Finally, some recognition

On getting onto the Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica:

Me: [Puts last of fare into machine]

Driver: "You're wearing the right colour tape on your glasses."

Me: "I think you should give me a discount."

Driver: "I agree. You should have asked earlier."

See? I knew it would come up trumps. Maybe if I work it I can get the tape to, I dunno, <dooce caps>PAY FOR ITSELF</dooce caps>.

(Reminds me of a favourite joke, from Bob Monkhouse of all people: "They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They're not laughing now.")

Shadow Boxing

There's something apt-to-the-core about the rebuttal to theists who insist on misrepresenting atheism as a religion, or something akin to a religion, that, if atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby. However, while this identifies the theoretical heart of atheism as the absence of a specific belief, and nothing else, in practice things are a bit more complex.

I glanced through American Atheist at the Santa Monica Public Library this afternoon. I was actually looking for Non-Stamp Collector's Monthly, but it happened not to be on the shelf. You see the point, of course. Even if atheism is the absence of a specific belief, and nothing else, it also serves, unlike non-stamp collecting, as a rallying point for a collection of causes and interests semi-coherent enough to support organisations, meetings, publications, and such, at least in the U.S. This might have something to do with the position of the atheist community (see, there I go again; a non-stamp collector community is the stuff of a comedy sketch) here, misrepresented and marginalised at all turns (hence with plenty of axes to grind), but also constitutionally free to express itself. It neither enjoys the more mainstream position common in Western Europe, nor suffers the more overt suppression and even persecution of places in thrall to even greater theistic monomania. It has a voice; just a very small one, used to argue for separation of church and state, for teaching of evolution (because it's true; not because it has any bearing on the god question), rejection of Intelligent Design, and similiar issues which place science and reason at the foreground.

It might partly just be an aversion to joining communities of any sort, but, while wishing more power to their elbows and opposable thumbs, I'm not remotely drawn to such organisations. It might also be a pointlessly stubborn stand against the very fact that there's even a need for them, in what should be a post-post-post-post-post-Enlightenment society; instead, we have a kind of Hokey Cokey in and out of the circle of reason, to the music of time. The very existence of a word for someone who doesn't believe in a god (rather than someone who doesn't collect stamps, for example), never mind organisations and publications, ought to have been buried dinosaur-deep. Reason implies a simple default, and it isn't theism. The Google search I just performed returned (approximately) 778,000 results for 'theist', but about 12,500,000 for 'atheist'. The moral is pretty clear: it's (obviously) not that someone is sixteen times more likely to be an atheist than a theist; it's that someone is sixteen times more likely as an atheist to need to refer to themselves that way, or to be referred to that way, in order to override the societal default. Theism is assumed. This isn't really any happier a situation than one in which a non-stamp collector had to explicity self-identify that way, in order to override the widespread assumed default, or in which belief in unicorns was sufficiently prevalent to make useful a word meaning its opposite. Society pushes atheists to define themselves as other, by providing unacceptable defaults, then points to those very same definitions as evidence that atheists are something they're not.

I've been meaning to write something about Dawkins's The God Delusion, too, but haven't found the words. The situation is analogous: part of me is just angry and bewildered that such a work is even necessary. I doubt he'd agree, but it also seems a poor way for Dawkins to spend his time, rebutting and refuting and knocking down targets which ought not even to be standing. As is often the case, it will probably end up his most popular work without being remotely his best. Notwithstanding that I'm not really part of his target audience (though one of the best things about preaching to the choir is to let them know that the choir exists, because they might not), it's a choppy, inconsistent work, which digests material he's covered elsewhere, and at times reads as a literature review.

All of that being the case, I think a work such as this one faces a more or less insurmountable problem, which is only tangentially to do with the subject matter and how well it's handled. My hunch is that as a species we're inclined - perhaps for reasons that game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of behaviour might disentangle - to give positive expressions of belief rather greater weight than they deserve according to their intrinsic rationality and likelihood, and negative expressions of belief rather less weight. All other things being equal, we're more inclined to wish to associate with a positive belief than a negative belief. However kooky, positive beliefs have a siren song which is not necessarily related to believability: rationally, we might reject elaborate conspiracy theories - the moon landings were faked; 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government - but emotionally we're drawn in. We smile at the craziness of the kooks themselves, but have a grudging regard for their tenacity in the face of the evidence. Conversely, rational scepticism has the bitter taste of negativity, a rational sceptic the killjoy's role in the proceedings, no matter how utterly groundless the assertion being challenged. "So what do you believe in?" whines the theist to the atheist, as if not believing in their god implies a knee-jerk disbelief in anything and everything else.

