I will point out up front that I’m very lucky in my audiences. Some of this is work on my part, since I have no problem being fiercely critical of the hypercritical. A lot of it, though, is having largely other bloggers as readers of my blogs, other fiction authors as readers for my stories. There are few things more grand than to have work appreciated by those who understand what went into it.

How other bloggers cope sometimes is beyond me, though. The onslaught of commenters telling people what they should be writing about, how they should write it, what they can and cannot say about it, how what they left out is far more important…well, you get the idea. And the people saying, “Thank you, I enjoyed reading that,” or, “I’m so glad you brought that to my attention,” are rare indeed. All the more precious for that, but rare.

There’s a group of entertainers I’ve hung out with over the years. They make much of the money for their work by passing the hat, which means they have to engage their audience. Even among them, there’s a saying: “The cost of your ticket does not include a speaking role.” It isn’t entirely true there, any more than it is in blogging, but it’s worth remembering for anyone wanting to continue to be part of these audiences.

What is the point of writing anything if I’m brilliant only until I challenge you, when I become insane/dishonest/evil?

I wrote a little riff on this recently, but what the hell is up with all the people in the atheist/skeptic/rationalist blogosphere who suddenly think they can read minds? Doesn’t it make any of them suspicious that the only minds they can read are those of people who disagree with them, or that the mind-reading consistently reveals depths of depravity hitherto unsuspected?

Despite my continued interaction with the frustrations of social media, I’m truly unlikely to suddenly go around the bend. If you appreciated my ability to reason about topics on which we agreed, it might be worth a little work to follow along with an open mind when you think we don’t. If you appreciated my insight on topics you understood, it might be worth asking me questions to unpack the statements you don’t understand–and listening to the answers. If I have written things that have helped you in the past, is it not worth it to you to help me communicate with you now?

And if it isn’t, what is it worth for me to continue to keep you in mind as I write?

The best free entertainment/enlightenment comes from people who can do many things. Do you pay enough to keep them doing what you like?

Specialization keeps our industrialized world running, but it’s hard to beat a generalist for communication. Silos and jargon don’t make for good conversation. We can come across fifteen different analogies before finding the one that fits our experience well enough to make an explanation click. We can read the story set in fifteen different cultures, with fifteen different themes emphasized, before we find the one that resonates with us. We need and want these connections to be made.

Ironically, that means the person who is entertaining you today doesn’t need to be doing it again tomorrow. Sure, they probably have some kind of creative itch that needs scratching or social responsibility that needs appeasing, but they have options. I could go write one of the many books that would really like my attention. I could go apply my talents for the many nonprofits that share my values. I don’t need to blog. None of the people who write well-received blogs need to, so why should anyone keep it up?

I think this is one of the things we sometimes forget as we get comfortable with our free-content culture. We get entitled. Oh, do we get entitled. This content, this blog (this forum) is available to us, just like the things we’ve always paid for, so it must be ours.

Except we didn’t pay for it, and it isn’t ours. We’ve loaded a page and let a few words in. The price of that ticket doesn’t pay for a speaking role, and we should expect to be treated with little more respect than a heckler–or that person who wants you to work for nothing, just for them–if we act as though it does.

It isn’t as though bloggers are charging exorbitant rates. A full reading of the post, a second glance to make sure the thing that pissed you off was actually what was said, addressing the meat of the post before wandering down tangents, the occasional compliment or link sent to your friends who would appreciate it, the simple acknowledgment that the blogger has done some honest work. None of those are a high cost for what we’re being provided for free these days, and they’re the kind of pay that matters to someone who is already doing it for the love.

Much later, of course, I moved to Minneapolis. Minneapolis was for a time a sort of Mecca of homeopathy and is the site of some of the more significant showdowns between homeopathy and what we now know of as “modern medicine.” It may be hard to accept this now, but which of the two kinds of medicine should be practiced was not at all clear at the time. Homeopathy was, of course, totally ineffective. Homeopathic treatments did nothing. But the other sorts of medicine that were being practiced often killed the patient. A sip of water may often have been better, or at least less harmful, then bleeding someone or using heavy metals or some other dangerous “cure.”

I happened to end up working on an archaeological site which was the residence of one of the major supporters of homeopathy around the turn of the century. We didn’t find much. In fact, we found only one small fragment of a fragment of a fragment of a fragment….

But I digress.

Anyway, my first exposure to homeopathy was actually visiting a production site for homeopathic substances. I was visiting an old family friend, whom I’ll call “Joshua.” I was staying at Joshua’s house for a couple of days, and he was showing me around. At one point he wanted to show me his current major source of income other than working in the garage. It was his “crystal water” production.

We went into the crystal water production room.

“See this crystal. Nice, isn’t it?”

And it was nice. It was a whopping big fragment of a geode the size of a horse’s head with amethyst crystals. There were some other crystals laying around the room as well.

“I put this in this bucket of water,” showing me a bucket of water, “and for good measure, I sit it under that skylight where moonlight usually comes in. Depending.” Depending on time of day, month, and year, I assumed.

“Then here are my reducing containers,” pointing to a set of large glass jars. “I put one cup of pure crystal water from the bucket into this container, and add ten cups of plain water, and mix,” he made mixing motions. “Then I do it again, one cup of that mixture and ten cups of regular water, and mix.”

I’m thinking…hmmm, this is Joshua stepping on the magic water. Note to self: Do not buy expensive narcotics or anything from this guy.

“And when I’ve done that ten times, I’m done. The crystal water is ready to go into these vials,” there were some vials, “retailing at 12 bucks or so a pop, wholesale at 4 bucks, and I want to sell them online for 6 bucks. Or maybe 7.”

I stared politely at the vials and breathed deeply.

“Then I’ll be able to quit working at the damn garage. What do you think?”

I thought, “Hell, yeah. This is way better than working at the damn garage. But who will buy this stuff?” Well, not many people did buy Joshua’s mixture, but he later got a job channeling a divine entity, and I think that ended up paying a bit better.

You might be wondering what the point of this blog post is. Well, when I started out, I had a point. But then I mixed that up with two references to 19th century archaeology, then I mixed that up with one story about how to make crystal juice, then I mixed that up with a bit about some guy changing his job, then I mixed that up in a metadiscussion of what my point was.

