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I used to be an atheist, but as of a month or two ago, I'm agnostic.

The reason for this is that I had an outright, incontrovertible, literally-shaking kind of spiritual experience, in which I perceived something enough like God that -- well, let me put it this way. If you, as the result of either experience or faith or just hearing about it from other people or whatever, have a notion of a duck as something that quacks and swims and is roughly shaped like a duck, then, if you were to see something kind of duck shaped and hear a quack, you'd probably feel fairly comfortable inferring the rest.

The reason I'm still agnostic is that I don't entirely trust any particular concept of the underlying duck.

The other reason I'm still agnostic is that this particular concept isn't just about ducks, it's about God. Which is to say, it's intimately connected with a notion of morality (which I take seriously, no matter what worldview I'm interpreting myself through). It's not the sort of thing you want to get wrong. Indeed, there are good reasons to have strong feelings about not making moral claims lightly. Thus, there are good reasons to have strong feelings about not lightly making claims about God.

There are also, based on my perception, very good reasons to be incredibly cautious about making claims about ... that.

Whatever "that" is. I'm still sifting through all the things that I felt were connected to it. It's a lot. Like, I'm trying to make logical arguments based on the things that I'm fairly confident are definitely involved, but a lot of my feelings on the matter are more about the thing in itself, which resists definition and hence further logical inference.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, what this means is that I now have very strong feelings about blasphemy. Seeing double, in agnostic fashion, my feelings about blasphemy overlap with a lot of my prior feelings about atheism, actually. If I let my theistic side take over for a moment and describe my atheistic side in terms it might not agree with: my atheism is based on a dislike of blasphemy. That is one of its essential core feelings.

The other essential core feeling in my atheism (as described by the theistic side of my newfound agnosticism) is an equally strong dislike of idolatry. The part of me that is drawn towards goodness and rightness doesn't like the idea of placing something else between that and me. It never has! I have always been this way. I just -- interpreted it in different terms.

I have seen God and now I think there are blasphemers and idolators everywhere. What a cliche.

Mind you, I'm not actually saying I can definitively determine blasphemy from without. That would also be blasphemy -- I'd be claiming knowledge of other people's sincerity, and of their ability to perceive ... whatever that is ... that I simply don't have.

Moreover, I suspect that a great many things can be idolatry, or not, depending on whether you are coming or going. Are you using it to draw yourself closer to what is good and right, or clinging to it so hard that you blind yourself to what is good and right? I cannot necessarily be the judge of that. In most cases it would require a lot of knowledge about where you are, and where God is, to be really sure.

The thing I value -- and I value it highly enough that I distrust it -- is being able to describe myself and my own behaviour using these terms. No, I cannot affirm your creed, sorry; I take these things seriously and it would be blasphemy to me. It always would have been blasphemy, but now I get to call it that.

The sense of self-justification that I get from this wording is probably not to be trusted. I do not actually know for sure that it is blasphemy. I am, indeed, still agnostic. Deep down, this is still just about my feelings, and you don't have to believe my feelings and you don't actually have to respect them any more now than you would have, were I to use an atheist wording of the same feeling.

On the other hand, though, maybe this is a wording that might make my feelings make more sense to some people? That would be nice. That is what words are supposed to do, convey something of our experience to others. It's not wrong for me to be happy about that.

I do need to be careful with this, though. I've already discovered that telling people that you've just had a religious experience and now you realise you have strong feelings about blasphemy and idolatry is the kind of thing that gives people the wrong idea!

Ah, well. No language is perfect.

I was recently reading Constance Grady's article on Vox about the inadequacy of some of our language around sexual harassment and assault:


Slime was the guy in his 40s who used to put his hands on my waist to unnecessarily "position me" before I walked on stage. Slime was the man who leered at me when I adjusted my very annoying bra strap when I was only twelve. Slime was knowing that any other boy could become fixated on me any time he wanted, and treat me just as badly as nursery rhyme guy, and I wouldn't have any defenses against it because ignoring him wouldn't make it stop.

It wasn't until I became an adult that I learned that sexual harassment could describe some of these situations. It definitely described some of the later iterations of nursery rhyme guy -- he went with nursery rhymes at fourteen, but by the time we were both sixteen he had graduated to making repeated explicit comments in the hope that he'd get a reaction to that. I wonder, in retrospect, whether I could have demanded that a responsible adult make him stop sexually harassing me, or whether I would simply have been fobbed off in the way that teachers like to fob off complaints so that they won't have to deal with them.

Sexual harassment is a very useful phrase. But I think Constance Grady is right that it's insufficient. It's very clinical and serious. We need clinical and serious words to describe these things, but we also need words that are not clinical or serious.

Skeevy describes some of these things. Creepy describes a few more of them. Indeed, it's interesting to note that the definition of the word creepy has been hotly contested in many of the same ways that, as Grady notes, sexual harassment has been contested -- and with far less justification. After all, a person inquiring after the precise meaning of sexual harassment may simply be asking for clarification of a new rule. This can be done in bad faith -- as when, for example, the rule is interpreted in the most uncharitable way possible in order to discredit it -- but it can also be done in good faith.

The fuss around creepy has less justification. There's no law against creepiness. You can suffer social consequences for it, of the "if you make people feel bad feelings, they will try to exclude you" variety, but that is all. Yet there are plenty of people who are willing to say that "branding" a man as creepy is unfair, that it's just punishing the socially awkward, that there need to be criteria before you can use that word, criteria that won't sweep up "innocent people".

Internet feminism has responded to this demand with impressive perceptiveness, and creepiness now sort of has a new definition as a result. It now frequently refers specifically to the practice of manipulating social conventions in order to get away with doing things that make people uncomfortable. True creepiness is a form of coercion, drawing on other people's politeness and goodwill as armour to shield yourself from having to truly respect others, and something can "feel creepy" if it is starting to feel like it might be an instance of this.

It's great that we have a word for this particular sort of behaviour. But what creepy used to refer to was, well, a sort of nebulous crawling feeling. It was a feeling that could arise in a number of situations -- notably, of course, the one above, but also other situations where the person involved might not even mean to do anything wrong. It could even refer to outright prejudice, such as the classism that makes visibly impoverished people just feel sort of ... wrong. And, of course, because it had this breadth, it was an ineffective weapon at stopping these genuinely wrong behaviours that it also referred to, and that's why it had to change. Creepy isn't a feeling any more. It's a specific behaviour.

We still don't have a word for the feeling. You know the one. Slime. And I don't think we'll ever get a word for that feeling that can stand uncontested until we are willing to let women's feelings about sexual violence and sexual bullying stand uncontested without needing justification. "This boy touched me on the cheek" is never going to win anyone over as a description of sexual harassment. Nor was this boy really creepy in the sense of pretending not to be coercive. I mean, he was bullying me pretty openly. But the point I want to make is, I know what I felt. I felt slime. And someday we'll have a word for that, as a society. Not a word for a specific behaviour, just a word for the feeling it induces.

I don't think we should jump the gun on this one, and try to make up a word and promote it. Teenage girls are excellent language innovators. They are also the group most likely to feel slime. They make up words for slime on the regular. When we're ready, as a society, to hear them, one of those words is going to make it big without the need for any sort of campaign.

Work on hearing girls and women. The word will take care of itself.