The Consternation of an Apoplectic Spirit

The Unbelievability of Believers

2010-08-16T18:04:00.000-07:00

Being the member of an organization that is responsible for a recent decision of a federal court declaring the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional, I get the organization’s monthly newsletter. Usually full of news about this or that court process or essays by members on such topics as atheists in foxholes and the efficacy of prayer in treating disease, the newspaper, Freethought Today always has a section called the “Black Collar Crime Blotter,” which lists the news items sent in by members from local newspaper reports on crimes among the religious and believing oligarchy.
Back when I was not retired, I’d sit down to lunch and read from the black collar crime section, sometimes out loud to my workmates. The conversations that came from these moments were often quite exciting. It’s always good to be around open, functional minds and the interesting people who use them.
But no matter what we said or thought about the individual reports and their legal consequences to the oligarchy or its victims, we were all in agreement about the contents of reports.

Plain & simple: You couldn’t make this shit up.

You couldn’t imagine what would drive a member of the clergy to try nude bible studies in a hot tub (Tulsa World, 6-12-2010) or an 59-year-old-man thinking he could “marry” his ten-year-old niece at Yellowstone National Park and then, upon his return home, spend alternating nights with his “real” wife and his “new” wife. Or that the child’s mother would go along with this nonsense (Minneapolis Star Tribune, 7-1-2010). Or that an 83-year-old man, a retired pastor and volunteer chaplain to the local police force, would sexually abuse a young girl in his home over an extended period of time (St. Cloud Times, 7-9-2010).

You couldn’t make this shit up.

At which point all of this goes into my silly human tricks folder, where I keep things like a Mormon losing his faith and becoming a Moslim, if only ’cause the polygamy laws are a little more widely accepted in the latter delusion than in the former.
Shit you can’t make up.
All of which also goes to my snicker & headslap of incredulence that people – ordinary homo sapiens modernis like you and me – would think that they could actually get away with some of this shit.
Scamming money off of folks in the Habitat for Humanity deal while at the same time stealing money from their church. As in the church within which they have some position of trust (Birmingham, NY Press & Sun-Bulletin, 6-25-2010).
Some of these things are truly stupid moves. Others, because of the defense the perp mounts to prove or mollify his or her guilt, are absolutely barbaric. Like back to the ridge with the geladas. Or back to the grade school class room after pinching little Molly Beans on the neck repeatedly during the math quiz. Stupid shit like that, well, maybe you could dream it up but you’d rather not. At least if you’re normal and have a sense of your own responsibility, culpability or shame.
But not so the guy who gained the trust of a thirteen-year-old girl by way of his position in the church and then subsequently molested her in the rectory. In his home.
This jewel of humanity went to court claiming that he was “overcome by the demon of lust” and claimed that the girl was “in heat” and “asking for it” when he did it.
“It weren’t me judge! It were the devil’s hand on me what did it! And besides, look at her judge! She’s in heat. You can see it in her eyes. You can smell it all around her! Holy Lord Frank Almighty, yer honor! She was askin’ for it!”
Reminds me of a South Park episode or something.
“She’s askin’ for it rat naw, judge! Look!”
Yeah right.
“She’s beggin’ for it! You can smell it!”
I can see William Burroughs, with a sneer of glee, or Harlan Ellison coming up with the scene:

Female musk fills the courtroom. The men rip down their draws and start pounding their johnsons. There’s heavy breathing, the sound of flesh slapping flesh. Soon the breathing becomes cries and shrieks of lust. The monkeys all go off at once, impregnating the statue of justice on the spot. The eagle squirts all over itself.

Talk about stupid human tricks. These morons have every defense. They can make it up as they go along, the devil this and the victim’s oppressive attractiveness crawling up their leg like some kind of science-fiction infection, ready to turn everyday moron males into slobbering, drooling hounds, rutting along the ground for the scent of a female in heat. Askin’ for it, even.

In truth, it’s disgusting. Barbaric. But you have to remember, as the third chimp line on this green planet of the clocks, we ain’t that far from the other guys and their other relatives. Rape, plunder, piracy, slavery, misogynous & pedophilic practices such as these religious types get into is no different from the same crap – all of it from rape through pedophilia – that muslim mullah, ayatollahs and imams say is just fine.
It’s in the Qur’an and the hadith. It’s cool. Go for it.
In the end I see it all as a simple truth of governing.
Religion and religious preacherant spew this crap left and right, makes no difference at all who’s god this time or in that place. You’ll always be forgiven by the divine hand if you repent or, as in the case of Mohammedanism, find a passage in scripture that lets you off the hook.
And man, there’s a ton of folks do this and then repent and figure they’re good to go.
I’m saved. I’m forgiven. No matter what I do in my minute-to-minute day of life, I will be forgiven if I ain’t already.
And therein lies my own particular bitter attitude toward all these miscreants: they start out above the law in their minds, working in the hand of the divine and thus part of some imagined realm of what’s right and what’s wrong, and they prey on every sucker, born again or otherwise. They assign themselves the role of aide, guide or spirit friend and they pick their next victim. Whether it’s conning you into believing that, once you snuff it, there’s something waiting on the other side of that last breath. They promise you that what comes next will be better than what comes in the here and now. And then they promise you that it won’t hurt.
See, that’s the deal on all this: it won’t hurt.
Right. Ask the little kid got buggered by Faitharr O’Cleeary how that works. Ask the kid, like me, who got back handed by Sister Merry Discipline of the nuns of Our Lady of Fishy Gains.
Go on. Ask!
It was frickin’ ugly, actually. It set a mode in my head that allowed for my own delusional rescue. Jesus didn’t save me. Robots did. I couldn’t understand how a woman – ostensibly the wife of Jesus – would be so cruel as to abuse every single one of us in the second grade. No human, in my mind, could do what that nun did. Only a robot sent from hell would be so inhumane.
Yeah, that’s the start of it.
Over time it came to me that this nasty shit was part of the package. At some point or the other you have to let your mind say “Oh, that was just one. You can’t judge the barrel by one apple.” Except that you find ’em everywhere.
Kinda like Chickenman.
And it’s this omnipresence of the mindset of conning the dim and worried that there’s something better than here and now and it will only cost you your life and a fair amount of your cash to keep the con man working just for you.
As if the divine hand works for you (almost alone) special and if you shake the hand of the god con man as he greets you at the border.
Why?
’Cause he said so.
He’s a friggin’ oligarch, man! One of the self-selecting few! Jebus, you can’t see that? Ok, then can you feel this . . . ?
Like the guy who was spending an overnighter with a family. Got up in the middle of the night and went to unzip a seventeen-year-old kid’s jammies so as to fondle the kid. The kid woke up. The rest is in the Camden, NJ Camden Courier-Post of June 13, 2010.
Or the suit lodged against the Salesian Society, St. John Bosco High School and the Vatican (Oh, no! Not the Vatican!) by a guy who was abused by Fr. Titian Miani when the rev was dean of students at the high school. (I always wondered about St. John Bosco, mainly ’cause I was into Bosco, the drink, but not Bosco the saint.) All this recorded in the pages of the January 7, 2010 edition of the Los Angelese Times.

So here I sit on vacation, shaking my head as I read the stuff in the black crime blotter, thinking how lucky I must be to (a) have survived that shit (a couple times, as I remember good enough) and (b) I still have enough sense to look at it and realize that it’s mostly stupid monkey tricks pulled by a monkey supposedly in some fashion aware of its own awareness.
Which is a lot more than I can say for any putative divine being.

Another Divine Oopsie

2010-06-15T06:12:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite bits about disbelief is the question of "acts of god." You know: the divine hand works in strange ways, its wonders to perform. Like Norwegian stave churches being hit by lightning. Or churches swept away by tornadoes or hurricanes. Or arsonists setting fire to churches filled with little black chillin'. All that.
The bad shit comes down and the divine being, even as omniscient and omnipotent as it is, does zilch to prevent the conflagration or destruction or death.
With Norwegian stave churches, you have this weather pattern problem. Like Norway is far enough north to assure that the wonders of auroral displays being more frequent than thunderstorms with concomitant lightning. Something about air pressure & off angles of solar heating. So here you are in Norway and ZAP! A stave church, built somewhen in the 1400s or 1500s gets hit by lightning and burns to the ground, destroying the center of worship to the divine hand supposedly in control of the lightning bolts. Gone.
ZAP!
As is usual after such events, the believing will say that the destruction is a test of their faith.
Yeah, right. An omniscient god, a being transcending time and space, a being supposedly knowing all that is, was or will be, wants to test the faith of those about whom the divine knows everything.
I don't get that.
How does a being knowing past, present and future, complete and inerrant of every person on the planet, need to "test" the faith of believers about which god knows everything?
If god knows everything and every thought of every person on the planet, wouldn't it know beforehand who is weak in faith and who is strong?
ZAP!
Same-same with churches blown down by tornadoes (as has happened around here frequent enough) or churches full of worshipers set to fire by racist bigots. Since when is all that a test of faith? Since god wasn't sure about what it knew? Since god forgot about what it knew?
An omnipotent, omniscient being forgets? Ain't sure? Has a weakness of mind leaving it in doubt?
Don't make no sense to me, yo.

ZAP!

So here we go, get up Tuesday morning after a night of rains and storming, only to discover that the famous "Touch Down Jesus" along the roadway to Cincinnati, Ohio, had been struck by lightning overnight. And burned to the ground, leaving behind only the inner metal framework of the "statue" supplicant to heaven.

ZAP!

But even more mystifying is how this particular piece of amorphous, slightly tetched piece of Midwest semi-demi-PostModernist art is part of the grounds of one of those mega churches. The kind with a couple thousand tithing congregants with, I can only guess 'cause I've only read about such stuff, a Starbucks or some such franchise inside the "community center," not to mention other perks to participants in the weekly divine tuchus-licking.
You know: monster church, two deck parking lot, somebody's always got something going on inside, fancy audio system with flat screen TVs about the place so you don't miss a syllable of the divine word being interpreted for the weak-minded by Reverend Pastor O'Seanessysteinovitch & his pretty wife (with too much make-up) of sixteen years. One of them places.
Which might make it possible to say that this was a truly righteous "act of God."

ZAP!

By way of this thinking, it might be possible for the divine hand -- if it exists at all in any truly participatory sense in the universe -- to have decided that blotting the church's choice of lawn decoration might have been a justifiable act of the divine will.
The place makes enough money to spend it on a butter-colored piece of tripe containing damn near every symbolic metaphor of the faith. (And no, I ain't going into how present time Christianity is an accretion of even older saviour/hero myths.)
There's a freakin' cooling pond out front, from which the Lamb o' God does beseech heaven for release.
From the pond.
And even if there ain't a Starbucks inside, it's still pretty nuts, all that money spent on flash and glitter.
Kinda like the buskers in Seattle makin' enough money in donations to afford an iPod and a nice suit.
Maybe -- just maybe -- the divine hand dealt this hand to the church to tell 'em to straighten up and go back to Christian humility and caring for the sick and poor and homeless. Like they should in Seattle or Portland, but that's another rant.
Or, on the other hand, the burning down of the butter Jesus is just another in the millions of lightning strikes occurring around the planet any day, 'cept this one went for the statue, which turns the statue and the church into metaphors by way of interpretation of ancient blathering scripture from the mouth of some guy don't want to miss out on a dime of tithing from his congregation of the multitudes.
More 'n likely that, at least to me.

Which brings me then, as it always does, to the question of why people will believe myths going back to the early Pliocene if not earlier and have no sense of even grasping the base-band basics of, say, genetic theory or evolution or even the physics of lightning strikes.
"My church got hit by lightnin'! Oh Lord, what is it that you're trying to tell me?"
"My church's statue of the Lamb of God got set on fire by latnin'! It is a test of faith! Praise!"
Yeah, a test of faith.
A test of faith in the simple laws of physics involved in lightning being a charge between earth and sky, which charge must be dissipated, usually through the highest standing local structure capable of handling the extremes of voltage and current. Like the metal support structure for all that exterior claptrap of a white man's version of a supposedly Middle Eastern holy figure, metaphor or not?
A test of faith in the guy who designed the framework?
A test of the volatility of the materials used in making the statue?
A test of simple lightning strike phenomenology?
Noooo!
"It's a goddamn test of faith, you disbelieving pile of evil white shit! Goddammit! Get down on your knees and pray it don't happen to you, scumbag of Satan and god-hatin' sinner!"

ZAP!

So the old "Butter Jesus" is now gone up in smoke. A burnt offering, you might say, to the lord of creation, a lord which took the time out of its busy eternal day to smite a piece of metal and whatever that offended its divine aesthetic.
One of those rare moments when the divine anger was directly dealt, as opposed to those all too frequent moments when the worshipers of the divine take it upon themselves to smite the heathen disbelievers & others who would insult the faith.

ZAP!

Kinda like that extra brush we had layin' around the yard what we burned up a couple weeks back. 'Cept for us there weren't no god in it.
It was instead a burnt offering onto the sky. A wisp of smoke & pollution onto the neighborhood. A tendril of "stay the hell away" to the moths and mosquitoes and flies.
Sure. Lightning Strike Jesus was test of faith. The thunder must have been awesome!

ZAP! . . . . . .
It has come to my attention, by way of the quickness of a friend, that the Lightnin' Strike Jesus statue cost the church in question $500,000. Half a million freakin' dollars! Enough to build at least two schools in Haiti. Enough to feed a whole island in the Pacific for days if not months! And they say now that they're going to rebuild it! What kind of flaming assholes are these believers anyway? Mental defectives? Yep. Delusionals? Yep. Self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, better-than-anyone-'cause-they-believe morons? Yep. Yep. And . . . yep.

ZAP!

PostModernist Novel to the Rescue

2010-03-06T18:37:00.000-08:00

So I'm finished with writing and proofing and rehabilitating and straightening out all the work that went into my book, the PostModernist novel of space, time, mean monkeys and friendly cats herded by a couple time travel guys from the future and all that.
Damn it was a pile of work.
But the hardest part -- after the proofing &c -- was keeping my place within the characters and the story line.
See, the biggest chunk behind the action of the novel was one guy who, in addition to having no faith whatsoever in the possibility of human kindness, sees no proof for the the existence of a just and loving god. Yeah. An atheist.
What made it interesting, at least from a literary perspective, was the place within the story of a singularity species, a single organism from one planet with multiple intellects spread over the surface of the planet, which surface is covered with the single organism.
Part of the story line was the eventual escape of this singularity species from its home planet and its taking over seven other worlds before finding Earth. In the process of all this species meanderings and conquests, it has had to deal with time and space. Having figured the technology to move through time as space (or space as time), it is pretty close to what most people say are divine qualities. Omnipresence for example. And transcendent for another.
As in: the singularity species has to be able to communicate with the rest of itself on the other planets. To do this properly, it must be able to communicate across interstellar distances instantly, which means time travel. And it must exist in complete and constant communication with itself simultaneously everywhere, which means space travel. Thus the singularity species is transcendent.
Which makes the singularity species fit two features in the phenomenology of a divinity. A god.
There's a place in the novel where this subject is brought up. Actually a couple places. But the most solid example of this occurs when one of the characters, by dint of having been sent back in time and thus finding himself talking to himself, says

“Ain’t no god,” the younger D.S. said.
The elder D.S. squinted at D.S. as if he were a bug and flashed a grin. “Yeah, I knew that too once, just like you. You already met god,” he said. “Up there.” D.S. pointed up at the sky. “Brought your shiny little ass back here to face the music. And I’m the only band . . . ’Cept for her people. People as they are.”
“Which is to say?” the younger D.S. said.
“Which is to say that, first, you’re on the wrong continent.”

At which point one might get the impression that I was supporting the belief in a divine hand moving in the universe. Which, if you wanna get picky, is probably true.
But the point made in the book is not so much that there's a god but that what appears to be divine action might well be -- as it is in the case of the story line -- one man's technology being another man's witchcraft.
And then there's the story line of the savior/hero myth that is the turning point of the end conflict in the novel: The savior character is given that position not because of a need for his existence within the structure of the society but because the savior character begins to believe that he is, indeed, a true savior to the world.

“Point made. But the humans assign a pattern-level reference for him. He’s special to them. A sign that what the Tribe does ain’t as powerful magic as what they see as a sign. At which point. . .” D.S. stopped pacing. He went back to the console and sat down.
“At which point what?”
“At which point, being as how nivenids and humans have a sense of their own self-worth, Sapor decides himself that he’s special.”
“Which he is?”
“Which he is if you’re human and believe in ghosts and goblins and spooks and wreaths and such.”
Njee put her hand on D.S.’s shoulder. “You’re saying that the humans worship him?”
“No.” D.S. smiled. “No, it’s not that he’s special and they worship him. It’s that they worship him and he likes that feeling. Feeds his ego, you might say.”
“Oh Frank!” Njee took her hand off D.S. “Damn! He’s fallen . . .”
“Fallen for the con himself!”
D.S. turned and faced Njee. They stared at each other for a moment. D.S. wheeled around to the keyboard.
“Worst part,” D.S. said as he typed, “is if we snuff him he becomes a martyr. And if the Community falls for his shit, they’ll bring him back, which will be a miracle.”

And it's here that I begin to think about things like who will read the book and see that I'm making a very serious statement about the presence of belief within the entire concept of consciousness.
Simple fact is, as monkeys go, we humans have a wonderful ability to imagine anything we want. If we didn't have that ability we would have never survived the ice. If we didn't have that ability, I wouldn't be able to dream up this crazy story. If we didn't have that ability, we wouldn't have an InterWeb and I'd be talking to my fingernails on some hillside in Africa. If we'd evolved that far in the first place.
Which makes writing this novel quite the trip.
I didn't want to set out to write something that others would think was too violent or too dystopian or misanthropic. Oh, lawdy yes, it is indeed misanthropic. Very misanthropic, in fact.
But even weirder is how I didn't see the need to push the disbelief/nonbelief thing as heavily as I could have done. The story just kinda threw itself together -- with a bit of cogitation and thought about the story plot as I went along -- in a way that, for me at least, worked out in the end.
What others will think of the story is something yet to be determined.
So if you want to help me determine whatever it is I'm trying to figure out, buy a copy and read it. Don't tell me it's too PostModern. I know that already. Intertextuality, bending of time and space relationships, juxtaposition of archetypes across extremes. All that's in there.
That and probably a huge number of typos, most of which I have long since given up on finding.
And now you can help me find them too!
The advert in the sidebar will take you to the storefront.
You already know where I live.

The Celestial Dice Again

2009-12-14T08:47:00.000-08:00

A while back one of my relatives sent me a link to a page about a guy having survived a vehicle accident that parked him four-down on the edge of a hundred-odd foot cliff. The banner for it read something like "I bet this guy will be in church on Sunday!"
Now this relative is a church-goin' person, believer and all that. So this missive was sent by way of attempting to get me to join her in the superstitionism of her choice, which happens to be praise-god, witness-for-the-lord, full-gospel, Jesus-focused Christianity.
Of course, I looked at the picture and wondered if the god that had saved this guy's neck were the same god who'd allowed a drunken, masturbating, rejected-by-call girls Muslim to plow into a British man and his young son, snuffing both of them mid-stroke. I figured that if god were too busy to save them but had time to save a guy at a cliff's edge, then god's reasons for doing what it had done must be very, very bizarre.
Save a guy in a pick-up to show the world how a miracle works. Let a non-Christian, drunk moron kill a father and son who just happened to be standing by the side of the road when they were mowed down by the car. One guy gets off. The other guy, in the process of getting off, kills two people.
How's that work, math-wise? How's that work ration-wise?
How's god think it can save one life to show off its power over evil and bad shit happenin' and let two other folks die from evil bad shit happenin'?
Don't make no sense to me.
So the response to that was that god doesn't have to explain itself.
Which is a blind fall blank answer.
God doesn't have to explain why it allows evil in the world, leaving us to think that (a) god allows evil for some reason or (b) god has no power over evil, except in rare cases, or © god is a pernicious little vituperative shit who intervenes in the course of time and space just to keep us guessin'.
Or there is no god and the sunabitch at the edge of the cliff was just lucky and the father & son were unlucky.
Not that luck makes any sense either.

Now, when I brought these points up with my believing relative, it was is if I had run buck nekkid through the church at the consecration of the host in a mass celebrated by the pope of the universe.
How could I not believe?
Well, that's easy. I think the explanation is in my treatment of the situation above. I don't believe because I see no sign of any deity worthy of my going on a huge tuchus-licking prayer cycle. Especially if that deity is as venal and self-absorbed as to let things get the way they are when children are dying of hunger and other folks are wrapping bombs around their children and sending them off into markets to be blown up by remote control.
"Here, Ahmed, put this on. It fits you nice, don't it?"
"Boom."
Yeah, right. I can believe in that. Sure.

The Fractured & Fragmented Body of Christ

2009-05-05T06:06:00.000-07:00

Got this off a Christian ecumenism site. It's a quote from an editorial published in October, 2000 concerning the Roman Catholic Church's explications in Dominus Iesus concerning the primacy of the RC church over all other Christian churches. The editorial quotes from the Vatican document, in particular that part concerning the position of believers outside the Christian cult's belief system.
Like Hindus and such.
Here's the quote:

"If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation. However, all the children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ."

Sleeping Through Dead Girlfriend Music

2009-04-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

There's a pile of music that came out and went straight into my brain about the time I joined the USN back in '68. Most of it's the stuff I'd been listening to with other hippie types, music that had so much meaning to me then but which I today realize was, for the most part, vacuous.
Some of the music, upon hearing it today, reminds me of the girls I knew back then, the women I knew back then, when I was a sniveling little shit more interested in getting laid than in getting to know someone well enough to really care about them. Some of the women that this music reminds me of, well, some of 'em is dead. Some of 'em just disappeared into the void of time and have since turned up in the SSDI, deceased as incredibly wrong ages. Or dying from truly incredibly unbelievable diseases.
One died from the effects of AIDS and liver failure brought on by hepatitis (which she contracted long after I knew her). Another died of unknown causes back in the 90s at age 47. When I was 47 and still no less of a kid then than I was when I first met her. On and on like that, one woman dead here, another dead there.
And the music?
Well, when I hear some of the stuff from that time & place in my life, it reminds me often enough of the dead women or the woman I just met & passed on. I call that music just what it is to me: "Dead Girlfriend Music."
Some of it's so bitterly unlistenable to me now that I would rather turn off the radio or box of whatever's playing it and move on to the next cognitive distraction.
But some of it, well, it plays a longer role. It makes me remember then and think of now and how much I never heard those words or thought of that song or even listened to the notes with enough sense to realize how much those songs were part of me even then.
Like it maybe Dead Girlfriend Music but it's also music that reminds me of the peregrinations of mind that I took in the process of losing my faith in faith.

One song in particular is James Taylor's Sweet Baby James, a bit that I remember listening to while thinking of Kathy Alexander as the wind went through what was left of my hair in Navy boot camp. I was there 'cause I didn't want to get drafted and I had the sense at that moment that my life was gone out of my control.
As if I'd ever had any control of it in the first place, but that's another story.
Something about that song – probably because it was popular to some of my old friends back in the barrio – made me think of how much I wanted to be with Kathy as opposed to standing on the asphalt "grinder" with a pile of other recruits, learning the dance steps to a routine some ten weeks into our collective futures.
Now the song in question has some topical referents that I just plain didn't get or heard as somehow homey. The bit about it being a song about a "young cowboy" on the range, "his horse & his saddle his only companion" were only tags to me in remembering my earlier but none less immature at the moment involvement in the daydream of what I had learned from television westerns. Gunsmoke, the Sugarfoot and Cheyenne tv shows were some kind of romanticism thing for the "Old West" that my father said never really existed as they showed it on tv. Didn't stop me from believing that it really was that way or that guns were dangerous in the hands of your range-wandering sociopaths.
So there was that.
The other nostalgic stuff about thinking "of women and glasses of beer," well, I wasn't yet then quite that hip to the beer and the women, well, I was pinin' for Kathy, see. So it stuck in my head that way.
Until a couple days ago when I got in Cindy's car and headed off to the store and what should pop up on the car's playlist but a piece of Dead Girlfriend Music. James Taylor singin' Sweet Baby James.
As I sang along – 'cause I still remember the words to the song even though I might not remember what it was I was goin' to the store for in the first place – I thought about how the song's lyrics tied to when I was where I heard it repeatedly . . . back in bootcamp.
There is, after all, a certain range-riding mystique attached to sailors. They make great wanderin' guys for song writers and poets, the probable best to my mind being the song Brandy, by Elliot Lurie. The guy turns down some fine chick 'cause, as the lyrics say, his love and "life and lady is the sea."
Shortsightedness like this would take decades to filter through to my consciousness, which is why that song and Gerry Beckley's Sister Golden Hair always remind me of Janet Norton, another of the list of dead girlfriends.

But that ain't quite the point yet.

See, as I sang along I came to a part of James Taylor's song (you remember that song, right?) that gave me pause again to consider the meaning of the words from a long-ago worldview as compared with the meaning of the words to this old guy remembering dead girlfriends' worldview.
The lyrics in question go:

" There's a song that they sing when they take to the highway,
A song that they sing when they take to the sea,
A song that they sing of their home in the sky.
Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep
But singing works just fine for me."

And it was in the end two lines that I started thinking about how much I'd missed by just pinin' for Kathy.
See, Taylor says (and yes, I'm gonna get academic on you here) that there is a song some folks sing "of their home in the sky" and then suggests that your sleep may be affected by the chance that you believe in this celestial home.
To me that sounds like a suggestion the Taylor might be saying that he doesn't believe. Not that he doesn't. But the words suggest he didn't at the time of writing. Or that he might believe but that some don't and those who don't, well, their sleep is not disturbed by not believing.
Which is right where I am now and well on the road to disbelief then but never tied the words in the song to the words disappearing in my head as I discovered my own evolution to disbelief.

It's shocking to me that the song, especially with those lyrics of possible disbelief, got as much air time as it did back then. Back then was when the Beatles caught hell for suggesting that they might be more famous & well-known than Jesus. Back then was when kids were living together without benefit of matrimonial ceremony, and sometimes not just livin' together but actually sleeping together and getting pregnant without benefit of ceremony. It was a time of social upheaval and the damn church heads didn't even catch that line in that song!
What a trip, so to speak.
Here all this time I'd put this song on the endangered species list and all along it had been there without any participation from me.
Which goes back to the concept of the time/space where that song was birthed and what it might have meant for me if I'd been paying attention.
Even if it is still Dead Girlfriend Music to me to this day, reminding me of a time when I was so seriously disconnected from society by way of having myself included (as opposed to including myself personally in society) in a society that was then as it is now, horribly artificial.
Hippie days, yo, were seriously artificial.
Peace and love and all that, sure. But in the end we just wanted to be the usual white gringo kids who had no responsibility and expected our parents to bail us out if we ever got slipped off the high moral fiber or whatever we thought we were pursuing.
Which weren't much, what we were pursuing weren't.
We were after hedonism, instant gratification, ratiocinated-all-to-hell escape from responsibility and gimme-now-I-wanna-get-laid. That's what we were after.
If we actually ended the Vietnam War, I ain't so sure.
It was Nixon, the creepy old dude who followed LBJ in the president's chair who ended the Vietnam War. And we can look at that move now as the beginning of the end of isolation between China and the USA.
Maybe Nixon was going after the kids & veteran vote in ending the war but I'd be hard pressed to say that we, as a demographic, actually "ended" the war in Vietnam. Our noise & bustle might have been part of it but I seriously doubt it was all that much.
We wanted to be cowboys by the fire, sailors on the sea, warm breeze blowin' south over our shoulder, stardust and bullshit. That's what we wanted.
And out of it all, I remember the dead, male, female & whatever else. Kathy, Janet, Steve, Dick Curwell, the crazy little dude who always came to me when he wanted to get stoned, Renée & Jerome and Susan & all of 'em, dead from our inability to see how close death really is everyday, because we believed we could change the world for the better. Believed that we could make the world a bright & shiny place to live, full of parking lots and shopping and sunshine and all that expanded consciousness stuff that we as a demographic were into then.
We believed.
And it helped us to do more than sleep together.
It hid the meanness of existence from us just as much as the church or religion has always covered for the nasty shit in life by promising a home in the sky.
If you can believe that.

Ora pro nobis, yo.

2009-03-24T05:28:00.001-07:00

Noted earlier on – as in last posting – I have a pretty good time with folks come to the door trying to sell me a soul. It doesn't happen very often but more 'n once or twice a year and I start to remember 'em better.
The Mormon thing, well that was an interesting moment.
I was over a friend's digs, putting together a Heathkit AM/FM tuner for him, bits at a time, when some Mormons did indeed knock on the door. Matter of record.
Then a couple days ago I got the knock on the door early up a week day morning. I was home, as was Cid, 'cause both of us was feelin' puny and it was all we could do to keep ourselves awake from one nap to the other. Between that and all the concomitant parts of having some rhino virus, we was just plain blowed away.
So the knock on the door.
It was just after the postal organs had deposited the days fun, so I figured it would be cool to see what was up & get the mail outta the box at the same time.
I opened the door and noticed quick off that the guy at the door had a black prayer-ish lookin' book in his mitt. There was a woman with him, similar attire and also holding a book.
Bible thumpers, I thought to myself.
This did not preclude me from being friendly and all that "good mornin', neighbor" stuff.
The guy intro'd himself and I acknowledged by saying that I'd seen what I could only guess was a bible in his hand.
He acknowledged my acknowledgment as I opened the mail box.
I made some mention about the mail.
He made some mention back.
And right there on top of all of the stuff in the box was the monthly edition of the FFRF newspaper, Freethought Today.
I said that it was interesting coincidence that he should have a bible in his paw while I was taking my monthly disbelief newsletter outta the mail box.
He didn't get it.
I explained: "You're sellin' belief and I ain't a believer."
So he explained back that he was going around inviting people to see how the bible was a source of solace and quietude in troubled times. The bible was a book that showed how the future would work out.
I said that I didn't believe and the I didn't want to take any more of his time and I wasn't gonna let him take any more of mine.
"Thanks for stoppin' by. Have a nice day."
They left.

Now prior to this, or just as I had opened the door and looked out onto what would have been a beautiful day to be outside, were Cid & me not tied to the Kleenex box, I noticed a county auditor's vehicle parked in front of the house.
"Oh Lord, let these two belong to that vehicle," I said to myself 'cause ain't nobody else was listenin' to my thoughts but me.
Well, it weren't.
At least I don't think it was. The pair on the porch left by the steps and walked down the street, passing the county vehicle and walking on down the street toward the bank. So I didn't have to worry about church/state issues.
It was such a relief to me to see them not take county bus that I went upstairs immediately, took a nap and immediately upon waking up from the nap, wrote a letter to my friends at the Freedom From Religion Foundation telling them the story and enclosed a donation check.
Then, feelin' drained and puny again, I took another nap with the cats.

This is the second time in what I can only remember as a couple three months. Peeps show up at the door with their holy books or whatever and try to convince me that I'm needin' saved or goin' straight to hell unless I'm washed in the blood of Lord Jesus.
Seriously.
I take this stuff in a good frame of reference. I mean, they's all just good-hearted folks worried for my soul. They show up at the door and hope to bring me into the light. They usually get a pretty friendly rejoinder from me and that's it.
But the other day while I was out in the printery thinking of Joey the Car Wiper, I came across a sticker that I swear I'm gonna put on the door.
It's one of those "not allowed" red circle with a diagonal line through it signs. Under the red diagonal and inside the red circle is a restroom gender kinda sign with the characters holdin' bibles.
"No bible thumpers allowed."
"Take yer jive simpering superstitionism somewhere else, you mutant albino freaks!"
Only problem is, if I do it, Cid will be up in arms over it.
She said the first time it happened that she was surprised that I had been so calm and gentile about it. I said I'm always calm and courteous about my disbelief. I'm even that way about belief in general.
I guess she expects me to go off like a rocket and tear the holy word up into shreds and tatters right there in front of the poor delusionals.
Like hell.
There's standing at my door and there's assault. The standin' is ok as long as it doesn't become a matter of me havin' to shove 'em off the porch. The tearing up the book would be pilfering from the poor retards and then assaulting their beliefs right there on the porch.
That wouldn't be fair.
It'd be like kickin' a puppy.
But I have to say that the past two occasions is pretty much my limit. And I have to say that it's likely that, after two such visits that I know of, and with my neighbors pretty much knowin' well-enough by now that I don't believe, that there'll likely be more.
There'll always be more.
In fact, there's some suspicion in my mind that some day I'll wake up and there'll be a hand-holdin', candlight-filled, mumbling & gyrating prayer group standing in front of my house, legal on the sidewalk, prayin' for me.
Oh, please, Lord, let that cup pass from me, yo.
'Cause if it does ever come to that, I will definitely have a problem.
I'd have to kick a puppy or two to get 'em to leave. And hope that they would.
My orbit is fixed. And the more gravity gets piled up against that, at my LaGrange point, you might say, the more out of kilter the rest of the universe will become. I'll be steady as the rock of wherever and they'll be out there gyrating on the sidewalk and then it will become difficult.
They'd be impeding the progress of foot traffic back and forth from the bank. And you and I both know that we can't have people unable to get to their money.

Old "It Came to Pass" Again, Almost

2009-01-28T14:29:00.000-08:00

Somewhere back in space I got on a rant about people who leave religion. Folks will cut out from the Roman Catholic herd and go mill around with the Baptists or Nazarenes or whatever. Go from one religion to another, usually within the same belief set, like the examples above. Some will do that but go elsewhere. Like the friend I had once who, after becoming involved with a woman of the Jewish tribal belief system, joined up with that belief and, as far as I know, went off to live on a kibbutz somewhere.
Hope he's still alive. Him and his loved one.
Another group of drop outs kinda makes me wonder. You know: good RC boy goes off to become a Muslim, hoping some day to be a shaheed. A martyr. Blow himself up with a bunch of other sinners around. Or a plain wrapper Lutheran will drop out of that one and head off to spend time saving diesel fuel in barrels on a commune and waiting for the arrival of the ass-ended masters.
And then there's folks who become $cientologists.

Well, this ain't about none of that. It's about the divergent gang who fall under some name or the other with Latter Day Saints in it. Like Church of Christ Jesus in the Reformed Latter Day Saints of Yore. Or Ladder Carrying Polygamists of Jesus & Quetzalcoatl from the Latter Days of Saints. Or Church of Mormon Reformed and Isolate. Whatever.
Mormons.
Them.
Like when I was a kid we knew about Mormons 'cause, well, my father had been raised in Arizona, close enough to Utah to know about 'em and with a last name like Young, well, it aroused prescriptions, see?
"No, I'm not related to Brigham Young. I'm one of the Arizona Youngs. Different people, see?"
Some folks did. Most didn't even ask.
That was back when Mormons lived in Utah and the rest of 'em weren't all that common, even with the pairs of missionary kids out patrolling neighborhoods in black pants and white shirts with black ties all day and night in 110-degree heat.
The knock at the door.
"I'm Elder Levi and this is Brother Nephi and . . . "
"And I'm an atheist. Have a nice evening, fellahs."
And the closing of the door.
Say hallelujah.
Hallelujah.