So, now, if you are having trouble coming up with something to write, just read this post. I’m sure it will cause inspiration. Or not.

Tom Robbins, author of such books as Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume, has a unique style of building books and storylines. He adds subplots that seem to be unrelated to the main story, or tangential to the theme as diversions and comic relief. Readers familiar with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues will recognize his absurdist chapter breaks, but those who aren’t fans of his work find it off-putting that he doesn’t keep his stories on track.

In Still Life With Woodpecker, he developed at least two subplots that seemed totally unrelated to the story. One subplot, the illustrations on a pack of filterless Camel cigarettes, found its way into the main plot towards the end of the book and gave the main character a revelation that was necessary for the plot’s resolution. The other subplot, that of his difficulties with using an electric typewriter while writing the book, he used to illustrate what I think is an important development in the evolution of modern English writing style.

English has become mechanistic. Various composition teachers have coached me that, in order for my readers to engage in my points, I must follow a trend towards simplification and reduce my use of flowery and poetic language. I remember discussing the work of William Styron in his books Sophie’s Choice and The Confession of Nat Turner and how I love the way that his language flows so that the reader is enveloped in the story. The person with whom I was discussing it complained that Styron has tendency to show off his vocabulary, to “use a fifty-cent word when a ten-cent word will do.”

I was puzzled by this response, frankly. My goal has always been to stretch my vocabulary when both reading and writing. I love the use of words and the play of sentence structure, and I find that my favorite writers have the ability to clarify complex concepts both fictional and factual by pulling in words and phrases that are not in the common vernacular of everyday English. Styron is one of those writers who drives me occasionally to the dictionary but more often teaches me new vocabulary using context.

This is where reading is fun for me, and writing for you is more challenging.

The tools of writing have changed rapidly since the middle of the 19th century and the development of keyboards to convey thoughts. We use a keyboard layout designed specifically to inhibit the speed of typing. Early typewriter designers found that skilled typists were typing faster than the strikers could handle, so keys frequently jammed. The layout that we have on the QWERTY keyboard places the most commonly used letters in English on the left, so that right-handed typists are slightly shackled.

Tickling a Writer's Muse

Prior to the development of typewriters, people wrote by hand. The process of writing was directly connected to the person and the paper. Yes, it was tedious. Yes, people with poor penmanship (I’m looking at you, Andrew Jackson!) were often handicapped in communicating. It seems to me, though, that because writers were more closely connecting their thoughts to the paper, they were more expressive. They had a “feel” for what they were writing, and it seems to me that quill pens had something to do with that.

Classical literature reads as though the words and language had been “tickled” from the writer by the feather of the quill. When I read “The Lady of Shalott,” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, I imagine him at a writing desk with a goose quill pen in hand deliberating to come up with these two stanzas:

Only reapers, reaping early,
In among the bearded barley
Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly;
Down to tower’d Camelot;
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
Listening, whispers, ” ‘Tis the fairy
Lady of Shalott.”

There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
And little other care hath she,
The Lady of Shalott.

In my observation, modern writing has lost that tickle and tease in the effort to push writing into a crammed little box of clarity for the most common reader.  In the mix of journalistic and business writing, we are taught to reduce our verbiage and to let the reader skim the works while still getting the full gist of our themes and plots.  Cut back! Clarify!  Stop with the flowery phrases!

I have found that this has had an effect on my own writing.  Not only in the essays and posts I write here, but in the poems I write.  I struggle to make them romantic, or to convey the depth of my meaning.  I write with a keyboard, and I have instant feedback and I can backspace as I need to but I am afraid that the “teasing” is remote and I am dragging the muse along pissing and moaning as I use Blunt Force English.

I have a hard time shifting writing styles between what is needed for work and what is needed for creating more interesting pieces, such as those I write for Quiche Moraine, or even the poetry I write.  My vocabulary has shrunk as I seek similes.  Perhaps I need to go back to writing by hand.

Towards the conclusion of Still Life With Woodpecker, Robbins the writer has added Robbins the writer as a character who has gotten fed up with using a fancy new electric typewriter because it doesn’t give him the language that he needs. He had already discarded his manual typewriter, and so he finishes the book with handwriting.  He is satisfied with the way he has become a writer again.

My birthday is a the end of August.  A quill pen is on my wishlist, as are writing tablets.

I hear the cries and the calls of the religious moderate, and they are, as usual, correct. We have been too uppity, and I apologize on behalf of all of us. We should have known better, of course but in our exuberance at the publication of books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and others, we forgot to realize that even though our numbers seem to be growing, we are really riding the crest of a fad. It was something we should have recognized, and we should have told all those who heard that there are other atheists just to go home and pretend that they are religious, just like Mom and Dad.

It would be better for all of us to just sit back and let our rights come to us, because if we ask for them, we are being ungrateful. We really should learn to ignore all the creches and crosses and banners of churches being promoted by and paid for by cities. They aren’t aimed towards us, so they really shouldn’t be important to us. We can just look away, because we aren’t supposed to be offended. We have been wrong, egregiously wrong to think that our opinions matter, and now I surrender.

So I will go back into the closet and start telling everyone who asks me what church I go to “I grew up Catholic.” It won’t be lying, but if I tell them the truth, it might offend them and I shouldn’t be so bold as to allow that to happen. We need to just celebrate Christmas and sing along merrily to the songs we love, and we shouldn’t point out that many other cultures have long standing celebrations at that time of year, too. It’s not fair to spoil it for the majority who want to add a little churching to the crass commercialism and the credit card binges, because, after all a baby born in April must have his birthday and his birthday only celebrated at the solstice. We need to remember it.

We need to just start going along to get along and to stand up for the pledge, because good Christian soldiers fought for the right for the rest of us to be free, and to exercise the freedoms that they fought for would be to spit on their graves. We need to start saying the pledge, every word that has been part of it since 1954 and not to skip over the “Under God” part, because if we don’t believe the whole thing, then we don’t believe any of it. But we shouldn’t let anyone know, lest they think we are troublemakers.

