Author: Ophelia Benson

I read a bit of Julian’s Atheism: a Very Short Guide earlier today and there was a bit I wondered about. It gave me pause. He’s comparing belief in God with belief in the existence of the self – one’s own, that is.

For many religious believers, their belief in God’s existence is of comparable strength. They feel the truth of God’s existence so strongly that they can no more doubt it than they can doubt the existence of their own selves.

Is that true? I wondered. I don’t know that it’s not – but I wonder. It seems implausible. It seems implausible because (as we all know via Descartes, of course, if not in any other way) it’s not the same kind of belief or truth-feeling or inability to doubt. We can’t (I think) even imagine not believing we ourselves exist. We can imagine believing we’re in the clutches of the evil demon, in the matrix, all that, but we can’t imagine believing we don’t exist, because if we did we would immediately wonder (unless we’re very absent-minded) who that is doing the believing then. But no other belief can have that kind of strength, or force, because no other belief has that trick up its sleeve. Unless of course I’m just wrong. I’m curious about it. I could ask Julian, but I don’t think he has time for my footling questions.

His point is interesting, and no doubt right: that arguments are beside the point for most religious believers because arguments aren’t why they believe in god to begin with. I’m sure he’s right about strong belief – but I wonder if it can be as strong as belief in the existence of one’s own self.

I suppose for people who believe in an immanent god it could. You just believe your self and god (and all selves) are the same thing – so you need to believe in just the one. I don’t think that’s really what Julian meant though, since he wasn’t talking about mysticism and inner experience and so on. But maybe it is what he meant all the same. Anyway it’s given me an interesting puzzle.

Good book, by the way.

Uh oh.

[I]t might be useful to examine what deaf identity might be and how that identity fits in with current notions of other identities based on race, gender, sexual orientation…[T]he status of deaf people has changed in important ways, as deaf activists and scholars have reshaped the idea of deafness, using the civil-rights movement as a model for the struggle to form a deaf identity. Deaf people came to be seen not just as hearing-impaired, but as a linguistic minority, isolated from the dominant culture because that culture didn’t recognize or use ASL…Harlan Lane, a professor of psychology and linguistics…drew on the ideas of Edward Said and Michel Foucault to suggest that the deaf were like a colonized people. Lane was instrumental in defining deaf identity based on the notion that deaf people were a linguistic and even an ethnic minority…The definition of the deaf as a colonized, ethnic, linguistic minority has in turn been widely accepted in deaf circles and taught for more than a decade in deaf-studies programs…

A colonized, ethnic, linguistic minority – I can certainly see the linguistic and minority, but colonized? Ethnic? Well – no doubt that’s exactly why words like that tend to make me come over all suspicious. It’s because I think there may be some conning going on. Who, may I ask, colonized ‘the deaf’, and what the hell for? To corner all their minerals? To force them to find ivory? To disappoint and confound The International Commonist* Conspiracy? Because it was a way to employ younger sons? Why? And as for ethnic – well I always knew that was a stupid meaningless elastic word that people use to make themselves feel special, and that just puts it beyond doubt.

[I]s a deaf person excluded from his ethnic identity of deafness if he or she chooses not to act deaf?…African-Americans who speak standard English and do not code-switch are sometimes accused of being “Oreos” — black on the outside and white on the inside. Do we really want to go down the road of thinking of some people as deaf “Oreos”?

Hey, I don’t even want to go down the road of thinking of African-Americans who speak standard English and do not code-switch as Oreos, let alone thinking of deaf people that way. That is precisely one of the chief reasons I despise the whole identity mess – this business of telling people they’re not [whateveritis] enough, not authentic enough; this business of expecting them to code-switch whether they want to or not. It’s coercive and parochial and stifling and I hate it.

The problem with such concepts is that they exclude people, reduce their rights, and create marginalized communities. And then there is the question of who gets to set up the barriers and checkpoints. In the past, it was hearing people who did; now segments of the deaf community have declared themselves the gatekeepers, by defining deafness in the narrowest possible terms.

What I said. Parochial and stifling. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.

*McCarthy always pronounced it Commonist.