Privilege and Resentment

Over the last year or two, the issue of privilege has become kind of omnipresent all over social media. More and more people are thinking in terms of privilege and trying to exercise compassion. At the same time, reactionaries have formed whiny counter-movements such as the MRAs, the Meninists, and the "Why Can't We Have A White Pride Movement" people who think they're the real messengers of equality. It's pretty interesting to watch.

For those who don't understand what all this "check your privilege" stuff is about, let me lay it out for you simply:

Not too terribly long ago, white men were the only people who had any sort of privilege. This was written into the laws of the land. Eventually people got sick of the obvious unfairness of this arrangement and laws were finally passed for the cause of equality. These laws granted equality on paper, but not in real life. For instance, as soon as black people got any rights whatsoever, we got the KKK, Jim Crow laws, and urban segregation/"ghettoization." Even today, we have "equality" on paper but not in real life: black men with college degrees are as likely to get jobs as white men with felony records. That's right - if you want to see how hard it is to get a job as a black man with a college degree, go kill someone and see how easy things become for you. White people are still living with the residual privilege we inherited from our ancestors.

I've seen white people roll their eyes when talking about black people: "Oh, for heaven's sake. They have so many scholarships - more than we have! They have every opportunity WE have, and MORE! They need to get off their butts and do some work and stop complaining."

This is where people say "Check your privilege." White people take lots of things for granted: living in a decent neighborhood, not fearing for your life on the way to school, having a good school to go to, etc etc etc. When we forget about all of this sort of stuff, and then turn around and tell a kid from a terrible background that he's got the same opportunities as us, we forget about all the nice things that we had that he didn't. He DOESN'T have the same opportunities: he was likely surrounded by unchecked bad influences, his school was funded by abysmally low local property taxes, the teachers weren't engaged, and his education was very poor. Even if he WAS educated enough to go to college - which he very well might not be - what would he get for it? The same likelihood of getting a job as a FELON.

So - yes. "Check your privilege," indeed. We should always remember to THINK and LISTEN, not make assumptions and expect others to behave like we do. We forget how many things we take for granted that others find completely alien. This is what compassion and enlightenment is all about.

****Having said all that, I am now going to go down a path that will anger my more liberal friends. Before I start, I should be very loud and clear and say this: I am NOT into the MRA thing, the White Pride thing, or the Meninist thing. I find these movements incredibly disgusting and whiny and I have no use for them. Please remember that if you start thinking I'm trying to jump on the "persecuted" bandwagon. That is NOT me.And also, I'm sorry for telling such a long and detailed story. Context is important here to illustrate my point.****

So: A week or two ago, I joined a discussion on a friend's page. His article had suggested that the New Atheist movement was effectively an orientalist movement of white males who flex their privilege against everyone but white males. There were some allusions to things Maher and Dawkins said that sounded insulting to women (at least on the surface). The charge is also that the atheism movement is Islamophobic.

My response to this was that it is no measure of enlightenment to tolerate intolerance; the more humanist and rational you are, the more you will seek equality and the less you will tolerate ideas that elevate inequality (such as Islam). I said that the treatment of women and girls in Islam are barbaric, and any Eurocentric/Patriarchal views really stem a lot from religion. And as such, any problem of misogyny or Eurocentrism in a Western Atheist movement is not a function of its Atheism, but rather a function of its Westernness, which is actually a residual problem of religion. As such, the rationalist viewpoint is the antidote, not the problem.

I thought it was a pretty good point. Except what happened next was a woman butted in, telling me I shouldn't break my hand patting myself on the back for everything atheism has done for women.

