A Christian argument for homosexuality

So my little-brother-who-is-in-college decided to stop going to the church he had been going to, in large part because they are Not Okay With Homosexuality and he is Not Okay With That. (In other news, I am really quite proud of my little-brother-who-is-in-college.) Anyway so my dad (whom, let's be clear, both my brother and I love and even occasionally admire) emailed my brother saying, hey, you're not going to that church anymore, is it because of their position on homosexuality, and my brother was like, yeah that's definitely a big part of it, and my dad then proceeded to lecture my brother and my brother proceeded to forward that lecture to me. It was...an exceptionally predictable lecture, to me at any rate, and that may not say a whole lot since I grew up with the guy and know how he thinks. I'll spare you the details, but the short version is that my dad is upset because my brother is making his own moral judgments rather than relying on the Bible.

So here's why, from an evangelical Christian perspective, my dad's position and, more importantly, the position of a very large number of evangelical Christians (on homosexuality specifically and moral judgment generally) is both morally reprehensible and logically indefensible. (And I should say that I am not, myself, Christian, but I have endeavored as far as possible to argue from Christian premises, as well as premises derived from general experience. This is not an atheistic argument. It is a Christian one. Also, I've restrained myself from using my typical profane and offensive style, as a courtesy to the intended Christian audience of this post.)

First off, let's talk about what my dad is actually doing when he claims to be relying on the Bible for moral guidance. In a nutshell, he's relying on his own interpretation of the Bible (specifically, the English Standard Version translation, or in the case of the Old Testament, mistranslation, of the Bible.) Now, this isn't some total relativist argument where I wave my hands like a jellyfish and go "it's all interpretation! nothing is true! it means whatever you want it to mean!" No. That's not the level we're operating on here. Rather, what I am saying is that there is no language, and certainly no literature (this, by the way, includes the Bible), without interpretation. Some interpretations definitely seem better than others - they're better supported by the text, better reasoned, and so forth - that's fine. But it's still an interpretation.

And the thing is, I'm not certain my dad would disagree. He (and evangelical Christians generally) behave as though the Bible needs to be interpreted - at least when it suits them. For instance: evangelical Christians do not adhere to the strictures of the Mosaic law. That's all well and good, but it means you need to deal with verses like Ecclesiastes 12:11-12a ("The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these."), or Matthew 5:17-19 ("Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.") Now, it's not stupid to say that, when Jesus says "until all is accomplished", he means "until I fulfill the Law and the Prophets by my life, death and resurrection". It's less easy to deal with "whoever relaxes one of these commandments...will be called least in the kingdom of heaven", but there are workarounds I'm sure (most arguments I've heard follow the lines of, the Law totally still exists and is valid and true but we get to ignore it because Grace - which, there's a term for that sort of thing in programming: cruft. But okay, fine, not the most elegant solution, but a solution nonetheless.)

And of course you can look at other places in the Bible to support the claim that we need no longer keep the Mosaic Law - Peter chowing down on a hallucinated tref picnic from heaven in Acts, where God's all, hey yeah no forget the kosher thing, I get to declare things clean by fiat and you don't get to cling to your outdated codes of ethics (wait, this sounds familiar - did I mention that the point of the story was that Christians should stop treating a hitherto stigmatized and looked-down-upon group of people like garbage? Yeah, wow, that definitely sounds familiar but I just can't place it right now. Oh well.) or else Paul's screeds in multiple letters, most notably Galatians, where he says (Galatians 5:2), "Look: I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law." (Ironically, there are many in the evangelical community who circumcise their children, for who knows what reason. One possible interpretation of this verse is that they have thereby condemned their children either to hell, or to keeping the Mosaic Law - which reduces, in the evangelical mind, to being condemned to hell. Even if you don't interpret it this way, why, given this verse, would you even consider circumcision for your children? Anyway.) But the point is, you're using these verses to interpret the verses which would suggest that you should keep the Mosaic Law (instead of, for instance, the other way round).

