Deeply Blasphemous

Testin' somethin' new.

2010-07-26T16:23:00.000-07:00

This is a test post.

Notes on Lee Strobel's The Case for the Real Jesus

2009-01-09T11:58:00.001-08:00

Recently, I brushed up against Lee Strobel on the blogosphere. When researching Simon Peter, I almost read some of his work into the historicity of Jesus but after a little work I didn't because, well, I have little interest in Christian apologia. I was looking for history. (I didn't find any. What I did find was a vast perversion of history and archeology concerning Bible subjects, ugh, but that's a different rant.) But in my blogosphere brush with him, he tried to come off as a reasonable man with training in law and journalism who had studied all the available evidence and believed that anyone, upon seeing the evidence, would be drawn to the conclusion that Jesus existed much as said in the Gospels, that the evidence shows he is the "Son of God", that he died on the cross and rose from the dead and ascended into the Christian heaven. Not that he believed these things as an article of faith, but that the proof, the historical and archeological proof, when viewed honestly would lead a person to the inevitable conclusion that Jesus was the the true reborn and ascended Messiah of Biblical prophesy. I always hope that people who are acting reasonable are acting in good faith because, otherwise, it increases the cynicism of the world and a person who might initially come off as reasonable is turned into a crude manipulator of people's hopes.

Because I clearly hate myself, I picked up and plowed through Strobel's The Case for the Real Jesus. In this book, Strobel purports to address six arguments that people make to discredit the evangelical Christian view of Jesus. Each section of the book first briefs the audience on the argument and then he conducts a single interview with a single person about the subject. While the section where he briefs the subject demonstrates that he has reviewed the material in sufficient depth, all of the subsequent discussion is in the form of interviews with single scholars about the subjects.

The interviewees and subjects are:

#1: Craig A. Evans and "Scholars are Uncovering a Radically Different Jesus in Ancient Documents Just as Credible as the Four Gospels". Evans teaches at the Acadia Divinity College, located in Nova Scotia. From the intro for prospies: "Pastors today need to be proficient in many areas, and ADC helps our students rise to this challenge by preparing Christian leaders with a wide range of skills that will equip them for a challenging and rewarding ministry to this world that God so loves. ADC also works closely with the Convention of Atlantic Bap[t]ist Churches to prepare our Baptist students for Baptist ministry beyond the classroom." Yes, I had to correct the spelling of the world Baptist that I C&P'd from their website. That wasn't just snark on my part.

The thrust here is that the Nag Hammadi library and Dead Sea Scrolls pose a challenge to Christianity because their antiquity provides demonstration that during the first century CE there was no consensus on who Jesus was or Jesus' message. Which is, of course, true. Evans "refutes" this by basically saying that the Nag Hammadi library and the Dead Sea Scrolls were the work of crazy people who didn't know what they were talking about and that the integrity of the Gospels is therefore intact. He does this largely through assertion and circular reasoning. If those other texts were so good, why didn't they become the basis of Christianity instead of the books that did? He says it's preposterous, furthermore, that Constantine had the power to tell the Nicean bishops what to do - which is, itself, preposterous given Constantine's absolute authority and, y'know, the legion of hardened veterans he had with him at the Council of Nicea. (For the record, I don't think Connie much cared what they decided on, just that they did get the agenda settled. He was much too practical a man, in my opinion, to worry too much over the specifics of the theology, just that the religion he was grooming to unify his empire was itself unified enough to serve as his tool. Which isn't even to say that Connie didn't "believe". I'm neutral on that subject but I don't see why he couldn't believe in the fundamental tenets of Christianity while being indifferent to a lot of the specifics.)

#2: Daniel B. Wallace and "The Bible's Portrait of Jesus Can't Be Trusted Because the Church Tampered with the Text", another theologian, this time at the Dallas Theological Seminary, and one of the contributors to Bible.org. The upshot here is that . . . aw, I don't even fuckin' know, hehe. I mean, the real argument is that the Christian god wouldn't allow that to happen, so all the "differences" and "changes" are, at worst, grammatical and have had no substantial impact on meaning. Weirdly, the fact that none of the Gospels agree with each other is not touched on. I guess that ground has been sufficiently trod about apologists that Strobel felt no need to repeat it.

#3: Michael Licona and "New Explanations Have Refuted Jesus' Resurrection". His website identifies him as a Christian apologist straight off the bat. He's a Ph.D candidate at, of course, theology in the University of Pretoria after doing his undergrad work at Liberty University. To me, this was the most bizarre section. I didn't know that there were any "new" explanations to refute Jesus' resurrection. That it was an initiation ceremony or something of that nature has been floating around since the Roman Empire, as were conspiracy theories that Pilate was a secret Christian who spirited Jesus to safety or that Jesus' body had been moved. At the root, the question here is one of magic: either you believe it's possible for the dead to rise as described in the Bible or you don't. If you do believe that Jesus is the resurrected god, belief in the Biblical narrative is possible, indeed, likely. If you believe that when a person dies it sucks for them but is party time for the worms, then obviously something else happened. Which is the position that Licona inevitably takes - that the resurrection happened as described in the Bible therefore alternate explanations are wrong. Lots of circular reasoning.

#4: Edwin M. Yamauchi and "Christianity's Beliefs about Jesus Were Copied from Pagan Religions". He's one of the founders of the Oxford Bible Fellowship. So, this guy has his own church. Anyway, OBF are "[d]oing everything we can by faith through the living Word of God and in the power of the Spirit to equip this next generation in the love of Christ for a lifetime of service throughout all the world."

The argument Yamauchi uses is that Judaism was impervious to Hellenism, to sum it up. Or, in the case of Mithraism, Christianity predated the "mystery cult" of Mithraism, making a bizarre distinction between the "mystery cult" Mithraism and the Mithraism practiced by the people of, uh, Tarsus. The same Tarsus the apostle Paul came from. That Mithraism wasn't a mystery cult at the time (or, at least, the nature of the religion was uncertain because Cilician pirates aren't known for their exact records) is taken by Yamauchi to prove that there was no way that it could have influenced Christianity. And the rest of the Hellenic, Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, etc., religions that surrounded the area and resembled Christianity's narrative of execution, resurrection and redemption had nothing to do with Christianity because the Jews were immune to that kind of thing - after all, their religion was true as opposed to those false religions, right? The imperviousness to the Jewish religion to outside influence is taken as a given by most religious historians, unsurprisingly.

