Message to a Fellow Atheist About Atheism, Veganism and Feminism

Okay. I'm going to try to explain to you -- AGAIN -- why I sometimes get annoyed with you on the subject of religion.

This post may be annoying to you, too -- but suck it up, it'll be good for you, if you let it. If you freaking LISTEN.

It's not because you're an atheist. I'm an atheist too. I hope you realize that. I really hope you do. And I hope you also realize that other atheists probably have the same problem with you. And, for example, with Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher and Sam Harris and Stephen Fry.

 

 

Except that they're not trying so freaking hard to HELP. They won't go to the excruciating effort to try to explain it to you. They'll just stop talking to you.

This time, I will try to explain by comparing atheists, vegans and feminists.

Probably, most people you meet who are vegans will never mention it to you. But there are a few who who are a huge pain in the ass about it. Even if you agree with them that veganism could solve the climate crisis and wipe out human poverty if every human became vegan.

 

You might agree with them about that. You might agree with them about many more benefits of veganism. You could BE a vegan, and still find them to be a huge pain in the ass the same way you and I do, and for the very same reason: over and over again, whether the subject is politics or history or technology or whatever, as soon as they see a connection to veganism, they make the entire conversation about veganism.

The same thing can happen with feminism. You could be a huge, committed feminist. You could believe that feminism is the most important topic that humans could possibly discuss. And I might just completely agree. And still, it could be between extremely difficult and impossible to stand talking to you sometimes, if you made conversations grind to a halt by making them all about feminism. 

Some conversations ARE all about feminism. But some aren't. Some conversations are all about veganism, but others aren't. Until they're highjacked by some pain in the ass who is incapable of discussing anything else. Then the conversations grind to a halt, unless two or more such pains in the ass happen to be present. Everyone else will leave and find something much, much, much more interesting to do.

This brings us back to you, and the subject of religion. Religion, which has permeated human life for most of the time that there have been humans. So that it's fairly hard to discuss history, archaeology, anthropology, politics, economics or sociology while entirely avoiding the subject of religion. But some people will try anyway, if you're around. Because the conversation was interesting and they wanted it to continue.

Okay. I tried. Again. I guess I'll try again. Even though it's exhausting and a huge pain in the ass. Because the odds are very slim that, this, time, you got it.

Nostalgia Revisited

A man shaves with a straight razor, dresses, tucks his fountain pen and mechanical pocket watch into his waistcoat, dusts off his spats, leaves his home and walks across the street paved with cobblestones to his internal-combustion car, which he drives with its manual transmission to his club, where he dines on steak and oysters, and then relaxes before the fireplace with a cigar and a snifter of brandy, exchanging witticisms in Latin with other club members while someone extemporizes upon the grand piano.

 

16 things which either are, or are perceived to be, in decline: straight razors, fountain pens, mechanical pocket watches, waistcoats, spats, cobblestones, internal combustion engines, manual transmissions, private clubs, steak, oysters, fireplaces, cigars, brandy, the Latin language and grand pianos. But each of those things are staunchly defended by groups small or large. Internal combustion still predominates, but it will be outnumbered by electric vehicles much sooner than some people realize, while not soon enough to suit some of us, who are concerned about climate catastrophe. 

The number of people who eat steak is shrinking, and it seems it will continue to shrink. Vegans consider the human consumption of beef to be a catastrophe in several major ways, while others think that life without the possibility of steak would be a disaster, and I must say that I sympathize with both sides in this fight. The vegans make very convincing arguments. On the other hand, we still have teeth designed to tear flesh, and the smell of a well-prepared steak still makes our mouths water. It still makes my mouth water, at least. Are the vegans really immune to this lure? 

I think that if the vegans want to win, they will have to produce great quantities of delicious vegan food. And it seems that many vegans agree, because the amount of truly delicious vegan food is growing at an amazing rate. This will be much more effective than the stereotypical unbearable self-righteous disapproving vegan.

I've written often in this blog about my love for mechanical watches. But even I am wearing a G-Shock right now. They just work better. Yes, can get a mechanical watch which does 80% of what a $100 quartz watch does, almost as well as the quartz watch. You can get such a mechanical watch for as little as $50,000. 

Fountain pens are more of a mixed bag compared to ballpoints and gel. Fountain pens can, unquestionably, do much more than other pens. But the amount of work it takes to keep them working is -- well, it's much more than the amount of work it takes to wind a watch every day, if your mechanical watch is not an automatic wristwatch which winds itself as your wrist moves when you wear it.

If you're an American, you may or may not be amazed to learn how many cobblestones are still in use in Europe, and even on a few of New York city's streets, and for all I know, maybe in many other American cities too. What about cobblestones in Canada? Or Latin America? Hey, good questions! I don't know.