Or we could get away from the whole Mosaic Law thing entirely: look at Paul's instructions about women in the church in 1 Timothy 2:11-12 ("Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.") or in his astonishingly incoherent rant in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, in which really the only clear point is that women need to cover their heads in church. (No, go read it, it's total gibberish. Women need to cover their heads "because of the angels". Also, 1 Timothy 2:15 reads "Yet she [the woman] will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control," which might just be the most misogynistic thing I've seen all week, and I read manboobz [TW for misogyny, obviously]. "Saved through childbearing." Seriously.) Anyway, the point is that, though some - indeed, many - evangelical churches do in fact make women remain quiet, many, including most charismatic churches I've been in and the one my parents currently attend, do not. And no church I've ever been in actually made women cover their hair. There's a variety of justifications for this, including, "it's just a cultural thing! it doesn't apply to us anymore!" (which is oddly relativist) or "it's okay, we just don't give women positions of authority, that's what Paul really meant!" (which, I guess I could see that?) or "long hair counts as a covering!" (which I'm pretty sure is just being bad at reading comprehension, but fine).

Here's my point: when you choose (subconsciously, no doubt) to interpret the Bible so that you have enough wiggle room to eat pork and to not have to wear head coverings, then why, for the love of Jesus, do you not afford the same treatment to human beings? You have lost any claim you ever had to be acting out of Christ-like agape love when your ability to eat bacon supersedes the rights and happiness of your fellow human beings. You might still love specific people of whatever sexual orientation, but when you act to reinforce the legal or social oppression of specific groups of people, you are not and cannot be acting out of love. You are acting out of hatred.

But okay, you think you have pretty ironclad support in the Bible for "Homosexuality is wrong and bad." You know what? I agree. There are very specific verses, in both the Old and New Testaments, that say, essentially, "Dudes macking on dudes? EW EW NO STOP." (I'm pretty sure there's actually no prohibition in the Bible against female homosexuality, incidentally, but I'm going to give your blatantly inconsistent applications of "literalism" a pass because that's not my argument.) There are verses that you could use to argue that we should love and accept homosexual people and homosexuality, but only in the very general "What God has called clean let no man call unclean" sort of way. Honestly, the argument from the Bible that homosexuality is immoral is more airtight than any other argument from the Bible...

...since the pro-slavery arguments of the American South. See, the Bible has actually quite a lot of things to say about slavery, and they are all along the lines of "Slaves, obey your masters." Paul does say that slaves should gain their freedom, if they can, but it is very, very obvious that he means "gain their freedom legally," which was possible, both in the Roman world, and in the antebellum South. If he had instead meant "by any means, legal or illegal," he would emphatically not have sent the runaway slave Onesimus back to his owner, Philemon (see Paul's letter to Philemon). In fact, there is no hint of the idea, anywhere in the Bible, that slavery should or even could ever be abolished. Galatians 3:28 reads "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus," but it would be as absurd to try to use this verse as evidence for the Bible's support for the abolition of slavery as it would be to try to use this verse as evidence for the Bible's support of the abolition of gender. It's true, you can use the Bible to support the idea that masters should treat slaves better while still keeping them enslaved, just as you can use the Bible to support the idea that Christians should treat homosexual people better while still keeping them socially oppressed - and you can cite general themes in the Bible of compassion, mercy, and justice to say, "hey, maybe we should not have slaves, that seems wrong," just as you can cite precisely those themes to say, "hey, maybe we should not socially and legally oppress homosexual people, that seems wrong." But the Bible itself isn't against slavery: it's very clearly for it.

And here is precisely my point: the abolitionist position is, Biblically speaking, much less well-supported than the pro-slavery position. It is, however, nearly universally acknowledged to be morally superior. Which means that the Biblical position is sometimes morally inferior. Which means that we need something other than the Bible to guide our moral judgments. For instance, we could try using our reason and moral intuitions, like my brother is doing. My father, and many evangelicals, would say that this is "leaning on our own understanding", which is bad. But I have shown that this is already precisely what they themselves are doing when they interpret the Bible - in fact, they are "leaning on their own understanding" in many ways far more than we are, since they have unconsciously (and, I might add, semi-idolatrously) set up their own personal interpretations of the Bible as the literal Word of God. This prevents them from recognizing that their beliefs might actually be wrong, and thus from ever achieving significant moral growth.

And I just want to emphasize again that what my father and evangelical Christians in general are doing is harming millions and millions of people in this country alone, and that they are just as culpable in this as were the slave-owners of the South, who, like them, took the Bible seriously, and believed they were acting out of Christ-like love towards the people they were actively oppressing (and, by the way, consider the oppressor who literally demands that those he is oppressing recognize that he is acting out of nothing but love for them - there are few things more viscerally repugnant).

