And Tango Makes Controversy

So, many years ago, I was rather proud to say that my blog was one of the leading sources for introspective posts on the subject of gay penguins. I wanted to talk about gay penguins again, because it seems to be a topic that never ceases to be a fount of subject material.

 

In particular, I wanted to talk about book banning and the children's book And Tango Makes Three. It's a delightful book based on the true story of New York Zoo penguins Roy and Silo who paired up for mating season; both were male penguins. The zookeepers, noting that obviously Roy and Silo could not produce an egg, found an egg that was not being tended to and gave it to the couple. The egg hatched into a baby girl penguin named Tango, and they were a penguin family with two dads. It's a cute true story about some penguins, who wouldn't love it?

Well, And Tango Makes Three was the #1 most challenged book for 2006 through 2010 (except for 2009, when it was merely #2), and continues to be a target for book banners in 2025, twenty years after its initial publishing. What's so offensive?

It's conservative Christians' belief that any media that touches on the subject of LGBTQIA+ individuals (even animals!) is immediately classified as pornographic. This is a very strange viewpoint which defies logic other than the logic of bigotry.

See, apparently if you talk about two men being in love with each other, it's inherently implying the existence of gay sex, and sex is porn. Never mind that the existence of heterosexual couples likewise implies the existence of sex (especially if the couple has children), but of course, straight sex is somehow less pornographic than gay sex. Oh, and transgender people are also somehow pornographic by their very existence, even though gender is separate from sex. (Imagine if Finding Nemo had given mention of the fact that clownfish are transsexual in nature; there goes your G rating, right?)

A part of this aversion to LGBTQIA+ subject material for children is this strange idea that exposing children to the idea of gay people (and penguins!) will make them turn gay, and exposure to transgender people will make them turn transgender. This is despite the fact that science continues to assert that sexual orientation and gender are determined before birth, and the fact that children who are exposed to exclusively cishet media still turn out LGBTQ. Listen people, you're not protecting children; you may in fact be hurting children who are enriched by the existence of diversity in the media they consume. And LGBTQIA+ children (who, sorry, not sorry, but they do exist) will love to have representation in the books and films they see.

Anyway, in the end, it's not really about protecting anyone from inappropriate material, unless of course you have a warped idea about what constitutes "inappropriate" based on bigoted ideas of of what's acceptable. There used to be (and still are) a lot of people who felt that media portrayal of mixed-race couples was inappropriate. We've mostly evolved as a society past that, and we need to evolve past stigmatizing LGBTQIA+ people. And penguins.

Christian Buddhism

I've been considering the possibility of becoming a Buddhist without leaving Christianity. I know there are a lot of people who would view this as nonsense, or even blasphemy, but I've thought for some time that the idea has merit.

Back when I was in college, I took a philosophy course in which we examined eastern religions/philosophies (there's not really a clear delineation for most of them). I found them all very interesting, but I was particularly taken by Buddhism, and even way back then, I thought that so much of Buddhist thought was rather compatible with Christian thought within the practical realm, although obviously not the theological. Still where Buddhism in its original form was essentially atheistic, believing in the non-existence of higher beings, in that gap, one could place the God of Abraham and have a pretty solid system of morality that was quite compatible with Christianity.

At the center of Buddhism was the idea of following the Noble Eightfold Path, which I present here, cribbed from Wikipedia and edited for clarity and brevity:

1. Right View: recognizing our actions have consequences, death is not the end, and our actions and beliefs have consequences after death.
2. Right Resolve: striving toward non-violence and avoiding violent and hateful conduct.
3. Right Speech: no lying, no abusive speech, no divisive speech, no idle chatter.
4. Right Conduct or Action: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no sexual misconduct, no material desires.
5. Right Livelihood: no trading in weapons, living beings, meat, liquor, or poisons.
6. Right Effort: preventing the arising of unwholesome states, and generating wholesome states.
7. Right Mindfulness: a quality that guards or watches over the mind, the stronger it becomes, the weaker unwholesome states of mind become, weakening their power "to take over and dominate thought, word and deed."
8. Right samadhi: practicing meditation, culminating into equanimity and mindfulness.

