I forget who it was – Grayling or Dawkins or one of those clones – came up with what he thought was a very clever and witty comeback to the accusation that atheism is just another religion. "If atheism is a religion," he said, "then not playing the piano is a hobby."
Obviously he didn't realise that he was not only failing to be clever and refute the charge, but he was showing exactly what a ridiculous religion atheism is.
Let's run through this shall we?
'atheism' is to 'belief' as 'not playing the piano' is to 'hobby'. Therefore this:
A: "What do you believe in?"
B: "I'm an atheist."
Is the same as this:
A: "What are your hobbies?"
B: "My hobby is that I don't play the piano."
To put it simply, calling yourself an atheist is the same as considering not playing the piano to be your hobby.
Robin Davies writes:
Atheism is not a religion. It is not a faith. It is qualitatively different. Most atheists simply take the view that there is no point in believing in something (let alone basing your life on it, praying to it, killing for it, etc) unless there is good evidence for it. It would be better described as an attitude rather than a belief.I suppose the term “atheism” is rather odd because it seems to describe a negative state. Presumably it only exists because throughout history most people have been religious so a term was needed to describe a position which was different from the norm. In the same way there is a word for people who have never had sex but no word for, say, people who have never been to Belgium.
I think it’s true that the word exists because religion has always been there. There would have been no need to use a distiguishing word otherwise. I can accept that it’s simply a convenient way of saying ‘I don’t have a religion’. I have, in my lifetime, used it in that way, too. (I certainly wouldn’t want the above to sound like an argument for being religious. I suppose it’s both for and against.)There are people, however, who do go around, to varying degrees, so to speak, ‘not playing the piano’. And there are worse hobbies, I’m sure, but I simply wanted to point this out while it occurred to me.If you’re writing and promoting books such as The God Delusion, Against All Gods (cue comedy drumroll) and God is Not Great, then you’re spending a lot of time and energy ‘not playing the piano’. I think this is where the ‘not playing the piano’ argument starts to, well, fall down.Anyway, so, I’m more interested really in the idea of maybe using the piano to play a different tune. I don’t know. Or taking up the violin, perhaps. Or maybe I’ll make do with the mouth organ.I’m beginning to think about this whole thing in terms of genre and might write a post about this later. I wouldn’t like, for instance, the gothic genre not to exist as a kind of literary point of reference, but at the same time, the tribalism and narrowness of genre drives me mad. All I’m saying is that atheism is a genre too. Or, if you like, it’s not a ‘genre’, but ‘serious, mainstream literature’, with all the strictures and assumptions that involves.
Interesting!I “always” thought of those terms this way:Atheism is exactly what the word suggests literally “Without God”. So, being an atheist means not been given – or having rejected – any god whatsoever.Belief is a feeling of a god’s presence one way or the other – no logics or science involved. Just pure experience – no evidence.Religion is belief systematized hierarchically. Maybe that’s just me?
‘I “always” thought of those terms this way:’I like the way you’ve put “always” in quotation marks.Just to return to some of these points, it seems that there must necessarily be some rejection involved in using a word like ‘atheist’. I wonder if I should state the obvious and say that of course it’s none of my business what anyone does or does not believe – any more than it is the business of Richard Dawkins.And vice versa ad infinitum.A few entries back I posted a clip of Dawkins in interview and commented that he had gained and then lost my sympathy. He gained it in a number of ways, one of which was saying that he believed his book actually to be quite funny, and that he had had people laughing at readings of it, and of course, the lovely Lalla Ward, laughing somewhere behind him. He said that people are … hang on, can’t quite remember now … if people can’t see the humour (I’m misquoting badly here) then it’s because people are still not used to religion being criticised, so any criticism made of it seems maybe more violent than it actually is. I think that’s a very good point, and I support and applaud debate completely. I will necessarily speak for myself in any debate, though (how could I do otherwise?). By the same token, I wonder if this isn’t further evidence of atheism sharing kinship with religion. The whole area of ‘belief’ does seem to be very sensitive, whatever side of the polygon you’re on. Of course, and unfortunately, Dawkins then proceeded to lose my sympathy at the end by declaring himself the sworn enemy of all imagination and creativity. I might be paraphrasing slightly there again.