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Now before I continue, I should give you a parenthetical: I do not enjoy calling myself an atheist in the first place. The things people infer from that label are crazy: there are a whole lot of adjectives/baggage that goes with the term. In reality, atheism simply means "lacking the belief in God or gods." It does not mean "I believe there is no God" (although some atheists do think this) or anything else. I say this because for the purpose of this debate, I am defending atheism as a concept. This ONLY means that I do not have an active belief in "God" AS DEFINED BY THEOLOGY. I'm not an ontological naturalist; depending on your definitions, I could be an atheist, a deist, a pantheist, or an Einstein-ist/Spinoza-ist. So don't bother going there. That's not the point. ANYWAY.........
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So anyway, yeah. She said that atheists should calm down and stop congratulating themselves on the progress they've made for women. "And don't tell me it's better when compared to Islam," she added. "That's a stupid argument." She then said that, because Dawkins and Maher have both insulted women, atheism itself has a problem with women. And besides, the demographics of the atheist community: overwhelmingly white male.

I was a bit taken aback, but my response had two main points:

1. Atheism (lack of belief in God/gods) can't have a problem with misogyny any more than disbelief in aliens can have a problem with misogyny. Atheists do not have gods and have no allegience to Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins; if they say something stupid, that does not reflect on anybody but them.

2. I am a feminist because I am a humanist because I am an "atheist" because I am a rationalist. Rational thinking IS better for women (and everyone else) than the type of male-centric irrational thinking found in Islam. It's NOT a stupid argument; if you're gonna lambast atheistic feminism for its "misogyny" while defending blatantly misogynistic Islam against the Big Mean White Atheist, you need to get your life together.

This is where my actual point begins.

She responded by basically characterizing me as a stereotypical clueless white basement-dwelling Dawkins-worshipping "dudebro" with no clue how the real world works. From this point on, she had nothing to say against my arguments; she had only smack to talk.

When I took exception to the ad hominem, she told me sarcastically that she's sorry she hurt my "poor widdle feelings."

NOW.

This was not persecution. I am not crying, my widdle feelings aren't hurt, and I'm not pulling the "LOOK, WHITE GUYS GET DISCRIMINATED AGAINST TOO" BS. If that's the worst I have to deal with, I have no business even mentioning it, especially in comparison to people who ACTUALLY have issues with discrimination. So don't get it twisted... BUT...

Can you imagine if I dismissed the argument of a black Christian woman by writing her off as a "welfare queen on her way to buy some Newports and get her $200 nails done?" And then mocked her for having her "poor widdle feelings" hurt? I'd be SWARMED with indignation and shouts of racism and ad hominem and I'd be lower than troll toejam. And I SHOULD be. It made me cringe to even write that as an example.

Here's the thing. Being born into privilege does not make your opinions any less valid than being born into un-privilege. The only thing that makes your opinions invalid is IGNORANCE. Assuming that you are ignorant simply because you were born into privilege is PREJUDICE. No, it's not OPPRESSION; it's true that an unprivileged class cannot OPPRESS a privileged class. But they can still exercise PREJUDICE, and prejudice is still not okay - even if you get some sort of glee out of "giving the white man a taste of his own medicine."

This is why I've been - cautiously - saying that privilege is starting to turn into a handicap.

Privilege is real. I was born into it and I can see plain as day that others are not as advantaged as I am. The only time I have EVER experienced racism was when I was driving with my black girlfriend and got pulled over because they assumed SHE was a prostitute. She, on the other hand, dealt with racism her whole life. I went to a private school and there was one person of color in the entire school. I have no idea what it is like to have negative assumptions constantly leveled at you. I mean, look at me - I had a small whiff and here I go off on a rant about prejudice. Can you imagine what it's like for somebody for whom that is an actual issue that affects the quality of their life?

I say all this to drive home the point that I am NOT trying to play persecution. I would never cheapen legitimate complaints of real persecution that way. I am simply trying to illustrate a shift I see where privilege is becoming a demographic that people can attack with impunity. Like I illustrated, I called her out on making assumptions about me based on my inborn traits, and was only greeted with more of the same. This seems like the only demographic that people are "allowed" to do that with, the only type of person that they are allowed to ad hominem attack and get away with it laughing. I hope it doesn't get worse.