So let's consider: you, as an evangelical Christian, have to my knowledge, five main ways of responding to this argument.
First, you could disagree with my premise that interpretation is a necessary part of reading any text. If you actually want to argue this point, I can more than adequately defend it, but it's so fundamental and obvious to me that I will question whether you can properly be called "literate" in any meaningful sense at all.
Second, you could disagree with my analogy of anti-homosexuality to slave-owning, in a variety of ways. You could claim that the Biblical argument of slave-owners wasn't as strong as I've made it out to be, perhaps pointing to the significant differences between the system of slavery as practiced in the Bible, and chattel slavery as it existed in the United States. The most you could claim with this position with any legitimacy, however, is that slavery in the US, though it should have continued to exist, should not have been quite as bad for the slaves as it in fact was. But the problem with slavery is not that slaves are treated poorly, the problem with slavery is that slaves are slaves.
Or you could question certain historical claims - did slave-owners really make these Biblical arguments? (Yes, they did, and this is easily ascertainable, so if this is a legitimate objection, I expect you to research it and reach a conclusion based on the evidence you find, not to use it as a stalling tactic so that there's always enough doubt that you don't have to make up your mind.)
Or, most likely, you could attempt to argue for your own exceptionalism - that while, yes, slave-owners made these arguments, and yes, they were wrong, you by contrast are making very very similar arguments but magically happen to be right. This I find unconvincing for a variety of reasons, which I really shouldn't have to spell out, but will if it is necessary. Suffice it to say that any argument you could make for the exceptionalism of your position, slave-owners could equally well have made. (This includes appeals to tradition, as well as arguments from pseudoscience.)
Third, I suppose you could accept that the stance against homosexuality you have adopted is the product of your own prejudice and the societal and cultural milieu in which you exist, and continue to hold that stance. This is at least honest - you display your fear and hatred of that which you consider Other, which is pretty repulsive, but again, at least it's honest.
Fourth, you could accept that, like the slave-owners in the antebellum South, you are wrong. You could get over your personal prejudices. You could learn to love and accept who people are. You could join the fight for equal treatment for everyone, and attempt to guarantee all people the "certain inalienable rights" of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, as well as, in the end, being a far better witness for Christ and Christ-like love than you could ever have been otherwise.
Or, fifth, you could ignore all of this, pretend I never said anything so that you won't have to confront certain ugly truths about yourself and your beliefs. Which, let's be clear, is cowardice.

Remember that I'm not even requiring you to give up your doctrine of Biblical infallibility. I'm merely requiring you to give up your doctrine of your own infallibility. That seems like a pretty Christian thing to do, all told. Good luck.

This is your zeitgeist speaking.

A young couple who go to my grandparents' church recently decided that, since I know Chicago, and since they will be in Chicago in a couple of months, they would take me out to lunch and in return I would tell them what is good to do in Chicago (Orange for breakfast, Icosium for crepes, fuck the Sears Tower, try the cocktail lounge at the top of the Hancock Tower instead, Shedd Aquarium is kickass, Adler Planetarium is, like far too many museums these days, almost exclusively geared for children, because apparently adults don't want to learn things?) and somehow we got on the subject of homosexuality and therefore I had a lot to say. Two major points from that discussion:

1) One of the couple brought up a member of her family, who was gay, and sketched out in brief the fact that they loved him but disapproved of his"lifestyle choice". So we talked about the hate-the-sin, love-the-sinner dichotomy so common to discussions with Evangelicals on this subject. I should note that I rather approve of this attitude, when directed at things that could legitimately be termed "sins" - theft, for instance, or alcoholism. But, and this is the point I made, no such dichotomy is even possible when discussing homosexuality. The "sin" in this case is an essential and inalienable part of the "sinner's" identity. If you claim to love someone while hating their homosexuality, you are wrong. You can't love the "non-gay" parts of them because there are no non-gay parts: identity simply does not compartmentalize that way. So you both hate and love this person, and let's call that what it is: fucked-up.

2) This couple was very gracious throughout the conversation, even though I was rambling on about gay rights while eating a very nice meal they had paid for. They had every right to ask me to stick to more comfortable subjects, but instead they listened and asked questions and made points. They were members of the very, very right-wing church I spent my earliest years in, yet they were perfectly willing to agree that homosexuality was neither a choice, nor even remotely comparable in its effects to, say, alcoholism. That may not sound like much to you, but to someone who grew up marinated in the conservatism of that particular subculture, that's the roar of progress, which I hear everywhere echoed: the thoughtful Christian kids I grew up with are waking up, and realizing that the current attitude of Evangelical Christianity towards homosexuality is fundamentally incompatible with a just and free society. Given the conviction inherent to being a committed Evangelical Christian, I should not be surprised if, in a generation, the Evangelical Churches were among the strongest supporters of equality in this country. For the old have wisdom: they see the world as it is; but the young have vision: they see the world as it should be.

