When you think of ‘purity’, do you think of ‘not having sex’? There’s a conscious effort afoot to play up just that aspect of the word.

Here’s a recent example: a ‘purity ball‘. It’s like a regular dance, but devoted to purity. Fathers take daughters, and there’s absolutely no sex allowed. (Thank goodness.) Link courtesy of the abstinence-only folks at Abstinence Clearinghouse and Alpha Center. Isn’t that in that one state where they banned all abortions?

Here’s the blurb, sorry there’s no permalink:

Fathers:
Would you like to show your daughter just how much you love her, but don’t quite know how? We are offering the perfect opportunity for you to do this at the Father-Daughter Purity Ball. This is your chance to lavish your princess with your high regard for her and her future. Does your daughter know you as her protector? You can demonstrate your concern to promote her physical, emotional, and spiritual security and need for protection. Show her at the Father-Daughter Purity Ball.

Daughters:
Have you ever wanted an opportunity to grow closer to your daddy? The Father-Daughter Purity Ball is the stellar event for you to be honored as his beautiful princess. By the end of the afternoon you will know without a doubt that your daddy really loves you. Plus, how many opportunities do you have to see your dad try ballroom dancing? Seeing is believing!

Creep factor: high.

I deplore the Victorianisation of words. Take morality. To me, morality involves doing the right thing by people, trying to be honest, and so on. Being a moral person is a worthy goal. But now try out the word in this sentence: “We need to make sure that young people stay moral.” You thought sex, didn’t you? For lots of people, especially the religious kind, the sexual aspect of morality has become the most salient.

The same thing has happened to virtue. It’s a wonderful word that comes from the Latin virtus, or ‘man’. Virtue was the set of qualities that made a man (or woman — sexists!), including valor and moral perfection. But now? It’s about the sex.

Why are the sexual aspects of words so salient for them? They’re simultaneously drawn to sex, and horrified by it.

And now the New Victorians want ‘pure’. Haven’t they had enough word mangling yet?

One more thing: the over-reliance on the word ‘princess’ in the blurb above is raising all kinds of Lakoffian framing flags for me. If I know one thing about Christians, they feel constantly afraid and threatened by ‘the world’ outside. These people are suckers for a fortress frame. Imagine: you’re in a big safe castle with an alligator-stocked moat around it. You live in a (repressively) feudal society where everyone knows their place. All the bad is outside. You’re a king, you’re safe, and you’re in control. And your daughter is… what else? a princess.

They do a pretty good job of hiding it, but sometimes the fortress mentality leaks out.

It’s Easter Sunday, and churches are ringing with messages of hope and rebirth — and how horrible it must be to be an atheist.

What meaning would life have without the reality of immortality? Otherwise life would become only a dismal journey of ‘getting and spending,’ only to end in utter and hopeless oblivion.

Hey, don’t knock getting and spending — it’s fun, and besides, the government might target you as some kind of subversive. And what kind of argument is that, anyway? Shorter version: “If we just died, that’d be too sad. So that can’t be true!”

Lots of Christians have written about how hopeless atheists must feel. It goes way back to Paul. Muslims even get into it from time to time — at last, something everyone can agree on.

But is life without belief in a Supernatural Being really that hopeless? This is my first Easter as a born-again atheist, and I’d like to say that while unbelief comes with some responsibilities (like life itself), you get a lot in return.

You are free of sin.
Sin is transgression against the laws of God. Subtract God, and the idea of sin becomes meaningless.

In its place is something far more difficult: ethics. Even if there’s no such thing as sin, you can still behave crappily towards other people. The problem is that no one will forgive you if you pray. If you choose to live ethically, you have to try and be aware of the effects of your actions and try and minimise harm to other people.

In return, you get to choose your actions based on how it will affect you and other people, without worrying about offending a Supreme Being whose commandments change depending on who you’re talking to. You are free of sin, and always have been.

You are free of false beliefs.
Well, at least some. Watch it, though — even when you think you don’t have any, you really do. Unexamined assumptions need to be ferreted out and checked against reality, as best as we can perceive it. This seems a bit wobbly — what good is your belief system if you can’t be certain? But the pursuit of knowledge requires a willingness to relinquish certainty and accept wisdom, including the wisdom of knowing that we may be wrong.

Giving up superstition allows you to use humanity’s most successful invention: science. To commit to a scientific approach is to commit to truthfulness, to discover and overcome your own personal biases, to be honest in reporting your data, and to be appropriately cautious about the conclusions you draw.

In return, you can be reasonably confident that your beliefs are true and well-supported, as least until more data comes along. Just think — people who believe in unprovable superstitions can never have that assurance. It drives them nuts. Sometimes they even kill each other over the comparative value of their delusions. You can be free of this.