#5: Michael L. Brown and "Jesus Was an Imposter Who Failed to Fulfill the Messianic Prophecies". Probably the most pernicious person in the book. While I think that Strobel's work is largely in bad faith, one of the sections is basically an attack on Judaism and Brown's the interviewee for that section. Brown is a former Jew who is now an evangelical Christian. He's now the pastor and founder of ICN ministries who is taking the Christian message to Israel to convert all those heathen Jews. The book is totally shameless on several levels, but this in particular - given Christianity's history of antisemitism - I found most galling. Here, better than anywhere in the book, the sick bias attacks. Because Christians are in a spot with Judaism - Jesus was, well, a Jew and Christianity broadly seeks to distance themselves from Judaism which rejects Jesus as a messiah. So, to do this, rather than just present the standard Christian line that the Jews are wrong, he gets "one of their own" to reject Judaism's claim that Jesus is no messiah. I found it to be in extremely bad taste, far moreso than the other interviewees.

For the record, did Jesus fulfill the Old Testament prophesies? The short answer is "no". My favorite part of the Gospels are the genealogies of Jesus on Joseph's side. The damn book goes on to say that Joe isn't Jesus' father but they trace his descent from the House of David from Joseph's side. Comedy abounds. (When asked about the specific point, they'll go on to say that Mary is also descended from the House of David, though there's no evidence of that even in the Bible. This is also typical on how contradictions are explained away - Christians create an additional narrative that has no textual or historical support whatsoever. But that is also another rant.) The longer answer is . . . that the prophesies are so badly worded and unclear that it's possible to read a lot into them.

#6: Paul Copan and "People Should Be Free to Pick and Choose What to Believe About Jesus". Another seminarian, shocker, and yet another unabashed Christian apologist. As a philosopher, this part was pure lulz because, y'know, outside of Christian apologia, apparently, almost all philosophers agree that not only are people intellectually free to pick and choose what we believe but it is inevitable (er, assuming they believe in free will at all, hehe, that'll be my caveat, here - the subject is reasonably complex amongst philosophers, which Copan is by education, but outside of Christiania the question of free will assumes that if we have it, well, we have it; I, myself, don't believe in radical freedom for honesty's sake). So, Copan and Strobel, even if they agree with a traditional evangelical position about Jesus, chose to do so. Furthermore, because almost all Christians believe that the choice to believe must be freely made, without trickery or coercion, well, yeah, even from within a very traditional Christian point of view they're free to choose what they believe about Jesus. (Tho' there is another school of thought amongst Christians who are, obviously, quite comfortable coercing the decision in a number of ways, even while mouthing platitudes about free will to justify the existence of evil. It's all very intellectually corrupt.)

Right off the bat, not only are all of them Christians, they're all a particular kind of Christian - evangelical. Not only does he ignore all nonbelievers, he also ignores all non-evangelical types of Christianity. No Catholics, no Episcopalians, no one who might be termed a "moderate Christian". Also, no women. And five of the six men are lily white. All of them come from reasonably advantaged backgrounds.

He says at the beginning of the book that he's going to take a hard, skeptical look at the subject. He has certainly reviewed the material, but when he presents the case it is extraordinary one-sided - it is largely the case of white, male evangelical middle class Christians. He truly runs the gamut of possibilities from A to B.

So, while his reading of the material seems to be broad, his journalism is dishonest and lazy. He claims that he's going to take a skeptical look and really address the questions about the person of Jesus but just looking at his interviewees I think that claim is entirely discredited. Comically so. Deceptively so. His research has all the honesty of a person asking questions about intelligent design whose sole stop along the way is the Discovery Institute (the rumor is that's where Strobel gets these guys from in the first place). What is particularly galling and what makes him a liar is that in the intro he goes on at some length about how, when he was working for the Chicago Tribune, he made the reporters under his watch get elaborate proof for the things they published, making sure that they authenticated the information accurately to meet high standards - but in his own book, his entire proof consists of one interview with one person about one subject, and that person is massively biased.

Further, while I am a vocal atheist, I believe I can tell the difference between an honest apologia and dishonest swill. So, while I might disagree with John Shelby Spong I do not doubt his integrity. It's stuff by people like Strobel that confuse the hell out of me. Because he's, well, a filthy liar judging him on his own standards. He said in the introduction that he was going to really, seriously look for the truth behind the various challenges to concerning the identity of Jesus. He didn't. He didn't even try. After reviewing the material, he went to well-off evangelical Christian men to (often crudely) discredit the questions Strobel raised concerning the identity of Jesus without the least bit of critique of their position or even the acknowledgment that, as evangelical Christians, there might be bias. In short, he lied when he said he was seriously going to consider the questions he posed. Which is what confuses me about all of this. Christians are supposed to have a religious attachment to the truth, and there's a huge difference between being wrong and lying. But that's what Strobel does, and he does it obviously and, apparently, shamelessly. I would think that his books would be rejected by Christians, even if they agree with the conclusions, because of the dishonest way Strobel reaches those conclusions. (F'rex, if I say my car is white because pixies sprinkle it with pixie dust, and that I went down to the factory and saw the pixies, you're going to conclude I'm a liar or a madman even if my car is white. Full disclosure - it's sort of gray because I find car washes to be a wasteful use of water, hehe.) But when looking at reviews of the book, I didn't find a single self-identified evangelical Christian who said what I feel is obvious: that the book is a giant lie. It does not seriously answer the questions he poses, he doesn't even try, and the book is an insult to everyone who honestly struggles with difficult questions.

Needless to say, I didn't like the book. Oh, no, not at all.

Bad, survey, bad!

2008-12-19T23:58:00.000-08:00

I was going through PZ Myers' blog and he posted about this survey, Coming Out as an Atheist.

I couldn't finish it. I mean, not because I didn't come out as an atheist - I think, fairly obviously, I have quite a bit come out as an atheist. But like many of these surveys, I find that the choices I'm given for the answers simply don't make any meaningful sense for me.