Nietzsche came up with a term in his Geneaology of Morality: Ressentiment. The gist of this idea is that underdogs tend to find value in their identity as underdogs, reinterpreting their underdog status as "inherently good," and classify the privileged classes as "inherently evil." Some examples of this would include:

-"The meek shall inherit the earth."
-"Mainstream bands are just sellouts. Nobody listens to REAL music anymore."
-"I hate the Yankees. Somebody needs to take them down a peg."

I think this is kind of what is going on here. White men have held privilege for so long that it is becoming fashionable to reject white men, rather than to reject white PRIVILEGE. I am all about rejecting my special privilege. But the solution isn't to diminish ME as a white man; it's to raise everybody to the same level. I'll be damned if I'm walked all over by anyone trying to get ahead of me. No. We should all be in this together, walking forward hand in hand. I actually care about these issues, and it's VERY dangerous (and disappointing) to be tossed aside as a privileged blind dudebro when I'm in fact trying to HELP.I'm done now. You may now tell unleash your fury and tell me why I'm an insensitive prick.

The Story of My Deconversion

So let's see. I was born and raised in Christian Fundamentalism. At first it was general/nondemoninational, then it turned into IFB (Independent Fundamentalist Baptist), where women couldn't wear pants, boys and girls couldn't touch, TVs were frowned upon, and music with "a beat" was demonic (except for march music). We believed in only the KJV, we went to church at least three times a week, and my father was the choir director.

When I was 11 or 12, we were at yet another Bible study at my mom's friend's spot and were deciding what book to cover next. As usual, they were choosing between Paul's Epistles. It was ALWAYS Paul's Epistles. Most of the time in church when they were preaching, the main passage was from Paul's Epistles. It was starting to get weird. A philosophical kid, I wanted to go back and read Ecclesiastes or Lamentations, or maybe go back through one of the gospels. A thought struck me, so I asked it immediately: "Hey, why do we treat these books like they're God's Word? In all the other books, there's something saying 'This is the word of the LORD.' In Paul's letters, it only says 'A message from Paul to Church Blahblahblah.' What makes us so sure these books even belong in the Bible?"

Boy, I'll tell you what - you'd have thought I asked "hey, what's so bad about Satan?". They looked at me like I had three eyes. Their faces said "that's preposterous." My dad offered a frowning reply: "The Bible says that ALL scripture is inspired of God."

"Yeah, I know," I said. "But whoever said that Paul's epistles ARE scripture? HE never said they were inspired, so why should WE?"

This was my introduction to the tyranny of dogma. The conversation did NOT go well.
The question was never answered, no matter how many people I asked. The best I ever got was something from 2nd Peter in which Peter refers to Paul's writings as authoritative. Which, of course, didn't help me at all. Instead it lead me to ask "Why should we take PETER'S writings as inspired? He never claimed they were, either!"

I was very concerned that maybe Paul was a bad guy or at the very least his writings were not scripture. I was concerned that Satan had crept into our version of the Bible and our entire movement was mistaken about the "purity" of the Bible. Maybe Satan had us fooled! So I studied and found out about the councils of Nicea and Hippo.

"CATHOLICS decided canon? And not just any Catholics - An EMPEROR with political motives!!! Holy crap! Why are we taking our canon from a Catholic emperor?"

The rest of what I discovered about Nicea was too horrifying for me to even process. Most Christians were coptic or gnostic, until an "official canon" was established around the politically best "official doctrines". The coptics and gnostics were wiped out in short order. Many of the early Christians, I found out, didn't believe in the virgin birth or Jesus' status as God. And the people we got our doctrines from KILLED the people who thought differently, destroyed their writings, etc....... it was really starting to look like Satan got in while the getting was good and corrupted Christianity by making it a Roman political tool. Hence the similarities to Dionysis and Mithra..............

