Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

Friday morning's team catchup, our manager asked as he often does what people's plans were for the weekend.

"Fasting," the one Muslim on the team said. "So I'll probably spend today eating everything I want to eat." When someone (maybe her) mentioned Pancake Day, she said she was devastated to learn that it's during Ramadan this year.

I pointed out that she's participating in spirit if she makes a point of eating nice food before her fast begins, because that's exactly the point of eating pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. I hope it helped cheer her up.

My mom is doing some good activism at her church, speaking up against the pastor praying for Trump and for "a peaceful transfer of power."

The church has never included this kind of thing before, and good for her for speaking out. She's already complained to the council, who unfortunately all agree with the pastor.

She said if it continues she'll have to leave the church, which religion aside is a massive source of social connection and support. Especially because I don't know where she would go; the other ELCA church in town is the other side of the schism of allowing women clergy.

I'm proud of her, but it's sad because there's so little she can do and little chance it'll come to anything. But so many of our battles are like that; we gotta try, gotta speak our little piece even when it feels hopeless or you're outnumbered.

L at work today: "...and I need to go purchase a cheesecake."

Me: *nods, wonders if it's Cheesecake Holiday time already*

L: "Because it's the Cheesecake Holiday."

I'm not being irreverent, this is what they call it so it's what I call it!

19 Do you operate out of any particular faith system that informs your actions? Do you intentionally NOT have a faith system, and if so, what beliefs or ideas inform your actions?

I do intentionally not have a faith because I feel like it was a lot of effort to get away from the one I grew up with, which was Catholicism. For a while I thought I'd replace it with a different kind of Christianity -- my mom's Lutheranism, my friends' generic evangelism -- but I ended up disenchanted with it all. I used to worry that I'd miss it, the sense of being part of something bigger than mysekds, the consolation when family members died... but I didn't. I get that stuff from my activism and my chosen family and things like that.

As for the values I do try to live my life by, I think a lot about the preamble to the Lib Dem constitution that says "no one shall be enslaved by poverty, ignorance or conformity. The party falls short of it a lot, but I think a lot about what that would look like. Especially freedom from conformity, which no one else seems to talk about.

--

I've had a tired day: just as I was getting ready for bed Andrew was being told he should go to A&E for his chest pains. He's been having them for days and they sound just like the ones I've been having, but he was worried so went and had actually a pretty quick A&E trip for a Saturday night: in a few hours he'd had am ECG and blood tests and was told it's probably nothing. I woke up a few times in the night and checked my phone, but even after he told me he we going to bed himself, I didn't sleep great.

Had fun at Euston trying to get some help finding my train: first I was directed to a Glasgow train that wasn't going to Manchester, then I was disbelieved about the kind of ticket I had, as if I couldn't get back to Manchester with a return ticket bought in Manchester that had no restrictions on it. I just wasn't getting listened to; no matter how many times I said "I don't have a reservation," "I don't have a particular train I have to get" (and "help" like this is one of the reasons I stopped buying tickets for particular trains! it's not always even cheaper any more, and it isn't worth what it costs me in anxiety).

But I got on the right train, then waited a long time for a bus and made it just (about) in time to see Doctor Who -- wasn't it good? -- and make dinner and now I think I should go to bed soon.

1. Do you like bleu cheese?
I genuinely don't think I've ever had a kind of cheese I didn't like. But I do have some I love and blue cheeses definitely are high on that list, yum.

2. Coke or Pepsi?
They're both evil and bad but so tasty. I slightly prefer Coke maybe but I really don't care, I love fizzy drinks. As long as there's sugar in them.

3. Do you own a gun?
I've never even touched a gun. Ugh.

4. Whiskey, Tequila, Vodka?
Whiskey. Tequila is the only spirit I really don't like. Vodka is just above that in the list though: I've probably had some nice cocktails that contained it but it's not something I go out of my way for.