In particular, there were two political ones, right in a row - asking one's political views, ranging from very conservative to very liberal. I held my nose and clicked very liberal. I mean, I'm not a liberal. But, generally, my views are leftist - in the sense that I'm somewhat to the left of Karl Marx - so I held my nose and clicked. But the very next question was how I generally voted, ranging from . . . all Republican to all Democrat. The real answer is, "Well, mostly socialist, if applicable and in many races there there are only Democrats and Republicans running I don't vote for either." Right or wrong, I feel that choosing between Republicans and Democrats, in most instances, is like choosing between Coke and Pepsi - the ad campaigns might make a big to do about it, but the differences are really quite superficial between the two.

So then I stopped taking the quiz. The people who gave it couldn't envision atheists as being anything other than liberal or conservative, Democrats or Republicans. It never entered their mind that around 5% of all Americans vote, fairly regularly, as independents of various stripes. Their inability to imagine a world that wasn't split between two parties, largely identical in a great many ways, far more ways than they're different, made me close it down.

Let's change the date of Christmas!

2008-12-17T22:19:00.000-08:00

I largely like PZ Myers. But, like many atheists, he's in denial about Christmas. He says, here, and a number of other spots, that Christmas is really a secular holiday.

Which is why it's the busiest day of the year for Christian churches, right? The secularness just packs the Christians into churches. Ugh. It's not a secular holiday, it's a religious one, by and large, and obviously so.

But Myers quotes some thing or the other about how the US courts have largely claimed that Christmas is a secular holiday. I feel that's an appalling ruling. I think that's a clear and transparent attempt to keep this religious holiday on the federal books - because, again, it is clearly a religious holiday for the overwhelming majority of people who celebrate it in the United States. And given such preponderance, to call it secular is absurd.

And I can prove it! If Christmas is a secular holiday, well, let's move it. There are good reasons to do so. In particular, it is criminally irresponsible to encourage people to drive on icy roads. Auto accidents shoot way up in December compared to both November and January - and the reasons are clear. People do lots of driving on lousy wintry roads. So, why not change it the date of Christmas to September, when the roads are a lot better, to minimize the thousands of preventable injuries. It'd be a much better idea to do shopping in late August instead of December!

I will take it as given that everyone reading this knows that could never happen. Not because of the inertia of it, either. Holiday dates have been changed plenty, and they will be, again. But I think we all know that Christmas can't have it's date changed for reasons founded in religion. That the Christians could not endure it because they view Jesus' birthday as December 25th and so to celebrate Christmas at any other time violates their religious beliefs.

Still, the date should be changed. It's crazy to encourage people to crowd the roads on days that are often icy. It's downright irresponsible.

Tony Blair = gutless coward and lousy Prime Minister

2008-12-13T15:56:00.000-08:00

It wasn't until Tony Blair was out of office that he admitted he was Catholic. Oh, but not because he couldn't be a British Prime Minister, oh, no, that had nothing to do with it!

Likewise, as the article makes clear, he hid his religion from his constituents for the duration of his time as a politician. He was afraid of people dismissing him as a "nutter".

Yeah, Tony, that's the point. Your constituents needed to know how you made decisions so they could meaningfully support or oppose you. So you decided to engage in decades of deception because you know your real thoughts and feelings would be bad for your political career. And in some bizarre way no one seems the least bit, oh, I dunno, feeling weird or betrayed over this?

But mostly what I'm thinking is that Blair is a gutless coward. I mean, here's this thing, and if you listen to what religious people say it's the most important thing there is, and he hid it. And not because he and his family would be hurt or even disgraced. Tony Blair is rich, he's been rich for a long time. No, no, he hid his true feelings about what religious people claim is the most important thing there is because he was worried that people would call him a "nutter". I don't think being a Roman Catholic makes you a nutter - tho' switching from the Church of England to the Catholic Church is basically as exciting as switching from Coke to Pepsi, IMO - but I do think hiding it like he has and for the reasons he has makes him a hypocritical gutless coward.

Traditional Christmas rant - oh, I loathe Christmas

2008-12-04T14:43:00.000-08:00

I deeply dislike Christmas. Since around the time I was twelve or so I haven't actually liked gifts - my mother was terrible at giving them, not the content of the gifts but how she gave them; on my birthday one year she pretended to have forgotten my birthday and waited until I exploded about how she'd forgotten and then exploded back at me about how she did get me presents and she did remember my birthday but she was just trying to build tension by pretending she'd forgotten. There were several experiences like that, so I actually dislike gift giving as a Pavlovian thing. When I was a child, however, I still liked the religious aspects of it, church and singing and such.

Then I became an atheist. Because Christmas was, for me, always a religious holiday, when I became an atheist I gave up Christmas. It was actually out of respect for the religion. I don't celebrate Christmas in the same way I don't celebrate Ramadan or Holi or Shavuot. At this time I didn't particularly dislike Christmas, either. Indeed, part of me still yearned for it because I did enjoy the music and church and the rest of it, but a yet bigger part of me would have felt disrespectful for celebrating a holiday for a religion that I found quite absurd.

Then this really weird thing happened. People would ask me what they should get me for Christmas and I'd say, "Nothing. I don't celebrate Christmas. I'm not a Christian." Then they'd try to talk me into celebrating it! They'd say it was a secular holiday (it is, weakly, but it is much more a religious holiday) so my reasons were silly or wrong somehow. Almost inevitably they'd end up by telling me that they'd get me a gift, anyway.

I really hate that. That's the proper word. Hate. Because what it does is ignore me. It ignores the way that I, Chris Bradley, really feel about gifts in general and celebrating Christmas in particular. This has caused me to see Christmas in an entirely different light. I feel Christmas is a very selfish holiday. Everyone gets so wrapped up in whatever it is that they are feeling, well, they don't really have time to be honestly generous or loving or even peaceful.

Take this Christmas season - a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death. The customers broke down the doors of the Wal-Mart and when this regular guy tried to stop them from literally invading the store they trampled him to death. Beyond the death itself, how does that show any "Christmas spirit"? How is that about generosity, love or peace? Everyone is in such a hurry! Traffic accidents skyrocket, violence skyrockets, people are brusque and rude, everything about Christmas - except a few parties - is pretty unpleasant really. And deeply selfish. Like those people at Wal-Mart - and tens of thousands of other places all across America - where people started the holiday season by mobbing stores.

