Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa

One of the earliest prayers a young child being raised in Catholicism learns is the Act of Contrition. The form in which I learned it was,

Oh my God, I am sorry for my sins.
In choosing to sin and failing to do good
I have sinned against You and your Church.
I firmly intend, with the help of your Son,
To make up for my sins and to love as I should.
Amen.

(Pointlessly capitalized nouns sic.) Older English-speaking folks will have learned a translation with more grandiose diction, and there are plenty of other variations, but all of the translations come from the same Latin original, and they all have the same import.

The reason this prayer is important is that it's a standard part of the sacrament of Confession (also known as Penance or Reconciliation), in which one privately and, these days, anonymously confesses one's sins to the Catholic god (as represented by a priest), expresses contrition, and receives absolution, often coupled with a penance. This absolution is necessary in order to be in good standing to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion (Eucharist), which is the central sacrament of membership in the community of the Catholic Church. Children are expected to begin receiving this sacrament at a very young age, around first grade, well before they are confirmed as adult members of the faith through the sacrament of Confirmation.

Children's first experience of Communion is often a very big deal, with a special Mass for each cohort of kids, who wear adorable little white dresses and suits and often even get parties and presents. But before they can make their First Communion, each must learn and perform the rite of Confession. Because the Catholic Church strongly encourages infant baptism, this first Confession is often the first Catholic sacrament in which a child consciously participates, their first experience of "choosing" at some level to become Catholics.

Whatever else I may have to say about the Catholic Church, or about the details of how this specific sacrament is imposed, I think there is a great deal of potential value in having a process for regularly and deliberately examining and honestly and forthrightly owning up to one's failings. The penance portion of the process also has potential value as a means of committing to specific and effective actions designed to repair as much as possible of the harm cause by those failings, and to help one avoid repeating the same errors in the future.

However, my own experience of Reconciliation as a small child was that it was not implemented in a terribly effective way. I would Confess to hitting my younger brother when he annoyed me, and the priest would ask me if I was sorry. Of course I was sorry when Drew wasn't right there being an annoying jerk who needed hitting, and so the priest would tell me to try not to do it again and to think about what I'd done and maybe apologize to Drew and say some prayers. And that was it. The repentance was superficial, even though I meant it when I said it, the remedy was symbolic, and the next time Drew took something that I thought he didn't have a right to or said something that made me mad I was right back to hitting him again.

Unfortunately, it's not just at the individual level that the Catholic sacrament of Reconciliation is poorly implemented. The most scandalous part of the child abuse revelations which have rocked the Church in recent years is not the fact that children were abused. While the harm done to the victims is indeed unconscionable, the original acts of abuse were crimes committed by individual men and women, not by the Catholic Church as an organization, and it is those men and women who ultimately bear the responsibility for what they did.

Instead, the truly terrible and damning thing about these abuse cases is that officials of the Catholic Church, quite possibly ranging all the way up to the man who now occupies the Chair of Peter, engaged in a consistent program of turning a blind eye to and covering up the sexual abuse of children, while sometimes even condoning or commanding abuses of other kinds. The treatment of residents in Ireland's Magdalene laundries and Catholic-run orphanages and industrial schools are among the more infamous of these other abuses, but the past few months have brought news of whole different classes of victims, such as the more than a million young unwed mothers who, from the 1940s through the 1990s, were coerced by Catholic organizations into giving up their children for adoption in Spain and elsewhere, and the at least ten young Dutch boys who were forcibly surgically castrated in Catholic psychiatric institutions in the 1950s after reporting that they had been abused by priests. The nature of these cases leaves little room for doubt that there are many others which have not yet been revealed, and I am certain that there are also other known cases which I have neglected to list here.

Even worse, as these abuses have finally begun to be brought to light over the last decade or so, and as more and more victims have gained the courage to speak out, the continued response of the Vatican has not been to accept full and unreserved responsibility for its institutional failings and to implement effective reforms to prevent such things from ever happening again, but rather to stonewall and deny the abuses for as long as possible, to fight vigorously against any possibility that the Church or its individual leaders might suffer any consequences from these crimes, and to issue tepid and meaningless apologies absolving "the Church as such" from any guilt, and blaming "Her sinful children" for everything, and bemoaning the harm these scandals have caused to the Church. Even my childish attempts at repentance for hitting my brother were more meaningful and effective than the half-hearted reconciliations offered by Joseph Ratzinger, the man who wants to lay claim to supernaturally granted moral authority over the entire planet, and by his predecessor, the ridiculously rapidly beatified Karol Wojtyła. It took me less than a decade from my first Confession to the last time I hit anyone in anger. This was perhaps a small and slow repentance by any reasonable standard, but it was also a real one — anyone who meets me now can have confidence that I have overcome that failing and will not hit them simply because they annoy me. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, still has not even progressed beyond the stage of denying that the Church itself, the Church as such, has failed in its stated mission to bring good to the world in a very serious and very devastating way. Joseph Ratzinger's public statements suggest that, when enters the Confessional, it is highly doubtful that he even recognizes his behavior in this matter as a sin to which he should Confess.