We shouldn’t be setting up information tables at college campuses, even though people might be curious about why we are atheists. We have been wrong to do that, because anyone who is an atheist or agnostic on campus should think they are the only one. It’s only fair, because the nonatheists really have a right not to be offended. We need to stop having events like the “Superstition Bash,” where we have fun with some of the old superstitions like throwing salt over our shoulders or avoiding black cats. Some people might take that the wrong way, and we don’t want them to think that we are “bastard atheists.”

We need to muzzle the scientists who are atheists, or at least those who are publicly atheist. They should stick to the labs and not poke their heads out. If they let people know that they are atheists, no one will want to learn about science. We need to leave the driving to someone else, someone who knows about both science and religion and who is properly embarrassed by atheists even though he claims to be one himself.

We need to let science communicators repeat the meme that atheism is bad for science, and we need to just relax when they put out a book that only tells a tiny part of a story so they can make PZ Myers look like a nasty little son of a bitch, and then we are right to ignore that the incident that led Myers to do what he did led to death threats against a college student. We really should be ashamed of ourselves for thinking that any sort of mockery has its place in a civil society in which good Christian people threaten harm to anyone who attacks the ideas of their religion. It should just not be done, because that wouldn’t be civil.

No, we really need to be quiet about the situation in a country in which bishops threaten politicians with refusal of the host for refusing to back down on principle. Religion teaches us morals and ethics, and speaking truth to power, but there is only one power that shouldn’t be spoken truth to, and that is religion. Religion has our best interests at heart, and is there to prevent us from going to the hell it invented to scare us into following its teachings. We need to not let anybody know that this is all made up, because if we do, then we are indoctrinating them.

We need to stop talking about Christianity and really hone in on the evils of Islam and the planned Muslim takeover of the world through terrorism. If we do this, the Christians will love us again and maybe take up the slack that we will be letting out on issues of liberty (which we don’t deserve anyway, but they will be nice enough to grant to us if we are good). We really need to return atheism to the intellectual stores, and we need to remind ourselves that we really aren’t good atheists unless we can rebut all of the great historical theologians, however much they contradicted each other.

We are not worthy of our country. We are only riding the coattails of the enlightened Christians who fought against the Christian Monarchy (twice) so that we could have the right to be a Christian Nation. We are not worthy of our country, so that when the American Legion wants to lead our kids in prayer in public schools, we should just let it be, even if that is a violation of the Incorporation of the 14th Amendment. Violations of the Constitution are to be permitted when our youth need saving.

We are not worthy of our cities, so when councils want to open the meetings about zoning variances, curb heights, renewing sewage franchises and authorizing the funding for a new speaker podiums, then we really need to let the council members pray about it. We don’t want any of our residents who are religious to get the impression that atheists walk among them.

It is time for Atheists to Stop It. Things were so good for us, and we didn’t know it. We had to start putting up billboards that say such offensive things as “Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.” Or the really, really mean one that says “Millions of People Are Good Without God.”

It is time for atheists to leave well enough alone. We’ve had our say, we’ve had our moment in the sun and now it is time to go back to being nice and quiet and let the Christians guard over us, so that we can all live and let live and no one will ever talk about the ways that religion rules our lives unfairly again.

To all Christians: I apologize for being so uppity. I promise to be good. My hat is in my hand, and excuse me while I go to the back of the bus and get off at my stop and hope that none of you are dishonored again by having to look at me.

(This is a re-post from Tangled Up in Blue Guy.–MH)

“I tire of being asked what I think about something only to have the conversation derailed at the first ‘bump’ in my logic, at the first self-contradiction,” Pat says, of life in general.

My response: “I savor your contradictions. It is my desire to explore them with you and to experience the change that happens when you wrestle with them.”

“Yes, I think you get it. How refreshing.”

As you can see, Pat and I have a deeply meaningful relationship. Enviable, in fact. It is based on not knowing things that we want to know, and how to fix that. There is also an element of bringing unformed or poorly formed thoughts to the table, cutting them up like a fruit salad, and enjoying them. Our conversations are like a cold fruit salad on a dusty hot summer day. Yes, very, very refreshing.

But not everybody has the opportunity to interact that way. This is because all utterances are questionable, if you want them to be. All communications are subject to measurement against a standard that one can easily justify as “Teh Standard,” even though one has merely pulled it out of one orifice or another. In fact, there is a place where that kind of communication is favored, revered, honed and practiced, and imposed by force of will and repetition on those who do not come to the table oppositional in affect and armed with snark.

That place is known…as the blogosphere.

But, dear reader, that is a feature of the blogosphere that I generally don’t like, even though it can be amusing, it can be productive, and it can bring lots of page views to my hit-counter. I don’t like it even though I am as capable as the next person of doing damage with printed word, baiting the most wary of trolls, and turning and churning the most innocent of conversation until it becomes vile like ogre piss. I don’t like it because I find it inhumane. I find it not the way I want to interact, not the way I want to understand. It is bitter roots and rotten offal. It is not a refreshing fruit salad on a dusty, hot, summer day.

I want to understand you. I don’t want you to say things to me in a way that I am brought to the edge of understanding and left to wait there, as though it was my job to figure out what you meant. I want you to just tell me what you meant.

I want you to understand me. I don’t want you to find meaning that I did not intend and then use that unintended meaning to abuse either yourself or me.

I don’t want you to misunderstand me, willfully or otherwise, and then fetishize the false or manufactured meaning of that misunderstanding like it was some sort of trophy. Your misunderstanding of my words is not your shrunken head.

But it goes beyond that. I don’t want you to be thinking the same thing today that you were thinking last month. I want there to be a conflict between what you thought about some thing the first time we talked about it and what you think about it now. I want to be your Red Queen, so we can keep moving yet luxuriate under the same forbidden tree. I want you to giggle when I mix my metaphors like a Kitchen Aid in heat. I want to hear the full version of the story behind the allusion.

Expect me to contradict myself. Sometimes what I say now will contradict what I said when we first met. Sometimes the end of my sentence will contradict the beginning of my sentence. Be an interesting grownup. Be an interested grownup. Don’t be a winged monkey. Don’t make it your business to jump on my wrongness and howl like some four-winged, maned, scale-covered, drooling mythical creature from a Piers Anthony book.