Well, as you can well imagine in times like these, there are tons of web sites defending or defaming the Mormons, their prophet and his antecessors and all that. Some of 'em try mightily to convince you or me that, despite all the archeological evidence and the DNA research and all that, there never were chariots pulled by horses under the command of Jewish tribal migrants in the North American continent before Cecil B. Demille and Charlton Heston got ideas.
Other sites provide intimate detail on how the prophecy of the Book of Mormon came to be, was plagiarized, fabricated or whatever else you want to know about it. The book.
All in all there's a ton of stuff on the InterWebs about Mormons and a big chonk of it ain't all that nice neither. But then there's a ton of stuff about Roman Catholics and Baptists and the Holy Spirit of Pedophilia Crutch pastor got sent to prison a couple weeks back for somethin' happened at Christ Camp.
So you get to see a lot of it, if you chose to look for it.

And then, sometimes, you get a good giggle out of it.

So let's start with Oahspe, of which I have two copies, one the British 1960 printing, which I bought at a hippie/lesbian book store, back when I was self-medicated. The other is the 1935 edition, edited by E. Wing Anderson and published under the dispensation of The Essenes of Kosmon, a Fraternity of Faithists.
Them.
If you are not aware of Oahspe (also called "The Kosmon Bible"), I can tell you that you better get yer readin' glasses on. It's a hugely thick book of persistent stuff about different godhead figures having children who become gods and travel from planet to planet in "star ships" doing whatever they want as gods and so forth. Some of the stuff is from the divine perspective and some of it is in parallel text from a historical & more human perspective.
The spirits keep good records.
I say that 'cause it was the spirits of the various deities and the arch-chief-overall deity, known as Jehovih, commanded the transcriber of the texts to buy a typewriter and to turn to with taking copious notes.
The transcriber, a dentist named John Ballou Newbrough, was told by visiting angels and spirits what to do and how to type it. He eventually finished all the writing out of the spirits' stuff and had the entire thing published, first, in 1882 (also known as Anno Kosmon 34). The book attracted some attention, in that Ballou Newbrough suddenly found himself with questioning followers, and eventually the collected folks formed a community that ended up, of all places, in . . .
You ready?
. . . ended up in . . . New Mexico.
Bet'cha you were thinkin' they'd end up in Utah, didn't'cha?
Nope.
They formed a community in Shalam, NM, where, during a flu epidemic, John Ballou Newbrough and many of his faithful met their ends.
But the book's still here, two copies in my house and a bunch more in libraries and homes of disbelievers and not. Don't know how many of 'em there are, them books, but I figure if I got a copy in 1972 or so, printed in 1960, there's gotta be a bunch more of 'em out there.
And man, are they out there.
Star maps. Descriptions and pictures of hieroglyphs – none of 'em as cool as the stuff Joseph Smith the Prophet of Moroni cribbed from newspapers &c – with the path of the stars and planets through the firmament. All that. The rotation of the galaxy. All that.
In the book. Fold out pages in the small, 1970 edition. Full page in the larger edition from 1935.
It would be a hoot to find a copy of the original printing. That would have been around the same time that the Mormons were getting run out of town after town on their way to the promised land of Utah.

According to what I've been able to spirit up (no pun intended), the Book of Mormon and Oahspe are just two of a couple more religionistic spirit texts that surfaced in the 19th Century. The two that got printed (Oahspe & Mormon) are probably the lucky two for having a readership and subsequent followers.
All the same, I come back to the question of leaving faiths again.
Like why would anyone look at their present belief system – religion, creed, fellowship, whatever – and say to themselves that such was not the right path.
"Hmm . . . this killing for virgins . . . It don't make no sense . . . "
"Hmm . . . maybe I should stop being a Muslim and become . . . "
A dead body?
That's what happens with that line of thought.
"Hmm . . . the nuns brutalized me in Jesus' name . . ."
"Maybe I should become . . . "
A Baptist?
Yeah, right.
Look at a belief and reject it, only to take up another belief with all the usual mental gymnastics that the previously rejected faith had in spades. Don't make no sense to me. I don't understand it: Why would a person fall away from believing on a god who had certain rules only to take up a belief in a god – either under another name or with a completely different disguise – who had another set of equally arcane rules?
Wouldn't it make more sense to just say "Nah. Ain't no god. I'm done"? And go forth from that moment to believe no more?
Makes more sense than to spend your life as a Roman Catholic and then become a Mormon. Or a Nazarene Church goin' person.

But here's the real dig: Out there in the InterWebs, there exists a site that goes on about Mormons for some time before revealing that there are two books from the book of Mormon that never got put in the original book.
And whoever said that didn't pay much attention to the website promulgating the first one, The Book of Zelph.
If you go to it (the site), you'll quickly see that it's a spoof on the Mormon book, right down to the blind obedience to the person who claims to have found the "cartload of gold plates" which said person subsequently translated – a la Joseph Smith – and subsequently offers to the masses yearning to be free of their minds.

At least it's not another Church of the SubGenius con. Right?

शान्ति This Ain't About, Yo

2008-12-03T15:09:00.000-08:00

In aftermathismatic fervor over the satanic & diabolical massacre (please pardon my hyperbole for a moment) in Mumbai a few days back, some Muslims appear to have suddenly gotten balls. At least that's what you or I might get from the reportage in the most recent online edition of the Times of India
The article, however, has only one quote from anyone Muslim saying that the Mumbai carnage was troubling. To wit:

"The occupation of the synagogue and killing people in hotels tarnishes the Muslim faith," said Kazim al-Muqdadi, a political science lecturer at Baghdad University. "Anyone who slaughters people and screams 'Allahu Akbar' (God is Great) is sick and ignorant."

And meanwhile, back at the madrassa, a person named " Sheik Youssef al-Ayeri said the killings are in line with Islam.

'It's all right for Muslims to set the infidels' castles on fire, drown them with water .... and take some of them as prisoners, whether young or old, women or men, because it is one of many ways to beat them,' he wrote in the al-Fallujah forum."

And as much as I am willing to take one quote against the carnage with one quote for the massacre, I'm still wondering, among other things, what took these few more vocal than your average sheep Muslims so long to get up about the inherent violence hidden in the untranslatable verses of their holy book.
Or to put it simple: The massacre was one of a continuing list of atrocities perpetrated against civil society by a religion that preaches in text and pulpit & deed the annihilation of everything that goes against the creed. And that includes members of that creed's community. And here we are, seven years and some after the destruction of the World Trade Center twin towers, Muslims are finally getting the idea that such madness might be harmful to the view of others toward their faith.
Yeah, right.
Fact is, somebody probably went fishing to find out how many Muslims might have something to say about it. Such a fishing expedition eventually led to the two quotes above ending up in a small article on a web site.
Seven years after 9/11.
Or some five hundred years after the reconquista
Finally.

At the same time, after watching this madness for the past however many years that the show's been on the air, The Daily Show has also taken off the gloves in a more forthright way than they have since 9/11 knocked the entire television audience into holy-shit-mode seven and some years back.
You check that response online here.

At which point we get down to the part where I reiterate once again (kinda like déjà vu all over again) my feeling that religion and the superstitious mind from which it springs will be the ruination of the species.
Of course, I am now so far gone in my cynicism toward my species and my pessimism that there will never be a better reason for us all to just die out and let the processes of physics on the planet carry on blindly in our befuddled, cranky, lame, abusive, self-absorbed, self-centered, "screw-you-I-got-mine-every-crumb-for-himself-his-hair-stands-up-and-crackles" way of doing things absence.
And yes, from time to time I see signs and portents that say much about the ability of our species to actually act like we have a rational brain in our heads or that we may just for one moment have worth more than the last roll of toilet paper the cats shredded up for me special over night. Sometimes it happens. People behave in ways more appropriate for what we presume to be the most rational & knowledgeable species in the whole goddamn universe.
Sometimes I see that.
Most of the time I don't, and most of those "most of the time" times I see that it is usually a handful of considerably addled and viscious (in ways that no wild or predatory animal would even begin to understand) humans going on a tear about an imaginary friend or some conception of having been dishonored or whatever silly puerile bullshit we dream up. Most of the time it's a couple loonies, truth up.
Most of the time it's insanity.
And that gives me another chance to reiterate once again (kinda like déjà vu all over again) my feeling that there are some six billion point 993 many of us; that we should just snuff it and let the processes of physics on the planet carry on blindly in our befuddled, cranky, lame, abusive, self-absorbed, self-centered, "screw-you-I-got-mine-every-crumb-for-himself-his-hair-stands-up-and-crackles" way of doing things absence.
And if you think I'm getting boringly repetitious, stick it in yer heiny, hotshot.
I think the entire species is getting repetitious. In act, word, thought and, best of all, conversations with imaginary friends for whom we are quite willing to kill many folks who otherwise ain't caused much more harm than making someone slow down at a crosswalk.
These repeated killings and massacres in the name of a nonexistent entity are getting repetitious. Goddamn repetitious. F@%king repetitious, actually. And it's time for those who don't agree with the perpetrators of these horrible travesties of reason and intellect to pick up the stick and beat the living bejebus out of those who think that rape and pillage, piracy and murder, subjugation and pedophilia (among other brutalities) are the course of life.
It's time to end the bloodshed and misery by giving to those who perpetrate bloodshed and misery the chance to kill themselves off before we get pissed off enough to do it for them.
Which presents the conundrum of capital punishment, into which I will not now delve, since I've begun to become one of those who feels very strongly about the need for capital punishment, bitter old shit that I am. Even as my family tries to keep me from sitting in a chair Christmas morning, happy with what they gave me but still unable to smile a genuine smile 'cause there's peace on earth and all that happy shit.

We Shall Gather in the Restroom . . .

2008-11-19T06:03:00.000-08:00

I'll be the first to admit that I don't understand gayness. You know: homosexuality in all its many permutations across gender and age. I don't understand why heterosexuals don't leave meeting notes on restroom walls like gay males do. I don't understand why heterosexuals don't meet in parks and highway rest stops to have moments of passion (whether amorous or just hedonistic) when so many homosexuals have no problem with such meetings, judging by the arrests & crime sweep-ups of such events. I don't understand what is so inspiring of passion in a young boy's butt or the soft skin of boys' faces yet to be touched by a razor.
I just don't get it.
But then, I don't get how anything at all happening in the world is immediately taken as a sign of the divine's disapprobation of whatever is judged sinful or damnable by the divinity of the moment.
And after such an announcement, I can get down to the point where the sex and the gods get together.
See, a friend of mine referred me to a blog website whereon the blogger proposed that the fires now doing a Bushian job of California are the divine getting back at gays.
Only problem with that is such an event would show that the divine hand is pissed at California for voting against gay marriage. Hell, you can be gay and get married in Connecticut. How come god ain't burnin' the livin' bejebus out of the East Coast? You'd think any god who was weirded out by two men French kissing in a restroom stall would set fire to the stall and its wide-stanced inhabitants as a much more directly readable response to gayness on the part of the deity in question.

Of course, the blog aforecited engaged many comment responses, the most rational of which proposed that the Christian propensity to explain natural events from a divine perspective was, at the very least, self-serving and self-absorbed. That and how "not everything is a sign from god" and that such explanations of events are a more sure sign that "you are not allowed to make it up as you go along."
Which is exactly what we're talking about here: making it up as you go along.
At which point I am in firm agreement with the commentator's extension of the metaphore:

"Religion is -- in my opinion -- a brain virus. The need for some daddy figure or his graceful, lithe, unmarried, hippie son to rescue you from your own personal misfortune is childish enough. But the further need to have this dad or his son visit wrath upon your enemies is pure school-yard nonsense that really speaks to a sense of helplessness in your own personal life."

To which I must go on to say is a perfect explanation for the tendency among believers of any stripe to blame misfortune of others on the other's being unapproved, unloved, unsaved in the sight of whatever divinity is supposed to be doing the misfortunizing. That or the misfortunate are supposed to be unschooled in the divine mysteries and/or belief and thus even more deserving of the divine wrath.
It is schoolyard stuff, however, plain and simple.
Little Johnny gets his feeling hurt by a girl don't like his nose and he then claims that he's gonna get back at her for it. Only problem is, Little Johnny ain't got the muscle for it. So he thinks about how he'd like to see whatever misfortune fall on the girl. But time she go by and the girl goes on about her life while Little Johnny wastes time and neural energy vilifying the girl in his mind, which Little Johnny knows subconsciously is a further sign of his weakness before her and thus even more disempowering. And it's the disempowerment that really does the job on Little Johnny.
Weeks go by and every time he sees the girl he gets pissed at her and even more pissed at himself. On and on like that until he's so full of hatred and bitterness that he can barely spare a smile on a sunny day.
And when the slightest thing happens to the girl, like a cold or a bruise or a missed period, Little Johnny doth rejoice in his heart that some bad luck has finally befallen the object of his bitterness and disgust.

Ach, Freude in Himmel! Gott hat Seinen Zorn gegen das Mädchen doch aufgewiesen!

Makes no never mind that the girl got sneezed on by her little brother who had a cold or that she happened to walk into the open fridge door in the middle of the night or that she engaged in unprotected sex with her best friend's step brother. To Little Johnny's little mind, it's the divine hand taking retribution against the girl on Little Johnny's behalf.
As if all the starving children in Africa and all the people poisoned by tainted milk in China or the seventeen-year-old youngster got shot in a ghetto drive-by had to be put on hold from the divine's protection just to avenge Little Johnny's pitiful, puerile and prepubescent sense of dishonor.
As if Little Johnny took precedence over the divine hand saving a child from dying of an asthma attack or the divine hand preventing a family in Yorkshire from being mowed down by a drunk and obviously sinful Muslim.
Like that.
Which is exactly where the comment quoted above points: Such claiming to understand the hand of divine justice are stupifyingly self-absorbed, self-centered and quite seriously & immaturely self-adulatory.
"I know what god's doing 'cause, well, I'm tight with the god-dude, yo."

Yeah, right.

This is the same shill been used for the past thirty-thousand and some years. I figure that stretch since it was about thirty k-years ago that we flat-faced chimps drove the last Neanderthals off the cliffs of southwest Iberia and into the sea. We took control of everything and then decided that our invisible friend was really in charge and that he had given us control of everything.
Another "yeah, right" moment.
Everyone claims to be in contact with the divine but we always leave it to one special, usually self-appointed loudest monkey to tell us what god has in mind. You know: the prophet has all the answers, even if we each claim that we understand how the divine has punished this person or that.
You died. I didn't. God loves me.
What a horribly self-absorbed way to think. What a horribly self-aggrandizing, mean-spirited way to view the world.

Let's face it: the fires burning the hillsides and valleys of California, much like the earthquakes that rattle buildings which subsequently fall on children and parents and the floods and tornadoes that rip up farm lands and families happen because, well, somebody's at whatever site it is that the catastrophes take place.
If nobody were there to notice, nobody'd be bothered by an earthquake or a storm or grass or forest fire. And if we didn't have the technology to monitor and understand such things as earthquakes or the weather at a distance, we wouldn't know about them or even care that much. But since there have been at least a few hundred million humans on the planet for the last couple tens of thousands of years and since we're so widespread in our overpopulation of the planet, we notice a lot of stuff goes against our survival.
Or so we think.
See, we survive mainly 'cause we've figured out how to have the free time to make our lives easier. If we didn't have our imaginations we wouldn't have figured out how to make arrow points out of metal, which of course led us to being able to kill more of each other over time than we would ever have done with a Clovis point and a stick.
All that imagination has taken its toll on us and not the least of which toll-taxes of our imagination is our ability to dream up goofy ideas for the way things work when, later on we were able to imagine new ways of seeing how things work so that we could do away with the goofy ideas. At least that would be the plan, were it not obvious that many more of us than is necessary still believe the goofy stuff even if we accept the possibility of the new ways of seeing stuff being more correct than the goofy stuff.
That's why we fight over the space between gods and science.
That's why we still manage to build conceptual pictures of the molecular structure of the basic cell while going off to thank the divine hand for having given us the last couple hundred thousand breaths. That's why we pray for good weather and wonder how we pissed off god when the weather turns sour, even if we can read in the technology how the weather patterns are predictable and produced.
It gives us the ability to cop out, religious belief such as that does.
God's burning the forests and valleys and homes and houses of people in California because they voted against gay marriage?

Gimme a break.

The houses being burned down in California are burning because they were built in the middle of a forest area that has been for a long, long time notorious for its near desert-like drought and fire cycles. Ain't no god told folks to build there and it ain't no god told folks not to think of what they were doing.
It was just such pretty countryside that somebody had to develop it.
And people paid for the houses thus developed.
Without one thought to the fire and drought possibilities. Or the possibilities of flash floods in those times when water was droppin' from the sky in buckets and barrels.
People moved in there of their own delusion, much like the delusionals who believe that they know the hand of a god being that no one in history other than seriously deluded psychopaths have ever seen. Ever seen. Not once.
Which leads me to the following proclamation: I do not understand gayness. It just don't even begin to make any sense to me. That don't mean that I think gays are the demon spawn. Yes, I do wonder about the juvenile and narcissistic hedonism that I see in the multiple messages on restroom walls. But I ain't about to claim that we should cull the herd beginning with the gays and lesbians.
And if I cannot understand such a simple concept as gayness . . . or the lifestyle that it is supposed to be, or any of the other bits and pieces of gay behavior or gay thought or gay psychology or gay physiology, up to and including transsexualism, I am sure as hell not going to understand the even more simple concept of the existence of a divine being punishing its creation (humans) for the divine having allowed the gay humans (its own creation as well) to be. And I do not understand how anyone can claim to know that catastrophes are happening to people because they themselves do not want gays getting married. It just don't make sense.

Divine Retribution & the Voice of Whoever

2008-10-10T10:05:00.000-07:00

Aside from the linguistic considerations of how humans think, there's one question that has always made me just stand shaking my head in disbelief: religious zealotry. Take any religion, any belief system that proposes first that there is a supernatural divine agent as the source, cause and continuance of the universe with a set of doctrines and pronouncements about the divine agent & its rules of conduct for all that is. Apply those rules to every human creature and do so in a way that makes any variance from the following of the rules the most abject form of blasphemy and then make any blasphemy punishable by death.
God, as divine agent & ruler of the universe, has rules. You obey the rules, you get an eternal reward beyond measure in a supernatural existence. If you disobey the rules, you get punishment & torment in the afterlife and, if you disobey the rules enough to piss off other believers to want you dead, you die right then and there.
Now my question about this hangs on one simple hook within any belief system.
Makes no never-mind whether we're talking about Christianity, Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism (in all its manifestations), $cientology or – dare I say it? – Atheism, Agnosticism & complete disbelief.
You act against the divine commands, you can pay with your life in the here and now.
Never mind that your sins will deny you an eternal reward in the hereafter.
Sin means death and sufficient sin means that believers will want you dead.
It ain't enough that the divine judgment of eternity will not tilt in your favor.
It's that right here, in this physical world of this very moment, other believers will want you dead. In fact they will be quite glad to see you dead. They will end your life right now so you can burn in hell or suffer whatever divine retribution might befall your soul in the hereafter.
But most importantly: you will pay right now for your sins today.
And those who do not believe as the rest do will suffer the same fate, should they choose not to convert their beliefs to those of the gun-totin', scimitar-wavin', rock-chuckin', epithet-screamin' majority believers.

You do as someone has decided the divine wants you to do or you suffer physical torture and, ultimately, death. No questions asked. No second-chances given. Belief and obey or suffer and die.

Now, this is all a little weird to me because, if I understand the divine agency message correctly, the divine agent, by dint of having created the universe out of nothing, is thus much more powerful than anything or anyone who might have lived, ever will live or could ever live, now and forever, amen.
So if god is omnipotent, god itself can punish the sinner directly.
Why would an omnipotent god need to use its creation – human beings in this case – to punish those who act or believe or speak against the divine will?
Why doesn't god punish them now? And why is punishment right now in this time and space so absolutely necessary? Wouldn't an omnipotent divine agent, able to transcend time and space, matter and energy, be capable of punishing the sinner before the sin was even contemplated, let alone committed?
Are you getting me here?
God is divine. A divine being is immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.
God is thus aware of everything everywhere all the time.
God has rules which god has transmitted to the humans.
If humans disobey god, then god will exact punishment.
So why do other humans – creatures much less powerful and a lot more inclined to weakness in all aspects of the universe than god – have to become involved in the punishment of the sinners?
Shouldn't humans just let the sinners die off and receive the punishment in the hereafter that the divine agency has promised those who disobey?
It doesn't make any sense to me.
It's not a wookie. Wookies don't even exist and yet here's a picture of a wookie.

"For it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord."
(Romans 12:19)

At least that's the way it comes to me, that condition of retribution: god says that retribution for disobeying god will come from the hand of god.
Or so some might think.
So it's here that the question becomes all foggy and ratty.

First off, what we as humans know about the divine agent comes not from direct communication between that agent and every individual in the human species. The info we have on god, how it works, how it built the universe, how it expects us to act, how it will or has or can act with or toward us comes from the mouths of singularly self-appointed other humans.
God doesn't tell me how I'm expected to act or what I get for acting nice.
God tells someone else and that someone else tells me what god told them.
Chinese whispers on a metaphysical scale.
Thus, linguistically, the trouble begins there, with that particular human being who claims to have been informed by the divine as to the wishes, commands and directives of the divine. Not god directly. Another human being. Somebody just like you and me, with blood in his or her veins and a whole life of likes and dislikes, neuroses, psychosis, hates and loves and preferences and all sorts of tastes and disgusts.
Another human speaks for god.
Which, despite all the history of human beings trusting in the words of some self-appointed (or otherwise mysteriously chosen) human being as the front man for the divine, is the weak link in the chain.
Prophet, priestess, shaman, wizard or witch, it makes no diff: god don't talk to nobody directly. The divine agent has an agent.
And we know how selfless & dispassionate agents can be, don't we?
As if.

See, that's where it really all falls apart for me. Over the course of six million years as a species under development and over the course of something like twenty thousand years as a species per se developing today's culture, it's likely that a few billion human beings have claimed to speak for the divine.
Among that group – and most recent 'cause they seem to keep better records now than they did twenty thousand years back – you can count the likes of Ezekial, who saw the wheels and the faces and such. Or John Smith, who got his info from some stones in a hat by way of gold plates carved with stuff that no one ever really, truly saw in the flesh, hands-on, so to speak. Or Jim Jones, who distributed the Kool-Aid to his flock in the jungle of Central America. Or David Koresh, about whom any number of conspiracy theories have been proposed and used as fodder for or against government interference in belief. Or the Ayatollah Khomeini, who proposed in a fatwah that it was ok to have sex with a child. Or Adolf Hitler, who proposed that the German people were the last vestiges of a once great Aryan race, despite all evidence to the contrary then (or now). Or Julius Caesar, who claimed to be the child of parthenogenesis and who was supposed to have ascended into heaven upon his death all them millennia ago, thus copping in on an act that Christians today claim only happened with Jesus.
Yeah, year and month and day and century after millennia of this or that human being claiming to be inspired by and speaking for the divine agency when the divine agency, by way of being divine and thus omnipotent &c should, by all rights, be talking to each and every one of us individually.
Or is that the story of prayer?

See, that and the rest of it makes the entire conceptual underpinnings of belief and disbelief so incredibly, well, human. And I ain't talking about humane or how humans are better 'n the other animals on the planet, even if they do appear to have some sort of inner dialogue or reflective consciousness.
I'm talking about humans gaining control over other humans by saying that they got the word from the divine mouth.
Ages upon ages of prophets, seers and metaphycicists.
Them guys.
The holy men.
Every single one of 'em born of the flesh, given to the flesh and living within the flesh, they somehow get called "holy" and none dare question what they say about what the divine might have said to them.
Period.
Silence! I kill you!
Them guys.

All of which brings me back to something I noticed when I was talking with a believer one year at the Dayton Hamvention.
This guy and I started talking and he expressed his belief in a divine agent. Jesus, to be exact.
I explained that I did not hold to that particular accretion of mythic elements.
I explained that I did not see a god to believe in. (As opposed to saying that I didn't believe in god, which to me is a way of saying that I choose to not believe in a god which I somehow have to admit exists by way of negating my belief in it. In god.)
The other guy then went on to explain that he worried for my eternal soul and then explained how his life had been beset by some personal problem (into which I will not go, since it's basically immaterial). He explained how this problem bothered him and how he prayed and consulted the Bible and prayed and tried to figure out what his god would have him do.
Then, finally, he said he put the problem in his god's hands (yeah, I know: this is figurative speech about something that is entirely conceptual within the reflective consciousness of any human of the species) and how at that point a great weight was lifted off his shoulders.
The great weight being, of course, this problem in his life.
So the guy tells me that he just let it all go and then, lo and behold, he hears the voice of his god telling him to proceed as he has been proceeding and to change this or that behavior and all would come out well.
Which, he told me, it did.
Eventually.
Now all the time I'm hearing this story, as I listened to him tell me about his concerted effort to find a way to fix things, I kept thinking that his prayers and his readings and his contemplations of scripture all amounted to the beginnings of a trouble shooting exercise.
Collect all the data about whatever you've got to fix.
Look at the problem in a linear, step-wise fashion, not letting one minor thing get missed in your evaluation of the problem's cause.
Then! Then you let your understanding of what you're looking at, based on what you've accumulated as data and information, float the problem to the surface.
In other words, you relax all the serious referentiality of the situation and look at what you've got.
This don't happen because of action A, B or C.
Or, to put it a bit less technically, the guy had given up thinking about the problem, at least to his own conscious awareness.
This didn't make the problem go away, of course.
It just meant that he wasn't spending serious awareness time on it. He put himself to the task of not thinking about what was wrong by way of not thinking about all the thinking about the problem that he had been thinking about.
Degrees of referentiality. Or at least one version or the other of degrees of referentiality. Among many others.
And then one day the gentleman's subconscious mind just floated a solution to him and, bingo, just like that: problem solved.
Thank you, Masked Man.

Of course, the conversation that I had with this guy is just one of many such that I've had over the many years of my life of disbelief which cause me to take a very simple, almost chimp-like, view of just what it is comes out of our minds when we assign significance of thought to an agency outside of our six-million-year-old neural architecture.
In other words, the idea that a divine speaks to the select comes directly from our innate ability to miss the fact that nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain.
We think of stuff and, since thought & language seem to be so intrinsically linked after a hundred thousand years of gibbering like patients in the Thorazine ward, we think it's not our voice telling us to do shit.
Even if we do think out loud and even if we do work out problems in our heads using words – which words are really never spoken but are nonetheless taken as "internal dialogue."
Which, as usual, brings me right back to the question of the divine agent needing an agent.

Having spent so much time thinking about language and thought and applying that to the obvious question of why the divine don't communicate with everyone individually and all at once with a uniform message across time, space, geography & politics, it's obvious that there ain't no divine.
Either that or there's a lot of 'em and they're all very weird about who knows what about them. Or the other 'n.
Or the one Deeny listens to.

And it came to pass that after such a time as was wont, no knowledge has appeared to me directly from the voices in my head. And I know that they're voices plural 'cause, well, there's a huge range of personalities that I am.
Everyone is.
A huge range of personalities.
There's the more-or-less '60s me, the crazy guy who has no serious referentiality at all. I'm just watching the show, man.
There's the father-son me, the guy who stands in his garage print shop and talks with the now absent & non-existent father who died a couple days before Christmas over 26 years ago come this December.
There's the sailor/NCO me, the RM2 guy, who stayed with the watch while the rest of the section got sent topside when the second of two engine rooms flooded back off the coast of Greece back in 1972.
There's the guy who looks at women and girls and thinks of other women and girls whom I've known, some of whom are dead and gone many years. That guy, he's the same one who watched friends in high school walk hand-in-hand with their girlfriends and wondered why.
There's the guy who loves his sons and his wife and looks forward to growing very old with them as part of his life.
There's the guy who builds things.
There's the guy who, when he messes up or injures himself building things, can drop into a rage so violent and single-minded that he may as well be homicidal.
And there's the inner homicidal maniac, sitting there waiting for the moment of truth.
And there's the me who knows all them guys and who knows that every single one of 'em is completely outside the control of the guy who knows about 'em.
Them guys.
Them referentialities.
Not a one of 'em the voice of god or Jesus or even The One True Frank.
Just me.

One thing I know for sure about all this, by way of knowing so much about my inner selves: I cannot account for all the voices that communicate the me (that persona who is me at any time) to me. I know that the person I am varies from moment to moment and that, since I am in a constant state of conceptual flux, my perceptions are in a constant state of flux. And the universe, as cosmic and big as it seems to be, is not a steady state either.
Part of this is time/space theory, granted. But part of it is also cognitive theory and cognitive theory is pretty damn exact in all its vagueness when it comes to explaining beingness.
The old Cartesian view (Cogito, ergo sum) of the mindness state has been proven false in all ways by neurology, biochemistry and chemical & neural biology.
Nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain.
That, in sequence, means that all the folks who claim to hear the voice of a god speaking to them directly – and particularly those who claim primacy in delivering what they think god is saying – are dead wrong. They are listening to their own self-perpetuating, self-moderating, self-absorbed selves. Certainly not a divine being.
Which, again, brings us around to the original question or conundrum with which I started this rant: The info we have on god, how it works, how it built the universe, how it expects us to act, how it will or has or can act with or toward us comes from the mouths of singularly self-appointed other humans.
There ain't nobody ethereal and divine whispering in my ear. And no, it ain't because I don't believe that I don't hear it, that divine voice. It's 'cause there ain't nobody whispering in my ear.
Thus I shake my head in solemn disbelief when I hear Benny Hinn or whoever else is hip with the divine making fanciful pronouncements that, like all other such pronouncements over the course of human history, serve not the divine but the ego and self-adulation of those claiming to speak for the divine. And who claim the right to demand payment for blasphemy in the here and now instead of waiting for their imaginary friend to do the job itself, as any truly omnipotent & transcendental being should be able to do . . .

Unless that being never has existed and never will.

Dead People in China Again

2008-07-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

The Chinks killed five Muslims today. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, were it not for the fact that the Muslims in question have been taking shit from the Chinese government since before Mao. And the best of that is that Mao didn’t really give a shit one way or the other about the ethnicity of the Muslims recently snuffed.
See, the folks recently snuffed were Uyghurs. They’re part of the hugely unnoticed Altaic tribal group with a language that stretches from the Mediterranean to the Great Wall pretty much unaltered by the differences. Gringo coordinates for that change, given that most Gringos have no idea at all that there is any other language than English, would be like the linguistic difference between Spanish as she be spoken in Argentina and Brazilian Portuguese. Simpler? Ok, how about between Castilian Spanish and Portuguese?
Got that?
Ok, so here are the Uyghurs, kin to the Kazakhs and the Kyrghiz and the Uzbeks and Turkmen & all them other turkish folks, living in a chunk of the planet that has been pretty much theirs to enjoy, at least until Leninism hit the big time.
Up until then they’d been farmers, herdsmen, tradesmen, merchants and such, living among themselves in their tribal units (which is another story), eating yoğurt & livin’ to be a hundred & something for the Dannon commercials. But when Lenin got hot and the Russians needed to validate their territorial imperatives, the locals got inculcated and then Mao ignored ‘em long enough to think it’s cool to be Commies.
Good commies, mind you. We do business with China like they was old boys on Wall Street, which they will quickly enough soon own.
But I digress.
Islam came to the region early, mainly as the result of the spice and silk trade, by which the future attackers of the European civilizations aided in making the European civilizations some of the most prolific, profitable and advanced for the past millennium and a half. When Islam rose up out of the tribal superstitions of the Arabian Peninsula, it eventually spread – by the sword more than by any price of religious or superstitionist truth – out to the East, where its sole competitor was Buddhism with a little animistic superstitionism thrown in for flavor. As Islam spread eastward, it became part of local tribal lore in much the same way that Christianity bled into African animism to become the Caribbean versions of santaría or voudoun . Thus the blending of honor killings, virginity rites and similar ancient arcana became part of present day Islam.
Don’t ask Muslims if this is true, however. They don’t like to think that the message given by the prophet was anything but pure as the driven snow, even if there ain’t no snow in Arabia, if it was a small snow and you wanted to put your hand in there anyway. Thus we arrive at the recent executions.

Even before the Soviet hegemony discovered what the US hegemony has been trying to avoid recognizing, Islam was a problem to the Russian imperialist leitmotif. While the fervor of jihad did pay nicely into the Leninist/Stalinist mindset of total subservience and dedication to the expansion of world socialism, the simple fact that it was action done according to divine command rubbed the Soviets the wrong way.
Not that they didn’t take advantage of the situation.
There’s a beautiful chunk in the middle of the Reds where John Reed is standing in the middle of a theater sort of place, surrounded by local tribesmen, giving a speech to the locals on the advent of Leninist socialism. The audience picks up a chant from the translation of Reed’s speech and suddenly Reed realizes that his speech has been mistranslated.
The crowd which he thought was hell-bent for socialism is actually calling for a jihad.
That’s pretty much the same deal in China today, ‘cept that it ain’t Reed and it ain’t Mao and it ain’t no jihad you or I or the next dhimmi would recognize.

The Uyghurs have been watching their culture disappear under the Maoist yoke for decades. They’ve watched their herding lands and their mineral rights and their homes and schools and mosques turned into Maoist instruction centers under the hand of Han Chinese. In other words, the Han Chinese have been displacing the local Altaic folks for something like forty years now.
Where once the signs and language as Altaic, now stand banners in gold Chinese characters against a red field. Where once the children spoke the language of their parents, now they learn to speak Chinese.
And, to be sure, where once the tribal manners were maintained, today the Chinese socialist way is the only way . . . at least as long as you put on a good show.
And it’s at the putting on the show that we end up with five Uyghur şahidler who were executed for being part of a militant Muslim group with obvious intentions of overthrowing the local Han Chinese administration and instituting their own Islamic government.

I know about this stuff as little as I do for as much as I know because I have two friends, both refugees, who are Uyghurs. Each of them has had opportunities enough to know how the Chinese "organs" work. They are intent on being contributing members of Gringo society and they have worked hard to become such folks. I consider them my friends, a son and daughter, members of my family.
As I got to know these two folks and become acquainted with other members of their ethnicity, I became more familiar with their homeland situation and with their relationship with the folks who basically built a wall to keep 'em out.
At the same time, they know that I am not a believer. They accept that as far as they can and understand – so far as I know – how I have come to that. They also know that I have almost as jaundiced an eye for Islam as I do for the Roman Catholic church's self-proclaimed hegemony over whatever it is that the accretion of Mythrasism onto another Judaic heresy which led to the Pauline letters becoming part of the Jesus myth.
Yeah, like that.
So here I am torn between my feelings for the people of a distant place who have representatives within my life & family circle while at the same time feeling that the Uyghur Muslims who where rounded up and shot by the Chinese organs are probably just the tip of an iceberg in the oceans of future diplomacy & desires for peace and harmony worldwide.
On the one side, nobody, regardless of their language, culture (providing it's at least as egalitarian as I think I am), ethnicity or whatever deserves to be cleansed from the earth just 'cause they are different in some typically simian prejudice way.
On the other, Islam has become very vicious of late. The war that the rest of the world thought was over 1400 years ago has been hiding in the closet, waiting for the hired help to leave before bursting out of the darkness to kill everyone that doesn't agree with it.
And there ain't much of anything even Muslims seem to agree about any more.
So it's simple prejudice and genocidal politics versus another damn pack of sociopaths who happen have taken Islam as their shield on the way to dessimating the rest of humanity.

