Monthly Archives: October 2016

On Chick Tracts

25 Tuesday Oct 2016

Posted by in atheism, Childhood, Religion

≈ 18 Comments

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Chick Tracts

The God of Chick Tracts always struck me as something of an asshole.

I still remember the first time I encountered a Chick tract, but I can’t remember if it was the 4th or the 5th grade. I think I might have been hanging around after school for some reason. I do remember quite clearly that it was one of several that had been left scattered about the boy’s bathroom at my school.

This particular pamphlet contained a pretty generic story of a sinner who died and went to Hell. The pamphlet ended, as always, with a message of hope; we didn’t have to end as the character in the story did. Through Jesus we could be saved. In my charitable moments, I like to think that message of hope is the real point of these pamphlets, but frankly I think that might be giving a little too much benefit of the doubt. On that day it was clearly the message of fear that left its biggest impression on me. I remember the feeling of horror coursing up and down my spine as I read about the suffering of sinners damned to a lake of fire. The mere thought that this could be the world I was born into was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck and keep it there. The suffering itself and the cruelty of the being who would inflict it stuck with me for days, as did the cruelty of anyone who could say of such a thing that the source of it was good and worthy of praise.

It’s more than a little fitting that my first encounter with a Chick Tract was in a bathroom, because my whole world got a little creepier that day and I don’t think it’s recovered since.

I grew up in a household filled with the ideas of Spiritualism and Theosophy, essentially the forerunners of modern day New Age thinking. I’d heard of people who believed in Satan. I’d heard of people who believed in Hell. In retrospect, I must certainly have known many who believed in the things talked about in that pamphlet, but I hadn’t ever really talked to any of them about it. What I heard of God and Jesus was all love and kindness, and so those who literally believed in Hell were (much like Hell itself) a remote possibility to me. To my family, such people were largely a whipping boy, an image of someone who gets it wrong conjured up mostly for the purpose of telling a story about how more enlightened souls get it right.

The Chick tract was the first time such people became real to me. They became real to me in the most caricatured form imaginable. On that day, the worst things said of organized religion by the adults around me had not come close to the pure malice of the story I held in my hands. Someone had left this with the intent that children would find it and read about it. Whoever that person was believed quite firmly in Hell, and they believed in it strongly enough to want to share that message with others.

…with children.

It didn’t escape me that the chosen mode of delivery was less than honest. Leaving pamphlets in a children’s bathroom is more than a little underhanded, and this fact was the icky icing on a whole cake of ugly. So, there I sat with this pamphlet, trying to wrap my mind around the twin horrors of this vengeful God and the fact that some people actually do believe in Him, and whats more that they love him. Suffice to say those horrors outweighed the significance of any hope the pamphlet might have had to offer. The vision of Jesus might have been the end of the story, but it’s most memorable moment for me (and I suspect others) had clearly been the lake of fire.

Could the world really be so perverse? Could people really be so morbid as to think this way? Those are the questions I kept asking myself after encountering that first Chick Tract. It’s all I could think of for some time afterwards. Eventually, I managed to put the whole thing behind me, but not entirely. It was a bit like some of the dirty stories my friends were beginning to tell at that age, or images of odd porn that somehow crossed my path. I hoped one day to make sense of all these things, but for the time being I found them simply disturbing and I preferred not to think about them much. To me, that pamphlet had always been a kind of pornography.

It still is.

I understand the author of that pamphlet, Jack Chick, has recently passed away, and it reminded me of that day back in school. I don’t wish to celebrate his death, but I’m also quite aware that his passing will stimulate a surge in public interest regarding the man and his work. I take no pleasure in his passing, but I do think his life’s work is worthy of a comment or two, critical as mine most certainly will be.

The next time I had cause to consider Jack Chick’s particular brand of pornography came in the mid 80s when I and my friends took to playing Dungeons and Dragons. “Dark Dungeons” would be Jack Chick’s main contribution to the Satanic panic of the era. I don’t recall when I first became aware of it, but the story-line always struck me as both laughable and deceitful. I didn’t really become fully aware of Jack Chick himself (or of his operation) until I joined a few discussion boards back in the early 2000s. It was odd to me, a bit like learning the name of a creepy caller. This was the man who had written that story from back in my childhood. He was the author of those morbid images, and he was the source of that sick feeling I had upon seeing them.

Good to know.

…but also a little disconcerting.

I recall only one other Chick tract with any degree of significance to me. It was about Navajo Medicine Men. Chick portrayed them as Skinwalkers, thus conflating healers with monsters, and of course ending the whole matter with a familiar pitch to Jesus. It was no more insightful than the hack job Chick did on D&D.