Why do I claim that these failings are failings of the Church as such, and not merely those of "Her sinful children"? In part, I say this because the structure of Catholicism itself is what turned these abuses from a few isolated and quickly-halted crimes by a handful of rogue priests into the all-consuming scandal it has become. Catholicism is authoritarian and hierarchical, and the Church as an institution is central to the religion. The aura of spiritual power and holiness which is accorded to priests makes it easy for a predator priest to awe a child into submission, and easy for parents and other adults to deny the evidence before their own eyes that a child is being abused, or even to blame the child as a liar or a tempter. The priests themselves are the arbiters of morality in the community, so how can a mere layperson stand in judgment over them? And even if the parents do gather the courage to challenge the abuse and take their case to the bishop, the centrality of the institution of the Church rather than the individual conscience of the believer, and the elevation of the Catholic Church above any secular authority, make it all too easy for a bishop to convince himself that protecting the one holy catholic and apostolic Church from the poison of scandal is a nobler task than seeing abusive priests prosecuted and removed from their posts. Instead, he makes the problem go away by shuffling the priest off to another parish where he can pretend to himself that the abuse will not recur, and then he uses his spiritual authority to forcefully declare the matter closed. And thus a priest who might have abused only one or two children if his actions had been taken seriously and he had been referred to secular authorities like any other child abuser instead abuses tens or even hundreds of children and is never called to account for his crimes.

In many of the abuse cases, Catholicism's deeply conflicted attitude towards sexuality also played a strong role in creating and perpetuating the problem. When even fairly vanilla mainstream heterosexual desires (even desires one never acts on) are seen as a misuse of God's gift of sexuality if they're directed at anyone other than one's contraception-free spouse, and when sexual purity is presented as a central component of life in Christ, it's difficult for anyone other than a true asexual to avoid becoming pretty messed up about sex. You get kids going to seminary before they've developed an adult relationship to their own sexuality and then learning to suppress it instead of enjoy it, so that later it comes out in harmful ways. You get people who go into the priesthood because they have sexual urges they're not comfortable with, so they believe this means they're called to celibacy, but then they're never able to forthrightly discuss their problematic urges without sacrificing their belief in themselves as pure, and so they never seek the help that might have prevented them from becoming abusers. You get abuse victims who feel defiled by and ashamed about the abuse, who feel as though they must have brought it upon themselves through some innate impurity, and who rightfully fear being seen as impure if they tell anyone what was done to them. You get supposedly responsible adults treating those abuse victims as if they were at fault, are defiled and should be ashamed. You get people like the women imprisoned in the Magdalene laundries, the young unwed mothers forced to give up their children, and the Dutch boys who were castrated, all being victimized for no reason other than their supposed sexual impurity. In short, you get decades of widespread and spiraling abuse, shame, and coverups, all because of an inhumane fixation on sexual purity.

And even with all of these crimes to its account, the Catholic Church is not satisfied to simply deny the role its insistence on the importance of authority, hierarchy, institutional primacy, and sexual purity has played in creating and perpetuating the climate which fostered these abuses. Instead, faced with the existential threat created by worldwide condemnation of its abuses, the Church has doubled down on every single one of the characteristics that caused the problems in the first place. From open declarations to African audiences that condoms make the problem of AIDS worse, in defiance of all credible science on the subject (since walked back slightly, grudgingly, and in a weirdly specific way, but still pretty bad) to outright interference by bishops in American politics in the name of restricting women's reproductive rights, sexual purity seems to have become the defining issue of today's Catholic Church. And even in its Summary of the Findings of the Apostolic Visitation in Ireland, the document in which it purports to address the abuse scandals there, the Church couldn't resist a chance to reassert its authority by condemning those who have the audacity to "hold theological opinions at variance with the teachings of the Magisterium", calling the presence of such people a "serious situation" which "requires particular attention", and warning them that "dissent from the fundamental teachings of the Church is not the authentic path towards renewal". This is not the attitude of an organization humbly cognizant of its imperfections and seeking to amend and atone for its errors.