As I said, this leaves me in the same condition I’d be in if all I had for breakfast was a half-ett toaster strudel and the coffee maker was broke. Sure, I can get by thinking that what happened to these folks is a racist move on the part of the Commie Chinks. Or I can get uprageious about it saying that the Chinese are moving to cut off the incursion of Islam's more dangerous political elements before the jihad hits Beijing. And it will.
Count on it.
Which statement puts me back in the clear light of whatever passes for day in these dark times. I have to admit that there is no love lost between me and the delusion of religion. I ain't a believer and, although I do have no problem with most believers, I ain't all that good on religions which seem to be based on piracy, plunder, slavery, subjugation and violence against those who don't believe or believe as they should.
I ain't even good on Christianity 'cause it's got its own history – not the least of which is being forged every day as I write by the likes of Karl Rove or the Bushies and the rest of the pack of Liars for Jesus – and because of what it's become in today's simplistic and dumbed-down political depravity.
I'm tolerant of Buddhism 'cause it's so back burner about conversion, belief or disbelief. In fact, there are parts of Buddhism that are plainly disbelieving in the main. At the same time, reading the papers about a gang of Buddhism monks set buildings on fire 'cause of an argument makes me laugh.
Judaism, well, that one's a good 'n 'cause of the same things that make Mormonism so bizarre: there's no serious archeological proof for anything in the Bible, new or old testament. And if Jews are a private race within the human species, then that beggars the position held by some that Jews are an anointed and blessed people, which is another way to hide your own version of racism and elitist delusion masquerading as belief.
And then there's Islam, which we all know has been hijacked, although most of the Muslims I know don't talk about that much 'cause, well, they either accept being hijacked as the status quo or they're in on the hijacking and don't care one way or the other. Or they're just simple believers who'd like to be left alone just as I, a disbeliever, would enjoy being left alone about all this stuff.

And then here come's the Chinese organs, rousting a bunch of Muslims in a nominally break-away province of the Commie Chinese geopolitical hegemony and I'm not sure where I stand.
I have friends among those people.
I have very little respect for the world-view of present day Islam, which puts me at odds with the co-religionists of the Uyghur people.
But these folks – these two folks in particular and members of their ethnicity whom I've met as well – are close to me, mind and spirit.
The attack on the Muslims may have been justified by the Chink organs and police state politics since, after all, the dead Muslim Uyghurs were, by someone's definition, jihadis. They were working for the end of the Chinese hegemony and the eventual imposition of Shar'ia law across China (and the rest of the world in the process).
At the same time, these are just folks want to be left to be Uyghurs.
All of which leaves me conflicted. And sad.

Truly, this is another case in point of religion and the delusion from which its ugly little head doth spring ruining everything. Everything. Every last single human concern & compassion burned on the edges, if not in flames all around, by the fire of religionistic superstitionism.

And I don't know what to say to my friends, believers they be and all that.

The Clear Light of Evolution at Work

2008-06-23T10:47:00.001-07:00

Back in the day, folks would sit around the tribal fires and roast marshmallows while discussing the serious conditions imposed on the universe by any number of goblins, spooks, jinn, ghosts, demons, angels, archangels and ass ended masters. Er, make that ascended masters.
Someone with appropriate authority within the tribe would shake a bone necklace over the flames and smoke and invoke the name of the appropriate imaginary friend, whatever entity the tribe had chosen to consider as principle benefactor within the cosmic goofiness of the tribe.
Sacred words, dreamed up long ago by somebody with nothing better to do, would be spoken with deep reverence and concentration, even if nobody knew what the words meant. Order and peace would be brought to the world and all the tribal enemies would shake & rattle in their penis gourds for fear that the surrounding tribal imaginary friends would be appropriately pissed off to do something bad to whoever.
Like someone might die that very night, even as the bone necklace was being shaken. Or some child might start to sneeze and cry and come down with a deadly fever from the opposite tribes spooks attacking the other tribes.
Such beliefs and such silliness and such superstition were once the way of the world, everywhere with everybody. There were local deities and their subalterns. There were local spirits in local trees and any tribe that shared a river or well knew that the other tribes use of the well or river might be a matter of contention.
People would kill each other over whose spook or demon inhabited which bank of whatever river along which might live any number of tribes, each with their own special mysteries for the entire course of the river.
The wind would blow, the rain would fall, the sun would set and the sun would come up under the influence of as many different delusional & imaginary friends as you or I or the next believer might believe in.
The world was grand 'cause your god or my god was in charge.
And if you didn't believe as I do, then I'm out to kill you.
My god can't do it all itself, can it?
Such is the way, after all.

Now we'll forget for a moment that all of the above goes back at least thirty thousand years, ten times the space between us and the end of the legends in the Judeo-Christian holy texts. We won't stop to spend much time on the concept of deep time, which is the inability of most folks to consider anything more ancient than where they bought lunch yesterday and left their credit card on the counter.
Such things as time are outside the complex of this rant.
Only one thing is important:

It has been over thirty thousand years since this insane & delusional ghosts & goblins childish "imaginary friends will protect me" garbage first got fleshed out of the mind of whichever homo erectus led to you and me being here.

Thirty thousand years!
Thirty thousand years.
For thirty thousand years – at least – human beings have been dreaming up weird shit about imagined beings who control the physical world via whatever metaphysical means. Not only have we been imagining this that long, we've been sure all that time that whatever we do or say in a friendly and childlike manner to these beings, they will work in our favor if we say the right things and do the right things. And they will work against whoever it is we ask them to grind into submission.
For this guessed-at and imagined subservience to these imaginary friends, we get nice stuff & good times and nobody who believes otherwise will ever cause us any harm . . . because Our Special Imaginary Friend itself will protect us from harm.
And if the shit should hit the fan & we all get beaten or crushed or boiled in a sauce?
Well, that's happening 'cause we somehow pissed off our imaginary friend and, well, our imaginary friend loves us so much that it has to show us how much love it's got. Or needs from us.
That and money.

Now I am off on this tear because two things have happened to unbalance my world.
First off, George Carlin, one of the most outspoken disbelievers & the natural successor to the ironic & somewhat bitter comedy of Lenny Bruce, has died. He was 71. The same age my father was when Dad died. Seventy-one years old.
And you can bet that somewhere in some pulpit or church or mosque or temple, someone will be saying that George Carlin died because he didn't believe in god.
Yeah, right.
George Carlin died because he ran out of heart beats. He died because his body could not continue the processes of metabolism necessary for the continuance of life. The mind of the man may have cancelled out already, but ultimately, George Carlin died because it was time for him to die.
He didn't die because he finally had pissed off whatever god is in favor to such an extent that the god in question cancelled George Carlin's subscription to the process of living.
The second thing is pretty nicely tied to the first by the simple fact that, one way or the other, we're talking about superstition here. Good old fashioned belief in things that aren't there and for which there is either enough contradictory evidence for belief or for which nobody in their right mind would ever consider more than superstition.

So the second thing: I was coming out of the rest room at work and happened to pass by the office of another university functionary. This person, a woman with a long attachment to New Age "theology" (and we'll deal with that in a moment), was sitting in her office chatting with someone. All I heard were the words "archangels" and "ascended masters" and I was off screaming.
"Make it stop! Please make it stop!"
After years of hearing this prattle, every time it comes to ear, I am always immediately reminded of the howl and moan that associated the arrival of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi ji to this country in the 60s. You may remember the ol' Maharishi as the Indian yogi guy who ministered to the Beatles. You may remember having seen him on TV or in the newspapers, pushing is own brand of Hindu/American mysticism, which came to be called "Transcendental Meditation." You may remember how this kinda scared parents and elders as the number of young Americans in those times went over to the Maharishi's side and began chanting mantras and dancing around in circles of love and transcendent joy from what the Maharishi had taught them or sold them.
Maybe you remember.
Over the nearly 40 years since the 60s hit my neck of the backwater, I've watched friends from that time do a couple interesting things as their ages advanced.
The first was a return to Jesus.
Normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s, folks who screwed and slept nekkid next to other nekkid people, generally of the opposite sex, folks who smoked dope and dropped acid and spent enormous stretches of time either giggling inanely or talking in raspy voices interspersed with giggling about god and light and peace and love and all that, well, they went back to Jesus. Became rock-solid member of their rock-solid faith in the Bible, in the saving blood of Jesus, amen & hallelujah.
The former hippie libertines are now deacons and pastors and congregations of Christian churches.
Next was a turn toward New Age hodge-podge of wherever the Maharishi left off and whatever was left of a brain burned on acid starts.
Normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s, folks who screwed and slept nekkid next to other nekkid people, generally of the opposite sex, folks who smoked dope and dropped acid and spent enormous stretches of time either giggling inanely or talking in raspy voices interspersed with giggling about god and light and peace and love and all that, well, they went on to discover new and even more convoluted belief systems. Became rock-solid members of the Urantians or the Rosicrucians, or $cientologists or Knights of the Round Table or whatever.
You know, wack-job cult members hoarding guns and gasoline in preparation of the outbreak of a war between the greens and the reptilian alien lords of the universe come back any day now to fix the world up so a good, law-abiding Ceti-reticulan can sit on the front stoop with the wife and kids and watch the UFOs go overhead without a care in the world. Them kindsa folks, them's was hippies once.
Another group just sat back, looked at the joint smoldering between their fingers and figured it was time to go down to the drive thru on the Harley to get some beer before granny gets back with the grandkids.
Normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s, folks who screwed and slept nekkid next to other nekkid people, generally of the opposite sex, folks who smoked dope and dropped acid and spent enormous stretches of time either giggling inanely or talking in raspy voices interspersed with giggling about god and light and peace and love and all that, well, they're still normal, everyday, joint-rollin' hippie types from the 60s to this day. Tell 'em you're lost & they'll tell you you ain't 'cause you're right where your supposed to be, man.
And Dave's not here.
Some of 'em believe there might be a god. Some of 'em believe outright that there is a god and some of 'em just don't care. But if you ask 'em, they're likely to say "Yeah, sure. Whatever," and be done with it.
And then there's the gang who went through all that and came to the same conclusion I did: There ain't nothin' to believe in, not a god or a devil or a box of engrams held captive in some volcanoes or whatever. It's just the way things are and, from all we can tell, there isn't much more going on. Things happen. They don't happen for a purpose and they don't happen because of some grand celestial design and they don't happen 'cause there's a bunch of aliens controlling our every move with electrons and implants and anal probes.
Out of all of that it comes down to three moves. First there's back to the Jesus that they almost rejected 'cause they were counter-culture fired up. And there's off to some new age nonsense 'cause it's counter-culture, in that they didn't want to be like Mom & Dad. And them's what, left to their own devices, maintained who they were then, either believers or not, but not that much fired up one way or the other. Christians, Mixtions & Who Cares?
Still believers all the same.
And then there's folks like me, people who went through all that process, Hari Krishna, Harry Kirchner, Holy Christ, Ass-ended Masters & Pick-up-the-cans, all that, only to realize at some point that it's all the same mumbo-jumbo not much different than having an imaginary friend watchin' out for us instead of just doin' the damn jobs ourselves. The last & most rational choice.

So here we sit, thirty thousand years after the ice finally melted – or at least finally started to melt quickly enough so as anybody'd notice – and we're still acting like the wind is driven by the blast of air from the mouth of an exhaling demigod or that the sea is calm because Neptune (or whoever) took his meds. We pray to somebody or something when we get sick even though we all know that medical science, even as limited as it is, is still a damn sight better than a poultice made from the ground up skin of a snow lizard. When the earth shakes we know it's because of geological activity but we still ask god to help us find our loved ones under the collapsed rubble. And damn sure betcha somebody will say that the earthquake somewhere killed all those children 'cause their parents didn't know about Jesus or turned the backs on Allah or whatever.
Thirty thousand years.
Don't tell me evolution doesn't work.

Gracias por los Matzos, Ché

2008-06-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

There are many things about belief that I have a hard time believing. Sure, it's easy to understand – or believe, if you wanna use that word – how folks can believe that there is a divine being floating around in space/time who controls all the stuff we see every day, except for the car wrecks and homicides and earthquakes killing children.
All the bad stuff is caused by – dare we say it? – Satan.
That's what they think or take as true in the absence of other evidence (or logic sometimes even): that there's an almighty, loving, judgmental guy in space/time who's on top of it all, right down to the cell growth in your belly that you're gonna find out about some time soon enough, pilgrim.
But me, well, I don't see it that way.
I ain't gonna go into the way that works right now. Right now I have this thing about one of the doodads in the Christian religion that is part of every single Christian belief system – and there's almost as many of 'em as there are "sects" of Islam – since the before time.
The Eucharist. Εύχαριστία in Greek. Means "the giving of thanks." The bread that is either taken as a sign of remembrance of the death of Jesus for your sins or as a means of becoming absolutely one with Lord Jesus his own self, right down to every cell in your body becoming of his.
That eucharist, the one the Protestants call "The Lord's Supper" or "Breaking of Bread" or "Sacrament at the Altar" or just plain "Communion." That's what the Catholics call it, by the way: "Holy Communion."
And if you're even the least bit familiar with this sacrament you know the drill: Jesus is sittin' at his "Last Supper" before his torture and brutal death and he hands out bread saying "This is my body . . . Do this in remembrance of me." The handing out of the bread & all that, that's what you do to remember Jesus' having snuffed himself for your sins, you heathen.
So, carrying on a modification of the Hebrew tradition of Passover, Christians, since they finally figured out how to organize themselves some 200 years after the supposed Jesus story, get together to break bread, share the bread and remember how Jesus saved them from just turning to dust when they die and get buried.
Didn't know it was that complicated did you?
Well, it is.
First there was that deal with the apple (or fruit of the forbidden tree), which pissed God off so mightily that he gave everybody a birth and a death, at least at first. Then he decided to be nice and send a piece of himself to earth, which piece he allowed – or designed the scene so as to allow – the death of that piece of himself at the hands of humans . . .
Well, you know the drill, right?
No? Well, I hate to say this but it's in that myth book, the Bible.
At which point we can get back to the breaking of bread thing, which was borrowed from Hebrew "Passover" tradition.

You google it yourself, yo. I'm on this bread tear.

Now this all started with me 'cause I happen to like Goya crackers. These are the so-called "Mexican crackers" that the big food company Goya makes, which they sell in the local Krogers under UPC code 0 41331 03945 1. They're kinda like ordinary crackers but they ain't dusted with salt and they're about two inches in diameter with a deckled edge. Like biscuits or something. Resemble them crackers came in a can in C-rations. Anyway, that's what I like for snack crackers and that got me started on the communion crackers.
See, the RC kids generally hand out the communion bread in little white disks that – at least in my childhood did – stick to the roof of your mouth once you get one in your mouth at communion time.
"Corpus Christi?"
"Amen."
Stick out your tongue and the priest (or celebrant) puts one of the little disks on your tongue and you nod reverently and go back to where you was sitting.

Momentary aside:
Back when I was a church-goin' doubter, the worst part about communion was trying to remember just where heck it was that I had been sitting. Like I step over half a dozen other kids (or adults on Sunday mass) and walk up the central aisle to the communion rail. I kneel, do the tongue out & host on the roof of my mouth schtick and then get up reverently to go back to my seat.
That was the easy part.
Then I'd have to remember how many rows up I had walked or who had been sitting at the end of the aisle or whatever. It got so my mother would stand up and wave at me to find my way back to the family brood kneeler.
The most terrifying thing to me then, that getting lost. Took a lot out of the meaning of the Eucharistic ceremonial, let me tell you, Maurice.
. . . and now back to the previous rant . . .

But it turns out that other Christian sects use different stuff. Some, like the Eastern Orthodox (and similarly Byzantine-oriented groups) use bread that comes out much like a regular loaf, which is then cut into cubes for the ceremony of handing out the remembrance breads. Some western or Protestant sects do the same thing, adding, as the Byzantines do, the small cup of sacramental wine.
No, not like Gallo or Rufino Vespucci or Ripple. Sacramental wine, like hardly got any kick at all, yo. Remember, they's kids takin' the sacrament too, see?
Other groups use cracker sorts of things, matzos (מַצָּה) and the like.
At which point enter my Goya crackers again.

Before you ask, however, I am aware of the strange irony of my favorite non-salt crackers being made much like Jewish מַצָּה by a company with the name Goya. I noticed that right up front when I found 'em in the store. Right across the aisle from the kosher products.
And yet, here I am, chewin' on one of 'em right now, right after lunch, during which I had the ultimate of non-kosher, a beef burrito with sour cream & extra lettuce on it, plus some hot sauce.
Come to think of it . . . the burrito was an unleaven bread product too!
Oy vey!
So I go looking for the event of the communion wafer becoming a wafer, as opposed to the more (almost) rational leaven bread that was probably available throughout Mediterranean Europe when the Christian myths were being finalized, codified and generally agreed upon by the early self-designated "church fathers."
And no, I don't wanna talk about the church mothers.
At some point it was, I can guess straight easy, the matzo as sacramental bread. After all, Christianity is an accretion of Mithraism, Isis-worship & other Gnostic elements out of Judaism (check out Saul the Rabbi becoming Paul the Apostle [even if he never met Jesus]). In as much as Easter came to be celebrated during the Passover time, the extension of one bread product from Judaism into the favored bread product of the bacchanalian community meal, starting out with matzos wasn't that big a deal.
Unless you were one of the hated Jews.
Which probably led to the establishment of the Byzantine loaf cut down to cubes being the preferred form. More pleasing unto the eyes of the Almighty than to have that flat Hebrew cracker held aloft for the transubstantiation than that heeb cracker thingie.
Of course, it's probably impossible to know with any reasonable certainty – and I'm good for thirty years either side of an established date – when the host (wafer) became the host and the cubed loaf was relegated to those infidel Byzantines.
And don't you love the brotherhood and community that implies?
But I digress.
Back around three hundred years after the death & putative resurrection of Christ, a bunch of the aforementioned "church fathers" got together and decided what it really meant to be a Christian & ultimately what it meant to be a Roman Catholic. That was the Council of Nicaea, which gave unto us the Nicene Creed.
Now we'll avoid the tangent about a meeting three hundred years after Jesus is supposed to have lived being a direct line from Jesus himself. What we can't avoid, however, is the distance in time between that Last Supper in the Upper Room. The place where the bread was passed out and the idea of remembrance was introduced to the religion.
Three hundred years, a whole herd of dissenting and factional sects all claiming to represent the same Christ (and there must have been plenty if we take Paul's references as gospel [no pun intended]) and probably a few million deaths here and there over those sectarian distinctions lead to the Nicene Creed and the shape of the host.
And you can bet there was an argument over the shape of the host.
Look what Christians fight about among themselves today.
And no, I ain't talkin' about Paul Crouch or the wonderous and weird things that he & his followers believe. Yeah, as in: take as true that which cannot be substantiated by evidence.

Such as the evidence of the host tasting different, church from church. Or how it represents – or in Catholicism actually becomes – the body of Jesus his own self, all of him, hair follicle to toe nail. Which then derives the question of which part of the divine body one is upon having taken communion.
That's why the call it communion, dig? You commune with Jesus by eating Jesus, which makes you part of Jesus, body, soul, mind & spirit.
And somebody please explain them parts: body, soul, mind and spirit.
The body I get.
The soul, well, that means there's an afterlife. But since I don't remember the beforelife, I have a hard time understanding how I remember life in the afterlife. But we'll just take the idea that the soul is what is purported to live on after you have died.
Mind, well, for me that's a no-brainer: nothing comes from the mind that doesn't come from the brain, which means that I am not a Cartesian. I see Descartes statement (Cognito, ergo sum) as wrong. Descartes thought the mind was separate from the brain, some sort of operative working in the brain or throughout the body so that the body felt that it was apart from itself, special in every way.
Science proves otherwise. Hell, neurological knowledge from the 19th Century proved that otherwise.
Spirit?
Didn't we just cover soul? Spirit is what? A stand-in soul for when you need to have some motive force within the soul making the soul work.
Can you say infinite regression
And there we were, stickin' our tongues out at the communion rail all them decades ago waiting for Jesus to hop in and turn us into shining beings of light (sounds pretty newage-ish don't it?), being as how the bread wafer thingie stuck to the roof of your mouth really is/was Jesus.
And it was anathema to put your finger in your mouth and dislodge the host from the roof of your mouth 'cause, well, your fingers were unclean. As opposed to the roof of your mouth, which, providing you had gone to confession and gotten absolution & had brushed your teeth, was clean as clean can be.
Ah, what a joy beyond compare.
Right.

I remember all the prep to First Holy Communion. Sister Merry Discipline beating the words into our heads. Memorizing this or that piece of mythic lore. Getting measured for a suit & tie. Shiny shoes. Going through rehearsal after rehearsal. Over and over until we could just about do it in our sleep.
Then going to confession, getting absolved for our six-year-old sins. As if a six-year-old kid could have done anything contrary to the divine laws other than pause to wonder what the hell this was all about.
Which I did even back then often enough.
Like what sin could I have committed that would have kept me out of heaven?
I was six. I didn't even know what sex was. I didn't drink. I didn't smoke boo. I didn't cuss or stab people or rape little girls or steal money from the poor box. I was a six-year-old kid, fer cryin' out loud.
Even so, there we were one Sunday morning, all dressed up special. Boys in black suits with white shirts & ties. Girls in frilly white dresses & white shoes and stockings. Little angels going off for their first time encounter with the all-encompassing, total-body awareness of the life of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord hopping in our mouths, getting stuck to the roofs of our mouths and eventually, slidin' down the old esophagus and into our pure little bellies, becoming part of us. Body, soul, mind and spirit.
And getting lost on the way back to the pew.
Yeah, I remember it all.
But I remember most of all thinking that I didn't feel any different. There was no overpowering, all-encompassing, top-to-bottom, inside-and-out sense of being in the Lord's divine presence.
I remember it 'cause somebody asked me what it was like, having Jesus in me.
I dissembled.
There was a piece of cardboard-like bread stuck to the roof of my mouth; I didn't remember where I had been sitting, and I didn't feel different at all.
Body, soul, mind & spirit.
Many years later I would remember this while reading The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna
Cutting to the chase, Sri Ramakrishna was a Hindu ascetic who, his followers claim, was god incarnate, a divine emanation, an incarnation of the divine. He was born a human person like you or me but at some point in his life he was filled with the knowledge that he was god itself. The various moments when he was aware of this were filled with such ecstasy that he was unable to live as a normal human. Divine, he was above everything physical. Divine, he was metaphysical in such a way that when he died, he just sloughed off his corporeal body and slipped out into the great divinity-filled void of creation.
Written like a true believer, ain't it, that paragraph?
Well, reading that book I realized that what I'd missed in my first holy communion was exactly what I'd missed about a religious life that cast all fate to the divine wind and cared not for this world.
If such souls really exist, I ain't met one yet. And of all the ones I've read about, well, they all end up being human beings in the end, just like you or me: they get born, learn about life, get old, get feeble and die. Every single one of 'em. At least the ones we can document, which we can't do for Jesus or any of his disciples or followers or any such until about 1500 AD. And even then the trail gets dodgy.
And thus the bread of remembrance is now a wafer to some, a cube to others and a bit of fanciful cogitation to me. Even when I was a nominal believer, back when I was a kid, I didn't get it. Still don't.
But I'm glad Goya makes these crackers, yo.

An' Gawd Done Moved the Rocks!

2008-04-23T09:34:00.000-07:00

I get up every weekday at 4:40 a.m. By around five I'm sitting at the table in the kitchen, suckin' down my coffee & amaretto and wolfin' down some cereal or toasted waffles or whatever. Takes me about half an hour to eat. I eat slow.
So there I was, sittin' at the table with my rice crispies last Friday, wondering why the newspaper weren't here yet & reading the back of a cereal box. It was still dark outside but the days before had been nominally warm enough for things to start turning green. And bein' as it was Friday, I was feeling pretty optimistic for a change.
Somewhere around 4:40 I heard what sounded like a gust of wind.
Then the house kinda bounced. As if a good wind had come up all of a sudden and struck the side of the house real good before rolling on past.
I thought about it for a moment, that bounce.
There was something strangely familiar about it. I'd felt it before, first, and secondly it just seemed like something more easily explainable than blaming it on some stray wind.
I got up and went into the dining room. The plates on the wall were rattling.
I looked out the window. Then I made a cognitive decision.
The bounce was the P-wave.
The rattling plates was S-wave.
It was an earthquake. That's why it was so familiar. After forty-odd years I could still tell you what it was, even if I only learned about it in geology class and came to experience it later when I was in the USN. Puerto Rico sits on the Puerto Rican trench, a subduction zone that forms a crescent under the Atlantic that marks the ring of island that stretch from Cuba eastward and south to the coast of Brazil.

I went upstairs and googled earthquakes in North America and ended up on the USGS website. There it was, marked out in all its beauty by some seismologist. A R5.2 level quake, 11 km below the surface, near the Indiana/Illinois state line around Bellmont, Illinois. And right there, under the listing was a little link marked "Did you feel it?"
Yeah, I thought. I did feel it. I clicked the link, put down my experience in words and noted that I was going to check on the chart recorder at the university's geology department after I was at work.
When I clicked on the report invitation, there was a single page of reports. By the time I clicked back to the list of reports there were three pages. I went downstairs, finished breakfast, brushed my teeth and went back upstairs. Now there were over 20 pages of reports. I went in the bedroom and checked to see if Cid was awake. Barely. She asked me what was up.
"You didn't feel the earthquake?"
"No. Was there one?"
"Yeah. Earth doesn't move for you any more?"
"Not without some help."
I went back into my office and looked at the reports page. Now there were nearly 40 reports, some close in to the epicenter, the rest out as far as Ohio & West Virginia..
I got my act together, went downstairs & grabbed my lunch and bag. Outside the birds were busily chirping at each other. The cats were looking at me funny. I fed 'em, got in my car and went to work.

When I was a kid there were earthquakes in Hawaii and Alaska and such. Never really knew about earthquakes back then. Stuff happened. I could still watch Tom Corbett & His Space Cadets on the old Sylvania B&W. The nuns were mean as snakes, the pope was some austere dude lived in the Vatican. Sometimes there'd be a real bad storm and my folks would hustle me and Sis into the hallway or down to the basement but I don't remember a single person talking about earthquakes as local events. The Midwest was geological stable as far as I knew or heard. No problem.
I knew about earthquakes only from school textbooks or hearing some someone who'd been in California. I got through all twelve grades of school before college without so much as a giggle in my brain even thinking of earthquakes at all. And even after that I didn't think much about it.
About the second year of college I ended up interested in rocks and earth science. Not as a real science but just something to take. Geology. Invertibrate paleontology. Sedimentary environments. Physical geology. The usual stuff.
But there was this new subject, plate tectonics. Sounded interesting. I signed up.
Now you have to remember: in 1966 the idea of continental drift was a hypothesis. It wasn't a theory or a pile of serious laws of physics. It was a hypothesis that happened to be part of the program. The professor, Ben Richard, was a young guy with new ideas and a very personable teaching style. I learned about the angle of repose. I learned about mountain chains being part of a huge collection of encounters between large blocks of pretty much solid & unchanging planks of the planets surface. And I learned a bit about the idea of deep time, by which most humans without any time to think about it often get the idea that just 'cause it ain't moving fast right now, it probably won't move fast in the future. Or the past.
And there was a field trip too.
Back before satellite pictures of topography or such, the garden variety way for geology students to pick up on how plate tectonics works was to stand on one side of a valley with an open rock face before their eyes. Taking human imagination for what it's worth, the student then looks across the valley to see a similar band of rock on another exposed rock face in the distance.
You look at any Grand Canyon shot & you'll see the layers of rock echoed across the gorges and washouts. That's how it works. Here is rock A. There, over there across the valley you can see rock A". Sweet.
At one point in the field trip we were standing on the side of a road in Virginia. Directly in front of us was a rock fact that rose some sixty feet into the air. Running across the face of the rock was a unique pattern. Rubbed one way, the surface was rough. Rubbed the opposite direction, the surface was stippled but otherwise smooth. The face of rock before us had been broken and shoved up into the air by geological forces. Tectonic activity. Mountain building.
We were standing on one side of a fault line and staring at the face of the other side of the fault line. Our side of the mountain had either dropped or had stood its ground and the other side of the mountain, the face of rock before us, had either moved up relative to the other side of the faultline or it had stood its ground and our side of the mountain had dropped. The rough/smooth test told us which side moved which direction.
And the time it took to move that rock sixty-odd feet in the air?
Maybe months. Maybe centuries. But the pattern on the rock before us told us a simple possible answer to the question of how long. It had all happened at once, boom. Just like that. Maybe just over a few weeks or less, worst case scenario.

There have been twenty-six seismic events in the direct vicinity of the event last Friday (as of 21 April, 2008), near Bellmont, Illinois. Twenty-six bumps and grinds of the earth in an area about the distance between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio over the past five days. The Richter scale values for these events vary between the 5.2 that started the shakin' and Sunday evening's event at 1.0. The first one was felt by folks as far east as West Virginia and as far south as the middle of Georgia. The reported disturbance of human life varied between zilch to R2 or R3.
I only really felt the first one. I kinda stopped paying attention after that because, well, I stopped paying attention. Such complacency does have its merits. This way I'm not standing around, nervously waiting for the next shoe to drop. And given the exponential method of the Richter scales I doubt if I'd notice anything less than the slight bump and rattle that I experienced Friday morning as the cereal went limp.
The lesson isn't missed on me, however. I've always paid attention to the signs, even if they were arcane little flutters of the ground. And sitting as I do on the disbelieving bench, I look at things like earthquakes and volcanoes & the like as hints to the seriously ephemeral nature of all life.
It could end any time, this paradise.
The five things that give life a chance on this little speck in the middle of nowhere special are really simple good fortunes.
The planet happens to be in just the right orbit (right now) for generally comfortable conditions. We're not too far and we're not too close to the sun and the planet's tilted just enough to modulate the weather so we have seasons.
There's liquid water in a large amount (right now) to support life.
There's a breathable atmosphere (right now) with just the right ratio of the right molecules to interact with the carbon-based life that's around (right now).
And the planet has a molten core & active geology, which keeps the environment moving around, which stresses the life forms to evolve. The active geology also leads to the existence of a magnetic field, which protects the surface from nasty rays from space as well as holding off the solar wind so the oceans and atmosphere don't get blown away by the solar wind.
You want a comparison?
There's earth with exactly those five things and there's Mars with barely one (the distance from the sun) and none of the other four, especially a magnetic field.
Mars is a dead subject.
Earth has life.
And as part of the bargain, we get interesting geological activity, which makes us pause now and then after the house bumps and the plates rattle to think of how little it would take for all of this – ALL of this – to disappear in a puff.
Not that it makes the rattling plates and the bouncing house any easier to take. After all, if the earthquake that everyone is agonizing over or trying very hard to ignore the predictions about ever does take up course in the middle of the North American continent, living in a tiny village in Ohio isn't going to mean much.
All of the possibilities are thus aggravated by the severity of the fault structure and how long nothing's happened around there. But even more important in figuring what might happen next is the simple increase in global population.
Back when the New Madrid fault did its last big dance – around 1895 – there were much fewer humans hanging around. The global population back then is estimated to have been around one billion. Not much more than that. Now there are nearly seven billion of us crammed into the space barely able to support much less than two billion, at most. That many folks take up a lot of space & because the space they're occupying doesn't give a rat's ass one way or the other to how many there are or how high quality their lives might be, even a modest earthquake (like the one last Friday) is going to get more notice and cause more trouble.
So in the middle of the messed up windows and the broken plates and the fallen bricks and the need for reinforcement of the kitchen floor, there's the extreme likelihood that last Friday's event wouldn't have caused much damage in a world of half as many people or less.
Those who suffer in any way from the earthquake can blame it on their neighbors or on the government for not letting them know that this might have happened. Or they can complain to their favorite imaginary friend and beg him or her not to send any more destruction and misery their way.
Or they can pick up and go on, knowing that it's all gonna end eventually some day, one way or the other. Eventually the continents will drift back together. Eventually the churning core of this planet will cool its jets and the magnetic field will collapse. Eventually the sun will run out of fuel. Eventually there won't be anything here in this corner of the universe but a blue cloud of disturbed gasses and maybe a handful of cinders & rocks.

Of course thinking this way doesn't sound very optimistic. Talking about the eventual demise of the solar system and the galaxy and our self-absorbed, self-important little brief snatches of life in the vast deepness of time isn't the kind of thing people want to hear. They'd rather talk about an imaginary friend and trust the words in a book of dubious parentage and provenance.
"Don't tell me that we're running out of water. Jesus is coming back and we won't have to worry about a thing, those of us who have faith in the Lord God Jehovah and the redemption of the blood!"
Sorry, it don't work that way.
Science shows us with a definitely more focused eye what's happened in the past and leads us to understand the possibilities of the future in a world that is quite unavoidably real, physically present, a place & time that we can touch & feel and occupy every sense.
Religion tries to tell us – in a language and with metaphors no better than a child's imaginings – that we're going to live forever.
As if we could stop – or some imaginary roaring thunderer will stop – what's going to happen next. Ain't nobody that powerful. The rocks prove that.

If you listen real good you can even hear 'em sing. Lot easier to hear than that voice of god you've been waiting for all these millenia.

Thank Yew, Lord!

2008-03-10T09:56:00.001-07:00

Those living in sunny climes may have read that we had what some are calling a blizzard over the past weekend. Started snowing early Friday and snowed on through the weekend until late Saturday night. There was wind too, which whipped what was a fine misty snow into dunes and shallows, across the road and across the yards and driveways hereabouts.
There was a lot of snow, something like six inches to a foot and drifts higher than that, but I'd hardly call it a blizzard.
A blizzard is heavy snow, big nasty-ass flakes, coming down out of the sky at warp two and wafting across the yards and alleys and trees and whales and snakes and badgers in a 20 knot gale, unending, relentless and mean. Temperatures down to single digits and that's even before the wind-chill gets figured.
That, that's a blizzard, dammit.
Anything else is a snow fall or, at worst, a snow storm.
And to hear it from around here, you'd think we were stuck in our igloos with Nanuk and the kids, chewing on spoiled rodent blubber with only the light of the chicken fat lamp to illumine the darkness of winter.

As if.

