Sex+

NOTE: The formatting on this post might be a bit funny, because I'm using a spare computer, and therefore wrote it mostly in Notepad.

I was ambushed by a wandering gay Pride parade* yesterday! So I joined it, and now I own a nice, colourful gay pride lei. Along with the other assorted stuff that one seems to end up with whenever one is at a Pride event.

You might think that, for an asexual, it would be entirely natural to be in favour of gay pride. Sex is sex, after all, and looking from the outside, there's not really that much difference between various kinds. And it's true that, at least for me, there's really not any significant difference there. I don't, honestly, care much about little things like the gender of the participents. It's like, if you'll pardon the theft, fighting over which end to open a boiled egg.

But that analysis is an analysis that does make one important assumption - that the asexual in question is in favour of sex at all. One may make no distinction between heterosexual sex and homosexual sex, but that does not preclude one from hating them both equally.

And... well, some people do. It's easy to do. I make no secret at all of the fact that sex is something I find disgusting, and personally, I would not be unhappy at all if it just disappeared. The distinction here is betweren sex negative asexuals, and sex positive asexuals. As the terms suggest, sex positive asexuals think sex is a good thing, and that anyone who wants to have sex should be free to have it without prejudice or judgment. Whereas sex negative is, obviously, the opposite - someone who doesn't like sex**.

Being sex-positive isn't limited to asexuals, of course. Sex positive feminism, for example, is a thing. Sex-negativity, too, happens outside the asexual community***. But it's a lot more prominent in the asexual community, simply because there's more of a debate to be had - if you think sex is disgusting, and you're not sure why people are so interested in it, then, looking from the outside, it would be very easy to misinterpret it as an addiction, and then start thinking of it in terms of drug addiction. Or to just be so bloody annoyed by everyone talking about it constantly that one just wants it to go away. Or to look at all the conflict that happens around sex, and decide that it's really doing more harm than good (you'd think that the last one might be the most sensible of the three reasons to be a sex-negative sexual, but no, actually sex-negative sexuals in general tend to be more divisive about different kinds of sex).

I, personally, am sex-positive. Because, for me, not understanding why something is appealing doesn't mean caring whether or not someone else does it. I mean, I'd appreciate it if they didn't do it in front of me, but that's something that happens pretty rarely, especially if you're trying to avoid it. And... well, I'm not (quite) arrogant enough to think that my own personal preference is very relevant here. For me, sex-positivity is mostly bound up with Liberalism, with viewing people as real people, with whom one has no real right to interfere, unless their actions are harmful. I would hate it if someone told me I had to stop playing Settlers of Catan, and I like Catan a lot less than I think most people enjoy sex. 'It disgusts me' is a terrible reason to say anything is bad. If there's any doubt of this, look at this short list of things that can be (and are) opposed on these grounds: Transsexuals, gay people, coleslaw****.

And frankly, I don't really see that much that might make opposition to sex in any way better than opposition to board games. You might argue that there are, indeed, qualitative differences between the two. And I would, to some extent agree with you. I'm not going to get into all that right now. But what differences there are, I would argue, are really mostly irrelevant. Sex compares more closely to Catan than to Cocaine. It's a bit more dangerous than Catan, admittedly*****. But mostly only if you don't do it safely. And I have this wierd bias towards treating people as responsible adults, who can make their own decisions about risk. This is also why I completely fail to be opposed to hang-gliding, cheerleading, drinking, carving beef, and crossing the road. And at least one of those can actually be dangerous†!

As for talking about it all the time... Yeah, it would be nice if the rest of the population could shut the hell up about this already, but... well, freedom of speech and all that. It's really not that different from people talking about football the whole time. Yeah, it might be a little impolite, if you're in a group with someone who is more interested in carpet lint, or who even finds the conversation rather squicky, but... well, at this point you're moving away from being sex-negative, towards being 'politeness-positive'††.


Also, there are all the problems associated with sex. Fortunately, most of them don't come from the sex itself. They come from things like lying, assult, prejudice and all those various other things that just so happen to already be wrong, even without the sex being involved. So attacking consensual sex between two people just because it's vaguely associated with things which are generally condemned anyway? That sounds counter-intuitive. And really rather unhelpful.