Justin Isis writes:
If you self-identify as an atheist, you’re still defining yourself by ‘religion’. A lot of people who self-identify as atheists are using, for example, “not believing in religion” as a defining factor. It’s the equivalent of saying “I’m a Satanist!” – you can do it, yeah, but at the same time you’re also sort of a Christian, because Satan is something that exists in (and is therefore defined by) the Christian system. To put it another way, there can be no atheism without religion, and so I would argue, in a sense, that self-identifying atheists are actually religious, since they’re merely reacting negatively to the presence of religion. The question itself – “Does God exist?” – seems meaningless to me unless you first define what is meant by “God.”For example, if someone asked me if I believed in God, I would say something like “Which God? How is this God defined?” Second example, Buddhists get called ‘atheists’ a lot, but to me that seems like a (Eurocentric) misunderstanding, since the term ‘atheist’ usually denotes stated disbelief in a Western-style God, which isn’t the same thing as Buddhism at all. So you get things like Western intellectuals jumping on the Buddhists bandwagon and assuming Buddhism is some kind of Eastern version of Western rationalism, when most actual Buddhist teachings would be considered nonsensical (or at least irrational) when considered in the light of Western rationalism. Or, someone who grew up as a Taoist wouldn’t think of themselves as an ‘atheist’, because they wouldn’t be using the Western system of ‘God/Not God’ as a measuring stick. Keep in mind, I’m not trying to start a theological debate here, just saying these terms depend mostly on how certain words are defined.
Yes. I suppose it’s wise not to try to start a theological debate, probably. What you said in the first paragraph is basically what I was trying to say, but, because I was trying to be pithy for once, probably failed to say. After I left my comments last night I was thinking about the example of Japan. No one calls themselves ‘atheist’ in Japan, even though almost no one believes in God. If someone went around saying, “I don’t believe in God”, I think the general response would be, “So what? Your point is?” This is what I find tedious about the likes of Dawkins, Grayling, Hitchens. And, just in case I need to state the obvious here, this is, to a large degree, a matter of personal taste. I would also add to that that I think what they’re doing is extremely counter-productive. But then, I suppose the same could be said of me in many ways.There is so much – as with what you say about Buddhism – that loudly self-proclaiming atheists just don’t seem to get. But maybe this is the point at which I should reiterate something I mentioned above and that I may or may not write an entry on later. My own feelings are that atheism is a kind of block on development – pretty much the same kind of block on development as religion, although you could say that it’s differently coloured or differently shaped and argue the finer points. I haven’t drawn up a manifesto or anything, but I tend to think that it would be better if we could move on from religion, which definitely means moving on from atheism. My reservations on the subject are – I now see – pretty much the same as my reservations about moving on from all sorts of identities, whether they are national, religious or genre identities. I do like the reference points that these various forms of identity provide. I think one of the worst aspects of Japan is a kind of national vacuity, and this is – it seems to me – directly related to the fact that, since almost no one has grown up believing in God, almost no one has had to struggle with the question of whether or not God exists, what life’s all about, etcetera. It just doesn’t come into conversation. What comes into conversation is, oh, I don’t know – “You’re good at using chopsticks for a foreigner, aren’t you?” “Let’s all go and have some sushi”, or, if you’re really lucky, “Yes, the seventeen-syllable structure of the haiku is now deeply ingrained in the Japanese psyche.” But it’s almost as if people are illiterate in ‘the meaning of life’. Now, I’m sure that this can be seen as a fantastic state of affairs, and no doubt it’s kind of what I was arguing for in my previous post about Tanizaki, landscape painting and so on. But certainly in the case of modern Japan, I feel there is a terrible lack of something. It’s not as if daily life is really that deeply informed by Zen or Shinto, rather than, well, rather than shopping. At least the whole debate on whether or not God exists has given us the kind of crowbar tools necessary to attack the vacuity of materialist culture. Is that attack counter-productive, though? Well, maybe this should be handled with care.
“Think I’ll have to read some Darwin, errr – Dawking.”See, I knew I was being counter-productive.Actually, everything I’ve said about Richard Dawkins boils down to jealousy because he married Lalla Ward (I’m presuming it was a civil ceremony). I think he and Tom Baker should have a big fight and settle all theological matters that way.
Think I’ll have to read some Darwin, errr – Dawking.
Thanks for the leads……
Thank you for dropping by.