So, in actual behavior, I feel there is a real deep hypocrisy about Christmas. People aren't being generous. Generosity isn't giving your kid an Xbox 360. Generosity is . . . creating a society with no poor. Not giving to a food bank once a year (often just cleaning out canned goods from your cupboard) or giving something to a Toys for Tots thing, but eliminating the social need that makes people that vulnerable in the first place. Generosity is feeding the poor all year long, making sure our schools are good, making sure that everyone has medical care, outreaching to people in countries poorer than ours (all of them) to make sure they've got enough food to eat and their kids go to good schools and have medical care. It is not about trading gifts with people. That is a parody of generosity - giving people who don't need anything things they don't need!

It's not about peace. If it was about peace, instead of going shopping and to parties, people would be petitioning the government to get out of Iraq, to shut down Guantanamo Bay's illegal prison. It would be about working to end the scourge of war both here and abroad. But you can't do that because to get political wouldn't be in the spirit of the season, which is absurd.

It's not about love, because you don't need - indeed you can't - buy love. Love is something you feel, and while you can work on feeling love, greater love, both for those you know and those you don't, there is nothing about Christmas that invokes love with the possible exception of the actual Christmas feast. (Eating good food with people you love is a way to keep the bonds of love strong. Companion is Latin for "people you share bread with".) Shopping, gifts, all that, has nothing to do with love.

So, when I tell people I don't celebrate Christmas and they try to talk me into it, often with emotional manipulation and always over my (I feel) reasonable objections, they're being selfish and offensive. They show no generosity, charity, peace or love for me by ignoring my clearly expressed, reasonably and easy to follow request to be left out of Christmas. They focus on their need or desire to force others into celebrating this holiday. They show, indeed, quite a bit of contempt for me - that my requests aren't worth following. It pisses me off. And it happens so damn often that it's entirely poisoned the season for me. Entirely.

Since I stopped celebrating Christmas, I have grown in understanding. I understand that many atheists and agnostics are cultural Christians - Christianity is a foul religion, true, but it is also an integral part of European and American civilization - our history is bound up in innumerable complex ways with Christianity. And much like people can go to medieval recreation societies, or Civil War recreation societies, and appreciate how feudalism or the Confederacy shaped their history without wanting to recreate feudalism or the Confederacy, people can celebrate Christmas without endorsing Christianity. I see that.

But for so long people have been telling me that I'm silly for not celebrating Christmas that it's stripped off the mask. I see the fnords. Christmas is a giant hypocrisy, where selfish people make a mockery of the very principles that the celebration is supposed to be about. Not to mention that so many Christmas celebrants have been rude and arrogant to me, personally, that I have no desire to "celebrate" Christmas. For me, it's just a sad and ugly time that's made all the sadder and uglier because of the hypocrisy of it - that except for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day it's all just a consumer driven holiday, that the Christmas Season is a marketing ploy that pisses over the supposed principles of the season. That instead of being a time of joy, it's a time of stress mitigated by one day's celebration after six weeks of lousy traffic, drunken drivers and chaos in the marketplaces.

Ironically, and I'm poignantly aware of this irony, it's actually religious people who listen to me when I say I don't celebrate Christmas. They always go, "Oh, yeah, I understand that." They might believe my soul is damned to hell, but they grasp why a non-Christian doesn't celebrate the holiday.

Catholic Church tryin' to blackmail America! Seriously!

2008-11-25T21:14:00.001-08:00

So, some bishops are trying to hold Americans hostage about abortion. Some bishops have mouthed off that if the Freedom of Choice Act gets signed into law that Catholic hospitals will close their doors. About a third of all hospitals in America are Catholic.

And by "Catholic hospital", well, I mean that only in a narrow sense. Most of their income is actually from fees, and the federal government funds them more than the Catholic Church does through Medicare and Medicaid, not to mention grants from the federal as well as state and even local governments. So, they're only Catholic in a very vague sense. I think that's important to realize.

But the Freedom of Choice Act . . . well, no one has even tried to pass it in fifteen years. So, it's an act that doesn't really, y'know, exist, and it hasn't come before the House or Senate in any form in fifteen years, so who knows what it'll actually say? But the act would presumably force hospitals to give or refer abortions. And the Catholic Church is trying to blackmail the US government with it.

Mind you, the medical profession is already regulated. Catholic, and Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, secular, etc., hospitals are already regulated to do a large number of things if they receive public money. They can't, for instance, deny emergency services. They have to contentiously serve their patients. Stuff like that.

But because abortion is an "intrinsic evil", they feel they can threaten the US government! That they can blackmail us. Because that's what this is - a threat, blackmail.

Me? I hope they do it. I think it'll destroy Catholicism in America - which ain't doin' so well to begin with - if they try that. They love life so much that they'd close down a third of the hospitals in America, causing untold suffering, because, oh-em-gee, they might be forced to give medical services to people after receiving billions in taxpayer money.

Which is part of the key thing, here. These institutions get a lot of funding from the government. They're not private hospitals (which would likely be exempt from the FOCA, or they were as of the last draft of it, fifteen years ago). These are public institutions . . . but also religious ones?

I think that the Catholic Church shouldn't be allowed to get government money. Separation of church and state. If they want to run these hospitals as privately financed charities, they should do that. Make 'em private hospitals. Oh, but they can't afford to do that. To do what they say they want to do - help people - they receive huge amounts of money in the form of grants and Medicare and Medicaid and supplementary state and local programs. So, they want our money, but don't want to follow our laws . . . ? I think that just this threat, alone, is enough to get their non-profit status removed. It's insane that they should try to blackmail the American people!

