An Atheist's Guide to Scripture: Using the Bible Without Being Used

First of all, I'm not religious. I'm not here to sell anyone on religion. I'm not here to convert you. I'm here to show you how something actually works, and some hacks with it. Life is bewilderingly complex, but it's full of little maps, if you know where to find them and how to use them. The Bible is one of them, and a pretty neat one, especially the Old Testament.

1. Matthew 7, among other things, suggests that most people, especially the people that bang on the Bible the most don't get it all. Seem familiar? The religious are lost.

2. These are stories but that doesn't make them "false". The Boy Who Cried Wolf is similarly not false on the basis that there is truth to the moral it conveys.

3. That being said, approaching the Bible as a moral treatise is pretty much the worst way to use it. This is where pretty much everyone gets it wrong.

4. Because the Bible is exactly as terrible as people are. That's the point. It's about how we're wired, not some ideal. The goal is to "solve" the law, not enforce it. If you go to enforce the law you'll be exactly as terrible as people are. We'll approach this later.

5. The God character is not omnibenevolent, not entirely omniscient and not omnipotent, despite what you've been told. God follows certain rules, like nature, and God is as cold as nature. God is basically allegory for nature and consequence. This is so important: God is not an absolute moral entity in any human sense of it.

Now, if you're caught up, the above should outline a much different approach to scripture than the common Christian one.

We're going to read the Bible a bit more like a Rabbi would than a Christian, though I don't want to sell this as a Jewish take on scripture. It's not necessarily. I'm just trying to help draw a bead for you, the reader: This isn't Christianity.

Scripture as Sociology

Scripture contains patterns for human behavior that were developed using storytelling and observation generation to generation. Some of these predate the Torah and the Old Testament, and come from Babylonian folklore, for example. The oral storytelling allows the tales to adapt over time, and become more refined. In the end some are quite useful for predicting human behavior because we follow patterns, and those patterns are "baked" into scripture.

Scripture maps out conditions for a society, and then the arc that puts society on, so your goal would be to map your society to the appropriate scripture that best reflects the conditions the society is in. From there, you can use the story to chart a course for that society under those conditions.

A couple of good examples of these are contained in Genesis 19 and Ezekiel 16. 

Genesis 19 is about Sodom and spells out what happens to a society with rampaging rape gangs and general cruelty. You can see the state of such societies by looking to war torn bits of the Middle East where these things are common, especially where ISIS operates. They are doomed. 

Ezekiel 16 is about Jerusalem and spells out what happens to a society given over to social vanity, and the impact of that. It states that such a society is cruel. Such a society promotes queerness and taboo. Such a society promotes the worship of false idols (like money). Such a society is indifferent to the poor. This is the cost of social vanity. Such a society will falter but recover as according to the passage God "forgives" rather than destroys them. One might look to the arc the United States is on for an example of this.

Scripture also contains patterns for relationships between individuals and groups generally, but we'll cover some of that later.

Navigating Scriptural Laws

Scripture lays out different laws for different groups, precisely because different groups have different needs and different behaviors.

As a gentile, in order to be considered "righteous" - or rather, upright and sensible all one need observe is the Noahide laws:

1. Not to worship idols.
2. Not to curse God.
3. To establish courts of justice.
4. Not to commit murder.
5. Not to commit adultery, bestiality, or sexual immorality.
6. Not to steal.
7. Not to eat flesh torn from a living animal.

Of these 1,2 and 5 probably require further explanation:

Number 1 is important, because idolatry is a kind of obsession, and obsession leads to all kinds of ugly. The central idol of the modern world is money, and we can see what obsession with money brings. None of it is good.

Number 2 is important, because cursing God is as pointless as cursing the universe. It makes a fool of you, and worse, makes a victim out of you. There's a word for people that go through life cursing it, feeling like they're put upon by the world and the world owes them something: "Criminal" - this is how you become lost.

Number 5 is important because, victimization inherent to things like adultery, bestiality and general sexual abuse aside, things like sexual fetishes become idols, and obsession sets in. Admittedly I'm not clear on what constitutes "sexual immorality" for gentiles, but my advice is to avoid clinical paraphilias generally. For Jews as I understand it sexual immorality is basically sex outside the confines of marriage, possibly non-reproductive sex, but I have some reason to suspect the latter standard would not apply to gentiles.

As a Christian the laws are simple to understand, but difficult to follow. They boil down to "treat others - even your enemies - as you'd be like to be treated", detest your own sin first and foremost, and operate from a position of love. Jesus suggested that by doing this you'd fulfill all of the "old laws" which we'll get to.

As a Jew the laws are numerous, and navigating them, much less following them all is incredibly difficult, if not impossible for most people.

We're going to be focusing on these "old laws" that the Jews use, precisely because there are so many and they're so intricate, but also because you use them differently than you would something like secular law, or the way Christians tend to use Christ's laws.

