Defending yourself and your vocation from critics

[RonTheLogician]

Hey Danny,

I'm so sorry I didn't have the chance to offer you needed moral support when you were first living in L.A. and sharing lodging with The Roomate From Hell (TRfH), who told you that she would pray for you so that you could be "rescued" from your chosen vocation. You told her off in a way which adds to my respect for your strength and intelligence!

Unfortunately, you might well run into an antagonist like her again, although hopefully not as someone with whom you need share lodging. Therefore I think it worthwhile to present here the material I wish I had shown you earlier. My "sermon" will start out facetious, move on to substance, and finally close with irony.

The first thing you can do for such an antagonist is to reciprocate the passive-aggressive "good will" offered by the gift of "praying for you," by donning a shirt such as the one above. (Firms like CafePress can create customized teeshirts using your design via Internet order.) Then you can go on to explain that originally, you had aspired to attend college for a professional education, but were badgered to enter the adult entertainment industry instead, and by someone they might not have expected!

Yes, it's true: Jesus loves porn! (At least AVN Hall-Of-Famer Paul Thomas, who starred as Jesus in the Broadway version of Jesus Christ, Superstar, does!) And for those who want to celebrate this fact, there is lovely artwork with which they can decorate their possessions.

Besides decorative things, one can also install practical items with which one can turn on to (or at least with) Jesus, The Light of The World. (I think one calls the aperture in the fixture below a Holy Glory - or maybe a glory hole?)

More persuasively, one might have referred TRfH to the book Sexual Liberation: the Scandal of Christendom (Praeger, 2007) by Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr., a Protestant minister long involved in psychiatric pastoral care. A theology professor opined that the church history recounted in his book was ...a lucid and masterful account of Christianity's shifting attitude toward sex from the positive valuation of its Jewish roots to the contemporary Church?s obsessive hysteria about sex. A psychiatry professor and chaplain at LSU Medical School in your native Louisiana added that the author has the courage to restore Jesus the Jew to his own origins. In doing so he removes the false garments the Church has spun to make Jesus non-sexual and super-human.

And once again I would draw to your attention the book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (Oxford University Press, 2013). Beyond its nominal erudite exploration of "obscene" language, it also does a wonderful job of illuminating the very different attitudes people had toward sex in ancient and medieval times, compared to those in that part of contemporary America who so often go out of their way to torment you and others who follow your valuable and important vocation.

As to the much broader question of religion versus spirituality, I would commend to you The Quotable Atheist (Nation Books, 2007), the excerpts from which I make immediately below I hope will tempt you to explore it further.

Religion in general is based on falsehoods -- comforting beliefs in a heavenly parent or big brother; hopes of surviving death -- and on utility or expedience: socially cohesive tribal myths; politically useful codes of law and behavior; divine ordination of rulers (including certain presidents); attempts to explain, influence, or placate nature and the elements; the wish to raise ourselves above (i.e., deny our place among) the animals. Religion may help people feel their lives have a loftier purpose than the mere satisfaction of material wants and sensual desires, but it does it with smoke and mirrors, at the cost of our respect for truth and of our integrity and dignity...

Religious tolerance has grown just to the extent that we have become less religious. Religious authority has always sought to obstruct scientific research and education; to control and censor art and literature; to impose rules of behavior that may have made sense centuries or millennia earlier, and probably not even then; and to support rulers and governments, however cruel and oppressive, in exchange for the preservation of its own privileges and wealth. In short, religion has been doing more harm than good...

Yet I confess, I?ve got a soft spot for 'spirituality.' Why those quote marks?The trouble with 'spiritual' is that, at least according to the diagram in my manual, there aren?t two kinds or levels of reality -- a physical world and a second, separate, spiritual one. 'The supernatural does not exist.' Or, if you prefer (and I rather do), it?s all 'supernatural.'

...I respect, indeed feel awed and somewhat shamed by, the seriousness, depth, and commitment of the genuinely religious life... It can make the adherent a better, kinder, gentler person...

The problem, however, isn?t that science, secularism, and Enlightenment ideas have become the modern religion, but rather that they haven?t. While fundamentally antagonistic toward science, the current antimodernist, postmodernist religious reaction isn?t against a rival belief system or philosophy, so much as against an absence of strongly held values -- a spiritual-philosophical void that business seeks to fill with toys, amusements, and celebrity idolatry, replacing old-fashioned ideals, with a cool cynicism, irony, and disdain for any kind of seriousness and passion -- religious, political, emotional, or intellectual...

Note by RtL: Originally, in deposing the Catholic Church, the French revolutionaries established in its place a Cult of Reason ("Culte de la Raison"), complete with congregational worship and other devotional displays. (View some engraved masonry on a Temple of Reason here.) It lasted only a couple years before Robespierre, as virtual dictator during the Reign of Terror, replaced it with a Deistic faith called the Cult of the Supreme Being. A decade after the revolution, Napoleon, as total dictator, banned both cults and re-established a non-exclusive Catholicism, which won him the support of the Vatican and its army of simple-mined peasants and laborers, who were relieved the Tooth Fairy could be real again. Napoleon: In His Own Words (1916) quotes Bonapart's cynicism so: Religion... introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor. And an 1817 letter by him in exile on St. Helena adds this: Jesus calls himself the Son of God, and yet is descended from David. I prefer the religion of Mahomet [Mohammed] - it is less ridiculous than ours.

But spiritual appetites are real, worthy of respect, and of course are begging to be milked for profits. What?s needed is more than just the discrediting and utter humiliation of religion as we know it, but a counter-religion, if you will -- a positive, assertive, science-based secularism that amounts to, and isn?t squeamish about being, an alternate way forward 'spiritually.' Science, after all, arose out of mysticism and sorcery, with which it shares the thirst for higher knowledge and for mastery over nature...

Accordingly, this book is intended not only to inspire, amuse, and pander to nonbelievers but also to challenge them...

Finally, knowing how much you enjoy backyard entertainment, in the present context I would bring to your attention a brilliant song by Garfunkel and Oates (Riki Lindhome and Kate Micucci), wherein they rejoice that the poophole is a loophole! Let this prove to your most refractory antagonists that you're really not having as much "sinful" extramarital sex as they might imagine! Find the song's unforgettable music video here.