I am often told by defenders of the Catholic Church that its insistence on authority and hierarchy is essential to preserving the purity and truth of its message, but it seems to me that a message that leads to consequences like these is a message which is corrupt and false, and which needs to be abandoned, not preserved. Of course, there is a response to this too: the Church is good (just look at all the hospitals, orphanages, etc.), but it's run by imperfect humans, and so it's up to people of good will to help perfect it, but we have to be patient because the Church deliberately changes slowly so as not to fall victim to the vagaries of intellectual fashion. But again, I look at all of the crimes listed above, many of which took place in Catholic hospitals and orphanages, and suddenly the Church's good works don't look so good any more. And I look at the Church's pace of change, and what I see is an institution which claims moral leadership over the whole world and yet which lags behind every Western nation on this planet in terms of recognizing the basic human rights of women and gays and anyone who doesn't conform to their assigned gender role, and which, instead of recognizing that it's behind and scrambling to catch up, is kicking and screaming as hard as it can against any attempts to drag it into the modern era, while doing its damnedest to drag the rest of us back into the Dark Ages of its heyday.

It seems to me that it is well past time for Catholics of good will to figure out what even I was forced to admit back in 2005 when Ratzinger was chosen as Pope: the Catholic Church isn't going to change because it doesn't want to change. It doesn't want to humble itself and admit guilt. It has become, in the minds of its leadership, so strongly identified with the exact traits which have caused it to fail humanity so colossally and so horrifyingly throughout human history, that no Pope will ever truly meaningfully atone for any crime committed by the Church until it is far too late to do the victims of that crime the tiniest scrap of good. Perhaps in 400 years or so, the victims of recent abuses will receive an apology as timely and unreserved as that offered to Galileo, but this hardly seems to befit the moral pretensions of an organization which every Sunday commands its adherents to recite,

I confess to almighty God,
And to you, my brothers and sisters,
That I have sinned through my own fault,
In my thoughts and in my words,
In what I have done and what I have failed to do,
And I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin,
All the Angels and Saints,
And you, my brothers and sisters,
To pray for me to the Lord our God.
Amen.

And I tell you this truly, if you still consider yourself to be part of the Catholic Church, if you still contribute to its claims of multitudes of adherents and supreme moral relevance by offering your spiritual fealty to the Pope, you are part of the problem too. If you want to stop being part of the problem, your first step ought to be to say the words the Pope won't:

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

And your second step ought to be to stop associating with the organization that did all of these terrible things, and that continues to defile its adherents with the taint of its willful refusal to accept full responsibility for its crimes.

Here's what I did a few years back: a "formal act of defection from the Catholic Church", which was a real thing that they'd let you do at the time. I've got a note on my baptismal record and everything now, about how I've rejected my membership in the Church freely and without force of any kind and have thereby become ineligible to receive the Catholic sacraments and am no longer entitled to a Catholic burial. Unfortunately, they changed the system when they realized that people were starting to like it too much. But you can still become effectively excommunicated by openly and forthrightly rejecting the Catholic Church, and you might even still be able to get some kind of unofficial note on your baptismal record if you contact the right people and are persistent enough. It's worth doing. It feels good. It sets you free of the lies and the oppressive authority and the snoopy old men telling you what you can and can't do in the bedroom. And it means you're one step closer to being part of the solution rather than part of the problem, one step closer to repairing the damage instead of helping perpetuate it.

That's a true act of contrition.

Guns didn't kill Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin

I need to get a few preliminaries out of the way before I get down to the meat of this issue, so that there's no possibility of confusion.

To begin with, I'm generally not opposed to private ownership of firearms. I know plenty of people who own handguns and other such weapons, and I know that for the most part they're sane and responsible and are unlikely to do anything stupid with them. I've enjoyed the times they've let me go shooting with them, and I think that knowing how to use a gun safely is an interesting and worthwhile skill to acquire, especially for those of us who were raised without firearms in the house and who therefore find them excessively frightening and bewildering. I even have some sympathy for the notion of having a few guns in one's home (kept in good working order, practiced with regularly to ensure that one knows how to use them skillfully and safely, and carefully hidden away from the possibility of casual misuse), just on the slim chance that one may some day need to fight off the zombie hordes or deal with some other extreme worst case scenario.