First of all, for all intents and purposes nobody will follow all the old laws all the time. That doesn't make us criminal - it makes us human. Following all the old laws all the time would be conceptually a perfect execution of one's life, and everybody makes mistakes, makes suboptimal choices, etc. We are not Jesus Christ. We are not one of the 36 righteous individuals ("Tzadikim") for which God does not destroy the world, nor must we be. Achieving this level of perfection would be analogous to being a Buddha. It's simply not something most humans will ever do.

So why have the laws? Because they show us how to make effective choices. Following a law puts you in a position where you have more and/or better choices from there. The laws are action/consequence. Consequence is typically not meted out by man but by God, so for example in Leviticus 20:13 where it says males engaged in homosexual acts shall be put to death it's saying God will kill them. In other words, they'll die sooner. This is true, by the numbers. Sexually active gay men do not generally live as long as straight men or celibate men. 

If a human tries to enforce the law, they are trying to do God's job. "Vengeance is mine", sayeth the Lord. God's job is to mete out God's justice (the laws of the universe). We are not meant to enforce natural law. That's God's province. Our job is to endeavor to prevent the laws from being broken, not to punish. Otherwise we become bloodthirsty, and this is where so many Christians get it dramatically wrong.

What this also means is that the laws are often predictive of human behavior and consequence, not simply laws like you'd find in a court. They're more like laws of nature.

So when Paul for example (who draws from the old laws a lot despite being Christian), declares that sexually active gay men shall not inherit the kingdom in 1 Cor 6:9-12, he's also suggesting that people will endeavor to enforce this law and cast gay men out of mainstream society (social allegory for the kingdom) - indeed we see this among homophobic people - and it's especially directed at the men, just like the law.

Scripture on Slavery

I feel this requires its own section as it's typically dramatically misunderstood.

Scripture acknowledges slavery as a fact of life. When the Bible was written slavery - even chattel slavery - was a fact of life. 

Today we still rely on a form of slavery in order to support a leisure class (non toiling class) - not just the rich, but also people like professors and marketers. They can exist because someone somewhere is toiling under slave like conditions - toiling far more than what they need themselves to survive. This has been how humans have operated since time immemorial, and still do, and likely will until we automate toil or otherwise escape it. Scripture acknowledges this.

Scripture repeatedly implores slave masters to treat their slaves well, and indeed suggests that treating slaves well makes them become like family (see Proverbs 29) - this is true often of people that treat their "help" or their "employees" like family. This is important.

Scripture repeatedly implores slaves to be obedient. This is something people get really hung up on, but it makes sense. Someone in that situation usually does not have the option of escape or open revolt - in fact they depend on their master in order to survive - for food and shelter. So what happens to a disobedient employee, like a slacking maid, or even an actual slave in a labor camp? They suffer consequences for it, and they are trusted less by their masters and treated worse for it, down the road, and since their master has so much control, he can make their lives miserable, at work, or worse, in that labor camp. It's common sense to act upright. 

There's another advantage of acting upright in the face of oppression, as Peter suggests. You remain blameless. The reason people blame antifa is antifa isn't obedient to the existing powers like MLK Jr was. Contrast their methods of resistance. MLK Jr's powerful legacy speaks for itself, and it could only happen because he remained honorable and upright in his actions, even toward his oppressors.

A Nascent Evidence and Reason-Based Political Party

The Common Sense Party is working to become a registered party in California. The group needs about 67,000 registered voters to register with the CSP as their party to obtain official recognition by California. A group of voters decided to form the CSP last September out of frustration with the two major parties. I joined the group effort a few days later when I heard about it. The party intends try to to mostly set standard liberal and conservative ideology aside and instead look more to evidence, reason and public opinion as influences on policy formation and choice. The group has registered over 15,000 voters so far.

Not surprisingly, local commentators have pointed out the difficulty that third parties have in gaining traction with the public. Lack of ideological unity among independents and dropouts from the two main parties is cited as one reason for why third parties don't easily gain traction. Despite the problems, there is enough discontent to lead about a quarter of California voters to register as no party preference or NPP voters.

A possible unifying belief that might help to attract ideologically disparate voters is a belief in facts, truths and sound reason as important guides to inform both reality and policy choices.

My participation

Once the party is officially registered in California, the group plans to have party members vote on a platform. I communicate with the group's Interim Chairman, Bob Campbell, a former republican US congressman and currently a Professor of Economics and a Distinguished Professor of Law at Chapman University. At present, I am writing platform and position papers for the CSP to take up once the party is officially recognized. 

To the extent I am able to do so, I will take this unusual opportunity to introduce the anti-bias mindset and moral basis of pragmatic rationalism to the CSP. In part, doing that is my attempt to provide some basis for cohesion and CSP identity. Obviously, CSP members will accept or reject anti-bias and pragmatic rationalism in whole or in part as they see fit. Nonetheless, my position and platform papers will be informed and shaped by my anti-bias mindset and the moral principles that pragmatic rationalism is based on. 

The CSP's website is here.