Ultimately, then, being sex-positive is about treating other people as genuine people, as human as oneself, whose preferences are as valid as one's own. In other words, not being an arrogant bastard. Which is something that I think a lot of sex-negative aces could be accused of. At least it's not the last reason to be sex negative - that sex is an animalistic, base thing, and therefore bad, that asexuals, not being saddled with this animalistic desire, are less animalistic, and therefore 'more human' or 'more evolved'. Making them inherently superior. Obviously.

Well, at least it's straightforward in its arrogance?

And, I suppose, I'm asexual. So there is some evidence that asexuals are just way better than the rest of the population.

But yeah, I'm honestly not going to dignify that one with a reply. No. Just... no.


*It genuinely surprised me - I thought is was in about a month.
**There's a bit of a double definition here. Sex negative can either mean someone who doesn't like sex personally because it disgusts them, or someone who actively thinks it's a bad thing. I'm sticking with the latter definition because otherwise it would be possible to be sex positive and sex negative at the same time (it still sort of is, but it's a lot harder). Also because 'repulsed' works fine for the first definition.
***It's a lot less popular, of course. Because it's really kinda dumb.
****OK. Fine. It may just be me who hates coleslaw this much. But it shouldn't be.
*****If your games of Catan involve any risk of death, consider the possibility that you may be doing it wrong.
†I'm not sure, but I think it's the carving beef. It lulls you into a false sense of security.
††I would like to take this opportunity to declare myself broadly in favour of 'manners'. Y'know. In general. It's this kind of bold stance on difficult and important issues that's the reason for half my readership.†††
†††I'm really not sure what the other person comes here for.

Quick nameless update

So, I went to see The Tempest on Friday. The play takes place simultaneously over two days and over three hours, and over the course of the play, Miranda and Ferdinand meet and fall in love. Miranda has never seen a man before. Whilst Ferdinand admits that there were other women he was attracted to before Miranda (like Romeo before Juliet). And there is no indication whatsoever in this comedy to say that Shakespeare is intending the audience to disapprove of this relationship. It's treated pretty much entirely positively. I won't go into this too deeply, but I thought I'd mention it, since it pretty much reenforces the argument I made last time.

What else? Um... The leader of UKIP is a bloody moron, but that's nothing new. And I'm pretty sure that anyone who says that immigration is bad for the economy hasn't really looked into the actual economic arguments. Because um... it is really pretty clear cut.

There is a Tumblr on which I was interviewed: http://asexualistic.tumblr.com/. It has cute pictures! It was about 1AM when I did said interview, and I was kinda tired, so it's not the most coherent I've ever been, but still.

I was oing to do a full post but... I just kinda don't want to at the moment. It keeps getting all bitter and angry for no good reason. So I'll just leave it at that*.

*Oh, and I'll include this footnote. Because otherwise it's not really a proper post.

Time's out of joint

Let’s talk about Shakespeare. There are a lot of crazy theories about the man. Some people think he was the Earl of Oxford, for example. That’s utterly ridiculous. Obviously, he was a time traveller.

OK, that might sound a little silly. But it’s a lot less silly than you might think compared to a lot of the other theories. What evidence is there that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare? Two centuries after his death, people decided that someone middle class couldn’t possibly have written something so brilliant. So they’d have to find a much nicer, more upper class, person, who could have done it, due to their superior breeding. That’s it, really. On the other hand, there’s the fact that there are mistakes specifically traceable to things in Shakespeare’s own background (mistakes which, say, the Earl of Oxford, would never have made), the fact that the man was actually pretty well educated (he was pretty much middle class), we know more about the man’s life than about most other writers from the time, the fact that the man co-wrote several plays without, apparently, managing to tip anyone off that he wasn’t what he said he was, and the fact that he was mentioned repeatedly during his life as a genius author, and the fact that his social class was actually mentioned by his contemporaries, in case anyone thought that the ‘Shakespeare’ thingy was just a pseudonym. I could continue, but the point probably stands. If people who knew him for two decades didn’t notice that he was actually someone else, I cast doubt on the idea that it should be obvious to someone who lived more than two centuries after he died.