I’ve encountered a few more of Chick’s pieces over the years, but not many have really stuck in my memory. The formula is simple. Some worldly interest will lead a person down a very dark path toward Satan, death, and Hell itself, but Christians will offer them salvation. In the end, the reader is invited to accept Jesus and be saved. I understand others have been doing the work for sometime now, but the essential formula remains largely unchanged. I always wonder at the choices Chick and his successors make in these stories. Do they really believe the details of their claims? It’s one thing, for example, to believe that Dungeons & Dragons is a bad influence on kids, and quite another to believe that it is literally run by a cult as a means of initiating children into arcane magical rites. This is what fascinates me most about such work today. It isn’t testimony to faith, but rather the myopic interest in sordid stories about actual people real world world institutions. What kind of mind spreads stories like this? And how did they decide to produce them? With or without evidence, I can’t help thinking the bottom line is the same. Someone is getting off on these narratives. Whatever their interest in selling the hope of Jesus, someone is reveling in the vision of sinfulness a little too much.

Don’t get me wrong; I have no particular reason to condemn anyone for pursuing their prurient interests, at least if you can do it without harming anyone. What bothers me in this instance is the bad faith and the lack of self-awareness, the sense that someone could play so happily in the very imagery they seek to condemn in others. Perhaps more to the point, what bothers me about Chick Tracts is the sense that this is a pleasure taken in sordidness of others’ lives, a kind of hope that other people might really be worse than you could possibly know, and of course a hope that they will suffer in the end. This sort of thing is not unique to Chick publications, unfortunately, and one can often find preachers indulging in a kind of proxy porn. I suppose that was Chick’s particular genius. He found a particularly vivid way to present that kind of material. Whether that is to his shame or his credit is of course another question. For me the answer is clear enough.

I wish I could find something better to say about Jack Chick than this. It is of course tempting to follow an age old wisdom and say nothing at all, but Chick’s passing reminds me of that moment all those many years ago in which I first found one of his publications. Don’t get me wrong. Worse things have happened to me than the discovery of that creepy pamphlet. Even still, I can’t help thinking it wasn’t a particularly positive experience. For me, that will always be Jack Chick’s legacy.

It isn’t a good one.

Utqiagvik By Any Other Denali

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by in Alaska, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

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barriow-signI live in Barrow, Alaska.

Wait a minute. No I don’t.

I live in Utqiagvik, Alaska.

It turns out that the town of Barrow has elected to change its name to Utqiagvik, or at least we have initiated the process for making this change.

Okay. It’ll take a day or three to get used to, and I can certainly understand some of the reasons for opposing it, but on the whole the recent name change of the town where I live is fine by me. It’s a native designation for a primarily native community. I’m not that involved in local politics, but suffice to say that this is a local decision I am happy to live with.

Thinking about it, a little bit, I am reminded of the way people responded to a similar change of names. It was a little over a year ago that President Obama announced the decision to change the name of Mt. McKinley to Denali. I recall immediately realizing that this would have little impact on the lives of Alaskans. To us, that was the name of the mountain, Denali, full stop. My favorite anecdote about that change came from a guy on Twitter who related the story of how he learned Denali was Mt. McKinley when he moved to the lower 48 and people began asking about it. He had lived in central Alaska for a couple years, and nobody that he noticed had ever called it Mt. McKinley. So, he simply hadn’t made the connection until non-Alaskans began talking to him about it. For myself, the only reason I knew it was Mt. McKinley was because one of the many pilots who called attention to Denali as we flew over actually bothered to mention that it was called Mt. McKinley in the lower 48. If I hadn’t heard that, I might not have made the connection myself. To me, it’s Denali. It’s been Denali since I moved up here, and near as I can tell that’s what the mountain is to Alaskans in general. Sure, there are some other native groups with names of their own for the mountain, but to most Alaskans it is Denali. So, that change shouldn’t have been all that controversial.

…or so one might think!

It wasn’t really all that surprising, but it was certainly worthy of an eye-roll to find how many people viewed the move as an instance of political correctness. Obama was, in their view, caving to the social justice warriors of the world and adopting a new term just to placate Alaska Natives. We all knew it was really Mt. McKinley, so the argument seemed to run, at least it should have been, and it was damned silly to find this mountain whose name we already know getting its named changed just to keep some odd group happy. Yawn! Heard that story from lots of folks who’ve never seen Denali, much less talked to Alaskans about it.

