Atheist nerds, geeks and jocks
Offline A typical high school cafeteria is the classic population sample wherein tribal affiliations and distinctions are most prominent. It is unclear to me when the social aspect of our brains instinctively gravitates to different groups. The nerds/geeks sit with nerd/geeks, jocks with jocks, goths with goths, sexy popular girls with sexy girls, etc.. Often there is an overlap among groups yet the nerds and geeks are always a group unto themselves. It is this group from which I came from who always put studying above anything else, enjoyed science, physically unfit, introverted, never groomed and did not get laid ie. the sterotypical geek. It was unthinkable of me to traverse borders from the geek table to the jock table. How relevant is religion and spirituality in this mileu. As a cultural force, I bet even amongst teens, religion is likely the most dominant in shaping one's social identity.
When I read posts from the folks whom I presume are atheist jocks and extremely hot women on this site, I wonder which tables they sat at in high school. And I bet atheist geeks like me would have found common ground among them because of shared outlooks on life and dared to engage in conversations with them. And I wonder what the atheist table would've looked like if it existed.
- Login to post comments
The divisions sadly reveal a human flaw. It was the same in the 60's. I was a rather lucky and hung at all the tables. I was a gymnast nerd party guy, with the longest hair. The coach would make fun of my hair but I would just laugh. He never would quite buddy up with me, but I was a team asset, and loved them bars, chains, and rope. Record rope climber I was. My elective classes were electronics.
I quit school after 10th grade, worked and partied, and returned to school (junior college) at age 19 full time for 5 semesters, avoiding Vietnam. College was the first time ethics had been mentioned to me in school. I loved it.
I think teaching basic agreed ethics starting grade 1 , would deeply improve the near future of most any nation.
Focus on the kids, and give them what they want and need. Fix the schools.
Atheism Books.
Ha ha! That's a good one.
Atheist table in high school? Surely you jest
I sat at all the tables. Not all at once, of course, why that would make me god.
Seriously though, played lots of sports so I sat with jocks.
Was in several science related clubs so sat with the brains (geeks)
And from time to time would even sit with the burn-outs, which I don't think you mentioned. You know, the druggies and dopers and drunks. At my school, they partied more than any bunch of college frat boys from all those overrated hollywood college flicks....
Oh and out of a graduating class of 600+ we didn't have a single goth. Think maybe there were a couple in the frosh class.
And I didn't need a reason on any particular day to sit with any particular group.
I take great pride in that part of my high school.
I was 17 or 18 when I first began to consider myself an atheist (as opposed to an agnostic), and the table I sat at (The "Punk Rock Corner" was the kind of place where punks, goths, art freaks, intellectuals and others actually did discuss things like the question of the existence of a higher power.
“It is true that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. It is equally true that in the land of the blind, the two-eyed man is an enemy of the state, the people, and domestic tranquility… and necessarily so. Someone has to rearrange the furniture.”
You totally forgot the pot smoking hippies group. At least they occasionally got the hot stoner chick to sit at their table.
Your god's silence speaks loud and clear
I sat with the Punk rocker table as well, it was also the nerds table and the Gamer table. There wasn't a druggie table due to the fact that nearly 65-75% of the class did some kind of drug or drank. I never went to any of the parties that my classmates held, due to being an outcast...Uhhh and about your comment about there being non-religious, i had no problem speaking out in classes whenever religion came up and i know that other than my group of friends there weren't any others due to the fact that i would get confronted in the hallways about my twisted view as one jock put it... Now some of my teachers on the other hand were sorta leaning toward the agnostic Atheist side. Hell one of them argued with nearly the entire class when he made slip a comment about how the catholic Church was founded by idiots. LMAO
Since I went to an extremley small christian school, there weren't any 'table divisions' and definetely no atheist table.
As for labels, I was a bit of everything. I hated sports and was considered the class genius, but I was pretty outgoing and social. I got into metal towards the end of my school days..I was also the only kid to ride a motorbike to school and kinda started the chess club. So ya, abit of everything.