( A bunch more )

It's Ramadan, when Muslims fast between dawn and sunset. The meal they have after sunset is called Iftar. Hundreds of people go to my local mosque (about a minute's walk away) every evening to share the meal, and this time the mosque invited the non-Muslim community to join them for Iftar. I went along with a couple of my WI chums.

This is part of Taste Ramadan, which had ten mosques across Manchester having an open Iftar this evening. Apparently at least this mosque had done this last year, and found it really successful. Tonight there were ten, and next year they're hoping to spread it out across the whole North West.

I'd never been to such a thing, knew embarrassingly little about Ramadan (I've read a book about Islam, Reza Aslan's No Got But God, and really enjoyed it but that's pretty much it as far as my understanding goes), and the mosque had gotten good reviews from other WI members who'd been along to Visit My Mosque in February, so I was excited to go along and learn something.

And I definitely did. We had a speaker, who seemed quite scholarly/academic which might not be to everyone's taste but it was mine! he talked about the etymology of words like "Ramadan" and "Sawm" (fasting), and generally offered context which I really appreciated.

Muslims' knowledge of both other religions, especially Judaism and Christianity, more than one language and a generally wider view of the geography and history than I'm used to, always make me feel a little sheepish. It must be exhausting, I thought tonight, to have to explain yourself in the only terms white people understand sometimes: to say "fasting already existed before Muslims were told to do it" and I'm like oh, yeah, so it did... I remembered how much I resented giving up candy during Lent and wondered how I'd have coped with giving up everything.

I did think that it must be exhausting having to explain yourself to people like me, on our own terms. So basic. So spoon-feedy and hand-holdy. Everybody was lovely and gracious about it, as always has been my experience with Muslim colleagues and shopkeepers and whatnot, but that makes me feel even worse that white people are so amazed that they're not all terrorists and they do normal things like eat crisps.

He answered a few questions, one of which was about women and the other...actually I think they both were about women? One about their role in Ramadan and one about "the veil." I think he handled them very well, at first saying women's role is the same as men's in Ramadan, except they do most of the cooking and men just sit down to eat and complain about the food, and he'd rather have it the other way around. About niqab he said in so many words that what a woman chooses to wear is her own business, and told us that what is worn is mandated more by culture than religion.

Sadly he also had to make a point of condemning terrorist attacks like the recent one in Manchester, in a way that I will never be held responsible for all the shootings that white Americans do. But again he did it very skillfully, making the point that during Ramadan Muslims are meant to restrain themselves not just from eating and drinking (and sex), but also to try not to tell lies, get in arguments, etc. Much less blow up an arena.

One of the friends I was with had fasted today -- except for a cup of coffee she had to save her from a caffeine-withdrawal headache that she knew would have left her too ill to come along tonight otherwise -- and the other didn't. I didn't, but I also understood that this was in keeping with what Muslims are asked to do during Ramadan, because it would have affected my mental health so severely to not eat. But I didn't eat much (I did let myself drink as much water as I needed, because dehydration induces awful headaches and I've already had those nearly every day this week) so I was really excited for Iftar by the time it arrived.

The food was really nice, all made on site in the apparently vast kitchens, by volunteers. A few hundred people were there, and apparently feeding this many is an everyday occurrence during Ramadan. People kept coming around to see if anyone was running out of food (it never ran out, but it did need to get moved from place to place!) and to answer questions: we asked one when they started cooking these meals and he said around two o'clock in the afternoon. Imagine putting all that work into preparing the meal, having to smell the delicious curry and everything cooking, and not being able to eat it for hours!

This afternoon I was starting to marvel at how anybody managed not to eat until it was dark out (at the height of summer, anyway; I probably do this during winter without even noticing it tbh) and by half an hour before the time I was leaving for the mosque I was beginning to wonder how anybody stayed awake that long. My insomnia has been terrible this week; I hope I get more than four or five hours of sleep a night, soon. Better go try to do that then.

