The Scarlet A

[flexagon]

It's crunchtime at work. I could look at the big picture and say "Yow, what a shitty week!". But:

"Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small."
~~Virginia Woolf

Just added the Scarlet A to my public blog.

It feels like a brave thing to do, and that makes me cheerful.

Comments

[heisenbug]

Wha??!

Oh, it means Atheism. Right. I knew that.

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

The A means Atheism? I didn't know.

Also, is it really crunch time? It feels like we're totally on top of it to me.

[flexagon]

Well, it's not now, but it was during the week, for me. I missed both my acrobatics classes plus a squirrel-feeding commitment, in order to get stuff into next week's... weekly thing.

[flexagon]

Yes, I've been cheating on you by not believing in a god. Or something.

The good news is that I have it all on videotape and I'll let you watch. :D

[a-kosmos.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I didn't know that you were an atheist; I wonder if agnostics get lower case a's.

[flexagon]

Hahaha! It would be brilliant to make a similar site with similar "lowercase a" links for agnostics.

I called myself agnostic or "don't like to talk about it" for a while. But the truth is I believe (don't know for sure, just believe) there is not a conscious, intelligent god. Such a thing seems unlikely. So it seems atheist is the word for that. :)

I feel like, as a word, "atheist" carries harsh overtones but I'm not sure why that is... in my own life, religion has been the source of real-life harshness.

[nahele-101.livejournal.com]

Hi.
This made me think good things about ya.

Peas n' papayas,

[flexagon]

Peas n' papayas, Mr. Oil Spill Cleaner. :)

[miyyu.livejournal.com]

Atheist has definitely come to be a loaded word. I rarely tell people outright that I am an atheist, because often they assume it means I am also amoral. Which is also very silly, but very hard to get out of people's heads and defend against.

[flexagon]

Yep, people think it means more than it does. I met someone who, after hearing I was an atheist, was surprised that I VOTED IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.

(Of course I vote, dumbfuck, because I believe this life actually matters.)

[heisenbug]

Thou shalt have No God before me.

Or at the same time, if you're feeling flexible.

[webrat.livejournal.com]

Sign me up for a lowercase a.

[flexagon]

Here you go.

[kaigex.livejournal.com]

The more I read mythology and see how the same stories are used and shaped by culture over time, and the more I read about the construction of mythos and sociology and the human mind, the more glaringly obvious it is that we made God up.

But getting rid of God is relatively easy; trickier is getting rid of the possibility of, say, a great ambient universal amoeboid, or other higher-order forms of life we don't generally account for but that would be quite supernatural by our understandings, and that may or may not work to influence reality around us, and so may or may not fit into general notions of gods, demons, angels, or whatever.

Then, of course, there is Durkheim, what with saying that the modern label "God" is really just an abstraction over culture. It *used* to be ascribed to an abstract sense of punishment and retribution, but has trended more positive over time and now nudges towards a generally optimistic cultural model in which people help each other just slightly more often than not, and the collective worship is merely there to support and permeate that model, of which I generally sorta approve in the sense that nonrational optimism beats nonrational pessimism any day. Though this may just be a Wittgensteiny logic-linguistic foible. And anyway, this all breaks down once there is an organized Authority/Church - as administrating spirituality feels like nonsense from any perspective.