For this reason, expressions of atheism generally, and The God Delusion specifically, must carry an inevitable, unreasonable burden. Just as society pushes atheism to name itself in opposition to a default, so society pushes it to be negative in order to counter the vast arrays of positive but groundless theistic assertions out there which obtain a pass simply because they're positive assertions. The position Dawkins finds himself in is that of a shadow boxer, swinging left and right, left and right, refuting this assertion, and rebutting that logical fallacy, but unable to land any significant punch, both because (the collective) we rather like our positive beliefs to remain standing, however chimeric they might be, and because, well, he's trying to punch something which isn't actually there.

I take heart from the fact that the book has indeed sold so well; there's something very much in keeping with Dawkins's other works in asserting that, no matter how much we might be inherently programmed to prefer positive statements of nonsense to rational debunking, we're perfectly capable of overriding those instincts. It takes a shift in perspective, but rational debunking of myth and nonsense is a positive force for good in the world. Such a shift in perspective faces plenty of inertia, though; the linking of theistic cosmology with theistic morality is the greatest confidence trick in the history of mankind.

A final qualm about The God Delusion is that, aside from all of the above, I actually think The Selfish Gene, for example, is a far more powerful expression of atheism - in the sense that it conveys that life works perfectly well without a divine hand, thanks very much, rather than the sense that it has some sort of subtextual agenda. Partly this comes from the fact that it's an extraordinary progression of positive assertions about how life works, from the small to the large, the microbiological to the social and behavioural, so it benefits hugely from building a positive case, a positive thesis, a positive argument, quite aside from the truth-value of any of the assertions. Rather than boxing a shadow which isn't there, it's about elucidating exactly what is there, slowly, carefully, and with just the right combination of rigour, clarity, and language which inspires while being sure not to do nothing other than that. Accepting that society pushes people such as Dawkins into some unavoidable combination of the boxing of shadows and the building of reality, I think I prefer to get my own inspiration from the latter.

LOTR/Bridge on the River Kwai/Foley noise

That's it. That's the whole post. I have a text file which I (very occasionally) use to make notes of things I'd like to burble about here, and at some point I added the line:

LOTR/Bridge on the River Kwai/Foley noise

But now I can't for the life of me remember what I meant. 'LOTR' is Lord of the Rings, natch, and 'Foley' is the process of making human sound effects for films and such, but together they're all a bit random. They'll have to live on together in Google, until I figure out what the hell I was going to say.

Induction

One of those trucks which serve as mobile billboards sat at the kerbside as I went to buy some toilet paper (the Scott 1000-sheet rolls, since you ask - I'm an enthusiastic convert). This one was advertising Silver Reign. It said:

Free admission if you mention this truck.

Trying to imagine exactly how I would do the business of the mentioning, I settled on:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention it."

Because of course no-one would just say: "I saw a truck with your ad on it." That would sound lame, as if the speaker was just making small talk. The point isn't just seeing the truck; it's seeing what the truck had to say. It follows that what the truck is actually saying is something like:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

It might then follow that the business of the mentioning properly goes something like:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention that you saw the truck which offers free admission if you mention the truck."

In which case the implied message on the side of the truck is:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

And so on and so forth, until the writing became so small that you wouldn't see the ad anyway. Yes, this is what I thought when I saw the ad. What I didn't think was: "Wow! Free admission to Silver Reign!"

The BDSM SDK

A funny dream last night. Mostly it was guided by a Grand Theft Auto narrative. It was one of those dreams where you're both observer and participant, both experiencing it and commenting on it. It was exciting and a bit scary.

Towards the end, though, it skipped to me watching (or reading about, or both) a cheesy BDSM-themed musical, which on waking left an impression something like Gay!, from The IT Crowd - well-meaning but horribly clueless.

What resonated after I'd woken up, though, was remembering that in the dream I'd been reading the lyrics for one of the songs, which were printed in a programme or somesuch. My waking memory is, as one would expect, of seeing the complete lyrics on the page, then scanning down line by line. Notably, the lyrics rhymed.