But what strikes me as interesting is how conservative the Catholic Church has become. I can't think of a single time in my life that I've seen the Catholic Church go after anyone the way they've gone after Obama. Beyond the institutional racism in the Catholic Church (WHEN is there going to be a Latin American or African Pope?! African and Latin American Catholics are the huge bulk of Catholics!), there's been a steep rightward slant to Catholic politics for the past ten or fifteen years. Once viewed as being a center-left organization, now it's basically an all out right-wing organization. While giving tepid statements about how global climate change and war are bad and should be worked against, while very lightly castigating corporate capitalism, the Catholic Church doesn't do anything about any of those things. You don't see Catholic bishops threatening to excommunicate soldiers who work with nuclear weapons (also intrinsic evil) or who fight in illegal and immoral wars, or who serve greedy, soul-destroying corporations that are plundering the wealth of the world - but with abortion you've got these right-wing reactionary bishops threatening to close a third of all hospitals in America and trying to blackmail the American government. Wow. Which really tells a person where their priorities are, huh? War in Iraq? Well, they can work with that. Having to refer abortions? Intrinsic evil and they're willing to blackmail the US government over it!

John Lennon in hell

2008-11-22T21:51:00.000-08:00

The Vatican forgives John Lennon. Y'know. For when, back in the 60s, he said that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus and opined that rock and roll might outlast Christianity.

I think it's fascinating that they imagine anyone giving a damn - least of all John Lennon who if not an out-and-out atheist was definitely massively distrustful of all religion. I think it's fascinating that they imagine we care what they think about our art and our artists. It's all so narcissistic! The idea that Lennon needs to be forgiven by them, that such a thing would have any meaning at all (especially in light of the fact that their religion condemns him to eternal torment because whether or not he was an atheist might be in question, but whether or not he was a Christian is not).

In Russia, they steal CHURCHES

2008-11-13T22:32:00.000-08:00

I can't make this stuff up. Apparently, thieves in Russia are hitting rural churches, stealing them. The whole damn thing. The churches have valuable icons that can be sold, and the building materials apparently are worth enough for the thieves to dismantle whole buildings.

I'm not sure what I feel about this. I mean, on one hand, it is thievery. On the other hand, it's so funny that whole churches are being stolen and I have trouble feeling sympathy for the Russian Orthodox Church - another reactionary religious organization that does nothing but impede human progress.

Funny stuff, though.

Justification by faith alone . . . not!

2008-11-06T18:02:00.001-08:00

Often, in a sort of vague theoretical way, religious people will say that they have faith in their religion and that faith is enough to justify whatever it is that they want to justify. My experience with religion is . . . different. In particular, I can't think of a single person on this blog, or on any blog I've read, or in any of the fairly large number of private email conversations I have had with religious people where that religious person said, "My religion doesn't make any sense and I'm comfortable with that."

Time and again, I point out the absurdity of religion - like believing in an all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving god who allows children to die of cancer. It makes no sense that a being would both love something and wish to see it harmed in such an unjust and arbitrary way. Lots of religious stuff is like that - it does not make sense. It means believing in magic, miracles, supernatural beings and things like that. But I can't remember a single person admitting that their religion makes no sense.

Usually, they will insist that their religion makes objective intellectual sense. The best known case of this is Pascal's Wager. Almost every religious person I've ever met will insist that their religion is sensible, and even if I don't think that their religion is right for me they deeply want me to agree that how they practice religion is reasonable - while many just insist that their religion is the most reasonably way to live.

Even when they are argued into a position of essentially having to say that there is no objective reason to believe in their religion, rather than just admitting that they will say that they've personally experienced things that make it sensible for them to believe in their religion. But that's not faith. If they've seen, as in honestly experiencing something, that inclines them towards a given faith, if they have proof and I've merely not witnessed this proof, that's still not faith. (It is, however, a conversation stopper - there's no good way to say that they haven't seen what they claim to have seen, after all. But it is my impression almost everyone who claims that is, well, lying. Or maybe crazy. Or both.) Faith is believing without proof.

(Which does have interesting consequences. If they have faith, they can't claim the Bible as proof.)

It is, of course, normal to want people to think that their decisions are intelligently made. And people use proof and evidence as the major influencing factor in almost every part of their life that isn't religious. When struck by a car, almost no religious person says, "Oh, my god will cure me if I'm to live." They go to the hospital. When they cross the street, they look both ways. They do not trust that their god will halt oncoming traffic. They make almost all of their decisions based on reason, evidence and proof. So it's normal to want a decision as important to most people as their religion to be sensible and reasonable.

The problem is . . . it's not. Most people are religious because they have been told their entire lives, since they were infants, that religion is important, that their religion is the most important thing there is, and the importance of religion is constantly reinforced by society at large. Most people do not seriously choose their religion - and when they do choose it's generally a small lateral move, such as a Catholic becoming Episcopalian, or Lutheran becoming a Baptist. Hell, even moving from Christianity to Islam is a fairly small step - it's merely changing from one large, organized patriarchal Judaism based religion to another. Almost all the tenants they learned in their old faith apply to their new. But most people don't even make it that far - they are the same religion as their parents. But that doesn't mean it makes sense. It just means it's a tradition and a great number of traditions are deeply stupid.

It is interesting to note, however, that almost no religious person is actually comfortable admitting their religion makes no reasonable sense.

The problem of pain vs. atheists?

2008-11-01T02:16:00.000-07:00

This guy was my first ever troll. He's a crazy man who believes crazy things. On October 30th, he posted an article about his take of the problem of evil - and from his point of view the problem is with atheists. I'd give a direct link, but his blog is about as user-friendly as a whip-sword.

See, for him, the problem is pain. And it's a problem, and we atheists can't solve it. I used to consider myself a philosopher - I certainly studied it long enough - and I'd never heard of it as a serious refutation of the problem of evil. I mean, as atheists, we believe that "shit happens". Not to mention from a biological perspective, pain serves all kinds of useful functions (like us knowing when we're being injured). That it occasionally incapacitates the subject is one of those things that just happens to be the case - like bad backs and acne. Much of our biology is pretty slap-dash, as befits something that arose out of negentropic stochastic chemical processes.

The Problem of Pain is the name of a book by C.S. Lewis. But it was him trying to answer the normal problem of evil. Or, in other words, why does his god - whom he claims is all-loving and all-powerful - allow suffering to exist.

So, y'know, I wasn't aware pain was a problem for atheists. But this guy apparently thinks it is. Allow me to quote: "See: if something painful happens, and the person it happens to can't fix it except by causing more pain -- in fact, more pain than they are experiencing in the first place -- they don't have a way to choose their actions."