Justin Isis writes:
“almost no one has had to struggle with the question of whether or not God exists, what life’s all about, etcetera. It just doesn’t come into conversation. What comes into conversation is, oh, I don’t know – “You’re good at using chopsticks for a foreigner, aren’t you?” “Let’s all go and have some sushi”, “I really think that’s the way life probably should be, and we’re in fact actually just insane.Like, I think most people are basically happy and don’t feel troubled by questions about the nature of existence, identity, etc. Most people are just born, imitate everyone around them, and eventually die, all while having normal emotions like “I love my boyfriend,” “I’m sad because my cat died,” “Ice cream tastes delicious,” etc.Also note that Japan doesn’t really have any concept of irony. Western humor is often based on lying and being sarcastic, but Japanese humor is like “That person is unusually fat!” or “She’s jumping up and down in a strange manner!” or “This bowl of curry rice is giant-sized and no one can actually eat it!”
I must say, I didn’t manage to get into it myself. Let me put it this way, inasmuch as people have to talk about God it shows that there is some undigested issue there. Spirituality has not become fully integrated. I realise that ‘spirituality’ is a naff word, too, but I insist on using it, because any word I use to replace it would end up being even more naff. Hmmm. Actually, this is getting complicated, but I’ll try and keep it simple. I do have a notion of a world where “all is god and god is just a word”. I didn’t find that in Japan. It was not my impression that the Japanese are, on the whole, happy. I felt that something had been concreted over. Well, there are lots of issues there, especially with relation to the emperor renouncing his godhood. I think Japan had the potential to be fantastically great as a place where no one had to think about these things because they were deeply integrated, dissolved like sugar in tea, but, somewhere something has gone wrong with that, and, I don’t know, it’s as if something’s been amputated from the national psyche somehow. That’s my impression.
Robin Davies writes:
>Of course it’s none of my business what anyone does or does not >believe – any more than it is the business of Richard Dawkins.>If you’re writing and promoting books such as The God Delusion, >Against All Gods (cue comedy drumroll) and God is Not Great, then >you’re spending a lot of time and energy ‘not playing the piano’.Everyone is free to believe whatever they want to believe. The problem comes when belief systems such as religion become so all-powerful and pervasive that they affect everyone. It leads to the murder of doctors who carry out abortions, Catholics preventing birth control and helping the spread of AIDS, Muslim suicide bombers, the seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East etc etc. The chance of a President Huckabee turning the USA into a theocracy seems to be fading but the possibility was surely a bit worrying! This is why atheists can’t just “shut up”. If a man told you that he had been ordered by Martians to cleanse the earth of anyone with dark hair and was on his way to get a gun, would you just “respect his beliefs”?>I would also add to that that I think what they’re doing is extremely >counter-productive. Actually I’d agree that Dawkins is sometimes too rude and that is certainly counter-productive because it alienates the moderate, mildly religious people who might otherwise have come to agree with him. The fanatics are probably beyond reasonable argument anyway.>Of course, and unfortunately, Dawkins then proceeded to lose my >sympathy at the end by declaring himself the sworn enemy of all >imagination and creativity.Eh? I don’t think he says that at all!>To put it another way, there can be no atheism without religion, and >so I would argue, in a sense, that self-identifying atheists are >actually religious, since they’re merely reacting negatively to the >presence of religion. Sorry, I don’t follow that. I can’t see any way in which atheism can be described as “religious” except perhaps in the extreme case of an atheist who declares that he is 100% certain that there is no God. As Dawkins says in Chapter 2 of The God Delusion, very few atheists are that hardline. He says “Atheists do not have faith. And reason alone could not propel one to total conviction that anything definitely does not exist”.
