I have done a few things the average college student has not done yet, but is likely to do in the future. One of these things is marry and divorce.

That’s right, the average college student is likely to divorce. The likelihood of divorce, in the United States at least, seems to hover around 50%. This makes every marriage somewhat like a coin toss.

According to evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss there are universal gender differences between what seems to attract men to women, and women to men. Men tend to prefer women who are youthful looking, and place emphasis on appearance. Women, in contrast, will place the emphasis on a man’s resources or potential for resources. These controversial gender differences have been identified by Buss and his collaborators in countless cultures.

Furthermore, the data imply that men are far more sexually demanding than women. To clarify this means that men want sex more often and with more partners.

This seems to imply that women and men are driven towards each other for completely different reasons individually, and for no other reason universally other than to reproduce.

If these impulses are programmed into us by evolution, and with built-in conflicts of interests, why get married?

My own philosophical musings lead me to ponder that men and women are both humans only transiently on this mortal coil with no greater purpose to be had yet with tremendous drive to reproduce given to us by nature.

If this is true why get married?

An answer often given is “because we are in love.”

Falling in love is advertised throughout western culture, but what is it to fall in love?

I have heard “falling in love” described as though it where some transcendental force which possesses two people and pulls on them as if they had puppet strings to do heroic things.

What hogwash!

The whole concept of romantic love has also been largely shaped in the west by Christianity. Different sects have different approaches, but in my own Charismatic background we were all encouraged to “get a word from God” in a delusional vision quest to find our wives. The doctrine was that everybody’s amorous consort had been predestined by God and was a perfect fit.

This seems to have some parallel with the belief of the ancient Greeks who thought that humans had once existed as a pair per organism, and we were all searching for that ancient part of ourself in each other.

These ideas may be beautiful, but they seem to be little more than stories. The only destiny we have is the mindless determinism of nature, and that which we make for ourselves.

Neurochemically amorous love seems to consist of oxytocin for bonding, dopamine for the high feeling of having the other person around, and testosterone (for both males and females) gives us our sexual desire for one another.

At first glance the findings of neuroscience and evolutionary psychology may seem bleak compared to the romantic notions of the Hellenists and Charismatic Christians. Yet, if one accepts that our dilemma is that we are here without greater meaning and that our feelings are born from the chaos of nature for no other reason than reproduction, then one can take a more realistic approach to amorous love.

My own conclusions are that to exaggerate the power and importance of romantic love is nothing less than what Paul Kurtz called “the transcendental temptation.” Far better is it to make one’s own meaning based on what works, what doesn’t, and one’s own philosophical inquiry.

I enjoyed marriage, and can see how if it could be made to last it would be a worthy endeavour.

I also hold the rather traditional view that the best thing for marriage is amorous love.

Where I break with popular thought is my definition of amorous love. I believe that amorous love is two things in combination, each one able to exist without the other. The first is friendship, real friendship, Aristotelian friendship where you consider the other person’s interests more highly than your own. The second is sexual attraction.

And that’s it: friendship and fracking

There is no concept associated with amorous love that I can not find to be a worthy trait of a good and strong friendship, save sexual yearnings and indulgence.

Fracking stands on its own two feet just fine, as many who have no feelings of friendship for each other have found it in their hearts to assist their fellow humans in the eternal quest for orgasm.

However, I am not saying that one cannot frack one’s friends. In contrast, what I am saying is that a good marriage is when you frack the same friend for a lifetime.

So say we all.

It started when my girlfriend’s mother gave me a copy of Dreams from my Father, Obama’s bestselling 1996 biography. Reading it got me very excited about Obama’s candidacy, and once it became clear that it was going to be a contest between Obama and McCain I enthusiastically threw my support behind Obama. A McCain presidency promises a fresh social conservative in the Supreme Court following Justice Stevens’ imminent departure, something that, as a freethought activist, I felt I had to oppose. Meanwhile, Obama has been explicit in several speeches about his staunch support of church-state separation. To me, the choice was obvious.

Then my wake-up call came, in the form of Obama promising to promote and enhance faith-based initiatives across the country. I was shaken; was there any candidate who could help us progress as a society, who would not actively promote conformity to mainstream religious modes?

The answer is simply no. This election is noteworthy, among many other things, for the fact that the Evangelical Christian bloc is up for grabs for the first time in recent memory. They carried Bush II to victory in the 2000 and 2004 elections, swinging states like Ohio into the Red and helping him capture the White House. However, the evangelicals are not as excited about McCain as they were Bush II, and both camps know that they have to mobilize to target this very motivated group of voters. The first real appearance of the two candidates together was the recent Saddleback Church forum, hosted by celebrity evangelist pastor Rick Warren. Before they debated on real issues, they instead got on-stage in front of the nation and tried to out-Christian each other, jumping through the Judeo-Christian hoops to prove that they are Christian leaders who will lead a Christian nation with Christian values towards a Christian world.

As an non-believer and a secular freethought activist, this sickens me. Many who decry the role of religion in Middle Eastern politics passionately advocate a Christian stranglehold on our own government, the worst of which we have seen since Bush II came into office. Christianity disproportionately dominates our government, unreflective of the true nature of the American religious demographic: anywhere from 4%-14% of Americans(depending on who you ask) consider themselves to be non-believers, not including many who keep their mouths shut about their disbelief. Despite this fact, one has to ask: where are the non-religious politicians? Well, here’s one, and he’s not the first; California Gov. Culbert Olson, a Democrat who served from 1939 to 1943, declared his atheism as well. But these men “came out” close to or after the end of their political careers, when they had little left to lose by such an admission. It would seem as though the non-believer is among the last of the political outcasts; the Democratic Party has a black man running for president with a Catholic as his running mate, and it came narrowly close to nominating a woman. A Jewish man was a Vice Presidential candidate in the 2000 election. The Democratic party openly supports civil unions for homosexuals. Yet, for all of its talk, the “party of inclusiveness” shuns those whose worldview tends toward the skeptical.

Given the current socio-political landscape, this makes bitter sense. To formally recognize non-believers as a political entity would be instant suicide for any political party. The best that we can hope to do is to vote for someone who would hurt our cause less, and in this case, the choice is clearly Obama. However, it is a regrettable choice, one that hurts more and more with each election cycle as we grow as a subset of the population while facing the same political disenfranchisement year after year. Perhaps someday the non-believers will know the joy of having a real say in politics, like women, minorities and soon homosexuals. Until then, we’ll fight the good fight until the world considers our voice a legitimate one.

]]> http://factonista.org/2008/08/29/political-untouchables/feed/ 8 http://factonista.org/2008/08/28/secularism-on-the-colbert-report/ http://factonista.org/2008/08/28/secularism-on-the-colbert-report/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:06:02 +0000 Roy Natian http://theedger.org/?p=863 This just in:

Lori Lipman Brown, the Secular Coalition for America’s director and lobbyist in Washington D.C., will be featured on The Colbert Report segment “Better Know a Lobby” most likely today, Thursday, August 28 on Friday, August 29.

From the Secular Coalition for America’s site:

Secular Coalition for America director Lori Lipman Brown is being featured on The Colbert Report’s “Better Know A Lobby.” The two-hour taped interview with Stephen Colbert in his New York City studio will be condensed to a six-minute, or less, segment. We hope the final product will be humorous and possibly even informative. The Comedy Central show, which airs at 11:30pm (10:30 central time), is expected to be broadcast on Thursday (8/28).

Too bad it will be only 6 minutes long. However, this looks like it will be good exposure. Tune in and watch!

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