My wrongness is a comfortable table for two at a coffee shop. Your wrongness is a long, lonely drive on a nice day.

On Tuesday, I received an email from Mike’s first wife, Shelly Leitheiser.

I have sent this to Greg Laden but I suppose I should send it to you too.

You have a situation of libel on your blog written by Mike Haubrich. I don’t intend to let this go until the posts mentioning me are removed. I intend to take legal action if the lies he wrote are not removed.

Hello,

Are you the editor of the Quiche Moraine blog? If so, or if you know who is, I’d like to request the removal of the posts Mike Haubrich wrote where he talks about his “first wife” and how she was so terrible to him, cheated on him, was undiagnosed mentally ill, etc. etc.

[...]

No one should have to tolerate (damaging) lies about themselves on a blog if it’s hosted by someone else who is editor. I couldn’t do anything about the lies on his own blog but it looks like he took care of that himself due to someone else complaining.

If you want your blog to have credibility, and it’s fairly well-known, then you should remove these false and slanderous remarks about me that he has incorporated into his fantasy writing about his past.

There was more, but it’s all about her marriage to Mike, so I won’t share it with you. I think it was inappropriate to share with me, particularly if she thought I was Mike’s boss at Quiche Moraine. It’s also inappropriate, of course, to send such an email to Greg instead of me if she thinks that Quiche Moraine has that kind of editor. I pointed out that it doesn’t in my response (corrected so as not to accuse Shelly publicly of something she didn’t do).

While I edit Quiche Moraine, I do not exercise editorial control over the content of my co-bloggers’ posts. I edit only for punctuation, spelling and the occasional infelicitous turn of phrase, and there is a great deal of correspondence and edit history to back that up. With respect to legal responsibility, Quiche Moraine is no different than any of Mike’s other blogs, over which you have not previously seen fit to try to exercise control. Any problems that you have with Mike’s posts are problems that you should take up with Mike.

I assume, although you were not specific in your demands, that you were referring to the post on which you left the comment and Mike’s post regarding charity. I suggested as much when I forwarded your email on to Mike. I also told him I didn’t see anything in those posts that rose above opinion and, thus, into the realm of libel. Mike decided, however, on slight changes to wording to make it even more clear that his statements reflect only his opinion of you. That has been done.

Your comment makes reference to retractions. While we can put a retraction on the front page of Quiche Moraine stating that those posts have been edited to clarify that his statements reflect only his opinion of you, I presume that you will not want that done. After all, Quiche Moraine, your statements about reputation aside, is a small blog and was even smaller when those posts were published. Adding a retraction would only serve to draw attention to Mike’s opinion of you and to you partially identifying yourself in the comments.

Note that commenting on an old post on a blog with a recent comments widget is one of the best ways to draw attention to it. Your comment was, by sheer accident, held in moderation until it would no longer appear on the widget. Otherwise, you would have pointed readers to a post that no one but you had read in the last month.

Given all the points above, I consider this matter closed and don’t expect to hear from you again. I do, however, expect you to understand that accusations of libel are serious matters that also fall under defamation law, per se. The comment that you made on Quiche Moraine has been removed for that reason, and I expect the comments you made elsewhere accusing Quiche Moraine of libel to be removed promptly.

Were we done after making the changes? Well, no.

You missed my point. I wasn’t asking you, I was telling you to remove libelous content about me from your blog. I already have a lawyer who has told me I have a solid case of libel. This post in particular:

[incorrect link removed]

is clearly libelous to me. It contains serious lies about me and it is presented as fact, which is certainly is not. It does not clarify that it’s his opinion, and it doesn’t matter anyway, because what he wrote in that post and others are lies about me. Do you get it? I’m sure if someone did the same to you, you would be pissed off and incredulous as well. What is wrong with a person who has to write about something that happened 25 years ago? But what he wrote about me was intended to hurt me NOW, in the present day. This is typical of his personality.

As I explained, he uses his real name and anyone will know who he was talking about. The length of time that has passed since originally wrote is completely irrelevant, anything can be googled as you well know. His comments about me are completely false and obviously done with malice. His posts contain direct lies that reflect on my character and contain outright false information that could easily negatively impact my reputation.

I don’t intend to drop this and if you do not remove that post and others like it by him, and if you don’t remove the libelous content (and I have NO problem using that legal term, as I know exactly what it means) then I will. You are the editor of that blog so it is YOUR content legally, not Mike’s. I have a legal background, FYI, and it’s obvious you don’t.

[...]

You are at fault here, and your silly mention of libel being a serious charge is correct. You’re damn right it is, and I take it 100% seriously. I expect you to remove all posts of his mentioning me in a negative light, lying about me, and fantasizing that I did anything “bad” to him. ALL of them. I demand it.

I asked her to tell me exactly what she wanted changed. She pointed at this post. She made one objection that didn’t seem unreasonable, so another change was made to the wording and another opportunity for a front-page retraction presented. However, that wasn’t the only thing she objected to.

Another is this:

“the way she’d betrayed me” That didn’t happen either. Another lie.Any mention of his belief of my mental state or how I’m at fault in that marriage is libel. Any claim I harmed him is libel. It’s the very definition of it. [...] Why would anyone have to still discuss a breakup that is 25 years old? Doesn’t that strike you as odd? I had forgotten my past with him a long time ago and I can’t imagine why he can’t move on and stop writing about me. It’s astounding and it makes me furious that he’s still dredging up this old shifting of blame on his part. You have no idea how he hurt ME, but I’m sure as hell not going to write about it. Why would I? I have a good life and have been happily married for 22 years. I never think about Mike, and wouldn’t have if I hadn’t found that he was still writing BS about me.

Remove these posts, and let me know when it’s done. This matter is not settled until all his writings of me in a negative light are gone. I’ll give you a few days to get it done. Then I’m meeting with my lawyer again.

I think the post is pretty clear on the relevance of the first marriage, particularly as the mention is so brief.