Psalm 14:1 "the fool hath said in his heart there is a God"-From a 1763 misprinted edition of the bible
Argument from Sadism: Theist presents argument in a wall of text with no punctuation and wrong spelling. Atheist cannot read and is forced to concede.
i forgot to mention but us punk rockers were also the metalheads, I found it to be quite ironic that only about 15 of us liked either punk or metal, the rest of the class either liked country music or pop...
Yes, I was being somewhat facetious about the "atheist" table. My point was that if you are a freethinker it shouldn't really matter if you're a nerd, goth, geek, jock, etc.. A spark of rationalism among youth is IMO a giant leap in maturity that ought to build bridges among disparate groups. At least that's what I think. The trouble with nerds and geeks is a sense of elitism that alienates them from others. Yet if they recognize that the stoner who may not be excelling in Calculus has a similar atheist world view shouldn't that create friendships? I always had a disdain for the non-nerd crowd by mistakenly assuming that the gorgeous cheerleader was a vapid airhead who unquestioningly worshipped Jesus and thought that the earth was flat. This is not true whatsoever and my character likely cost me friendships. It is false that only the nerds have a rational view of the world and BTW, the majority of nerds and geeks are religious (at least they were at my high school). Just look at this website. It is co-run by a gorgeous, intelligent, atheist, freethinking stripper. That just blows my mind!!!!! It demolishes stereotypes which I long held especially in high school. It is absolutely fantastic that there are strippers, porn stars, punk rockers, goths, jocks, etc.. who have a rationalist scientific worldview. I wish I had known that in my ignorant youth.
I actually seriously doubt whether the 'typical' high school cafeteria you describe even exists in reality or if it is confined to teen television and movie dramas.
One question, though, what table d'you think I sat at?
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
Well I'm geek, but I'm always trying to get the sexy girls to sit on my lap. They always want at least $20 to do so. So talk to them about being more friendly (and less expensive).
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
You'd have likely been at the cool table.
I ate in the chapel.
I was pretty much a dork BTW.
I usually was by myself or with a couple other people.
In fact, I tried my best not to be in the cafeteria at all... everyone did, it sat a quarter of the school or less and was in the basement. When I was, I was with my close friends who were a mix of people from preps to wankers. I usually lunched at my house or in a hallway, again with my friends. Many of us lived within walking distance of the school. I suppose every 'table' was 'cool'. I guess I was a nerd in high school, but it's hard to say. I wasn't anti-social (only, to an extent, socially retarded), I was flamboyantly gay (having come out in grade 9) and I was in vocal arts as well as the academic programme (so were most people).
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
As I read the comments of you guys, I recall that I was rather in hell or purgatory, than on a high school. School cafeterias? Philosophic discussions? Religional discussions? Girls? Freethinkers? Fellow geeks and nerds? Long hair? Groups at tables?
What the heck???
Actually, I think I saw a glimpse or two of some of these mentioned things during my hi-school years, but only after an intense searching. Purgatory, exactly. I had to learn how to control myself better and how to deal with others' irrationality and agressivity. Yeah, some people actually learns something useful on a high school. But for these things it's too late. As I.A.G. A.Y. says, and he's very right in that, ethics should be taught in first classes. Otherwise we will have shooting at schools, murders or attempts for it, and it is generally not a totally fault of the murderer. This is why I avoid to make fun of anyone, I can imagine how wrong it all can go.
As for the society, in class we had a "healthy core", who were metal or d'n'b listeners, motorbikers, alcoholics, smokers, stoners, shroomers, sportsmen, ganja farmers, and who all the days did nothing but discussed nights of going from a pub to pub, and 'cunts'.
There was a few of more intelligent guys among them (like one or two math or sudoku champions) but most of them were painfully stupid... How else I would describe guys, who all the day talked about nothing else than pubs? This is an origin of the word of 'puberty'.