For California residents interested in registering with the CSP, you can do that online by going to the Secretary of State's online registration form: https://covr.sos.ca.gov/ . When you get to the choice of party option, select OTHER and then type into the Other (specify) box that lights up when OTHER is selected. After you fill out the form and submit it, you will receive a card a week or two later indicating that you are registered with the CSP. Note, this is a legal affidavit and the registration form must be filled out honestly. 

Woke Scolding, PC and Socialism – America’s Deadly Slide into Globalist Nonsense?

Militant anti-conservative and anti-Christian reaction now accompanying PC mavens’ behavior is called - “woke-scolding.” It is a way of correcting someone’s speech by declaring that certain words and phrases are now officially off limits and can no longer be used. They may not be able to tell you who the officials are because, in fact, they are simply a mob of progressive malcontents.

Examples are phrases like “illegal alien” and pronouns like ‘he’ and ‘she’. Exactly who decided that such words are now off limits is unclear. It is a consensus of the trendy leftists and progressives and it is supposed to cover everybody—progressive or not.

Performativity: Foundation of leftist thinking—“if we say it, it is now truth”

Every attempt to regulate the speech of nations throughout history has been fueled by a despotic ruler or experimentation with a totalitarian ideology, communism or socialism, a lesson now known to be lost on our generation.

Performativity is the foundation of leftist thinking, which is a way of saying—“if we say it, it is now truth.”

The idea of truth and progressivism being coupled together for any reason is torture to anyone with only a basic modicum of credulity. Progressive philosophers of language would prefer to make us prisoners of language, but most of humanity will always rebel against it, not just American conservatives.

Babies are still dying even as Ruth Bader Ginsburg is given a million dollar prize for her 26 years on the Supreme Court, much of it involved in causes that champion death to the unborn and favorable rulings for the extremely perverted.

Perhaps the black robe Ginsburg wears gives some performativity to her brand of woke-scolding, but then along comes the more cartoonish lefties like AOC. Only a few months ago, Cortez was seen in a video claiming that growing cauliflower is – wait for it – racist.

Progressive thought is wrongly labeled

We don’t think it is altogether too extreme to mention that only a generation ago Ginsburg may have been fined a million dollars and spent 26 years in jail instead of flying around the hallowed halls of SCOTUS.

If we give a seat on the Supreme Court and a seat in the congress to such celebrity woke-scolders, we have only to imagine what the rank and file leftists are claiming to be the new truth and PC rap. For a quick cross section of what the ordinary leftist socialist leaning thinker is going on about—check out this 30 minute video called “Intellectual Froglegs.”

Progressive thought is wrongly labeled, it is without doubt regressive thought that we have all been hoping would hurriedly pass away and become obsolete. It has taken on a grotesque nature because it is ideology under the curse of its own incestuous relationship with only other like-minded people. When thoughts never move into the larger world for scrutiny they become disfigured and are hardly of any use to the rest of humanity.

Free speech has been suspended on campuses and free expression is the fear of every snowflake and safe zone advocate found cringing as if they were being pursued by the ghosts of objective truth and civil discourse.

The fearful prefer to keep all the good stuff from their woke experience to themselves. But the cloister becomes a whirlpool circling the drain.

Their inbred thoughts

They dare to do exactly what the Apostle Paul said would lead them to a kind of collective ignorance the world cannot bear.

“For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.” (2Cor 10: 12)

Their inbred thoughts have dissimulated to the business of evil judging other evils and straining to decide which thoughts are the better evils.

The Apostle James summed it up with this.

“Are ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become judges of evil thoughts?” (James 2: 4)

Conservative Americans hold the constitution and the truth they gather from the Bible in the highest regard. They don’t want any of the words in the constitution to be altered or deleted, and they also know that no word of the bible will ever change.

Woke indeed!

“For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.” (Rev 22: 18-19)

Finally, it is beyond belief that modern progressives would choose to use the word “woke” in reference to themselves. According to the bible,  all who abandon the scripture and disregard the lives of the unborn, all while promoting perversion on every level, are anything but “woke.”

The scripture declares that they are not only asleep, but have been lulled into a deep unconscious level of reprobation from which they may never recover, to wit:

“In whom the god of this world hath blinded the minds of them which believe not, lest the light of the glorious gospel of Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them.” (2Cor 4: 4)

https://canadafreepress.com/article/woke-scolding-pc-and-socialism-americas-deadly-slide-into-globalist-nonsens

Queerness, Civilization and its Discontents

Forward: I'm cross posting this in a couple of places. It's bound to be a dramatically unpopular piece wherever I post it, but I'm providing it in hopes to stir thought on the subject, if not agreement.