“Everyone is free to believe whatever they want to believe. The problem comes when belief systems such as religion become so all-powerful and pervasive that they affect everyone. It leads to the murder of doctors who carry out abortions, Catholics preventing birth control and helping the spread of AIDS, Muslim suicide bombers, the seemingly endless conflict in the Middle East etc etc. The chance of a President Huckabee turning the USA into a theocracy seems to be fading but the possibility was surely a bit worrying! This is why atheists can’t just “shut up”. If a man told you that he had been ordered by Martians to cleanse the earth of anyone with dark hair and was on his way to get a gun, would you just ‘respect his beliefs’?”I agree with all of this, actually. I’m not sure how helpful my own attitudes are. I hope they’re helpful to someone, somewhere. Perhaps wrongly, I find it difficult to take religious extremism very seriously. I do take a materialistic view of the world, as advocated by atheists with the support of science, pretty seriously, though, and consider it destructive, which is why I tend to talk about it a lot.Sometimes I think I’m worrying about nothing, but I then I see again things happening in the world that seem the result of materialism, and, well, it seems to me to be an important issue. As much as anything is on this blip of a planet. It should be pretty obvious that I’m not really putting forward any answers right now, if I ever will, but I’m about as convinced as you can be that materialism is a dead end. What do we replace it with? Well, none of the things that we’ve tried so far, anyway. Probably.”Sorry, I don’t follow that. I can’t see any way in which atheism can be described as “religious” except perhaps in the extreme case of an atheist who declares that he is 100% certain that there is no God.”I do agree with what Justin said there, actually, and it’s pretty much what I was trying to say, but didn’t say so well. I do see atheism and monotheism as basically part of the same culture and in that sense both religious. I kind of feel that one reason that atheism was just a sort of phase for me was that I’ve never been to church (well, once or twice in adult life). Atheism vs. monotheism in some ways feels like someone else’s fight to me, (which is why I don’t want to sound like I’m championing one over the other). But I have found myself, in my own life, kind of having to be on one side, because that’s the side most of my friends were on, and in the end, I just got really pissed off with this.All of these things, though, are difficult to pin down. People diverge and converge again in strange ways. I can listen to/read Dawkins and find myself figuratively nodding at what he’s saying and suddenly he says something and a chasm yawns. I wouldn’t like the world to be without critics of religion. Certainly not. I suppose, more than anything, I feel that the most prominent critics of religion tend to attack on a pretty shallow level. And just attack. There doesn’t seem to be much ongoing self-assessment. I mean, if you’re going to call a book Against All Gods, (as Grayling did) it kind of shows that you’ve already dug your trench and settled in for the war.”Eh? I don’t think he says that at all!”To be agnostic about fairies is actually to be ‘afairyist’, is what he says, making Mariella Frostrup’s mind up for her that she doesn’t believe in fairies because that would be very silly. It’s funny he should pick on fairies, as they do seem to represent ‘the imagination’. I just found it incredibly condescending that he would make up someone else’s mind for them right there on the spot.
Justin Isis writes:
“I mean, if you’re going to call a book Against All Gods, (as Grayling did) it kind of shows that you’ve already dug your trench and settled in for the war.”I wonder how many Gods he actually attacks in this? I mean, does he actually take on EVERY GOD IN EXISTENCE as the title seems to imply? How much coverage does he give to Zoroastrianism, for example? I mean, isn’t Ahura-Mazda equally deserving of an ass-kicking as Jesus? I imagine due to the great length this would involve, he just divides the book into a kind of index and then gives brief comments on everything he doesn’t actually have any firsthand experience of. So it’d be like:”AHURA-MAZDA”And then the entry for it is”Is rubbish.”Or:”HINDUISM” :”Uh, there’s some god with an elephant head or something. AND HE ISN’T REAL EITHER!” “THE YEZIDI SECT””They think God is a giant peacock. And that’s just FUCKING STUPID.”Then someone translates the book into Kurdish and sends it to a Yezidi community in northern Iraq. There is a letter attached like”A.C. Grayling is talking shit about Melek Taus. He totally dissed your mystical tradition!”The Yezidi chieftain looks at it and says “…who the fuck is A.C. Grayling? Is he from a neighboring tribe?”
I just remembered the following gapingvoid cartoon:http://www.gapingvoid.com/11444661520.jpgWhile I was Googling that, I also found this:http://gracefulflavor.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/believe-in-god-spray.pngPerhaps they will amuse.Unrelated, but I also liked this:http://www.gapingvoid.com/changethesystem117.jpg“I wonder how many Gods he actually attacks in this?”I think the Hindu pantheon alone runs to millions of gods. In fact, there might just be more gods than there are human beings, and they have added superpowers, so Grayling’s on for a bit of a fight there. You’ve got to admire his balls, anyway, so to speak.