I suppose it wouldn’t occur to some folks that the indigenous people in the area might have thought the same thing when the mountain was renamed in honor of one of the nation’s caretaker Presidents. It certainly didn’t occur to some people that the name change might have had overwhelming support throughout the state at large, a marked preference for both native and non-native alike.

There was, as it happens a political angle to this. President Obama was then preparing a visit to Native Alaskan communities even as Shell Oil was preparing to drill in the arctic; the renaming might very well have served to provide a token gesture of good will in advance of a potentially divisive moment of history. But if this is a problem, it was a problem of timing and ulterior motives. As regards the merits of the name change itself? No, that’s not a problem at all. Not here.

So the renaming of Denali  was for me one of those moments when PC-bashing rhetoric revealed its true colors as a form of political correctness in itself, and those complaining about the name change found themselves triggered, so to speak, by a symbolic issue of little genuine significance to themselves.

So, I wondered…

I wondered what certain ‘conservative’ voices might make of this recent name change? It seems an innocent enough question, doesn’t it? Ah, but in this case an ‘innocent question’ is another phrase for ‘damned morbid curiosity.’ That’s the only reason I can think why I would have found myself scanning the comments section at World Net Daily. I know. It’s a bit like scavenging a garbage dump except I can think of legitimate reasons to look through a garbage dump. As to looking at the comments on World Net Daily, I have only the aforementioned excuse, and it’s not a very good one at that.

Like any other miserable person, I am apparently interested in some company, so let me share with you what I found. The article itself was just a stub and a link to a piece from Alaska Dispatch News, but the comments? Oh, the comments!

Let’s see…

Well, don’t get to used to it, before long they’ll be telling us the muslims were there first.

Um, no. But it is fascinating that a perfectly real question about a community that really was here first would be so easily dismissed with a story about one that clearly wasn’t.

How many Inupiak actually lived in “Utqiagvik” prior to its being named Barrow? I would venture even fewer than lived in Iqaluit (which is in Nunavut) prior to its being named Frobisher Bay (which was its name until 1987).

Basically, this was copied from the 1987 Canuck folly of renaming Frobisher Bay as “Iqaluit”.

A bit more detailed than the other folks weighing in on the subject, which is it least interesting. I really can’t tell why the number of Inupiaq who lived here prior to contact is relevant to the current name. Likewise, it isn’t entirely clear why the renaming of Frobisher Bay is a problem. That name change too is not what this individul would like to see, that’s clear enough, but he never does present a clear reason to believe his preferences should weigh more than the preferences of either community. …or that they should weigh anything at all, really.

Oh no… not another passport stamp within our own country !!!

HE IS COMING……………..

Passport? Do we need passports now? I don’t think so. It is interesting though to think that the name of our little town could trigger the second coming? At least I think that’s what the writer is referring to. So, I guess Jesus doesn’t think much of indigenous names. Unless he does. Seriously I suspect the many churches of Utqiagvik are filled with Native people who may have prayed for this very thing, or given prayers of thanks afterwards. I could be wrong of course. Honestly, I don’t know what happens in churches on Sunday, but still. Seriously? He’s coming? Over this!?!

“To [rename Barrow] would acknowledge, honor and be a reclamation of our beautiful language which is moribund.”

Their “beautiful language” is dying is because to embrace that culture is a sure-fire way to wind up spending the rest of your life performing the Inupiaq equivalent of burger flipping. The young just aren’t interested and are leaving for better, easier lives, hence the moribund language.

Okay, this is an interesting narrative. To say that it affirms a kind of cultural imperialism would be putting it mildly, but it’s an oddly caricatured version of the local job market. Simply put, the North Slope of Alaska does not seem to be lacking for jobs, and in particular it does not seem to be lacking for jobs in which speaking Inupiaq would be anything less than a plus. Speaking Inupiaq alone could be an issue, but English + Inupiaq? That’s a damned pay raise right there! If people are leaving that’s not it. If the language is floundering, that’s not why.

A barrow by any other name….

Hm…

Dog gone it !! I missed Indigenous People’s Day again.

So somebody doesn’t give a fuck about indigenous people? Well fuck his fucks anyway.

Re: BARROW, ALASKA, CHANGES ITS NAME … TO ‘UTQIAGVIK’
‘It reclaims our beautiful Inupiaq language’
———————-
If memory serves me the people of Alaska recently voted to call Mount McKinley by its original Native-American name.

More than half the US states have Native-American names and there is a reason for that. Native Americans may have fought each other, as well as Europeans, but the Europeans admired Indian bravery and kept most of the Indian names of places for that reason.