“Betrayal,” like any reference to your mental state at the time, is clearly opinion. It doesn’t indicate any specific behavior, simply an opinion that you did not meet the expectations set out in the relationship, whatever they may have been. As I have stated before, Mike is entitled to publication of his opinion of you. That you don’t like it, or even that you disagree with his opinion, does not rise to the level of defamation, as you should know with your legal background.

Now, when can I expect that you will address your public accusations of libel?

You can, perhaps, guess the answer to that question.

This is my last request that all references to me, all his nasty inferences, all his ridiculous claims and lies about me be REMOVED, which includes the paragraph I sent you and any other nasty references to me or his perception of my health.

Your blog is public. This is not his private journal. Set your blog on “private” and I won’t mind what he writes about me.

Or, if not,

If you feel that he can write whatever he wants about me then you must feel I can write whatever I want about you, or about him, which according to your logic, I now have permission to do where ever I want. According to you, everyone is entitled to any opinion they want, and can write it anywhere they want with no repercussions. As long as it’s opinion, it cannot rise to the level of defamation.

Or, you can remove the libelous things he has written.

Mike is entitled to “publication of his opinion of you”, according to you. So that gives me implied permission to publish whatever opinions I have too. Great!

You have until Monday to remove his BS about me, or I will feel free to share with the world my facts and opinions about him, which I have a right to do, and I will not hold back anything. Since I don’t use my real name online, I’ll feel free to use his. Yeah, there might be something to this “opinion” sharing.

So much for the lawyer. Something tells me they don’t suggest this as a legal strategy. Still, she’s got the right. But only as long as she gets it right.

Well, Shelly, I think this makes it clear that the legal definition of libel isn’t your concern here. I’d suggest you be very careful and seek legal advice before publishing anything about Quiche Moraine, me or Mike, as you’ve done an excellent job in this correspondence of documenting both your intent to harm Mike and me and your inability to distinguish between factual assertions and opinion. You’ve also provided a tie between anonymous assertions about either of us on the internet and your intent to harm.

In fact, I should make you aware, although you should be aware of this already, that none of this correspondence is in any way private. Not your threats or your inconsistent pseudolegalistic attempt at coercion.

Good luck to you.

And then it gets weird.

You have taken this to a ridiculous level from my original request and now you are harassing me.

Nope, I have no intent to harm anyone, just to prove my legal point. Harm and libel was Mike’s intent, which is what I documented. It’s also his clear intent from what he wrote on YOUR blog, which is your legal obligation. Your intent by not removing his comments about me is that YOU intend to do harm to me also. You have made that very clear.

And your correspondence has not been private either. I’m sharing it with quite a few people and I’ll be sharing it with a lot more very soon.

You told me Mike has the right to publish his opinion of me and I do also of him, of you and of your blog. As I said, you have until Monday to change your mind.

Mike’s intent from the beginning was to harm me and he has committed libel, but that’s because you have published it. I have every right in the world to write anything I want about you and him and QM as a result. It’s my opinion, which you said is not defamation. No opinion, according to you, is defamation. The “legal definition” is what I sent to you, but you have said published opinion is perfectly fine with you.

I don’t have to seek legal advice, I already have. I have every right to share my opinion of you, of Mike, of QM and reprint any and all of your emails in any public venue I choose to.

If you want to both be assholes, after I have been very clear and polite, that’s fine with me. I’m done corresponding with you and from now on will do exactly as I choose. It’s not my problem if you don’t like my opinions, but you have made your intentions very clear.

Tell Mike I’ll be writing a lot this weekend, it should be interesting to revisit some of the fun I had while in the company of a total sociopath/asshole.

Of course, Shelly hasn’t been waiting. The same day she sent the original emails, this appeared on a blog-rating site.

She (or someone using her IP) has left two comments here badmouthing the blog and Mike and a comment at Lousy Canuck calling Mike a liar and wondering, “Why wish him a happy anything?”–all moderated but saved. And her Twitter stream has been all about me and Quiche Moraine for much of this evening.

All in all, it’s been an interesting day. I’ve mediated changes (Shelly didn’t want to talk to Mike) to protect someone else’s reputation and seen mine attacked for my troubles. I’ve replied to something demanding a response, only to be accused of harassment. I’ve seen thousands of words written about a paragraph. And as I mentioned, it’s not even Monday yet.

So if you see a strange comment attacking Mike or Quiche Moraine floating around on one of the sites that mention us, let me know. They’re trophies at this point, but they may be very useful later. And if you’re trying to sort this all out, I recommend this information from the Electronic Freedom Foundation.

In the comments for my most recent post on Atheism, Core Values and Religion, a daughter’s mother and I engaged in what I consider to be an interesting exchange on the use of the labels “agnostic” and “atheism.”  I am not sure that we have it settled yet, so I wanted to do a completely new post to explain why I refer to myself as an atheist.  While I accept that I hold philosophical positions in common with other non-religious people, I have a sincere reason for choosing to label myself as an atheist.

I really need to be clear that as an atheist, I don’t pretend to “know” that there are no supernatural entities.  I agree with those who label themselves as agnostics that there is no way to ever know the unknowable with an absolute degree of 100% certainty.  I think that those atheists who claim to know that there is no such thing as a supernatural realm are overstating their case by tiny degrees.  There is no absolute knowledge of anything, a position that even naturalists accept, and if faced with the prospect of trying to understand that which can not be known there is no way to investigate to find objective knowledge.