Robin Davies writes:
>To be agnostic about fairies is actually to be ‘afairyist’, is what he says, making Mariella Frostrup’s mind up for her that she doesn’t believe in fairies because that would be very silly. It’s funny he should pick on fairies, as they do seem to represent ‘the imagination’. I just found it incredibly condescending that he would make up someone else’s mind for them right there on the spot.OK, he did jump the gun a bit, but surely there’s a difference between creating and using fairies in a fictional context, and a belief in fairies as real things. I don’t think Dawkins (or most people) would have a problem with the imaginative use of fairies in fantasy stories but his assumption that Frostrup was “afairyist” was probably correct. So am I. Aren’t you?
I wouldn’t call myself ‘afairyist’ for very similar reasons that I no longer called myself ‘atheist’. I mean, a lot of this is ‘smoker who’s given up’ syndrome, so perhaps a bit irritating, but I think there’s other stuff to it, too.I think a kind of determination to believe something just because you want to… Well, I’ve never actually been able to do that anyway. For instance, I did try and fail to convert myself to Christianity many years ago. If only I’d had the spray from that link above then!!! But I suppose I no longer feel like things are either real or not real. This is actually still something I’m trying to articulate to myself, or, if not articulate, then understand or explore. To me personally, fairies are ‘just a symbol’, but that’s because I haven’t invested everything in them. I’m not sure there’s any one place or thing in which I’ve invested everything. When I say ‘everything’, I suppose I mean whatever it is that keeps me alive as a person rather than just a body (and perhaps it’s the same thing). However, I understand the need to invest in something. I think the problem, in the world as it now stands, is choosing the right thing. Perhaps I am actually inclined to agree with Burroughs in his talk about polytheism – jumping from one god to another (one investment to another) – before each one sinks. I’m actually rambling a bit here, but the basic, rather vague point I wanted to make before having dinner (I know, it’s late), was that the point of these things – for instance, fairies – is to be alive in a way. I associate this with the following Burroughs quote:”The way to kill a man or a nation is to cut off his dreams, the way the whites are taking care of the Indians: killing their dreams, their magic, their familiar spirits.”
Actually, you know, the older I get, the more I feel just quite simply drawn to Taoism:http://www.answers.com/topic/zhuang-ziThere's nothing really I don’t like about this. I think it would be silly to call myself a Taoist, though. After all, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao.
Actually, I just thought I’d add something else here while I’m thinking of it.Atheists are my friends. I don’t mean ‘some of my best friends are atheists’. I mean that my friends and acquaintances, the circles in which I move, are, by and large (but not exclusively) atheist (actually, I have noticed a shift here recently, whereby growing numbers of reasonable people are quite rightly renouncing their atheism and becoming indefinable, or even intelligently taking up a particular spiritual path if they wish to). Politically, and in other ways, since I was old enough to really be discriminative in making friends, to flock with ‘birds of a feather’, those friends have tended to be in the atheist camp of camp atheists.However, this, I suppose, represents the ‘becoming independent’ stage in many ways, and certainly for me personally. That is, atheism belongs to that part of my life when the influence of peers was really becoming much stronger than family background.I feel like in many ways I have ‘reverted to’ or whatever phrase you might wish to use, my roots. I was brought up to believe that I was a free-thinker (not a Christian, or an atheist, or a Buddhist or whatever). Now, you can, of course, question whether there really is such thing as a free-thinker (perhaps you are free to do so?), but I’d rather have been brought up that way than any other of the ways mentioned. I was never made to go to church. I had an intense Bible-reading phase between the ages of about ten and thirteen that just happened and no one forced on me. I didn’t think of myself as ‘Christian’ though. I have never been a member of any church or religious group. Haven’t been baptised or anything. Good.Anyway, so, atheists have been my peer group, but not my roots, really, and I suppose I’ve felt some conflict there. I think atheism is an incredibly English thing, and my lack of ultimate harmony with it has been one symptom on an underlying un-Englishness in me. But, since atheists have been my peer group, I certainly feel more inclined to talk about and to them here than most other ‘groups’. A note of hostility, however, does creep into what I’m saying because I see atheism as carrying, in spirit, some of the evils of religion to their conclusion – these being the materialistic attitudes that allow us to treat living humans as so much experimentation-fodder, and to treat living things generally as dead things and thereby fuck up the whole planet.I know very well that atheists are able – for instance – to complain about music that has no soul, or that kind of thing (and probably believe they are being figurative). I don’t believe this is figurative at all. It seems to me that it is precisely the materialism advocated by atheists that is creating a world with no soul. Naturally I want to speak out about it. I suppose I don’t really believe that atheists are atheist. If they are on the side of ‘the soul’, then they can’t be. Some people do become very thorough in their thinking about this, though, and, if they are thorough, either reject materialism, or embrace it in ways that I find to be destructive and evil.I wonder if that makes my position any clearer.