It is impossible for a human being to operate without bias, and so I will make a good faith effort to make my biases known up front: I'm an aging queer, a bit mad, and disaffected, but hopeful in the end. I'm a lifelong leftist anarchist that recently went over the high wall and saw some things I maybe shouldn't have seen. Who knows? But there's no going back. My politics around queerness, and my understanding of queerness is inspired largely by the work of Lee Edelman ("No Future") and Baedan ("A Journal of Queer Nihilism") which we'll explore here, but please don't mistake inspiration for total agreement. My understanding of human social functioning is informed by sociobiology and complex adaptive systems theory. I also readily employ scripture, but am not religious in any meaningful sense of the word. I'm not a fan of academia for its own sake, and I didn't even go to college myself, so I'm going to try to keep this out of the ivory tower of academia Edelman tries to pull us into.

Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind,Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. 

- Paul the Apostle, on one of his characteristic rants.

Paul's decree is perhaps the root of anti-queer sentiment in the west inasmuch as Christianity formed foundational western values. Paul understood queerness would be and must be outcast from society for the society to function. Here the kingdom is not just allegory for heaven, but we'll take it to mean membership to the dominant social order in this life. He brands queerness criminal.

Edelman writes:

We might do well to consider this less as an instance of hyperbolic rant and more as a reminder of the disorientation that queer sexualities should entail: “acceptance or indifference to the homosexual movement will result in society’s destruction by allowing civil order to be redefined and by plummeting ourselves, our children and grandchildren into an age of godlessness. Indeed, the very foundation of Western Civilization is at stake.” Before the self-righteous bromides of liberal pluralism spill from our lips, before we supply once more the assurance that ours is another kind of love but a love like his nonetheless, before we piously invoke the litany of our glorious contributions to the civilizations of east and west alike, dare we pause for a moment to acknowledge that he might be right—or, more important, that he ought to be right: that queerness should and must destroy such notions of “civil order” through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity?

I'd like to focus on the very last bit, and strip away the purple prose some. He's saying, like Paul that queerness is contrary to the social order. He goes further however, in saying that we're disruptive to the social order because we break a fundamental faith in the idea of a "better future for our children" on which all politics are based.

This idea that queerness is disruptive to the social order can be found even 2000 years ago in Greece. Here Philo of Alexandria, with a similar background as Paul the Apostle makes it clear that queerness is more than simply about orientation or gender, and characterizes the disruptive and subversive nature of queerness and its impact on society in detail:

The Special Laws

I. 324-325 [referring to Deuteronomy 23:1]

But while the law stands pre-eminent in enjoining fellowship and humanity, it preserves the high position and dignity of both virtues by not allowing anyone whose state is incurable to take refuge with them, but bidding him avaunt and keep his distance. Thus, knowing that in assemblies there are not a few worthless persons who steal their way in and remain unobserved in the large numbers which surround them, it guards against this danger by precluding all the unworthy from entering the holy congregation. It begins with the men who belie their sex and are affected with effemination, who debase the currency of nature and violate it by assuming the passions and the outward form of licentious women. For it expels those whose generative organs are fractured or mutilated, who husband the flower of their youthful bloom, lest it should quickly wither, and restamp the masculine cast into a feminine form.

III. 37-42 [referring to Leviticus 18:22, 20:13]

Much graver than the above is another evil, which has ramped its way into the cities, namely pederasty. In former days the very mention of it was a great disgrace, but now it is a matter of boasting not only to the active but to the passive partners, who habituate themselves to endure the disease of effemination, let both body and soul run to waste, and leave no ember of their male sex-nature to smoulder. Mark how conspicuously they braid and adorn the hair of their heads, and how they scrub and paint their faces with cosmetics and pigments and the like, and smother themselves with fragrant unguents. For of all such embellishments, used by all who deck themselves out to wear a comely appearance, fragrance is the most seductive. In fact the transformation of the male nature to the female is practised by them as an art and does not raise a blush. These persons are rightly judged worthy of death by those who obey the law which ordains that the man-woman who debases the sterling coin of nature should perish unavenged, suffered not to live for a day or even an hour, as a disgrace to himself, his house, his native land and the whole human race. And the lover of such may be assured that he is subject to the same penalty. He pursues an unnatural pleasure and does his best to render cities desolate and uninhabited by destroying the means of procreation. Furthermore he sees no harm in becoming a tutor and instructor in the grievous vices of unmanliness and effeminacy by prolonging the bloom of the young and emasculating the flower of their prime, which should rightly be trained to strength and robustness. Finally, like a bad husbandman he lets the deep-soiled and fruitful fields lie sterile, by taking steps to keep them from bearing, while he spends his labour night and day on soil from which no growth at all can be expected. The reason is, I think, to be found in the prizes awarded in many nations to licentiousness and effeminacy. Certainly you may see these hybrids of man and woman continually strutting about through the thick of the market, heading the processions at the feasts, appointed to serve as unholy ministers of holy things, leading the mysteries and initiations and celebrating the rites of Demeter. Those of them who by way of heightening still further their youthful beauty have desired to be completely changed into women and gone on to mutilate their genital organs, are clad in purple like signal benefactors of their native lands, and march in front escorted by a bodyguard, attracting the attention of those who meet them. But if such indignation as our lawgiver felt was directed against those who do not shrink from such conduct, if they were cut off without condonation as public enemies, each of them a curse and a pollution of his country, many others would be found to take the warning. For relentless punishment of criminals already condemned acts as a considerable check on those who are eager to practise the like.