Well, of course, that's nonsense. If I get cancer and the only way to cure it is chemotherapy which will, in the short run, will be far worse than the cancer, I'll still choose to get the chemo. Duh. Because, as a human, I can understand the options - comfort in the short term and a lingering death later on, or suffering in the short term and a an overall greatly improved.

He goes on to say: "You know: as if somehow some suffering ultimately has a therapeutic or, if we dare say it, redemptive purpose." His argument seems to be - albeit stated in an awkward way - that because atheists have a the faculty commonly described as "will" and they can accept pain for a greater purpose (such as willing to accept chemo to overcome cancer), that atheists themselves have answered the question of evil because, wait for it, we accept that sometimes pain is necessary to be better people.

The problem he has with the problem of pain, however, is that atheists aren't either all-benevolent or all-powerful. With our limited powers, yeah, we'll accept chemo to get rid of cancer. But none of us are invested with omnipotence. An atheist can't just will cancer away with no pain or suffering, not for themselves or others. Many of us would, if we could, because the pain of chemotheraphy does not make cancer patients better human beings, except insofar as it prolongs their lives. They don't come out the other side with more character. They're just alive.

The common Christian conception of god, however, is all-powerful, however. Instead of making cancer patients go through chemo, their god could just decide that there was no such thing as cancer. Furthermore, this being could decide that there is no reason for redemption, either. That redemption just didn't mean anything in this universe, or any other universe, because - out of his infinite kindness and compassion - their god wouldn't want us to suffer.

The funny thing is, he even knows this. He says, "[John Loftus' view] is that God ought to be good enough and powerful enough and intelligent enough to create a world where these crappy choices ought not to have to be made." But then he goes on to say, "It's an interesting redirection of the question, but it is where we turn the bend from exposing the atheist short-comings to actually advancing the Christian faith -- and I'll get you back with that another day."

So while he admits the argument needs to be addressed, he doesn't actually address it. I don't much read the guy's blog - it's . . . not my cup of tea, shall we say - but I'm almost curious to see if he does try to follow this up. Because I just don't see pain as being a problem for atheists. It exists along with a lot of other crappy things like earthquakes that level cities and pop music. Pain exists because it exists, and because it serves a useful biological function (one that far outstrips its occasional down sides). I just don't see how that's a problem for atheists in the first place.

Still, a pretty bizarre argument. But to try to argue the problem of evil while maintaining your belief in an all-loving, all-forgiving, all-powerful god requires a lot of bizarre thinking.

Priests and "sex drive tests" - the laughs abound

2008-10-30T23:45:00.000-07:00

Apparently, priests are gonna going to be evaluated for their sexuality before taking the cloth. This is one of those things where my fairly considerable mockery skills are challenged by the inherent stupidity of what they're talking about. How can I mock the Catholic Church's testing of the sexual orientation of enforced celibacy? A bunch of eunuchs are going to be designing tests about sex. Funnier than I could come up with.

The reason is, of course, because priests are raping little kids. In my mind, the real problem is that instead of allowing the authorities to do their job the Catholic Church hushes it up. They're still going to hush it up. This is just one of those sound bite talking points that they can trot out to say that they've cleaned up their act - when the real problem is the tradition of secrecy around the crimes of priests that the Catholic Church has defended for sixteen hundred years or so.

However, the article doesn't really seem to be about trying to weed out pedophile priests. They're looking to vet "deep-seated homosexual tendencies", "uncertain sexual identity", "evident the candidate has difficulty living in celibacy: That is, if celibacy for him is lived as a burden so heavy that it compromises his affective and relational equilibrium". It doesn't even sound like they're looking for pedophiles. What are they looking for? Priests with a "positive and stable sense of one's masculine identity".

Priests. With a . . . positive and stable sense of their . . . masculinity. Isn't being a Catholic priest slightly more girly than being a cross-dressing hooker? The priesthood is about as masculine as a doll house! How can I mock that? It's pretty self-mocking, if you ask me.

The Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests isn't fooled by this nonsense. They say, "Catholic officials continue to fixate on the offenders and ignore the larger problem: The Church's virtually unchanged culture of secrecy and unchecked power in the hierarchy" and "these broader factors are deeply rooted in the Church and contribute heavily to extensive and ongoing clergy sex abuse and cover up".

Indeed. If the Catholic Church wants to stop priests from raping little kids, they need to, first, when they become aware of the problem inform the authorities and, two, assist in whatever way possible the authorities in prosecuting these criminals. Whether or not priests need to be screened to determine if they're butch enough for the job is a question I can't answer - but the Catholic Church currently acts like a criminal conspiracy towards criminals who have taken the cloth.

If it was up to me, I'd have the Pope up on racketeering charges for his role in protecting sex offenders - rapists - in the Catholic clergy.

Another pseudo-answer to the problem of evil

2008-10-29T17:59:00.001-07:00

I was actually slightly wrong last post. Christians will offer two arguments to try to defend their religion against the problem of evil.

One is the "best of all possible worlds" scenario, which is vapid because a child could think of a better world than the one we've got. One without, say, disease or natural disasters.

The second is "god is mysterious and we can't understand god because we're finite beings". This is also a bad argument because while it is likely true that we can't really understand a higher order of intelligence (much in the same way that a dog can't really understand humans), an omnipotent and omniscient being can certainly understand us. So while a human's motives are totally inscrutable to a dog, the dog is pretty transparent to a human. So we know, even if the dog can't really say it, that it's not OK to beat and torture the dog. And you can abuse a dog in such a fashion that it will continue to show all outward signs of love - we're smart enough to do that, too. But anyone with a mind can see that the paranoid wreck that dog becomes, both angrily lashing out at strangers while being pathetically obsequious to it's "master" isn't actually good for the dog. Much in the same way, one would expect an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent god to understand that people, y'know, don't want to suffer the infirmity of old age, we don't want to get cancer and die lingering deaths, we don't want to be destroyed in natural disasters. And because it is the contention of almost all religious people that their god is all-powerful, they can't say that their god needs for things to be this way or that way in order to achieve an end. They're just stuck with the inescapable conclusion that an all-powerful being must, in some way, want people to suffer horribly and to be aware of that suffering, even when it does not infringe on individual will.

