencies into some sort of continuity (that’s half the fun); but we understand that the show is a fictional story, with all the flaws that fiction is heir to, and we don’t treat it as a divinely-inspired guide to reality and life.

That’s what “it’s just a metaphor” religion would look like.

And if religion looked like that, I would have no problem with it at all.

But it doesn’t. Too many people believe it’s a reality, even though the grandiose miracles of God’s early days have never been duplicated in a time when we could film and properly document them and prove once and for all a god really does give a damn who wins. Now God’s stuck “proving” existence in tree trunks and chocolate bars. People have to put logic on the back burner to credit a disaster to God’s hatred of one group of people. They have to put facts in an oubliette in order to shove their deluded reality into the foreground of their lives and everyone around them.

Progressive religion says, “This is simply a story”… but it isn’t sincere. You can tell that it isn’t sincere by how bent out of shape it gets when people point out that it’s just a story, and therefore isn’t really true. Progressive religion uses the “metaphor” trope as a slippery way of avoiding hard questions when engaged with skeptics… and as soon as the skeptics turn their backs, it slips right back into actual, non-metaphorical, “belief in immaterial entities or forces that it has no evidence for” religion. Progressive religion is ultimately just as willing to ignore evidence that contradicts its comforting story as hard-line conservative religion.

Truly secular “religion,” on the other hand, says, “This is simply a story” — and means it.

I’ll pull a few things out worth noting about this column in the Times, Religions tell us who we are and what we need to be by Jonathan Sacks.

Atheists tend to think that religion is about God. Of course it is. But if that is all it is, it would hardly explain religion’s tenacity and power, its hold on the human imagination, and its strange capacity both to unite and divide.

Religion is about gods but every faith, schism or new breakaway due to a snit leads to new interpretations of a god’s supposed divine word and different gods are created in the process. One god is relatively tolerant of homosexuality, another isn’t. One cares about finding lost keys and new boyfriends and another provides rain in a dry land once in a while but can’t be buggered to fix any other problems.

Divisions happen because there’s supposed to be one god, and yet every group believes a different thing and every group believes they’re completely right about it. Few leave room to consider the possibility that their interpretation is flawed, that their rituals are meaningless beyond the meaning people have attached to them and many of them never have any intention of looking into the past to see how their faith evolved.

Religion is also about identity. It is an answer to a set of questions that science cannot answer, perhaps cannot even understand. Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I belong? Of what story am I a part? How am I connected to those who came before me? How then shall I live?

Religion can aid a person in defining a cultural identity, but it’s not the only available option to achieve the same result. Develop an interest in genealogy, biology, history. Does one’s way of life have to come out of the past, or can it be decided based on what’s valuable and worthwhile in the present? I don’t think it’s accurate to say only a faith has all those answers.

Although religion winds up so ingrained it no longer looks optional, it will forever be optional. A genetic tendency toward god belief doesn’t mean we have to let it be a self fulfilling prophecy. A thin person with a familial genetic tendency toward obesity can still manage weight with diet and exercise. People with a tendency toward god belief might be able to circumvent some of it through education and improvement of reasoning skills.

I’d never say god belief is the problem in and of itself. It’s the actions people do and claim they’re allowed to do because of god belief or even devil belief, for that matter. The devil wouldn’t exist without the bible interpretations that say it does. Terrible behaviour would still happen, obviously, but at least we’d look at the root causes and try to fix things at a societal level and the personal level and maybe develop better ways to track mental problems and behavioural inconsistencies.

The great religions answer these questions against the broadest possible background and in the richest possible way. They celebrate identity in stories, rituals, celebrations, prayers and holy days. They speak of the universe, creation, revelation and redemption. They show us role models of sages and saints, heroes and heroines, exemplary lives. They tell us who we are and what we are called on to be.

I’ll admit to some points in this, that there is value in the stories and people worth admiring in those stories. But can we do a little less harkening back to the “good-old days” and look at ways to improve life now? How the bible boys sorted out problems might not always be ideal and we’re forever having to reinterpret what was done and what was said as if what was done and said can always be pulled around like Play-doh to fit every possible present contingency. Some can, I suppose, but a lot more can’t and it would help everyone to have religious authorities admit that some of that old time religion will never be compatible with today’s consciousness.

Should we even have identities? There have been people who said No. There were universalists such as Socrates, who said: “I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.”

I like this quote. We all could call ourselves citizens of the world but then that’s also an identity, isn’t it? It would be nice if we all identified ourselves like that but I think we’d still seek to create smaller localized groups that share our interests and experiences. Internet groups have memberships around the world since geography isn’t a limit like it used to be. Our minds are still limited by what we want to learn and identify with, of course. People who are willing to be open to more new experiences are probably far better off, especially if they’re the type of people who experience without belittling or judging what they learn. It’s hard to resist comparing quality and purpose, though.

This is one reason why religion has returned, centre stage, in the 21st century, because of the waning of secular alternatives. Most of us need identity as our way of being at home in the world. It helps to be able to say: this is my story, this is who I am.