(Here's a picture that has me and my friends in it, though you can't really tell. This is only a fraction of the number of people there, but you get the idea.)

My mom told me in our usual Sunday phone call that the ELCA has voted to allow gay pastors. It was hard not to cheer when I first heard this, but while my mom knows I don’t share the visceral hatred for non-straight people that I was raised to have, I don’t see any point in rubbing her nose in it.

But that quickly changed. It seems, from her muddled rendition, that there is much dissent among the ranks. People see the vote as rigged, something shoved down people’s throats, because the voting majority required to pass this was changed from the usual two-thirds to a mere fifty percent.

And Mom’s said her local... bishop? do Lutherans have bishops? well, whatever he is, you know... has made his disapproval clear and told the individual churches they don’t have to allow this. So now my mom says her church is going to have a discussion about this.

The more I think about this, the more I feel sick to my stomach.

I have long said that religious communities like the ones I grew up in do people a lot of good. I have said they provide the social welfare that the U.S. government won’t or cant, and the power of support from regularly seeing a circle of people wider than your family or friends, symbolized by the holy power of potluck.

I’ve seen people benefit greatly, both emotionally and practically, from small rural churches like the ones my mom goes to. And I prefer to think of them that way, which is only natural: these are middle-aged farmers who always look happy to see me and the old ladies who served the food at my wedding reception. I don’t want to think of them as having anything to do with the frothing, raving, bigoted, hateful lunatics that people think of when they think of American Christianity’s worst characters and caricatures.

But I know my mom isn’t the only one who’s so uncomfortable with the idea of accepting gay people in any way that she can’t even talk about it. There’s no way she’d go to such a “discussion,” because my family just don’t talk about things and anyway I think she prefers to hang on to her willful obliviousness as much as possible. But other people will go to the discussion, and I can’t help but imagine the things that will be said.

These people who get excited when I’m back home, who go for coffee with my mom and me, they will never know that I am going to Pride this weekend. They’ll never know how I met most of my friends in Manchester, that I -- oh bitter irony -- have replaced the support network I expected from church with the one I found in a group for bisexuals in Manchester.

I think most of the bisexuals will find that pretty funny too, as on the surface there couldn’t be more difference. In one group I’m the girl with the exotic crazy lifestyle, who ran off to the land of free health care and tea with the Queen, but in the other group I am the sweet and innocent one that other people avoid talking about their kinks around.

But despite that wide-ranging difference, I feel love from both groups.

And yet one can love me only because it doesn’t know I’m a part of the other. Some would rage at the dissociation between a deity that pointedly loved the worst among his society displaying such intolerance of those who dare to love who their heart tells them to. I don’t have the energy for that kind of anger; I am merely disappointed, and sad that I will have to continue being a person I am not around the people who have known and loved me since I was a baby.

I just saw my first atheist bus!

Well, technically my only atheist bus. So far.

And it's not really that the bus is an atheist... (I suppose all buses are atheists, come to think of it. You'd have a hard time showing me a bus that believed in God.)

Still, I'm excited.

THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD, it says. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE. Just like the ones I read about! Hurrah for signs of life outside London. I hadn't even known we were going to get atheist buses in Manchester.

Needing someone to tell, I dragged out my phone and texted innerbrat, who's just written about this, and matgb, who told me that they raised enough money that the atheist buses are everywhere. Hurrah!

Even more deliciously, though, I just realized that it was a Stagecoach bus. Take that, crazy CEO! Brian Souter, well-known bastard who campaigned to keep the homophobic Clause 28, is (surprise) an evangelical Christian and there was concern that the outside-London campaign might not happen on buses anyway because of him.

Obviously he apparently decided that atheist money spends as well as any other money, but I still like to think it needles him to see this on "his" buses, just like it needles me to think of giving him any of my money, which is why I don't do it if I can help it.

So ha on him anyway.