Anyway, maybe I've been a bit of a douchebag for the way that I've repeatedly attacked nostalgia, because I feel a protective urge for most of these old-timey things, and I can at least sympathize with most of the rest. And that doesn't make me, or anyone else who likes these things, reactionary.

But, Aha! you exclaim. The club! It excluded women, and most men, too!

But Aha! yourself, I shout back at you. Just because you were in the club in 1903 didn't mean you weren't progressive. You could go to the club and argue that club membership, and even the vote! should be given to all women and men. Just because you love a stick shift doesn't mean you're not going to get an EV -- or even a bus pass. Loving history does not mean that you hate every progressive evolution. Conversely, cheering on ever-better automatic transmissions and EV's, and doing away with writing on paper altogether, let alone fountain pens, and being vegan, and having been the first to abandoned straight razors and spats -- alas, none of that guarantees that you are not, politically, socially, a reactionary pig! You can't judge the citizen by her timepiece!

Dream Log: Beautiful, Unsuccessful Hollywood Actress

I dreamed I was an actor in Hollywood. I was the same age and appearance as in real life, and just as poor, and I was writing this blog same as in real life, but I was living in Hollywood and auditioning. I knew many actors and actresses who were much more successful than I. 

 

It was afternoon, and Ryan Gosling and I and several other actors were hanging out at some tables on a sidewalk. Ryan was wearing a tuxedo. I was wearing a cheap suit. It was uncomfortable and I was self-conscious, worried that others could see how cheap it was. 

George Clooney showed up, also wearing a tuxedo. He asked me what I had been doing lately. I started to talk about the blog, and the conversation died. It didn't seem to me that George was being rude. Rather, it was extremely difficult for him to sustain an interest in something which, from his point of view, had so little to do with movies.

It became evening, and we went inside the theatre outside of which the tables had been the entire time. I felt miserable, and was at the free bar, searching for something with alcohol in it among the soft drinks and snacks, when a very beautiful actress approached me, wearing a man's-style white shirt, black skirt and black stockings. We had known each other for a long time, but had lost touch.

I don't know whether she was someone who exists in real life. She was a little under medium height, had green eyes and straight chestnut-brown down to her shoulders, was a little over 40 years old and looked essentially the same as she had when she was under 20. I was confused about why she wanted to talk to me. After a little while she said she had to go, but that she wanted to hang out with me some more, and, the way she touched my arm and looked into my eyes when she said it, it seemed like she meant it. 

Eventually I gave up my search for booze, concluding that this must be a health-conscious event. Many actors and actresses are extremely meticulous in choosing healthy refreshments. The incidence of veganism is very high in Hollywood. This is one of the reasons why some actors and actresses look very much the same over age 40 as they did under age 20.

Across the room I saw the beautiful actress talking with a man wearing a tuxedo. From their body language, he looked to me like a boyfriend or ex-boyfriend. 

I had conversations with several people similar to the one I'd had with George Clooney: they asked what I'd been up to, I answered honestly, describing the blog, they found it impossible to feign interest. 

Then I heard the voice of the seeming boyfriend over the PA. Somehow, although I hadn't heard his voice before, I knew it was the same guy. And now it was clear that he was her boss, because he was telling her to put on an apron and bus the area. And apparently the reason I hadn't heard anything about her recently, was that her acting career had not been going especially well. Earlier, she had easily supported herself by acting.

She went behind a curtain to the service area to get an apron. I took off my suit jacket and followed. Even though I really hate food service work, I was going to put on an apron and tell her I wanted to help her bus the area. But before I got there I woke up.

Stinky Cheese Monkey

mee r stinkee cheez munkee. mee luv yu.

You know how the cheese section of a supermarket will offer small pieces of cheese for sale, an ounce or two per piece? Maybe they'll be in a wicker basket or something like that, a bunch of all different sorts of cheese. Maybe the supermarket does that because they have small pieces left over after cutting the cheese up into the more normally-sized pieces. Or maybe they offer the small pieces in order to entice customers to try new things. Or maybe both, or maybe something else.

Be that as it may, Whole Foods donates some of these small pieces of cheese to the local food bank. A nice lady who works at the food bank has noticed that I really like these fancy pieces of cheese from Whole Foods, and apparently there's not a lot of demand for this stuff generally at the food bank, and so, the last few times I've gone to the food bank, as soon as she sees me coming, this nice lady goes and gets me a few pieces of wonderful, exotic, expensive, stinky cheese. mee r stinkee cheez munkee.