So there we were, damn near out of milk and needin' to get to the store for more toilet paper, itchin' to get out of the cabin after a couple hours of snow fallin' like a dusting of crops in Kansas. And we all know how cabin fevered we can get in a Kansas crop dusting. But that's how it was.
Horrible, death-defying loneliness and isolation.
Cid comes up the steps to ask me what I wanted to do about dinner.
It was Friday, after all, and on Fridays it's become the custom for us to go to some restaurant that don't have a drive through and get dinner. Been doin' it for years. Hell, we've been doin' it for decades.
Just like that.
I looked at Cindy's haggard expression, the woeful circles under her eyes from hours of tormenting television weather channel watching, and realized that my RoadRunner link up was slower than usual. So slow I'd taken to playing solitaire.
Horrible, crushing isolation and pain.
I said "What you wanna do, yo?"
She said "Well, we could fix something . . . or we could go down the street . . . "
She was referring to the Tavernet, a small formerly-smoke-filled eatery about half a block down the ice-infested, snow-covered, froze all to hell street.
Truth up, I was torn between just collapsing into a ball of painfully beaten flesh, right there on the floor in front of the battery back up power supply to my three different ham radio doodads.
Oh, the humanity.
But I did not collapse. I thought about what Cid had suggested and said "Hell with it. Let's go to the Tavernet."
She said "Ok."
That having been decided, we gathered about us our warmest space suits, ready to go EVA on the house & the weather, to trudge through the minimalist wind and tiny flakes smaller than a mosquito's pudenda, what a horror! Of course it took extra time because I had to find my glasses and my wallet and the keys to the house and put on the helmet and the gloves and check for leaks.
Then I had to take a leak, it being cold outside and all.
And then we were off! Facing the gale, marching in locked step through the maybe three or four inches of snow on the sidewalks, down across the crushed and glazed surface of the streets, on we trudged, knowing we would freeze . . . or at least get our feet wet. Then, looking both ways for traffic & knowing better, and finally got to our destination, safe at last.
Merciful heavens! The raw power of nature at her worst!
Cindy opened the door and, with great trepidation, stepped inside.
The place was packed!

Yes! We were safe and again in the company of others! No more were we isolated ourselves into our tiny two story, twelve hundred square feet cabin! No! We were now with other humans, other people just like us, the kind of folks who, when faced with adversity and the punishing torment of nature gone wild, will step out of their cozy homes and venture across some kind of cold stuff with snow & all that to eat together at some place that has cold beer on tap and two restrooms.
Saved, I tell you! We were saved from a grizzly & horrible boredom!
And it would only cost us slightly more than it would going to one of those tony places by the mall where they have a wide variety of drinks and food and salads and such. Ok, maybe a bit more, maybe.
But we were safe from the storm!
So we ordered and they brought the relish tray thingie over with the sauerkraut and the cottage cheese and pickles & such, and we ate of that. Then they brought our orders – and for me another beer – and we did eat of that.
Then they brought the check and did eat of my wallet.

But while we were there, during our meal, I heard a strange conversation from a family at another, nearby table. Four people sat there, stuffing food into their chops and one of the women said "They're closing the churches! Can you imagine that?"
Of course, me being an as-yet non-migratory snow bird, I could imagine that.
I could imagine a church being so snowed in, by the Ohio definition of snowed in, that the pastor or deacons would decide it might be better to just lock the center of worship up for the weekend. No need to ask people to endanger themselves or others driving through what were pretty bad driving conditions just to gather for a few hours Sunday morning in praise and supplication of their divine.
It would be potentially costly to those driving in, should they have an accident on the way. And it would be potentially dangerous to others on the road as well, many of whom might be headed to the grocery store to stock up on bread and milk, as we seen to do in Ohio just before it snows bad. Or just before it snows some.
Makes perfect sense, don't it?
It's rotten weather; no need to cause problems. Close the church & tell folks to pray in their own homes with family & loved ones.
But it got me thinking, all the same, these folks getting het up about the churches not bein' open. I could almost see their plight, these cognitively incapacitated hominids and their religious conundrum. Dutifully worshipful they obviously were. Addled, maybe, but obviously dutiful toward their divine's need for attention, even in the middle of a blizzard. Or a serious snow storm.
Whatever.
Whatever you want to call it, the weather was bad enough to close the roads and highways and keep the ambulances going back and forth to homes & businesses where someone with a sedentary lifestyle would have a coronary shoveling the snow out of the way for Jesus.
So I began to imagine the wonderful sermons that people would do donuts on the highway ice and creep across lawns and down into gullies, getting stuck on their way to hear. The preacher's voice in the pulpit. The congregation attentive to every syllable while the snow plows ground on through the early morning, spreading salt and plowing in driveways just cleared by the old guy got took off to the hospital.
The sermon about the beauty of the winter scenery – 'cause I guess for some it would beautiful, and even to me it might be – and the divine's attention to all the details of esthetics, the contrasts of light, the monochrome nature of the light, the trees frozen, the birds frozen, old drunks in the street frozen, down there on the streets of iniquity which the lord doth so greatly detest, praise be!
Yes, friends, we now bow our heads and thank yew, Lord God, for this marvelous morning, bright and frozen all to hell and back, and for the accidents that we had getting here, the maimed and broken bodies, the busted up windshields, the towing fees, the insurance premiums and insurance cancellations, oh Father God, praise! For you have chosen to freeze the shit out of all that is and cover it with a blanket of freezing snow which doth test our cardiovascular conditioning in the removal of which, Oh God, we do strive mightily, unless we have a friend with a snow plow!
Yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! Yes! Yes!
Don't stop!
Oh yes! Yes! Yes! Oh! Yes!
Yes!
At which point we got to the bottom of filling our guts with food, so much being left over in his grace that we should not have desert but instead ask for boxes. And we did then return to our humble oasis from the storm, walking this time with the wind behind us and a good dinner and a couple beers & a margarita in our bellies, back to the safety of our home, in the name of all that we had consumed, amen.

On Sunday morning Cindy and I were out shoveling the snow off the driveway. We had a patch about five foot on a side done when I noticed the guy with the truck in the parking lot of the bank next door. I put my shovel down, Oh Lord, and walked over to where I could see him and he could see me.
He pulled up and rolled down the window. "Want your driveway cleared?"
"Yep. How much?"
"Fifty. All the way up to the garage & out, fix you up."
"Take a check?"
"Yep. Here's my card. Make it out to the name on the card."
"Gotcha. Be right back."
In something like ten minutes maybe total my driveway was cleared off and I could get my car out of the well of snow that had built up around it. Cid's car was in the garage, brand new and auto 4-wheel drive. By that time, as we'd discovered when we first picked up shovels and headed out, the sun was higher in the sky, the air did warm and soon enough everything was melting along on its own nicely, thanks.

It's a Divine Message! You Can't See It?

2008-02-07T13:22:00.000-08:00

One of the subtle incongruities that always gives me more than enough proof that there ain't no divine hand keeping everything moving along smoothly is the continued bad shit that happens to good people.
Like this guy I know. He's a church-goin' guy who participates in the operation and governance of the church to which attends. He works hard. His wife works hard and between the two of 'em, they manage to make their house payments and have food on the table. Every so often up comes a problem and here this guy is short on cash to put gas in the car. Every so often up comes something that takes the tinsel off the Christmas tree or reduces that summer's planned vacation in the back yard to another week at work.
His car dies three weeks before Christmas.
So much for that pay check.
He gets in the car after work, and on the way home, somebody blammoes him from behind.
And the person who drove into him? No insurance.
Then his wife's job tanks 'cause the money company she works for filed Chapter 11 and has to reduce its staffing so the honchos at the top don't miss out on their Christmas bonus.
Cigar smoke and slaps on the back all around, Attaboy.
So now he's down to getting a ride on the bus earlier in the morning than I wake up so he can get to walk through the rain to get to work to earn some money to find another car ain't beat up too much that he can drive to work.
Until the next accident.
Or the next thing goes wrong.
And all the while he's at church every Sunday, playing music in the service, helping get the choir directed, participating in the worship of his god in heaven who loves him so damn much that this guy and his wife can't get clear one week after another straight.

Oh yeah, his god loves him.

Now to me or the next disbelieving person, this kind of thing is a dead give-away. You can almost hear the George Carlin rant about god's love for your being superseded by god's need for your money. If there were ever a sign of the absolute absence of a divine will – especially a loving, caring & merciful divine will – it would only be a pope dying of some horribly degenerative disease.
Or hadn't you noticed?
Nope, this bad shit happenin' to good people thing is to me the most obvious of all signs contrary to the existence of god.
And we ain't even gonna talk about the money a divine being might need, transcendental and all that.
Now this subtle incongruity of existence is applicable not just to this guy I know but to every one I've ever seen who tried mightily to maintain their faith and their worshipful attitude toward what the divine "has in mind" for them.
You know: god has a purpose for each and every one of us.
Like driving a car into the ass of a devote believer's car.
That's a purpose, ain't it?
As if.
So when something bad happens to me or my family, someone – and it's usually someone fairly distant from whatever's happened – will suggest that god is trying to tell me something.
"Listen to your heart" is the usual sort of remark gets made.
I listen to my heart all the time. It goes "lub-dub, lub-dub" a lot.
But the remarks get made all the same and I'm glad that I have yet to hear such a remark from anyone close to us, which is another reason I love my family.
But the bad stuff happens and, for the life of me, I can't figure out what it is bad that I might have done to result in bad shit happening. Even as a non-believer.
And the idea that god is trying implies that the omnipotent god is not as omnipotent as the claim goes, no matter how much free will I am purported to have. Which is another argument.

The ultimate truth of bad shit happening to good people always comes down to the simple fact that such shit does happen. Happens all the time. One day the butterflies are happy in the field and the next day they's daid 'cause they fulfilled their destiny in keeping the DNA around.
One day it's a beautiful, clear sky and the next day a plane full of people drops out of the sky, sometimes because a believer thinks that everyone on the plane should die 'cause the believer's god told him so. Or her so, if the believer's a female delusional.
Six hundred and fifty million-odd years ago a bunch of molecules somewhere around here linked up into the beginning of the DNA strands that now cover this planet and somewhere in that molecule a glitch was waiting. Somewhere in that molecule was the glitch that makes people drive cars without collision insurance. Somewhere in that molecule was the glitch that made Stalin such a horrifyingly bitter sonovabitch murderer. Somewhere in that molecule was the glitch that gave my late brother-in-law the degenerative disease that, one way or the other, ended his life a few days before Christmas some years back.
Somewhere back in time there was a molecular glitch that let the genetic propensity for muscular dystrophy pass through millions of generations of women, ultimately reaching my mother-in-law and eventually her youngest son.
It ain't my mother-in-law's fault that this happened.
It's the way that the molecules combined and separated and rejoined over maybe even a billion years that led to that disease and death.
And it's not much different from what happens when my son gets sick and it turns out to be another genetically derived disease, this time from my side of the gene pool.

It ain't my fault that the boy's got asthma, that he had his first asthma attack on his first birthday or that he had his second attack a few months later just before Christmas. And it sure as hell ain't my wife's fault that she – and she alone out of all her male siblings – kept the genetic molecules around for the possibility of muscular dystrophy or Crohn's Disease available for our two sons.
Nope. All that stuff happened long ago in the past and, because the purpose of life is to keep the DNA around, that's why all those potentials for life threatening or quality of life threatening illnesses are still here today.
No divine hand willed this to happen.
And if some divine hand had willed that my brother-in-law would some day way too early in his life die with his muscle mass nearly gone, such a divine being would certainly not be worthy of any worship whatsoever.
No divine will worth worship in any universe of any magnificent physical properties would ever even design the possible combinations of DNA molecules that could lead to Stalin or asthma or muscular dystrophy or pain or suffering of any kind. No such a divine being would be worthy of anything and any who presume to speak for or know the divine will are certainly as delusional as any Charles Manson in any species.
And before you suggest that this is a rant against the divine permission for the existence of evil – which it most certainly is – consider also that it is a recognition of something so deeply ancient that no human will ever know the source of it.
Yeah, we're talking about the fact that there are no choices and no opportunities other than those to which we are all headed.
Eventually there will be nothing left and no one will be the wiser or the witness for it. And that little simple truth is the lens through which rational beings with reflective consciousness can finally realize that suffering is part of enjoyment and that even the most destructive elements of existence are not just preassigned but scripted from the first moments of the universe.

We get sick because we evolved from the weakness of the history of DNA. Germs and viruses attack us, lay us low and often kill us because they too evolved from the weakness in the history of DNA. Mutations and misreads and miswriting of DNA molecules over billions of years has led to a huge number – perhaps even an infinitely limitless number – of possible calamities and successes.
Germs survive by infecting us. Viruses the same.
We evolved to figure things out and thus we know about germs and viruses.
As we have learned about viruses and germs, the germs have been responding to what we do against them, based on what we know about them now.
At some point there is a zero crossing, a place where what we know will be sufficient to cover the worst possible infectious germ or virus but by the time we get there, the germs and viruses will have evolved so handsomely that nothing we can know or do against them will stop them from infecting us.
Happens to rats in labs and cats and dogs in the street.
One day you’re here and that's fine. Next day your not and that's fine too.

So before anyone tells me that some delusional mythic father figure with a penchant for hyperbole and knee-jerk meanspiritedness is trying to show me how much it loves me by my son getting ill, please give me a chance to leave the room before the preaching begins. After the past week and some between hospitals and doctors' offices, I think the message about a divine being has been laid out pretty damn clear.
Out of all the ills that can beset a person, the most hideous is the delusion that any supernatural being tells other people what's going on in the lives of people they don't even know.
There ain't no god. Dirt cheap, straight up, country simple. If you want to help, go get a PhD in biology or chemistry or genetics and work selflessly and ceaselessly to improve what bits of the human condition can be thus improved. Don't waste your time on gods or books or prayers or penances. Don't waste the time of the human species trying to kill off those who don't believe & certainly don't waste my time trying to convince me that I should.
This universe has been as it is for fourteen billion years. There's nothing else to believe in. There's nothing else to know. Nothing lasts forever and only nothing ever will. And the idea that an omnipotent being is trying to communicate with me is so monstrously delusional that I have to invoke free will to keep from smashing your lights out right here and now on this page, on this planet.

Mikä minua ärsyttää

2007-11-30T09:21:00.000-08:00

There's a site in Finland, I guess, since the site has a menu in one of the Uralic languages and I'm willing to take a guess that it's in Finnish. Has to be: there are menu subjects with the word Suomen in them, suomen being Finnish for Finland. The site has a long list of topics and links to things that aggravate the author of the texts. The menu for this list of topics is titled Mikä minua ärsyttää which translates into Gringoese as "Things That Get Me Stirred Up."
Among the many things that stir up the owner of the site is conspiracy theories. The page cited here goes to some considerable effort to point out how conspiracy theories grow, how they are assembled and how they are the work of less than rational thinking.
Kinda like religion with me, but that's another delusional subsystem.
Now all this comes up 'cause one of my colleagues at work has been getting into government-sponsored conspiracy theories for the past year or so. I didn't pay too much attention to it at the time, but by the time he moved from Ed and Elaine Brown to the so-called "chemtrail" conspiracy I began to get worried.
I mean, here's a college-educated guy with a degree in political science and a bunch of course work in history and anthropology to boot, strung out on the InterWebs, looking all the time over his shoulder or up in the sky 'cause he thinks somebody in the government has organized a huge conspiracy to flood our environment with poisons and germs and viruses using alien technology in an effort to suck off all our vital bodily fluids.
Yeah, that kind of conspiracy theory.
The paranoid conspiracy theory thing. The PCT thing.
And to make matters just a little more sensitive to me, the other day he calls another coworker's cell phone to say that the sky was filling up with chemtrails and that it was dangerous to go outside.
Then when he got to work he called her again and demanded that she come outside to see what he could see just sitting in his car in the parking lot. And he wouldn't take "no" for an answer. When she put on her coat I asked her what was up. She said she had to go out and see the signs of a conspiracy to poison us all with contrails.
Yeah, she said "contrails," not "chemtrails," which pretty much clued me in on her position on this rather bizarre delusional process. And she's a person with a psych degree & grad course work to boot.
So here my coworker goes out to the parking lot. I could tell it was another case of mikä häntä ärsyttää. Stuff that ticked her off.
A few minutes later she came back in, accompanied by the fellow who's become the PCT aficionado.
A minute or two went by and the PCT guy mentions that we should all go out and see the poisons that are being sprayed on us from four or five miles up by these aircraft of the US government as part of the conspiracy & plot & all that.
I responded by sticking my tongue out and pointing my face skyward.
"I lick that stuff out of the air all the time," I said, sticking my tongue out & licking at the air above my face. "It's really closer 'n you think it is."
Silence from the theorist.
"Perspective is a part of a plot to make us think that things far away really are far away," I said. "They ain't! They's right here on the tip of your tongue!" I stuck my tongue out again and continued to lick at the air. "It's better if you can catch it while they's still fresh," I said.
And again the tongue in the air: "Lalla-lalla-lalla-looooo"
More silence.
So this morning I come in to work and my friend with the cell phone and I get into a conversation about this bizarre change in my other co-worker's behavior and rational faculties. She said that he'd been going on about this stuff all the time any more, going from one conspiracy theory to another in the usual grand collection of dots that lead to an overarching, all-encompassing sort of "unified field theory" about what was happening in the world and how we are all just guinea pigs for "The Man." Like the Illuminati and the Trilateral Commission and the greys and the dracs and the Nazi flying saucer base on the moon and in Antarctica where the predator species trains against the alien species and all the stuff from the movies is true, man!

A couple weeks ago maybe it was this one fellow had mentioned that he was sorry he ever got involved in looking at this stuff, all this Ed & Elaine Brown and the chemtrails and the Masonic temple and the Lodge of whatever stuff. All the stuff that gets conflated into the PCT handbook.
Kinda like the DSM IV but with a huge pile less critical analysis of the data.
I said that I used to read some of that stuff but most of it was just dreck and garbage and anybody with any reasonable consciousness would recognize it for what it is: stuff that might happen or might have happened but which was, either way, way the hell outside of what any government or collusional force might orchestrate or do.
Bullshit, I said. It was all bullshit.
And if you want to listen to it and if you want to believe, the only thing you're gonna get out of it is a horribly depressing view of the world that wastes time and sucks energy out of you. And I said all that energy could go toward having a nice day in the sunshine while the increasing airline traffic causes many more planes to be in the air at any given time than even five years ago.
'Cause that's all it is, the "chemtrail" hypothesis reviewed.
It has nothing to do with plots or conspiracies. It doesn't involve the tunnels under the entire United States where the aliens control the way toilets flush. It has nothing to do with a supposedly secret cabal of neo-Nazi atheist new agers sitting in a room under a crystal pyramid orchestrating droughts and solar eruptions. No gang of feisty Jews or ascended high mutant overlords of an ancient lodge going back to before the Pleistocene works with the psychological profession to subvert and destroy the hard-core "facts" of $cientology.
Tom Cruise is good at that enough the way it is.
He don't need no help from his alien homeys in the volcanoes of Venus.
We got kooks right here on Earth quite willing to believe that.
And that's the point where it becomes quite truthfully "mikä minua ärsyttää" and I start shaking my head in abject disbelief.

See, on one side of the human brain there's this marvelous ability to imagine and invent. It's what makes us so easily adaptable: we can imagine and we can plan and we can take evidence and make projections on the actions of other objects. We know when it's unsafe to stand on the rock near the edge of the canyon, not because we saw somebody else fall to their death but because we can see ourselves, right there, right then, in a situation where we might fall to our deaths.
We're creative.
Language gives us that creative ability because we are able to symbolize and reassemble symbolic concepts into complete philosophies and technologies and sciences.
And out of all of this marvelous creative and imaginative mental functioning what do we end up with but delusions so grand that we ignore all signs otherwise present revealing delusions as delusions.
We are so easily convinced by our creative, imaginative neural structures that we get blinded by our own otherwise uninspiring creativity & imagination. We become part of a process that Steve Quackenbush used in explaining language. To wit:

"It's the failure of the self to coincide with itself that is at the root of the nature of language."

Now what Steve said about language easily applies – at least to me and in this application – to the process by which what we think about things and how we observe things and allow ourselves to fall into delusions. When we lose that "coincidence" between who we are as self-aware entities running on a very specialized and equally ancient neural architecture, we drop out of the pool of reasonable and rational individuals. When our awareness of the specialized human rational abilities fail to coincide with who we are within a sense of being what we are, we let ourselves be led astray by others similarly adrift in their own consciousness.
It's the old gambit where the monkey sees a rope on the ground, which rope has been laid out like a snake, and thinks that it's a snake and not a piece of rope.
Out goes the alarm call: "Snaaaaaaake! Snaaaake!"
And immediately the entire gang of monkeys is in the trees, screaming about a snake that none of the other monkeys has even seen.

Another web site much more easily explains what I've just ranted about. In that it is probably the best example of how conspiracy theories seem to spread and grow in the technology of the InterWeb. And that's because the InterWeb makes it so easy for people to just block-copy and paste horribly and often outrageously incorrect information, turning everything, even the baldest lie, into truth according to somebody else's definition.
No true evidence and no contrasting information is presented.
It's all stuff to be read, assumed as true and accepted as one more quite dangerous rope mistaken for a snake, part of an entire process of monkey screaming. It's a process that has been going on since the first scream turned into the first word.
And for all I can say here, there is nothing I can say to my friend that will bring him back to reason. If I say he's looking at the wrong things in the wrong way he will say that I am either an unwitting accomplice to the conspiracy or I am part of the conspiracy. If I try to protest that assay of my reasoning abilities it will be taken as further proof that I am further down the slip toward hell than even I will ever know.
That's because once you let Rush Limbaugh start screaming about the snake, the screaming will only be silenced by the silence that awaits us when the sun goes out and nobody's left here to explain that it was just a rope on the floor, a rope that just happened to fall in such a way as to look like a snake.
And worse yet: nobody will care.

That's Entertainucation!

2007-11-27T10:17:00.000-08:00

There is probably one thing more whacked than religious, full-blown delusional psychotics and that one thing is religiously full-blown delusional irrationalists who think that just any day now either Jesus is from Venus and he's coming back or the aliens are gonna show up any minute now and put us into slavery 'cause they all look like a fat John Revolta in leather underwear.
Seriously.
I'm being serious here, yo. You have your gone-of-this-world enough-already religious preachin' on the corner types for whom every single thing that happens in their lives is a direction or direct result of the divine manipulator.
"God let me fall asleep behind the wheel but I woke up in a toaster oven, which show that God cares about me."
"I got drunk in a bar full of bikers with chain mail on & didn't get raped, which shows that God loves me and protects me."
Or the quintessential story of two teenagers out drivin' one night get in a wreck. One of the kids gets killed. The other survives with minor injuries and the subsequent Sunday morning gets up in front of the whole congregation – including the parents of the dead youngster – and says that "God obviously saved me for a purpose." A round of "Praise" goes up from the congregation. And nobody notices that the parents of the dead youngster rush from the church in inconsolable tears. Probably so they won't get up and strangle the self-centered, self-absorbed little shit who says God save him while allowing his friend to die.
And what's better than any of those?
How about a huge government-wide, aviation industry-wide, global conspiracy to poison us all with weird chemicals by sending planes around the world at hugely high altitudes spraying the goo on us from on high?
Yeah, that one.
Chemtrails.
Contrails.
No, you!
No, you! You!
Ok, chemtrails. Whatever.
And should there be any doubt in your head that this is not a global conspiracy organized and perpetrated in collusion with the alien greys or pinks or whatevers, here's your picture.
You can plainly see that the picture shows where a strange extraterrestrial vehicle is slipping through the stratosphere, obvious as hell 'cause we PhotoShopped it in. You can plainly see that it's a picture and you can plainly see the UFO. Thus there is a conspiracy.
Right.
The conspiracy is in the PhotoShopped picture, as in the PhotoShop work that was done to the picture so you'd see the damn UFO better.
Like the face on Mars.
Yeah, like that.

Manipulate the evidence with as many layers of manipulation as you can muster so the original picture shows what wasn't there until you started dicking with it. That's how science works, see? You come up with an idea and then you bend the hell out of every possible real-world, quantifiably neutral bit of whatever you're using as a means of measurement to prove your case until the case is proven.
By the manipulation.

So now that we've got that clear, it's time to get on the shuttle to the mother ship and check this mother out! But first there are some things you need to attend to before you put your hand on the registry pane and prove that you really do need a ride home after the dance.
I say this because, long ago and in a place pretty far way, I was contacted by alien beings who assured me that one alien being was enough and, what with multiple consciousnesses going on in their being, they had some stuff they wanted to hip me to. That first thing – the thing about the multiple consciences and all that – has subsequently become a copyright issue and thus I'm stuck with it and you ain't.
But I digress.
The first order of business is whether or not I was really contacted and whether or not anyone else really gives a small rat's ass about ass-ended masters, higher states of consciousness, silver ships moving without a sound or whether or not, for that matter, hay bales make good insulation for houses in Montreal.
Once you get past that, you'll have to prove that you are not a clone of somebody masquerading as someone you ain't. Easiest way for you to do that is to send all your bank numbers to that guy in Nigeria who has his brother's assets frozen up solid in a bank in Switzerland.
You remember Switzerland, I'm sure. It's the place where that aliens-came-to-earth guy has his theme park.
Get that out of the way and we have to search for implants. Easiest way to do that is to give whatever bank account information you didn't send to Nigeria to the bursar at the local org. If you're unsure about that, you can just go to the $cientology headquarters web site and take care of that matter there.
You may have to physically go to the headquarters, for which you will have to personally take all fiscal and physical responsibility.
We ain't liable if you fall into a volcano or get abducted by space aliens flying in what looks like DC-8s. Nor are we liable for any other physical things that could happen just from reading these few screens worth of useless information.
In fact, by this point, if you haven't figured out that this is all useless information, you are definitely on the wrong bus, tied to the wrong dimension or have traveled into a parallel universe not too much different from anything you'd find at the places linked to above.

Now, as one of those who has spent a lot of time in delusional land and survived more or less intact, let's consider a couple things, the first of which is the nature of delusion itself.
If you're already familiar with this, go ahead and read it again.
Basically it works like this: you get a bunch of folks in a room and tell 'em that something marvelous or special or whatever's gonna happen. You promise to show them that you can do something totally bizarre, like communicate with the dead or pick up their vibes about a problem in their lives or pull your head out of your ass. And yes, this is a take on the so-called "cold reading" game.
It all begins with one suggestive statement. Of course if you have a really whacked statement, like you're gonna contact somebody's dead sister's pet boyfriend's aunt, it gets even easier. Promise 'em a message from beyond the grave.
Everybody wants to go beyond the grave.
That's why we have paid "weepers."
Or you take somebody into a darkened house and tell 'em you're lookin' for haints. You know: ghosts.
You take 'em in and then you start this "Did you hear something?" or the "Is it suddenly cold in here or what?"
Do that a couple times and then do one of those "Ooh! I felt something brush my arm. Did you?" Followed shortly thereafter with "The light! Look! There's a light over there."
Makes the hair on the back of my red neck bristle and stir just writing about it.
So easily are we deceived. Or deluded.
Either way, them what you're trying to impress will immediately start to feel what you feel and agree with what you say. Even the most ardent of skeptics, even them, sometimes, they get bit too. Before long you have a room full of shivering peckerwoods looking around furtively for the ghost or spirits or whatever you wanna call that imaginary stuff that falls into place so easy you realize right off that you should have charged money for this freak show.
Well, don't look now. It's on the web.
Yeah, right there on the web you can get yourself totally screwed up in the conspiracy thingie about how those airplane tracks in the sky are a lot more of 'em now then there used to be and they's everwhere crissy-crossin' across the sky like they was plowin' a field, thems was.
Right.
Back when there were fewer contrails there were fewer people takin' plane rides, mostly 'cause plane rides are the province of people with more money than brains or folks being sent somewhere or going somewhere there's money.
Nowadays there are many many more airplanes in the sky 'cause nobody but po' fo'k does the Greyhound. And because of that – that increased air traffic over your house or garden or UFO welcome center – you will see and can bet damn sure you already have seen contrails from one end of the horizon to the other.
And the wide ones versus the skinny ones?
Well, gee . . . Let's see . . . Over time the wind at high altitudes might just blow crossways across a contrail and it'll spread out. And the fact that there are cold water molecules in the air way the hell up there will cause the formation of more frozen crystals that will spread the effect of the once whisper-thin contrail into a wide-ass contrail looks like Aunt Martha's bridge club held a meeting up there, all their wide butts ripping through the sky at supersonic speed.
What? You didn't know that Aunt Martha's bridge club was in on this conspiracy too? My gawd, man, have you no concern about the way the world is being plagiarized by all these conspiracies! Pick up, yo!

Now, the entire process leading to this point having been wasted, it's time to get serious about something absolutely outside the real of anything real and/or serious. We're talking about things that no rational person should even worry about, let along write about.
We're talking about extraterrestrial life.
Yeah, that.
See, the deal is simple: if there were alien beings on other planets who had developed advanced enough technologies for them to travel through space without worrying about what time it was, you'd think they'd have already been here by now.
Yeah, Fermi's paradox again.
I mean, think about it.
The earth is over five billion years old. Four and a half billion, if you want to get dodgy. That's a five with nine zeros behind it. Longer than Grandpa got and a damn sight longer than the dinosaurs got. And out of that four billion years we can deduce from the fossil record that we, we high-order monkeys with frontal lobes and reflective consciousness, are the only animals to ever become sufficiently self aware to figure out science, reason and superstition.
And we've only been running around in this model for something like a hundred thousand years. That's a one with five zeros behind it. Which, in comparison to the five billion years aforementioned, is something like .002%, which is a very tiny slice of time. That against the .015% of the time that there's been multicellular life on this planet.
So if there's a species out there with better science than we have, they must be either awful stupid to not have found us by now or they don't give a shit. Being as smart as they would be they'd pretty much retire to a nice place in the galaxy and watch Honeymooners reruns. Any civilization of advanced beings with reflective consciousness that has developed technology sufficient to ignore time and space had better have the rational faculties to know better than to waste time on looking all over the galaxy for other civilizations anywhere near ready to leave their home planet for another 'n somewhere else.

Let alone poison us 'cause we'd make better pets that way.

But lest we forget, this is the time of high frivolity. Not only is it time to stuff yourself with food that you normally would be happy to eat out of a can, it is also the time to take all your money and put it into useless projects. That's what I'm doing.
I'm putting my money on the aliens and their pets project. That's the one where they land, turn us into kittens and let us have special corners of the house next to the washer and dryer where we can make our poo and whizz our lives away. That and sleep on their beds like my cats do.
Just think of it!
They're coming in their invisible space ships that you can only see through the magic of PhotoShop to fix up the world to rights – thus displacing Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and Beavis – and put the world at peace so that we can live under their kind and generous care from now until the sun turns into a big red ball and eats Mecury and Venus.
Yeah, Venus gets ett.
I can hardly wait to see that! Better 'n them donkey shows used to have down there in Santo Dorito or wherever.

You gotta be kiddin' me. If there's one thing I've learned over the past sixty-one years of being of this species, it's that science and rational behavior do not run blissfully hand-in-hand through Bambi land. Science always presents the human species with new and exciting ways to kill each other.
Somebody figured out the wheel; Hittites & Akkadians slaughtered the Sumerians with cavalry and war chariots.
Mongol & Turkish blacksmiths learned how to make spring metal; armor-piercing cross-bows became the norm of foot-soldier war.
The Chinese learned how to make explosive powder; you can now buy an AK47.
Einstein comes up with the equation that led to understanding nuclear processes; the US built and used the first two atom bombs.
Same nuclear power got harnessed for "peaceful" electricity production; nuclear submarines lurk beneath the waves with nuclear warheads on top of rocket missiles.
Some guy in France figured out that his name was really Raël and now there's a building made of hay bales somewhere in Quebec Province.
You see any technological process leading to peace and love yet?
I don't.
Thus I think we can safely say that if there are alien, extraterrestrial civilizations that have learned to live with their high end technology, they have either died out before they learned to move outside of time and space or they got lost out there outside of time and space or they had the common sense to stay home and enjoy what will probably be a very short ride toward oblivion.
After all, the sun that our planet orbits is halfway through its life. In another five hundred million years it will be at crossover point and quickly turn into a red giant. This will involve the inner planets being either gobbled up or thrown awash into space by the sudden change in solar diameter.
Anybody living on any other star in the galaxy, which star will have to have at least the same life time as ours – and there are cosmological & astronomical limits to even that – will be facing the same fate. It would hardly make sense to spend the entire lifespan of a species inching toward technological superiority such as I'm talking about here and not be aware of the very sure likelihood that they would get that far only to get ett by their own prime luminary. And if they did go to that extreme, any effort that they applied to exploration of other planets would show them that, while they might escape their own world before it disappears into a red-faced star, any other planet that they might go to will eventually suffer the same fate.
The prospect of that constant movement one move ahead of species death – especially considering that they'd have to move their entire population and all its technological, artistic and societal baggage with them when they did – would eventually become so dunning that it'd be better to stay home and watch the show.
Unless you really enjoy being interstellar gypsies, one way or the other.
And any society that did get hung up in that one-step-ahead act would eventually lose all their cultural and technological advancement to the effects of only taking that which is absolutely crucial to the continuance of the species. Or the society.

All of this leads back to the central nothing at the beginning of this rant: the proximity effect of all these crazies with access to the volatile nature of the web & the huge amount of absolute bullshit that gets spewed out every day by people whose main claim to fame is being able – much like I am – to connect a random series of dots and then PhotoShop that into an even large vista of hogwash.
Returning thus to the central tenet – that delusional behavior and delusional belief systems are endemic with the species – I stand in awe at the huge amount of energy a world full of delusionals can spend at one sitting. Page upon page and block of text upon block of text pasted, cut, folded, mutilated and sheared so that you & I and whoever else we like to think is watching can be entertainucated.
Yeah, that's right: I used a home-brew neologism.

Entertainucate: (v.) to combine loud noises and flashing lights with textual truncation and poor choices of type, color and background so the average human monkey will think it's actually learning something when in fact it has only been entertained.

Kinda like "edutainment" but different.

And That's Fine Too

2007-11-20T05:28:00.000-08:00

I was slitherin' around the InterWebs the other day looking at things that piss me off when I was suddenly inspired to Google "end of human species." This got me a huge pile of Wikipedia stuff about how we're all gonna die because of something.
Now, when I read this stuff – and I do so only because I have the desire to know whether anyone agrees with me on this – I am always challenged by what I see as a sort of Bambi-Gets-an-UZI sort of world where all the blissfully sweet and gooey goodness of creation (and I use that word only 'cause it's a metaphor) collapses in on itself and we snuff it.
One day it's butterflies and moonbeams.
The next day it's shit-up-to-your-nose and poisonous river snakes comin' up the toilet pipes.
"Quick, Ma, get the plunger!"
Or as it says somewhere in a John Rechy novel – and I've "normalized" the exact quote – "One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."
And yes, I did actually read John Rechy.
A couple times. Two books. City of Night and Numbers.
Which, when I think about it metaphorically, makes perfect sense.
This a sort of "here today/gone tomorrow" sort of quality to the stories in those two books, paralleling the way things work in the so-called "straight" world (where it's all a matter of a wide stance) and in the universe altogether (where stance has nothing to do with anything).
And that's just about how I see the human species.
Of course I come to that view by way of having spent enough time in geology courses to have a sense of deep time (or at least an appreciation of what it would take to have a sense of deep time) and to recognize that every animal gets a chance and then it dies. And that death can be over a long period of time within a species or it can be a hugely long period of time across the expanse of deep time.
So the rocks tell the story and it's always a story of here today/gone tomorrow.
Just ask the chickens. They know. They were here when the dinosaurs snuffed it, same as the monkeys will be here when we monkeys snuff it.