He covers trans people, gay people, recruitment, social degeneration, the allure to taboo, all of the standard fears around us queers we enjoy 2000 years later. Here he's saying that there are rituals to queerness, and that recruitment is part of the process. Something like 40% of teens that wind up in homeless shelters in the US are LGBT, where do they go? Often, someone takes them in, and it's often a queer person. Statistic aside, we can focus on the blame (parents? queers? both?), or on the ends.


Returning to the general criminality of queerness: Some of my fellow queer anarchists had this to say in Total Destroy (2009) in a piece titled "Criminal Intimacy"

The machinery of control has rendered our very existence illegal. We’ve endured the criminalization and crucifixion of our bodies, our sex, our unruly genders. Raids, witch-hunts, burnings at the stake. We’ve occupied the space of deviants, of whores, of perverts, and abominations. This culture has rendered us criminal, and of course, in turn, we’ve committed our lives to crime. In the criminalization of our pleasures, we’ve found the pleasure to be had in crime! In being outlawed for who we are, we’ve discovered that we are indeed fucking outlaws! Many blame queers for the decline of this society—we take pride in this. Some believe that we intend to shred-to-bits this civilization and its moral fabric—they couldn’t be more accurate. We’re often described as depraved, decadent and revolting—but oh, they ain’t seen nothing yet.

I've purposely illustrated extreme left and right views to illustrate the point that queer relationship with the social order is one that is antagonistic from either direction.

Edelman has his own ideas as to why it's necessary:

To figure the undoing of civil society, the death drive of the dominant order, is neither to be nor to become that drive; such a being is not the point. Rather, acceding to that figural position means recognizing and refusing the consequences of grounding reality in denial of that drive. As the death drive dissolves those congealments of identity that permit us to know and survive as ourselves, so the queer must insist on disturbing, on queering, social organization as such—on disturbing, and therefore on queering ourselves and our investment in such organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one. And so, when I argue, as I aim to do here, that the burden of queerness is to be located less in the assertion of an oppositional political identity than in opposition to politics as the governing fantasy of realizing identities, I am proposing no platform or position from which queer sexuality or any queer subject might finally and truly become itself, as if it could somehow manage thereby to achieve an essential queerness. I am suggesting instead that the efficacy of queerness, its real strategic value, lies in its resistance to a symbolic reality that only ever invests us as subjects insofar as we invest ourselves in it, clinging to its governing fictions, its persistent sublimations, as reality itself.

Let's unpack this and strip the jargon away from it. What he's saying essentially is that queerness is subversive by nature, and that queerness is most effective when it's at odds with society and our notions of civil order. He's saying furthermore that the foundations of society are little more than grand narratives imposed by existing power, a very post-structural view. The death drive is simply a persistent thread that emerges from any ordered socio-political system and undermines it, in this case occupied by queers, criminals, and the mad.

And here we have the convergence of Edelman, a radical gay queer theorist, a group of queer anarchists, the Christian Apostle Paul and the Jewish scholar Philo all on a singular point of agreement - queerness is dangerous to the social order.


Edelman makes a convincing argument that "a better future for our children" that is, reproductive futurity is the foundation for all of our politics - that ultimately they are all centered around a symbolic Child by way of whom we project ourselves vicariously into the future.

Queer people, being removed from the reproductive role are fundamentally severed from this notion. For the queer, there is No Future, hence the title for Edelman's book. We must find our own way, and Edelman suggests that way exists somewhere beyond pleasure and pain:

Queerness undoes the identities through which we experience ourselves as subjects, insisting on the Real of a jouissance that social reality and the futurism on which it relies have already foreclosed. Queerness, therefore is never a matter of being or becoming but, rather, of embodying the remainder of the real internal to the symbolic order. One name for this unnameable remainder as Lacan describes it, is jouissance, sometimes translated as “enjoyment”: a movement beyond the pleasure principle, beyond the distinctions of pleasure and pain, a violent passage beyond the bounds of identity, meaning and law. 

Here, he argues that queerness strips us of identities, and undermines futurism itself - queerness is purely negative. In an effort to simplify this he's saying in essence that queerness is about nullifying the social order, and we seek an unnameable enjoyment and fulfillment in this chaos - however impossible that may be.