After lunch, the woman mentioned in passing that talking to me reminded her of an old friend of hers, the one who had convinced her to take the one philosophy class of her life, and whose discourse often went over her head. I tend to get this a lot, I say not to my credit; often I am more concerned with backing up my opinions with the names of philosophers than I am with making myself understood. But what has been made abundantly clear to me over the past year is that what matters is not education or intelligence, but the ability to listen, the will to understand, and the drive to learn. The meek shall not only inherit the earth; they shall save it.

Review: God is Great, God is Good

So I am home in Arkansas and it turns out that when you post on your public blog that you are an atheist you can be pretty sure that your grandparents will read it. So a while back I had lunch with my grandfather and we spent it talking about my atheism. His arguments, if I recall correctly, were "What do you think of the scientific principle that something cannot come from nothing," which is a) not scientific but rather philosophic, and b) actually directly contradicted by scientific evidence; "Evolution cannot explain love or morality," which is just false; and "If you are right, we will neither of us ever know it, but if I am right, you lose," which is of course Pascal's Wager, which is a) not a particularly valid reason for believing anything, b) based on a false dichotomy - if the only choices were between christianity and atheism, sure, but they aren't - you also have islam and buddhism and hinduism and scientology and raelianism and shinto and wicca and so forth and so on, and you have to pick the right one out of hundreds if not thousands of belief systems or you lose, and c) based on the assumption that neither being christian nor atheist has any relevant impact on the quality of this life, which is questionable at best. In fact, my grandfather went on to say that he thought there was no life better than that lived by christian principles, which I think is only a compelling line of reasoning if you have basically no experience with godless people in this country. But to my grandfather's credit, he politely listened to me explain all (or at least most) of the above, and it seemed to make sense to him. See I don't get my family at all - they are very intelligent and even open-minded to a point but this has never prevented them from being creationists or using Pascal's Wager as an argument. Anyway then my grandfather handed me a book called God is Great, God is Good which is a selection of essays by various Christians, pretty much explicitly targeted at what is called the "New Atheists" - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and so forth. So I'm going to go through this book and review it, but first I should make my position vis-a-vis the "New Atheists" clear.

I am not a New Atheist. I have never read any of Dawkins or Hitchens, though I probably should. I follow two New Atheist blogs: Pharyngula, by PZ Myers, and Daylight Atheism, by Ebonmuse. And I recommend both of these, particularly Daylight Atheism, and I agree with their positions on issues nine times out of ten, but I am not a New Atheist. What I am, first and foremost, is an Existentialist - which means that Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky are the people I agree with far more often - and you may have noticed that half of those people are christian. If you read Camus' The Plague (and you really should), it presents several characters, each with their own way of coping with the world. One of these characters is a Jesuit priest named Father Paneloux, and at the crux of the novel, he and almost all of the other important characters watch the effects of an experimental serum administered to a child afflicted with bubonic plague. The only effect the serum has is to drag the child's death throes out almost interminably, and afterward, one of the characters asks Father Paneloux essentially, How can you believe in God if this is what He does? Paneloux takes a long time to reach an answer, and when he does, it is that God is unknowable, that his ways are not ours, and rather than use this, as it is almost always used in my experience, to simply dismiss the problem of evil and to retreat into a fantasy divorced from reality (easy enough to do when you're middle-class and white in the First World), Paneloux instead comes to the apparently horrific conclusion that one's will must be in accord with God's, and that if God's will is to slowly torture a child to death, then we too must try to will that. Ultimately, the conclusion Paneloux reaches is that it is illogical for a priest to call in a doctor. Needless to say, this conclusion kills him when he too succumbs to plague. (I can't really do Paneloux or Camus justice here - you really must read the novel.) But the point is that this way of coping with the world is nowhere condemned in Camus' novel. It's portrayed, rather, as a meaningful and valid existential choice. It's not the one I choose, but the point is that I can have respect for and even approve of the religious choice.

Now, do I think most religious people in the United States or in the world have made that choice? Hell no. They live in denial. They make excuses for God. Do I think that religion, at least as practiced in the United States, is bad for society? God, yes. (Anyone who wants me to have even an iota of respect for their beliefs, why don't you stop lying to children about how evolution is false, and more importantly, how about you stop denying people I love equal rights? Seems reasonable enough to me.)