That needs some unpacking, I think, because taken at face value it's pretty amazing. If one assumes that the complete lyrics genuinely were on the page - such that I could have read them in any order - it entails that my dream created them in a single step. The me in the dream wasn't hearing the lyrics line by line, or seeing them as if typed out line by line. They were there, fully formed, just as if I might have picked up a book of poetry and turned to a poem I'd never read before.

That's extraordinary enough to imagine, without the extra problematical constraint imposed by the lyrics also rhyming. Rhyming imposes structure, which requires planning, memory, and all sorts of other cognitive tasks. If (again) the lyrics were genuinely complete on the dream page, available to be read in any order, and they also rhymed, then this amounts to the instantaneous creation of structured language in large blocks.

Or maybe it doesn't, because I'm deeply sceptical about my or anyone else's ability to do this, even in a dream. However much it seemed to me during the dream - and in retrospect after having woken - that the lyrics were fully formed on the page the moment I turned to it, it sounds far more likely that this was precisely the illusion the dream needed to convey. Though I felt that I could read the lyrics in any order, it's more plausible that the dream was furiously laying the tracks as the train steamed forward, making it up as it went along. This is in itself impressive, of course - both the illusion of completeness of the lyrics, and the ability to back up the illusion as necessary. It's not quite the alchemy of a poem from thin air, though.

As I read the dream lyrics in order, the laying of tracks ahead of the train seemed to work. My memory is that the rhymes were good, if not inspired. I regret that I wasn't able to fix the words in my head after I woke. Without that, I can't of course be sure that the dream created rhymes at all, and didn't just bamboozle me into falsely remembering that there had been lyrics, and that the lyrics had rhymed.

Except I did manage to grab onto the final word, and it convinces me that the dream machinery was indeed frantically making it up as it went along, that there actually were lyrics, which more or less adequately rhymed, and that the whole thing - structure, rhyming and all - hadn't appeared as if by turning a page. The final word was 'SDK'. It's techie jargon for 'Software Development Kit', the sort of hardware/software combo that, for example, Sony makes available to developers of PlayStation games. Funnily enough, I'd read a story a couple of days before about how Sony had reduced the price of its PS3 SDK.

Ah well. Like stage illusions, when you look hard enough at dreams the mechanism reveals itself. I guess the point is always to admire the trickery for what it is. Something doesn't need to be unexplainable to be magic.

Walking home

A nice little piece in the LA Times about Will Self walking in Los Angeles. LAX to Watts is a significant endeavour. I've done it by bus a few times and even that takes a couple of hours.

It reminded me of a day I walked from the outskirts of London into the West End. The Macguffin was the fact that I didn't have money for the tube, but it ended up being a pleasure in itself. It was almost a straight walk - maybe ten miles - down the Edgware Road, through Hendon, Cricklewood, Kilburn, Maida Vale, Marble Arch. I can date it precisely, because it was the Monday that the (fantastic) XTC album Oranges and Lemons came out, and buying it was my treat at the end of the walk.

Riding a bus gets you much closer to a city than driving a car, cycling gets you closer than riding a bus, and walking - especially this sort of long city-walk performed despite the existence of other options - is just the best way to soak up the feel of a place and really understand the geography. One of the alienating things about LA is that, not only don't people walk, it's more or less impossible to get from anywhere you are to anywhere you might want to be by walking; if you have a go at it, incidental pleasures on the way are pretty meagre. It's not a city for serendipitous wandering.

One of my heading-off-to-sleep thoughts (you can only really do it when you're safe and warm and home) used to be to imagine myself either dumped in the middle of nowhere - a moor, a desert, etc. - or some known but distant place, and then either to imagine the pleasure of arriving home after a monumental trek, or to play a game with myself, where I'd try to figure out what sort of reward I'd accept for willingly undertaking such an adventure. I'd put myself in a desert on the other side of the world, or perhaps just a long night's walk through the cold and dark away from the bed I was currently in. Would a hundred pounds be enough? In the end, the pleasure of arriving home - with the memory of what it felt like in the desolate starting place - always seemed the real prize.

Rape and Raspberries

A trip to Westwood Village to see Eastern Promises sparked a conversation - over Pinkberry frozen yogurt (with strawberries and raspberries) - during which I tried to describe to A. the viscerally unpleasant reaction I have to films which portray the unrelentingly grim realities of life. The connection is a little unfair to this film, which is layered enough to be far more than just a wallow in grimness, but there's enough grimness - rape, sectarian murder and reprisal, prostitution bordering on slavery - for it to be relevant.