The rest of class were mostly shy guys with flabby attitude and no hobbies, unable of forming any group, like the 'healthy core' would suck away all their energy. OK, I had a few friends not exactly from these groups. But to be my friend IRL, there must be something special about you, empathy, intelligence, wisdom perhaps, otherwise you won't see who I am behind that nerdy mug, and maybe you'd need to have something in common with at least some of my quite exotic hobbies. (exotic, compared to repeated pub exploration) Only a few of guys met that criteria, others were faaaaar beyond.
Yeah, and did I mention any girls? There were none in class and almost none at school. Any school social life? Nope, maybe a five or ten minutes dedicated to moving from a class to class through crowded corridors, or a moment of truce with cigarettes.
This is why I don't hesitate to meet everyone, no matter if atheist, agnostic, theist of any faith, or even a fundie, if I have a mood for that. Any people other than permanent pub-dwellers of male gender are very valuable to me. Submarine illness ravaged my sanity for too long. According to my priorities, most interesting would be a communication in person, with a female, hot, english-speaking foreigner of significant philosophy or non-chaste religion, in a pub or a tearoom with water pipe. This is some of what I want to do abroad in free time
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I was at the popular table.
I was like the least popular kid in the entire school.
I just sat at whatever table. Being an Aspie (though not knowing it at the time since Dr. Asperger was only just then defining the syndrome) I was blissfully unaware of cliques and other social strata and just struck up conversations with whoever was nearby. It worked out pretty well, really.
The conversations that most fascinated me were the ones where folks were busy complaining about others. I'd keep asking about motive and why it mattered so much. It was amazing to me that they really didn't know, and how often it turned out that there wasn't really any worthwhile reason to be annoyed with someone or concerned about what they were doing or thinking.
Come to think about it, high school was what got me interested in behavioral psychology.
Anyway: This was a Catholic high school, so it's not much of a sample of how religion did or didn't shape individual identity. Folks did all the churchie stuff because that's the way it was. I don't recall any conversation about the veracity of it all. I'd already come to the conclusion that it was all on par with Santa Claus two years prior, and being comfortable with that it never occurred to me to bring it up.
Although, two of the people I attended school with I know now are also atheists. They both got into social work and I ended up working with them indirectly. A few lunch conversations turned to religion. I wonder how many others deconverted...
"Anyone can repress a woman, but you need 'dictated' scriptures to feel you're really right in repressing her. In the same way, homophobes thrive everywhere. But you must feel you've got scripture on your side to come up with the tedious 'Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve' style arguments instead of just recognising that some people are different." - Douglas Murray
Australian schools don't generally have cafeterias (over here they're called a tuckshop and it's basically just a countertop food selling outlet administrated by school and volunteer employees) but we had clique territories when I was in high school which were distinct sections of the outdoor area. There was usually one sports field left open to the students at breaks so naturally the jocks congregated there with footballs, the more secluded areas were usually claimed by the nerdy geeky types and the rebels, the popular crowd would gather in the schools central byways, several reasons for that come to mind now I think of it...
As for me, I was a loner and a drifter due to my complete lack of enthusiasm for social activity, I just didn't make any effort to make friends and had long since stopped caring whether I had them. Usually someone would make the effort to befriend me and I would end up hanging with the group they chose to associate themselves with. I spent most of my early high school years in geek girl groups and later found myself more comfortable with the rebellious types. Before high school I spent almost my entire collective school lunch break period in the library, alone, I was happy that way.