Where I differ from the New Atheists is this: they take truth to be the primary (and almost the only) criterion for beliefs, although to their credit they realize that they cannot be talking about absolute truth, but only whether beliefs are more or less true than other beliefs. This I cannot do - it is imperative, true, to ruthlessly confront oneself with reality as much as possible, to really plumb the depths of the absurdity of one's beliefs. But if, after that, one chooses to continue to believe the absurd (and I do not think there are truly non-absurd options available) then this, I think, is making one's existential choice, and that is good. But anyway, this apologetics book I have here: let's go through it.

1) William Lane Craig, "Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God"

Bit of a disadvantage here, never having actually read Dawkins, but I'm more concerned with Craig's arguments than I am in his reading of Dawkins anyway, so onward. Okay, first we have the Cosmological Argument, which Craig formulates as follows:

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Note that the word "begin" is doing a lot of lifting for Craig. Had he left it out, and said instead, "Everything that exists has a cause," then it could be of course objected that this would require that God have a cause, and that cause would need a cause, and so forth into an infinite regress which Craig so deplores. However, it is unclear that the statement, "Everything that begins to exist has a cause," is any more true than the statement, "Everything that exists has a cause." It is, technically, a weaker claim, but as we have absolutely no experience of anything that exists without, at some point, having begun to exist, we are forced to conclude that, as far as we can tell, the statements have equivalent truth value. But one of them allows Craig's argument, and one spirals it into an infinite regress! To prefer one statement over the other is nothing more than special pleading - everything that exists has a cause, except God. It doesn't apply to him.

Further, I don't think that premise 1 is even true. My understanding of quantum physics has it that, for instance, particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously form and annihilate in vacuum. Whether that amounts under any circumstances to the spontaneous creation of a universe, I don't know. But it does cast doubt on Craig's argument.

But you know, I'm fine with the conclusion of the argument. The universe (as we know it, that is, from the Big Bang until now) has a cause. However, my understanding of cosmology (and I am admittedly a layman) is that the state of the universe just pre-Big Bang was a singularity, which means that no information about prior states of the universe was preserved. Far from confirming Craig's claim that the Big Bang represents creation ex nihilo, it seems to me that this makes his statement completely unjustified. The most we can say about the universe pre-Big Bang is that we can say nothing about it. Note, too, that as time and space and the laws of physics were created during the Big Bang, the universe prior to that may well have had no resemblance to our own in any intelligible respect - including entropy and causation itself. This makes Craig's subsequent argument mostly moot, but let's follow along anyway - he makes some rather awful mistakes which I feel I should point out.

Let's first examine Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor, which he says states that one should not multiply causes beyond necessity. I believe that a more accurate rendition of the principle would be that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Sadly, Ockham's Razor is, though an incredibly useful rule of thumb, and indeed one of the most reliable heuristics we have, it is not absolute. And it certainly cannot be used to say that an eternal entity is more probable than an infinite regress of events. To speak of an eternal entity is to posit an entirely new, unknown species of entity. This is the kind of thing Ockham's Razor is designed to prevent. To try to simply count the entities involved and then to say the one with fewer entities wins is to entirely miss the point of Ockham's Razor. Further: if we were to follow Craig's argument to its logical conclusion, we would be forced to admit that the only universe that exists is one moment of our consciousness, with illusory memories and illusory knowledge of an illusory externality. This (since Craig fatuously has declared "mind" to be "startlingly simple" - perhaps he means merely "divine mind", but I am led to think otherwise) would be by far the simplest explanation for the universe, and the one with the fewest entities. Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor has inadvertently but irresistibly led him to solipsism. I'm going to assert that solipsism is an unacceptable point of view and move on, if there aren't any objections.

Now Craig gets to the good stuff - the cause of the universe, he argues, must be personal, because it is timeless and immaterial, and there are only two things which possess these properties: mind, and abstract numbers. Leaving aside his extremely controversial and not-well-justified statement about the nature of numbers, we turn to his assertion that there exists this thing called 'mind' and that it is both timeless and immaterial. William: you do not get to posit things like that. What you are calling 'mind' is, first of all, inextricably bound to time. Your consciousness is dragged whether it will or no from one moment to the next. This is not timelessness. If you wish to reply that memory counts, first, no - there is an enormous and qualitative difference between memory and experience, and second, we have no memory of the future, which again doesn't look a lot like timelessness. As Lewis Carroll might put it, "It's a poor sort of timeless mind that only works one way." Second, positing that mind is immaterial flies in the face of all the scientific evidence which points to the identity of the human mind and the human brain - the case of Phineas Gage is the most obvious example, but the scientific literature is simply resplendent with these cases. The problem of consciousness - and it is a problem - is something I will discuss in a later essay - I merely wish to point out here how totally unjustified Craig's wild assertions are.