Given all that evidence, I don’t think it’s much more idiotic to claim that he was a time-traveller than to think that the man was any of the other idiotic options we’ve been given about him. But there is actually some evidence for the man being a time-traveller. Namely, he had no understanding whatsoever of the concept of time. The obvious example here is Hamlet – the conversation between Hamlet and his father’s ghost. During this, they walk a little way along the castle walls, and manage to have a conversation of a little under seven hundred words. Why does this matter? Because it apparently takes them about six hours. The ghost arrives around midnight, and leaves with the dawn. Clearly, the man had no understanding of time on the micro level.

So what about the macro level, then? Well, here I’m going to look at Othello. Mostly, because it’s a play I know pretty well. In Othello, one of the reasons some people have condemned Othello is because of how incredibly fast Othello turns from love of his wife to utter loathing of her. If, they say, he is so quick to condemn his love. Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, after all. But at the same time, a lot of Othello works because there’s never really any chance to just sit down and think things through. Or for Othello and Desdemona just to sit down and talk about things. Othello takes place over a few days, right? Act one must take place over the course of a single day, then they leave straight away, the festival in act two has to start the same day they arrive, by act three the day after that, Othello wants Cassio dead within three days, and it really seems that the play takes place over less than a week. Except that in that time, Cassio apparently starts a relationship with Bianca, it becomes serious, he leaves her for a week, and she gets angry with him. So that’s about two weeks. At least. This timeline also fits a lot better with the communications between Othello and Ludovico than the idea of a play of less than a week does – at this time, it took some time to travel between Venice and Cyprus, and Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have much truck with this idea. Almost as though he were  from a time when it didn’t take so long.

OK, no, I don’t really believe that Shakespere was a time traveller. So what is my point? Well, there’s a rather popular little theory that Romeo and Juliet isn’t a love story because of the timeline. They’re too hasty, they fall in love too fast, it would never have lasted, blah, blah. You might be able to guess what I think about that idea. I don’t think Shakespeare really subscribed to the notion that falling in love takes time. In The Taming of the Shrew, the relationship between Bianca and Lucentio is hardly extended, and on Lucentio’s side falling in love based entirely on appearance is apparently entirely fine, and encounters no real problems whatsoever. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, within four days, all the love problems get sorted out, and Demetrius falls in love with someone couldn’t stand just a few days before. Also, the cycle of the moon apparently takes about two days or so. So that’s another bit of time he was a little confused about. Although if we can take a week of Shakespeare to be actually a couple of months, that could actually explain quite a lot. I could go on thinking of examples, but I think I’ve made my point. The evidence is that Shakespeare didn’t really see time spent getting to know one another. Midsummer Night’s Dream is a pretty good parallel here, where the loving couple is completely fine, and, really, Demetrius should just stop being so stubborn, and fall in love with the person who loves him back, rather than pursuing the one who doesn’t (as with how Paris shouldn’t be pursuing Juliet, and how Romeo should give up on Rosaline).

The fact is, Shakespeare was not, I think, writing to be analysed. He was writing plays to be watched – and this is not to say that his plays are in any way shallow, or that there aren’t deep things in them, or that they shouldn’t be analysed. The point is, if there’s a conflict between what you feel  one of his plays is about when you’re watching it, and what you conclude it must’ve been about when you study it later, you should actually probably be trusting the play. Shakespeare’s was, really, quite good at what he did, and with the exception of values dissonance like in Taming of the Shrew, if he creates an emotion, I think it’s probably because he wants to.

And I don’t think he was really worried about the timeline, either. Shakespeare is, in my judgement, a writer. He is not a historian of the fictional. The story is a lot more important than sitting down and thinking ‘does this make logical sense?’. I’ll probably talk about this more if/when I get to Lord Dunsany*, but the events of the play feel true, and they make for a truly engaging and enjoyable play. They don’t have to be representations of things which could actually happen.

*Quickly, though, if you have time, you should read The King of Elfland’s Daughter. It is a very good book, and it’s really not too long. This has been my mandatory footnote for this post.