See, it all comes down to a couple simple rules. The first rule is that shit happens. The second rule is that shit will happen no matter how much work goes into it not happening. Like global warming (GW).
You can agree with GW and say that we should try to stop the slide toward a hot house vegetable garden planet but it won't make any difference one way or the other whether you agree. Or not. That's 'cause humans have been around in this package with this much knowledge for less than ten thousand years. That's not much against 700 million years of life in general or against the 100 million years that dinosaurs were pissin' in the oceans and shittin' in the forests. So with less than ten thousand years under our belts and despite all the things we think we can know by searching the geologic record, the simple fact is that we are part of the planet, not apart from it.
This means that the shit of GW might be the way we go, but if it ain't that it'll be something else like glaciation setting in so good that the only unfroze oceans will be down by the equator and they won't be that much fun to look at even then.
So you have your shit happens and then there's shit happens.
Against this we think we know how to change weather. Yeah, right. Ask my brother-in-law about his adventures in the windy place where the Native Americans told the gringos not to live. Or my friends who ain't here 'cause some illness snuffed 'em or the illnesses that some friends are trying to survive by means of modern medical technology.
Chemistry, really.
Yeah, that kind of shit happens.
And you can damn sure betcha that if it'll happen to an individual it will happen to a group of individuals and if it'll do a group, then it'll do the planet and none will be the wiser or stronger or more likely to survive.
As in individual life, so in the life of a species: when your numbers up, you're just another number.

"One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."

At which point we get back to the end of the human species. And we can do that simply because we know that it's going to happen. Either a big rock will fall or a gamma ray burst might go off somewhere close enough to cook us good or a germ will mutate or a virus will become impervious to whatever countermeasures we rely on or the world will shift in its orbit or something equally catastrophic and the human species will disappear.
Just like that: finito.
"Damn, Ma! This plunger ain't working! Gimme my shotgun!"
The best part of any of those scenarios – or even ones that I haven't thought of to say anything about – is the way that nobody will be left to explain this all to whoever comes by next. Animals from a far planet might land here and look around and recognize that we were able to build a bunch of stuff and not kill each off outright (although that's a possible scenario too) and we might have even figured out a lot of science. But that'll be it.
If nobody shows up from somewhere (which I think is extremely more likely), whoever evolves to reflective consciousness when we're not around will find the rare and deteriorating remnants of our presence and likely wonder what the hell it all means.
Either way, one day we're here and the next day we're gone and it won't mean jack to anything or anybody.

It is the finality of death that makes us dream of an afterlife. Even for all the toil and trouble of ensuring the breathing process, each of us finds sufficient cause to wish to live. Makes no difference the animal; we all want to live as long as possible, and in the case of believers, forever.
The extinction of a species offers the same ghost, the same fear.
Although no one ever notices outright, the disappearance of a species seems to make us wonder about the inevitability of our own species' demise. That we have neither the sense of time nor the sense of deep time that would provide us examples over the course of life on this planet, we still know from meager experience that extinction is a distinct possibility.
Families die out. Why shouldn't the entire species?
That becomes the paradigmatic question.
'Cause if we are willing to admit that it's possible the human species will snuff it, then we have to figure what is going to mean in the long run. And by long run I'm talking about from now to that last human. Which brings us back to Bambi.
See, as animals go, we're too gooey sweet to be worth much on the pages of survival. We care about stuff. We care about our families, our friends, our continued existence and the continued existence of those we care about. Of course we're easily baited into thinking that killing off every other sonovabitch on the planet is within our purview and a dutiful one at that. Thus inspired to love and hate at the same time, we are stuck like a mobster in tears when it comes to figuring it all out.
That’s the purpose of superstition, religion and the verbal fluff of philosophic ramblings such as this.
If, however, we are willing to stare blankly into the cold and dark face of the night-time sky, we'll have to admit that not much of any of this matters in truth. We will be here for a while & then we will go out like the dinos. Yes, it's a hard concept to accept and I'm sure that someone will gladly point out when I approach my own passing that nobody wants to die. But what nobody wants and what nobody gets are not the same things. Death is inevitable. Life is a terminal illness. If along the way we catch other terminalities, so be it.
As a group of animals with reflective consciousness we may not be too willing to look hard into the cold reality but as a group of beings who have discovered over time that nothing lasts forever, we should be able to accept our own impending nothingness.
And just because I can talk about it this clinically does not mean that I look forward to the end of my life or the life of my species with any glee. I will be sad to leave and I will be and am now sad to know that we will all leave some fine day.
We have to get used to it, this eventual disappearing act.
Makes no difference who we are or who we sleep with or what we think or believe.

"One day you're here and that's fine, and the next day you're gone and that's fine too."

Only This I Believe

2007-11-08T08:29:00.000-08:00

One of the things that I've learned about the InterWeb is the simple need to get the hell away from it now and then. I've learned this so many times that I've just about forgotten what I do that makes me learn it. One minute everything is sweetness and light. A couple mouse clicks later it's a drop into such vile & disgusting knowledge that I have to give myself a pep talk before I start praying.
Seriously. Me. Praying.
As if.
Recently – like a couple minutes ago – I did something that I learned long ago to not ever do again.
I clicked on the Religion of Peace link that's on this very page. A few seconds later I was staring at the beginning of that old feeling: a Muslim Day Parade in New York City, just a day or two before the six anniversary of a Muslim Day Attack that killed tens of thousands of people and turned the entire planet into a jihad fest.
You may have heard of it. Back around 9/11 of 2001.
Yeah, that.
And just to make sure that we didn't forget who'd done that, thousands of Muslims collected themselves all together in New York City, not far from where the WTC towers had been, to show us how much they appreciate being in this country of infidels and idolators.
Then I clicked on another link on the RoP page and ended up reading about how some Muslims are getting to Gringoland and changing their names to Christian-sounding ones, joining the local Christian churches and attending Christian church services. All the while knowing that they have every intention of following the suggestion of a mullah that "Muslims should be peaceful in Western countries until they are the majority. Once in large numbers, they should wage violence to establish Islamic supremacy." (source)
And that led me to another link that explained (a) why there are no serious agricultural activites among hard-line Muslims (it's forbidden by one hadith or the other) and (b) what the real story is on the Muslim zakat tax, among other "taxes" that are nothing more than pillage & piracy, rape & subjugation. The usual sorts of things known to a society based on war and internecine violence.

It was just about there that I had to get away from the screen & keyboard. I sat down and read a few pages of Dawkins' book. That didn't do the trick, so I read a few letters and noteworthy bits of info in the most recent Freethought Today.
Right about then I just gave up, sat back and stared at the wall. I remembered walking outside in the autumn air, cool and not too humid, the sounds of birds singing and people laughing and all that. I remember thinking that the only way we will ever live, one way or the other, is to enjoy what we can right now.
The future is gonna be a whole bunch more shitty than any shit you can think of right now. Gotta be.

If you look at the faces of the folks who got down on their knees to pray during the Muslim Day Parade over there in NYC, you'll see nary a smile. If you look at what the posters and signs say about Islam and its relationship with what's left of Western Civilization, you'll see nary a reason to feel safe. If you think about what all those Muslims in the middle of New York City a day or so before the sixth anniversary of a visit to the US by another gang of Muslims, you'll probably get a bit hot under the collar. Maybe a bit irate. Maybe even a bit depressed. Maybe you'll think like I did: All you get is this time. You may as well enjoy what you've got 'cause, come the Muslims as a majority force in our country & elsewhere around the planet, it's gonna be shit from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. And for all the usual religious reasons.
Music, forget it. It's haram. So get ready to see that beautiful saxophone that you bought just so you could play out in the surf at night at the beach turned into scimitar handles &c. Same-same that beautiful violin you gave to a friend's wife so she could play like she did for her father in the old country. A Muslim country, even.
Dogs? Haram. Adios Fido. (Cats, strangely enough are ok, but not necessarily halal. Some authorities contest this & Saudi Arabia has just outlawed the selling of dogs and cats. You take your chances.)
Women, well, hell, we all know how Muslims feel about women.
And all those pulled pork barbecue sandwiches & outside food vending &c? Forget it. Iranian religious police have started closing down pool halls and coffee shops 'cause they say irreligious things happen when people frequent such places.
And don't forget about the daily beheadings & beatings and stonings & all that stuff. Who'd want to miss one of those events. If you had televisions you might be able to watch the beheadings. But televisions – by way of music &c – are also haram.
And if any of these points are debatable owing to interpretation of the law by various ahadith, the various factions will be sure to fight it out through your neighborhood house by house just like they do in Iraq today.

Allah be praised, such a peaceful world we will have once everybody is Muslim and all the infidels, idolators, atheists and pagans have been subjugated or killed & their property and children sold into slavery to the glory of Allah.
I can hardly wait.
All I have to do is look at the Middle East to see how the future will look.
For starters, farming will be an ill-advised form of employment. It's in the hadith, see?

Narrated Abu Umama al-Bahili: I saw some agricultural equipments (sic) and I heard the Prophet saying: "There is no house in which these equipment enters except that Allah will cause humiliation to enter it" [Sahih Bukhari 3.39.514]. Dr Muhammad Muhsin Khan, the translator of al-Zubaidi's collection of Sahih Bukhari hadiths, comments on this hadith that the profession of cultivation is often of oppressive humiliation especially under the feudal system. By indulging in this work, one may neglect the obligatory Jihad in Allah's cause [al-Zubaidi, p505]. (source)

So you can count on having a lot less to eat. Not to mention the obligation of jihad, which business I suspect will continue pretty much unabated being as how there's all those sinners to be rounded up and beaten on a regular basis.
You close down one pool hall and another 'n will spring up like a weed somewhere else.
Stupid sinners & their sinfulness.
Don't forget the peace.
The future of an Islamic world – from sea to shore & pole to pole (yes, even the Inuit will bow towards Mecca) – will be blessed with the sort of peace that one sees all the time in the Middle East and in Central Asia.
Sure, there's turmoil there now 'cause the crusaders & the infidels and their take-charge women are running loose. But when the peace of Islam is the law of the planet things will calm down pretty quick.
Why, even the Shi'ites and the Sunni's will get along.
You can count on it.

A world without music or song or dance, without music & television and motion pictures. A world where children will remain silent & respectful. A world where the words of the glorious Qur'an will be recited – in the original Arabic, the language of the angels – all the time everywhere, whether you understand them or not. A world where no woman will ever sully the streets or doorways or windows again, ever, lest she be beaten or stoned or killed for dishonoring her husband or his family. A world where the Qur'an and the ahadith will be the source of all scientific knowledge, all biological knowledge, all medical knowledge, every action of life and every function of death. A world ruled under the hand of Allah, who through his prophet & the clerics allows pedophilia, sodomy, bestiality & rape. A world under total & unswerving submission to the Lord of Creation, most merciful and gracious.

What a future.

Some day I will snuff it. I will cease to be. Not another thought will cross my neural chemistry. I will know nothing more of what is and what might have been. My body will deteriorate into a pool of biochemical molecules & after a few billion years what I was will be dust in the void of space.
Between now and that day, I will hope to be able to enjoy what little joy there is left in a world ruled by such absolutely heinous system of rage-filled madness. The flagrant idiocy of religion, however, will keep me pretty well tethered to a huge sense of total waste that this one species, humanity, has become of its own.
Gone I will know nothing.
Gone I will never see the future that I fear to consider, a future before the last human being strangles the next to last human being over some imaginary friend & perceived transgression of some fanciful, delusional divine law.
Gone I will never know, as I know now, that the human species – indeed all life on this planet because of the human species – has been a monstrous, undeniable, utterly disgusting waste of time.

And given that, I sit here and hope that some day soon – whether I live to see that day or not – a huge rock floating out between the planets will fall upon this little ball of dust in the middle of nowhere special to put an end to it all.
That or a germ.
I hope for that – no, I almost fall on my knees and pray for it – because we do not deserve to be here, hateful and vicious and insanely ignorant as we prove ourselves to be daily.
Every breath ever taken by every human being since the beginning of the species – and even before we were the species we are today – has been a waste of time & space.
No prayers will change that. No god by any name will change that. No single person & no grand community of believers will ever change that. I believe this with a faith that borders on the irrational. It is the only thing that I can believe, and I believe it because of what I see everyday. The proof runs amok among us. Religion and superstition – by any name & in the service of any imaginary divine being – is a delusion. Unless a rock or a germ intercedes, the delusion of religion will be the end of us. We will die out, our every grand moment a waste more perverse & disgusting & putrid than anyone's wildest & insane nightmare.
Religion will see to it. Religion will be the cause of it. This alone I believe. It is my only faith.

Smoke & Mirrors & an Angel

2007-10-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I have a message! Yes! The message of what's actually goin' on out there in California with all them fires burning and scorchin' the earth clean of the sin and iniquity out there! Yeah! I say! Praise!

Seriously.

With the propensity of some religionists to claim divine design in catastrophes, it's a wonder nobody's yet said anything about the fires that have been incinerating large parts of southern California. I can imagine that those praying for deliverance are likely among the nearly million people who have been displaced.
Gringos make really poor refugees.
Just look at the New Orleans/Katrina catastrophe for that one, Brownie.
As yet no word from the emperor & his entourage on California. I guess they're waiting for better weather & a clearer sky for the appropriate photo-ops.
In the meantime, divine vengeance is being wreaked on them Left Coast know-it-alls & their mamby-pamby limp-wristed tuchus-licking pals. In fact, looking at the picture of the situation gained via a satellite survey, out there in the whisps of smoke running to the west from the flames, one can easily make out the hand of the lord in the form of an obvious archangel.
Check it out yourself, homie.
See it?
No? Well, here, let me show you how it looks in this field-enhanced version with the proper digitalization having been performed by algorithmic manipulation of the pixel vector stabilization. Same stuff we did with the face on Mars, dig?
You can see it very easily.
Right there, just off the coast and flapping its wings between the two main plumes is none other than an archangel of the Lord's own power, managing the flames so all those gay pansy-ass liberals out there in Lollywood get burned to a crispy crème.
And Disney Land? Ain't it out there too, all them castle lookin' pointy towers sticking up in the air like firm young pe. . .
Yeah! Jebus!
I see the angel of the Lord moving across the plains and through the valleys and hills, spreading the awesome destruction that our God almighty has deigned upon them sinners! Praise!

As if.

Like a really foul person, someone who is hated by so many people that there's a crowd of neurotics fretting away their time because of her or him, such a foul person gets in an accident. Totals the car. Falls off a bridge. Loses footing and takes a tumble down a flight of stairs. All that and they survive.
Everyone else around this foul person suddenly realizes that they are sitting there hoping the foul person dies.
Seriously.
They hear of the report, learn of the accident, become aware of the destructive potential of whatever mishap has befallen the wicked and those people, the audience of otherwise decent sorts whose lives are affected by the wicked, they think for one second "I hope she dies," and then realize what they've just thought.
Drives 'em crazy, realizing that they can think of something horrible befalling a wicked person. And they're struck with guilt.
At what?
Guilt at wanting to see someone who's a waste of skin die?
Bullshit.
Let the wicked, evil, punitive, nasty, back-stabbing wastes of skin, the evil white shit of humanity, let 'em all die.
Let 'em die horrible, painful deaths of extended suffering and torture.
Let 'em die.
And you ask "How can he say that?"

Well, it's easy. See, a long time ago I discovered that hate, the kind of feeling a normal person can get from being screwed with or stabbed in the back or walked upon or mistreated, the kind of hate that is pure and clean, that kind of hate is delicious.
It's the inability to accept this concept that drives people into counseling.
It's not being able to see that hate is natural, that it is part of the neural response to injury, that it's okay to get really pissed at someone who treats you like their personal cell-mate bung-hole, this is missed by everybody in so-called "civilized" societies.
Bullshit!
Being civilized means providing for everyone -- everyfawkingone -- to behave in a manner consistent with fairness, compassion & reason.
And hate is the only emotion (as an emotion is a chemical state of the sense of mindness) that human beings have spent serious time contemplating with their one-time chance at reflective consciousness.
And every time that someone has spent energy & cognitive chemistry to understand hate, it's been misunderstood.
That's because hate is a natural reaction to injury. It is the neurochemical equivalent of discovering that the dog bit you. It's the cognitive equivalent of pulling your fingers back from the soldering iron when you're stupid enough to put it where your fingers are. It's the cognitive equivalent of the fight/flight response to possible injury.
It's the natural & cognitive equivalent of staying the hell out of the way of trouble and recognizing the source of that potential trouble as dangerous.
Period.
And you definitively do not have to feel guilty about it.

Got that?

Ok, so here's the flames of the Lord's own hand spread out across the southwestern edge of the North American continent (and you'll notice that there are no stories in the news of how fires may be burning in Baja California, Mexico) and somewhere some moron is claiming that it's the Lord's work.
And there's a similar moron sitting somewhere thinking that the fires are some divine response to being gay or Mexican or lesbian or a Democrat or whatever other form of life is considered inauspicious by the self-style religious leadership of this country (or any other country).
I'd bet that there are mullahs and ayatollahs and imams and muftis somewhere praising the powers of their god to burn the living shit out of the entire western coast. As if everyone there deserves to die.

It's probably the only time you can safely say that the hand of any divine being is at work, mainly 'cause most of the rest of the time that people die from what is considered the work of the divine hand, it's usually from some very physical & substantive human hand.
And out there in California good old fashioned people like you and me and the next guy down the street with three kids, goes to church every Sunday or the mosque on Friday or whatever, their houses are going up in flames.
Good people are getting their world rearranged because some person claiming direct contact with the divine will says god's angry at the gays.
If that's the case, let the divine hand snuff the gays.
And no, HIV and AIDS are not signs of divine intervention. They're diseases.
Divine work should be obviously divine work: no intercessionary forces.
If god's pissed about the number of gays, then god should have had the foresight – being as god is supposedly omniscient – to no let gays be born or evolve or whatever.
If god don't like gays, let god get rid of 'em outright. Make 'em disappear. Turn 'em into honest & hard working heterosexual citizens like the rest of the monkeys believe in a god.
And if you think the fires are from god's hand, well . . .
They're fires. And they're burning good peoples' homes as well as anyone happens to be a bad person. Good people are suffering. And bad people get away with some horrible shit, not the least of which might just be having set one of those fires in the first place. Which the torchers will claim they did by divine edict. Delusionals. You gotta love 'em. They're such morons.

But did you see the angel in the picture? I did. Sure made a believer out of me!

Call in the Professionals!

2007-10-12T09:39:00.001-07:00

I'm admittedly very slow. It takes me days to get emails recirculated, responded, whatever. I get ideas, forget the ideas, wander around looking for ideas and then, after remembering that I'd gotten an idea, promptly forget what the idea had been that I'd been looking for. Sometimes I even get the original idea back only to forget what it was that helped me remember that I'd gotten an idea in the first place.
So it is with my usual amount of tangential thinking that I arrive at something everybody else in town has already thought about a couple million times or more.
I'm talking about professionals. You know: people who make their living or at least supplement their incomes by making a part time job out of something that most folks think should just happen by itself.
Like mourning. There are professional mourners. "Weepers" they're called. These are the folks who get paid to show up at funerals and wail as if the soon-to-be-interred dearly departed were someone so close that their passing has literally cut the heart of out of existence. Moan and cry, shake, stagger, fall on the ground, need assistance to just take two steps, folks do that & get paid for it.
Seriously.
The phenomenon is pretty common in the Middle East & places around the Mediterranean. Folks die & the weepers show up to do their bit. Once the dead is in the ground or whatever, the weepers collect their money & head off back home again. Must be quite a scene. Different take on the "I had a bad day at the office" bit.
"How'd the funeral go, Umm Fatima?"
"Not too bad. Good crowd. Nice man. Good family"
"So how much you make?"
"Oh, seventy-five, plus a tip. And the son paid me too. Ninety & some change total."
"Oh, that's nice. So what's for dinner?"
"Oh, I dunno. Wanna go out to eat?"
"Sure, why not. You pay."
And not to be left out, seems there are folks get paid to protest too. Like this guy, Shakil Amad Bhat, of somewhere around Srinagar in India.
Rage Boy they call him on the InterWebs.
If you ain't seen him you ain't been watchin' enough television. Or you don't get on the InterWebs much. 'Cause the dude is out there, in your face, lookin' for all the world like he's dead set on killin' you kufar apes and pigs over the slightest insult to the faith. The Islamic faith.
He's been on the BBC & in a whole pile of newspapers and blogs.
He's got a sighting fan club, even.
And a cartoon.
He's even got a cartoon.
And no, I don't know if he's protested his cartoon protester persona yet.
We can only hope.

Of course, nobody has gotten from him how much he makes for showing up to clench his fist & open his jaw as wide as possible while screaming threats to the infidel scum who turn his crank. He says that he's going it out of devotion and in defense of his faith.
What a kid.
He's got a family, widowed mother, sister, bunch of brothers. He gets out to every protest he can, leaving his family behind at home. Such is his devotion. And being a true believer he doesn't use a car or bicycle to get to protests within 10km of home. Beyond that he hitches rides or goes with other protestors in whoever's got a car.
I'd suspect that it'd take some serious cash to get a car, on what I can only suspect is a very little bit of money that he might make from showing up & chanting.
And he's got such a face for the page, don't he.

There's two ways to look at this. You can see the face & think that this guy must be really dedicated. You look at that nearly Conehead jaw extension & think the camera lens distorted his looks. You can see right there that the guy's obviously very deep into whatever he's fired up about. The guy's an honest person honestly aggrieved about something.
And if you don't think about his anger being that of an enraged Muslim, you can get over it & go on to the next face.
Or, and this is the second way of lookin' at it, ol' Sahib Bhat hissownself is as much a product of Islam for the media as any collection of guys in the middle of a street in Iran watching some poor sucker get beat near to death with a long piece of rubber hose.
Everything in that face is focused on making sure the kufar don't forget that these are enraged Muslims, not just your ordinary cranky Muslims didn't get enough sleep the night before, what with all the canings going on.
Nope, ol' Rage Boy Bhat is definitely there to show you that Muslims can get so goddamn mad that they'd dislocate their jaws and shave their heads just so kufar will tremble in their boots & bodega pants for fear of the anger of those who maintain a millennia-old lunar goddess cult.
"Holy shit!"
"Will you look at that!"
"That mofo's mad about something!"
"Yeah, no shit!"
"Let's get the fawk out of here before he spots us!"
"Jesus Cheeeerist yes!"
Sure looks like that to me, and I ain't even anywhere near Pakistan or Srinagar or wherever it is this guy hangs out.
But I do have to ask how the hell he does it without feeling the least bit ashamed that he has to get himself so tensed up so he can be a professional about it.
Yeah, professional.
We don't know if he gets paid by the mullahs or whatever, but it's pretty obvious, being as how he's got a loyal following of supporters and detractors on the InterWebs, that he sure doesn't seem to be doing much else. Like very day he's out there enraged.
And the face.
Yeah, the face. Can you imagine having a rational conversation with a guy looks like he's recruiting for a flea circus? And the Conehead jaw thing?

So while the rest of the world's non-Muslim majority sits around shaking their heads 'cause they don't understand how nobody can understand them, as understanding as they are, a subtle & wise-ass few will look at that face and smirk.
We smirk at the childishness & the pettiness of a belief system that requires its participants to go out in the street in these meaningless protests while poverty and inhumanity persists within the society of those participants. While the rest of kufar-dom is out trying to fix things up for people alive right now on this very planet, Islam is out trying to make sure that more people die so that someone else can have a pile of virgins and young boys in some post-bedouin hereafter of the absurd.
They bomb each other. They bomb buildings. They bomb other people who have no real reason to get bombed. They kill and maim and beat and torture and subjugate and oppress in the spirit of their petty & puerile rage. And they do all this while millions of their co-religionists (or is that co-superstitionists) are living in filth with the whimpering of hungry & hurt children unnoticed by the mullahs and their posse. The rich get richer & the poor stay poor and the only population control they have at hand is mass-murder.
Meanwhile we non-believers and those outside of Islam go about our lives trying mightily and successfully in the majority of cases to live like human beings, to treat each other with a modicum of respect, to teach and clothe and feed & keep as many of us alive as we can.
All this while every day Rage Boy shows up it's really nothing more than a societal temper tantrum from the believers in the moon goddess, people who know from in front that they are inferior by their faith but totally unable to accept it.

All Rise in the Name of Deeny

2007-10-10T06:53:00.000-07:00

Up front & country simple, I do not understand why someone who believes feels the absolute duty-bound need to convert me to their belief. It doesn't make any sense. If I believed, that would be good enough for me & that would be good enough. Anybody else who didn't believe, being as I believed & was satisfied with my life believing that way, would be left to do as they damn well please.
No compulsion in religion. That would be my motto. After all, it's in the Qur'an, ain't it? Yeah, right there, Chapter 2, verse 256.
Allah said it, Mohammed recited it, that's good enough for me.
But there's a problem, I guess.
Some folks, especially those who believe in Allah and his messenger, seem to think that just because I don't believe as they do that they have some duty-bound need to convert me to their belief. And that's in the Qur'an too. Chapter 9, verse 5.
Same-same many Christians. They show up and, upon discovering that I don't believe period, they start prayin' and recitin' and witnessin' and testifyin' in goodly number until such time as I get out the 12-guage and get 'em off my porch.
Worst of all is the orientalist cults and $cientology in particular.
They latch on to you, it's a pit bull and three vultures can't get you unclutched.
In the end we get back to the original wonderment: I do not understand why someone who believes feels the absolute duty-bound need to convert me to their belief.

Well, I didn't understand. Now, after much cogitation & talkin' with believers & other nonbelievers, it's pretty easy to explain.

See, if you back to your childhood you'll see the act forming up. You have an imaginary friend, let's say you call him Deeny. Deeny is your buddy. You and Deeny talk all the time, sometimes out loud, with his voice comin' out of your mouth and then your voice coming out of your mouth in response. Pals you are. Best of. Get down funky never a day goes by you and Deeny don't talk about something.
And if anybody should ask who you're talking to, you can say "It's my friend, Deeny."
And when anybody says that they don't see anybody but you, you tell 'em with that smug sense of satisfaction that kids with imaginary friends have that Deeny is your invisible friend.
And just because you admit that Deeny's invisible doesn't make him imaginary and don't make him any less imaginary & certainly no less real.
You can see Deeny in your mind, you can see him right there before you. You say Deeny exists.
Deeny exists.
That's good enough for you.
And should anyone question your faith in this imaginary friend or try to point out that, since no one else can see Deeny, maybe he doesn't exist, holy hell will that cause a ruckus
You can't doubt the existence of Deeny.
He's your goddamn invisible friend, for Christ's sakes!
You just say he doesn't exist. That'd tear his heart out. That'd be like cutting your hands off. It'd be the worst possible thing any ethical, caring, humane individual could do to anybody even if they weren't invisible.
Jesus! Don't you have any compassion for my friend Deeny?
What kind of monster are you, anyway, doubting the existence of my friend, my best goddamn friend in the world, born of my own mind and here in front of me right now so intense I can see the worried look on his face?
I'll never deny Deeny! Never! You cruel bastard! Never!
How could you even think of such a thing?

Get where this is going? No? Well here's how it works: I believe in Deeny, my best friend in the world. If you propose that he doesn't exist, then even suggesting that will anger me (since Deeny's a being of my own imagination) so much that my anger will spill out all over. And for you to suggest that Deeny doesn't exist, being as it calls into question my faith in an imaginary entity of my own creation, that causes me pain because I know what it would feel like if I were rejected as non-existent.
So, on the one hand I get angry because you are calling my attention to the fact that I dreamed Deeny up, something that would suggest that I ain't quite tied down solid.
On the other hand I am sympathetic to the concept of rejection by someone whom I hold to be essential to my own sense of being, my own sense of self-worth. If I deny Deeny's existence that would be like my parents rejecting me as their child and that would be a pain beyond my ability to explain. Therefore your suggestion that I deny Deeny causes me pain because I am sympathetic to being rejected and my denial is tantamount to rejecting Deeny.
And with those two emotional moments tied up real good in the existence of Deeny & my behaving in a sympathetic and supportive manner with Deeny – much as Deeny's existence supports me –the suggestion that Deeny doesn't exist is plainly revolting.
I dismiss it out of hand.
But my dismissal is a point from which I can, as a supporter, friend and confidant of Deeny, see the need to convince you that Deeny does indeed exist.
Thus I begin to introduce what Deeny says and thinks into our conversations.
Deeny says that you are not my friend and that he alone is.
Deeny says that you should be treated meanly. Deeny says I can hit you and beat you and trick you and do anything else I want to you because, well, Deeny says so.
Deeny says that those who cannot see him have a black heart.
Deeny says that those who reject him are less than human.
Deeny says that dogs should bite you, you who do not see Deeny as I see him.
Deeny is the bringer of joy and peace to my heart and soul and your rejection of him brings hate and vilification, brutal attacks and meanness out of me.
And Deeny says that any anger I feel toward you or anybody else who does not support me or see Deeny is good and that this anger must be used against those who do not believe in Deeny.

Yeah, like that. That's how it works.

Believe me, I know. I know because I had invisible, imaginary friends when I was a child. Lots of 'em. I'd have conversations with 'em when I was sittin' on the can. I'd have conversations with 'em when I was out walking through patches of poison ivy. I'd play with 'em and wrestle with 'em and they'd be my friends forever.
One was named "Pipsqueak" and he lived on the end of my sister's right arm.
Yeah, invisible friends are the best. They're full of all the love your parents can give you. They are full of ideas and inspiration. They are the kinds of friends who never let you down, who always make you feel important, even if the rest of the world seems cruel and mean-spirited by comparison.
If ever you had an invisible friend, you'll know what I mean.
If you know what I mean, then you know why someone who believes feels the absolute duty-bound need to convert me or anyone else to their belief.
They have to do it to expand the fable. They have to do it to make sure that others feel & believe as they do so the fable will become more real and less a fable. They do it because a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.
They do it because everyone has a little Rush Limbaugh in 'em.
They do it because they know in their deepest heart of hearts that what they believe might just be a bit this side of delusional and man, that would never do.

I ain't crazy! I'm talkin' with my invisible friend, Jebus! You don't see him? Well, buddy, you are in for a surprise. Man are you in for a surprise.

And thus we arrive at the point where I can say I understand how folks who believe seem to be constantly on their guard against being caught out delusional. They know somewhere that it don't make sense, that it wasn't O.J. and it wasn't a Wookie. But that doesn't help them at all, because they know that without that imaginary friend and his promises of eternal life, life itself would be empty and fearful.
As if the believers don't make life fearful enough as it is.
Nope, it's the sense that all believers have about what is real and what ain't. What is important and what ain't. Believers deal with that every day, sun up to sun down, awake, asleep or at the dinner table. They all know somewhere in their little haids that it doesn't make any sense to have so much energy invested in the Deeny myth.
They know it 'cause the brain – despite all the cognitive mistakes that we make as sentient beings – doesn't have any room for mistakes. The brain has a place where two and two do not make Deeny real and that bothers us, that doubt.
In the end belief depends on the believer constantly reminding himself (or herself) that god (Deeny) does exist, that god (Deeny) is real, that a deity (Deeny) is responsible for all that is goodness and light & that without god (Deeny) there would be no morality.
After all, Deeny does tell you what to do against those who do not believe in him, don't he? See! There's your proof: Deeny speaks to me (or to us, once you have all your friends convinced that Deeny exists) and tells me what to do and, most importantly, what to tell you needs be done.

A make-believe story repeated often enough with enough threats and promises thus becomes the truth. At least until the story needs changed or the characters need changed or the societal moment expresses a need for the change.
Zeus is no more, although his name means god yet in dialect Greek. Hera, the wife of Zeus is no more. She has been replaced by the Virgin Mary. And all the minor subdeities have been replaced by angels and archangels and saints and the blessed souls unto God. Apollo, the son of Zeus, is now Jesus, savior son of God, born, died & reborn.
And all the while the little voice in your head says "Dude, how can a god have a son? Like how does Jesus become god while at the same time, having been human, exist in God. In, of, out of, whatever. How's that work?"
And no, it ain't the Wookie.
The rational part of your brain, the one that tells you not to put your hand in the lawnmower when it's running, wants to run screaming from the building because, at heart, none of it makes any more sense than Deeny telling you to take off your pants and run around the back yard.
You do remember doing that, don't you?
I do.
And I know for a fact that it was Deeny 'cause I heard his voice plain as day tellin' me to do it. Same with them houses I lit fire. Deeny said to. Why would Deeny tell me to do something wrong? He's the best of friends, Deeny is. The best.
You don't believe, do you?
Well . . . now you're gonna wish you did . . . For Deeny is a just and wrathful Deeny, who wishes all of his children to come unto him in goodly number lest his wrath be sent among you, you who do not believe!

Amen!

Talkin' About Them Jebus Nets

2007-10-03T09:34:00.000-07:00

Been about five years now I figure I've been getting the newspaper Freethought Today every month. It's published by the Freedom from Religion Foundation, an organization that maintains a watch on church/state separation & an active attitude toward making sure by all means legal that the separation of church and government continues, or as is most often the case, is imposed and obeyed.
Over the course of the time I've been getting FT, I have noticed that the pages of the paper are full of four kinds of news. The first is a monthly update on the court cases that the organization is following or has engaged.
The second kind of news is articles written by more active members of the organization or essays that have been submitted and accepted for publication by the organization. This includes the essays submitted for the annual scholarship awards to young people active in church-state separation issues or who have been more vocal and forthright in their disbelief or atheism.
I especially like reading the two page spread in small type called the "Black Collar Crime Blotter," taking its name from the journalist's head slug on news items gleaned from the so-called "Police Blotter." This info, the third kind of news, is a listing of all the criminal activities, arrests, trials, convictions & church leadership comments on court cases. It's one of my favorite sections of FT.
The fourth bit of news, however, is the kind of stuff that truly stands in the place of what religionists call "fellowship" but which is just letters to the organization from folks all around who belong to the organization. It's a way of reaching out, a one-way sort of communication that can, in some cases, lead folks living in one part of the country discover that they have fellow disbelievers living nearby.

I've sent my share of "hey, guess what" letters to the organization, often with a pitiful donation or two. A couple of 'em have been published. Some have warranted a postcard or letter from this or that organizational officer. I long ago learned that reading the letters every month is really the only "fellowship" that most non-believers get outside of family members or co-workers.
It feels pretty good to know that I ain't exactly alone.
Among the topics that I've written about in my letters was my hope that there would be ham radio crazies also members of the FFRF. Most of the people I know who get on the air are believers. Some are such staunch believers that they participate in one or the other of any number of what I call "Jesus Nets." These are the kinds of round-table discussions that one hears on 40m most afternoons or evening where the participants are obviously all co-religionists. Sometimes there's a group leader who collects the check-ins for the net & guides the meetings topic of discussion.
It's really pretty lame. All these guys get on the air praising Christ Jesus as their personal saviour and all that. Then they read to each other whatever Bible quotation has gotten stuck in their brain for that day. The verse is discussed, sometimes at boring and trivial length. Someone will read a prayer & everybody will give an "amen."
It's really pretty lame.