Craig has another argument for why the cause of the universe must be personal, and it is even worse. Given that the first cause of the universe is beginningless, and that the universe began to exist a finite amount of time ago, the cause of the universe must be personal, he says, for a non-personal cause would have created the universe infinitely long ago, and only a personal cause could choose to create the universe a finite amount of time ago. William: literally two paragraphs ago, you called the first cause of the universe "timeless". As in, "outside of time". Now you are using the word "beginningless" to suggest, instead of timelessness, merely an infinite past. Hey, William, pop quiz: when was the universe, including space and time, created? How about, "at the beginning of time"? There's no such thing as "before time" - the concept is incoherent. I'm going to assume good faith here, William, and merely conclude that you are an idiot. Is this the best Christendom can muster against the New Atheists? (Answer: no, it's not. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, does a much better job handling Dawkins at the end of this book. He's still wrong, but he's much less stupid, and much more of a gentleman, than is Craig. I know, of course, that the tone in this debate is vitriolic on both sides, and I'm (obviously) okay with that, but the only thing worse than an idiot is a smug idiot, and Craig couldn't be smugger if he had just been awarded top prize in the annual "You're Always Right" competition for the third year running and Dawkins was the guy who had to hand the trophy to him.)

I'm also pretty sure Craig is blatantly misreading Dawkins, but I don't have The God Delusion on hand, so this will have to remain an unwarranted aspersion (but if someone wants to compare p. 17 of GIGGIG to p. 77 of The God Delusion, you can see for yourself.)

More to follow.

Edit: Augh the font and line-spacing is all wrong I can't fix it. Does anyone know how because otherwise we are all stuck reading something with inconsistent formatting oh nooo.

The title of this blogpost is blogpost.

Eschewing juvenile styles and outgrown beliefs we move forward. Also I'm sick of looking at that last blogpost.

I feel like this is me actually starting this blog, so I'll introduce it and me. I am a second-year at the University of Chicago. I'm undeclared as yet, was going to be an English major, but then I decided to write a BA on Novalis which means I'm going to be a Comparative Lit major or something like that. Which means I need to teach myself German over the summer. Which is intense.

Grew up young-earth creationist in Arkansas. I don't recommend it. Kicked around charismatic evangelical Christianity for a long time, until I realized that none of it had ever made sense to me, and that I'd manufactured all the warm fuzzy Jesus feelings. So now I'm an atheist, and that, my friends, has simplified my life wonderfully. Guess I'll talk about that more later.

I am surrounded by exceptional people, to whom I talk about (lately) literature, ethics, and philosophy of science. I'm in charge of the fiction selections for one of the literature magazines on campus (it's called euphony and it's actually pretty legit. I think I've got a book review of Umberto Eco somewhere on that site.)

As for this blog, it's about music, literature, film, and so forth. Used to have theology instead of film, but you understand why that changed. My music tastes are omnivorous and ever-expanding, but I plan to review Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna Are You The Destroyer? and Demon Days by Gorillaz in future blogposts. Maybe Air's Moon Safari as well. Oh and Steven Wilson's Insurgentes. Lots of stuff, is my point. In terms of genres, classic rock, progressive rock, progressive metal, eighties synthpop, eighties punk, folk rock, and pretentious indie bullshit cover it pretty well.

As far as literature goes, I'm weirdly limited to mostly 20th-century novels, but a lot of those (GK Chesterton, Italo Calvino, Hemingway, James Joyce, Nabokov, Umberto Eco is a good list). Theoretically, I like sci-fi. In practice, usually not so much. I care less about fantasy, but therefore have lower standards for it and so probably enjoy most of it more? I tend to dislike most poetry not written by TS Eliot, and almost nothing before 1900.

Film is much more haphazard. Pretty sure Blade Runner is the greatest movie ever, with maybe Pan's Labyrinth in second place. Visuals are important - plots can be vague and still work, but a beautiful detailed world makes a lot of films great.

The rest is pretty much whatever I feel like. Perhaps this will include me talking about coming out to one's (fundamentalist evangelical Christian) family as an atheist. Perhaps it will include good conversations I have with exceptional people. Who knows? The possibilities are Literally Endless.