The question of evil vs. Christians

2008-10-27T21:18:00.000-07:00

Almost all Christians try to talk about the existence of god. Like that's the only question. If only, they think, we can get atheists to acknowledge god exists then we've got 'em! Or, anyway, that's what I imagine they're saying to themselves.

Furthermore, the question of the existence of god is nice and . . . abstract. Since they acknowledge the world exists in the form it exists, they can assert the god of the gaps. Wherever we can't look is where their god is, operating in secret.

But there's really a much better way to expose the fundamental absurdity of religion - which is the question of evil. You know, if god is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-benevolent then why is there evil?

They'll try to derail the question with the question of free will. They'll say, "There's evil because people are evil." Don't fall for it! The argument isn't about free will, and what constitutes free will, and the limitations of free will. The question is one of evil.

Say, instead, "Why is there cancer? Why does your god allow little babies to die horrible, lingering deaths because of cancer?" Focus on the fact terrible things happen to innocent people - not as a function of anyone's will. Focus on disease and natural disaster. Focus on real things that happen to people.

Then sit back and enjoy. Because, at that point, they're stuck on the horns of of the dilemma of the problem of evil. Either their god isn't all-powerful or isn't all-benevolent. They will agree that their god can do anything but they can't offer any reason why their god hasn't stopped suffering that does not arise from human agency.

They will not admit, however, that the dilemma is real. Well, none I've met, anyway. They'll look for any kind of excuse they can think of to justify why terrible things happen to good people.

Eventually the have to come down to Leibniz's argument in some fashion: that this is the best of all possible worlds. It'll come out in some twisted version. They won't say that. They'll just insist that everyone happens for a "purpose". They don't know the purpose, but whatever it is, they will assure you, it's worth the untold suffering that disaster and disease bring. They must assert that their god both allows evil and is perfectly good.

It's really a much better way to argue than wasting your time talking about the creation of the universe. ;)

Cornering the market in reactionary behavior

2008-10-25T01:21:00.000-07:00

As readers of my blog know, I occasionally get very amusing letters that I share. To be honest, most of the people who are religious don't threaten me with death or anything - probably the most common letter I get from Christians (and so far they have all been from Christians) are attempts to dissuade me from lumping all religious people together.

For the record, I don't lump all religious people together. I do, however, have deep criticisms about religion generally, tho' I'll acknowledge there are a few religious out there I have no beef with. It's sorta hard to get worked up over Jain or Unitarian Universalists. But they feel that my general critique of religion throws the "good" religious people out with the "bad" religious people. I just got done with precisely such a discussion with a Catholic woman. As usual, it went no where. In the end, she was just offended that I think her religion is sexist, racist and homophobic and the supporters of that religion support sexism, racism and homophobia - which is to say that they are sexist, racist and homophobic. I compared the Catholic Church with the KKK in that regard - if someone in the KKK said that they weren't racist, you'd laugh. The Catholic Church isn't so much different from the KKK to me.

But during all of this I got a revelation. At some point, the woman said that religious people don't have the market cornered on sexism, racism and homophobia. I thought back for a while and thought to myself, "But . . . they do. I can't think of a single sexist, racist or homophobic organization that isn't pretty explicitly religious. I can't think of a single atheist organization that is." I wrote back telling her that, but shortly afterwards she stopped writing to me altogether.

So, that's my little revelation. Religious organizations do have the sexist, racist and homophobic markets cornered.

Researching Las Vegas

2008-10-24T16:19:00.000-07:00

Researching Vegas is always a little . . . weird. Especially when you're researching gangster activities in Las Vegas.

The reason is that the people who write the books are often locals or semi-locals who use their insider connections to bring stories about gangland Vegas to the book. Almost all of them - and all of the dozen or so I've read of late - are basically told from interviews. Very much, "so-and-so told me this story".

The stories get a little strange when talking about the mob run casinos of the 40s through 70s. (In the 80s, the mob better learned how to hide behind corporations like the Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts. If you think the skim isn't happening and the mob's out of Vegas, well, I guess you're entitled to your opinion, hehe.) At the time, it was pretty open that the mob was in town and the stories reflect that.

But almost uniformly, the casino employees from that time will talk about how nice the gangsters were and, bizarrely, how Las Vegas in those days didn't have much crime - even when they were talking about the crimes the mobsters committed. Several times I've read these interviews where the person would go, "In those days there wasn't any crime in Las Vegas" and then go "people who were caught stealing or cheating would be taken to what we called the torture room and afterwards they'd have a cast and a limp". Like the numerous assaults that the mobsters were committing - that these former employees were acknowledging - was somehow compatible with a town with "no crime". Not to mention the skim, itself, which was a daily theft of millions of dollars to support organized crime.

Even more than the stories themselves, what I find weird is how people rationalize working for the gangsters like the gangsters were somehow *good* for Las Vegas.

The way to be a Christian

2008-09-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

Some months ago - it'd have to be some months, right, because it's not precisely like I'm undating this blog regularly, hehe - I wrote an article how atheism was Conservapedia's article of the year, wherein I pointed out how terrible and insulting the article was. In particular I found it amusing that one of the reasons Conservapedia believes atheism is spreading is peace and justice! Anyway, I got this comment from a Christian about my article that's amusing enough I feel the need to share:

Okay, you cocksucking, worthless atheists. Conservapedia, while not being perhaps the most famous website, is still excellent and trustworthy.

But you, Satan worshipping, child sacrificing atheists will go to Hell, and that's a fact, you faggots.

Atheists, go back to suck your beloved Dickhard "Dick" Cuntkins's cock, you whoresons.

Richard Dawkins is a cunt, whoreson, shiteating fuckface, and he should be killed. With the rest of you fucking atheists.

We christians will rule the earth, and there's nothing at all you butthurt atheists can do! Mwahaha!

IN YOUR FACES!

Poor lad. He thinks his dinosaur of a religion stands a chance. And he seems to be a Christian to hate without regret and seek some kind of power that will never come to him, because if history has shown anything it has shown the ease with which Christian rulers oppress Christian subjects in horrific and brutal ways. But, mostly a big laugh for me! ;)

John Freshwater and a student of his . . .