The paradox here is that I'm mostly aware of processing stories at a considerable remove. I don't typically get swept away, except on occasion by the elegance of the narrative itself. And yet, stories whose business is portraying with something approaching verisimilitude what a shitty place the world can be hit me in the gut in a way that significantly compromises whatever enjoyment I might get from other aspects. Eastern Promises reminded me somewhat of Mona Lisa; both involve a quasi-innocent becoming submerged in low-rent seediness, returning damaged but in some way stronger.

In particular, the narrative of an innocent being ground by the more brutal wheels that people are capable of creating strikes me with something like nausea. Distance from what I perceive to be a real-world setting does make a difference. Hitchcock, for example, was gleefully fond of sending innocents into torment, but his playful, theatrical style draws the sting. Brazil, just about my favourite film, involves torture, murder, terrorism, and finishes with a man being lobotomised; again, though, its otherworldliness buys it an indirection which dulls the pain. It refers to the grimness of life, without being about it. It seems to be the reality and proximity of grimness, rather than grimness itself, which repels me.

Even though the effect is again ameliorated by a stylised narrative - I don't find A Clockwork Orange remotely disturbing, for example - portrayals of rape in particular get way under my skin. It's notable that the comments following Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice quickly morph into a discussion of the fact that the pain in many of the nominated films concerns violence against women. Aside: Even though they have a Michael Haneke on there, Funny Games is conspicuously missing. He's a sanctimonious prick, but he knows what he's doing.

More than that, situations of assault by multiple aggressors are a special case for this bit of squeamishness I have. It feels as if the horror here relates not so much to what is done to the victim, as it does to the inevitability caused by numerical advantage. It makes no sense to suggest that rape or assault by an individual is somehow less horrendous than rape or assault by a group, but my brain processes things that way. This might relate to the general revulsion I have for group behaviour in general. Groups of human beings are capable of things unimaginable to each of the constituent individuals alone. There's both a premeditation and an unchecked momentum to group behaviour that's as primitive as we ever get as a species. At the head of my own list of painful films (though not necessarily great) might be A.L. Kennedy's Stella Does Tricks, which burned into my brain a gang-rape that's not graphic, but is hideous for its premeditated cruelty, intended to serve as a vicious punishment. I find myself unable to think of the actor (James Bolam) who played the part of the seedy pimp who orchestrates the rape, without remembering the scene, though I know him for many other roles. Bolam himself is almost tainted in my mind, which makes no sense whatsoever. We don't always make sense.

Oh, and do you know what the best thing about strawberries is? It's that we can eat raspberries afterwards, and be reminded once again just how much nicer they are.

Spanking and the Excluded Middle

Some post-Shadow Lane thoughts, in no particular order or coherence.

At this September's party I felt more comfortable than I have before; more of a sense of being inside looking out than outside looking in. I'm sure that's mostly just an effect of familiarity with the grammar of these events, and also that the number of people I know who go to these things has steadily accumulated over time to the point that the days have a momentum of their own and don't need to be a matter of awkward introductions among groups of strangers.

I still miss a sense of community that I perceive many others feel, though. It's easy to be sanguine about the absence of a sense of belonging when one has chosen a life that is essentially solitary, and when kink has always thus far been experienced remotely or vicariously. But once one has plunged right into the heart of the scene - and it's hard not to think of a Vegas Shadow Lane party as anything else - that absence is much more primary. I do know that this is a matter between me and my personality, of course. One acquires a sense of belonging as the dividend from a significant investment of time and self. The question is: how can someone as deeply introverted and (let's be frank) misanthropic as me come to feel a sense of belonging within a larger community of people without changing who they are - even when that community's unifying trait is one which burns inside them too? I think the answer is: they can't. I'm okay with that, but it's worth being honest about it.

Easily my favourite moment of the weekend was watching a young woman, who couldn't be more full of life without actually bursting (she knows who she is), invite a young man with cerebral palsy out onto the dance floor for a joyous bop, walker and all. The relative infrequency of these events, and the newness of them to many people, can stir up a mixture of barely-concealed needs and desires, such that they're a bit blinded to anything other than their kink hungers. I've become used, for example, to seeing soi-disant 'fans' of spanking models behave more or less like sanctioned stalkers. But the dance cut right through that; the two young people on the dance floor seemed like the most grown-up among the several hundred present.