But that was far too much to process before I even got into high school. So I tried to ignore it.
My question about why hell was never mentioned in the Old Testament? That never got answered at all. Quite an omission - quite the silent response. That was a bigger deal, because Jesus was bringing a totally new doctrine with him that wasn't mentioned in the OT. What was that all about? Is it possible Yahweh FORGOT to mention hell for four thousand years? No answer.

I successfully put that thought on the back burner, but then other points started standing out to me: Why am I obsessed with making sure a book CLAIMS to be inspired? Claims are easy; talk is cheap. Like Jeremiah: "The word of the LORD unto Jeremiah." Sez WHO? Jeremiah?? Yeah, easy for HIM to say........

By the time I was fourteen, I was an unbeliever in denial. I had heard so much about hell that I refused to admit to myself I didn't believe. WAY TOO SCARY. A few times I was driven so crazy with anxiety about this that I wanted to commit suicide to get away from how scared I was. But why commit suicide and go to hell? Was finally knowing my fate REALLY better than being uncertain? Indecision and doubt filled my being.

Every night I prayed for salvation over and over again, waiting for the warmth and reassurance of my God to wrap me and hold me and heal my abject terror. It never came. Maybe I didn't do it right. I wasn't deeply enough SORRY. I need to examine myself. Maybe there is a sin I didn't repent of, or maybe I didn't repent deeply enough. Maybe I don't feel strongly enough how BAD I am - I mean, I don't FEEL like I'm that bad... but I need to convince myself of how worthless and terrible I am.
Self-abuse. Abject terror, self-abuse, nightmares, and no answers. Never any answers. Only questions and "maybe you can ask him that when you get to heaven. Now straighten your tie and sit up straight today in church."

The treatment I got because of this taught me it is better to twist yourself into a pretzel in order to please "God" (really it was human beings), so I started burying these feelings deep down and pretending they didn't exist. It was far less of a HASSLE.

Speaking of burying feelings, this was about the time I was getting to REALLY like girls. I didn't know what sex was or what my feelings meant, but I knew that looking at a woman and feeling arousal was lust, which was the same as adultery. Sexuality was, in my mind, conflated with the concept of "forbidden." Therefore, everything sexual was forbidden, and everything forbidden aroused me. That was REALLY a bad situation, and I am fortunate I did not end up hurting anybody. It could have been far, far worse than it got.

By the time I was sixteen I was smoking weed. It relaxed me, put me at ease with myself, helped me not stress out about my repressed sexuality or my indecision about religion. By the time I was seventeen, I was doing LSD too. Doing LSD gave me the profound realization that we are all made out of the same sort of energy, that "all is one" and that we are all connected to each other, that your mind is composed of energies with various motives each tripping over each other to be the primary energy in your life... things that Taoists and Buddhists had been saying for thousands of years. I of course had not been EXPOSED to Taoism and Buddhism at that point; but when I later read what they said, I felt extremely validated.

But let's not take drug epiphanies as if they are divine revelation. Don't worry, I don't make that mistake. I simply became aware of something that I think we all know deep down.
From 16-17, I basically chilled out. I wasn't worried; I had learned how to bury everything and just get stoned and practice piano. Then I got caught with pot and of course things went haywire. It was anguish and tears and horror and it was immediately back to hardcore church mode for "reparative therapy."

I got "saved" "again." And re-baptised. All that guilt and stuff had come cascading back and I acknowledged that they were far more powerful than my questions. That is, of course, until the emotions faded and the questions remained, sticking in my craw like never before.
I asked more people my questions, more boldly now; got the same answers. I read up on it. I used the Internet to read apologism articles. Everything relied on hermaneutics (the fine art of extracting doctrine from scripture - assuming, of course, that whatever you read in that book is true). Well, my questions couldn't be answered by hermaneutics; my questions were about the allegedly divine origin of the Bible itself.