It's not just the beloved eccentrics we've got to watch out for. Andrew called me today to tell me that his great-grandmother has died. In an attempt to provide what comfort I could from so far away, I said that while I knew his family isn't always close (it's too big for that!) and they're certainly not religious, if he wanted to go to whatever kind of memorial service might be held (and of course assuming it was after I was back in the UK), I am happy to go with him.

I told Mom about this conversation when I got off the phone, we finished our Scrabble game, and I got up to get a drink or something. Out of nowhere she said, "Well, I guess if they're not religious there's no point in me sending a card." It was a good thing she couldn't see me; I was shocked speechless. And that's probably a good thing too, because if I had been able to speak it would've been nearly impossible to keep myself from saying "WHAT? So only religious people mourn their loved ones?"

I couldn't believe she'd said such a thing. I reviewed it several times in my head to make sure I couldn't have misheard. But it was inescapable.

I couldn't follow the "logic" of that at all. I suppose it wouldn't do much good to send one of those sappy "Well at least they're with Jesus now, eh?" cards, but my family doesn't really go for such overt religious sentiments anyway. (Their reasons for this may be less theological than mine and more cultural — people around here are embarrassed on behalf of the people whose Christmas-card letters are full of gushing about the holy event rather than telling us about what they've done during the year, much less the people who speak in tongues — but the end result is the same for them as for me; the first rule of being a Midwestern churchgoer is you do not talk about churchgoing. (Even if only because you assume that everything you've "learned" from it is obvious to everyone, since that's how indoctrination works.)

"Well, I don't know about that," I said, genuinely dubious. "I was planning on sending a card," I added after a pause, slightly more defensively. I hadn't been until I said it, but it did sound like a good idea. I'm sure Andrew's family wouldn't be expecting anything from me or my parents, and probably wouldn't notice much one way or the other (though our moms do exchange Christmas cards, and his mom sent flowers and other lovely things for us when she heard about Chris, so I wouldn't think it wildly inappropriate, especially since it's Andrew's mom's side of the family, her grandma, to send her a card or something).

But that wasn't really the point anyway: how could my mom think that sympathy was somehow predicated on religion? (If you were going to follow Christian theology through to its logical conclusion, you should really be sending cards to non-Christians especially, because you'd believe their loved ones had been just condemned to an eternity of torture!)

I’m forever telling Andrew, apologetically, that I know my family and the state of Minnesota and other things near and dear to my heart are religious weirdos compared to him and his family and his culture… but they’re not too bad about it, I swear! Yeah, they go to church and they might mumble the mealtime prayer before supper, but otherwise you’d never know! I know a lot of the intolerance endemic in rural areas is encouraged by religion, and that’s terrible, but I’m also almost proud that my family and my community generally seem to use church as a way to catch up with friends and have lefse and lutefisk suppers. We’re subverting the system a bit! Getting positive social benefits out of this as well or hopefully instead of the negative social ostracism, ignorance, hatred, and indoctrination.

But the negative things are always finding new ways to show up, like whack-a-mole, and I never stop being surprised and dismayed at them. It’s rare I hear such bizarre things from my parents, and all the worse for being rare (because I’m not used to it) and for being my parents (because I want to think better of them).

That would’ve been unsettling enough, but she didn’t let the topic go. “Do they have churches around you?” she asked.

“Yeah, lots,” I answered, as innocently as possible. I didn’t bother adding that many seem to have been converted to more useful things, like pubs, flats, community centers, mosques...

She followed up with, “Do you ever go?”

“I, well, I work a lot of weekends, unfortunately, you know…” I said. Immediately I hated myself for weaseling out of answering the question. It’s true that I do, but it’s also true that I am, basically, an atheist now.

I don’t know if there are gods or an afterlife or whatever. They've never tried to make themselves known to me, that I know of. And that's kind of the point: I don’t care, because if they are out there they’re not making any impact on my life.