So it came as a bit of a surprise to me, thinking as I did that I had already read the August '07 issue of FT, to discover a letter with the headline "Ham Radio Transmission Offer" over a letter.
The letter was from W9YZ, Ronald Williams, of Indianapolis, IN. Ron wrote saying that he had long ago noticed the presence of the Jesus-nets on the air. He asked in his letter if there were other FFRF members who were also hams. He suggested we could meet on the air.
So I just emailed off to Ronald this morning, telling him of the old glory days of the OVTN and our transcontinental communications one rare night with some folks who claimed to be the California Atheist Net. I suggested that there were other hams who did not believe and that some of us got on the air often enough.
I didn't tell him that we had a net.
We don't. At least not a net that is publicly pro-disbelief.
What I did suggest was that we should find a place in the electromagnetic spectrum and get on the air about it. I didn't mention that I thought such a move would get us the usual amount of "carrier dropping" and others ostensibly "tuning up" whatever it is that still needs manual adjustment in this day of computer controlled radios and automatic antenna matchers.
But I did tell him about the "Iowa Cornfarmers" as W9BS used to call them when his callsign was longer. This was the gang of guys in Iowa who were angry at then-WB4REN because he had such a killer signal that he could be heard halfway across the continent on a bad day with no ionospheric reflectivity.

I'll say right up front that I'd love to hear a herd of atheist, agnostic, disbelieving, free-thought kinda folks on the air. I'd love to just sit and see who's who and what's what and how this all works out.
I'm definitely not suggesting that we get on the air and, every meeting, choose a Bible or Qur'an or whatever holy book you want & then pick a verse or whatever from said book to deconstruct & make obviously lame. That would be too much like growing reefer in your basement and having all the ex-con junkies come by your house, expecting that no one will ever notice and you'll never get busted.
Religionists don't work that way.
I suspect that any sort of net where the participants debunk or destroy any religious text would be more than unwelcome. I suspect that, given the nature of the US government's faith in faith, any group that actively discussed and debunked Bible verses would meet with a stern warning from the FCC under the aegis of hate speech or some such idiocy.
If we got on the air and read the fifth verse of the ninth sura of the Qur'an day after day, nobody would notice.
If we got on the air and showed how that verse promoted jihad and the basic Qur'anic message of hate, slavery, rape, pillage & murder, we'd all have our licenses pulled & our antenna systems cut down into small chunks suitable for the trash can.
I say that 'cause that's the way it works today.
The way it works today is based on faith and make-believe. We have faith that Jesus will set this world of sin & temptation to rights when he returns. We have faith that Christian charity and compassion will provide sufficient refuge for Americans against a moon goddess cult that believes to this day in slavery & war to promote its misogynistic message. We are ethnically diverse but ethically tunnel blind.

Which is the exact reason that a ham radio net of disbelievers and such should get on the air. And the sooner the better. So I am suggesting, as I did to Ronald in Indianapolis, that we get on 3775 some Friday or Saturday night. I am hoping that enough disbelieving hams will have the guts to check in to whatever we want to call this net-to-be-established. If enough of us show up – and enough of us have reasonably good signals – we might just be able to find the fellowship on the air that we have to get out of monthly magazines and newspapers, even as worthy as they be.

Guess it's time to tune up in Iowa, ain't it?

Come Back Mommy! It's Getting Hot in Here!

2007-10-02T07:35:00.001-07:00

Taking a look around I'd estimate that the human species has, at the most, another million years before it too goes south like the saurians. Taking that view, I can see little reason for any of us to get really hot in the pants about space travel.
We got too much shit goin' on right now to fix. Any money, time or effort we put into going to Mars or the Moon or even sending space robots to distant planets in this system is money, time and effort taken away from calming the madness.
We have religions at war with reality.
We have politics at war with humanity.
We have economics at war with anybody at all, just so long as the money ends up in my pockets.
We have historicity at war with historicity.
Vengeance – even if I do think it works good – is going to take its toll on us.

We have adapted & evolved our environment such that we are unable ourselves to evolve. Thus, when our environment goes into the dumpster, as I suspect it will before I snuff it, very few human beings are going to be up to the effort of adapting themselves.
Come the next ice age, not even the Inuit & Eskimo are going to be up to the brutality. They've lived and adapted themselves to the same green & pleasant world that we've been lucky enough to have for the past 20 thousand years or so.
Come global warming, not even the people who run around buck nekkid in the forests & jungles are going to be up to the effort. They've lived in a comfort zone to which they've become accustomed for the past 20 thousand years or so.
Won't make any difference.
Hot, cold, muggy, cloudy, dry, wet, snow or sleet or the rain of comet pieces and small rocks, nobody on this planet today, as well as anybody's been on it for the past 20k years will be prepared, let alone able to adapt lifestyles to the changes.
Air conditioning in Selma, Alabama ain't gonna mean jack. Neither will all the wood stoves and kerosene heaters in Detroit or St. Johns, Newfoundland. The plain and simple fact is we're no longer the adaptable & inventive types of animals we were the last time the ice sheet melted.

I bring this up in this obviously cynical and bitter manner because I have the ultimate faith in my species to completely miss the signs & portents. I have no doubt in my mind, body, soul, spirit, ghost, animus or anything else even the least bit esoteric & metaphysical that we will spend so much time looking at the stars and wanting to go there that we'll miss the fact that we're going to be extinct pretty soon close enough, boss.
It all comes down to the most recent issue of Scientific American, wherein many writers & illustrators have a heyday with "going into space" fantasizing.
George Musser and Steven Ashley get down with what it means to have a space program that got to the moon and then got boring. Here's what we did; here's what we can do now; ain't it wonderful?
Yeah, sure. Whatever.
But what about George Musser's "Five Essential Things to Do in Space"? You know: go to the moon again, go to Mars, set up colonies on Mars, the Moon and any other place that looks like it needs a Chez Bernard and a dog grooming parlor, mine the minerals of the asteroid belt, break the speed-of-light barrier & find the Romulans before they find us, right.
No?
Ok, so first we figure out how the weather works so we can control it, right?
No?
How about find all the asteroids that we can mine & get to them before they get to us? Maybe?
Ok, how about getting in contact with Mars Sector Six? He's pretty hip. He can help us, being an ass-ended master and all that. That's important, right?
Ok, how about all the other stuff like robots? We need them to get to the everlasting life & all that. They're important. Jesus will be able to fix up all that stuff.

Sorry Cooksie, it don't go that far.

Even if we do learn to "monitor" the climate we still won't be able to do anything about it. Our governments are too busy keeping themselves in power and their fantail posers rich to give a roaring rat's ass about whether New Orleans ever recovers. The weather, no matter how important it really is, will be the balance point upon which tumbles the future of the species. And that future is damn short.
Even if we do manage to keep track of every single piece of rock out there that might at some time in the future hit the planet, we will never have the technology to put that information to use. We'll have the technology to kill each other over the name we chose to call our gods and mythic saviors but none of that will ever go toward preventing even the slightest cosmic catastrophy.
Seeking out life?
Yeah, right. What will it prove? Nothing. It will prove nothing because no believing son of the Lord God Jehovah will ever submit to the idea that life is not preciously reserved only for this planet, no matter how much we might do to kill off all life. If you believe in Jesus and hold to his merciful grace, you know that this is the only world of creation, with life put here by the hand of the Almighty four thousand and some years ago. Period.
And with Jesus as my Lord and Savior, who cares how the other planets got here?
Same-same figuring out how to leave this solar system behind and explore the lights of distant suns. Even without going at the rate we're going, we'll never get to that point because, truth up & country simple, we don't need to.

Ultimately someone – and I'm one of many – has to stand up and say "Bullshit!" to the space exploration smarmy-marmies. We have no idea what it means to be a lifeform on a planet, despite the technology that tells us this and the science that supports that technology and knowledge. We think we belong here because this is our planet.
It ain't our planet.
It's the only planet we have and most likely the only planet we'll ever have.
Mars is a radiated husk of a planet; Venus is a boiling, septic sore. Everything else between the sun and the last piece of the Oort Cloud is too cold, too big, too poisonous or too far away.
We're stuck here. It's all we've got and it's all we're gonna get.
And it doesn't belong to us any more than we belong to it and certainly no more than the dinosaurs belonged here.
It's a planet unfortunate enough to have been infected by the human virus and that's it. No buttered popcorn. No sugar-laden drinks spilled in the aisles. It's a planet. We live on it only because there's air & liquid water & supportive vegetation and animal life. Take away any of those things and it's still just a planet.

See, to me the whole idea of exploring space is for toasted dreamers, even if I'd love to go into space, meet some alien beings who communicate by pheromones & colours & waves of electromagnetic energy. Even if we could figure out how to get past all the hurdles of interstellar travel & manage to put interstellar travelers into hibernative sleep for the duration of the trip, the vehicle would still be cruising into a huge amount of empty space.
Take four years & some (at the speed of light, mind you) to get to Alpha Centauri. Even after you got close enough to see that star as a bright disk & not a pinpoint, you'd still have to find the planets, figure out which was habitable (likely none of 'em) and then take the time & energy to maneuver into position to do some exploration.
We've been dickin' around on Mars for nearly 20 years now & all we can still say is that it's red, it's got some water somewhere & the weather is wicked.
No little green aliens with antennae.
No canals & aquifers, no cities, vehicles, roadways or school crossing signs.
It's a red planet with some water and very nasty, windy, dusty weather.
And some people think we're gonna go to another star system and find a planet to live on after we've finished turning this one into a stinking pile of shit?
You gotta be kidding me.

If there are truly five things we need to do in space, the first of them is to get rid of superstition and religion. We need to face the objective facts: we are animals living on a planet that has been circling a star that has reached its mid-life crisis. We are subject to the laws of natural selection in an environment that has been exceptionally nice for the past sixty thousand years, with us as a species as we are for a bare half of that time. We are not protected by imaginary friends any more than an imaginary friend has made this planet for us.
Secondly, we must recognize that we have manipulated our environment for the past twenty thousand years and that our manipulations have reached their most critical mass. Everything we do from here on out will determine what our environment will do in ways that will force us to adapt to it. This is a phenomenal point in time: our actions over the entire time that human beings have lived as a domesticated species are now coming back to roost. Our inattention to that detail, borne as it is of our superstitions as much as of our arrogant self-absorption, is going to cost us time to go. We may run out of time before we get even to the point of seeing our place on a planet that we do not own.
Thirdly, we must change the way we think of wealth & possessions. Chief among these changes is our attitude out the planet itself. We do not own it, we have no power over it and we certainly do not belong here because some imaginary friend might have said so. Once we get to that point – another step toward realizing our true, inherent animal nature – we might begin to consider that wealth based on shiny metal is about as lucid a delusion as thinking that there are extraterrestrial beings interested in visiting us. We have to establish a trade and economic system based on something serviceable, useful and supportive of life. Worshiping shiny bits of metal is not the way to go.
Fourthly, we need to recognize that we are passengers on a rock moving through the void of space around a star and that the concept of territoriality is a remnant of a long distant moment in time when life was just plainly reptilian. We must unite as a people on a planet, nothing more. We are one species among millions. We're lucky to be here at all. Our survival – albeit short-lived anyway – depends on recognizing that we are not nations or tribes or even economic opportunities. We are a species on a planet. We must cooperate.
Fifth & finally, we have to recognize that the day will surely come when we will all be dust in the wind. Everything that we have done as a species, from the first scratches on a chip of bone to record the moons of G'lo'uğlar'chu's mate to the VLSI chips in this computer, from the cave paintings in Lascaux to the Grand Mosque at Mecca will count only for our passing through. We will be gone, along with all other life on this planet and soon enough blown into nothing.

Our waiting for imaginary aliens to come show us the beauty of their advanced technology and imputed majestic philosophizing is like making ourselves the baby left in a car on a hot summer day. It is a purposeless exercise in self-immolation. Nobody's coming to save us, not Jesus and not Spock. We're stuck here on this globe, this interstellar space ship and the sooner we figure that out the sooner we can release ourselves from the child's safety seat and get the hell out of the car.

Or we can blissfully wait for Mommy and end up dead.

Jetzt Fahren Wir Weiter!

2007-09-30T15:01:00.001-07:00

Eugenics doesn't sound so good, does it? I mean, there's all that whining about "who's gonna decide?" and "what's going to be the top priority?" and "you can't breed people like cattle." Those who think it's a good idea look like Nazi storm troopers shovin' bodies in the ovens to those who oppose it. And those who oppose it look like a bunch of namby-bamby bleeding-hearts to those who might not have an opinion one way or the other.
Me?
You gotta be kidding.
If there was a review board on who gets to procreate, my kid's would be . . . well, there wouldn't be any kids my responsibility. Cid & me wear glasses. Asthma and blood pressure problems, alcoholism & depression on my side, among other things. Cid's got a gene somewhere coded for muscular dystrophy.
We'd both be childless. We could spend more time raising cats.
If there was a review board on who gets to procreate back when my folks were young, maybe. Strong farm family on Mom's side. Dad, well, he was intelligent, well-read, capable. Journalist. But his mother killed herself and Dad had a running battle with the bottle. Maybe I'd be here.
If there was a review board on who gets to live after birth, I'm pretty sure that my sister would not be on the census. Troubled birth plus MS. Not a pretty way to live.
So from a personal perspective – presuming that I have this value-oriented sense of my own importance as a human being – one might think that I was not quite in tune with the idea that procreation should be a privilege, not a run-of-the-mill right you just do when you feel like it. After all, I wouldn't be here right now, maybe, and it's a sure bet my sister wouldn't have made it through day one.
Going on the premise that I like myself and feel that I have a need to be here, yeah, I am opposed to eugenics in even the least offensive form. Like not letting folks who have congenital disease or physical or neurological defect in the family have kids, well, you gotta have kids.

Yeah, right.

Let's be real: there are nearly seven billion of us and a good half of that number is tramp-stamped, trailer-trash, back-of-the-holler, Irish Traveler cracker wasted skin. Seriously. There are whole neighborhoods where the high point of the day is getting drunk and working on a car that should have been compactored decades back. Grand and irresponsibly large numbers of folks have kids who see their life's goal as living from one eviction to the other. Folks who don't know how to take their trash down to the curb and keep it all bagged up in the garage until they're evicted.
I have to ask you now, do we really need that many social welfare cheat irresponsible & degenerate no-brainers walking around the big-box store lookin' for a pair of slacks that hangs low enough to have the butterfly tattoo on their butt show when they bend over to pick up the crack nugget they were about to smoke?
I don't.
I don't need people who talk through their noses. I don't need people who seem to have about as much economic stability as my attempts to stand on one foot for more than two minutes straight.
I don't need crack whore mothers and their loud-mouth, argumentative, talk-like-we-be-in-the-'hood head wagglers.
I don't need people who love the sounds of a race car engine or the smell of melted tires on the drag strip track. I don't need folks who never seal their asphalt driveway because they just let the engine oil run down it when they work on their pick-up trucks with the hydro shocks. I don't need people who can't seem to get a job, let alone hold one for more than a week at a time between welfare checks.

I don't need people who are overpopulating the planet with the same dip-shit dumb-ass kids who never learn to read past stop and go like everyone seems to be these days. I don't need 'em and the planet sure doesn't need 'em and I can't see any reason that any of 'em should be here anyway at all.
Trash is trash. Get rid of it. Otherwise you just clutter up the planet with trash and after a while what ain't trash is buried by all the trash.
That, after all, is what it's all about.
Anybody with any brains – as in: graduated from high school and knows how to do more than run the French fry machine at the hamburger heaven – can see that the world is in its present state of complete pandemonium because there are way the hell too many dumb asses on the loose.
And with this many dumb asses on the loose, it makes perfect sense that anyone who can convince dumb asses to do dumb ass stuff will end up on top. It's like having your own private fawkin' army, yo.

My solution to this ain't pretty. It's simple and it's straight-forward and it could be accomplished easy at any time. It could happen tomorrow or it could happen yesterday afternoon, it's that simple.The first requires a bit of a bureaucracy. The other one is more, well, natural.

First we issue permits to everybody who has access to a street, running water and a roof. That way we get the upper edge of the so-called "Third World" and the entire second and first worlds. We issue permits to conceive and give birth. We issue the permits on the basis of a simple intelligence and problem solving test. And then we check to see if any of those tested have any sort of shit-head morons in their immediate family.
Tramp stamp trailer trash folks, them we collect into corrals like cattle. One by one we neuter 'em same way we do dogs and cats.
And everybody knows how many dogs and cats there are runnin' around feral 'cause nobody's taken the time to collect them up and neuter 'em too.
The folks who pass the tests to show that they can tie their shoes, sign their names, make change and change a roll of toilet paper, them we give provisional permits to keep their reproductive systems intact. Folks who don't pass that test but who, for reasons yet to be assumed, can prove that they might still make good neighbors, them we give provisionals too.
Intelligent, educated and/or educatable folk, them we give free range. House, medical benefits, research tools, nice kitchens, hot & cold running water, all that. The provisionals have to prove that they can be admitted to the free range by producing intelligent, rational children who don't like rap music and who can manage to figure out that screwing around with someone else's stuff is not cool, dog. Everybody else is out of luck.

Now the second thing, well, it's a bit extreme but it's a lot easier than collecting shit heads into corrals and loppin' off their balls. Only problem is the timing.
See, the second way involves what some folks might think is a catastrophy. But that's because some folks wouldn't have even gotten this far without thinking that I was nuts, which I ain't. It's really rather simple in a complicated sort of way.

Natural catastrophies make great herd-cullers. A huge rock falls onto the planet and sets of a series of events that turn the tables on survival. Huge numbers of animals and plants die out or go so close to extinct that they have all but disappeared. Nowadays, with humans messing up the planet, an extinction event would – providing the human species actually could survive (which I doubt) – cull the human herd back to the kinds of folks who can figure out how to get out of the path of an oncoming alligator or stay off the path of a pit viper or a spitting cobra. All the high tech whiz kid know-it-alls would probably snuff it.
That would simply reduce the technology available to the point of stone blades and sticks. No problem there: we lived as a species like that for a damn sight longer than we have lived with computers and DVD players.
Folks who had to get their food from a grocery store or get reservations for six at Chez Bernard would be the first to die of hunger. Or be eaten.
Folks who live like pigs would die from rampant disease. No biggy there.
Folks like you and me, we'd be toast.
But the planet would be rid of all those dead beat morons who leave VW beetles upside down in the snow in the back yard for a year and some. Them and the kinds of folks who can't live without rap music. Hell, boom-boom cars would be, well, they'd rust out after a few years and nobody'd know what to do with 'em anyway within another six.

Yeah, nothin' like a good rock from space. Or a couple of 'em over the course of maybe three years. That would do it.
And germs.
You can't forget the germs. There's so many of 'em out there just waiting for you and me to weaken up enough to slide right through the cell membrane and snuff us quicker 'n you could find a microscope slide in a hospital.

Now I know that you're sitting out there thinking "What the fawk? This guy's nuts!" and that there are others sitting out there thinking "So why's he still living? Why don't he snuff his own ass and get it over with?"
Well, to answer the first group, yes, I am insane. The recent altercation with my Irish Traveler neighbors – recently evicted, by the way – has put me in touch with my inner homicidal maniac. And I found out that he's really not that bad of a guy. A bit edgy maybe but a nice guy all the same. Very thorough. Very logical. Very easily able to get bit on the thumb and still know how to strangle the dog.
Goddamn do I wish I'd strangled that dog. Do I ever.
And as for the next question set, here's the deal: I'm having no end of fun thinking of how many ways we could be put out to pasture as a species. I really enjoy it. Between the pleasure I get from conversations with my new friend, my inner homicidal maniac, and the continued example of a large part of the rest of humanity as wastes of skin walking around looking for another fix, I'm pretty easily entertained.
Wouldn't miss that show for the world. Especially if I get to strangle another dog.
Finish it off this time too, I would.
We would. Me & my inner buddy.
We're a goddamn team now, thank you very much.
And no, I don't hear any voices in my head.
My own voice is good enough, thanks for asking.

So eugenics? Yeah, sure, why not? But on the way can we get someone to develop the techonology to just go out there to the asteroid belt and take some large rocks and pitch 'em into earth-crossing orbits? That'd be a good way to help the project along too. Cut down on the individual man-hours spent castrating stupid shit jack ass mofos like just got evicted two days back.

I wonder if the military is working on any good germs. Wonder how they taste . . .

Shields Up! Skeptics!

2007-09-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

The university student newspaper came out today with a revelation by way of a student's letter to the editor
Seems the student was angry at discovering that a professor who plans to have a "skeptics" forum was a "devout Christian" and that the professor was being supported by the local campus chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ. The student's letter (linked above) contends that the information about the professor's relationship with CCC and his beliefs was withheld simply to con the doubting and firmly nonbelieving into showing up for a drubbing.
Gee, ya think?
Cid said she thought it would be fun to attend.
I asked her why.
"So I could argue with them," she said between fork-fulls of killer eggplant salad.
"Not me, yo," I responded. "I ain't on the debate team. Better Dan Barker should show up."
"I don't know that person."
"Co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation. Used to be a preacher, now an atheist. He knows all the good lines out of the Bible. He's done debates."
"Well . . . "
Thus relieved of any sin by the eggplant, dinner proceeded as it had in the times of David and the times of Frank, who was greatly pleasing in the sight of the Lord.

The student has it right, however. In his letter Patrick Craig pointed out that a previous advertisement in the Guardian had said nothing about the professor's religious orientation or the background for the advertised event. This, the student claimed, caused confusion.

"Apparently students were expected to infer his [Dr. Littlefield's] stance on the basis of the mention of the Holy Bible in the article (because non-Christians would never touch a Bible, right?).

My guess is that the student had not yet been exposed to taqiyya.
It ain't just a Muslim thang anymore, D.
It's become fashionable to do a bull-bait on folks from Christian organizations. Evidently taking their hint from the duplicitous nature of Islam's "trouble" with the West, so-called Christian groups are now into calling a meeting to find out who needs a good preachin' and prayin' after.

Kinda reminds me of the time I went to a Edgar Cayce thing out on Virginia Beach.

Got there late in the evening and one of the local "experts" started out with the obligatory invocation of spirit voices & all that. I remained quiet. This was at a time in my life when I felt (wrongly) that I needed something that would give me a sense of community. That feeling persisted up to the point where the leader of the session got into some heavy weird shit about souls and karmic action & auras &c.
I was still enough of a skeptic to listen to folks who were obviously trying for cult leader status with a seriously jaundiced ear. Like I was too yellow to believe the crap 'cause, well, I didn't see it necessary for us – as elemental beings stuck in a bag of water & protein – to need leaders.
If there was a spirit world, it would talk to each of us individually without intermediary faces in front of the voice.
If there was a spirit world.
Which I was at that point in time pretty much unsure of. Took me a few years but I finally got that straightened out good. Must have been the santaría thingie down in Puerto Rico.
Either way I found a moment to leave and did.
Riding the bus back to base I was struck by two things. There were an incredibly large number of drunken sailors on the bus. That and I had never heard of Edgar Cayce but maybe once up to that time and that time (when I heard of Edgar Cayce) was, to memory, back when I used to skip Sunday mass so I could shoot the shit with my yoga practicin' friend.
Pausing then – as well as now – to consider what I'd experienced at the Cayce session I was impressed mostly with the obvious gullibility of the folks who'd invited me to the session. I was also struck by what I sensed then but was not until recently able to communicate as a huge desire to accept any sort of strung-together hodge-podge of vague new-age-ish & theosophical arguments with no basis at all in any probative research or source.

I can only imagine the horror (or disgust and incipient glee) on the part of true nonbelieving and nominally agnostic disbelievers showing up for Prof. Littlefield's dog & pony at discovering that they'd been snookered. I can also easily imagine how some – like my son – would walk away from an experience like that thinking "It's time to form a free thinkers' group on campus."
Fact is, this may be the catalyst.
The young'n's talked about organizing a disbelievers & humanist group on campus.
I wish him luck.
I also suggest that he get Dan Barker to come give the opening talk so the kids and their friends will have some serious power on stage when the Christers show up to teach the heathens the truth about the redeeming blood story of Jah'heyeeeeeeeeeezass.
Praise.
Even with polarized outer hull plating – in the absence of a regulation Federation shield – anybody crazy enough to call a meeting of university skeptics also must be prepared for a huge inrush of believers. Of any number of faiths. Or the Edgar Cayce believers. You need that sort of preparedness, particularly if you're going to be up front about forming a group of "skeptics."
Especially if the students are setting this up without a faculty member to polarize the hull plating.

Whole Lot o' Shakin' Goin' On

2007-09-18T08:23:00.000-07:00

So here I sit, working my way through Linda Simon's Dark Light: Electricity & Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray, which is an interesting event of its own, when I come across a quote from the North American Review around 1860 or so that professes that any electromagnetic signal is pandemic "simply because it is and works everywhere."
Now this catches my attention for a couple reasons, not the least of which is my having already read Pope's Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph: A Handbook for Electricians and Operators. That reading showed me time and again how close the users of that somewhat arcane technology were to radio. And I call it arcane although it's just the same tech we use today but in different clothes. And from that it strikes me strange again and again that, as close as they were technologically by way of observations of how much it took to send a message over wires, they were even closer by way of thinking how "universal" electromagneticsm is. Or was, judging by the quote above.

It's the sense of the ubiquitous that makes this interesting.

First, at the time Morse (and a herd of other folks elsewhere) came up with the idea of using electromagnetic pulses to communicate words & numbers, there was a very strident voice of spiritualism running rampant in the world. This was the time of Blavatsky and Mesmer, Theosophy, the Faithists of Kosmon, and Joseph Smith's prophesy, The Book of Mormon. People everywhere were at some level or the other turning to or returning to ancient beliefs. Spirit writing and the many adherents of whatever transmogrification of so-called "Eastern" yore were a constant of conversations, newspaper and magazine articles and the traveling show of evangelists of many stripes.
Kinda like today only different.
People wanted desperately to believe that their lives had a purpose, that there was something more to life than working a team through a field in Pennsylvania or beating slag into something smoking from the forge. The concern was not so much for who or what ran the show but what it meant to be part of it.
Tent revivals.
Table-rappin', haint-conjurin' séance rooms full of believers & doubters alike.
Folks lookin' for the answers that they had the liberty, means and free time to ask. And them what was workin' too hard to do all that stuff themselves read about it in magazines and newspapers like it was the most important thing in their lives.

A ubiquitous sense that the spirit-world was close at hand and willing & able to contact this side from that side. "Simply because it is and works everywhere." Which sounds like the InterWeb to me, jasper.

At the same time I sense the beginnings of what we might as well get right to the point of calling the advent of a society less dependant on superstition. It's ironic that the spiritualism of the then-time would be so closely paralleled by the continued evolution of rational thought & free thought.
Here we were back then, in the early 1800s through the first two decades & some of the twentieth century, firm in our belief that there was a divine purpose for every life, that each human being on this earth was part of a divine plan. You were an ascended soul, fer cryin' out loud. You had been put in corporeal form by the divine hand and will and you were here on this physical planet, this tangible, contactable realm of being to do something special for god.
At the same time, everything you did, in as much as science and scientific progress – the building of a corpus of knowledge about how the divinely created world worked – was part of an ongoing revelation. God was giving you and the rest of the world knowledge – at the cost of experimentation and a huge pile of mental activity – in a plan to make your life and the lives of every other Christian being on this earth a chance to see, and probably more importantly use, what the divine had wrought.
Which explains Morse's first transmitted message, now recorded for history in a collection of dots and dashes on a paper tape: "What hath God wrought!"
And that's the way it was.
For those wishing to reconcile the technical accomplishments of those harnessing an incredibly ancient force with the incredibly ancient superstition, electricity became a bridge between wild ideas. Electric currents would heal. Electric current could dispel melancholy or insanity (as it was understood back then, which is barely at all). Electricity might some day make it possible for a man in one end of the country or hear – or, gasping appropriately, see his new born child within moments of birth. And the world might some day possibly be lit by more than fire.

It takes guts to think that way.

It takes a huge amount of courage to look at the electromagnetic spectrum by today's standards and not be awed by how incredibly simple this incredibly ancient force is. From the low frequency rumble of the magnetic field around Saturn to the precision of a laser pattern cutting machine in a metal shop, it's all just vibrations. Oscillations, really. Wigglin' and jigglin'. A whole lot of shakin' going on.
The problem of complexity comes in when you try to talk about what's wiggling & jiggling. With radio and everything below light we can talk about magnetic fields and electrical fields. We can measure and modify inductances or capacitances. We can feel the vibration of the bass guitar line in a Carlos Santana tune. That's the easy part.
Eventually, however, we're stuck with pretty much the mathematical equivalent of philosophical meanderings. You get to light, sure, you can measure it in brightness and explain its colors by prismatic filtering. But once you leave the visible light spectrum, you walk into another bag of rats.
Particles or waves?
Singular events or multiple? And multiple, then what happens to the particles? Do they split? Do they exist in two planes of time to be coalesced later at the target site? And if they're waves, how do they maintain synchrony?
And what about those satanic verses?
And Einstein?

Yeah, what about Einstein, pilgrim?

On the other hand, there's the quote in Hammond's The Electric Light in Our Homes, published in London in 1884 where one person proposed that

"he quite expected these electricians would be put down by law, because if they consumed as much electricity of the air as they proposed to do, that would upset the balance of nature, and probably jeopardize the existence of vegetable and animal life upon the earth" (pg 92 in Simon's book).

Under those sorts of misunderstandable situations, I could guess that it's a wonder we got to where we have televised executions of kufar showing up on our TiVOs. Also makes you wonder, since that sort of deductive thinking is still endemic, how the hell we'll ever get to a StarTrek tricorder.
Personally I doubt we'll get there.
We have too much power in our paws as it is. Guys are flying shooting war airplane missions from the safety of a bunker somewhere out in Idaho while the planes doing the bombin' & strafin' are out over the scrub of Central Asia. Everybody everywhere wants an atomic bomb. Everybody seems to be tied deeply to the investment of a type o' dong missle carryin' system by which the bomb will appear somewhere destined to die.
And there's all those cars and nuclear power plants and lights on the Christmas tree that we just gotta have.

Nah, there's just enough electricity to go around a couple times more than is necessary to snuff the entire human species in one take before breakfast. We'll never quite come to grips with that, being as how it's gonna be a Muslim world in the future and we all know where that leads: dead science, dead medicine, dead arts & literature & music, and a huge pile of dead people. And not a single lightbulb lit by any sort of electromagnetic mechanism. You can't have electromagnetic mechanisms if you're gonna live in the dark ages. Which is pretty much where we're headed. Again. After all these 600-odd past years of crawlin' into the light of neon & dayglow.

Not that it'll make much difference. Be too dark to see anything anyway.

Threaten Me Not with Thy Grace, Oh Lord!

2007-09-12T12:48:00.000-07:00

"If it is true that the followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation. However, all the children of the Church should nevertheless remember that their exalted condition results, not from their own merits, but from the grace of Christ."

Now what I find interesting, other than the ability of the RC governance to issue dictates on the condition of "grace" that non-Christians get stuck in, is the fact that it makes a decision about the eternal rewards of those who don't know Jesus.
Kinda like the police figuring you're guilty before a crime has even been committed. An a priori statement about whether or not you're going to hell 'cause you don't know the Lord before they even got to you to tell you the "good news."

Up front, this is the same game as a mullah saying that all infidels will burn in hell, even those who have, for reasons beyond belief by today's communications systems & the level of political & social activism, never heard of Islam.
"You will all be punished!"
And that's it. No more & no less.
You don't know Jesus? Well, it's to hell with you, Jasper! Ain't nobody gets away without knowin' about the Lord God Jehovah and the Salvation of the Blood & Christ!
Period.

At which point we get to the point where I'm remembering a cartoon that somebody sent me once. Bunch of post-neanderthals sittin' around the fire, talking about who does what in the universe. Talkin' about belief, god, goddesses, moon & sun, all that.
One of the cave men says something like "Well, that settles it. Glogh doesn't believe in the wind spirit so we'll smash his head in with a rock."
The only difference between this and that, between the dictates of the RC church pursuant to the condition of "grace" enjoyed by non-Christians & the retribution promised by the divine lover upon those who are non-Christian, is the fact that it's a cartoon, one, and it's supposed to be a joke, two.
Yeah, a joke: smash his head in with a rock 'cause he don't know Jesus. Praise!
On the joke side, such a cartoon, were it to say Allah instead of the wind spirit, would be cause for a world-wide pillage & plunder fest from Muslims. Not to mention the fact that it says a lot about how seriously we take religion, in as much as we (gringos) can put a joke like that in a magazine and get away with it.
Also on the joke side is the fact that religion itself is indeed a joke.
As in: you gotta be kiddin' me! You expect me to believe this shit?
And yet so many do, a condition that leads me to doubt seriously that any of us humans would be able to survive a big rock from space or an appropriately mutated germ. We'd be so caught up in killin' each other off from lack of faith that the killin' off done by the impactor or germ would be pretty much inconsequential and moot, deaths & body counts and all.
'Cause you can damn sure betcha that the impactor or the germ would be ascribed to satanic forces acting against the loving nature of the god who wants money. Which reminds me: Zeitgeist is one of those all-inclusive movie thingies you can catch on the web. Most of it's a compilation and overview of religion, money and the 9/11 WTC destruction. But there's a part right in the middle that calls Christianity to task.
Although they leave out the things about the Vatican being built on the site of a former Mithraic temple known as Vaticanum where the head priest was called pontifex, which would have made things even more interesting to my way of thinking. Outside of the line for "grace" as it is.

Which gets me back on track: this thing about the divine dispensing "grace." As if there were this spiritual food you had to get from the divine hand so you'd be down with the sky pilot himself and all that. "Grace."
What the hell is "grace," after all?
Yeah, the RC church and its catechism defines "grace" a bunch of different ways over time. All together it comes down to "grace" being a helping hand from the divine which leads to the inclusion of the believer (by grace) in the body of Christ & a membership of the divine family by way of the believer becoming a 'child of god." And if that smacks of patriarchialism, super. That's what it says to me.
But beyond that there's the question of why anyone who believes in a divine being would need "help" in coming to see that there is a divine being to believe in up front. It would seem more advantages and certainly less capricious and more just for the divine being to just outright speak into the ear of the believer so as to give the believer absolute proof of the existence of god. As in: "Say hello to my little friend" and god himself would show himself daily, regularly, obviously, without fail and with complete openness to any believer or group of believers.
He'd be like the cop on the beat, that kind of god. You'd see him or it or whatever every day, day in and day out, working with you, standing beside you, directing illness and mayhem away from you all the time. God would "be there" for you.
Now that, that would be truly gracious.
It'd be grace like you could see and feel and believe in.
As opposed to millennia of words suggesting that (a) the concept of grace changes over time (which would run against the eternal and unchanging nature of god as presented by the Christian churches & the RC church in particular) and (b) the way you get grace changes according to the whim of god (which would go against the nature of an all-loving, compassionate & caring divinity).
That kind of grace.