Toward the end of eleventh grade, we studied Descartes in Literature class. We went through his Meditations; in his first meditation, he erases all his assumptions, destroys all his beliefs, and determines to rebuild his belief system from the ground up; he wants to eliminate any bad assumptions he's made and see what a purely objective world view will get you.

I did this, and was not surprised to learn his subsequent logic had major errors; and now that "door" was missing that I was telling you about. I couldn't find the way back in! As Richard Ingersoll said:
"All that is necessary, as it seems to me, to convince any reasonable person that the Bible is simply and purely of human invention -- of barbarian invention -- is to read it. Read it as you would any other book; think of it as you would of any other; get the bandage of reverence from your eyes; drive from your heart the phantom of fear; push from the throne of your brain the coiled form of superstition -- then read the Holy Bible, and you will be amazed that you ever, for one moment, supposed a being of infinite wisdom, goodness and purity, to be the author of such ignorance and of such atrocity."

I did that - approached the Bible as an outsider - and found that there was no way IN. You have to already BE there - as in, be convinced - and then whip your disobedience into shape by making a decision to repent. At no point in that equation do you need to be CONVINCED - only CONVICTED.

From the outside, there appeared to be no door available to one who insists on intellectual honesty. This was just my experience, of course, and I could totally have been be missing something.
But I had DEDICATED MY LIFE to "The Ministry." This was just Satan messing with me, whispering in my ear. I hated that voice of reason, that obstinate logic. There is a quote by Martin Luther I find applicable here:

“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”

I was sick and tired of the exhausting mental game I was playing, and concentrated on piano instead.
When I was 18 I got caught holding hands with a girl from my church. I had been planning on going to Baldwin-Wallace College for piano performance and becoming a concert pianist. But this was a big deal. Holding hands? I needed to be straightened out - and GOOD.

No longer would my parents help me attend school. Not unless I went to Bob Jones University.

I went to Bob Jones University.

Trust me on this.

I hated the people there. They were all so sanctimonious and plastic, each preacher sounding JUST like the last in their cadence... each saying the same stuff and making the same sort of analogies and..... it was creepy. But I paid the fakers no nevermind. I could spot them a mile off; you couldn't ignore them, but you could navigate your way around them for the most part. I navigated fairly well, using what I had learned about burying your identity to minimize hassle; but I sought out the Dean of Men, three of the pastors, four of my teachers, and another three pastors from area churches. I sent them all a list of questions, and each of them gave me the runaround. My favorite response was from Jim Berg, the Dean of Students at BJU, who said basically "These questions are elementary and easily answered by any mature Christian. If you don't know anybody who fits that description, try Dr. So-And-So."

Well shoot, I thought. I just took these questions to the "Real Vatican," ie Bob Jones, and even THEY couldn't answer them. These are questions that have no answer. We believe the Bible because the Bible says we should. Period. Yes, it really is that ridiculous. It really does just boil down to being selectively gullible.

I came back from my year at BJU and halfheartedly went back to church because my dad was still the choir director and really really wanted me to. My mom had grown sick of the fake plastic people and politics there and refused to go; I went a few times and petered out. I was angry at those people for being such jerks, for keeping my repressed, for confusing me, for wasting my teenage years, for everything. But I never once blamed God for what they did, nor did I reject BELIEF by virtue of how I FELT. That kind of thing, where emotions overrode fact, was no longer acceptable to me. I gained the ability to believe or disbelieve by virtue of information and information alone, without cognitive bias. Or, at least as close to it as I could get.

When I opted out of church, I explained it with honesty. It was a "coming out of the closet" experience. I explained that I'm not going to believe a book simply because the book asks me to; that I'm going to pay attention to facts, and right now the facts are leading me away from the Bible; that if hell were a real thing, they might have found a moment to mention it in the Old Testament; that an omnipotent merciful god could not be forced into torturing his own creation against his will; that I was taking a stand for once in my life, and refusing to give in to pressure. That day I felt more integrity than I ever had before, and I was FREE. I wasn't a Christian.

