Words &c.

This reads like a Modest Proposal-esque satire.

Curious to know what are the leading causes of injury to women? Here they are: unintentional falls, car accidents and overexertion. Domestic violence did not even make the list.

So relax ladies. Everything you've heard about the "epidemic" of domestic violence is mostly hype calculated to stampede you into divorcing your husband and voting for yet another taxpayer-funded, ideologically charged abuse reduction program.

Women fall down stairs of fist-shaped doorknobs a lot. Domestic violence is just a socialist myth.

I'm an atheist, that's what the scarlet A over on the right means. That label carries a lot of baggage with it but means very little to me. It's just the default response to "what religion are you?" - I'm an atheist. Taken literally that's not an answer. Buddhists and Jains can be atheists but still religious. It's interpreted as what I mean to say: "I'm not religious nor spiritual and I'm a bit more blunt about it than an agnostic." The phrase 'non-believer' - which the President was kind enough to use once amidst a day full of prayers and beseeching the Almighty - gets used quite a bit to encompass atheists/agnostics/Pastafarians/etc.

I don't like that term, though. It reinforces the most harmful misconception about atheists - that we're all nihilists. We believe in nothing, and go through life doing only what furthers our own ends with no care for the consequences to others, following a base and crass materialistic philosophy that rejects any higher moral or ethical principles.

That's a misconception that better people than I have explained. It does get to the heart of the matter for me: we've banded together as atheists because that's the feature of our beliefs that society finds most disturbing. People go around asking "what's your religion?" but they should be asking "what do you believe and why?" (but it's hard to compile those answers into survey data). Atheists are just as moral as the rest of humanity and find just as much wonder and beauty in the world for a whole variety of different reasons.

But there are commonalities. I find my line of thinking very similar to that of Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Hemant Mehta and a lot of other people who have been labeled as militant "New Atheists" (putting up friendly signs on public transit now counts as militancy). Freethought, skepticism, humanism and secularism overlap in this category. Free and bold inquiry are valued, science held as the best method for knowing the cosmos, and human and individual growth and betterment sought after.

There are a lot of similarities between the queer community and the nascent non-religious community. In both cases its members ascribe to themselves such a wide variety of labels it's hard to pin down a good collective name. GLBT (which sounds like a sandwich to my ears) gets used a lot, but some insist on putting the L first, othertimes you'll get LGBTQ or LGBTQQ (queer and questionings), there's also an A or SA for 'allies', let's not forget the polyamorous and pansexual... You can end up with LGBQTTIAPO. Minority Sexual and Gender Identities (MSGI) never caught on, and queer has been settled on (by many if not most) as a good catch-all.

Doing the same thing with the non-religious, you can get AABFSSIHN (atheists, agnostics, Brights, freethinkers, skeptics, Spinozans, ignostics, humanists, nonreligious). Like queer, the summary term is about what makes us distinct - queer sexual/gender identities and lack of belief in the supernatural.

As time goes on I imagine a good term will pop up. I have my suspicions it will be Atheist, with the proper noun saying more about what we believe than its literal what we don't believe.

All this gets to a big problem for me as an atheist: I really like symbols, emblems and insignia. Atheism doesn't have much available.

This means there is a lot of room for new ideas, though. The scarlet A has been settled on as our rainbow flag, but I still think it has a lot of the same problems as just the term atheist: it doesn't say much about what we do believe. It's also too Romanocentric for a global movement.

The US military has seemingly decided this is the de facto symbol of atheism, unfortunately. I really don't like it. One, it just cuts off at the bottom which I think looks very silly. Two that's an outdated (even if very neat looking) atomic model. Three, it's American Atheists. They're just one group in one nation.


The atom is a good choice, though. Modern thought, particularly Atheist thought, owes a lot to the ancient Greeks. Atomism (while it might end up being strictly false) is an important part of a lot of Greek materialist philosophies. My favorite Greek - Epicurus - did a lot of thinking on atoms. We could take the symbol of the hydrogen atom, but that symbol has a lot more connotations to the general public now.

I used to like this one a lot: the Happy Human. Humanism is a good movement and label. It's a lifestance that says a lot about what the person believes in, the IHEU are there but loosely organized, and saying 'secular humanist' sends Bill O'Reilly into cardiac arrest. It's good but for one thing - anthropocentricity.