Interesting. I don’t think warrior heritage is really the issue in either of these cases, but this does strike me as a reasonable effort to understand what’s going on. It’s nice to see that reasonable happens from time to time, even in odd places.

Well, if I ever have to go to Barrow/Utqiagvik I’ll have to visit the travel agency to book a flight. They’ll never understand what the hell I’m saying over the phone.

Okay.

Unpronounceable Utqiagvik is so…so…PC!

Always amusing to see someone who has ideas about what other people should be calling themselves complain about their political correctness. And seriously, it’s really not that hard to pronounce. I mean, the ‘g’s around here are not like English ‘g’s but no-one has been executed for mispronouncing a ‘g’ in at least 5 years. Say it like it looks and no-one is going to bug you about it.

Now, knowing we are meant to have a republic, this is one of the few democracy style political decisions I can live with. Doesn’t bother me one bit to have a community decide on a name change…even if I have no hope of pronouncing it in this lifetime.

Nice to see a conservative voice in the comments at WND for a change.

WHAT-I-VIK!???

Utki… Oh that was a rhetorical question, wasn’t it?

I guess we can call it The City Formerly Known as Barrow.

…or we can call it Utqiagvik.

We could have its name as ‘UTQIAGVIK’, but since this name seems to be unpronounceable or sounds and looks almost random to most people, I think nearly everyone will continue to call the town “Barrow”. Thanks, though.

Reply 1: It looks like a name some negro might give to their child.

Reply 1a: …could be an Icelandic volcano name

On the first comment here, I find the authorial ‘we’ interesting. If ‘nearly everyone’ is nearly everyone that lives elsewhere, then I suspect nearly everyone here won’t much give a damn. If nearly everyone were here, then well I suspect the vote would have been different.

On the first reply to that comment, I’m guessing this is one of those folks mystified by the way some people keep calling him ‘racist’, but I’m sure I would have no idea why that would be the case.

On the second reply to that particulatr comment, I suppose it could, and that would be cool.

I went on a one night trip to Barrow um Utqiagvik back in 1993. Alcohol was prohibited but there was a speakeasy just a snowball throw away from the law enforcement building. I went on a school bus tour and the driver narrated. It was great. There was an italian restaurant that had excellent food. It was an expensive trip but worth it.

Right on!

Disgusting! We brought these people civilization, yet they still want to celebrate their savage ways

Reply 1:  Maybe they didn’t want to be brought into anything! Maybe they just wanted too be left *** alone.

Reply 2: Barrow had Eskimos. They were peaceful until corrupted by alcohol. The noble savages lived in the south and they too became corrupted after being turned on to petrol and alcohol too. The white man did it.

Reply 2a: All the white man did was give them God, civilization, and stopped them from warring among themselves over sparse resources.

Reply2a1: The black man and woman are the start of humanity.

Reply2a2: One more IDIOT that does not know their history the white man sold alcohol to the Indians in the lower 48 and in Alaska also….

Reply 2a3: When before that, they had only Peyote and Mescaline. Fine hallucinogens indeed. Good Grief.

Reply 2a4: I know the white man introduced them to alcohol. The point is that the indian moral character was so weak that their way of life collapsed because of it, so big government has to give them land and take care of them like orphan children

It’s always nice to see bigotry drop the white robes and show its face in the light of day, or at least the internet equivalent. That would certainly cover the first comment. What’s fascinating to me though about this exchange is the use of peyote and mescaline to undermine respect for Inupiat. Those plants are not found in the arctic, so this person is clearly treating the indigenous people of the Americas as one homogeneous group. That he also doesn’t seem to understand much about native use of these hallucinogens is of course par for the course. The mere presence of drugs in the Americas is, for him, sufficient cause to comment on the moral character of all of them.

…and we’re back to naked bigotry, bigotry that’s still going strong at the end of the thread.

Also find it fascinating that such folks could consider themselves conservative. There is simply nothing in conservatism that should contribute to such naked bigotry. And still…

Why don’t they just piut up a blank sign, since the enlightened indigenous people of Alaska had no writen language….or an alphabet for that matter?

I normally make it a point not to use people’s spelling and grammar against them, but I can’t help feeling amused at the difficulties this fellow has writing about the inferiority of those without a written language. I also find it fascinating to see someone hold the lack of a written language against any population. Suffice to say that Inupiaq is written now (hence the ability to write the name, Utqiagvik), and there isn’t much reason to hold it against Inupiat that they learned writing from someone else. …just like most of the peoples of Europe did at one point or another.