Speaking of which, when did A. and I become grown-ups in the kink ourselves? The experience of talking to young kinksters who devoured our stories while they were barely teenagers is getting a bit familiar.

Most bizarre moment of the weekend:

Ditzy Woman in Hot Tub (after some small talk led her slowly to figure out from my accent that I'm English): [thinking] "Is there a town in England beginning with a B?"

Me (sitting beside hot tub while A. pretends to be deaf): "Is there a town in the U.S. beginning with a B? - you see what a stupid question it is?"

Ditzy Woman in Hot Tub: "But England's such a tiny little country!"

Iris's piece on the Punishment Book about rediscovering the value of play is a good one, and I share some of her feelings. I think it's probably especially important for people whose primary expression of the kink is real-life discipline that they try to balance that with play that's more explicitly fun, both with their own partners and with others - whatever the conventional kink analogue of a fuck buddy would be. Which is not to say that real-life discipline can't also be fun, of course, but it's, well, it's different, and it's often complicated, and the point of more casual play is that it's uncomplicated by design, and delimited by time and space.

However, I do find myself feeling stuck in something of an excluded middle. I've rambled before about my inability to do role-play and how that feels a consequence of how things need to be real in order to work for me. Figuring out what it means for play to be real, without being real-life (or at least without being real-life in quite the same way), is a bit of a conundrum. I'm not really interested in impact play - even impact play which works its way deep enough to find all those nice endorphins.

Play that's meaningful for me is all about finding vulnerability and pushing on it. That seems to require finding a narrative to guide the play. That same narrative can often turn out to be the most satisfying outcome of play, like improvising a story, but a story that's personally satisfying, and which involves a journey into real vulnerability and back again. Without a narrative, I don't really have any compass as a top. I'm not sure what I should be doing, and that brings out a profound performance anxiety. And it matters to me to feel like I can do a good job as a top.

I'm aware of a bafflement among some people with how little I play at Shadow Lane parties. To me it seems pretty obvious. I'm not interested in play unless it's meaningful. In order for play to be meaningful for me, I need a narrative - an angle into a vulnerability. (A. joked that it's like a actor asking what their motivation is, and she's right, it's just like that.) In order to have an angle into a play partner's vulnerability, I need to know them very well, and feel comfortable and confident that I know how to find vulnerability - and that they'll be okay letting me do that. That situation isn't easily reached, especially for someone who finds it as difficult to become close to people as I do. Exactly what I need in order to find play fulfilling (and to feel confident and competent), is exactly what my personality type makes it hard for me to achieve.

The point is that real-life discipline provides exactly the sort of narrative that I'm talking about here. It's completely clear to me what my role is and what my partner's vulnerability is. That it's real-life might not be as important as that there's a clear narrative. For some people role-play does just the same job, of course. The vulnerabilities they play with might well even be perfectly real ones, but they're mapped onto a fictional surface, and the narratives can be chosen as if from a shelf of novels, with all that pseudo-Victorian blather about 'miscreants' and 'infractions' and such, which I can't hear as anything other than pantomime (in the thigh-slapping, cross-dressing British sense of the word).

What kinds of real kink narratives can exist for two people who don't do role-play (at least with each other), and don't have a relationship which involves real-life discipline? I'm not sure. There are some possibilities. Their relationship could have the feeling and closeness of siblinghood, in which there's a deep mutual caring, which is expressed with occasional forays into something like discipline, but doesn't have the depth of a primary relationship. This of course still implies a rare and nurtured closeness, difficult to construct and maintain, even if it doesn't have the same bedrock as a life-partnership.

I do find myself wondering sometimes - and I do know what a horribly sneering thing this is - what people can find in much of the superficial play that I see around me. 'Parties' where men pay for a conveyor belt of interchangeable bodies, for example. I realised a while ago that it matters a great deal to me that I not be interchangeable as a play partner - I think it's some component of what I think of as real play. If it happens to be my lap, and my right hand, but it could just as well be someone else's, then I'd rather not be there. The play wouldn't be diminished; it would be completely empty.

