poukledden

Yours Truly has been planning and plotting, and the result is up to see:

Atheist A Go-Go!

This is something I've been wanting to do for a while -- a blog with a tighter focus than this livejournal (which, granted, is a pretty easy thing to do :) ). As much as anything, I want to do this to have a place to explore a lot of the weird and wonderful thinking going through my head, the ideas I'm being introduced to, and the mapping of New Gregory from the vantage point of having no belief in any kind of god. This isn't going to be about debunking, but rather exploring what, for me, are the implications of atheism, naturalism and skepticism. And there will be robots, oh I promise you there will be robots. And Mad Science.

Anyway, I hope you'll all take a gander, and take part in the conversation, whatever your religious feelings are. If anyone is interested, let me know and I'll create a LJ feed for the site. And in case you're wondering, I have no plans at the moment to drop this LJ. This will just be the Other Stuff blog, more personal, or personal in different ways, and updated with the usual frequency and lack of same.

Tons of people have said it better than I could already:

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: RIP George Carlin
Elizabeth Hand: Touched by an atheist
The Friendly Atheist: George Carlin Dead at 71
John Scalzi: RIP, George Carlin
The PETA Files: In Memory of George Carlin

Yep, even PETA chimed in. You fully expect the atheist blogs to be full of remembrances and thoughts today, but that one might surprise you. But as Christine points out, Carlin had, on many occasions, talked about the cruelty that humans treat most of the animal world to:

One of my personal favorite Carlin quotes comes from his book Brain Droppings, in which he said, "And I think people have a lot of nerve locking up a tiger and charging four dollars to let a few thousand worthless humans shuffle past him every day. What a shi**y thing to do. Humans must easily be the meanest species on Earth. Probably the only reason there are any tigers left is because they don't taste good."

He had the most exquisitely tuned hypocrisy detector ever. We're a bit less of a species today with his loss. If there is an afterlife after all, George, make sure you say hi to Lenny for us.

The Root of All Evil -- if I were to succumb to the desire to simplify such a complex question into a simplistic answer -- might be our desperate need for certainty. We don't deal with Not Knowing very well. We don't deal well with Doubt.

Jacob Bronowski once warned us about that, and showed us the example of where that desperate need to be certain can lead:


But that is the stuff of the large movements of peoples and civilizations. It works on a personal level, too. As I look at myself, I see that every fear I have is founded in just that desire -- to know, to be certain. Labels are useful for that, because they give the illusion of Knowing. I am This, or I am That, and it all becomes easy to understand. Labels encourage ingredients-list membership*, and suppress the difficult act of thinking and questioning. Labels are, of course, useful, and often necessary. But they carry a danger of becoming the object of devotion, rather than the thing they point to.

In the modern age, we know more than ever how little we know. It takes a definite courage to face up to that, embrace it, and run with it, content to know that there is much you will never know, much you'll never be certain about. I'm tired of searching for certainty, and increasingly aware of the madness that quest can engender.

(*it strikes me that there's an entire metaphor to be had with cooking -- there's folks who follow recipes religiously, always using exact amounts and never experimenting or deviating. Cooking is Following Directions. And then there's the mad scientists of the kitchen, who mix and experiment and wing it, and sure they sometimes create something inedible or accidentally set fire to the blender, but then again, they also create wonders. Certainly, we all know whose dinner parties we most look forward to.)