How about “Freezeyourassoff”?

Point taken.

been to Barrow, it’s a dump

Reply 1 – So is Detroit

Reply 2 – But it was fun for me. I visit the hood while there but the hooligans were safe. I ate fried chicken at the supermarket and while there checked out the prices of food items. Triple in cost! The beach I went to was cold but nice. It was fun for the one night I stayed.

Your face is a dump!

From now on people will say “so, you’re from Unpronounceable, Alaska”

Reply – Or, gesundheit.

Touché and thank you.

More PCBS

Pure projection.

Weird.

Reply 1 : How do you pronounce this new name!!????

Reply 1a: I guess the Alaska Dispatch News never expected to get national coverage of this story. Either that, or it never occurred to the writer and editor that few people outside of the area would have the first clue how to pronounce the new name.

Reply 1b: oot-GHAR-vik

Reply 1b1: Thank you!

Reply 1c: Utqiagvik… pronounced just as how it looks.

Reply 1c1: It looks pretty messed up.

Reply 1c2: The same forward and backward … at least when I say it.

Reply 1c3: Haha, Okay! That makes my day. I can chuckle all day now.

Us Americans are so darn monolinguistic.

Fantastic.

Reply 1c4: “Us Americans are so darn monolinguistic.”

I’ll bet the Romans were too when they were the dominant world power. And very likely whoever comes after us will be as well.

It’s ridiculous to suggest that people should learn a second language “just because” or that not doing so makes one small-minded. It’s about as intelligent as mocking someone because they can’t play more than one musical instrument.

But no doubt it makes you feel somehow more enlightened to make such comments.

And there it is, the right wing reaction to another name change occurring in Alaska. Its an interesting mix of outright racism and the usual complaints about short-sighted thinking associated with political correctness. Some of these folks have very specific objections, and those very specific objections often seem to turn on value judgements the authors take as obvious. In the end, it does appear that respect for native communities simply isn’t very high on the priorities of a good portion of these critics. At least a couple of these guys would appear to object to that value in itself. Others clearly think other things should come first. But what strikes me most about the whole thing is the ease with which this crowd picks apart a local issue in terms of national priorities and ideological assumptions.

I keep coming back to the one person who voiced the notion that the preferences of a local community ought to control the choice of its own name. All other issues aside, I can’t help thinking that’s the winning argument in this case. It strikes me as the sort of argument I would expect a conservative to make on the subject, and this one more reason why the right wing stance in America’s culture wars always seems so disingenuous to me. For all the fretting and fuming over left wing excess in these conflicts, it is as often as not the right wing that seeks to impose national agenda to the issue at hand.

…and proceeds to tell us it is someone else that is politically correct.

De-Ontologizing a Bear

16 Sunday Oct 2016

Posted by in Alaska, Animals, Bad Photography, Native American Themes

≈ 16 Comments

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student

Still Ontological, I Believe

As I recall, the picture was a selfie. My student was one of many people who come up here from the lower 48 to teach somewhere in the K-12 system. She was taking a course from me to help satisfy her certification requirements to remain in the state system.

…And there she stood in the picture with a polar bear walking along the beach in the background behind her. No, she wasn’t that close. She was fine, but really, it was a fantastic picture. I could imagine her showing it to people and chattering on about it for years to come. I was happy for her, and just a little jealous, but mostly happy for her. It had to have been a cool moment.

…which is what I said.

To my surprise, a frown immediately captured her face and her shoulders slumped as she looked down. For all the coolness of the pic, it was evidently not part of a happy story. She struggled to explain why. It turns out that someone shot the bear mere moments after she had posed for the picture.

No, this is not a story of criminal activity, at least not that I’m aware of. The hunter was an Alaska Native, and yes, they are allowed to take polar bears for subsistence activities. Still, I couldn’t help but feel for the student in this instance. To see a bear go from shared space in a selfie to dead on the beach in a matter of moments must have generated a kind of moral whiplash.

(Clunky metaphor, I know.)

I can’t help thinking the sudden transformation of the bear from a living breathing subject that one might want to share space with in a selfie to a dead animal must have been a bit shocking. I suspect the issue here is more than the sudden death of the bear; it’s this sudden change in the way circumstances invite her to think about him. One minute, she was celebrating the presence of the bear, and the next it was no longer a presence to be celebrated.

Is a bear fit for a selfie? Or is it fit to eat (and perhaps to wear)? You can answer both of these questions with a ‘yes’, but it may be a little disturbing when both answers play out at the same time and in the same place, and most particularly, with the same bear.