Baedan elaborates on the concept of jouissance as it is used here:

We can locate this jouissance in the historic moments of queer riot: Compton’s cafeteria, Dewey’s, the White Night, Stonewall, and countless other moments where queer bodies participated in rupture—throwing bricks, setting fires, smashing windows, rejoicing in the streets. But more to the point, jouissance is located in precisely the aspects of these moments (and of others unknown to us) which elude historians, the ones which cannot be captured in a textbook or situated neatly within narratives of progress for queer people, or of rational political struggle for a better future. Jouissance is the rage which boils over in the first queen to set a fire; the hatred of an entire social order which flows through one’s veins while they set a dozen San Francisco police vehicles on fire. It is the ecstatic bliss that must have shivered its way through the spines of any blessed enough to hear the siren songs of those police cruisers wailing in flames. Jouissance is the way that the sexual encounters immediately following such riots were totally incommensurable to the mundane sex of daily life. Jouissance is the driving élan of queer sex culture, and yet it is precisely that element of queer sex which still cannot be locked up in an industry, sold as a commodity or scheduled at some mass commercialized ritual. While each element of the sex industry attempts to resolve some fundamental lack and to integrate one’s desires into a coherent subjective experience, jouissance is specifically that element of sexual desire which makes such a union impossible. It is a desire for jouissance which sends us into the night seeking to overwhelm our bodily capacity, to disintegrate the corporeal limits of ourselves, to truly flee from what and who we are. It is specifically this remainder, which defines the unbridgeable chasm between the public sex culture of New York and San Francisco in the seventies (massive squatted sex warehouses, perpetual orgies, a culture of cruising which entirely dissolved the distinction between sex and the rest of life) and the so-called cruising of the cybernetic era (Grindr, craigslist, sparsely attended and overpriced parties at failing sex clubs). This distance might also be understood as what separates the anarchy of an orgy from the democratic ideology of purist polyamory. Jouissance is the unnameable desire that one hopelessly attempts to summarize before giving one’s body to another: “I want to be negated.” Jouissance is that essence of queer criminality which cannot be reduced to any vulgar determinism. It is the joy found in the retribution of robbing some bourgeois john, the thrill of theft, the satisfaction of destruction. It is because we are addicted to the intertwining pleasure and pain which brings us again and again into the streets: seeking to riot or fight or fuck. It is specifically the pursuit of the unnameable jouissance which causes, without fail, to risk everything in sacrifice to some more grand chaos. This aufheben of the categories of pain and pleasure is also the overthrowing of our attachments and investments in political activism, stable identity, and reason. The negativity of jouissance is the same that drives us away from obligations to the economy, the family, the law, and, above all, the Future.

We also see it in Philo's passage about us.

Edelman concludes about jouissance:

This I suggest is the ethical burden to which queerness must accede in a social order intent on misrecognizing its own investment in morbidity, fetishization, and repetition: to inhabit the place of a meaninglessness associated with the sinthome; to figure an unregenerate, and unregenerating, sexuality whose singular insistence on jouissance, rejecting every constraint imposed by sentimental futurism, exposes aesthetic culture—the culture of forms and their reproduction, the culture of Imaginary lures—as always already a “culture of death” intent on abjecting the force of a death drive that shatters the tomb we call life.

Clearly, this is utterly incompatible with a functioning society. The social conservatives, as stewards of the social order, are right to confront or even fear our queerness. Because of our severance from the social order both sought and imposed, and our lack of investment and regard for it, we are relegated to the role criminal with respect to it.

Liberals themselves, still beholden to the social order and The Child it preserves try to sanitize and repackage queerness for mass consumption, creating artificial boundaries around it. Pride was borne of this - the purest expression of jouissance that liberals can accept.

Nobody can reconcile jouissance with the social order.

Furthermore, people are both repulsed and attracted by jouissance - this is taboo in its purest form, and taboo can never be neutral despite liberal attempts at normalizing it.

It can be celebrated or it can be despised.

The only alternative to this taboo of ours is to try and normalize it, but such a task is dangerous when not impossible, because to normalize jouissance completely ruptures society. The attempt at normalization of gay people, to the degree it succeeded, led to the attempt at normalization of trans people. The death drive will always create new ways to rupture the social fabric. Jouissance will not be contained. There is always another level to it.

In its totality jouissance represents the crisis of our existence in the west. Both social liberals and social conservatives attempt to respond to this crisis and do so differently, but as a result queerness finds its essence is missing from all political discourse. As Edelman writes:

For the liberal’s view of society, which seems to accord the queer a place, endorses no more than the conservative right’s the queerness of resistance to futurism and thus the queerness of the queer. While the right wing imagines the elimination of queers (or of the need to confront their existence), the left would eliminate queerness by shining the cool light of reason upon it, hoping thereby to expose it as merely a mode of sexual expression free of the all-pervasive coloring, the determining fantasy formation, by means of which it can seem to portend, and not for the right alone, the undoing of the social order and its cynosure, the Child. Queerness thus comes to mean nothing for both: for the [social conservatives], the nothingness always at war with the positivity of civil society; for the [social liberals], nothing more than a sexual practice in need of demystification. (emphasis added) 

People will generally either war with our nature or try to deny our nature, but it amounts to the same - an inability to reconcile queer jouissance.

Attempts to destroy us haven't borne fruit. Attempts to separate us by force of law from the rest of society receive massive resistance from liberals.