I believe in humanism as the broad category of ethical philosophies. That same humanism is ascribed to by many people in many religions. I actually fit very nicely into Humanism itself, but I don't want to define myself that way. Anthropocentricity is one of humanity's greatest misconceptions about the universe. It was not created to suit us, it does not exist to serve us, it's not our domain by default, and we aren't its center. It's not our status as homo sapiens that sets us apart from the other animals, its our intelligence. The ability to look, inquire, examine, think and invent, and to imagine things far beyond what we can perceive. I don't like calling myself a Humanist because, optimist that I am, I don't think that transcendental quality will always be unique to humans.

Freethought is the underpinning of Enlightenment thought and has had its own symbol since the late 1800s: the pansy. Needless to say, there are some major reasons this hasn't caught on as a symbol. It's not bad at all, but its connotations aren't suited for a movement that's trying to be more assertive about its existence.

It is very hard to come up with a symbol for Atheism due to its nascence and heterogeneity. What do Atheists believe in? "Science" jumps to the front, and indeed the common accusation is that science is just the atheist's religion. There's actually a mote of truth to that: the same "spiritual" experiences others find in religion are found for many atheists in the universe, which science has done the most to reveal to us. It's far from being a religion, but it's a source of comparable emotions.


The Sun's a good symbol. Naturally it permeates every human culture and every religion. It encompasses a lot of Atheism: enlightenment, the glory of nature, and the vastness of the universe. The debate over whether the Sun or Earth was at the center of the solar system (another case where anthropocentricity kept down the truth) involved early freethinkers like Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and the martyred Giordano Bruno, and represents a triumph of science over dogma. Like the rose, though, it's one of those symbols so inundated with meaning it's almost meaningless. Still, the rose works well for socialists.

Out from the Sun there's the Earth. It's a good symbol of human unity and how tiny and unique we are in the vast universe. It's also a tad vague, though. Maybe the heliocentric model of the solar system would be a good symbol. Again though, I'm optimistic enough that I'd like to avoid schisms with possible Mars-born atheists in the far future.

While it has the same Latinate bias as the A, I like the I as a potential symbol. In its lowercase form with a dot it can be interpreted as a candle or simplified body and head.

About a week ago I attended a lecture on campus by PZ Myers. As is par for the course here, retirees outnumbered students at least ten to one (despite admission being free for students and $10/person otherwise). Lack of seating aside I really enjoyed it.

It was about intelligent design and why it's not, as people like the Discovery Institute claim, at all on par with evolutionary science. Part of his point was how different things that are designed and things that have evolved by natural selection are.

To illustrate this he brought up evolved satellite antennae. An evolutionary algorithm was used to create and simulate a variety of designs, the most fit one was selected, and them descendant forms of that antennae produced and selected from and so on. The resulting antennae look very weird but work very well - actually far better than the ones NASA engineers designed. They also have a lot of extraneous and awkward parts, the detritus of adaptations. This is why natural selection can produce things like us humans, who have phenomenally advanced brains but precariously located testes.

It took me until this morning, when I was sitting in math and sketching streetcar stations, to connect this to last term's Urban Geography class and realize you could do the same thing with a city.

There's plenty of data to be had on traffic patterns from around the world. From that you can develop a model to simulate the behavior of pedestrians, motorists, bicyclists and rickshaws. Develop a whole range of permutations of city layouts (with all their varieties of intersection types, speed zones, and and select for whatever criteria is desired - least number of accidents, least congestion, most pedestrian-friendly - and go on from there.

I'd be most interested to see how the evolved forms differ from our own. I doubt they'd look like the twisted mazes of Las Vegas suburbs, but it's also unlikely they'd be a nice gridiron like Manhattan.

I'm very glad I came down to Ashland and took that class. Crossing the hell-intersection of Siskiyou and Indiana is far worse than crossing 82nd Street. Part of this is just the drivers. 82nd Street has its fair share of idiots in low riders with oversized spoilers, but Siskiyou has all of them plus hicks in Ford F-150s with oversized tires who - as I learned last Sunday - will gleefully feign running you down for laughs. This plus the retirees. Half the driving population is made up of people 18-22 and 65-80. Of course the main problem is that Siskiyou is fed directly into by Highway 99, and no one can drive below 45. Anyone who was around me during spring break probably heard me bitch about the Ashland government's response to a pedestrian death at that crosswalk: put in more crosswalks.

Urban planning always tickled my interest, maybe in part because I grew up playing with SimCity 2000 and others like it. The anthology on cities I did for my senior English project also did a lot to put my mind on it. Dealing with that intersection and taking that class, though, have actually made me consider it more seriously as a field of study.

Hopefully all this doesn't bleed into the D&D campaign I plan to run over the summer. I don't want to bore my players with diagrams explaining the absolute genius behind Dwarven intermodal separation of transit.

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