Your mind and your body are your own.
No god is trying to put thoughts into your head. No devil is on your shoulder whispering words of sweet temptation. No mysterious promptings to puzzle over. When a thought comes into your mind, it comes from your mind, and you can choose what to do with it.

When you close the door of your room, you are blessedly alone. No angels, ghosts, or unseen spirits to pry into your boudoir.

It can be lonely without an imaginary entourage. Existential loneliness is something we all have to deal with. But in return, you get privacy. You also get a sense of personal ownership. No one has paid for you, so no one properly owns you but yourself. Your body, your mind, and your thoughts are yours.

After death, what?
There are lots of theories about what happens after death, but none of them are verifiable. From where we’re standing, it looks a lot like nothing happens, so that’s our starting point.

I don’t like the idea of not existing. I try to imagine what it’s like not to exist — like sleeping forever? — and I can’t do it. I look at people in the city, and I see my fellow travelers to the grave. I tuck my boys into bed at night, and I realise that they too will die, and I can’t stop it. And someday we will all pass out of living human memory.

And yet, though we may not exist after death, our influence may be felt. My children contain some of my genetic code, which will mix with that of all humanity. Perhaps someday some of my work will be useful to someone, and my words and ideas will linger after I’m gone.

This is the inspiring part of life, for me. For one brief instant, I was a part of human experience. And I think that’s beautiful.

You don’t have to go to Margaret River to get chocolate from the Margaret River Chocolate Company. There’s a factory in Perth that you can tour. By ‘tour’, I mean there’s a window that you can paste yourself to while you watch the chocolate being stirred around and around in the machine like some hypnotic wheel of lusciousness. They also have big bowls of chocolate chips to sample, a privilege we abused egregiously. So I bought some in penance.

The biggest disappointment was that the dirt out in the carpark was actually just ordinary dirt, and the flowers weren’t edible. Everything else was great.

Just got back from performing Mozart’s Requiem at St. Joseph’s in Subiaco with Collegium Musicum. It went really well.

Other times I’ve done the Requiem, there have been a hundred singers. This time — only twelve of us, three a part. It makes for a different sort of Requiem, more intimate. You have to be very confident on your part, and very precise; otherwise everyone notices every mistake.

Actually, the part I enjoyed the most was during rehearsal. It was during the ‘Benedictus’. The four soloists happened to be positioned all around me. I could hear each of them in perfect quadraphonic sound, and an orchestra on my left. Honestly, you couldn’t buy a seat to hear it the way I did.

We also did Bach’s cantata ‘Christ lag in Todesbanden‘. It’s BWV 4, so you can tell it’s one of his early ones. Not as singer-friendly as his later works. Very tricky runs, but lots of fun to do.

I love singing with a really good choir. I feel sort of connected with Mozart and Bach, and to all the people who have performed their works throughout history. The audience is in there enjoying it too. People like to hear a bit of history, especially when it sounds as great as this. And doesn’t everything sound better when you’re in the middle of it?

Is there a disease that affects your ability to realise that you seem ridiculous to other people? If so, we’d better isolate Bill O’Reilly for treatment, because he’s all over it.

Make no mistake, the War on Christmas was a resounding success. Presents and carols have been fully repressed in all major cities, and even the name has been subsumed into secular non-denominational ‘holiday’ greetings. Well and good.

But I personally have no desire to remove Easter from the calendar. And to understand why, perhaps we could reflect for a moment on the true meaning of Easter.

The name comes from Eostre, a pagan goddess among the Anglo-Saxons. The Venerable Bede wrote:

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated “Paschal month”, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month. Now they designate that Paschal season by her name, calling the joys of the new rite by the time-honoured name of the old observance.

And Jacob Grimm noted some aspects of Eostre worship that carried over into Christian Easter observance, notably the eggs and the bunny.

So here’s my reasoning: While I’m not into imaginary deities, we do have a shortage of pagan goddesses these days. If we have to have any at all, then let’s give the females equal time. Besides, any holiday that can sucessfully merge fertility with chocolate has to be worth something.

Remember, Eostre is the reason for the season!

Tiger Woods did, and Britons are outraged. And Americans are confused and outraged, even the PC kind.

Growing up in the USA, my friends and I always said, “Don’t have a spaz!” Never connected it to a disabled person — it was a ‘nerd’ word, like ‘dork’. Then I got to Australia and found that it was used in all seriousness to describe people who suffer from uncontrollable muscular spasms. I even seem to remember a ‘Spastic Society’ in Australia. I was horrified — I’d been using the word ‘spaz’ without knowing what I’d been referring to, and also because… shouldn’t they call them something else?