I'm also familiar with the Second Amendment, and I respect the reasoning behind its inclusion in the Bill of Rights, although I'd have a lot more sympathy for its more jingoistic partisans if they'd actually bother to read the first two clauses and incorporate them into their understanding of how the Amendment should be implemented.

On the other hand, the notion some hold that the few scattered handgun and rifle owners in the populace are actually providing an effective defense against government tyranny is a laughable action movie fantasy at best. We're far better defended from brute military coercion by the collective conscience of our citizen soldiers, our fundamental cultural value of respect for the rule of law, and the fact that the powerful in this country have discovered that it's far more efficient for their purposes to manipulate the public through politics rather than through force of arms. If things go so horribly wrong that all of this fails us, a handful of wannabe Rambos with tricked-out semiautomatics isn't gonna make much of a difference against the unconstrained might of the world's most powerful military force.

But by far the worst argument for private gun ownership is the self-protection argument. I'm not going to claim that a gun can never serve a valid self-protection purpose, because of course one can come up with plenty of scenarios where it would be beneficial, and probably even point to some number of real life cases where a civilian with a gun has saved the day. But all too often, what happens instead is that introducing one or more readily accessible guns into a situation makes matters far worse, turning a bad day into a tragic one.

And here's where we get to the main point of this post. The thing is, a gun, in addition to all of its other fine properties, is also an exceptionally high-quality stupidity amplifier. You can pump a couple of bullets into the vague scary dark shape climbing in your bedroom window before you're awake enough to recognize it as a late-returning spouse who forgot hir key, or a drunk friend playing a foolish joke. You can pull out your .45 and pop a cap in the ass of the unbelievable fuckstick who caused an accident by cutting you off in traffic and then had the balls to leap from his car screaming at you like it was your fault, all before you think twice about whether you really want to escalate your totaled car into a decade or more in jail. Or, if you're an unbelievably racist trigger-happy self-appointed neighborhood watchman, you can end up murdering a skinny seventeen-year-old kid carrying nothing other than a few bucks, a bottle of iced tea, and a bag of candy for his little brother, all because he terrified you by being an unfamiliar black person in a mostly white neighborhood.

If you think I am exaggerating what happened to Trayvon Martin, you really really need to listen to the 9-1-1 tapes of the incident, particularly George Zimmerman's own call (the first of the recordings listed in that article). He's absolutely convinced that "something's wrong with" Martin, and that Martin is a terrifying threat, and is completely oblivious to the fact that his own stalking of the smaller, younger Martin is far more threatening behavior than anything Martin was doing.

Under ordinary circumstances, Zimmerman's fear might have kept him away from Martin, and encouraged him to simply follow at a distance. The cops would have shown up and Martin would've been hassled, another innocent black kid once again reminded by racist profiling that the color of his skin means he can't even walk down the street without trouble. But in all likelihood he would've walked away alive and mostly physically unharmed. Unfortunately, Zimmerman had a gun in his pocket, and it appears that that gun gave him the courage not just to follow and terrify Martin, but also to approach him. Now, whatever happened at that point, whether the smaller, younger Martin was really foolish enough or desperate enough to attack a man 100 lbs heavier than him, or whether Zimmerman struck first, there was a fight. And if there had not been a gun involved, Martin might well have been beaten up, but he would almost certainly have lived. But Zimmerman had a gun, and so as soon as he felt threatened, whether from an attack by Martin or from Martin fighting back against his own attack, that was the end of it. Trayvon Martin was dead and George Zimmerman was a murderer before any of the neighbors who heard the scuffle could even think to intervene, and well before the police had any chance of stepping in.

Now there may be some people out there who will be oblivious enough to claim that if Trayvon Martin had had his own gun, he could have defended himself, but I hope that most sensible people can recognize the horrifying absurdity of this. For one thing, a gun doesn't stop bullets, so having your own gun is no guarantee you won't get shot. At best, it can act as a deterrent, and at worst, if Martin was quicker on the trigger, it simply would have changed who got shot. And let's now imagine that Martin did indeed manage to either deter Zimmerman at gunpoint, or shoot him. What do you imagine would happen to a young black man unknown to the police caught holding a white man they did know at gunpoint, or standing over his body, especially given that these were police who were all too happy to let Zimmerman go without even taking him to the station for questioning once he reassured them that the young black man that he'd shot had deserved it? Martin might well have died that night anyway, at the hands of the police instead of Zimmerman, and everyone would've just shrugged and said he was asking for it by being so foolish as to pull a gun, because, really, what did he think would happen, and why did he have a gun anyway if he was as nice a boy as his family says he was? The reality is that black men with guns are held to a far different standard than white men like George Zimmerman. A white man with a gun is just trying to defend himself, a black man with a gun is a dangerous criminal.