Atheists and agnostics, or general doubters of the prevailing cultural religions have struggled for centuries to find the correct label for themselves to carry.  A few self-labels that come to my mind:

1. Freethinker.  Unconfined by the dogma of religion, they see themselves as rational and skeptical and willing to look at their preconceived notions from a critical standpoint, to find if they are justified in continuing to hold those positions. I consider myself a freethinker.
2. Secular Humanist.  A philosophical position allied with atheism.  Most secular humanists are atheists, and most atheists are secular humanists.  I am also a secular humanist, because I believe that as humans we can solve problems without appealing to supernatural actors.
3. Rationalist.  Rationalists think of themselves as those who approach all of their questions by collecting and weighing evidence and, through critical analysis, come to the only valid conclusions possible.  I discount pure rationalism, because we have presuppositions of which we aren’t always aware, and even when we are aware of them, we don’t know how to correct for them.  No agent of thought can be purely rational, and I would argue that even processors in computers are not able to be purely rational because they are directed by human programmers and designers.  Spock, the agent of rationality created by Gene Roddenberry, admitted as much even for himself and was subject to the whims of his own biology every seven years.
4. Naturalist.  Naturalists are rationalists who accept the concept of human imperfection.
5. Bright.  A serious misstep and misguided label coined and conceived by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett.  Essentially rationalists who just want to emphasize that they are smarter than everyone else.  It’s one label I refuse to apply to myself.
6. Agnostic.  Don’t know, can’t know and won’t claim to know about the existence of an overriding supernatural presence in the universe. Logically correct in that, but often people use the term so they are less offensive to the religious.  My problem with the label is that in not being “offensive” to the religious, it gives them the impression that we are still open to proselytizing by the religious because we “just haven’t heard the good news in the right way.”  I am also an agnostic, because I refuse to claim that anyone can know either way.  I just know that human descriptions of the attributes of the unknowable are either worthless for using in my approach to life, or inconsequential.  Anything “out there” in the deistic sense doesn’t affect me in the least.  So if “it” is there, it’s fun to speculate about its apophaticness, but that’s all it is and it doesn’t make me a believer.
7. 

   Atheist. Like agnostic, there are scalar degrees of non-belief that people will assign to themselves.  Often the discussion of atheism in a post on a site visited by atheists, theists, agnostics will include people declaring where they fit on the scale from “weak to strong.”  There are weak atheists, weak agnostics, strong atheists and strong agnostics.  I think that they are separate, parallel scales and not a single continuum.  I am an atheist.  And I wear the label proudly.

Two years ago, I was visiting my dad when his health was stronger.  I turned on the radio broadcast of Atheists Talk, streamed through the KTNF website.  Dad had been a lapsed Catholic for several years but had decided following a heart attack that he better put in a chip in the game of Pascal’s Wager and start going to Mass again. He had never been an atheist, to be sure, nor had he ever told me that he was at any point an agnostic. He just hadn’t been going to Mass.

As I was listening to the show, I asked him what he thought about the fact that I am an atheist and belong to the Minnesota Atheists.  He smiled and said, “I think it is a phase.”  I reminded him that I was in my late forties and hardly in the throes of teen rebellion.  He just laughed and went back to reading his paper.  That was all the time that he wanted to devote to it, because he doesn’t feel the need to try to “win me back” for Christ.  He seemed to think that when my time came and my health started to fail, I would come to the realization that I have been wrong to deny God and Salvation.  I am the fifth of seven kids, and three of the preceding four of my siblings are also atheists or agnostics.  The shock value for me to declare myself an atheist to him and to my late mother had worn off before I had the chance to use it.

Now, suppose I had told my dad I was a “capital A” agnostic?  That I was hemming and hawing on my belief so as not to seem too arrogant?  It may have given him an opening to invite me to Mass with him, to catch up on my Confessions and Act of Contritions.  Not that I am opposed to having religious discussions with him, of course, but I think he would have taken a more pressure-laden approach as he tried to nudge me back to the arms of the Church.  The effort on his part would have been similar to teaching a pig to fly.  It would have served merely to annoy the pig.

There is a reason that I use the word “atheist” to describe myself, among all the other labels of disbelief and religious doubt.

In the early 1980s, ideological labeling was shifting in U.S. politics.  Liberalism, which had once been a respectable label, was being attacked in order to build the Republican Party.  Ronald Reagan had won his election as a solid conservative and with no concessions to moderate his views.  He tapped into a blue-collar sensibility that liberalism had been hijacked by socialists and elitists, and by gosh, it was time to put some power back into the hands of the guys and gals who carried lunch buckets to work rather than attache cases full of doctoral theses.  He brought back morning to an America which had seen our intellectual and humanitarian president as being weak against commies and imams.

The ushering in of the Reagan era gave succor to the liberal bashers who had for years been marginalized.  Liberals didn’t want to be called liberals any more.  There were accusations of treason and anti-familyism leveled against liberals, because we had this odd notion that women and gays should have the same rights of self-determination as straight men.  There were accusations that liberals wanted to get rid of the Godly heritage of ‘Merica (to be fair, I did want to get rid of that) and that we were thus tools of Satan whether wittingly or no.  The word liberal was soon the insult that destroyed political campaigns.  A liberal in the mid-Eighties had as much chance getting elected to public office as an atheist does today.  So, liberals started calling themselves progressives.

Not me.  I have never given up the word “liberal” because of what the conservatives want to blame us for doing to their America.  In fact, I decided that I would be even more emphatic about calling myself a liberal.  It was akin to being country when country wasn’t cool.  I hadn’t changed my political orientation because of the Reagan era, so I sure in hell wasn’t going to relabel myself to seem less offensive to the people I would meet. I am a liberal; conservative disparagement be damned.  I should also admit that at least one factor in my refusal to give up the word “liberal” is in large part rebellion.  It is a word that should not be so vilified, so I am not going to play along with that game.  I don’t want to let other people, many of whom I just don’t like but others with whom I merely disagree, pick my label for me.

This also leads to my choice to use the term “atheist” to describe myself. I am not worried that people think it is a negative.  It is a negative. I don’t follow nor do I believe in any gods.  It’s that simple.  The beliefs that I do hold in addition to my lack of belief in supernatural actors are largely positive statements, but they are built from a presupposition that I have no reason to accept the idea that the universe has a dualistic supernatural/natural…um, nature.  There may be unreachable, unknowable entities, but I am not going to waste too much time thinking about it.

I am aware that people have negative impressions of atheists, that it is a choice of word that can lead people to dislike me or claim that I am being fundamentalist or arrogant.  I hold that the atheist position is just as honorable as any other position that anyone else has in regard to religion and theology and that it can’t be made more palatable by atheists shying from the word.  So I tell people when they ask me, “I am an atheist.”

I am also an agnostic, but most importantly I am an atheist.  People tend to like me for some odd reason, and I don’t scare them away when they meet me.  So, if atheism is going to become acceptable in our society, then we had better own up to it and not let other groups dictate to us what we should and shouldn’t call ourselves.  We can’t let people who don’t understand atheism get away with a smugly satisfying claim that we are just as fundamentalist as Christians.  The word “atheist” isn’t too strong.  It’s accurate.