Reflections on the milk-snatcher

Margret Thatcher. Is dead. I never liked her that much, but I feel pretty sad about it anyway. Here’s a post for her, on the day of the public funeral, to show respect, and not at all because I write slowly and kept getting distracted. So, lets’ get the really obvious thing about how obviously her funeral can’t remain a state funeral, and how it should be privatised, out of the way now, and move swiftly onwards.

So, um, my view of Thatcher is probably a lot different from a lot of British people’s, for two reasons. Firstly, I am very young. I never lived through her time in office – she was gone by the time I was born. Secondly, I have some fairly good links with the ASI. And even though (despite popular belief) the ASI is not really a Thatcherite think tank… well, they ARE pretty pro-Thatcher (I think that it’s become a lot more pro-Thatcher than it was back when she was actually in Parliament). So when I hear people talking about Thatcher, it’s almost always positively, or at least ambivalently. Which means it’s really hard for me to feel the kind of anger a lot of people feel towards her. I disagree with a lot of her policies*. I disagree with a lot of what she said. But I have a really hard time not respecting the woman, and not least because she actually had principles of her own.

A lot of people might be a bit annoyed at me for saying that – there were people who got all angry at Obama for expressing sympathy for her death. And some people seem to be convinced too that not only do they hate her, not should everyone hate her, but, inexplicably, that the entirety of the UK actually does share their opinion. I mean, like, she got about 42% of the vote pretty much consistently*. And a load more people didn’t care enough to vote for a party with any chance of actually winning against her. So no. Not everyone hated Thatcher. And a lot of the people who didn’t hate her aren’t complete raving loonies. It’s easy to pretend things were never bad enough that Thatcherism seemed like an improvement, but… they weren’t. Now, to be fair, a lot of sane and reasonable people hated Thatcher too. I’m not denying that. Nor am I denying that the people who seem to think that everyone loved Thatcher really aren’t just as insane. But Thatcher wasn’t just the province of the mad Tories. People who voted for her failed to vote for Major, and not all of that can be accounted for by mass dying. Reasonable people looked at her, and decided she was the best option.

She also did quite a few things we… kinda needed. All in all, I am, in general, pro-change. Like, I know it doesn’t work this way, but my instinct is that if you change things, you can change back if it turns out that that was a really stupid idea, whereas if you keep everything the same, the chance to try out new things doesn’t arise. The term ‘sick  man of Europe’ has been thrown around a lot lately, but it’s not something that should lose its impact. Twenty percent inflation is generally a sign that things have Gone Wrong. She also introduced secret ballots for unions on strike action. In other words, a union could no longer shut down a factory based on a show of hands. Now, I have very little against unions. I’m not very pro-democracy. But um… a show of hands. No. Just… no. Pre-Thatcher, the challenge was managing the decline of the country. Post-Thatcher, it was keeping its place in the Sun. I’m not a patriot. Not by any means – I think my attitude to the English is one I inherited from the Irish side of the family. But I did have to grow up in this country, and I’d rather prefer the one with consistent electricity, a strong (kinda,  ‘til the last five years or so, anyway, and even now compared to a lot of the world) economy, and inexplicable delusions of grandeur than one with realistic expectations of itself, regular power cuts, and an economy held hostage by insanely powerful (and/or just insane) unions.

Of course, she also did the EU thing. Yeah, massive shock, someone who’s argued for one world government is actually pretty pro-Europe****. You might want to stop reading for a while, to calm down from that kind of a shock. Now, I have to be clear here. The UK has never been pro-Europe. I think we have a kinda Napoleon Complex about the mainland. It’s bigger than us, it scares us, and we’re not going to stand for that, dammit! So it’s hard to tell how far she is actually responsible for the UK’s Euroscepticism. I mean, I would never say anything like ‘without Thatcher we would have integrated ourselves into the EU. But I don’t think she helped. I don’t think we’d be trying to get our way against the entire rest of the EU if Thatcher hadn’t given us the impression that UK-EU relations could work that way*****. And yes, I understand the reasons behind the agreement we eventually came to. But the fact is that Thatcher’s major focus was, I think, patriotic. Like, unquestionably abroad, the UK was her major focus (just compare UK-US relations under Thatcher vs. under Blair), and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, even if I’m instinctively pro-compromise. It’s not neccesarily a good thing, either, since that patriotism led to her opposing the reunification of Germany, and a series of other ways of throwing our enemies and/or rivals under the bus. She understood the need for compromise, and she signed the Anglo-Irish treaty, but she didn’t like it. The South Africa, thing, though, was, I think, pretty much unrelated. The thing is, I think she was a patriot on domestic issues, too. This isn’t too much of a leap, since, y’know, she actually said this, but I still think it bears mentioning that I think her purpose was ‘make the UK great again’. It misses the point, I think, to say ‘poverty increased under thatcher’^†. The point is that the UK became greater.