Now this is pretty weird stuff to me 'cause I can't figure out how pernicious a god has to be before folks start to wonder why the world's so screwed up, not counting what the loudest monkey does.
What people will assign and attribute to a divine being to the point where the attributes are contradictory or completely paradoxical is amazing. Kinda like the George Carlin bit where he explains how god is going to punish you with eternal fire & torture 'cause you did something like whip it off one night when the folks were watching a show about steam engines. All that torture &c for having just pounded it good one night. Flames, hell-fire, physical discomfort of a depth & type for which the human body – and the evanescent human soul – was obviously not designed. Not to mention letting you get sick or killed by horrible accidents, both the illnesses and the accidents being quite within the divine ability to prevent for you. All that and . . . God loves you.
Really. God loves you. He does. He loves you like crazy. Not even a priest and an altar boy would be capable of such infinite love.
Even with hell-fire and illness and accidents. Even then. God still loves you.
And he needs money.
For which, if memory serves, the so-called Protestant Reformation was battled out across Europe, your face & soul. Money for grace. Money for remission of sins. Money to celebrate a mass in the memory of your mother who died a horrible death after a lingering illness, believer that she was and all that.
That kind of grace.

A couple years back someone wrote in to the local newspaper about how screwed up atheists were. Dragged out all the usual cranks about atheists being too chicken or too stone-hearted or whatever to believe that there is a loving god in heaven watching out for the lives and welfare of every human being on the planet, right down to the starving children.
I wrote in saying that I couldn't believe anybody would write such drivel. I said that I had come out about my disbelief long ago and ever since my life had been a lot less torturous. I didn't have to feign understanding the Lord in its infinite wisdom. I didn't have to worry why babies died before birth or shortly after. I didn't have to worry about someone's eternal destiny 'cause I could never figure out what sort of god would allow that shit to happen in the first place. No, I said. I'm very happy and I find my life very rewarding without a sky-pilot overlord testing my faith even though such a divine being was supposedly outside of the strictures of time and space and thus was omniscient.
It was a lot easier for me not to believe than to pretzel my head through all the paradoxes and conundrums and oxymorons of religious belief.
Not the least of which was the supposed help that a believer needs from the divine so the believer can continue to believe.
It was just unbelievable.
And even more unbelievable, but on a less metaphysical level, was the number of others who wrote into ask the newspaper what kind of drugs the original believer had to have been on when he wrote the drivel in the first place.
That kind of grace.
The grace to shut up and let other folks be in their disbelief, much as they tried mightily day-by-day to put up with the constant assertion that disbelievers were so numerous as to actually "threaten" believers.
That kind of grace. It's unbelievable.

Hangin' with the 95ers

2007-09-10T07:05:00.000-07:00

A couple Christmases back, Cindy's mother signed a card on a present to me as "Mom." I was not surprised and I was touched. Right now Cid's mother is the only mother I have. My own mother passed away nearly 22 years ago this October.
Cid's mother has seen a lot for a girl whose father never thought women should be educated. She worked as a teller & retired as a high-end functionary in one of the local banks. Her husband of 30-plus years died after his third kidney transplant. Her youngest son slipped from this earth one quiet December morning over three years ago. Her mother long since passed on and her sister is not in the most marvelous of health. She's seen a lot and all the while maintained a cheerful yet determined disposition toward life. Her having presented the gift to me as "Mom" is most fitting.
And while saying all this with the greatest respect, I know that she knows that two, if not all, of her remaining children are not staunch believers. Cid, her eldest, is a fence-sittin' agnostic. Cid's second brother is married to a woman who is almost as vehement & a whole pile more outspoken than I about her disbelief. Cid's third brother goes to church with the family 'cause it's easier than arguing & it makes his wife feel better about her life.
Cid's youngest brother once asked me if I didn't believe in god 'cause I was angry with him. I suspect that this particular brother slipped into eternity believing he was headed to a better place after years of suffering an incapacitating & pernicious genetically-driven illness.
So belief comes easy to Cid's mother and touches the lives of her children.
And then there is me, the guy who reads Richard Dawkins while the turkey gets basted & who has never gone to church in all the years in the family except to funerals and weddings. I am the non-believer in a gang of disbelievers and their mother.

Nearly 50 years ago today the Lutheran church in Cid's home town was founded. It's not an imposing place and lightyears from the mega-churches that seem to inhabit that stretch of land along the Interstate where the neon billboards & Jesus statues live. It's a quiet place where folks come during Christmas to help the local – and not so well-paid – Latino field hands & their families get through the season with some semblance of blessing.
It's a church, plain and simple, this one Lutheran church in the middle of a typically nowhere Midwestern town surrounded by land headed for development & disarray.
And it's a 50-year-old Lutheran church this week.
They're having a special service & a post-service lunch for the congregation, former, present & impending future. Cid's mother made sure we knew about it and said it would be nice if we would show up, at least her children, baptized, christened or whatever or not.

The plan had been discussed & worked out & we all showed up as expected, with us bringing Cid's home-made barbecue beef (known in these hereabouts as "sloppy joe"), which was mixed with all the other pots and crocks full of individual replicas of the same. Hot dogs got boiled – yeah, I think it's a Midwestern thing, boiling hot dogs – and cakes & pies and ice cream and the works got spread out for the congregation.
Which means that while the congregation – a standing-room only crowd – prayed and thanked and sang & chanted, Cid & her brothers and I potted up the food & prepared the tables & lay out for the feast.
Put a whole new meaning to the communal meal, something that the young'n & I discussed after we'd covered the tables outside under the tent, which tables had been rained on from the evening before.
And we talked about German cinema, too, just to make sure that we didn't get too involved in the philosophical significances & all that. After a while we went back inside, mainly 'cause we were getting nervous about obviously not participating. So Cid & the young'n were in the kitchen while I went out to the back of the standing room only area to watch the service.
Watch. I didn't participate – just as Sister Merry Discipline learned me years ago – so there would be no sin. But that didn't stop me from noticing things like the invocation of the triune god and the thanking and praising and all that from the pastor, other prediger and the songs of the choir. I was struck a couple of time, given the way the building was laid out and all that, that I could have been standing in a mithraem on a rainy day in some first or second century AD Mediterranean town, roman guards & the centurions and all. The array of folks in the pews, the leader of the service at the front, the altar & the candles and lights and other symbolic stuff on the walls, not even the empty cross would have been out of place.
Standing there as I was, one thing that kept coming back to me was the intensely ancient form of worship that I was watching ultimately all reduced to words used to convince each other that we were participants in some grand & divine plan. Here I invoke the triune god. Here I speak of the hero savior. Here we sing a song of praise, as if our divine & invisible friend enjoyed the way we sang, songs that have been sung for so long that you'd expect an eternal being to get tired at some point of hearing them. At which point I went back into the kitchen & helped Cid & her brothers fix the food up and put the stuff together so the participants in the worship would have a communal meal outside of the metaphysical.

Later on I got drafted to help clean up. Cid's mother had put in some serious time on getting all the post-service stuff arranged and going. Another member of one of the other churches in town went around trying to figure out what we wanted to do. That's a nice way of saying that we watched this guy change his mind about twenty-seven times while we ignored all of that and just get the food ready & the tables cleared & set.
In the end we fed the multitude. It might have been "sloppy joe" and hot dogs but we all knew that it was the loaves and finches. The guy who was figuring out what to do next estimated that we had about 150 people in the service & that most of 'em had come through the food line.
As we started cleaning up from the crowd I told Cid that I should have known that I would get drafted into the scullery crew. That and a tiny sink barely enough room to wash off the serving spoons & all. In the end I just rinsed out what I could and washed up the smaller stuff that belonged to the church or other local good-will organization. In all I figure we put in something like five hours of doing the lord's work.

We got home, changed our clothes back to weekend grubbies and took naps. Bein' as how we'd been up since about six a.m. we had no guilt about being napped out. Cid hit the couch and me and the kittens went upstairs to snore & enjoy an occasional apnea.

Somewhere along the line we all managed to be awake at the same time and, for reasons known only to Mithras, we were hungry. We also didn't feel like messing with food or food preparation or fixing up. We went to a local sandwich joint & had chow. On the way over and on the way back Cid & I talked about how the church had filled a place in her mother's life after her husband (and Cid's father) died. We also talked about how the need for fellowship of co-religionists or fellow believers – as opposed to the camaraderie of co-workers & neighbors – seems to be a calling need in the human psyche.
I'll go along with that. I know that every time I get a copy of the FFRF Freethought Today, I always read the letters first. It's where all the fellowship of disbelief hangs out, there in them letters. You can see it in the affirmation of what the magazine/newspaper gives people every time it arrives in the mail: a sense of belonging to something that shows we are not nuts for not believing.
At the same time I can understand how folks feel fellowship in churching.
To some that would be a weakness on my part, as if my disbelief were somehow questionable. Such an opinion of me is just as pernicious as someone claiming that my faith were somehow below par, were I a believer.
I may be what's called a "strong atheist" but I ain't a severe or ultra-fundamentalist atheist. It's a way of saying that I have no problem with believers as long as they are willing to leave their belief out of my disbelief and, more importantly, out of any societal fabric beyond their church's door. Thus I don't worry much that Mom – Cid's mother – finds solace & fellowship in her activities with the church & church services. I would be seriously concerned if she were one of those church-going women who demands of every politician complete subservience to some "divine plan."
I don’t care what someone believes as long as their belief doesn't care about me.
I am not the atheist version of the Taliban's religious purity tac squad.
I don't believe 'cause I don't see anything to believe in or worship.
Can't get more simple 'n that.

Another thing that came to mind while I was cleanin' up – and it's really two things – was the fact that I was standing there over the sink, trying to make do with minimalist soap resources, wash rags, towels and a very small sink when I could have been home playin' solitaire on the computer or otherwise wasting what could have been a really nice day for a nap.
Then at one point the guy who was trying to be in charge came by and offered an apology for me having been stuck with the scullery crew.
I looked at him and said "Dude, if you want to inhale you have to exhale."
Another Zen koan from the age of space.
Another way of looking at the world without a Jesus.

Sure, I could have been doing something else but no matter what I was doing, I'd still be doing something. And given that it was rainin' pretty much the whole day, there were a lot of other things I could have been doing in the rain. Like trying to stay dry.
Maybe that's one of the things you get when you're 61: a sense that no matter what you're doing you're still doing something.
Don't make no never-mind what it is. You's still doing.
Or maybe that's what you get from being 61 and a non-believer: washing dishes and cleaning up from a communal meal outside of the metaphysical ain't no big deal.
To which some might say that I was copping out on my disbelief. As in: how can you do that in a church, for cryin' out loud, when you don't believe and everybody including Mom knows it?
Easy.
Mom needed some help and I wasn't gonna be a shit about it. I was glad to help after all the help she has given Cid & me and the kids over the past 30+ years of being a member of the family.

Even an atheist can be a human being.

Like, ॐ, Yo!

2007-09-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

Many more years ago than I care to remember, although the memory is quite sweet, filled with light & an intellectual agility that I would love to have again, I would get in Dad's car & tell Mom I was headed off to Mass at one of the downtown RC churches. Of course, I'd drive straight downtown and cross the bridge, headed for the part of town that was once peopled with members of the RC and Jewish faith, and down the street to an apartment building on a corner. I'd park the car on the side street and go up one flight of stairs to knock on the door of a friend's digs.
If I timed it right – and I learned easy up how to do that – I'd get there after he had finished his meditations. He'd invite me in with a nearly famous smile (one you can find on the web today) and we'd go into the kitchen to talk about belief.
Looking back I find it delicious that I could at once have so many doubts while at the same time entertaining so many divergent ideas. Truth is I was falling out of faith with faith, something I'd been on the verge of for years, and the conversations with my friend made the difference between abject renunciation and the renunciation of yogic ascent to higher consciousness.
The yoga metaphor ain't that bad, either.
The yoga metaphor allowed me to take steps, one at a time over the course of some six years, toward final recognition of the inescapable truth.
Bit by bit I climbed the ladder of awareness, first pulling my head out of my ass and then slowly working my way past fish and frog and lizard and mammal to reach the level of awareness that comes with acceptance of the primate line as heritage.
Over the course of the next year or so, I'd show up at my friend's apartment & we'd talk for hours about space, time, the universe, multiverses, elementary (as it was then & not just because we were pikers playing around with words and half-understood ideas) physics & similar subjects. It was a simple trade off: I'd skip Mass and my friend & I would talk belief & philosophy.
Central to this entire episode was his having taken up the worshipful study of a 19th Century Hindu mystic, Sri Ramakrishna (রামকৃষ্ণ পরমহংস) whose life story was contained in The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, which book was in the local public library. I'd come across the book at some point in my perigrinations around town – my RC high school's being downtown was partially at fault for that – and had smuggled it into the house, fearful my parents would think I'd slipped a cog.
Fact was, I was already well de-cogged from belief and, flailing around like a fish out of water, spent a lot of time trying to reconcile my growing understanding of belief in a deity as a sort of immature imaginary friend cycle that the human species should long before have outgrown. So there I was with the "gospel" in my mitts, learning for the first time that divine incarnation was not a wholly-owned subsidiary of Christian faith. That process having been declaimed I ended up a short while later skipping church and talking high-end esoterica with my friend.
Then one day, there was a change in the cultic nature of these conversations.
I showed up as usual and damn if the guy hadn't come across some reading about homosexuality, Freudian mother-worship psychology & deduced from that and other suspicions that the late guru paramahansa might have been gay.
This was back when "gay" was not a totally accepted lifestyle, even among the proto-hippies of the time. And it would be over three decades before an academic named Jeffrey Kripal would call the same card on the Hindu saint.
So the subject of Ramakrishna & his incarnation of the divine and his devotion to the mother goddess became, as they say in the South Pacific, tambu. At about this time the friendship slipped as well & I spent less and less time in my friend's kitchen and an equally decreased time in church. I would occasionally see him playing his guitar at one of the soon-to-be noticed coffee houses &c that blossomed like LSD-enhanced flowers across the urban landscape of middle America. But that's about as far as it went.
A few years later I ran into him on the street of a nearby small college town, getting out of a small car with his ubiquitous guitar case. I said hello & asked him what he'd been up to. He told me that he'd had to give up guitar for a while because of some pain in his wrists, pain which the medicos told him would not go away. Being thus forced into semi-retirement he had taken up prayer to Jesus. He told me that he'd prayed to Jesus to take the pain away so that he could go back to playing music – and he was a damn good musician. He said that one day he picked up the guitar and, lo & behold, the pain was gone and his playing was as good as, if not better than ever.
I had, by this time, long since given up on imaginary friends, invisible protectors and a divine hand that would snuff my shipmates in Vietnam but heal a hippie musician's hands in the middle of the Midwest. I said that I didn't go along with that any more and he began to tell me the wonders of the Lord's saving grace &c.
We parted company at that moment & I never saw him again.

The time of Ramakrishna's service to his gods (1836-1886) is/was distant enough for the vision of that time to get muddled & misunderstood. The fact that he was of the Brahmin caste certainly gives him all the leeway possible for him to have become the religious icon that his "gospel" makes for him. His years of service at the Dakshineswar temple, which was built with the funds of a rich BC (backward caste) woman, make it obvious that he never really had to do much more than talk the talk and walk the walk. His brothers worked, within their caste to be sure, although their work was considerably less onerous than the run-of-the-mill Hindu of the time. Even so, Ramakrishna's determination to become a priest at a temple did his family no favors.
Upon becoming the priest in charge of the Kālī' temple and as a result of his reputation as a completely absorbed devotee, Ramakrishna began to attract followers.
This was a time in India when western values and, in particular, western technology spread word of Ramakrishna's fame more easily than before. The presence of British colonial rule brought with it the telegraph and newspapers. Tied to this was a sudden resurgence in Hindu religious conviction – probably fed by the presence of the foreigners and their own religious determinism – which took people of all castes and backgrounds to reconsider themselves and their culture in the light of British might. It is likely that the spread of Ramakrishna's fame is the result of magazines articles published by the religious renewal groups that formed in reaction to British colonial and missionary imperialism. One, the Brahmo Samaj sought reconciliation of Hindu beliefs with Western Christianity. The other, Arya Samaj, demanded strict separation between believing Hindus and the British and their missionaries.
Interesting in all of this is the way that Ramakrishna came to desire followers, students & adherents to his own version of local Brahmin & Bengali Hinduism. The story goes that at one point he would go up on the roof of one of the temple buildings and plead in prayer for his "children" to come to him. By the time folks started to show up, he had already probably pretty well developed a deeply held conviction that he was (a) a true incarnation of the divine spirit and (b) destined to be a guru in the renewal of Hindu mystic faith.
` In the course of his short life Ramakrishna developed the philosophy that "all religions are like so many rivers, all flowing to the ocean of godhood." Of course this is an extrapolation of the underpinnings of Hinduism in that the divine essence is present in all of the universe universally, from which follows that the name god or the names of all the gods are just human misunderstanding of the essentially divine nature of the universe. Such a belief system, obviously, is a philosophical descendant of simple animism, a fact that most pan-religious believers seldom want to face.
Between the "gospel" and Kripal's book stand nearly a century of Ramakrishna's "message" and the work of his disciples and subsequent followers. One of his more active disciples, Narendranath Dutta (who was later to become the monk known as Swami Vivekananda) ended up traveling around the world as one of the first missionaries of Hindu mysticism. The swami wrote a series of books on yoga and Vedanta and translated the original "gospel" into English. There is now a large temple complex in India dedicated to the Swami's story itself.
As is sometimes strangely common, the followers of the guru are now swami saints worshipped apart from the founder of the order whom they (the swamis) had sought to serve. The original teacher, who made the swamis into gurus, led to the the swamis being turned into saints themselves.
Today the Ramakrishna Order maintains a functioning math or monastery school in India and governs a collection of other temples and shrines around the world. And, if that ain't enough, there are spin-off groups as well.

The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna is now on the bookshelf with my other books on religion & belief. Just 'cause I don't believe or see anything to believe doesn't mean that I ain't interested in the systems by which that works. There's even a copy of the Book of Mormon, Oahspe: a Kosmon Bible, the Qur'an (in three translations), the Essence of Vedanta, the Upanishads,, four different Judeo-Christian Bibles & a copy of Kaufman's book on $cientology. And a copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao TseTung, provided many years ago by what was then called Radio Peking.
Sitting on the same shelf is a copy of Jeffrey Kripal's Kālī's Child: The Mystical & the Erotic in the Life & Teachings of Ramakrishna, a book that appeared decades after my friend has announced his abjuring of the paramahansa's life & testament. I've read the book through once fully & have gone back bits and pieces of it over time, but I remember with each reading now hearing an academic colleague swear off the text because, among other things, Kripal (supposedly by way of the following quote) "doesn't even speak Bengali!"
If this is true, that's one thing. It would only add to the vilification of & reaction to Kripal's central thesis that Ramakrishna was a man prone to neural seizures & given to being attracted to young boys. Whether or not this is true is one thing. The fact that there is would be sufficient evidence on the surface – such as my friend figured out on his own before Kripal was even born – to propose that the Hindu saint was gay & possibly tended toward pedophilia is something else.
And it sure don't help the religionists' case none when added to all the stuff about "straying" religious leaders that shows up in the "Black Collar Crime Report" of FFRF's Freethought Today.
One way or the other belief in a divine being seems to run into trouble when its front men (and women) come up against the simple fact that the voice in their heads telling them that there's a god can't be discerned as different from the voice in their heads that tells them their pants really do need to come down. Across the board – or across the spectrum of belief systems – the divine inner urges are no match for the urges of the flesh. If a believer likes children for more than reading books and helping them learn to tie square knots, the believer has a problem that no god and no amount of prayer can fix. The pants are gonna come down.
And if I'm willing to be that harsh on believers with problems about sexual potency, you can bet up front that I'm gonna have no room in my understanding of them for the "Oh, I have sinned against yew!" and "I am not gay! The Lord has shone me that I ain't gay! Praise!" litanies that follow the public notice of the believer's tendency toward the unholy. Nobody's gonna ever convince me that a man who makes a public show of his obeisance to the so-called "Straight Life" so strident that it hurts is anything more than a man who is trying mightily to suppress his desire to have the little boys in the closet & the little girls on the couch. No Jimmy Swaggart cryin' on the pulpet and no Ted Haggard squinting in intense prayer to his imaginary savior will ever convince me otherwise. In a bit almost as weird but a whole lot more object than Tom Cruise's proclamations about psychiatry, I have lived six decades and some on this planet & I have seen criminals and killers, sheep and wild dogs claim that some god somewhere had fixed them up so they'd never harm another human being again only to go out and do the same damn thing again and again, all the while claiming their innocence before their Lord.
It just don't work that way, yo.
At the same time I am at least not so curmudgeonly or cynical to think that the average person, the average gets-up-each-day and goes-to-work person, might derive a certain amount of quiet mental freedom from not recognizing the truths that I picked up on years ago. Some folks just do well with religion. Some folks get from day to day believing that they are going to have a life eternal after death. Some folks think that they are working for the salvation of their immortal soul. Some folks do that and some folks get very far in life & die at least nominally satisfied and unafraid because they have some idea that there's a divine will.
I ain't, however, one of those people.
And since I ain't, there's a big chunk of me that feels, for all my ability to just let those folks be, that such folks are not just quaint. They're wasting a helluvalot of valuable time and who-knows-how-many valuable heartbeats.
Even if they do get back to playing music again.

And before you ask why all this is up on the screen, I'll answer straight up: I went fishing.
Cid & I were walking down the street one day recently in the little college town where I last saw my friend and heard his story about Jesus saving him from eternal silence. I told the story to my wife & she said she didn't quite understand that. That and she had to admit that such a moment must have been weird all those years ago in the long-back before Reagan promised the government to the hide-bound religionists just before he got his astrology chart read by the White House astrologer. And in truth it was. It was a time before heavy Jesus talk was heard all that often. Most folks were closet Buddhists or something and the number of true "Jesus Freaks" was not quite bursting out of another closet.
Later on, at work, where I get my many of the topics for my wilder rants, I wondered about my friend & where or if he might be. A simple Google search & there he was again, his face on the cover of a record album from those by-gone years, with a piece of architecture from the college town behind him & two other people from that time. I had to smile.
Then I remembered all those conversations & especially the conversation that predated Kripal's book.
I find all of this very interesting, if only because it calls back to a time when I was wondering about how one would not believe. I had begun to see how things were working out in my life & the life of my parents & friends & their parents. I watched people die from terrible illnesses and saw my contemporaries cut down in a war that was not only illogical & senseless (especially in the light of present day capitalism) but which also made some people extremely wealthy. Some friends didn't get to that war but became engaged in other wars, a few dying from their own desire to stay as stoned as possible or get as high as they could at the point of a needle & syringe. Nobody stood up to stop the carnage but a few and most of them eventually became members of the economic system that processed the war & destroyed the society. Over and over it was the same message: if there were a loving god it would have shown its face by now.
And then, in much the same way as some seem to fall into the hands of their Jesus, it came to me as a simple statement across time & space: it's all bullshit. Make-believe and jibber-jabber. Ratiocinations of extremely convoluted, imposing self-deception. Lies and jest.

I have no idea what my old friend from that long-ago time believes now. For all I know he is one of those who will never, ever give up their ability to find a reason to believe. I know that for me there is one song that tells much of it for me and says a lot about those who try to convince me I'm wrong. All the rest of the folks from that time are off on their own trips. I haven't seen but one or two of them over the course of the past forty years since I began to see clearly how clouded a believing mind can be. A very, very few I see now and then, infrequently, in a gathering of folks that remind me of all those who never survived the trip. All of them and all of the missing, all together, don't make my life any less pleasant. I enjoy their company because we who remain are all simply survivors. But I do think that out of the entire group, there are maybe one or two who do not believe, folks like me who look around at what we saw and what we can see today – and what we fear we will see coming before we snuff it – and find no sign whatsoever of a divine hand, loving and just and kind.
Instead we see the monkeys and we know the simple truth: there is no god to be angry at and the best we'll ever do is walk proudly toward the end, helping each other and others as much as we can to see what we know is correct.

That is our only purpose. It's our only task.

Trailer: the Future of the Species

2007-08-25T11:48:00.000-07:00

I was all fired up about the Kardashev Scale and hell-bent on making some sense of space travel when I just happened to come across a newspaper page from England showing the execution of justice in Iran. After I read the story and looked at the pictures I realized that what was happening in Iran was not too much different from what happened in the so-called Dark Ages, when the RC church ran everything and religiosity was the damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don't rule of law.
Back when you got your back sliced up for having dirty thoughts. Or not handing your newlywed wife over to the master of the castle for the rites of the first nite.
You gotta love how god hands out the favors.
So in some way we can look at the pictures of a guy getting his back laced and say "How horrible! Such savages!" while at the same time sitting here in our smug little world thinking "We have outgrown that savagery."
As if.
I suspect that there are a huge number prayer group members out there in superstition land who would like to bring the flog and the rake back to the punishment of sinners. And I find that suspicion so threatening that I sometimes wonder why we'd even be able to evolve any further than we have.
Truth is, however, we have stopped evolving.
We are what we are today as a species because at some point in the not too far back time, we managed to figure how to change our environmental conditions to allow us to live just about anywhere. No other terrestrial animal lives in the wide range of ecological conditions that we consider quite normal. No single above-ground, out-of-the-water species lives from the frozen North Cape snow or the Alaskan glaciers down to the dripping rain forests of equatorial South America or the baked desert sands of Africa. We're so comfortable in so many places that we are almost as ubiquitous as fleas and spiders.
With that going for us you'd think we'd be ready for anything.
We like to think we are.

My father never paid much attention to his health. He always figured that medical science – like his mother – would drag his ass out of the flames at that last moment, save him from horrible pain and misery and give him another day to complain about. With that attitude, however, he soon enough became pretty much glued to a chair or a bed, unable to walk without assistance, stuck in one place most of the day with his cigarettes and his coffee.
When his body started to fail him – mostly from the effects of alcohol, caffeine, nicotine & nearly paralyzing inactivity – he was still quite well aware and cogent. He got to see his legs turn blue, his lungs fill up, his intestines and innards harden and, at that last moment, find that you can't follow ghosts out of the ward with your cardiac arteries 80% blocked.
All that liniment he'd rubbed into his left shoulder didn't do a damn thing.
And he cared not enough to know about signs of cardiac degeneration.
So when the end came, it was not quite quick and certainly not painless.

I suspect that's what it's gonna be like for this species, this human species: well aware of it all and wracked in the painful flailing about that comes with suffocation in a quickly collapsing ecological disaster, self-righteously staking our claims on an imaginary reward for having done our imaginary friend's work, omnipotent & all as we have imagined that friend to be, we will die out. Completely.

Along the way, however, we'll be able to watch our dedication to divine hands lead us through brutality & mean-spirited violence. We'll beat ourselves up trying to get right with a god. We'll kill each other slowly with prayers and shouts of vengeance & all the might that we think our god has given us to use in the establishment of an imaginary kingdom here on what will be by that time a shattered and stricken earth.
Only a few – like the few faces expressing horror in the picture of the audience to the beating here – will stand as shocked, dismayed, frightened, horrified and disgusted witnesses to those final moments.
And then, once it's over and all the life of the human species has left this planet covered in blood and poisons beyond our wildest guesses, nobody will be here to explain what happened.
In fact, there will be no one to explain it to.
At which point life – such as it is without humans in the way – will go on and all the things that we as a species have held so dear and had thought of as signs of our essential superiority will be mute testimony to nothing.
The Parthenon, the cathedrals in France, the temples and pagodas in Asia, the cave paintings & the houses and libraries and schools and government buildings, all the monuments to great people and people not so great, all of it, every last stick that has ever felt a human hand, will mean nothing.
No one will be alive to say what it means and nothing will come behind us in time enough for anyone to ask what it all was supposed to mean.

If you want a look into the future, look at the picture at the top of this post and then, after you've feasted on the angles of the beating stick and the bruises on the back of the sinner, let that smug smile that says "We're better than that" look at the picture of those who attended the beating.
Look at each face in that picture, every single face, each one of them showing something of what it will be like on that last moment when the last human kills the last human and then itself dies. You'll see in those faces what it will mean to have removed the sinful from the planet in some god's service. The hate. The smug righteousness. The confusion. The worry. The doubt. The faith. The firm belief that this is the correct way, that this is how we should punish the sinner, forgetting that god should be able to punish the sinner himself without help from any of us. Look at those faces and then . . . then find the faces of those who cannot hide the horror in their eyes as they see this sinner brought close to death.
That look, that face covered with horror – and the fear of showing the doubt that comes with that horror – that face will be all that will remain of humanity on that last day of self-inflicted punishment, when life itself will cry out "Oh Lord! I am not worthy!" and then be silent.

Forever.

You Can't Dream This Shit Up

2007-08-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

From what I am able to gather from the reportage available to me from the so-called "liberal" media & what's on the InterWeb, the religious loonies are having a war over in the Middle East. The so-called Shi'a militias are up in arms against the Sunni militias and the Gringo army is in the middle of it. Added to that is the apparent collection of splits between the various militias – like the Shi'as have now split into at least three groups, each fighting against the Sunnis as well as among themselves – and you get some very interesting case studies.
I call 'em case studies 'cause there ain't no way in hell you can make sense of a bunch of people killin' each other over differences of opinion on how this or that verse of the Qur'an says to do this or that conflicting thing. You couldn't dream this shit up.
People all over the Middle East are killing each other instead of waiting for their god to kill them so they can see each other burn in hell or go to heaven.
Seriously.
I said you couldn't dream this shit up.

Habakuk kills Misru 'cause Misru said something to Habakuk's cousin about the way his second-cousins uncle on his father's side killed Mustafa's dog 'cause the dog was haram. Now Misru is a Shi'a and his brother Rashid is a Sunni. Rashid hates Misru 'cause of the Shi'a/Sunni problem but he hates Habakuk even more because he thinks the dog was not forbidden because Rashid's second cousin on his third uncle's sister's side needed the dog 'cause his uncle is blind. So Misru's brother had to make an honor killing of Habakuk's sister's daughter 'cause she was friends with the kufar Sven who lived in the bad part of town and sold wine to the Kurds before he, Sven, was killed by a mad dog that had gotten loose from the blind peoples' school on Friday just about prayer time. Sven's distant cousin Olaf flew all the way from Sweden to get his brother's body from Habakuk's grandfather, who'd killed the brother because of his having said something about a guy named Mohammed – but not the prophet Mohammed – to Habakuk's sister's daughter but which statement was misunderstood by a boy who lived next door, which boy subsequently blew up himself and sixteen people in a market the same day that the dog was declared haram by the mullah Omar, who shot Misru's dog. Which is why everybody's trying to kill a guy named Jack who lives in Florida and has never been to the Middle East but who did put new cabinets on a yacht owned by Sheik Garam Haramanggapuja, who lives in Kuala Lumpur.

Maybe you could dream this shit up. I most certainly don't have a problem dreaming it up. Even Yvan du Seine dreams this stuff up. To wit:

"I've never been to Baghdad
"but I've been to Anbar Province.
"They say the ladies are insane there
"But I really don't remember . . . "

Boom!

Now into this mix the US military had decided to give the US troops over there "Freedom Packages" which included Bibles & other "proselytizing materials." This pile of stuff was in English and Arabic so the locals with whom the US troops came in contact would be given the opportunity to come to Jesus.
And we all know how much Jesus can do for them towel-head camel jockeys.
Couldn't dream this shit up again.
So this pile of tripe was given to the troops to hand out, which would have worked good 'cept the Military Religious Freedom Foundation got involved and from there the military backpedaled on making the troops hand out the "packages."
What I find interesting about the packages was the inclusion of a computer game called "Left Behind: Eternal Forces'. According to another report, the game is a work-up of a series of cheap work novels about the end times, post-Rapture. The game evidently involves soldiers hunting down enemies of the Christ.
And then there's this from the second site (linked above):

". . . despite what Operation Straight Up and its supporters in the Pentagon may think is taking place in Iraq, the Rapture is not a viable exit strategy."

Dream this up too? Betcha didn't. I know I couldn't . . . ok, maybe I could, but it would only come out of my fingers by way of this keyboard if I had a homunculus living in my skull . . . which would be another version of Descartes' error.
But I wander off task.
It absolutely blows me away that one species on the planet can be so damn dangerous and so blindly so. Bush & his fakes at the "faith-based" White House, including Karl Rove have been pushing this war – this "Surge" – as some sort of defense of our way of life, our way of life, of course, being a Christian way of life. They'll tell you it's about Iraqi freedom or "catching al-Qaeda" or fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them over here. (Wanna bet how long that really lasts?) But we also have on Bush's word that the divine told him to wage war in Iraq.
Yeah, god talks to Dubya.
God doesn't tell individual soldiers when they're about to get fragged. God doesn't save groups of soldiers from IEDs. He doesn't keep the Iraqi children from being used as hand grenades. But god does talk to Dubya.
That otter be enough to get you to sleep at night, right?
As if.
And here some Christian activist/missionary zealots decide that they should give the Bible and a very sinister computer game based on some of the gibbering in the Bible to soldiers so they can hand the stuff over to Iraqi citizens. Show 'em that we care. Show 'em that we're concerned about their eternal salvation and after-life welfare.
Show 'em god loves 'em. And show 'em if they don't love god back, our boys will be glad to come in and wipe the streets down with their blood and skin and sinew and bone fragments.
'Cause god talks to Dubya.

Jesus H. Pluckin' Christ Almighty! It's already a religious war! The damn Shi'a militia has fragmented so that they're fighting each other! The damn Sunni and Shi'a are at each others' throats with guns and bombs and exploding seven year old boys! And our commander-in-chief monkey gets messages from the divine lips!
How many more exclamation points do I have to use to make sense of this?
Oh, I forgot: it don't make no sense 'cause I ain't in touch with the divine, who makes sense to every dumbass, desensitized, decerebrated frog-head religionist whack job believes that god talks to Dubya special.
And once I get my mind right about that, it'll all make sense to me?
Yeah, right. It'll make the kind of sense that has gotten into the military mindset that soldiers can be ordered to attend church, by which order any commander or platoon NCO will know that, should his troops get fragged, they will go to heaven straight up with Jesus.
So tell me how that's different from the dead GI and the shahid blows himself up in a market place or a mosque of the opposing sect?
Yeah, right. There ain't no difference.
If a soldier or mujihadin is right with his god, that person is expendable. Sure, the company or ummah is down a man, but, heck, at least the CO knows that soldier went to heaven. You can't find a more expendable soldier than one that's right with his god.

That's why it's a religious war, stupid. That's why it's a religious war, even if Dubya's god won't let him admit it. But then, the truth may set you free but only if it's god's truth. Kinda like "everything I say is a lie," ain't it? No difference at all.

Good Evening, Godless Sodomites!