Theist badge qualifier : Gnostic/Philosophical Panentheist
www.mathematicianspictures.com
With an old friend from high school, we had the rockers (metalheads/punks), the jocks, the blacks, the east asians, the geeks/nerds, the cool clique (which was a mixture of jocks, hot chicks and just the popular kids), the drama kids, music geeks (which in our area included the hip hop/rappers as well), the druggies (which naturally supplied it for the rest) and then us, we were neither popular enough nor geeky enough (although we were the only ones to play D&D at school, go fig) what united the last group was our distain towards the rest of the groups, we never hanged around with the rest of them after school (except for one party in 1994 and I was glad to say I brought over 60 people alone to it
). We had figured out early into high school how it all worked, and it was simply, you start on the bottom (say grade one) then worked up to top dog at grade 5 (depending if there was a middle school, here there was) then back to the bottom at 6th grade, then back up top at 8th grade, then back down at grade 9 till top at grade 12, or OAC if you stayed for an extra year back in the day (anyone in ontario know if this is still around?) then off to college where your basically a nobody no matter how popular you were in high school where the rest of the world doesn't give a shit for you accomplishments up to that point.
My group at the time consisted of the following, an italian photographer, a boarderline genius (may he R.I.P., he became schizod), a computer geek (hacked into american express, visa and mastercard at age 16.....before the whole internet phenomena, who now works for the government) a lesbian, a DJ, a car mechanic, a rich kid, two hot chicks, a male model, and myself (the master of disaster, you needed a dirty deed done you came to me
, I was such a bastard). But we never went to high school parties, did anything in regards to high school functions (unless it got us out of class). We went to other high school parties, we went to all ages clubs (ok until we hit 19 which was the last year of high school) and later 3 of us guys worked the club circuit being able to get VIP passes, line bypass and free entrances. However we knew it was what we did after high school that matters, not what you did during it, which is why we didn't give a shit for those other cliques or those people so self absorbed about thier achievements in high school.
(Edit: forgot the guy i was speaking with as well, one a wrestler and wide receiver on the football team)
I was in the miscellaneous group. For reals.
and ETC is my favorite word
Our high school had a class level above 'advanced' called 'enriched', largely for those who had been deemed 'gifted' in grade school. Anyone could enrol in an enriched class, but it was a bit more challenging, so mostly it catered to gifted kids. Of the gifted group, which might generally be considered nerdy in the first place, I fit into the anti-social rejects (nerds or geeks) group. So I sat at the geeky nerd table, as distinct from the popular nerds, jock nerds, underacheiver nerds, and music nerds. Then there were all the other non-nerd tables, as usual. The geeky nerds did math competitions, trivia club (Reach for the Top), paper and dice role-playing, and hung out in the computer lab after school. Of the geeky nerds, I was the science geek, so I got top score on the science competitions. I also hacked the school computer network, but that's another story.
As for social mobility, I was firmly stuck in the geeky nerdy group. When I started to get into alternative and industrial music, I remember some of the popular/jock nerdy types saying, "I had no idea you were into this kind of stuff." It took going to university in another city to start breaking out of that socially-reinforced mold.
As far as atheism at my school. It was generally considered impolite to criticize (or even discuss!) someone else's religion. So I pretty much had to keep it to myself. Ironically, one of my best geeky nerdy friends was a fundamentalist, though thankfully the non-evangelical, keep-it-to-yourself kind. We decided for the sake of our friendship to just not discuss religion, although the few times we did, he had no problems just saying "Well, I just believe it on faith." For a fundy, he was incredibly smart, especially in math and computers. I wonder if he's still a fundy.
Another guy was more vocal about it, and I remember pinning him down on biblical contradictions, and then someone who overheard us talking came in and basically said I was rude for challenging his beliefs. One of those don't-challenge-religion moderates.
I used to feel very inhibited, like I had to keep my real self locked up and silent. Like there was something socially embarassing about being an atheist; don't let anyone know you're an atheist, or they'll shun you kind of thing. It was partially true, many would shun you, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have handled it totally differently; I would have been much more vocal and stand up for myself. That's a big reason why I'm in support of RRS. I wish RRS had been around when I was in high school. Maybe I would have started up an RRS club in my school.
Wonderist on Facebook — Support the idea of wonderism by 'liking' the Wonderism page — or join the open Wonderism group to take part in the discussion!