One potentially interesting option for us queers to escape the above conflict is to simply place ourselves outside Paul's "kingdom" - self-imposed exile from mainstream society, where we are free to push the boundaries as far as we're willing to go, and take our essential jouissance with us. Another is joint cooperative exile where we divorce society and all parties are prepared to sever ties, and possibly trade on our jouissance, our art, our sex, our fashion, our muse as service to society, a bit of a neo-pluralist approach. This could facilitate an honor/service social contract between heteronormative society and queer sub-society, whereby we serve society with our gifts, and can be respected and afforded our own place on those grounds.

One way to orchestrate this is through the foundation of an insular queer church - a positive prospect with which to root the negativity of jouissance within the larger social habitat - an oasis of sorts. We don't have the baggage of family nor the need for familial infrastructure like private grammar schools or homeschooling because we typically do not breed. This also allows for legal protections for queer people under various "religious freedom" protections in the US.

If we are to preserve queerness from liberal attempts to appropriate it, and we are to find peace with our nature we need our own space on our own terms. The larger social order cannot accept us on our own terms, we must change ourselves or separate. To integrate is to both reduce our queerness to liberal parameters, or to suppress it altogether. To integrate is destructive to the social order, and hence the family and to The Child which it represents.

In any case, we as queer people can either embrace our social niche or lose it.

Book Review: Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life

The social incentives to deceit are at present very powerful; the controls often weak. Many individuals feel caught up in practices they cannot change. It would be wishful thinking, therefore, to expect individuals to bring about major changes in the collective practices of deceit by themselves. Public and private institutions, with their enormous power to affect personal choice, must help alter the existing pressures and incentives. ..... Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.-- Sissela Bok

 

Sissela Bok

Context: The moral landscape

The book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (3rd edition, 1999), was written Sissela Bok, a leading moral philosopher who emphasizes the morality of lies and deceit. Lying is an influential philosophical work on the topic of the morality of  lies and deceit. In my opinion, this topic is a critically important and urgent topic for current public political discourse.

The dismal public track record of false and misleading statements by our president speaks for itself. As of Oct. 9, 2019, his 993rd day in office, our president had made 13,435 false or misleading claims in public. That deceit has been buttressed by conservative political leaders who support and condone the president’s immoral behavior through their silence. In view of the facts, the importance and urgency of coming to grips with the morality of lies and deceit in American politics will be obvious to most open-minded people.

Analyzing lies and deceit

First and foremost, Bok sees unjustified and inexcusable lying and deceit as immoral.[1] She focuses the book mostly on lies because they are the most clear-cut form of deceit. Bok defines lies as a communication of information that the liar believes is untrue but nonetheless conveys to intentionally deceive or mislead listeners. For the purposes of het book, she defines a lie as “an intentionally deceptive message in the form of a statement.” Obviously, lies can be broader than that.

Honest mistakes of fact or logic are not lies, they are just mistakes and thus on different, usually less immoral footing, sometimes or usually including no moral offense at all. Maybe intentional sloppiness about facts and logic can constitute some degree immorality. That raises the curious situation of a liar who makes a mistake and tells truth while believing it is false and intending to deceive. That is immoral because the speaker’s intent is where the immorality arises. Well-intended deceit can be immoral as in a white lie told to spare someone needless shame, pain, embarrassment or emotional stress. In Bok’s view, even well-intended white lies can be immoral when all factors are taken into account.

Bok analyzes lies as starting from a negative or immoral position that sometimes can be excused or justified. The problem with excuses and justifications is bias. The speaker may believe circumstances excuse or justifies his lies, but when examined critically by other people, especially those who have been lied to, the liar's excuses and justifications tend to be much less persuasive than they are to the liar.

A problem that is usually present is complexity. People are complex and so is divining their intent. Bok acknowledges the problem of moral theory in theory compared to making moral judgments in real world scenarios. Influences including psychological, political, social and religious beliefs and biases make analyzing many or most lies difficult and at least somewhat uncertain. The complexity of reality problem has been reduced to some extent by the rise of fact-checking and online access to far more information than was the case when Bok analyzed the situation in 1999.

Harms that lies can cause

Bok describes the kinds of harm that lies can cause to the liars themselves and to people and societies who are deceived:

• Lies lead to loss of trust in fellow citizens, government and social institutions
• Lying is dehumanizing by treating people means to achieve the liar's purpose instead of a valuable end in themselves; in turn dehumanization tends to foment social discord and distrust 
• Lies lead people to base their decisions on false information or flawed thinking, which deprives them of the freedom and power to decide for themselves based on facts and sound logic
• Lies are immoral, an argument that dates back thousands of years, and immorality can beget more immorality leading to loss of social trust and cohesion; lying leads some or most liars to lie more frequently and/or easily
• Reliance on lies can lead to social, physical or economic harm or loss
• The liar exposes himself to loss of trust from others and sometimes damage to self-esteem, which can lead to more bad behavior
• Resort to lies tends to obscure possibilities where lying is not necessary and the same information transfer can be attained without lying
• People who learn they have been lied to may doubt their own ability to assess truth and make their own decisions, which damages their ability to make free and informed choices; sometimes they seek revenge
• When the general level of truthfulness falls, that can encourage or even incentivize some people to lie; if lying becomes a generally accepted practice, trust in others and/or the institutions of society weakens and cohesion decreases, which in extreme cases can lead to actual social collapse