When I get my precious home, I unwrap the small pieces of cheese and put the cheese into plastic refrigerator containers. Am I doing it wrong, by putting different sorts of fine cheese into one container? Am I ruining everything? Are true cheese connoisseurs in anguish as they read this? (Am I flattering myself to think that a true cheese connoisseur has ever been within a mile of reading anything I've written?) I don't know. As I unwrap them, I note the brand and the price per pound of each piece of cheese, and then I quickly forget most of that information.

If my memory were better, or if I had written down the name and price of each brand of cheese before throwing the wrapper away, this would be a much more informative and interesting post. And yet, here we are. If I ever get any more of the fancy cheese from the food bank, maybe I'll actually manage to add an informative PS to this post. I promise nothing! [PS, 16. June 2020: And today's the day! I got two pieces of stinky cheese from the the food bank, and I remembered not to throw the wrappers away. One of the pieces is Jasper Hill Farm Cabot Clothbound Cheddar and sells for $25.99 per pound at Whole Foods, and the other piece, also donated by Whole Foods, Is Jasper Hill Farm Alpha Tolman and sells for $24.99 a pound. It looks and smells a bit like Gruyere (which I've also gotten from the food bank). The manufacturer recommends Tolman for melting. I don't remember having seen either of these particular varieties before. I'm melting a piece of Tolman on a cracker... Very nice. The texture of the melted Tolman is reminiscent of Gruyere, and the flavor is a bit more intense. Very nice. As for the Clothbound Cheddar, a website devoted to cheese recommends pairing it with charcuterie. Cracker, cheddar, hot dog... Hmm, maybe I wasn't doing that right. Or maybe I needed to cleanse my palate after the Tolman. I'll keep an open mind about this cheddar.]

I try not to eat too much cheese. Even when it's really delicious. And it seems that, generally speaking, I like cheese better the more expensive it is -- another good reason for me to be a billionaire! -- and some of the little information from the thrown-away cheese wrappers which I have retained is that four of those little pieces of cheese -- at least four. Maybe five, or more -- sell at Whole Foods for $29.99 a pound. And at least one more cost $27.99 per pound.

Now, readers, maybe, for some of you, $30 a pound is not a lot for cheese. For me, $30 a pound is the most expensive cheese I've ever seen. And I know that some of you will be astounded to learn that cheese can cost so much. Astounded and perhaps also outraged, for all I know.

But like I said, for me, as a general rule, the more cheese costs, the better it tastes. Also, since I've been getting the fancy stinky cheese from the food bank, I've been researching cheese a little bit, on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and so I think I know a little bit about those $30-a pound cheeses:

-- One was a goat cheese with pieces of truffles in it. I was worried about this piece of cheese, because I'd eaten other, much cheaper things which supposedly had truffles in them, and gotten headaches from eating them. But in retrospect, I suspect those other things may have had very little truffle, and a lot of artificial additive to try to fake the taste of truffles, and probably the additives gave me the headaches. Anyway, now, after eating this $29.99-a-pound cheese, I may actually have some real idea of what truffles taste like, and I didn't get headaches.

-- Another $29.99-per-pound cheese reminded me a bit of brie, it was white and had a similar softness and mild flavor, but was better than any brie I've ever had.

-- Another one was a blue cheese. It's the only blue cheese I've ever seen that is orange except for the delicious blue pieces of mold which give blue cheese its name. It was orange, and more soft and pliant than crumbly, and it was sticky, and I remember that its name definitely sounded English, and it was hard to keep from just gobbling it down, without even putting it on a cracker or anything, just gobbling it down by itself, it was so good.

As for further $29.99-per-pound packages, I can't remember if one was another package of the same mild white variety which is sort of like brie but better. (Unless, of course, there are other, more expensive sorts of brie which I've never had and I can't even imagine how delicious they are.)

I admire the vegans, I really do. And I completely believe them when they talk about the health benefits of vegan diets. I have eyes. I can see how good-looking they are, how healthy, how clear-skinned.

But on the other hand -- for instance, stinky cheese.

They Say it Takes Thousands of Gallons of Water to Make a Pound of Beef --

-- takes it where exactly, is what I want to know -- deep into outer space, or to some other place where it is lost forever and ever, never available again for any human, bovine or plant to drink? Is that what they mean, exactly?

Do they know what they mean? Exactly?