Gnu Atheism Facebook group — All gnu-friendly RRS members welcome (including Luminon!) — Try something gnu!
My high school had fairly similar groups to those already described. I was pretty much a loner my first couple of years of high school. Due to a quirk of geography and bus routes, most of my friends from middle school and earlier wound up in the popular/jock group, while I did not (even though I played sports three out of four years). My third year in high school, I fell in with the theater crowd, which worked out well for me. I was no performer, but I got into the technical/stagecraft end of things.
I've been out of high school for over 15 years, and I've been to the 10-year and 15-year reunions. And I have to say that the vast majority of the people who were in the popular/jock crowd (who coincidentally consumed most of the drugs, alcohol and tobacco products during our high school years) now look like complete shit. Meanwhile, I and my geeky/theater cohorts are looking pretty good.
So, the moral of the story is - take care of yourself, ignore the assholes, and see who comes out ahead 15 years down the road.
Nobody I know was brainwashed into being an atheist.
Why Believe?
Speed Kills ... so sad ... maybe the worse poison of all.
For the longest time I regarded the high school cliques to be product of hardwiring biasing each individual to a specific group. And yet upon migrating to college the stereotypes seem to break down. They are, as you mentioned, socially enforced. But why does it have to be this way!!!!
The cliques seem to be "burqua" (for lack of a better metaphor) veiling what people are really like. People seem to show their true forms as they enter adulthood. I recently went to a Roger Waters concert (former lead singer of Pink Floyd) and I was surrounded by friends who were geeks, nerds, jocks, etc.. in high school. And yet we were all listening to an atheist artist singing the The Dark Side of the Moon.
I was kind of a hybrid, in that I played in a few rock bands (so I hung out with musicians)...and I also played on the Baseball & Football team ( had some jock friends)... Always liked the nerds because they weren't assholes, and once they came out of their shells they were almost always really funny...
I always *HATED* bullies... and still do till' this day.
www.RichWoodsBlog.com
..i always went across the street to a little laundry mat that had vending machines. i would just hang out there or walk around with the other art/music/skater nerds. once in a while i would drive off campus and get fast food with a couple other kids. i was an atheist from about 7th grade on, but it was Kansas in the 80s and i didn't know a single other person that had the same point of view.
www.derekneibarger.com http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=djneibarger "all postures of submission and surrender should be part of our prehistory." -christopher hitchens
Things were slightly different here. Jocks barely exist as a group in this country for a start. The split was Scallies and Moshers (although these groups don't exist anymore due to changes in fashion). Scallies were guys who listened to pop or rap, wore sports clothes and tried to act as confrontationally as possible with a "street" attitude. Moshers were the rock/alternative group, at the time primarily influenced by awful pop punk from across the pond, but also any rock or alternative music as well as a few goths. People could be geeks in that group fairly openly although not all of them were. People could be good at sport on either side of the divide. I on the other hand due to my lack of social skills or wit spent most of my time hanging out with a group of social retards, some of which were geeky, others who were just dumb, but who hung out together because there was no one else. It wasn't till I got to college (also known as sixth form, a pre-cursor to University or what you'd call college) that I could shine and become friends with a sociable group of people who were intelligent, geeky but popular. These guys are still my closest friends today, although the girl I was seeing isn't.
Atheist Books
And from what I've been reading now, this has evolved into a three-way fight between the chavs (is this what the scallies morphed into?), the emos and the goths (perhaps some sort of speciation event given a musical as opposed to geographical separation), who each hate the other two groups.
--
maybe if this sig is witty, someone will love me.
It seems most young people form a fourth group of trendy indie-kids. I think though that past about the age of 18 these things matter less. I'd say I'm a fan of indie, but not the unoriginal retro-shit that is being continually pumped out of the sewage works that is popular music at the moment. I don't identify greatly with that group at all.
Atheist Books