The Principle of Veracity

Bok arrives at a way to summarize the analysis. Her Principle of Veracity states that there is a strong initial presumption that lying is immoral. Lying is wrong but not when it is at least honestly excused and preferably justified. In asserting this moral principle, Bok rejects pure absolutism, which holds that all lies in all circumstances are immoral and thus immoral and unacceptable.

She also rejects utilitarianism, which considers only the consequences of the lie regardless of extenuating circumstances. For utilitarians, a lie that confers more perceived benefit than harm is acceptable. Lies that harm no one are acceptable. The problem is that some harms and benefits cannot be accurately assessed. For example, lies that lead to social distrust and reduced social cohesion. Also, lies can harm the liar as noted above. Bok argues “the more complex the acts, the more difficult it becomes to produce convincing comparisons of their consequences.” She points out that when multiple people are involved, assessing benefit and harm are “well-nigh impossible.”

Some questions

If lies can be considered immoral, can they ever rise to the level of evil? Bok does not appear to have addressed immorality compared to evil. She was focused on morality. If one defines immoral as something not consistent with rectitude, purity, or goodness and evil as something intending malevolence or harm, can a lie rise to the level of evil? If so, and in the context of arguing for civilized evidence- and reason-based politics, is it always counterproductive to call lies and deceit in politics evil or even immoral? Should the labels to confined to just calling lies lies and deceit deceit in the name of comity and keeping minds open?


Footnote:
1. Excuse - the liar speaks to himself: an attempt to extenuate or even eliminate moral blame by arguing to himself that (i) the lie was a joke or mere exaggeration, not a real lie, (ii) the liar isn't responsible and others are to blame for the need to lie, (iii) the liar did not intend to mislead, e.g., because he was high on drugs, (iv) circumstances, e.g., an emergency, made the lie necessary to avoid harm or unfairness to others or to confer a benefit on others

Justification - the liar speaks to others: an attempt to extenuate or even eliminate moral blame by arguing to at least some others to seek other opinions about the moral culpability of a lie; excuses can be presented to others and they can cast a moral judgement; this attempts to reduce the role of bias and self-deceit about the morality of lying and deceit; sometimes the others are seen as “reasonable people” and reciprocity (a form of the Golden Rule) applies: Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you

The test of publicity: which lies, if any, would survive the appeal for justification to reasonable persons

Touring the Dark Side(TM)

So, for several reasons I've been posting over at a site for British reactionaries called Going Postal:

• I wanted to see if I could place behavior over politics.
• I wanted to see if we could find any common agreement on major topics.
• I wanted to see if it would change me at all, influencing my behavior or my politics.

My experiences with Going Postal are that they have been welcoming, and we've found ourselves in agreement over several major points: Honoring Brexit, our distaste for the corporate ruling class, our horror at the state of the political landscape in general, our frustration at the lies of politicians, and our concern for what happens next. I've even updated some of my views, like I'm far more empathetic for the plight of UK citizens in the face of their immigration crisis - it's ugly over there right now.

The downside is the virulent racism is hard to take. That's really the main thing that makes the site cringeworthy to me, but there's no changing some people. So my best option is to look to myself for solutions, and one solution is to not respond to it, or to ask pointed questions about it. I alternate.

One surprising thing to me, is while it took months, I've found myself more empathetic of them in general. I guess it's easier to understand people and harder to hate people who treat you like a neighbor and fellow human being, and it's hard to hate people you insist on humanizing. That's important.

The other major surprise I had was just how welcoming they were. They knew I was leftist right away (for reasons) and it didn't matter. They were friendly. This is so important!

I've even come to appreciate some of their politically incorrect humor, like insisting that putting pineapple on pizza is why I'm gay.

I'm not the only one that was influenced by this experiment. The folks at that site, in large part have been more welcoming of trans people I think, because of me. Furthermore, several have acknowledged that the immigration problems in the US are far different than those of the UK, per our conversations.

My conclusions are thus, and should be obvious to anyone that's familiar with Christ's teachings: First, love your neighbor. Everything else follows from there. It's more important than politics. It's more important than opinions. It's maybe the most important thing you can do in terms of your fellow human beings. It's also difficult at first, but gets easier once you're past that initial meet, because it opens your eyes to the humanity of the person sitting across the table.

Ideology is no substitute for any of this. Ideology is barely secondary. Without loving your neighbor, you won't change your neighbor. Arguments only get you so far. First, find each other's essential humanity. Go from there.