Digital Cuttlefish has written a great poem that helps explain who we are as atheists. Look around you. I am sure that you know one or two and I am also sure that they haven’t stolen your Bibles to be used as toilet paper.

On the next episode of Skeptically Speaking, a panel discussion on skepticism and race. Is the face of modern skepticism really as monochrome as it appears? How do we make our message appeal to a broader, more diverse audience? And how do racial demographics influence belief in pseudoscience and the paranormal?

Our panel includes LaVerne Knight-West, Stephanie Zvan, and Girl 6.

Friday, January 22nd, Live on line

Details here

John W. Loftus was our guest on Atheists Talk on May 24, 2009, and he said something very interesting about religious people and their level of intelligence.  He said that they are not wrong nor stupid for being religious and even discussed the skeptical nature of the most intelligent of the apologists.  We can wipe from this list of intelligent apologists the creationists, of course, because they choose to ignore or diminish any factual data that contradict their dearly held notions that the Earth and its resident life are a special creation barely 6,000 years old.

Loftus made the case that, in fact, people such as William Lane Craig are probably more intelligent than he is.  I can name some religious thinkers far more intelligent than I am.  The issue with religion is not intelligence. The issue is that of core values, and presupposition.  (These are not Loftus’ direct words, they are my own interpretation.)

After leaving the station, I was listening to the occasionally entertaining “Speaking of Faith,” by Krista Tippett.  Her guest was Vali Nasr, an Iranian-American with Shia Muslim roots.  He was explaining the source of conflict between the Shia of Iran and the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq.  Yes, it’s a mess and the American war in Iraq has complicated things.  But that isn’t why I bring it up.  I came in at this spot, and when I listened, it helped illuminate what Loftus had been saying on the show:

Mr. Nasr: And therefore, you know, things don’t matter enough here for people to be killing one another but many, many years ago when Boston was dominated by Protestant English establishment and you gradually had an influx of Irish Catholics who came to Boston, you had a very clear sense of a difference, that the Catholic Church belonged to the Irish and belonged to the poor and the Protestant churches represented the Anglo-Saxon establishment in the city. Now, the differences were not so much theological as they reflected the fundamental identity division in Boston.

Ms. Tippett: Socioeconomic and ethnic.

Mr. Nasr: It’s socioeconomic. If we go to Northern Ireland today, you know, IRA fighters may go to church, may not go to church. I don’t think they’re really concerned with liturgy and what the Vatican says.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Nasr: Catholicism is not faith; it’s who they are. It defines what side of the tracks they were born.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Nasr: You know, who they are, what share of the wealth they get. And you have that in the Muslim world as well. I mean, in Lebanon or Iraq or in Pakistan, the Shia-Sunni difference is not necessarily theological. It is who you are. So the Shia in Pakistan are like the Catholic Irish of Boston.

Ms. Tippett: OK.

Mr. Nasr: Or in Iraq, they were like the Catholic Irish of Boston. They were not the “in” crowd. They were the “out” crowd. And then above this, you obviously have the theological difference and the major difference is the following: that the Shias believed that when the Prophet Mohammed died that his legitimate successors were his son-in-law and cousin Ali who’s buried in the shrine in Najaf and that God had willed that the charisma of the Prophet would run through his bloodline, and his bloodline would be the legitimate leaders of the community. So you could only have true Islamic leadership if the family of the Prophet ruled.

The Sunnis, essentially, who became the majority and whose writ ultimately carried, believed that the most suitable of the companions of the Prophet would be chosen by the early Muslim community, and he would be the leader. And from that disagreement over succession, over the years the two faiths evolved very differently.

Ms. Tippett: Right.

Mr. Nasr: They have a different historical experience, and then the two communities developed a very different ethos of Islam and they practice the faith differently.

I am good at math.  It comes naturally to me when someone shows me how to do it.  I have a natural proficiency when tutored in those concepts, and usually I catch on with just a few practice equations.  I learned from having kids with math problems that I am not a very good math teacher.  I do better teaching subjects at which I struggle, because I can better empathize with their struggle.

Having been a Christian, myself, I can certainly empathize with them when it comes to their difficulties in understanding a life without the “presence of God.”  It is part of them, part of their roots and part of their community.  Catholics brought up in the faith take the basic tenets as self-evident, much as do the Irish of Boston or the Irish Catholics of Northern Ireland.  The Proddies were simply quite wrong, and their lack of understanding of the true nature of the Catholic faith led them to oppress the Catholics financially (and with the aid of the Anglican English, militarily).

Loftus mentioned that the atheists brought up without any sort of religion have a hard time emphasizing with the intellectual struggle of doubt that the religious face.  It is easy to see that religion is false if one is not brought up with it as one’s cultural miasma.  Leaving religion when I no longer believed was a struggle, because I thought that if everyone I trusted and loved was enjoying a relationship while I was not, then there had to be something wrong with me.  I kept trying to find my faith and read the Bible and helpful works, but ended up deciding that the struggle was over and became an atheist.

Because it was tough for me, I can empathize with those who are still struggling with the doubt.  The faith that they have is one of their core values. It is not an easy matter of learning that religion is wrong on natural explanations and from there concluding that religion is wrong (or inadequate at best) in dealing with other matters.  Religion has “worked” for them and made the world whole in relation to their cultural experience.  The Irish in Northern Europe, the Shia in Iran, the Sunni in Iraq, the Wahabi in Saudi Arabia, the Hindu in India, the Buddhist in China, the Shinto in Japan and the Native Americans didn’t grow up skeptically responding to the lessons their parents and their societies taught them.  They are skeptical of all other religions, because they don’t make sense.  Their own does, and it is self-evident.

For the atheists who don’t go through this the process is confusing and, like the problems that I have in explaining math to my kids, the non-Godness of the Universe is too obvious.  So, for them religion is just kind of, stupid.  It’s not stupid, it’s just wrong. 