While certainly there are values here that Christianity doesn’t uphold, like the avoidance of meat, they are not incompatible. Of particular importance is that all of these things are values I nonetheless hold for myself (I am a vegetarian, for instance).

As always, the thing I strive for in a post is feedback and dialogue. In this case, I would particularly like to hear from both Christians and Buddhists as to what they might think. (I don't personally know any Buddhists, but I'd like to.)

About the pain

I pretty much never talk about it, but I think I'm underestimating the effect my chronic pain is having on my life.

For the past six years I have had chronic pain, nothing seems to work against it, and as time goes by, it seems to get worse and worse. I don't talk about it for two reasons. Firstly, I hate to complain about personal problems, and it's almost impossible to talk about it without sounding like I'm complaining. Secondly, the world is so screwed up right now that despite the intensity that the pain often reaches, it's not in the top five of the list of things that I'm worried about right now.

The reason I'm bringing it up now is because I am considering the possibility that the pain is having an effect on dealing with those things that are more important. When you feel like your head is simultaneously in a vise and on fire, it's difficult to find mental clarity to deal with life in general. The problem is that I don't know if putting more focus on the pain is going to lead to a solution. I've already talked to several doctors about it, including a neurologist who has tried about a dozen treatments to zero effect.

The nature of the pain is odd, partially because it's not all pain. Sometimes I describe whatever the condition is as "A smorgasbord of unpleasant tactile hallucinations." Usually the only thing that makes it go away is falling asleep, which is difficult to do when I'm in pain, but I almost always wake up symptom-free. Then once I'm awake, the symptoms eventually creep back up on me.

I used to call it "long COVID" and who knows? Maybe it is. It pretty much started when I got COVID, and at first it was mainly COVID-like symptoms, but over the years, the symptom list has gotten longer and stranger:

Headache, sore throat, coughing, sneezing, sore teeth, sore lips, sensation of teething, sensation of plugged sinuses, sensation of plugged nostrils, sensation of having been punched in the nose, sensation of hair being pulled out, sensation of difficulty breathing, sensation of tongue being pulled out, burning eyes, burning skin on my face, sensitivity to spiciness, tasting things that aren't there, feeling hunger when my stomach is full, sensitivity to water on my skin, burning in the soles of my feet, feeling like there's a piece of string wrapped around one of my ears, feeling like my teeth are razor sharp and cutting up the inside of my mouth, back and neck pain, sugar burning my mouth, salt burning my mouth, hair burning the side of my face,

All of these symptoms come and go at random, although once again usually later in the day. I feel fine in the morning, and a few times I have managed to make them go away with a nap in the afternoon. On a handful of occasions, they have gone away on their own, at least two of those times exactly at midnight (and one time I wasn't looking at a clock). It usually seems to be stress related.

Anyway, once again, I'm starting to seriously consider that this condition is standing in the way of more than just enjoyment of life. Maybe it's standing in the way of being functional in general. But I don’t know how to fix it. So what do I do, then?

Evil and atheism

I'm in the process of reading the book God Forsaken by Dinesh D'Souza because someone recommended it to me as the "definitive" book on the problem of evil. As I've already written about before, I'm having a crisis of faith with respect to the evil I am seeing in the world right now. Can God be good and evil on the level we see today be happening? I see genocide in Gaza, as well as other places in the world, including America, where legislation currently making its way through Congress would amount to genocide of transgender people in America.

I just read a chapter that gave me food for thought, in which D'Souza examines the idea that the burden of proof is entirely on theists. He argues that there are flaws in the atheist view that require explanation, but I only find some of his claims convincing.