She was also operating in an era where ‘trickle down economics’ seemed like a reasonable idea. Because another idea that goes back to Smith is that what matters isn’t the size of an economy, but how fast it’s growing. If the economy is shrinking, then wages will be low, people will be unemployed, etcetera, etcetera. If it’s growing, people’s wages will be higher, everyone will be employed, etcetera. This isn’t really that controversial, even today – the idea that ‘recessions are bad’ is hardly high level economics. So, there is a rather seductive logical progression that, therefore, what you need to do is grow as fast as possible, and everyone will be better off. A rising tide will lift all boats. There is a really annoying problem with people basing actual economic policy on economic models that don’t exactly… work. Like, not because their wrong – just because real life doesn’t let you simplify things that way, sadly. Trickle-down economics doesn’t work – it produces too much of a distortion, and the money doesn’t move about enough – but it’s a lot more reasonable to know that today than it is to expect that people should have known it back then. It’s still a bloody stupid mistake to have made, and trickle down had been tried before, in the 19^th century, but it’s a lot more forgivable than it would be if someone tried that one today.

It would be intellectually dishonest not to mention here that inflation was higher when Thatcher left office than when she took it, and that she had slightly lower than average growth. It would also be rather stupid to try and make something of this, since, if you actually look at inflation over time, it’s WAY down after Thatcher’s been in office for a little bit, and hasn’t gotten up to the levels it was at just before and/or just after she took office. Whatever you think of her, I cannot see how you can look at the graphs and say that Thatcher didn’t help with our inflation problem. That’s a misleading statistic. The GDP thing is also kinda misleading, since, y’know, that includes the beginning of her term – if you measure from 1979-1990, she’s slightly below average. Measuring the decade 1981-1990, which seems pretty reasonable to me, she’s way, way above average. You can argue that her entire approach was wrong, and you can argue that she severely damaged the underlying structure of the economy. But it’s pretty clear from the stats that the economic prospects of the country as a whole were rather better after Thatcher. And we’d moved from manufacturing-based economics to a… frothier^††… model. A lot of people complain about that but um… yeah, there’s no way we could have survived with that economic model. The UK cannot produce things as cheaply, or even as well, as other countries can. I’m sorry, no. That just couldn’t work. We pretty much had to move away from that model, because it would be nearly impossible for us to compete.

Oh, one last thing. The joke I made about the state funeral at the beginning? That wasn’t entirely pointless. This is Margret Thatcher we’re talking about. She would have hated the idea of this funeral. She said she didn’t want a state funeral, and even if she hadn’t, I think it would’ve been pretty obvious to anyone that the last wishes of Margaret Thatcher weren’t ‘spend state money’! I mean, this is actually possibly the greatest way of spitting on Thatcher’s grave I can think of, and has a lot more to do with making the government look like Thatcher-supporters than with anything to do with actual Thatcherism. The other thing they wanted to do, having a day in parliament dedicated entirely to praising her, was probably about as bad. No criticism whatsoever. If there’s something you couldn’t really accuse Thatcher of, it’s not allowing argument. I mean, if someone argued with her and hadn’t thought it through properly, or if they wouldn’t defend it with complete fanaticism, she’d demolish them. And she probably wouldn't listen anyway. But she’d at least let people disagree with her. Although, at the very least, I can’t complain that it’s not fair that she got something Atlee didn’t. Because I don’t think he would have wanted one either.