So now I’m watching the Tiger flap unfold. British folks are (incorrectly) assuming that Americans are mocking the disabled, and Americans are incensed to find themselves attacked. Such is the danger of semantic shift in cross-cultural communication.

Linguistics offers no answer to what people ‘should’ do. It’s just going to have to sort itself out. But from an interpersonal standpoint, I am dismayed by the ferocity of the reaction of many Americans (see here for a typical sample).

Do these people react that way to their partners or their children when there’s a conflict? And is that likely to lead to a solution?

One measure of a person’s humanity shows in how they react when confronted by someone who feels wronged by them. Do they a) listen and try to understand the problem? or b) act annoyed and say there isn’t really a problem, and you’re just being stupid?

Yeah, call me a PC idiot for trying to understand other people’s gripes. I know it takes more time, but I’ve actually learned things that way. The opposite approach looks like supreme discourtesy. A real lack of care. Far worse than an accidental epithet.

I saw this ordered list of the most offensive words for British English speakers.

I asked the ABC, Australia’s government TV station, if they’d done any research on which were the worst swear words in Australia. This prim message came to the inbox this morning.

The ABC has not conducted research about the words Australians find offensive. The ABC’s programs are classified in accordance with Office and Film Literature Classification guidelines, http://www.oflc.gov.au/special.html. Please be assured your suggestion has been noted. Thank you for taking the time to write.

What a shame. If only someone had taken the time to find out, we wouldn’t have had fiascos like this.

I can think of a few more words that weren’t on the BBC list. If you get an ARC grant to do this research, you can hire me as a consultant, and I’ll swear at you for a while. Anything for science.

Let’s take a look, shall we, at the groups that have been demonised in recent years by conservatives.

Arabs? Check. (And Australia is not to be outdone.)

Liberals? Check.

Blacks? How could you not? Check. And check.

Gays? Check, and then some.

Women? Well, not certain women. But single moms, check. Moms on welfare, check. In fact, it seems that every mother but their own is fair game.

The Judiciary? Check.

The media? Check. (See also ‘Liberals’.)

Liberals? Check again.

Environmentalists? Check.

Latinos? Cheque. Cheque.

Every other country in the world? Check, and double-check.

What can we say for a group of people that habitually turns ordinary people into targets for their unquenchable hostility? I’m no psychologist, but I’d say that it just isn’t healthy to be walking around with that much free-floating rage, especially in a country where guns are readily available. But the right-wing machine needs fresh meat every once in a while to keep its strength up, and if you haven’t been It lately, you’re probably next.

A joke I remember as a kid went like this:

How do you deal with a really dumb bully?
Put him in a room and let him beat himself up.

I just hope that once they’ve been through the list a few times, they’ll turn on each other. Very likely it’ll start with a patriotism contest that gets out of control.

Latinos are standing up to the ugliness of what passes for America’s immigration debate.

After seeing about a hundred different instances of right-wing racist freaks trying to find an enemy in order to galvanise their base, you get pretty good at spotting it, and I’m spotting it now.

In our current economic system, if you’re not growing as fast as everyone else, you’re shrinking. So sellers have to do whatever they can to grow — grow their markets, grow their profits. If they have to sell toys and TV shows to ever-younger markets, they’ll do it. If they have to get us to fight each other for ever-shrinking paychecks, then that’s what the market demands.

And so when people ask, “Who’s going to do the jobs no one else wants to do?”, we now have the answer from Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA): “I say let the prisoners pick the fruits.”

Well, of course. Money for nothing. And jobs are subtracted from the market. Tom Tomorrow called this one ten years ago.

You get to feed the racist beast, and screw the workers at the same time. Ain’t it grand being a Republican?

Outrageous things are happening right now. And I’m here working on a Java project. So posting’s light, whether Iran gets bombed or not. But here are things that are on my mind now:

• Bush pulls a 36% on the Fox poll. It’s not the most biased poll there is (that would be Gallop), but still. Ouch. Hand him an anvil, will you?
• Nuking Iran is “completely nuts”, says UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. No, it’s MAD, but not NUTS. Folks, this is another reason why you don’t want a religious believer in a leadership position. An atheist assumes that no one’s going to pull our fat out of the fryer. An apocalyptic Christian thinks it’ll make Jesus come sooner.
• Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital near UWA uses Reiki on cancer patients despite no evidence for its effectiveness. Do they not care if the patients are actually helped or not? This gets me cross.
• Linguists might think this is funny: A Gricean look at linguistics lectures. The rest of you may need to read this first.

Have fun while shopping!