Palin & Strieber

Standing in Barnes & Noble ("Will you be saving ten percent with our discount card today?" trills the girl at the till over and over) at the corner of 3rd Street and Wilshire in Santa Monica, reading through the new Michael Palin diaries. I'm struck by how often something depresses him, and how financial concerns recur - at least in my half-hour sampling. Maybe the best thing about even moderately-unexpurgated diaries is that they remind us that famous people aren't so different from the rest of us.

Then a bit of louder-than-usual talking from next to me distracts me from Palin and the podcast from the Edinburgh Fringe that's on my iPod, and it turns out to be a B&N employee guiding Whitley Strieber to a pile of his books on the display. The B&N employee picks up the entire pile and carries it across to a nearby desk, where I gather that Strieber is going to do a bit of impromptu signing.

Another not-in-Teesside-any-more moment.

Vonnegut: I hope it's fun being dead

I find that I don't actually know what 'R.I.P.' means. It's splashed everywhere today before or after Kurt Vonnegut's name - along with enough lazily glib trottings-out of 'So it goes' to dull the senses. But what do people actually mean when they say 'Rest in Peace', other than that it's the appropriate part of the clunky Lego construction set that constitutes an idiolect for most people?

Vonnegut is dead. He's not 'resting'. He's dead. He's not 'in peace'. He has ceased to exist. We really don't seem to be able to stop ourselves clinging linguistically - even if not cognitively, though the two usually go together - to some wishfully cosy image of death. The dead are 'sleeping', or 'resting'; they've 'passed', or 'crossed over', with the implicit or explicit suggestion that there's something cool on the other side, so we shouldn't feel too bad. We cling to some notion that they in some way feel better for having died.

This is all well and good - comfort objects have their uses after all, and who might need comfort more than the bereaved - but it stands out in extremely sharp contrast when the subject is someone who was as acidly dismissive of cheap sentimentality, and who clearly did not believe that death was anything other than the end. To mark someone's death with language that they themselves would have regarded as nonsensical strikes me as at best a bit silly, and at worst unthinkingly disrespectful - in the same sense (if not degree) as conducting a religious funeral for someone openly atheistic. Cling to your own comfort as much as you like, but consider with eyes wide open how the subject would react.

The suicide last month of comedian Richard Jeni was the occasion of a bizarre juxtaposition amongst the tributes. Elayne Boosler's piece at the Huffington Post, Remembering Comedian Richard Jeni, interpolates a number of Jeni's lines, the first of which is:

On religious wars, "You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend."

Now, that's not especially funny, but it would seem to unambiguously set out Jeni's feelings concerning theism. A post later the same day at the Huffington Post by Martin Lewis, Richard Jeni - RIP [of course], refers and links to Boosler's 'beautiful eulogy', then concludes with the line:

Rest In Peace Richard... Make God laugh.

Pause a moment to take in the layers of inappropriateness there. Lewis could be saying a number of things: that he himself hopes that something Jeni found ridiculous is in fact true; that he doesn't think that Jeni actually believed what he openly professed; that Jeni would thank him for words which contradict his own beliefs; or, perhaps most likely, that - despite explicitly linking to Boosler's piece - espousal of theism in the face of death is such a strong default position that Jeni's own words went in one of Lewis's ears and out the other, and a safe triteness kicked in. It's hard to argue that Lewis isn't wishing Jeni well, but the method is a slap in the face.

The situation here is that religiosity in the context of death is pretty much never seen as inappropriate, even when its subject was overtly non-religious. The subtext is something like: 'I want to wish you well, but in order to do that it's necessary for me to assume out loud that you were mistaken.'

A few years ago, in the final months of a friend's battle against cancer, I found myself wanting to shore up her own theism - not that it really needed much shoring up. I wasn't in the position of being able to say that I hoped I was wrong - nor would she have believed me if I had said that. What I could (and did) say, however, was that it didn't matter what I believed, and of course that's exactly true. The important matter, at that time, seemed to be to respect her feelings. It was, pretty much literally, the least I could do. To soften (but not disregard) my own views like that was my business, and in my control. In contrast, hopes that Vonnegut 'rest in peace', and that Jeni 'make God laugh', seem at best to presumptuously soften their views, and, at worst, to deny them altogether. The apparent feeling that this is least inappropriate immediately after their deaths seems to me entirely backward. An atheist's eulogy for a theist would not be considered remotely well-meaning which ended:

Rest in peace. Oh, that god you've believed in all these years? I hope you were wrong.