Well, I’ve probably forgotten something. And I’ve skimmed a lot of her. This is a thing that happens with someone who was the most important person in the nation for more than a decade. I mean, I haven’t even really mentioned that she was, in fact, a woman (this is the hard hitting insight for which you read Acanthus, yeah)^††††. Ireland, Africa, America, the Cold War, Chile blah, blah, blah. Some kind of scuffle with Argentina might’ve happened at some point. All of this stuff deserves looking at. But I can’t be bothered right now. So there.

Point is, I agree with David Cameron that Thatcher probably did save this country. It’s just that, as with the man who decides to end the Cold War by carpet-bombing every nation with nuclear capabilities, it might just have been possible to do it better^†††. Just possibly. She hurt a lot of people, and was also a complete lost cause on social issues (or most of them, anyway). But I find it difficult to actually condemn her. She was better than nothing. Economically speaking. Just about. I think.

*On Section 28: Yes. It is horrible. But um… congratulations, American conservatives. You’ve reached the point our UK conservatives were at in the 1980s. I should be furious about that, but I have difficulty mustering anger about homophobia existing three decades ago when worse homophobia still exists today.

**Note for Americans – 42% doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s because you have a two-party system. You might have heard that the UK has a two party system too. We do not. We have a two and a half party system. The third parties get a decent portion of the vote, but the system is pretty much designed to avoid actually letting them get any significant say***. 42% of the vote is really good. Like… landslide good. Our current Prime Minister got 36%.

***This system broke down a bit recently, I believe.

****In principle, anyway.

*****It wasn’t the EU back then. I know. Shut up.

^†Incidentally, people who tell you this will generally use the ‘less than 60% median income’ measure. Which is a stupid measure. What people mean is that inequality increased. Yes, there is an extent to which what people consider to be necessary. That’s been a thing in economics since… well, since economics was a thing. Seriously, Adam Smith mentions it in Wealth of nations. But I reject any system in which someone whose only act is to make some people richer can then be criticised for driving everyone else into poverty.

^††I might have to explain that metaphor. It means a more service based, aesthetic, economy. The idea is that most of the value of a Starbucks coffee is the froth – the bit on the top that makes it look all fancy, and makes it into a status symbol. And so, in this metaphor, the UK economy moved from trying to make coffee, to making the froth on top of the coffee, and doing other stuff which noone really needs, but which is somehow highly valued anway.

^†††In the Cold War case, by the way, it was done better. Obviously.

^††††Briefly – I think it was a bit of a mixed issue. She was pretty good at using anti-feminist stereotypes to get away with things that she shouldn’t have been able to. Like staying in the Heath government because the guy wanted a token woman, and I don’t think it hurt in Europe sometimes. Things like that. On the other hand, obviously she suffered from prejudice too, and I’m completely sure there were people who just wouldn’t vote for a female PM.

The Word of... meh.

One thing that I find… difficult about writing this blog is not giving completely the wrong impression of my actual viewpoint. Let me give feminism as an example. If I’m just going to talk about what I would naturally talk about, I’d probably end up being a lot more likely to be speaking against feminism than for it. Not because I am, but because most of what feminism says is entirely reasonable, and talking about it seems somewhat pointless. Let’s say someone is raped. This does not seem like something I can spend that much time on. Rape is terrible. Right to ownership of one’s own body is the second most important right, if you agree with the concept of rights. Or rape is treating someone as a means, rather than an end, if you’re a Kantian. If you’re a utilitarian, it’s a little lower pleasure at the cost of a lot of higher pain. What… what else am I going to say about that? Is there disagreement on this one? There is really nothing much to say. Say someone is found guilty of rape and is given a shorter jail term than if they’d been caught jaywalking? Well, I can tell you that that’s awful, and that that is a really skewed sense of priorities. But, again, I don’t have much else to say about it. There are no complex issues involved, it’s just wrong. I also don’t feel the need to mention that I disagree with the Chinese treatment of Tibet, or that I am broadly in favour of women getting the vote. I’m a lot more likely to mention it if I disagree with the feminist movement on something, since that’s actually a lot more interesting to talk about, and likely to require more explaining. Dog bites man is not news* – man bites dog is. That I don’t like rape is not something that’s worth your time to read about, or that I feel the need to explain – that I hate freedom and apple pie is. That’s one reason I try and avoid current events, since if I’m not talking about one particular issue I don’t end up expounding only those of my views that make me look even more like an evil bastard than I actually am***. Also for other reasons, but that’s one of them.