I thought about this over the last week or two as a polar bear had been hanging out near the college where I work for several days. Wildlife had to shoo him off a couple times. For those of us at the college, he was both a source of excitement and at least a trace of anxiety. More than a few of us grabbed our cameras, but even as we took pictures, several wondered if he wasn’t a little too close. He wasn’t so close as to generate immediate alarm, but he was close enough to make us all a little more careful as we went outside. In time, we began to worry about his own fate as well. If he didn’t move on soon, would officials end up shooting him?

I don’t know what happened to the bear. I have some ideas as to why he was here, and I believe he moved on eventually, but I don’t know this for a fact. For the present, the possibility itself, that he could have been shot is the interesting point. What would it mean to me, I wondered, if the bear in these pictures had been killed within days (or perhaps hours) of my taking them? It isn’t simply the possibility that he might die on his own. Hell, cycles of life and all that! No, the point is that a picture of a bear that might be killed because he is close enough to take pictures of him makes for something of an ironic photo subject.

The whole thing reminds me of the old bit from Marshall Sahlins on how you tell the difference between an animal you can’t eat and one that you can. Perhaps, I think, taking a picture with a bear is a bit like giving it a name. It’s one way of imparting a sense of personhood to the creature, one way of making it part of the world of lives about which you have some fucks to give. This is especially true if you hope to tell tales of the creature at some later date. I suppose it depends a bit on the picture, just how much the taking of a picture actually imparts meaning to its subject, but a selfie with a bear is probably on the maximum end of the personalizing spectrum. (We put ourselves in pictures with people and creatures, we like, not usually those who loathe or simply don’t care about.) At the other end of this spectrum, I guess we’d have to count most of the pictures taken by trophy hunters over a fresh kill. If trophy pictures impart meaning to the animal, I can’t help thinking it’s one of conquest. In contrast, I reckon most of those taking a picture of a bear want to talk (and think) about their encounter with an exotic living creature. They might want to think of him, for a time at least, as alive and well and going about his business long after the picture-taking two-legged has found its way to warmer homes and (hopefully) eager ears. At the very least, such stories are compromised by the thought that the very encounter that produced an image of the creature in question could also have reduced it to meat headed for the dinner table.

Good to eat and good to selfie, but not at the same time.

So, if the camera ensouls an animal, so to speak, the gun would seem to do just the opposite, at least for some people. Beyond the actual act of killing an animal, the willingness to do so would seem to transform an animal into something less than personal; it shifts from an end in itself to a means of sustenance.

Or does it?

Certainly not for indigenous hunters. If anything, their own traditions are saturated with motifs attributing personhood to animals. Whalers up here consistently speak of the bowhead as giving themselves to the hunters voluntarily, and similar themes can be found in hunting traditions of indigenous peoples around the world. For example, the oral traditions of hunting peoples often contain references to a time when animals spoke as humans do. As often as not, the loss of this quality in such stories will occur by choice, and as often as not that choice is motivated by the needs of human hunters. In some stories, animals may still take human form under designated circumstances. The upshot is a world in which role of animal and hunter is the conscious decision of persons who must be respected if the relationship is to continue.

But I don’t think the notion of hunting as a respectful enterprise is entirely limited to indigenous traditions, or indigenous people in general. Talk of respect is quite common among hunters, all the more so for those who do so as a means of feeding themselves. Animal rights activists may well dismiss this as convenient rhetoric, but the lives of subsistence hunters are far more intimately involved with the cycles of nature and the lives of animals than those of your modern citizen. There is little reason to believe those who invest a significant portion of their thought and their activities on the animal world come away from this with little but a utilitarian sense of those animals. It might be different for commercial hunters, and likewise for a certain scale of commercial farmer, but the people I know up here who feed themselves from the ducks, the geese, the caribou, and yes, the whale, live lives fairly filled  with thoughts about these creatures.

Which brings me back to the shock that shock of becoming an unqitting witness to the harvest of an animal. I reckon, it must be a bit more unsettling to those who’ve never participated in such activities. Folks may know that their beef was once a cow; their bacon was once a pig, and their chicken was once, …um, a chicken, but most have never witnessed (much less contributed to) the process by which the one becomes the other. For the average consumer of market meats, the consumption of animals is easily imagined as an entirely objective process. Vegetarians may escape this tangle of dissonance, but a fair number of those uncomfortable with hunting are fairly caught right up in it. Their discomfort is at least partly a function of seeing (or thinking about) a process which normally occurs out of sight, but which is absolutely essentially to their own sustenance. In contrast, participating in single hunt can be a lasting reminder that the food on your table was once alive. I’m not saying, everyone draws this lesson, but I certainly did (it’s been a log time), and I believe I see similar views in those around me now.

