In an interview a few years back with The Sun magazine, atheist bigwig Sam Harris had this to say about the comparable (de)merits of religion and rape:
If I could wave a magic wand and get rid of either rape or religion, I would not hesitate to get rid of religion.
You can read the whole interview starting here.
And some people wonder why so many atheists have broken with Harris and the rest of the Old School New Atheist Boys Club to start Atheism Plus.
EDITED TO ADD: Hadn’t noticed that the interview was from 2006, so maybe this is old news to a lot of atheists. Still horrible.
Martha Wells, P.C. Hodgell, Janet Kagan 🙂
I loved Ursula Le Guin for the first three Earthsea books, but didn’t care for her other work, and loathed the fourth Earthsea effort. These days I like Kerry Greenwood (the Phryne Fisher and Corinna Chapman detective series) and Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey). Mostly I’ve read non-fiction, though, as an adult, and it’s not a matter of authors but of subject.
@Nathan, I think so too. Every group will have its fanatics. It’s just that you tend to notice the fanatics of the opposite side more than those of your own side (for obvious reasons – it’s the opposite side that’s gonna attack you).
Regarding the militant vegans…
Sadly, yes. I actually have run into one of them. (Online, but it was a former close friend of a friend of mine. That friend now has officially given me “I told you so” rights.) I seem to recall the term ‘bloodmouths’ being used. But that person was… odd. (They also believed that to have agriculture at all was oppression of animals. I disagree.)
I am very glad that I didn’t really put much investment in this person’s opinions. I’m recovering from an eating disorder, of the starvation variety, and back when I tried to be more strictly vegetarian, I would use it to hurt myself. I am unable to keep myself healthy without animal products, and it’s a red flag if I haven’t eaten any meat in months.
One day, I hope to be healthily vegetarian, but right now, I can’t be. (And I realize that the more militant vege folk tend to make an exception for people like me, but I don’t really buy it. Why should my life be worth more than those of the animals I consume?)
That was basically my response at about the same age. Liked the first book and then in the second, Lyra feels like she does nothing. What’s with that?
RE: Katz
Oh thank god, I wasn’t the only one. I haven’t really read the later books since, (apparently we had VERY strong feelings when we were twelve) so obviously my memories are very fuzzy. I was in the books for Lyra, Pan, the armored bears, and all that stuff, and then in the second book, this other main character dominates, and I was just like >:[
It was actually pretty much the exact same reason I really adore the first of Wrede’s Enchanted Forest series, but never read (reread? I can’t even remember!) the other two.
OMIGOD I FELT THE SAME WAY ABOUT THE ENCHANTED FOREST SERIES TOO!
The first one was so funny and clever, and the second one was pretty funny and pretty clever, and by the third one it’s all serious and the cool people are being boring and I just don’t care anymore…
To her credit, she wrote the fourth one first and obviously had a totally different idea about the series at that point.
@pillowinhell – To be fair, that was the only time I was coerced into church during my two years in the Army. The rest of the time whether or not I attended was my choice, no negative consequences attached (I think that the main reason we were threatened with hard labor on that one occasion was that the drill sergeants wanted to be rid of us for a day). There were occasions, though, where a (Christian) chaplain would be present and he’d lead everyone in prayer. That couldn’t have been fun for any of the atheist or non-Christian troops.
@Falconer – Every time I hear somebody pull out the old “America was founded as a Christian nation” I want to kick something. Read the Constitution, people, including the amendments – you might learn something!
@ithiliana – thanks for those links re: military proselytizing. I read them after I was done with my initial word vomit. Looks like I need to write some Congressmen and send some money to the MRFF.
Ithiliana: Bujold. L’Engle (there was some eye-opening stuff). Blume (her juveniles, and her adults). Lyn MacDonald (WW1 Historian). Elizabeth Bear (whom I was resistant to read, because I HATE reading my friends’ stuff and not liking it).
Each of them, in their way, treat all the personages in the books as PEOPLE. “Are You there God?, It’s me, Margaret” is AWESOME.
Bujold plays with power in relationships in her books (I still need to read Ethan of Athos), is really good; even the painful scenes (the dinner party), manage to be explorations of how people want to behave, combined with what comes of not thinking of other people as ends, instead of means…
MacDonald brings an age long dead (the age of just before/during The Great War) back to life, and catches/reveals the sentiments of men (and some women, but she writes of battle, in an age when women didn’t really fight) who are; for so many, no people anymore, but rather icons in any number of narratives about War, Class, Culture, Miltarism, The Death of Innocence, etc, and wraps in up in the brutal contexts of the War…
Blume, insight to how growing up female worked, and how growing up hurts, and doesn’t. A charming simplicity (which takes both craft and art). She was my first, “banned book”…
L’Engle… Takes one of the most mocked lines in literature (Bulwyr-Littons, “It was a dark and stormy night) and makes it stand in for the struggles and trials of people who have been worn down by careless fate. Love is gone, a pale shadow in the background; with its threads in the lives of Megan, and Calvin and Charles Wallace; all sketched out; before you have all the players in the scene, as Charles Wallace makes the liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches.
It’s spare, and dense and 50 years after she wrote it, it’s still fresh; even the political messages manage to transition to the present. Almost 35 years after I first read it I find more in it.