Neighbors with guns couldn't have helped either. It's very clear from the 9-1-1 tapes that by the time anyone else understood what was happening, it was far too late to save Trayvon Martin's life. One caller became nearly hysterical with grief and horror upon realizing that someone had been killed and that no one had gone to help him in time.

And that's the problem with guns — they make tragedies out of stupidities before anyone has time for second thoughts, before anyone has time to rush in and save the day. Trayvon Martin was just a kid trying to get a snack for his brother, frightened by a creepy stranger who chose to follow him, and trying to defend himself. George Zimmerman was a racist fantasizing about heroically defending his neighborhood from criminals, who thought he'd finally found a criminal to fight, and who leapt into that fight with a novice's lethal mixture of nervousness and eagerness. The gun in Zimmerman's hand meant that the day ended with a corpse, a grieving family, and a murderer, rather than with Zimmerman slinking off sheepishly in his truck and Martin going home safely to give his little brother his candy.

So, as I said above, I'm not necessarily opposed to private ownership of firearms, but incidents like this point out real problems with the way that many gun rights partisans all too often address the issue. It's important to remember here that by all accounts Zimmerman owned and carried his gun legally, and many have even suggested that Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law means that it may not be possible to prosecute him for shooting Martin (although as far as I understand it, that law requires a person's fear of serious injury or death to themselves or others to be reasonable, and it's pretty clear that Zimmerman's fear of Martin was in no way reasonable).

But many firearm advocates oppose even licensing requirements, and will vehemently shout down any discussion of mandatory training, psychological profiling, or other requirements that might help ensure that incompetent or trigger-happy idiots like Zimmerman won't be walking around with gunpowder courage in their pockets. In fact, it's hard to avoid the impression that a substantial percentage of gun rights advocates are enthusiastic about their firearms precisely because they want to be able to do the kind of thing that Zimmerman did (although of course they would never be so jittery and trigger-happy as to shoot the wrong person, they'd be cool and collected and making clever wisecracks as they take out the bad guys one by one with carefully-aimed headshots).

And then there's the racism thing. Black people find themselves at the wrong end of guns far more often than white people, and I suspect that that's a big part of the reason that there are a lot more white people who are vehement gun advocates than black people. When you're in a relatively privileged and powerful position in society, it's easy to treat guns as a hobby, or to see them as guarantors of your security. When you're on the other side of things, when even a thirteen-year-old kid can end up staring down the barrel of a police officer's weapon because of his skin color, when your neighborhoods are marred by gun violence on a regular basis, when a self-proclaimed neighborhood watch member can get away with shooting an unarmed and smaller teenager in supposed self-defense, all because the shooter is white and the teenager is black, that's when you start to see an armed society as brutal society rather than a polite one.

I'm not going to say that it's time to repeal the Second Amendment. I'm not going to say that it's time for everyone to melt their pistols down for plowshares. But I am going to say that those who prize their gun rights over everything else need to think very very hard about what happened to Trayvon Martin, and about how Trayvon's little brother feels knowing that Trayvon died to buy him a bag of Skittles, and you need to explain to the rest of us what you and your allies are going to do to make sure that this never ever happens again.

Update: Shortly after writing this post, I learned that George Zimmerman's family is defending him against charges of racism by pointing out that he is of partially Hispanic ancestry, through his mother. However, I don't really think this substantially affects anything I wrote. After all, people from minority ethnic groups can easily absorb the racist attitudes of the surrounding culture, both against other minority ethnic groups and even against their own group, just as women can be astoundingly sexist. Zimmerman's 9-1-1 call linked above should make the racism underlying his pursuit of Trayvon Martin plain to anyone not steeped in willful denial. Furthermore, the police report of the shooting identifies Zimmerman as white, meaning that regardless of what he considers his own ethnicity to be, as far as the police were concerned he was a white man who had shot a black man. And that makes a great deal of difference.

