Vulnerable Agnostics

Short people got no reason to live!

Vulnerable Agnostics

Agnostics like myself can thoroughly enjoy horsing around with others who share similar tastes in potty humor and playing with weird concepts like instant karma. What's not to love? With all of its mind bending puzzles, enduring charms, and deep philosophical do-do toddler potty humor and the comedy of instant karma embrace so much of what it means to be human and can be surprisingly subtle. Having kids of your own is no guaranty anyone will ever enjoy potty humor or instant karma, but many just never understand the attraction until they have kids of their own and have personally wiped a few thousand stinky butts. I remember once thinking, while changing my daughter's diaper, that I really couldn't care less how many diapers I'd changed. Some things are simply priceless, especially for more ignorant agnostics like myself, and a personal sense of humor is something any of us can easily obtain for free. In my opinion, those who look down on potty humor, instant karma, and agnostics need to spend more time learning to appreciate the company of our most vulnerable agnostics.

Within a day's drive of where I live you can still find the old fashioned gentile rural southern culture of North Carolina famous for their gracious, charming, and endearing hospitality. These are home grown organic results that require generations of uncompromising cultivation from an early age, but produce adults who can be more charming than many toddlers and the fact they know it and find it amusing just makes them all the more charming. Small town folk who don't abide a lot of bullshit from their children other than for cracking jokes and their gentle-but-firm approach to bullshit, humor, and child-rearing in general elaborately reinforces the idea that bullshit is only good for good-natured fooling around and never to be used for lying or hurting people. Child-rearing that is never guess-work, angst filled, or riddled with confusion, but based upon well established time honored Southern traditions.

The Japanese are even more famous for their extensive child-rearing practices including teaching their children such specific things as how exciting it can be to return a wallet someone drops. You can literally throw your wallet down on the crowded streets of Tokyo and people will eagerly rush to the be first fool to return it to you and refuse to accept any kind of reward. Regardless of how unattractive, socially unrefined, or unpopular the rest of us might be, we can all benefit from cultivating our own individual and collective sense of humor even if we were raised in the most competitive, abusive, hostile, and violent of households and cultures.

Researchers in Africa were surprised, to say the least, when a troop of baboons they had been studying for forty years became total pacifists overnight. The baboons made it abundantly clear to any outsiders attempting to join their troop that aggressive bullshit was now frowned upon and taboo among them. Normally, these animals are among the most infamously vicious beasts on earth, documented as going on long random killing sprees or treks, which can last for days, where they kill every animal and person they come across for a hundred miles. What happened in the case of this particular troop was that all the more aggressive males contracted tuberculous in a garbage dump and died. Their troop numbers being decimated meant the survivors had become an easy target for neighboring baboon troops and, by becoming pacifists, they may have given themselves the breathing room they required to strengthen their numbers and heal any wounds. Evidently, even the resentment of pecking orders can serve a useful purpose in helping to rapidly normalize everyone's behavior to any dramatic changes in their fortunes, while a gentle sense of humor in such situations can prove invaluable.

In Florida a rural police department grew so disgusted with the rampant child abuse in their county, that they decided to try using a show of force by first sending police officers around to investigate reports of child abuse, instead of the usual social workers. Within weeks they were inundated with so many calls they had to double the police department personel and quadruple the number of social workers over the next couple of years. It was an extremely poor county that didn't know the meaning of political activism, nevertheless, when the inhabitants saw the first sign something serious might finally be done to address the problem, they reached out as a community to help the most vulnerable among them. Organizing their efforts through the grape vine and getting the message out as quickly and peacefully but, firmly, as possible insisting that abusing children was no longer socially acceptable and would neither be tolerated nor ignored any longer.

Thirty-two countries have now outlawed hitting or striking a child and, in the most famous case of Sweden, they did so by public referendum without any politicians getting involved whatsoever other than to offer whatever resources and support they believed the public might need or desire. Despite the strict new law children are still rarely taken away from their parents and the entire incident is widely viewed as simply the public officially demanding social reform and a chance to heal in a country that had inherited a vicious cultural tradition of child abuse. What a lot of hippies might describe as the people simply standing up for themselves and Just Saying No! The Swedes knew they had a serious widespread problem and made it clear to themselves, as much as anyone else, that they were now ready to take effective action.

In Hawaii a less ambitious, if no less moving, program was so popular it quickly spread nationwide. New mothers in every hospital maternity ward are provided with a short one page questionnaire and then told by the nurses they can ignore it, yet, a strong majority of them fill it out anyway. If they score high for being inclined to abuse their child someone approaches them and offers help which is accepted in the vast majority of cases. The entire program is free and run by adult survivors of child abuse who know from first hand experience that almost nobody ever really wants to abuse any child and, more often than not, a gentle but firm direct approach is all that is required to deal effectively with even the most culturally entrenched and blithely accepted violence.