D'Souza points out that many atheists have argued that the reason religion exists is essentially wish fulfillment. We live in a world full of pain and suffering, so we imagine that God will take us in the next life to a place called heaven where there is no suffering. He admits that heaven seems like wish fulfillment, but how can atheists explain hell? There's nothing comforting in the idea that there is a place where the suffering is both worse and eternal, is there? My thought on this is that I don't know if he's talked to the right atheists; there's a twofold purpose to the invention of hell, and that is (1) to keep believers in line and (2) to have something to scare unbelievers with. Also, I suppose to a lesser extent, it gives believers a feeling of superiority, which you sometimes see in a Christian telling an atheist, "You think your logic is so clever, but you won't feel so clever in the lake of fire!" Ugly, but it certainly happens.

D'Souza talks about how atheists point out that God is curiously absent for something like 100 million years of humanity's existence, and the reveals himself to a single Hebrew, so how does that make sense? D'Souza points out a couple of things. First, although homo sapiens was around for a long time before Christianity, only about 2% of all humans who ever existed lived before Christ, so perhaps the timing is actually rather fortuitous. Secondly, although homo sapiens was around for so long, before around 35 thousand years ago, humans accomplished almost nothing, and then suddenly they invented agriculture, art, language, and complex tools. D'Souza suggests that this shift may have been the result of divine intervention, and atheists have no solution for why this shift happened, and why so late given that homo sapiens didn't seem to have evolved much in 100 thousand years. It seems to me however that the invention of agriculture in itself would have played a pivotal role in the development of all of the rest. With agriculture comes culture, because we change as a species from nomadic hunter gatherers to people who take up a specific space. That creates culture.

D'Souza briefly touches on the problem of objective morality, pointing out how C. S. Lewis argues that if an atheist claims something violates a moral standard, there must be a standard giver. D'Souza admits this argument may not be very good, and as for myself, I think it's rather simple to conceive of a moral standard based on whether one is creating pleasure or suffering, or perhaps, as I myself have argued recently, on consent.

D'Souza claims that the real problem with evil is the extremes thereof. If we're just evolved animals, why is it that other animals will inflict suffering if it leads to their survival (such as a lion killing an antelope to feed its family), but they don’t do things like torture or genocide? These things do nothing to increase our fitness for survival, so why do they happen? D'Souza doesn’t really flesh out the theistic solution here as he challenges the atheist, but I assume it has something to do with sin or even the devil. I don't know about torture per se, but when it comes to genocide, I have actually read some very compelling arguments from an evolutionary perspective. There apparently was a period of time when the world was inhabited by something like six separate species of hominid, and then all of them died out except for homo sapiens. Some have suggested that it wasn't some inherent inferiority of the others, but rather that for some unknown reason an instict was born into us that drove us to kill everything that was similar to us, but not exactly like us, so sapiens became the dominant species. (I've even heard it suggested that this might be why we have the "uncanny valley" effect: something that looks really close to human but not quite is perceived as dangerous.) So as ugly as it seems, genocide could conceivably be bred into humans due to our evolutionary history.

D'Souza's final argument in the chapter is probably his strongest. He argues that humans simply have limited knowledge and reasoning, and because of this, we can't really say that any particular evil or suffering is without purpose. Like a parent can't really explain to their two-year-old child why they have to be poked by a needle at the doctor's office, perhaps it's simply beyond our comprehension why some suffering happens, but God's understanding is limitless. Thus, an atheist can't reasonably claim that there is such a thing as "needless suffering". The only problem I see with this argument is that it cuts both ways; while atheists indeed can't prove that any instance of suffering is without purpose, that in itself doesn't prove that it does have purpose.

I'm continuing to read this book, and I'm continuing to discuss the problem of evil with people of a variety of viewpoints. In the meantime, evil in the world continues, and so much of it inflicted by my government.

Mr. Crane and the bear

So there was this thing that happened recently to some people I know.