I wonder what he means by secular alternatives waning. Facebook is jam packed with groups to join. Be fans of actors, films, restaurants, shoelaces (to show I’m not kidding). Admit a love of vaudeville and find a thousand others who can claim the same. Think of an interest, slap it into Google and a club or community likely exists. We can all unite in shared interest-based identities independent of faith or religious upbringing.

But there is a great danger, and those of us who are religious must be honest about it. Far too often in the past religious identities have been a source of strife. Identity can lead us to divide the world into two, Us and Them, the children of light against the children of darkness.

I agree. It’d help a lot to drop light and dark or good and evil to explain people and what they do or think. Quit sorting people as if good people are always going to be completely good and bad people are always going to be completely bad. Life rarely works that way beyond religious ideologies.

The great unsolved problem facing these religions is: can we make space for one another?

I think we can. The paradox of identity is that it is precisely when we speak from within our particularity that we strike a chord with others of different particularity. You don’t have to be French to love Flaubert, Russian to admire Tolstoy, or Japanese to enjoy a haiku. Affirming our identity need not involve negating anyone else’s.

Which adds to what I wrote earlier. Nice to see agreement on something for a change. It seems to be a rare thing with me. Very nice.

The list is a long one, and quite serious in tone. However, today it’s this one standing out most:

4. Search for what is true, even if it makes you uncomfortable.

On Saturday I’m going to write about a movie I watched regarding this very thing. I’d do it now but it’s a film that deserves more than a random smattering of thoughts slapped down and I’m still in the midst of processing what I got out of it. A rare experience with movies, I have to say.

Nathan Fillion sure has a lot of followers. Anyway, I love his bio:

It costs nothing to say something kind. Even less to shut up altogether.

Good advice, Sir. Good advice.

How tall is Penn Jillette? He’s all awesome.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

I totally agree with this sentiment. I would rather live my life knowing I’ve done all right by people than deal with folks bearing grudges. Some of that I can’t help, I suppose. No doubt my dislike of some beliefs might bother people enough to condemn me to a place I don’t believe exists.

Reminder to those people: hell can only be a useful fear tactic for people who believe there’s a heaven they might miss out on. For anyone else, it’s a very empty threat.

H/T to Kat for having the quote on her sidebar.

This is an impromptu part two related to the previous quote. This from Helium.com comparing the differences between Jules Verne and H.G. Wells:

Verne is one of the more optimistic science fiction writers of all time and despite the drama of his writing, books like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon and Journey to the Center of the earth all used science as a method of empowering the characters. He looked at science and saw a blossoming of wondrous possibilities, this most evidenced in Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Whereas with Verne it was about romance and character driven dramas, Wells would use the medium to make a point about mankind itself. He criticizes the stratification in English society in his book the time Machine and in The War of the Worlds he seems to imply our technology will destroy us. Before it was even thought of he predicted the splitting of the atom. When this happened he was horrified… he encouraged governments not to pursue the technology but they did anyway… he died a bitter man.

So it’s not like the debate between futuristic formats is a new one. And I think it was Robert J. Sawyer who’d mentioned in a talk that Wells is better known (better liked?) specifically because he didn’t throw so much technical jargon into his books. Verne’s tech-specific accuracies are all well and good, but the science in them is somewhat dated now and a description of every exact measurement of the 20,000 Leagues vessel’s every gear and knob shouldn’t be the reason people want to read the book, unless they’re really into victorian steampunk and want to build the thing.

There will always be ones who are in it for the science, and others who’ll be in it for the plot and the people. I don’t think one way is more right than the other.

State what you need and the universe delivers..

Charles Stross explains his hatred of space opera like Trek and Battlestar and offers up his thoughts on what makes real science fiction the good stuff:

I use a somewhat more complex process to develop SF. I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don’t have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects. … And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.

Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it’s background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o’war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly. (The only casualty would be the eyeball candy — big gunpowder explosions be damned, modern audiences want squids in space, with added lasers!)

Not if the Captain in question gets to be Johnny Depp…

Ah well, good point he makes anyway. What’s the purpose, a romance set in space, or a space adventure that might include a romance when people tire of blowing up aliens?

Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast
by Robert Herrick

Have ye beheld (with much delight)
A red rose peeping through a white?
Or else a cherry (double graced)
Within a lily? Centre placed?
Or ever marked the pretty beam
A strawberry shows half drowned in cream?
Or seen rich rubies blushing through
A pure smooth pearl, and orient too?
So like to this, nay all the rest,
Is each neat niplet of her breast.

(found here)

Another day not on my fucking godforsaken calendar…

So, some quotes nicked from thinkexist.com

Robert J. Ingorsoll:
“This crime called blasphemy was invented by priests for the purpose of defending doctrines not able to take care of themselves”

Thomas Paine:
“Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities”

G.K. Chesterton:
“Blasphemy itself could not survive religion; if anyone doubts that, let him try to blaspheme Odin.”

And a couple from Famous Quotes and Authors

T.S. Eliot:
“Genuine blasphemy, genuine in spirit and not purely verbal, is the product of partial belief, and is as impossible to the complete atheist as to the perfect Christian.”

Anonymous:
“There is but one blasphemy, and that is injustice.”