I checked Google Images for pictures of Zimmerman after reading all of this, and the most common one seems to be a mugshot from his 2005 run-in with the police, although now there's also this one. In the mugshot, he looks like a big, sad-eyed kid, while in the newer image he's friendly and smiling. He doesn't look like a bad guy, and probably in many ways he isn't. But regardless of whether he is ever convicted of anything, his obsession with policing his neighborhood, his eagerness to jump to conclusions about a black kid he didn't know, and the fact that he had a gun ready to hand at the worst possible moment, have made him a murderer.

George Zimmerman's gun didn't save anyone's life that day, it just ended Trayvon Martin's. And even Zimmerman himself almost certainly would have been better off if he had left his piece at home. To anyone reading this who carries a gun "for self-protection" and who is not motivated to do so by a very specific and immediate personal threat, I sincerely hope that you will think about the trap that George Zimmerman set for himself and for Trayvon Martin, and that you will do whatever you can to ensure that you don't do the same.

"Oops, we fucked up"

When one points out religion's history of violence and atrocity (the Inquisition, the Crusades, Sharia law, sati, etc.) a lot of religious people will try to defend their faith by bringing up things like Social Darwinism/eugenics, the Reign of Terror, Stalinism, the Cultural Revolution, and so forth, and attempting to lay them to the account of science and reason, saying, "See? Atheist 'fundamentalists' are just as bad as religious ones." And, really, this is bullshit for a lot of reasons. F'rex, there's no necessary linkage between the notion that one should only believe shit based on evidence and the notion that one should inflict forced conversions and other violence and oppression on those who disagree with one's political philosophy or who are otherwise perceived as undesirable or inferior. In fact, I'd suggest (although I won't argue it here) that these two notions are actually somewhat antithetical. On the other hand, it can easily be argued that certain types of evidence-free claims about deities and afterlives do provide a pretty direct mandate for violence against and oppression of unbelievers, and even for oppression of those believers who don't happen to be powerful and male. It should be pretty clear to anyone who's not completely mired in religion-soaked denial that all of these so-called atheist or rationalist atrocities had more to do with totalizing utopian ideology than evidence-based reasoning and methodological naturalism. And, of course, this is all ignoring the thing about how religion lays claim to a mantle of moral superiority, so even if it were an accurate canard to pin these crimes on the rejection of religion, it turns out that saying, "You atheists are just as bad as us," isn't really such a terribly great defense of religion as it might appear at first blush.

But it occurred to me today that even if it weren't bullshit, even if Robespierre and Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Pol Pot and others really were all the direct, incontrovertible fault of Science and Scientists and Atheism and Atheists as a whole, it still isn't actually a very good argument against science and reason to point this out. 'Cause the thing is, the whole fucking point of science is to look at the world, to figure out what's true and what's not and what works and what doesn't and what makes people happy and what makes them miserable, and then to use that knowledge to do things better the next time around. Science is fundamentally designed around the principle that we don't have to adhere to and revere everything that was ever done by our forebears ever, and, in fact, we're supposed to question what was done in the past so that we can possibly improve upon it in the future. We can look at all of that shit that was done by all of those people who were supposedly inspired to terrible deeds by Science and say, "Y'know what? All of those things were giant horrifying mistakes. We went and used stuff we learned from science and reasoning to make things worse instead of better, which is exactly the opposite of the point here, so let's never do anything like what those folks did again." And then we go and we look in detail at exactly where we went off the rails and we scratch all those actions right out of our playbook and use the evidence-based reasoning our smart little monkey-brains are so good at to figure out how to make sure those things stay scratched-out.

Religion doesn't do this. Instead, religion is allabout maintaining unchanging traditions based on the eternal authority of revelations handed down from our ancestors. When we start to discover that those eternal revelations are fucking our shit right up, we are given exactly two options if we want to maintain our adherence to our proclaimed religion. First, we can talk ourselves blue in the face pretending that shit isn't being fucked up (no, nobody's suffering from this, look, see, here are members of the group we're oppressing who Stockholm-syndromically love their chains, can't you see that anyone who complains is clearly a tool of the Adversary?), or, second, we can talk ourselves blue in the face pretending that whatever actions we have to take to prevent shit from being fucked up were actually the true revelation all along and no, really, this is the way it's always been, never mind the temple scribes furiously rewriting history in some musty old back room. Either way, there's a lot of cyanosis going on, and not so much oxygen left to keep our brains chugging along the way they oughta. Either way, it's a big horrible mess, and it's hard not to wonder if it wouldn't make all of our lives a hell of a lot simpler if religious leaders could just learn the four simple words that keep modern science going forward, the same four words that we all use every day in our own lives to win the opportunity to change and better ourselves rather than being forever bound to defend and perpetuate the mistakes of our past:

"Oops, we fucked up."