Nate and Mr. Crane were walking in the woods and they saw the bear that lives there. You have to understand that this isn't just like anyone coming across a bear, because Nate has this extreme phobia of the bear. Pretty much as long as Nate has existed, he's been obsessed with the idea that the bear is going to attack him. Crane on the other hand isn't as much afraid of the bear so much as he just hates the bear; he'd actually been attacked by the bear before, and he had more than a little bit of a grudge.

So anyway, there was the bear. While most people would just back away slowly and hope the bear leaves them alone, Mr. Crane and Nate weren't most people. Nate handed Crane a big stick and told him to poke the bear to see what kind of mood the bear was in. It didn't go so well.

The bear didn't like being poked, and really felt--after having attacked Crane before--that Crane knew better than to bother her. She attacked. Crane was pinned down by the bear while she mauled him, as bears will do when angered.

"Oh shit!" Nate said. "You need a bigger stick!" So he handed Crane a bigger, heavier stick. The bear just seemed to get angrier. So Nate got another stick. And another. Meanwhile, Crane was losing a lot of blood.

You know, I have to pause here and point out that these two weren't alone in their rather crazy incitement of the bear. Some time previously, Mr. Crane had been sorting out his feelings about the bear, and he had said to himself, "You know, maybe I can just leave the bear alone, and we can live peaceful lives and not worry about each other." There was this other guy, Barry, who was really tough and popular and he heard Crane talking this way and he wouldn't have it.

"Dude," Barry told Mr. Crane, "that bear attacked you! You can't just let that go! And you know the bear better than just about anyone; I bet you could take the bear in a fight! If you did fight the bear, I'd back you up, too." The idea of being nonantagonistic toward the bear was pretty much over right there.

And so we ended up eventually to our story, with Mr. Crane pinned down by the bear, bleeding out while being handed a series of sticks by Nate. It just wasn't working out, and Nate was running out of sticks, but he was sure if he stopped helping Mr. Crane, the bear would surely turn on him. Barry wasn't anywhere to be found.

Right around that time, Don showed up. Now Don, he was tough like Barry, but he wasn't as well-liked. He wasn't as smart, and he was a bit of a jerk; in fact, most people considered him a bully. Weirdly enough, Don actually was rumored to actually like the bear, and some people said they were even on friendly terms. I would say Don's reputation was well-deserved, but in every way. He really was more friendly with the bear than just about anyone.

Nobody was happy that Don was there, least of all Mr. Crane, even though Don was probably the best person to help in the situation. Mr. Crane just wanted Don to get him a better stick, and so did Nate, who was still worried that the bear would turn on him.

Don was trying to get everyone to calm down, including the bear. "Listen," he said, "you're not going to get anything back that you lost from messing with the bear, but maybe if you stop fighting her, I can get her to back off and not kill you!" Nobody was really listening to Don, though.

You probably know, the end of this story isn't written yet. Nobody really wants Don to be right, or the bear to win, but nobody wants Mr. Crane to die either. What will be the end?

The Invention of Religion

Comedian Ricky Gervais is a funny guy, a very talented comedian, and an outspoken atheist. In his movie The Invention of Lying, there is a scene where the character he plays invents religion. If you haven't seen the movie, you have to understand the concept: the film takes place in a parallel world where humans haven't evolved the ability to lie, and Mark Bellison (played by Gervais) is the first person to ever lie. Because of Bellison's ability to lie, and everyone else's inability, every time he lies, people believe him. Eventually, Bellison tells everyone that there is a powerful man in the sky who is watching over everyone, and this man rewards good behavior in a special place after death.

It's funny, but there's something about it that bothers me. Gervais is making a statement about religion as an atheist that I don't think is true. That implied statement is that religion wouldn't exist without lying. He's suggesting that the source of all religious ideas is someone telling a lie.

(Perhaps it's important to take an aside here and talk about the nature of lying in itself. I want to distinguish a difference between lying, which is to deliberately tell someone something that one knows is false, and merely saying something which may not be true but one believes it to be a fact. Gervais and other atheists may believe that there is no God, but when a theist talks about God, they're not lying, they're talking about the truth as they see it.)