Fitzy: Oy…. I’m sorry. The stripe of evangelicals who become chaplains always bother me. Ours, in Iraq was a gung-ho motherfucker. He’d been an MP before he became a preacher, and he was one of the most offensive “religious” people I’ve ever met in my life.
The Baptist who tried to get me to “pray with him” while I was in hospital was also pretty bad, but I was in a better position to be rude to him, and he didn’t come back.
I spent Church Call at basic with the Episcopalians, because they were low-key, had a very small turn out (so I could spend four, or five, hours without seeing anyone I lived with), and there was much more chance to mingle with recruits from other companies; which included the female companies.
It was some very pleasant down-time.
nat: very similar in temperament and personality to the really evangelical, holier-than-thou vegans.
Yes. Rarely, and the one I lived with got over that aspect of things: partly because she had a partner who needed to eat meat (serious dietary issues). The one who was abusing her cat because she was a vegan… well she didn’t win any points with my boss; the vegetarian veterinarian.
So I can attest to their existence. In 35 years in Calif (LA, The Central Coast, Humboldt and The Bay Area) I met three. The most offensive was the woman who accosted me in the grocery. I was 16, so I probably looked about 13. I was trying to select a pot-roast for supper. She comes up and starts ranting about how wrong it is to eat animals, etc. She goes on, as I’m trying to be polite, and then she whips out what she thought was the untoppable closer (recall I looked a lot younger than I was), “Could you look at a poor innocent cow and kill it?”.
I picked up 3 lbs of chuck and said, “Yes”. With any luck she never tried that shit again; the look of shock, and then horror, on her face was incredible. She seemed to have discovered she was talking to Damien. She went white, and fled.
It’s just an internet thing really, isn’t it? No. It’s a real thing. I’ve seen restaurants with a six course menu that had bacon in every dish.
Urgh
That’s worse than the fancy London restaurant I saw in ’89 that offered roast beef and CHIPS. I mean, chips? With roast beef? What happened to roast potatoes? What happened to Yorkshire pudding? ::drool::
Only now I’ve got the Spam sketch in my head again, thinking about bacon with everything. 🙂
Ugh, the bacon thing! I can only go for bacon if it’s a tiny lean bit crumbled on a cobb salad or a baked potato. An entire piece that’s basically a fried strip of fat? Why do people consider this a good idea?
And why is it a breakfast food? What makes people go “I’ve just woken up, I feel like filling my stomach with grease?”
Hey! Quit raggin’ on my bacon!
:p
I’m only kidding.
I see bacon as a sort of “once-in-a-blue-moon” thing. I think the last strip of bacon I had was… 6 months ago? I like it… in extreme moderation.
Y’all should avoid Think Geek, BTW… they have a whole store of bacon stuff:
Bacon Mayonnaise, Bacon Mints, Bacon Gum, Bacon pops… it’s ridiculous.
Bacon MINTS?
Ewwwwwwwwww
I’ll have bacon for breakfast in two situation: if I’m on holiday and it’s on offer at the hotel/b&b (which has happened maybe two or three times) or across the veil, where it’s become a kind of tradition, not least since Miss Katie Cat has become a devotee of it over there. 🙂
Well I’m guessing that across the veil there aren’t any calories.
Bacon mints are disgusting, yes I’ve tried them. Two tastes that should NEVER be combined.
Katz – correct! Which is just as well. I’d be in real trouble if there were, lol.
I only like the meaty bit on bacon*. What the Brits call streaky bacon I don’t care for at all, and that seems to be the kind Americans like. IDGI – I find the texture of the fatty part horrifying, and used to always pull that part off and discard it as a child, but I guess tastes vary and all. Still, it’s a weird and interesting cultural phenomenon, the bacon obsession.
*The obvious exception being fattier bacon used as a seasoning that we were discussing earlier. Seriously, if you’ve never had the Chinese green bean dish with tiny pieces of bacon as a seasoning and you like both green beans and pig-flavored things, check it out.
I like Marion Zimmer Bradley. I think the first of her books was Mists of Avalon, but really its her Darkover stuff I love. Particularly the Renunciates. I grew up wishing I knew so many kick ass women.
Bacon MINTS? That sounds like it should be on Andrew Zimmerman’s weird and scary food program along with the snake venom ice cream.
Snake venom ice cream?
Me: Snake venom ice cream????
Colleague: Wonder what that’d taste like?
Me: Better than bacon mints.
@pecunium: I think I read A Wind in the Door too young. I especially didn’t take to A Swiftly Tilting Planet, largely because it didn’t have Meg in it (I also don’t like any of the Narnia books that don’t have Lucy in them except I abhor The Last Battle).
My grandparents on both sides had farms. When you get up at the crack and plan to spend most of the day with the horses hitched to the plow or the rake, or to crowd into the stripping room with the tobacco, you tend to need a lot of calories. Then eating eggs, bacon, biscuits and coffee for breakfast becomes a habit. I understand that the staple breakfast of factory workers in some parts of France in the 19th century was a hunk of bread and plenty of butter, such that when butter became scarce, someone developed margarine but it didn’t have the same fueling power.
Falconer – The Last Battle was the only Narmia book I hated as a kid; I loved all the others. What about it got you?