I don't mean to minimize water shortage problems, or problems caused by livestock farming. But I do think it is senseless to try to to discuss problems if we don't know what we're talking about. Water is absorbed by plants and animals, and escapes from them again by evaporation and urination and other means, and vaporizes into clouds, and rains down from clouds and is gathered in lakes and streams, and a lot of it goes into the oceans, but some of the salt water in the oceans evaporates into freshwater clouds, and some of that ends up in the lakes and streams again, not to mention the canals and reservoirs -- and yes, some of it actually does escape the Earth's atmosphere and go into outer space -- and my points are 1) that these processes are complicated, and 2) that the problem currently is not so much a lack of water, as a lack of clean, fresh water in certain areas. The problem has less to do with the overall quantity of water on Earth than with the quality of the water in specific areas.

And to make it more complicated, just one example: if we resort to large desalination of ocean water to meet the fresh-water requirements of humans and cows and grass and corn and so forth -- at some point we're going to think about all of that life back in the ocean that needs saltwater.

I'm not asking you to stop caring about such things. Vegans, I'm not asking you to stop raising Hell. I am asking you, however, to ask yourself whether a meme contains solid information before you post it on Facebook. All you can do, by being careful about such things, is make your case stronger.

Vegans and Atheists

I assume that most vegans are pleasant and intelligent people with great senses of humor. However, I do not have any direct evidence to support this assumption.

I just assume that, just as Dawkins and Harris and Myers and (from beyond the grave) Hitch are making us (atheists) all look bad, so the humorless, self-righteous and just generally stupid among the vegans, because they make so damn much noise, are making vegans in general look bad. Surely you've heard something along the lines of: "I'm a vegan, and the joke you just told offends me because[...]" and the remark ends with something other than "[...]because I'm a humorless stiff."

There are few atheists who are constantly jumping up and down and yelling, "Hey! HEY! I'm an atheist, and I hate the way that the New Atheist keep talking about historical topics without bothering to learn about them first, and I've actually read the Koran, and I don't think we all should be afraid of Islam. Muslims are pretty much just people like others," and so on and so forth. In fact, I may be the only one.

Likewise, there are few vegans jumping up and down and yelling, "Hey! HEY! I'm a vegan, and I have a sense of humor! You could even tell me a joke about vegans and I'll probably think it's funny. Especially if it's a joke about those vegans everybody hates because they have no sense of humor! 'Everybody' meaning 'including almost all vegans', cause Duh!"

I assume that almost all vegans are like that, even in the absence of the jumping up and down and yelling.

The alternative would be to assume that a sense of humor actually is dependent upon ingesting animal protein and fat.

Some Vegans Won't Understand This

Someone posted a video on Facebook of animals, cats, dogs, pigs, rabbits, other animals, all eating together out of one big pan. It looked very sweet and peaceful. The person who posted the video commented that humans have less capacity for peace than any other species. I reacted:

"Ich nehme an, dass es Menschen sind, welche diese Tiere fuettern und pflegen, und dass mangels dieses Fuetterns einige von diesen Tieren einige der anderen essen wuerden. Mann muss Menschen nicht hassen, um andere Tierarten lieben zu koennen." ("I assume that it's humans who feed and care for these animals, and that in the lack of this food, some of these animals would eat some of the others. You don't have to hate humans in order to love other species.")

Then I noticed that the person who'd posted the video announced that she was a vegan. (A German vegan.) So I figured, Eh, why try to point out the obvious flaw in her logic to a person who very likely doesn't want to hear it?

And that's why I'm sharing this with you instead.

But while we're all here, please do think about it: almost all (not all but almost all) of these sweet videos of animals of different species being friends are made possible by humans who feed and care for all of the animals involved. I love these videos, they're really great, but so far, they haven't stopped wild animals from eating each other. Human intervention has stopped it in individual cases. That is a plain and obvious fact.

So, vegans: we don't hate you because you're vegans, we hate you because you're incredibly stupid, and if you're not incredibly stupid, we don't hate you.

How To Get People To Stop Paying Attention To You And Shun You

The only thing wrong with that meme is that other vegans have been telling him the same thing and he always assumes they must be non-vegans because how could a vegan find fault with him? Him?!

JAMES: No-one who is not a vegan can call himself an environmentalist. (ACTUAL QUOTE!)

Class, what is going to be the effect of James' statement? Is it

A) More people will become vegans;

or

B) Fewer people will call themselves environmentalists?

That's right, it's

C) Fewer people will listen to James.

Which is a shame, because James was providing a lot of fascinating information about the food industry. And for all I know, James' information about the food industry may have been 100% correct. But James was wrong in his assumption about who is and isn't allowed to call him- or herself an environmentalist. And he's reinforcing the stereotype about vegans being judgmental douchebags.

I'm sure that if I dug through James' life I could find something which is less than environmentally-friendly. Instead, since I only have one life and I'm trying to use it efficiently, I'm blowing James off and moving on. It's not enough to be right in politics, and everything is political.