Now this is the thing, and the point of this piece: while there may be religions that started by someone telling a lie (and I can think of a few likely candidates, but I won't go there), I don't believe that that's how most religions were started, even if all religion is bunk. I can think of a lot of other ways that religion could be started, and I actually believe they are more likely.

There are a lot of variations on the idea of religion starting as the result of philosophical thought; these are not quite lies, but rather people thinking deeply about the world around them and coming to conclusions that the world is a certain way supernaturally because it somehow makes sense to them. The most simple form of this is the likely scenario of people trying to explain natural phenomena without scientific knowledge. Imagine living in a primitive society and experiencing thunderstorms. Where is that noise coming from? A lot of polytheistic religions have a god of thunder, and I imagine if you don’t know where thunder comes from, you would think there's something in the sky making that noise, and maybe it's a powerful man with a giant hammer? If you start imagining things this way, it would likely follow that you'll assign gods to other aspects of nature. There must be a god of the sun, who makes sure it shines and always crosses the sky on schedule each day. It would also make sense that there's a goddess of the moon, then. And so on and so forth, and someone eventually gives these gods names and comes up with stories about them that stick in the cultural consciousness. None of this is lying per se, but attempts to explain nature and the world around us.

I think some religions start with someone thinking that surely there must be a higher power, and surely that power must care about humankind and our moral choices. That someone puts into words a moral code, and expresses that God or the gods endorses this moral code, because of course they would. This person or persons sincerely believe this to be true. (I think we see a bit of this in already established religions, such as the many doctrines of Christianity that were established hundreds of years after Christ. Original sin? The rapture? Not in the Bible, but someone thought they made sense, so they became doctrine.) Honestly, it's a fine line here between lying (this is truth because I want you to believe it's true) and pontification (this is the truth because I am certain that it's right).

I think one can't rule out the idea of religion starting because of a person just being the right sort of crazy. There are a lot of people who hear voices in their heads, and there are certainly more than a few who decided (or the voice told them) that it was the voice of God. If they hear the voice of "God" and it's telling them things that aren't too farfetched, then when they tell other people that God is talking to them, they could easily be believed, and a religion could be born. On a similar note, a lot of people believe that those who had visions of God or something divine were either crazy or had ingested some sort of hallucinogenic substance. If their visions made some sort of sense, it could start or add to the religion of a group of people who believe in those visions.

All of the scenarios I have suggested so far have suppposed no actual supernatural intervention, but really, I don't think you can rule it out, and if you consider the supernatural, there are all sorts of other scenarios. You don't even have to get into the concept of religion possibly being true (although I of course don't rule that out either).

If there are supernatural powers out there that can influence people in some way, then there's certainly the possibility of those powers influencing religious thought. If there was a powerful being that wasn't God as westerners tend to think of him (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and creator of the universe), that being might nonetheless for one reason or another want to be thought of as God, and influence people to think that way. I suppose in such a case, religion is technically still a lie, but not a lie from humans. If an angel (a word that just means "messenger") came to you with a message from God, and the angel looked very impressive, you might be inclined to believe that message.

There may in fact be multiple "gods" out there vying for people's attention, and each would have a message of truth that would be different from the messages of other gods. Perhaps these messages were even actually true, but only within a specific scope of time or region. I don't know who originally came up with this idea, but many have suggested that there are many gods, and these gods get power based on how many people they can get to believe in them. (Terry Pratchett actually has a novel that is largely about exploring this concept humorously as part of his Diskworld series called Small Gods; it's a terrific novel that I think is both entertaining and thoughtful about the nature of religion that I highly recommend.) The idea seems too farfetched for reality to me, but then what about religion isn't farfetched?