Murderers

You may have already seen this:

One Town's War on Gay Teens

I've been hearing bits and pieces of this story for a while now, and, while it's smaller in scale than many religious abuses, this one hits particularly close to home for me. I've been comparatively restrained on this blog so far (for me, at least), trying to be at least somewhat mindful of the fact that a few of the people whom I disagree with on many of these culture war issues and who may wind up reading this are people whom I love and don't really want to pick screaming arguments with. But on this issue, at least, I'm done with that shit. As far as I'm concerned, anybody who is not with me on this subject is perilously close to forfeiting their right to receive even the mildest courtesy from me ever again.

So, to everyone from the Pope on down who still thinks that it's more important to pontificate about the will of some Bronze Age sky god than it was to protect the kids in this story, I have only three words:

Fuck you assholes.

For the rest of you, many of you may know that I was tormented mercilessly by my peers when I was younger, but unlike some of the students in this story I was fortunate enough to escape the public school system before I got to high school, and that shit still left some pretty deep marks. I had at least one classmate in elementary school who very nearly didn't survive the way she was treated. I have nothing but contempt for adults who stand silent when Lord of the Flies is re-enacted right in front of them, and that contempt is only redoubled when those adults blame the victims for their differences, rather than blaming the bullies for their brutality.

For those of you who love me, think on this --- these kids were essentially murdered by their peers simply for being a little bit different from the rest. It's not all that divergent from how my peers treated me, and when adults and the larger society join in the cheerful condemnation of such harmless differences, as if they were major moral failings, the kids have even fewer places to turn for aid then I did (and I had precious few — apparently being openly weird and then getting mad when people pick on you for it means that you're the one who needs counseling, rather than the assholes who won't leave you the hell alone). All of these kids had parents who loved them, some had parents who openly and warmly accepted them for who they were rather than treating them as compromised or damaged by their sexuality (or the other students' allegations about their sexuality), and that still wasn't enough to protect them from the murderous climate created by religiously-justified homophobia.

Every single person in this country who stands opposed to equal acceptance of LBGTQ people, their loves, their lives, or their freedoms, has these kids' blood on their hands, and I can't help but feel that they'd gladly sacrifice me and every other weird little kid in the world too, as long as it let them bask just another moment longer in their smug illusion of religious superiority and perfect authoritarian conformity. So to them, I'll say it one more time, just to be sure it sticks:

Fuck you assholes. It would almost be worth there being a hell, if it were only guaranteed that you would go there.

My Ethics

This is a follow-on to my previous "Why I Am an Atheist" podcast post. In that post I explained, in a personal and unscripted fashion, how I became an atheist. The primary purpose was to put a human face and voice on my story, to show that atheism can be a calm, thoughtful, humane, and mature stance, and that it's not simply about anger at whichever deity you happen to believe in, or about being a condescending overintellectualizing jerkoff who thinks I'm better than you, as many religious people seem to fear.

I made the recording with my family in mind. Though we love each other very much, our life experiences don't completely overlap and I know that there are a lot of aspects of my journey to atheism and a scientific worldview that I haven't managed to completely share with them, which sometimes leads to confusion and frustration. My hope was to give them a bit more of a taste of what they have missed so that we can talk about it and understand each other better.

I'm not sure that they've had a chance to listen to it yet, but after I posted it a friend pointed out that, even more than the question of why people become atheists in the first place, confusion about secular ethics is often a daunting obstacle for religious people trying to come to terms with atheism. I was planning to wait on posting a second installment until I got feedback from my target audience about the first piece, but the need to speak my piece finally got the better of me tonight and I decided that it was time, for better or for worse, to record my maunderings on ethics and get them out there already, on the off chance that somebody will actually find this kind of thing useful.

As before, I'm not going to claim that this is a pristine, polished intellectual argument for my position. It's a personal expression, unscripted, recorded as it tumbled out of my mouth with no edits, and that's it. I can't claim to speak for any other atheist, although there are probably many who will agree with much of what I've said but not necessarily all of it. Probably a fair number of them could say it with more solid citations and greater logical crispness, too, but I like to think that the sheer rawness of these efforts of mine might be valuable along a slightly different axis.