Robin Davies writes:I don’t see a contradiction in atheists or materialists talking about “soul” in the context of music. It’s an aesthetic/emotional concept like “beauty” or “horror”. It doesn’t necessarily imply anything paranormal, supernatural or mystical. A materialist would see “love” as a deeply complex mixture of emotional responses, some with biological origins and some with cultural ones; whereas someone of a more mystical or “spiritual” outlook might regard it as something fundamentally beyond analysis. Both feel the same thing, probably with the same intensity but would interpret it in different ways.
Yes, and perhaps – I don’t know – the two sides never quite meet. I’m reminded of a remark made by Momus in a now lost interview I did with him right about the time I started this blog. It was to do with the Isabel Huppert (not sure I’ve spelt that right) quote that “those who think that body and soul are separate have neither”, or some such thing. I thought that was a pretty great quote, but Momus interpreted (perhaps correctly) her intentions as being an attempt to collapse the binary so that only body remains. Why come down on the side of body? This seems to me to be a cryptic dualism. This kind of materialism is all the based on the cryptic dualism that God was exiled to outside of his creation because he was too holy for us sinners, so we were left with a machine. Then a lot of people started saying that the absent god didn’t exist at all, there was only the machine. It’s still dualism, even if it’s saying “there’s only the machine”. I recognise my own bias in this. When I attempt to collapse the binary, I suppose I’m more inclined to want it to collapse into ‘spirit’ or something like that. But, the thing is, they’re not really different. I just find materialism to be a little too frozen into this kind of cryptic binary. I don’t think I’m quite that frozen myself. I don’t know. Maybe I am. I shall have to examine my navel and find out.
I have actually read some of Against All Gods. I didn’t read the whole thing because what I did read I found to be irritating. Since writing this entry I’ve had a bit of resolution on these issues and no longer care as much about them. This came about largely after Justin Isis started a thread on the Richard Dawkins message boards called, “The Cell Theory of Organic Life is a Hoax”, and I joined him to put the case for immaterialism and uncertainty, and found that the majority of people their were rabidly narrow-minded beyond my expectations, to the extent tha I received a ‘poison pen’ private message from one of them, and so on. It was then that I realised I was basically right. There is a great deal of shrivelled and sinister narrow-mindedness in atheism, as championed by the likes of Dawkins, but there’s no reason for me to go and seek it out and interfere with it. There’s also a lot of tedious, adolescent well-meaning-ness, and other attitudes.I don’t have a religion, but I would no longer refer to myself as atheist, because that just seems to be a way to stop thinking and close your mind. I wouldn’t refer to myself as a naturalist, either. That passage of Grayling’s that you quoted appears to me very badly thought-out. Does he even know what a goblin or a fairy is? Does he even know what supernatural is? Why does he assume that one kind of thing that he’s never encountered (a fairy), belongs to some group of other things he doesn’t believe in (the supernatural)? His list is completely arbitrary. Basically, he’s just another rational idiot spouting unexamined prejudices.
What I find extraordinary is that it seems that none of the above correspondents have actually read “Against all gods”. Neither have I, I’m afraid – I only learnt about it today. But I did read in a revew the following quote from the book:”As it happens, no atheist should call himself or herself one. The term already sells a pass to theists, because it invites debate on their ground. A more appropriate term is ‘naturalist’, denoting one who takes it that the universe is a natural realm, governed by nature’s laws. This properly implies that there is nothing supernatural in the universe – no fairies or goblins, angels, demons, gods or goddesses. Such might as well call themselves ‘a-fairyists’ or ‘a-goblinists’ as ‘atheists’; it would be every bit as meaningful or meaningless to do so. “Whoever said “If atheism is a religion, then not playing the piano is a hobby” was making precisely the same point – that it is meaningless for atheists to call themselves atheists any more than a-little-pink-elephants-ist