I’m a bit uneasy about the militant tactics of some of the recent trendy atheists. I can understand the context for such zeal, especially in the States (though of course the most obvious example is British), where it’s bad enough being the wrong flavor of Christianity, or belonging to some non-Christian religion, never mind having no religion at all. But that passionate antagonism towards theists is not my thing, and for a long time I associated that antisocial behavior so strongly with atheism that I didn’t want to think of myself as one. (I admire many people who’d rather be right than be nice, but I’m not cut out to be one of them.) But when I think about it, I realize that since my life features nothing theistic, I guess it is atheistic.

It’s a silly way to define myself, by what I am not, which is another reason I don’t usually think of myself as an atheist… but that’s a point for another day! Today’s point is that there’s more keeping me from church than my work schedule, and I felt lousy for, basically, lying to my mom about this. Even if I was doing it with the good intention of avoiding a really difficult confrontation that would be sure to hurt and disappoint both my parents, even if I thought those ends justified that means, it’s still lying.

My mom agreed that I did work a lot of weekends, but wouldn’t let up. “You used to be so good about that sort of thing,” she said. "I'd like to see you get back to it." Meaning: for a year or so when I was in high school I hung out with fairly fundamental weirdos of the Charismatic Christian type; the sort who go on retreats and start Bible studies at school and listen to bad music that they’ve convinced themselves is better than any secular music and wear ugly jewelry with crosses on it.

I had lots of reasons for “being good about that” — practically no one else would be nice to me or even talk to me much at that point; I was thrilled to have something bigger than myself to belong to, something to feel passionate about; I had always felt different from almost everybody around me and this was a good excuse to be even more obnoxiously different — but none of the reasons were actually to do with really believing, deep down. (Though I did such a good job of pretending to be good that I even convinced myself for a long time.) So I wasn’t really “being good about that.” I just looked like I was.

And, in the way that my mom never seemed to notice if I dusted my desk and dresser as long as I shuffled around the things resting on them to make it look like I’d dusted, it doesn’t seem to matter if I’m good at religion as much as it looks like I’m being good about it. Indeed: though she’s disappointed in me now, what she doesn’t know is that I’m still getting pangs (they come and go) of longing for the sense of community that I grew up with in small towns and their churches. So I flirt with the idea of going to a Unitarian church or finding some Quakers to hang out with, but everything from habit to the sure and certain knowledge that Andrew will make fun of me to actually working on a lot of weekends has prevented me from getting any further than looking at some websites.

Though happily some good has come of all the uneasiness this conversation with my mom has brought me: talking about it to a good friend has inspired her to tell me that if she’s around she will go to those kinds of churches with me, and I think that might be good for both of us. I look forward to finding out. There is something about church, as my upbringing has made me think of it, that I do miss and that I do need to get back or at least to find some analogue of. It’s just almost certainly not the part of church that my parents think is important. And I don’t even feel able to tell them that.

I forget sometimes how hard it is, being back here. There’s a slowly but steadily increasing gap between who I am and who they think I am. Every Sunday when I pick up the phone to call my parents, I make a mental list about things to talk about: the weather? baseball? (only good for my dad, of course) complaining about how much I have been working? I might be making a slightly more conscious effort lately, but the fundamental problem is not new; it was never easy to talk to my family. I grew up in silent terror because I was more like people I read about in books and not much at all like people in my family or at school, and I (reasonably, I think) came to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with me.

Now I have the internet so I know that while there may be more of them, and people like me may be scattered hither and yon all over the globe (and perhaps on several other planes of existence that may or may not actually exist, depending on what you think the definition of “is” is) but they are out there; I am not alone.

But I’m still alone when I come back here (unless I bring Andrew with me, but that brings a whole other set of complications with it, because the sorts of things I'm describing happen to him too, except far more so as he doesn‘t have my lifetime of coping mechanisms for this cognitive dissonance). And here are there so many people who think more or less like my parents do (where else would they have gotten it from?), and I’m so small against all of that. I still, sometimes, have to remind myself that I’m not necessarily crazy just because I don’t have anyone to talk to here.