That felt good.

But then the angst set in, that angst that Christians imagine atheists must feel: Existence is meaningless! I am infinitely unimportant, nothing has any value, everything is hopeless. Why SHOULDN'T we just be as nasty and selfish and hedonistic as we want? What difference does it make anyway?

I pondered and finally decided: Just because life has lost objective meaning, that doesn't mean life is MEANINGLESS; it just makes the meaning of life subjective! I don't need to be depressed that there is no "meaning of life" being handed to me to consume on a silver platter; it's not a restaurant. I have to make my OWN meaning of life... and it tastes better than it did from the restaurant! And you best believe I will flavor it with the best life has to offer: not nastiness and selfishness. I will season it with love and respect, so that I might be surrounded by reciprocal love and respect.

When I went to OSU and studied existentialism, I found that yet again my thoughts had already been expressed long before I had figured these things out. Sartre and Camus had expressed these ideas already. Existentialism was thrilling - a "doctrine of optimism and action" as Sartre put it, and not "a doctrine of despair." Once again, I felt validated.

I dated an atheist girl and she convinced me that I was already technically an atheist. To be fair, using the dictionary definition of God, I AM an atheist; but I worked something out for myself that ontological naturalism is false. People assume atheism = ontological naturalism; but this is not the case. Ontological naturalists believe that the material world is all that there is; everything that is temporal is everything there is, PERIOD.

Not only is that prejudiced and arrogant, it doesn't even make sense. If your philosophy precludes you from HAVING a solution to infinite regress, it's a bad philosophy. You can't ignore inconvenient ideas. Therefore, I believe there is something greater - just as I felt there must be all along.
So I moved more into Buddhism and Taoism, where I found the thing that resonated with me most: The Mystery I was seeking was not a jealous being somewhere across a great gulf from me. No, the Mystery I was seeking was the basis for all things, the glue holding all things together, the unifying force, the very laws of nature and physics themselves; but beyond that, something deeper still. Something too omnipresent and magnificent to behold or comprehend.

Then I read about Einstein and Spinoza's version of "God" and felt that chill again: Once again, I had stumbled upon another piece of the puzzle on my own, simply by exercising a little intellectual honesty.

This more or less leads me to where I am today: I'm curious and irreverent, and I offend people by being brutally accurate when I talk about important issues. Not because I'm a jerk; just because truth is more important to me than my comfort or anybody else's. I refuse to dismiss facts that don't agree with my worldview; facts don't make room for my worldview, so my worldview has to make room for facts. This is especially important when I am asked to believe (on pain of eternal torture) that the God of the Universe wrote a book in which he called himself jealous. Or that he creates evil. Or that he is omnipotent, yet cannot forgive us without first copying the Babylonian Mystery Religion script. Or that he had to wipe out the world with a flood and couldn't spare people without asking them to build a boat for all the animals, even the sloths and kangaroos, which then showed no signs of migration back to their respective continents. Or this, or that, or the third, or the 99th.......

The short version of this story:
-I had some questions
-Nobody could answer them
-I kept asking and researching
-Discovered that there are no answers for these questions
-Realized that these unanswerable questions amount to gaping holes in the set of doctrines that is Christianity
-Decided to never again not confront facts and work them into my worldview; aka decided to be honest with myself
-My intellectual honesty appears to have precluded me from gullibility
-Gullibility seems to be the only way to adopt a faith, far as I can tell
-Realized that there is more to existence than the temporal
-I am now living with wonder and awe in a world filled with intriguing ideas and grandiose mystery
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One more parting thought: How is it I can stand not knowing? How can I have any foundation? Don't I feel lost and terrified not knowing where we're headed?

To that I have two quotes:

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition; but certainty is absurd" - Voltaire

 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” - Rilke

Now I live a life of wonder, and it's better than a life of fake certainty.