Inspirational efforts like these protect and nurture the most priceless and vulnerable agnostics among us and psychologists estimate without such interventions, assuming favorable conditions, it can require seven generations for dysfunctional families to fully heal. I've been agnostic since I was three years old myself and know from first hand experience what it means to be agnostic in a culture that promotes the widespread enforcement of the law of contention, among even their youngest children. Using these kinds of interventions families are estimated to heal in roughly half the time or about three generations and, despite vocal resistance and the long term investments involved, interest in such interventions continues to grow steadily worldwide as does the number of programs.

A loving family, adequate food, shelter, and a future where they can look forward to making their own personal contributions to the world, are the kinds of modest desires anyone can have at any age and, altogether too often, exactly what traditional governments, religions, and secular institutions have consistently failed to provide. Quite the contrary, their emphasis on the law of contention keeps entire populations ignorant, frequently impoverished, and riddled with social problems. Their major advantage appears to be that organizing as pecking orders helps to ensure that during times of scarcity the wealthy provide for the needs of the poorest, however, treating people like so many cattle to be used and abused at will is simply not enough in the long run for most countries to remain competitive much less humane.

Consequently, the growing majority of developed world countries have abandoned both extreme capitalism and communism, while simultaneously becoming overwhelmingly secular with their agnostic populations often doubling to roughly thirty percent of their population within a generation. Not terribly surprising when you consider how many agnostics still hide their identities as agnostics from abusive and aggressive cultures in traditionally capitalist and communist countries, where the law of contention still tends to dominate popular culture. Otherwise, ignorant agnostics can take pride in being able to successfully bridge the secular, religious, capitalistic, and communistic worlds peacefully, while also nurturing the next generation with uniquely agnostic contributions. In the broader sense of the word, agnostic simply means to have no strong feelings, opinions, inclination, or disposition on a subject and it is that kind of flexible open-minded neutrality, often combined with gentle humor, which can make building bridges and healing wounds possible.

The most ignorant among us also frequently happen to be the most vulnerable agnostics who need all the nurturing we can give them. According to Socrates ignorance is the only evil and knowledge the only good yet, ironically, it is only in learning to accept and embrace any ignorance that we can prevail over evil, beginning first and foremost, within ourselves and our own families and communities. Only by first making ourselves vulnerable in some ways can we hope to become invulnerable in others, by learning how to accept what it means to be fallible and to cultivate as much personal integrity as possible. Whether you believe in a God or not, accepting our own ignorance first remains the only way to nurture faith, and the only means of conquering anyone's ignorance.

Roughly half of the people that have ever lived during the last ten thousand years of the agricultural revolution are still alive today and humanity has made incredible progress in the last hundred years alone. Apparently, working on our collective sense of humor is another important step in building a more humane world and can sometimes be considered no less important than health care and education. A step which, understandably, has been put off to a great extent over the last century, as people have waited for the necessary tools to be developed and their cultures to slowly adapt to their newfound reality that they just don't have to put up with all the pointless, counterproductive, and even self-destructive lowbrow bullshit anymore and potty humor is not the work of the devil. Efforts such as Jim Henson's Muppet Show represent merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the popular applications of potty humor with even the sciences now finally branching out into comedy, while my own personal contribution of playing around with linguistic philosophy is something that, ultimately, goes beyond mere words for me.

When people suggest my potty humor is somehow evil or mystical or a communist plot or whatever I have to laugh. Can potty humor possibly be an evil Satanic plot? Is comedy simply beyond the comprehension of modern science? Is tribal adult potty humor from the dawn of time the source of evil black magic behind the Illuminati and the insidious alien anal-probe-mind-control-conspiracy? Does being an ignorant agnostic automatically make me a dangerous terrorist and radical commie from the third world? Should potty humor be considered a dangerous religious cult? Should we attempt to put an immediate stop to all the potty humor? Should we prevent our children from watching Groucho Marx, the Three Stooges, and Gonzo the Muppet? Quite the contrary, I believe its increasingly a modern science as well as an art which represents the oldest family comedy-drama on earth predating even the invention of agriculture. If you ask me there are worse things in this world than admiring exotic potty humor and weird hippie poetry, but there's no accounting for taste and I can certainly understand many of us remaining extremely reluctant and skeptical.

The dream that countless ignorant fools from around the world have conveyed to me, including my own children, is of a world where everyone watches excitedly as mountains of bullshit vanish in the light of day to the sounds of jubilant laughter, cheers, tears, and loud sighs of relief. Sometimes the crap has just got to go before the relief can be heartfelt, know I mean? Sighs of relief can be the most welcome of all sounds and this is what many refer to as "earthy wisdom". Rejoice all you adorable clowns! It's the same old show its always been from day one and, whether the adults want to admit it or not, we never cease to be amazed by even our own personal bullshit.