There are probably many other possibilities that could account for the start of religion, but of course, there is still the possibility that one or many religions is actually the truth. Certainly all religions can't be true, because a lot of them contradict one another, but that doesn't preclude at least one being true. And just because one is true doesn't immediately imply that all others are false. As a Christian, I am of the opinion that Christianity is true, but I feel that it's implied that Judaism is also true. In fact, it may be a truism of all the Abrahamic religions that Judaism is true, since all of them build off of that foundation in one way or another.

So, are there religions that are based on a lie? Almost certainly. Are most, or even all religions based on lies? No, I really don't believe that's the case. I believe that most religions are based on people trying to have an understanding of the parts of the world that they didn't understand without religion. Some of these understandings were accurate at least in part, while many were not. But it wasn't about lying. For whatever reason, I think that's an important thing to understand.

Trump’s America

There are a lot of people, probably mostly liberals, who are really quite shocked to find us where we are in America today. How did a terrible man like Trump become our President? This is not who we are as a country!

I think this sort of thinking requires a denial of the reality of United States history, both in the long view and in the more recent. Trump is, in many ways, the quintessential American President. Trump is America with the mask of politeness taken off and discarded.

Perhaps the most obvious thing about Trump that is so American is the racism. While we love to think of America as the "melting pot" of cultures, we're a nation pretty much founded on white supremacy. We were created by the genocide of indigenous Americans, and built by the forced labor of people stolen from Africa. The White House (so appropriately named) itself, the home of our nation's leader, as pointed out not too long ago by Michelle Obama, was built by slave labor. I myself am fond of reminding people that the founding fathers were made up of two groups: rich white men who loved Black slavery, and rich white men for whom Black slavery wasn't a deal breaker.

Trump’s sexism is also very American. We became an independent nation in 1776, but women weren't federally given the right to vote until 1920, nearly a century and a half later. (Oh, and that was only white women, of course.) And voting is just one right of many denied women; the right to own property, the right to have a bank account separate from their husbands, the right to not be discriminated against for employment or housing? All of those came later. Of course, one of the most important rights, the right to be able to control their own bodies and their reproductive choices? That one's still up in the air, as women are effectively given less bodily autonomy than a corpse.

What else defines Trump? Xenophobia? I would call it selective xenophobia, as ICE raids places known to have immigrants with black and brown skin, but makes no moves against communities of undocumented white immigrants. We build a wall on our southern border, but largely ignore undocumented immigrants coming across the northern border. Why? Well, those immigrants are white, aren't they? I may be wrong, but I believe the very first law in the United States limiting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, because we can't have non-Europeans in the U.S., can we? Of course before that, when the United States won a large portion of the southwest from Mexico in the mid-19th century, Mexicans in those territories were assured on paper that they would be American citizens, but apparently in practice, most of them were driven off the land, deprived of property and rights. America has never been keen on accepting non-Europeans, so Trump’s xenophobia is really nothing new.

Oh, and putting the rights and needs of rich people over those of the poor and middle class? That's just capitalism, which has also always been us. White capitalists have always ruled this country, and pretty much every President has been at least a millionaire. Bigotry against LGBTQ people? That's a western cultural norm. We used to (really still do) have laws against them existing, and barely have half a century of progress towards equality, but conservatives will constantly make up stories about how drag queens and transgender women are attacking children despite the fact that the observed reality is that the people children have to fear are religious leaders and their own parents.

This unfortunate conglomeration of lies and bigotry is what America is, has always been, and it's that reality that Trump represents. Can we change? I hope so, and so do many other Americans. But no politicians from either of the two major political parties seem to be willing to make those changes. I believe it's going to take a major shake up of the status quo that's going to require either some restrategizing in the Democratic party, or a rejection of the outdated Democratic party for a newer, more progressive set of politicians. Really, it may take a revolution of some sort, because the status quo needs to be completely rejected, and that's hard to accomplish.

If you, like me, don't want Trump’s America, then don't wait for voting in the midterms in 2026. Start strategizing now, and pushing for changes that can happen now. It's going to take a fight to reverse 250 years of history, but it's not impossible if we put in the work.