…all of which means, ironically enough, that shooting an animal may not equate to depersonalization after all, at least not for everyone. I reckon, it will always be a bit shocking for those unaccustomed to such activities, and it would be that much more so for anyone unfortunate enough to be sharing a selfie moment with a creature just before seeing it go down, but the real difference in worldview may be less a question of those who appreciate the lives of animals and those who don’t so much as a question of those who remember their own lives come at the expense of others and those for whom that connection is fuzzy at best.

The bear, from a couple weeks back (click to embiggen). He is, I believe, still alive. I’m sorry the pictures aren’t that great. I of course wanted to stay much closer to a door than he was to me.

Good Without an Apology

05 Wednesday Oct 2016

Posted by in atheism, Philosophy

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Saw this in Cedar City this summer (I think Moni took the picture.)

Atheists can’t provide a sound basis for their morality.

…it’s the kinder gentler version of “atheists can’t be moral,” which is a common theme among Christian apologists. To be sure, some folks go back and forth between the two messages, but at least some apologists do seem to keep a clear distinction between the claim that atheists cannot be moral and the claim that whatever morals we may have, we simply cannot justify them in rational terms.

Some folks express this position in the form of an architectural metaphor; we have no foundation for our ethics, so the argument goes. Alternatively, we cannot ground our moral principles in a sound basis of judgement; our morals aren’t based on anything objective, and so on. The sheer physicality of this rhetoric is always striking to me.

I know.

Metaphors happen.

Still, I can’t help thinking some of those using this language could stand to think about those metaphors a little bit. It would be nice if they at least recognized them as metaphors. As often as not, I suspect many of those producing such messages take these terms rather literally.

All that aside, lately, I’ve been thinking about this less in terms of the argument at hand and more in terms of the narrative about that argument. Questions about the nature of morality go back a rather long way in the history of western philosophy, to say nothing of countless other contexts in which people could ask about what people ought to do and whether or not they can provide a sound reason for their answer. This is not just one ongoing debate; it is many, and while that debate rages on with no likelihood of a clear winner, this story of the unique moral failure of atheism flourishes in its own right. The notion that atheists can’t provide an adequate account of the nature of morality may be a contention to be argued in select circles. It can also be a story told about the difference between us and them.

…in this case, I’m a them. Damn! (Othered in my own blog post.)

***

First an anecdote!

This theme reminds me of a time a college friend took me to see Gary Habermas speak at his church. Habermas is a renowned apologist, so I was expecting to hear an interesting argument in favor of Christianity. Suffice to say that I didn’t. I don’t know how to convey just how unimpressive Habermas was on that occasion. I could hardly believe my ears. To this day, I wonder if I missed something important or if Habermas was just having an exceptionally bad day? I don’t know.

The whole performance got a great deal more interesting though after Habermas stepped down, and the regular pastor for this church took a moment to add a few thoughts of his own. The pastor himself struck me as a fairly nice guy. I couldn’t help but like him, but there I sat listening to him try to put Habermas’ presentation into perspective for his audience. What impressed the pastor was the notion that someone could field a complex and sophisticated argument in favor of the Christian faith. He ended his own comments by saying how good it felt to know that people of intelligence could defend the faith, that smart people did in fact believe in Jesus and that they could justify that faith.

So, there I sat thinking on the one hand that Gary Habermas might be a smart guy, but we sure as Hell hadn’t seen anything to prove it on that particular day. More importantly, I couldn’t help noting how much had been lost on the pastor. He had nothing to say on the topic at hand, or the arguments Habermas had made, nothing at all. The mere fact that Habermas had fielded an argument in favor of Christianity was what interested the pastor. Such an argument did exist, and its existence was a comfort to him. It should also, he thought, be a comfort to others attending his church.

This is what I mean by the narrative value of the argument. Habermas and people like him continue to make their arguments, and people like me continue to be unimpressed by them. Still, the arguments seem to hold a value in believing circles, a value almost entirely unrelated to the soundness of the arguments themselves, much less the impact of those arguments in contested circles. An apologist may fail to engage unbelievers entirely and still count as a success in believing circles. For some, it is enough to know that smart people defend the faith.

Toward what end is another question.