How stupid of me to think I’d need LJ less when I was here. I always forget what it’s like here, what I’m like when I’m here. I’m gasping for it, and damn the dial-up, because the internet reminds me that I am not crazy.

This, written by an Englishman living in North Carolina, explains better than I've been able to (my USian family just blinks at me in confusion), just how different the British attitude to religion is. He's saying what would be for Britain tediously obvious stuff about climate change and the importance of teaching good science and so on, but as so many other things that are obvious in the rest of the industrialized world (where abortion, the dealth penalty, gun control, socialized health care, and many other hot topics in the US are not even an issue, are not argued by the extremes of the right or left wing), they're very contentious in the US.

I lie back and imagined that this guy might soon find himself in a country more like the one he left, where (as matgb pointed out), a Tory front bench spokesman just admitted to being an atheist on national TV. What would it take?

A lot. I sighed. It seems impossible really, but of course such paradigm shifts always do.

But then I started thinking of another newspaper article I read yesterday, about the demise of religion, specifically Christianity, in Canada and a feminist explanation for the reason it declined so suddenly in the '60s.

It is impossible to refute or underemphasize the fact that religion was suddenly confronted in the 1960s by changes in the social construct of gender and a resulting severing of the centuries-old linkage between Christian piety and femininity.

Women — the traditional mainstays of institutional religion — in huge numbers abruptly rejected the church's patriarchal exemplar of them as chaste, submissive "angels in the house" with all of the social and moral responsibility for community and family but none of the authority.

Unable to find acceptable religious role models or religious ideals that were not painful or oppressive, they reconstructed their identities as secular and sexual beings...Birth control gave them the deliberate choice to be sexual, to move out of enslavement to fertility, to delay and limit the size of families. Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae (On The Regulation of Birth), shocked even loyal Canadian Catholics by upholding the church's ban on contraception.

He makes a very good point, and from personal experience I can confirm that my dislike of the Cathollic Church goes all the way back to the fact that I learned at an early age that it had no interesting career opportunities for me even if I'd wanted them.

But there's something else that's occurred to me now in the context of thinking about what it would take for America to be like that. Because my first thought on imagining a religionless (or at least less-religioned) US was not about the sad disappearance of potlucks but about a neighbor of mine (well, of my parents now of course) who died of brain cancer a couple of years ago. And my own family when my dad didn't have a job for a couple of years. And millions, surely, of other Americans who have benefitted from bags of groceries, like we got, or benefit suppers to help pay for medical bills, like our neighbor got. Much of that sort of thing is organized by churches. "Faith-based" organizations are responsible for a big chunk of the volunteer work and chartiable giving done in America.

I didn't think, until now when I thought it strange that I hadn't thought of it, about any kind of mystical or metaphysical impact the loss of a churchgoing, theistic population, I just thought about what it would mean for me... or people like me, since I'm not there any more. As long as unemployed people and ill people are shat upon by the USian government, as long as there's a dearth of non-religious do-gooding (by the government as much as individuals! see "whatever happened to New Orleans"), churches will try to fill that vacuum.

My knowledge of all history everywhere is extremely vague, but when I read about the religious sea change in Canada in the 1960s, I couldn't help but think about the one other thing I do know about that place and time, which is Tommy Douglas. He's the Prometheus who brought socialized medicine to Canada. It seems obvious but it wasn't mentioned in the article, and I'm sure it's a gross oversimplification on my part, to think that people were less interested in church as secular institutions were developed to take care of everybody. But I'm sure of the benefit suppers for people with cancer, the mass food-shelf donations, the sense of community that is one of my favorite things about coming from where I do, and it's all based on churches, on organized religion.

Of course all that stuff is possible without religion, and of course USians with no religion can rely on other social networks of friends and family... but until a better governmental safety net comes in to place for the sick, poor, unemployed, etc., I wouldn't blame USians for keeping up with their god-bothering.