So, in any case, enjoy, for what it's worth.

MP3 download: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~orion/My_Ethics.mp3

Why I Am an Atheist

The YouTube video and MP3 link below present an audio recording I made primarily for my family, but I'd like to think that perhaps it will be of interest to someone else too, so I'm putting it here. In the recording, I try to explain, in a friendly, non-argumentative way, how I became an atheist and what some of the implications of that are. This was somewhat inspired by PZ Myers' "Why I Am an Atheist" series of reader-submitted stories, but I wanted to do this in audio rather than text because I want my audience to hear my tone of voice and be able to know that this is a sincere self-explanation, with all of the emotion and ums and ahs and hesitations and fumbling that entails. In writing it's too easy for me to fall into a sort of didactic, professorial style, and I know that some people find that condescending when such personal issues are in play. For the same reason, I did not work from a prepared script, and I did a single take with no editing, so there are a few rough spots and pauses, but hopefully it is still listenable overall. It *is* over an hour long, unfortunately, and I apologize if this tries the patience of any of my target listeners.

I also want to mention that I didn't really make this as a formal, intellectually rigorous argument for atheism. I like to think that I *can* do that at need (after all, I spent years refining and validating my current approach), but that wasn't the appropriate style for this recording. So if you think that some of my statements here are a bit fuzzy about the edges or need a bit of work, rest assured that I do know that, but I left things they way they came unplanned from my mouth because I was trying to capture the emotional valence of the process. The argument of this video is not primarily that atheism is true, but that my atheism, at least, is sincere, thoughtful, mature, and humane. I think that many religious people don't have a lot of experience with atheism, so they hold on to stereotypes about it instead, and I want to try to show that at least some of those stereotypes are not entirely accurate.

Anyway, I hope this is useful to at least a few people. Good luck.

MP3 download: http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~orion/Why_I_Am_an_Atheist.mp3

What to do when your cat is lost

I should start by saying that I have no professional expertise in locating lost cats. (Does anyone?) All I have is far more experience than I would have preferred. Of course, since all the lost cats I've found are my own cats, I have no idea how well my experience generalizes to cats I have had no hand in raising, but I don't think my cats are really all that unique, much as I love them and would never trade them for any others. As of today, each of my three cats has now gone missing at least once (Rumpelstiltskin has given me three separate scares that I can remember), and two of my parents' cats have been lost as well, and each time a little diligence and patience paid off.

Beloved

He was just a cat. He wasn't even my cat, or anybody's cat, just another scraggly scaredy blur diving under the parked cars whenever someone came too close. I don't even have a picture of him. I suppose I could have taken one this morning. It was the first time he was out in the open for long enough that I could have aimed a camera at him, but photography wasn't exactly at the forefront of my thoughts.

Boiling Part 2 - What is vaporization, exactly?

Commenter jfwlucy asked a whole stack of good questions on my earlier post, How does boiling work? I love talking about this stuff, so I found myself massively overflowing the comment box with my response and decided that I might as well just turn the whole thing into a couple of posts instead. So, first, here's the comment from jfwlucy:

I like it and I understand it but I have questions. You say the water at the bottom of the pot is vaporizing. Does that mean that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen that make up water are separating? What is inside a bubble formed during boiling if not that? Is it air that was mixed in with the water? Can you not boil some kinds of water as easily, then? And the honeycomb cells of the Rayleigh-Benard thing? What determines their size? Will they be similar in size whether the pan for boiling is eight inches in diameter or eight feet?

These are very good questions, and they open up a lot of different areas for discussion. Let me start by answering the question about what happens during the vaporization at the bottom of the pot, and I'll save the discussion of the Rayleigh-Bénard cells for the next post. The vaporization question is mostly a question about phase change, which is one of my favorite subjects, and which can become incredibly complicated and sophisticated and beautiful if you go deeply enough into it. Fortunately we don't have to go too far down the rabbit hole to answer your question, but there's still a lot of interesting substance to it!

More Cats

It's been a year of cats here in sunny Philadelphia.  First was Thumbelina, who came up to me looking for food while I was walking home one February night, and who has now been adopted by our neighbors.  Then, at the beginning of July, Moonshadow began giving me expectant looks from under the parked cars on our street.