2007-08-22T08:34:00.000-07:00

Cid caught me while I was drivin' the family tank to the low-brow Mexican restaurant that she & I enjoy testing our Spanish at. She started telling me about a pod (Oh, look, I used a neologism!) on NPR's On the Media segment about a journalist who started out with a positive religious experience and which experience drew the journalist to seek out and eventually get the "religion beat" on the LA Times and which journalist subsequently became an atheist because of the experience.
This sort of good news I need now and then to keep myself from backsliding into SubGeniusology. And this sort of info makes for things I can (a) read about and (b) write about. And there's the fact that I get a certain smug satisfaction out of seeing someone chuck the delusion & move out into the light of day, as bright and full of flying mullahs as it may sometimes be.
So after I'd recovered from dinner – which is the result of too much beer more than anything that they serve at el restaurante – I sat down and scoped out the text & audio files of the interview in question. In the end I came up with another file to which I listened, which file deals with the rise in openly atheist folks running around the world trying to save children from being used as hand grenades by the flying mullahs I mentioned above.

"I remind my honorable friend of the answer I gave a moment ago."

So it turns out that William Lobdell (linked above) started out as a journalist, went through a rough patch, went to church, got his rough patch smoothed over by the church, then began reporting on religious life & discovered by way of his investigations & reportage, that religion is pretty much a set up. A business as good as any con.
Has been a long time, a set up & con job, religion has.
Check out the KJV if you need to get a serious dose. It's got in there how the tithes to the temple went to the support of the priests who covered the bases of basic life for folks by way of making the smoke of dead animal animals being burned waft into heaven for the divine nostrils to pleasure.
Or you can check out all the various folks who've set themselves up as religious doctrinarians or prophets or preachers or healers or whatever else they can get away with while at the same time living a life that most of us would think, just out of moral awareness, might be a bit over the top. Fancy car. Nice house. Wife painted up like houri in the Muslim heaven.
Like Jim and Tammy Faye, if you need solid context.
What appears to have gotten Lobdell so quick to the give-up came when he was in a courtroom watching a well-paid lawyer representing a priest who had fathered a child for which the priest was reluctant to pay child support because the priest – and you'll love this – had taken a vow of poverty and thus had no jing by which to support the child. In court.
Now to me, that's balls-out crazy.
The lawyer, hired by the church, was defending the priest from the suit of a woman who didn't even have the money to think about finding a lawyer!
Wonder what the lawyer's take was, after the nudge-nudge and wink-wink was done. Bet it was pretty nice. And a couple extra rosaries for you too, Paddy.

Whoever controls the food controls the land.

But back to the reportage of the reporter: First off, if you check out the interview and an audio file make it pretty obvious up front that this guy, Bill Lobdell, has been through a pretty interesting time. And being as how, at the end, Lobdell discovers that there's nothing to believe in, I'd think that the lesson of the lawyer & the priest should be played out for every believer on the planet, followed neatly by a serious session of interrogation for the believer.
Why?
'Cause most believers think that the voice they hear in their heads comes from the divine mouth.
'Cause most believers don't take the time to even think about thinking through what it means for a church, the largest landlord on the planet with disposable income in the gold & diamond lit mitres and staffs that would support a couple African nations without so much as one belt notch, paid the lawyer to tell the judge that the priest didn't have any money!
Vow of poverty = no money.
No money = not my problem.
Even if the little tyke is a proven product of the priestly cocksmanship.
Right, padre.
Now can I hear your confession about the three teenage boys in the sacristy. You remember. The banana & the music & the funny noises they made through the cloth over their mouths. And the organs.

And immediately following my listening to the interview aforegoing, I listened to an interview with a bunch of folks about atheist activism.
Yeah, them atheists is gettin' uppity.
Next thing you know, they'll want their dog tags changed.
Which would be about time.

I remember standing in a line in boot camp. It was probably day two or three. I also remember that it might have been the first time that I discovered it was possible to fall asleep standing up. Either way, I was in the line. We snaked our way through the line and ended up in a cubby hole where two people asked us four questions.
"Your name?"
"Your serial number?"
"Your blood type?"
"Your religious preference."
To which my answers were pretty easy, since by that time I was fully awake. (Twenty push ups will do wonders to keep you awake.) My name: easy enough. Serial number: B441202. (This was back before social security numbers becoming military "service numbers.") Blood type: A. Religious preference: atheist.
"Bullshit, lad! There ain't no atheists in foxholes!"
"Sir!"
"What's your religious preference, son?" Nice woman, grey hair, smile, looked at me like I was her own son and said "No religious preference" is as close as you'll get."
I took NRP.
Bet I'd have to pick one nowadays.

I read a while back in an issue of Freethought Today that it is common practice in the military of today to order the troops to religious services. Seems that most NCOs and a large number of officers are now professing faith as part of their advancement in rank. As if belief in a divine cretin will make the officer or NCO a better man, a better leader, with better management skills and battle awareness.
Seems to me it'd be the other way around.
Believer knows he's goin' to heaven if he catches a bullet; believer don't worry none about bullets 'cause Jesus is a-waitin' him in heaven.
Give a shit about what happens to your troops. They been to Mass. They'll go to heaven.
Praise.
As if having various armies supported by various mullahs ain't bad enough, we gotta have our own army backed up by Jesus.
And you'll note that it's Jesus, as opposed to whoever it is them Jew boys worship.

If atheists are getting a little testy, if they are indeed coming out of the closet more, if they are just hedging their bets that they won't get fired – and I have a friend who fears this, should his disbelief become public knowledge – and if atheists are becoming more outspoken, sweet. It's about time that we showed the planet that it is quite possible – and uniquely rewarding – to live an ethical, moral life above ground as an atheist.
Being open and up front about disbelief, atheism or antitheism sure beats the hell out of priests claiming they have no money to support the children they've caused or abused. Being recognized by your family or by your coworkers or whoever else you see every day as an atheist or nonbeliever beats the hell out of the world of opulence that many religious leaders have built around themselves in the name of their Lord Jesus.
It's about time.
Time to put the delusionals aside. To get 'em off the pulpit, off the stage and out of our government & military. If you are going to live in this world and work in this world and behave as if you have some job to do in this world, be up front about it: you're doing it this way because that's the way that works.
God ain't sendin' no reinforcements.
God ain't stoppin' the bombs or the bullets or the sodomite priests & fraudulent faith-healers.
God ain't even there! And it's time that the species grew up and recognized that it's been shaking a bone necklace over the ceremonial fire far too long. It's time to put the imaginary friend out in the snow with the rest of the delusions.
Activism. Ain't no other way to be when you're dealing with crooks, conmen, liars and perverts & their fakery of doing god's work.
Ain't nothin' else to say after that.
Well, 'cept for saying that it is about time that disbelievers and nonbelievers looked around to see how many others there are and from that to take the initiative of recognizing the need for communal activity. Like at least letting the other nonbeliever know that you know and that you are as up front about it as you hope they can be. A sort of fellowship thing, but without the gibbering & phatic, knee-jerk repetition of stock phrases you'd hear on a poorly translated Mexican road-show revival tour.
Yeee-hah!
Bring it on! We are one body of people, we disbelievers and nonbelievers and antitheists, and we truly know that we are not alone. Not once, not never. We have no need for the imaginary friends and a herd of various polytheistic interlocutors and intercessors. Not now and not then and not whenever.
And we invite you to come out, you who haven't yet let anyone know that you don't believe.
I've done it, much to the chagrin or possible embarrassing inability to understand of various family members, some of whom are regular church goers. I've done it at work, where, thanks to the so-called "liberal" academic atmosphere, I have received supporting words from co-workers and academic colleagues. I've done it on my front porch when the salvation ladies come by on Sunday afternoons. I've done it here and there and anywhere I've ever been affronted by the delusional mentality of those who cannot imagine life without an imaginary intercessor, protector, provider or voice in their heads. I've done it.
I've come out about my disbelief, my nonbelief, my own findings that there cannot be a god of justice or light or love or strength. There is only the neural symphony in my head and the simple fact that the goal of life is to keep the DNA around.
I am not so self-centered or self-absorbed as to think that there is a special reason for my being here, breathing & doing stuff all day and sleeping at night.
I cannot see a divine hand at work in the universe, even with all the wonderful and powerful things that I see and know about in the world, in the universe.
Yes, the power of plate tectonics is wondrous. The beauty of a sunset or a moonrise is breathtaking. The harmony of life and the contradictions of life, the laws of physics and the rules of chemistry, all of it: it's beautiful stuff and I do so much appreciate it. But I do not see a god where there is none. I see a marvelous string of events leading to absolutely nothing special.
And just as I know that nothing lasts forever, I know that the day will come – I hope that the day will come – when superstition and the lies of those who practice superstition on others will end. It may be at the end of this solar system. It may be at the end of some distant century. It may be on the last day on this earth for the last human being. But that day will come.
I await that day with the same hope that believers hope to see Jesus.
And I know that when that day comes, when superstition finally disappears from the fabric and breath of the human species, nothing will replace the silliness and devastation of religious superstitionism but standard human reasoning. And then nothing will finally have its place in our human awareness.
It's the only thing you can be sure of: nothing lasts forever. Not even superstition. That's one thing I am very upfront about.

Now it's your turn.

Ninja Monkey Robots Will Save Us!

2007-08-13T08:48:00.001-07:00

Working my way through Richard Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, I came across Dawkins' mention of Fred Hoyle. The reason Fred Hoyle's name caught my attention comes from a conversation I had with a radio amateur friend from Italy, a man of considerable talent, who didn't understand how I could not believe.
When I explained to my friend that I was what some folks would call an ateisto, he immediately began telling the story of Fred Hoyle's science-fiction novel Black Cloud, wherein scientists come to realize that there is a divine hand at work in the universe.
At the end of the story about the book, my friend asked me "Così, ora credete?
I answered honestly, as I only could "No. Non posso credere."
My friend looked clearly disappointed. Our conversation from that point on staggered around until we had used up everything we had started talking about. It would have stood at that had I not recently picked up reading Dawkins' book.

The background to Black Cloud involves the approach to the planet Earth of a black cloud that appears to be an intelligent being wandering through space. Scientists eventually learn to communicate with the cloud & discover that the cloud is self-aware to the point of having a religious perspective of the universe.
You can almost feel Hoyle's beginning to shift from atheist to intelligent design advocate as the story line unfolds. But the connection between Hoyle's story line and Hoyle's turning away from disbelief hinge on Hoyle's working out the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, which is now a common accepted theory of star birth & death, among other processes.
It was the working out of this theory that led Hoyle to turn his back on disbelief. In the end, Hoyle came to believe that a causative intelligence in the design and workings of the universe.

Now all this about physicists seeing the face of god ends up my having recently read the review by Victor Stenger of Frank Tipler's book, The Physics of Christianity in the most recent issue of Free Inquiry.
In Stenger's review, he takes the time to set the stage for the rest of the review by giving a synopsis of the chain of events by which Tipler had earlier explained immortality. This explanation, from Tipler's The Physics of Immortality, involves Tipler's conceptualization of time, space, life, death, infinity &c. That conceptualization is best explained by one of the Amazon.com reviews of Tipler's work on immortality:

"IF
*strong (indistinguishable from human) artificial intelligence is possible
AND IF
*we can develop self-replicating interstellar probes
AND IF
*humans can be completely grown/raised/educated from stored DNA
AND IF
*on every planet, these seeded human colonists accept the destiny we assigned to them
AND IF
*nanotechnology is developed
AND IF
*250-gigwatt lasers are feasible
AND IF
*cost of materials relative to wages drops exponentially every 50 years
AND IF
*antimatter exists, can be feasibly manufactured, and harnessed as a means of propulsion
AND IF
*the universe is closed (will eventually contract)
AND IF
*a virtual "emulation" of a person in a computer is the same "consciousness" as the original person
AND IF
*all information in the physical universe can be retrieved without loss or distortion
AND IF
*a simulation of a living being also recreates perfectly its unexpressed internal states
AND IF
*emulations of every person in history can be made without also re-creating their diseases, conflicting ideologies, etc.
AND IF
*the cost of doing good is not significantly greater than the cost of doing evil, then an omniscient entity will choose the good
AND IF
*intelligent beings in the far future will have the desire to resurrect us to a life we will enjoy
THEN
on this basis, we might have hope of eternal life, "heaven," and a benevolent god.

If the thesis of this book is true, it won't matter what you believed anyway - resurrection is inevitable/inescapable."

Now, before I get too much further, I must admit that I have not read either of Tipler's books. More than anything that Tipler might have said or anything that I might learn from reading Tipler's books is the simple question of what kind of god Tipler sees as being part of a universe that involves, if I'm getting this right, robots, virtual reality, a closed-loop or oscillating universe with all of it under divine control.
Robots, an oscillating multiple-universe, a triune god as a property of matter & energy, the "recreation" of all life within a virtual reality built & operated by robots: that's your eternal reward. Praise.

For all the cred that I give science & all the compassion I have for scientists – even the ones who still believe in one way or the other – I really have to say (not having read the books) that I ain't lookin' forward to an immortality that will be the purview of robots runnin' a souped-up version of some yet-to-be-built god-enhanced Cray mainframe.

Please, Frank, let me be dust when the sun snuffs out & the last proton evaporates.

Yet, before leaving this idea behind – and recognizing that I am talking about a book I ain't read & probably never will – consider for a moment what gyrations of the neural bulb one would have to go through to be a believer & still come up with this shit. And shit it must be, even for believers.
Think about it.
You're the kind of person gets up every day and sets to with doing the Lord's work. You don't cuss, you don't smoke, you don't tell stories about girls in micro bikinis getting wax jobs. And yet . . .
You believe anyway that mutant ninja monkey robots from L. Ron Hubbard's worst auditing will, at the very second when the universe is about to collapse, build a monster computer which will then recreate every human being & all life so that you can live forever.
What ever happened to the basking & praising in the light of god's own grace?
And the robots: are they future versions of angels?
Does the mainframe end up being god?
What the fawk?
How can a person believes he's saved in the blood of the Lord almighty Jesus sit down to this sort of crap & not wonder what the difference is between this rabbit's foot and that scapular?
Seems to me that a divine hand in complete omnipotence & omniscience wouldh't need to have the human species make robots that would evolve themselves to the point of being totally self-aware and completely subservient to the human species and dedicated to its continued propagation. It seems much more easy (or as they say in science-talk, "parsiminous") for the divine to just make things the way the Bible says they're gonna be & be done with it.
Robots, fer cryin' out loud!
Robots!
My youngest used to talk about building mutant ninja monkey robots. He still does to this day and it's still funny.
So maybe Tipler's trying to tell a joke?
We can only hope.
It's either god saves us outright or the robots build us again – yeah, again, and in a simulacrum at that -- & we have to put up with system downtime & backup & reboot and all that. I mean, it's like the weirdest version of weirdness I've heard in a long time.
And it's from a scientist, no less.

God Goes Crazy in Jail!

2007-08-09T08:15:00.000-07:00

While I was considering how delusional belief in a divine hand can be the other day, I came across another example by way of a guy who thinks he is, among other things, creator of the universe.
Yeah, he's God. The one with the big G at the front.
God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth and every other goddamn thing in between. That god.
And then I discovered that not only was the creator of the universe among us in the flesh but that the one and same god of all things is in jail. And that the sheriff who is responsible for god being in the jail said that the creator is delusional. ""As a matter of fact, he is crazy. Anyone in their right mind can see that," the sheriff is quoted as saying.

But ask yourself one question: this guy, this Michael Jesus Archangel, is either delusional or he's right. He's either crazy like, well, your average psychopath schizophrenic or he really is the divine being in charge of all this shit. The earth, heaven, all that. He's t he boss. He's the man. He is, for want of anything else, God Almighty. With a big G.
Who can say?
Well, upon his arrest from having "pulled a knife on another guy and tells him he's going to kill him," the sheriff's office remanded him to a VA psych facility from which he was returned to the sheriff's office & jail, where he was at the time held against a $105,000 bond.
So God Almighty was sent to a psych facility to see if they (the psychological evaluation staff at the hospital) thought God was nuts.
Then they sent him back to the sheriff's jail for safe-keeping. Just like in the Bible, Mark 15; 7-15. Which would lead you or me to believe that God had been checked out and found to not be crazy, being as how he was remanded to the civil authorities and not admitted to the VA hospital for treatment, right?
Yeah, right.
This then leaves a single question: Is God in jail or is the guy in jail delusional?
Judging by the info we can grab – before going to his website – this guy, Michael Jesus Archangel, started out life some 60 years ago as Philip Jesse Silva. He changed his name to Archangel & all that back in '96, although he claims to have known since childhood that he was God. He just didn't reveal it back then 'cause, well, people would have thought he was nuts.
Delusional.
And he claims by way of a picture on his website to having his family behind him, by way of showing himself in earlier years with his daughter, Tanya. She's part of his United Domains of Heaven staff (or UDOH).
Wonder if this means he is three gods or two gods, or one god of two dimensions or whatever. Hmmm . . .

We live in an interesting universe. We have people who claim to hear from God himself on all matter of human activities. We have people who claim to be about their god's business, as if an omnipotent entity in charge of the entire universe might need someone to, say, shoot abortion doctors. Or blow up crowds in markets. Or set fire to temples. Or build mosques where temples once stood. Or make obnoxious noisy protests at the funerals of dead soldiers & sailors by way of saying that God hates fags. Or stand around trying to hand out little green Bibles to people who just want to get to class on time so they can take a chance at passing an exam about which they prayed all night instead of studying 'cause God will guide them through to a passing grade.
Now that, that ain't delusional.
Right?
Sure.
It's okay to pray aloud to whoever you think is the spirit in charge of stuff when you could have been studying. It's okay to hand out the Bibles. It's okay to go door-to-door bothering people about their religious beliefs. It's fine to burn down the temples and rebuild the mosques. It's okay for men to beat women 'cause they won't dress as their spirit master tells them women must dress. Or behave. Or whatever.
But a Philip Jesse Silva changes his name to Michael Jesus Archangel and, well, that shit ain't right. Boy's gotta be touched in the haid, right? I mean, Jesus H. Christ, you can't go around carrying a Claymore and tellin' people that you're God Almighty. With the big G.
It's delusional, that shit is, that acting like you're God.
Ain't it?
Well . . . that's an interesting question. First off, God does have an interesting record, telling people to kill people and tellin' people to dress like this or that and tellin' people to believe or be burned in hell fire for eternity and all that. And grace, that helpin' hand that God gives you so you can find God in your heart.
In your heart . . . Hmm . . . Let's see.
Maybe ol' Philip Jesse ain't so far tetched, eh? After all, if God goes into your heart and fills up your blood system with Himself and all that, wouldn't that make you God too? Bein' as how you were all filled up with God in your heart and your blood and your lungs and toenails and all, wouldn't that make you God?

Or is it me that's crazy? Deluded about how God exists and all, well, that could be as big a delusion as the delusion of thinking that there might actually be a spirit being who, despite being omniscient, must test people's faith. Or thinking that there might be a spirit being, omnipotent & all that, who hires people to kill other people or convert them to the delusions. Maybe that's nuts.

Yeah, right.

And Manson Was Crazy . . .

2007-08-05T08:13:00.000-07:00

Once every couple minutes I am reminded of how Christianity works. It's actually a very simple system, one that is at least twenty thousand years old. Some divine creator makes the universe and promises to let human beings live in it free of charge, except for this or that thing which is taboo for the humans to do with. Which the humans break down out of weakness and have to do with anyway, upon which event the deity says he's gonna punish the humans until such time as he sends a redeemer to get them back into the divine graces again. (We'll forego for the moment the question of why an all-knowing deity would put strictures on the behavior of any of it's creations without knowing that the creature in question was gonna trespass against the stricture anyway.)
Now it becomes important that between the time of the transgression and the promised redemption, the divine demands sacrifice from the humans by way of having them kill living things and then burning the bodies of the killed things so the smoke rises up to the heavens wherein the god lives so the god will know that the humans are doing its bidding. (We'll forego for the moment the question of why an all-knowing being would have to be reminded by the death of animals that the humans were adhering to the divine will.)
After an appropriate period of suffering imposed by the divine on the humans for their earlier transgression, the divine sends a piece of itself to earth to live among the humans. At which point the humans unwittingly disbelieve that their god is among them to the point of torturing the divine particle before killing it outright.
Now murder is taboo within rules laid down in human society by the divine. The penalty for murder is death. But in this one case, instead of killing off the humans for having murdered the divine particle, the god says that everyone who participated in the murder are now free of the sin of having been the children of those who did the first grand transgression in the long back.
You remember the first transgression, right?
Ok, so here we have the basis for Christianity or any other hero/savior religion you can find, and there's plenty of 'em. God gives a command about not eating from the tree of knowledge, which the humans disobey, for which god punishes them, with the promise that later on he'll send someone to help humans undo having chewed on the forbidden fruit. God then sends a piece of itself to live as a human among humans. The humans, for reasons never quite made clear, torture and kill the piece of the divine. The death of the divine piece is not taken as murder by the god, however. Instead, god forgives the humans for their distant progenitors' having tasted for the tree of knowledge because they have offered a fitting sacrificial death to the god.
In other words, the guilt of having disobeyed the god is transferred to all succeeding generations, which guilt is expiated only by killing a human being who just happens to be a piece of the god who made up the rules about killing in the first place.
A paradox if not a conundrum.

Only problem with all of the foregoing not making any sense is that it does make sense to so many. It's estimated that there are two billion and some human beings who believe that Christ Jesus, son of the Father, god of the universe, did die for the forgiveness of sins. The chief among the sins forgiven by the death of the Christ at the hands of an angry mob is the Original Sin, which occurred back in the beginning of the human species (according to the holy book of Christianity) when the first two humans ate of the fruit of a tree which the god have forbid them to eat. Two billion and some odd human beings believe, in one way or the other, that such is the course of the human soul. That those who do not accept the death of Jesus as exculpatory will burn forever in the flames of hell, that's what they believe. Two billion and some.
Never mind that killing a piece of a god dressed up in the skin of a human being is still murder, which is a transgression of divine (and ethical) law. Never mind that a piece of a god invested in a human body cannot die any more than can the god in toto die, being eternal and above the laws of nature & the universe. Never mind that we're talking about a blood sacrifice being held as a central tenet in a religion the dogma of which says that humans have been released from blood sacrifice by the blood sacrifice of the divine particle itself. Never mind that it's all a continual rotation of bent and twisted ideas through a convoluted pretzel logical pathway full of contradictions, confabulations, paradoxes and confusion.
No sir! Two billion and some human beings actually believe that this murder myth with no concrete evidence in archeology or written history (other than that which has been created and interpolated into archeology & human history over the past two millennia) is the word of the divine mouth and applicable to all.
And if I turn up and suggest that these two billion people are delusional about this, I get the look that I'm the delusional. It's suggested that I haven't found Jesus in my heart or whatever. It's suggested that I have hardened my heart against god itself.
As if.
Simple fact is, none of it makes any more sense to me than believing that a dead rabbit's foot on the end of a chain is gonna get me the winning lotto numbers or that a plastic effigy of a non-existent person who supposedly carried the baby Jesus across some river is gonna keep my brakes from locking up & throwing me to my certain death, upon which I will spend eternity in hell getting crispy-crittered by a bunch of howling demons.
Santa Claus don't exist, right?
So why don't that logic apply to Jesus?
You ain't got no proof there is a Santa, other 'n when the kids get you out of bed too damn early to even be thinkin' of getting out of bed so they can look at all the loot you bought 'em & wrapped up, claimin' that it was Santa did the job.
And the only proof you have of a Jesus is some interpolations in a few, scattered texts written at least a century after the purported Jesus is supposed to have lived. Even the physical evidence, the stable in Bethlehem for example, if not the supposed location of a town named Bethlehem is stuff dreamed up by an old woman of regal birth wandering around the so-called Judea over a century after Jesus is supposed to have been born.
Born to and from a virgin, at that. Parthenogenesis, they call it. Παρθένογένεσις.
Aphrodite was born of a virgin too, dig? And Caesar Augustus, him too: born of a virgin. A bunch of other gods and goddesses from the long-back too: born of virgins pure and chaste as the driven snow. Isis, Krishna, gods like them. Παρθένογένεσις.
But folks don't believe in Aphrodite and they damn sure don't think Caesar was born of a virgin. And Isis and Krishna, well, we all know that those are ancient myths and superstitions from the days of the Pharaohs & Hindusim and such. It don't make no sense. It don't happen. Other'n for that oncet.
Only time it ever happened, this παρθένογένεσις, was two thousand years ago in a cow barn somewhere off the coast of a lake in a chunk of land on the eastern Mediterranean coast. Just that oncet and never before or since.

Yeah, right. Two billion some odd dozen people believe. I don't. And I'm the crazy one.

That's exactly what gets me about belief: nobody ever seriously wants to sit down and do the doubting. Nobody ever stops for a minute and says "Hey, this don't make no sense! There ain't no such thing as a wookie!"
It's the will to confabulate and ignore that makes faith that unfaithful to what we have stuck in our heads. We have a perfectly well-organized brain that not only allows us to stay out of trouble but also shows us how, by evidence & logic, that trouble is a damn sight easier to get into than we thought.

This, this sudden recognition that who we are is really what goes on between a huge pile of nerve cells, that drives a lot of folks nuts. They see this dependence on chemistry as some sort of a sign of their personal non-existence. They can't take the thought that we are just as big a pile of animal flesh as the cat on the couch or the dog hunkered down over a turd in the back yard. They want something that makes them special and wonderful and unique and important. They want something that will assuage their weakness, their ego, their sense of self as important.
They wanna believe.
So they do.
They believe that there is a divine hand personally responsible for every damn thing that happens. They believe that there is a divine voice which whispers in their ears – and their ears alone – with messages of support and love and tenderness & all that. And they believe that each and every single one of 'em has been put on this planet in the middle of nowhere special to do something absolutely marvelous for a god which should be able to do anything it wants, being omnipotent and all.
And the assigned task? Well, spread the faith, of course. Or witness to the faith so as to impress on others who may or may not believe that they should believe even harder.

A more marvelous form of egocentricity I cannot imagine.

I am special. I count for something. I have a purpose and a mission. I matter. Jesus loves me. God put me here and he cares for me and guides me personally in his service. Because I am special. 'Cause god told me so.
Especially that: 'cause god actually came down on a cloud or whatever and spoke to them personal in some ethereal text message that only their brain cell phone could see.
Never mind that, should one of their neighbors come by and suggest that the cell phone in the house was being used by the devil to text message & control their brains by way of plastic wrapped batteries in the cupboard, everybody would say that the suggestion was nuts and that the suggestor needed a meds check and a few weeks of monitored institutionalization.
In the crazy house institutionalization.
But a divine voice telling someone that they have a divine mission, well, hell, you know that's perfectly alright, praise Jesus.
You get a kitten plays with folds in the bed sheets, you call it crazy.
You get a person says that god talks to them special messages and all, well, that's an abiding faith.
And any suggestion to the contrary or that such messages are a quaint ways of sayin' that the message recipient might be a little dotty, well, that's cool. Don't insult the man's faith, right?
After all, Jesus was tortured and murdered by a mob in mythic past 'cause someone even earlier on in the mythic history of humanity ate from a mythic tree in a mythic place, which was a grand transgression against the divine will even more dastardly and villainous than, say, murdering a man. Yeah, like that.

And they have clinical proof that Charles Manson was nuts.

Canvass over the Neighborhood

2007-08-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

Just before we went on vacation a couple weeks back, there was a knock at the door to which I responded. Cid & the young'n were in the kitchen and I was upstairs, getting ready to come down. As I turned the corner I could see through the window the bottom of a dress or skirt and a hand holding a book.
Yeah, that book.
I opened the door while muttering about the cats needing containment and made up some sort of cheerful greeting for the two ladies standing on the porch. I noticed behind them an older man carrying a briefcase in one hand and a Bible in the other walking down the sidewalk.
You know where this is heading, right?
The ladies introduced themselves and said that they were going through the neighborhood asking people if they thought morality based on the Bible would make the world a better place to live.
I said that I was not a believer but that I thought there was some moral message of worth to be found in a thoughtful reading of an otherwise confusing and contradictory text.
One of the women asked me what I meant by "not a believer."
I said that I see no sign of a divine hand in the universe.
The other said "Oh, so you're an atheist."
No, I said. I don't use the term atheist in discussion of belief. The term atheist has a time-honored nastiness about it, at least to those who don't believe. I said it wasn't that I didn't believe in god but that I see no sign of a god anywhere.
One of the women suggested that she read for me a passage from the Bible.
I suggested back that I had read the Bible at least three, if not four times and that I saw no need for her to read me anything out of it.
I don't like to let the praying people get started on my porch.
The ladies then thanked me for talking with them & wished me a nice day.
I said "And the same for you."
They smiled weakly and walked down the steps and off my porch. I could see them shaking their heads in disbelief at my openness about my disbelief.
Classic encounter, when you think of it.
When I stepped back into the house, Cid was standing in the kitchen looking toward the front door.
"What did you tell them?" she asked.
"That I don't believe and all that."
"Oh. You certainly sounded calm about it."
As if.

See, Cid's got it in her head that I'm some sort of high-energy, conniptionistic antitheist Richard Dawkins clone. Cid thinks that I'm a bit too outspoken and strident, that I'm too easily set off on a loud-mouthed, over-gesticulated rant about the world today being caused by the existence of so many people who have imaginary protectors or gods or whatever.
Truth is, I ain't what you'd call outspoken at all. Fact is, I pretty much keep my disbelief to myself and would love it immensely if everybody else kept their beliefs or disbeliefs to themselves. Of course, that would demand that nobody would kill somebody else for being a blaspheming infidel ape or pig. It would mean that folks wouldn't go around on a perfectly nice day to bother other folks on their front porches about the usefulness of a moral system derived from Bronze Age myths & mysteries. It would mean that nobody would bomb abortion clinics and that the world population would be driven more by a lack of need for more humans instead of gaining more souls for a mythical hero/savior figure.
It would mean that I'd have no reason to write this blog, readership or not.
But that ain't the way it works.
It's for that reason that I am as "out" about my seeing no signs of a loving, caring, compassionate interpolation of an authoritarian patriarchal spirit in the sky demanding worship & obedience. And even at that, my "out-ness" is a lot less strident & omnipresent than a couple ladies from the local church out walking the beat with the assistant pastor taking every other house to talk about Jesus or शिव or whoever else is Lord Supreme.

And even at that I'm not strident.

All the same, I am very out front about the need to get rid of superstition & religionism. It is a scourge upon the species, if not on the world, that allows delusional thinking to produce physical acts, many of which are contrary to continuance of the species and, in the end, life itself.
People who believe that their personal imaginary friend demands the death of all who do not believe as they do are murderers, plain and simple. If the same delusion demands subjugation of part of the species, those who believe that way are abusers and sadists. Saying that alone means that the delusion of such a deity is a simple method by which those with large enough egos and loud enough voices can hypnotize the believing masses into doing the evil against anyone the loud and egocentric might deign as enemies of the faith.
This is not a new or unknown situation.
For as long as some monkey has held power by dint of physical strength, violence and loud screaming, there has always been a crowd of monkeys who would follow that loud & violent monkey. It makes little difference if, over time, the screams turn into words and the violence turns to armed conflict. There will always be a loud monkey and there will always be a crowd of monkeys who give up their own reason & rational process to be led into violence against other monkeys. Religion, politics, it makes no difference. The delusions of a few or of one are sufficient to cow the masses.
Of course this is an easy paradigm to follow.
What makes it all the more dangerous today is the huge number of human monkeys so willing to follow those delusional few. You can call them swami or mullah, pope or rebbe, whatever you wish, but in the end you have to admit that they all follow delusions of grandeur and delusions of thought contrary to the continued existence of the entire species. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan, Caesar Augustus, Henry VIII, Robespierre, Mussolini, Cortez, Saladin, Bar Koch Bar, Flavius, Xerxes, on back through millions of names and billions of lives, it's always the same show: the deluded and loudest dragging the stupid, weak & lazy into the pit of homicidal rage.

Considered that way, it's a wonder I'm not more strident or out about the crying need to end superstition & belief now. Behind every political game there is and always will be a religious game, even if you a re unwilling to call Marxism or Communism a religion.
Marxism and Communism are simply secular versions of the redemption and ascension myths. They promise the light of a new dawn no different from the promise of the resurrection and the light at the end of the world as found in the Bible and other myth cycles.
So in effect, I am out about my seeing nothing to believe in.
And I am just as out about seeing no real need to use the remains of a book dreamed up in the Bronze Age as a source of moral or ethical behavior. The Bible is hardly a collection of nice and pleasant stories of a loving divine being. It's a book about death and retribution, as is the Qur'an and, if you get realistic about it, the Mahabharata. While each of these books, as well as other mythic texts that have reached socially-dependent status, do propose some sort of ethical behavior toward other humans and between humans, each of them at one point or the other descends into war, death, punishment & retribution from an imaginary divine figure with the personality of a sociopathic child.
Considering the huge number of sociopaths alive in a global species population of nearly six billion, it seems hardly efficacious and sensible to allow an imaginary sociopath myth to administer the behavior of those sociopaths who have learned to use the myth as a basis for their sociopathic connivance & leadership.
Simple put, we don't need religion.
We need population control & licensing of birthing rights. Even if that does sound very eugenic.
Adding more submissive monkeys to the population is egregiously counterproductive. It leaves room for more to suck at the teat of what social beneficence there is in return for which the society gets nothing but more submissive monkeys. Reducing the population overall and then producing only enough humans who have intelligence and reason to keep the population at about seven million (a 99.9% decrease in the species) would go a long way toward the death of religion & superstitionism, which suggestion leads immediately to a question of my own ethics & morality.
Too bad.
I know that I am the father of two sons. That's two people to replace two people, presuming that they each end up with progeny, a 50/50 bet at best. They are both intelligent, reasonable people who, like me, see the future of humanity with a rather dour view. They each are smart enough to know that in 500 million years this planet will be toast and all the people saved in Jesus or bowing toward some geographic coordinate will have about as much importance as the flakes of dust that this planet will then become.
Nothing we have done as a species is any more important than what any other species might have done or might do in the future. Nothing we have done as a species is worth taking or subjugating any human life. Soon enough on a geological scale this planet will cease to be and every prayer ever offered will not stop that happening. Every martyr and every saint will be dust in the wind and no god in heaven or demon in hell will sit back on any throne & smile at its handiwork.
Given that simple fact, it makes more sense to support a society for our species that allows for artful expression and loving compassion as opposed to delusional egocentrism and villainous hatred based on old stories from a time when our species lived in caves and slept in its own excrement.
My proposal that people be tested and licensed to reproduce only works if some force of nature culls the herd. I'm not suggesting we kill all the stupid people. I'm suggesting that we need to stop now from over reproducing, even if I'm responsible for the existence of two young humans myself. Should a rock fall from space or a germ or virus mutate to become hugely pandemic, that'll cull the herd well enough, you can bet. If I'm among the culled, so be it. Whatever happens after I'm toast will happen very well without my help, thank you very much. If religion dies because billions die, all the better. If not, and I'm dead, I won't be here to get vocal or strident about it.

We are, as a species, capable of so much beauty, love, charity & expression. We are the only species that we know of capable of understanding the mathematics of space and time. We are the only species to our knowledge capable of thinking of the world beyond our skin in ways that give rise to science & literature & language. And we are the only species we know of capable of striking from a distance, be that distance a matter of space, time or delusions & myths.

Religion must fade from society, from the minds and bodies of the human species and die the sole & uncelebrated death that it has so long deserved. If that's strident, then I am strident. So be it.