Debates between atheists and religious scholars are entertainment, but ultimately few minds are changed.  People can only come to the atheist conclusion on their own and, until then, will rely on intellectual justifications to support their faith.  I am well aware that the same can be said by a believer about my atheism, and that it is foolish.  But then there is a story of a person risking his family relationships.  Here’s an example from RichardDawkins.net:

At age 18, despite my homeschooling, I managed to get into a university to pursue a higher education and a better life, a pursuit I was able to continue through attaining a Masters degree. After finishing graduate school, I joined the military and went on to fly jets from the flight decks of one of the most spectacular displays of scientific and technological innovation, U.S. Navy aircraft carriers. My parents were very proud of my accomplishments and even made reference to me as their “self-made man.” This reference has a special kind of irony for me.

I actually went more than a decade calling myself an agnostic. One reason for that was the process by which I came to my non-belief in faith-based assertions of truth. More than that was a need to prevent division between my family and me. Agnosticism provided philosophical blinders to allow my family to view me as a “backsliding Christian” instead of a “traitor.” Eventually, I accepted that I am an atheist (under Dawkins’ scale, I am a 6 out of 7) and thus began my fall from grace. All of the taboos of thinking, formally part of my programming, have slowly eroded to a basic understanding of what we know versus what we don’t know – and this has helped shape my cultural and personal values. Now I have become, in the eyes of a few, one of the aforementioned “savage wolves.”

As Marshall woke up, he was aware that people around him were unwilling to accept his new-found realization. It’s a hard thing to give up, those core values, even when they are based on mistaken beliefs that there is an eternal “giver” of values.

(Originally posted at Tangled Up in Blue Guy on May 24, 2009)

I’ll describe these two worlds by informally looking at the example of fluoride in the diet of infants and children. Fluoride is added to drinking water in many American communities. Therefore, a baby that is fed on formula that is made with tap water gets a dose of Fluoride that is larger than otherwise likely. If the formula is mixed at home using special extra-fluoridated water (which is advertised as having a health benefit for the little ones) then an even larger amount of fluoride is added to the infant’s diet.

There is some evidence that too much fluoride cases a condition that affects primary teeth in a negative way. So some research has been done on this.

The conclusion of the scientific research is probably best described in a document provided by the American Dental Association, which indicates that you would not do harm to avoid giving fluoride to your infants prior to six months of age to avoid this condition, unless you are in an area where the water is not fluoridated. The current medical literature seems to indicate that other effects of fluoride are probably not anything to be concerned about.

But, there is another point of view. This other point of view claims that fluoridosis (the tooth condition of concern) is a very very bad thing to happen, that is occurs widely in children with fluoride in their diets, and, that fluoride in diets also causes brain damage, food intolerance, depression, other gut problems and autism. And more. In short, fluoride is a poison.

If you Google the right terms you will find mostly this second view. If you put the same search terms in Google Scholar, you get the other view, that fluoride may be a little bad in quantity for infants, but otherwise, it is not the end of the world and is mostly good.

The “fluoride is deadly” point of view emerges over time in a very straightforward process, which I’ll call the denialistic method. I call it that not because it necessarily leads to denailist conclusions, but because it is a method that was perfected by denialists (and conspiracy theorists).

Step 1: A winged monkey flies out of someone’s back side and screeches an idea. The idea may be plausible, it maybe insane. Doesn’t matter. It’s an unformed idea about something. So far, this is similar to (and sometimes identical to) the scientific methods, and in the scientific method it is called “observation.”

Step 2: Someone identifies a positive relationship that relates in some way to the winged-monkey idea. It does not have to be a valid or logical relationship. For instance, if the winged-monkey idea is that “Crohn’s disease causes autism,” then the positive relationship might simply be a study that finds that both Crohn’s disease and autism are increasing in incidence or reporting over recent decades. This would be instead of formulating and testing hypothesis, as in the scientific method.

Step 3: The winged-monkey idea is now formed into an accretive model, or glommed onto an existing accretive model, where it joins other winged-monkey ideas to be used as part of a Gish Gallop to convince anyone who is unsure of the the verity of the model, or to drown out and hopefully shut up anyone who has serious arguments against it.

It is interesting to see the same exact form of argument in denialist movements, race-based science, among creationists, and Kennedy conspiracy theorists. I used to get annoyed at the Kennedy conspiracy theorists. But they were all about 20 years older than me and are now mostly dead, so we don’t hear from them as much any more. But I now realize that if Kennedy conspiracies were still viable and vibrant, a lot of people who are otherwise involved in the modern white supremacist movements or antivax movements or other Bizarro World activities would instead be busy working on who shot the President in 1963, and maybe they would leave the rest of us alone.

Scientists, science communicators and skeptics need to understand where the Bizarro World ideas come from and how they develop. They really are not that different from science ideas. There are only a few real differences between the accumulation of information and development of theories in the rational world of science and in Bizarro World.

One difference is the accumulation of evidence. Both accumulate evidence, but in the real, scientific world, much of the evidence eventually gets thrown out, while in the Bizarro world it is never thrown out. Another difference is in what evidence is taken in to begin with. Another is in the placement of an immutable descriptive model or theory at the beginning of the process in Bizzaro World, as opposed to attempting to arrive at a descriptive theory at the end of a process as is done in science.

That there are races and that the “black” race is inferior, in a way that is genetic with virtually no environmental effects, is the immutable theory that starts the “research” process about race among the racist scientists in Bizarro World. That any given compound or chemical pushed on us by the government, such as fluoride placed in our water supply in order to contaminate our precious bodily fluids, causes any problem one may think of (or that may be suggested by the constant screeching of the winged monkeys) is part of the fluoride denialist theme song. Many of the science denialists put a literal interpretation of the Bible in front of any subsequent scientific investigation, such as related to evolution, or modern medicine.

These different Bizzaro World groups have historical links even if the modern practitioners do not necessarily always realize it. Race-based science and fluoride-panicked science deniers have common ancestry with each other, and with the Bible thumpers, and may even share some connections today. Look no further than the John Birch Society to find many of these links. I’ll bet there are white supremacists living in cabins in the Rockies (or for that matter, the Catskills) who refuse to drink municipal water when they roll into town for supplies. Which is okay. The problem is when they leave their cabins and get real, important jobs …