Now, in a normal blog, one written by someone with skills such as ‘planning’ and ‘vague coherence’, this would be when I’d come to the ‘but’ part of the post. But, sadly, you are not reading a blog by a member of that exalted company (and if anyone is still reading this blog under that false impression, I would direct them to the ‘next blog’ button at the top of the page, which random chance dictates shall lead you to greener pastures****). Thus, the preceding paragraphs have little or nothing to do with… anything, really, but are merely the insane product of my deranged imaginings. As, I suppose, will be the succeeding ones, so maybe they’re more connected than I thought.

Anyway, I’m a Christian. As you can of course tell from my unfailing love and kindness, my dedication to humanity, and my habit of burning at the stake those with whom I have minor theological disagreements. But I am also what is known as an apatheist. That rather rare word means that I don’t think it matters whether or not God exists. Now, many people would say that it’s quite important if an omnipotent being rules over the entire universe. Some would say that the existence of Heaven and Hell is a question that might concern people somewhat. I, however, disagree.

Let me start with the idea of the idea of the Irenaean theodicy. Which you’ve probably heard in a more basic form – but I’m going to explain it again in order to give myself a false sense of self-worth, and to try and justify to myself all the time I’ve spent studying the bloody thing. Also, my conception of it is mixed up with Hicks, meaning that it’s not quite the same as the traditional theodicy (not that that actually matters too much in this case). So, here’s the basic version: Ought implies can, you can’t say someone is wrong for doing something if they couldn’t have done anything else. I cannot really be blamed for the crusades, because even if that might be the kind of thing I would do, Christian that I am, there remains the minor fact that I hadn’t been born back then, which would make blaming me pretty unreasonable.

The extension of ‘ought implies can’ is that ‘ought implies can not’. If you can’t say someone is wrong for not doing something unless they could have done it, then you can’t say someone is right for not doing something unless they could have done otherwise. And if you can’t say that someone was right for not doing other than as they did, it follows that you can’t say that they were right for doing as they did. So morality implies freedom of choice – cliché as it is, a gun cannot be good or evil.

Which means that people without the opportunity to be evil cannot be good.  So, the argument goes, there is no point in God creating a world in which we do not have free will. The only way people can be good, is if they have the chance to be evil. Furthermore, one is only truly good if one is tempted to do evil – if one simply does the right thing because one might as well, that’s not really good.  Only a truly evil person does evil when it provides no advantage to them over doing good. By which I mean that I don’t think anyone does that, actually.

So you need natural evil, to provide temptation towards evil. And you need the ability to commit moral evil. Furthermore, you need not to know whether or not God exists. Because if you did know that there was an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient being judging your every action, who would reward or punish you depending on if you’d been good or bad, if His presence were inescapable… you wouldn’t really be doing good. You’d be doing literally the only thing that was the least bit sane to be entirely altruistic the whole time. What’s more, it would be almost impossible to do good even if you wanted to – even if you would do something based entirely on the fact that it is good, the fact that you will be rewarded for it is pretty much impossible to forget. So without some kind of epistemic distance***** good becomes impossible, and freewill non-existent.

And that’s the important bit. Because if that’s true, it means that looking for proof of God is pointless. And it means that a Universe with a God should look exactly like a Universe without God – at least as far as we can ever tell^††. So it’s not important in that way. And if you did know, how would it affect your behaviour? Well we’ve already established that doing good just because of Heaven isn’t really good at all^{†††††} – if you’re really going to do good, it has to be altruistic, it has to be done because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s in your own self-interest^‡.

So there you are then. There is no good reason why the existence of God should either be possible to determine, or should affect what you do. And I’ve mentioned before that any God who cares more about worship than about good and evil isn’t worth believing in.