***

So what? Conflict is a common source of good narrative material, and conflict over religious beliefs is no different. We unbelievers have been known to tell a story or two out of season ourselves, but I don’t think we’ve established quite the market for selling to the non-choir, at least not yet. A few unbelievers may be working tales of battle into a profession of sorts, but we are generations behind the business of Christian apologetics. So, our narratives are generally more fluid, the pay-off less certain, and the likely consumers for such stories less obvious. When an atheist fields an argument against a believer, it is still reasonably likely that the believer is the actual person we are trying to communicate with. Christian apologetics, by contrast is full of people framing arguments in terms of a confrontation with unbelievers only to produce them for the benefit of other believers. It is in effect a business aimed at producing stories like those told by the pastor above, stories of reassurance.

Let’s come back to the notion that atheists can’t justify our own ethical principles. What does this contention provide when it’s construed in terms of narrative themes? I think the payoff is very clear, namely in the implied contrast. If we non-believers can’t justify our moral principles, so the argument seems to suggest, those who believe in God can. As much as people working this argument may be trying to tell us about the failures of unbelief, they are also claiming a victory for theism, or at least for specific variations of theism.

What is wrong with us, so the story goes, is we cannot justify our moral principles. We may be moral people, but our morality is lacking something, and that something is important. Don’t get me wrong; this story a damned site better than the argument that non-believers are inherently immoral, but this particular concession that we are moral without a sound reason damns us with faint praise.

What’s so infuriating about this is the difficulty of the issue. It really is very difficult to establish a rational justification for ethics. We can often establish reasonable connections between certain basic value judgements and more specific propositions (Kant’s categorical imperative could be used for example to suggest that one ought not to lie to someone else as that would entail reducing them to the status of a means to an end), but providing those basic value judgements with a non-circular justification is damned difficult. I won’t say it’s impossible, but it’s certainly difficult, and always subject to contention. Is morality deontological or consequentialist? Universal or some variety of relative? These are all pretty difficult questions, and belief in a god simply doesn’t provide an obvious solution to any of them.

When apologists pretend that atheists are uniquely unable to handle the matter, it always strikes me as a rather premature declaration of victory. As often as not, they seem to confound two or more sub-themes in these discussions. When for example a theist claims their oral principles are objective because they have been mandated by God, I find myself at a loss for words. Even an ultimate subject is still a subject, and a morality derived from the will of a subject, even an ultimate subject, is still a subjective ethics. …unless of course one can demonstrate that the subject (God) has Herself based her judgement on something objective. Or perhaps, there is an objective reason why we as subjects are obligated to do what God (that uber-subject) wishes, but that would be stretching the meaning of objectivity a bit thin. I can certainly understand someone expressing skepticism at any of the attempts to establish an objective or absolutist form of ethics, but atheists simply are not uniquely implicated in this problem. I’ve known Christians who handle this issue very well. They are not among those proclaiming to failures of atheist ethical theory to the faithful in their churches.

***

In the end, I think this theme has two significant practical implications:

First, it reverses the point of morality, at least for purposes of the narrative in question. One might expect that the value of ethical behavior would in some sense be found in the behavior itself. Those hawking the notion that atheists are unable to demonstrate a sound basis for our moral judgements are, in those moments at least, shifting the focus of the work at hand. They are in effect, presenting the intellectual justification for morality as an end in itself. The point of morality is in such stories a bit intellectual exercise. I might do right by my neighbor, so the story goes, but I don’t really know why I should do so.

And thus doing right by my neighbor becomes just a little less important.

Second, this theme seems to produce a kind of moral hierarchy. There are those of us who do right, so the story goes, and those who know why we do right, or at least why we should do so. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise to see this kind of division of labor appearing as a theme in apologetics, but it is fascinating to see the way it takes shape in this rhetoric. The authority of the faithful seems to colonize the world at large in these stories, and those of us who are merely moral (at best) are just a little less than those that know why we should be so. Our actions are just a little less significant than those who claim to know the objective basis for moral principles. We can say no, as I surely do, but that’s to be expected of us. The faithful know.

But of course this isn’t simply a claim to authority over the rest of us, and it isn’t even a claim that privileges the perspectives of priests and pastors, much less the avergae everyday believer. It is a claim that privileges the perspectives of apologists. Simple pastors like the man I mentioned in the story above can do their best, but it is up to the smart people who defend the faith to do the real work of ethics. The rest of us, believer and unbeliever alike can be moral, sure, but our morality will always be missing something.

Which of course makes Christian thought into a rather esoteric enterprise.

And no, that doesn’t strike me as a good thing.