Month: June 2013

Hemant Mehta, who posts the chart above, turns to an excerpt from sociologist Ryan T. Cragun’s new book, What You Don’t Know about Religion (but Should) to support his case that atheists die “better” than the religious:

A growing body of evidence seems to support the idea that the nonreligious have an easier time coping with death than do the religious, at least with their own mortality. Religious people appear to be more afraid of death than are nonreligious people. Nonreligious people are less likely to use aggressive means to extend their lives and exhibit less anxiety about dying than do religious people. That seems remarkably counterintuitive since the nonreligious are much less likely to believe in an afterlife, which is supposed to help people cope with death. But factor in that religious people are contemplating their eternal fate and it begins to make more sense. Even if they have done everything their religion says they are supposed to do, there is always a bit of uncertainty about where they might end up. As a result, religious people appear to have a greater fear of dying than do nonreligious people.

In a related video post, Mehta answers questions about what atheists believe happens when the fateful day comes:

Related Dish coverage of atheist funerals here.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that it will take more than science and atheism to stave off fundamentalism:

In one respect the new atheists are right. The threat to western freedom in the 21st century is not from fascism or communism but from a religious fundamentalism combining hatred of the other, the pursuit of power and contempt for human rights. But the idea that this can be defeated by individualism and relativism is naive almost beyond belief. Humanity has been here before. The precursors of today’s scientific atheists were Epicurus in third-century BCE Greece and Lucretius in first-century Rome. These were two great civilisations on the brink of decline. Having lost their faith, they were no match for what Bertrand Russell calls ‘nations less civilised than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion’. The barbarians win. They always do.

The new barbarians are the fundamentalists who seek to impose a single truth on a plural world. Though many of them claim to be religious, they are actually devotees of the will to power. Defeating them will take the strongest possible defence of freedom, and strong societies are always moral societies. That does not mean that they need be religious. It is just that, in the words of historian Will Durant, ‘There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.’

In response, Jerry Coyne calls Sacks an “ignorant fool”:

Here is a partial list of countries that have a very high percentage of nonbelievers. This is all it takes to rebut Sack’s claim that if one loses Judeo-Christian sanctity of life (note that he doesn’t mention Islam) we will descend into evil, barbarism, and perfidy:

• Sweden
• Denmark
• Norway
• Japan
• Finland
• France
• Germany
• South Korea

The last time I looked, these countries were remarkably sane, well-behaved, and their inhabitants generally moral.

In an interview with Tracy Clark-Flory, former Playgirl editor Jessanne Collins describes where the magazine fell short:

Did you ever witness a Playgirl shoot that you found legitimately sexy?

Honestly, no. I mean, maybe this is another sign that I was very much a fish out of water, but I just did not at all get the aesthetic. I don’t buy the myth that women are “not visual” people whatsoever. I check out dudes. I know we all have specific aesthetic triggers. And yet in all those pages upon pages of photos — none of them did it for me. There was an almost clinical approach to photography — almost as if these bodies were specimens under a microscope, every muscle all waxed and on display — and I think that’s the major thing. It’s this certain type of porn trope that doesn’t translate well for a real female audience.

Which is why the majority of its readership was male, of course:

One can’t help but wonder why it took Playgirl so long to embrace their male demographic, which accounts for 60% of the title’s readership and 65% of online subscribers [in early 2008, shortly before the print magazine’s collapse].

Clark-Flory also asked Collins, “What would it take to publish a successful porn magazine for women?”:

Again, I think it’s very much a myth that women don’t like to look at hot visual content. I think the hard part is that there’s literally no formula for what that is. There’s something about expectedness, in fact, that just kills intrigue immediately. And this is a challenge because porn’s a pretty formulaic thing, most of it, especially what’s produced in a corporate capacity. So a porn magazine for women would have to be out of bounds — it would take a real eye for the particular chemistry that goes into making content that is suggestive and explicit, even, without being cheesy — it takes nuance, subtlety, a kind of storytelling. I think women are visual, but I also think perhaps they’re a different kind of visual than men are, maybe, in that a little can go a long way — there’s something hotter in an insinuation, a possibility, a tease than there is about a straightforward close-up of a giant penis. For many women, anyway. This is why the romance genre is so wildly successful where porn for women, in today’s porn terms, can be a hard sell. Also, smart words! Language can do a lot to turn women on, but it has to be the right language.

Reviewing Tao Lin’s new novel Taipei, Audrea Lim surveys a history of drug use in literature:

The scholar Marcus Boon’s The Road to Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (2002) usefully taxonomizes the different literary and philosophical tendencies associated with different classes of drugs. Narcotics are a transcendental experience, providing access to the sublime. (Antonin Artaud compared them to literature and theater). Amphetamines transform authors into tireless writing machines. (Kerouac cranked out On The Road in two or three weeks on Benzedrine). Cannabis causes the mind to meander, highlighting unnoticed details and revealing connections between seemingly unrelated things, a state that has obvious affinities with the mindset of the flâneur who wanders aimlessly through Paris’ Arcades. (It is telling that the list of books Walter Benjamin regretted never writing included one on hashish.) … Drugs can help us to adapt, to be more productive, and even to excel within our circumstances, to make our lives more bearable, and in some cases, to radically reconfigure our subjectivity, if not the world.

In Taipei, drug use is less about changing the world than it is about adjusting to it.

[The protagonist] Paul, nervous and shy by nature, tries various combinations of drugs to help him cope with ordinary life, but they don’t actually make him any more comfortable. He swallows potent chemical cocktails at parties, but they seem to produce the opposite of the intended effect: “after four more parties, two of which he similarly slept on sofas after walking mutely through rooms without looking at anyone, Paul began attending less social gatherings and ingesting more drugs.” The scene he is part of (twentysomething middle-class white kids who make mostly meaningless art) is hedonistic, yet while he participates, he seems not to derive any pleasure from it. If altered states were once, as the old Aldous Huxley chestnut has it, “doors of perception,” then sometime between Huxley’s era and the one depicted in Taipei, those doors seem to have closed.

(Video: William S. Burroughs talking about his addiction to heroin in 1977)