That leaves only one thing: If a particular holy book is the source of morality. That would make God’s existence important, at least as far as it meant that the morality of a particular religion was right. Fortunately, I’m a Christian, and used to interpreting the word of God according to my whim. IT’s kinda how we do stuff – the bible is the word of God as written by man, so it’s not inerrant. People interpret it according to their conscience... And the point is, you can do that. The Bible is the word of God written by the hand of man, and written for the mind of man… but, actually, that’s not the point. Because even I don’t know what I’m talking about most of the time. The point is that a good person can do nothing but evil deeds, and still be a good person – because being a good person is, by any reasonable definition, based on the person rather than the thing^‡‡‡. Which means that a person who works as hard as they can to do the right thing, even if they happen to be wrong about it, is a good person, regardless that they ended up with the death of millions. The point is the goodness of the person that matters. The other point is that if a holy book happens to be right in accordance with goodness, there is no way of knowing, so it affects little, and if it is true, it doesn’t matter if God wrote it – it matters what it says.

So… God doesn’t matter. His existence or non-existence doesn’t affect anything, nor does it affect anything in my behaviour. I am an apatheist. Not much else to say, really. Even though I’m sure I forgot something. So let me finish with a sonnet I wrote in Terza Rima. Because I’ve never done it before, and I heard it was really hard.

Lo! I can see, though ‘twas hid so well

Gleaming in darkness but hid from view,

Deep in the night time and lost in hell,

Devils and demons it’s wealth accrue.

Lo! I can see, that it’s holy still,

Rising from fire, and all made anew.

Should from its depths I now drink my fill?

Should I be careful of legends so old

Endlessly ancient, but perhaps, still,

Out of the ages, something of gold?

Beautiful flowers from knowledge grow,

Oh, How much more, from this thing extolled?

Just for few small pennies I’d know,

All of the things which can from it flow.

People were right. That is actually really hard… my congratulations to anyone who can figure out what I’m talking about. And yes, that actually is a sonnet. So there.

*Because those evil creatures will attack you the moment you let your guard down**.

**I am not a dog person.

***Heaven knows, I really don’t need help with that.

****I’d also direct you to Hitherby Dragons, because it’s been far too long since I blatantly plugged it.

*****Philosophers like feeling important, so they give things like ‘God not letting people know He exists’ fancy and complicated names like ‘epistemic distance’, hoping it will fill the emptiness inside^†

^†My love to any philosophers reading… though I would like them to explain why they’re reading this… just… why?

^††Although if you were to somehow compare the two , they would probably look completely different^†††.

^†††Although only as long as it’s impossible to do so – if they are possible to compare, they have to be the same^††††

^††††I’m pretty sure there is a clearer way of putting this.

^{†††††}If your name is Ayn Rand, you may want to ignore this entire post, by the way. Should probably have mentioned that earlier. Sorry Ayn.

^‡Unless, again your name is Ayn Rand^‡‡.

^‡‡You may think this doesn’t apply to you either, as a follower of Ayn Rand. But, unfortunately, the special treatment is just for people with that exact name. Come back when you’re on a stamp. And are called Ayn Rand.

^‡‡‡Virtue ethics away!... I make a distinction between ‘good person’ and ‘good deed’, and I make no claim here of which is more important, or of anything but the distinction between them. I simply ask that it be recognised that George Washington was a good person because of who he was, not simply because of what he did^‡‡‡‡. And that even though he was still a good person, his acceptance of slavery was kinda wrong, regardless of the perpetrator – and that he didn’t really do it because of a flaw in his character, as such^{‡‡‡‡‡}. Or if a man goes into a neighbour’s house, and lights a fire, so it will be warm when he comes home. But he accidentally lights the house, instead. The person is clearly a good person who tried to do something nice, even if they are unutterably stupid. The action (setting someone’s house on fire) is kinda an evil one.

^‡‡‡‡Which was, of course, to lead a totally unjustified terrorist revolt against the legitimate government of his people.

^{‡‡‡‡‡}Arguments about how flawed Washington was sound like things to avoid with a ten foot pole and a suit of armour. But ‘allowed slavery’ isn’t really one of them, I would say – in that time, and in that place, it was an absence of greatness, not a flaw. Incidentally, I have now surpassed my own record for number of footnotes, I think. Addiction to the things is one of my flaws.