2008-06-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

Back on this thread, I wrote about John Freshwater, a science teacher from Mount Vernon, Ohio, who taught creationism in class and as a "demonstration of electricity" would brand crosses into students arms. I got this comment anonymously, and considering how some students are acting, I understand why someone might want to be anonymous about this. Anyway, here's the quote - it's already posted publicly so there's no confidence issues involved, I should note:

I am a student at Mount Vernon High School and last year had Mr. Freshwater as an 8th grade science teacher. This man should have been fired years ago, far before the branding of a students arm. I have been raised Catholic, and many times we asked him to allow Catholics to be added to his "Fellowship of Christian Athletes" conversation, allow a priest to come in to talk. His exact response was, "I as a True Christian can not allow my students to bear witness to this." I am an atheist though, and he constantly is mixing religion into the classroom, straight out shunning certain students. The only reason anyone is now coming out and saying anything is because in the last year Mount Vernon administration has changed, being that the previous principal and vice principal encouraged him and allowed him to do this.

No real surprise that a fundie Christian is anti-Catholic, is it? And it is interesting to have someone say that it had hitherto been systematic. Not surprising, of course, but interesting.

On the other hand, at least he got fired. I wonder if that would have been the case if the story hadn't gone national. Freshwater says he's going to appeal, but, yeah, right. Unfortunately, he hasn't been arrested for his child abuse (which is a bigger issue than even the teaching of religion in class - the man burned children in his care).

I can't figure out how religion rots people's brains - but it does; another example

2008-06-13T18:23:00.000-07:00

An old friend of mine wrote the post about how Coyote loves him and what that "means". The person in question isn't particularly religious, tho' he maintains that the universe makes more sense with a governing intelligence than without one and I think this post really . . . make it clear the disjoint between what he says and what I hear.

See, his magical belief in Coyote is the belief in a god that does terrible things for laughs, and he isn't even a very good comedian. He gives an anecdote about how his step-dad got into a car wreck that looked horrible but wasn't so bad, haha, isn't that funny, what a trickster that Coyote is to scare a person like that! This reasoning, of course, ignores all the dead and maimed from car accidents. Well, for them, Coyote's joke was a little meaner. Some people pick bits of glass out of their hair, and other people pick out bits of their baby's skull, but it's just a cosmic joke, right? Which, of course, is how religious people everywhere "explain" things - they just say "it's my god's will". And if you disagree with it, well, then you lack the special knowledge (in this person's case, I don't "get the joke").

The only way this "reasoning" distinguishes itself from Christianity or whatever is that it acknowledges that the reasoning of the cosmos is, at best, that of a not particularly bright vindictive idiot who never the less likes to give his favorite pets pats on the head.

Dennis Kucinich introduced a bill to impeach Bush!

2008-06-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

Dennis Kucinich, a Democratic Cleveland representative, has has introduced a bill of impeachment against George Bush. It has thirty-five articles of impeachment ranging from conspiring to circumvent voting laws to the whole business with the illegal war in Iraq.

There aren't that many news stories out there, here's one from the Belfast Telegraph, and another from Newshounds.

I haven't seen any news story about this on CNN, BBC or any of the big commercial websites. I'm also not seeing any action on this on the websites I generally frequent that have lots of political content. Which is why I'm writing this blog post.

Dennis Kucinich is trying to impeach Bush! The man is a criminal! He should be impeached, tried and convicted by our laws and then given over to the International Criminal Court to face his crimes in Iraq and elsewhere! For years, almost every even vaguely liberal person I've talked to has agreed Bush is a crook and should be impeached. If you are reading and are one of those people and you have a blog - post about this! Right now! And then write and/or phone your congressperson and tell them to impeach Bush.

Derren Brown Messiah on YouTube - go watch it!

2008-06-02T15:36:00.000-07:00

Credit to Pharyngula for posting this so I might learn of it.

British stage magician Derren Brown apparently did a special called Derren Brown Messiah. It starts here on YouTube:

It's cool. Spoilers follow.

What he does is come to America, where no one knows him, and poses as five different people claiming to have paranormal powers of some sort - first as a psychic with remote viewing, then as a Christian with the power to convert with a touch, an alien adbuctee who could know people's medical histories (he assures us that abductees routinely claim to have these powers), the inventor of a machine that can collect dreams and, lastly, as a medium who can speak to the dead.

In each instance, he goes to a respected person in that field and tries to sell them that he's got paranormal powers. Part of the act is if anyone asks him if he's trying to trick them, if they ask if this is "real" or a trick in any way, he fesses up.

In every case, in all five cases, he gets at least some acknowledgment that he's got the powers he claims to have. Several of them are elaborately glowing in their praise and ask them to start doing things immediately on the grounds of his clear paranormal powers. None of them ask if it's real or not. They, on some level, just assume he's legitimate.

Of course they're tricks. I've seen Derren Brown's act before in different contexts. On his TV show, Trick of the Mind, he got some advertising professionals into his office and he pitched them a concept for them to brainstorm something and accurately predicted what they were going to brainstorm. He pulled back the curtain, then, and told the audience how he did it - he had, well, shills along the path the taxi took them from their office to his rented office, each of them with very noticeable signs and the like, knowing that they'd see them along the way - because they were so obvious - and likely incorporate them into their ads. They did. It as both eerie and fantastic.

But, here's this guy, a total scientific materialist skeptic, one willing to let people know how he does the trick, who tricked a bunch of "respected professionals" in their various paranormal fields that he had some kind of magic or psychic power! Often, their praise is elaborate, glowing, placing him as the best they've ever seen of that kind of thing.

And at no time did any of these professionals, nor anyone else with whom he dealt, openly criticize or doubt him.

All in all, absolutely fascinating because he offers a reasonable way that purely material events can cause the perception of the supernatural at the same time demonstrating it.

Which is something of a service the magician community does. Since at least the days of Harry Houdini, stage magicians have spent a fair bit of time, effort and energy throwing back the curtain on how religious, psychic, etc., "powers" are just psychology and performance. More than any other field, they blow away the clouds of obscurity from magical phenomenon. They show the the tricks are done. They do the tricks, but acknowledge that it's not magic, not supernatural powers, not psychics or aliens. Just real skills that can be learned by anyone with sufficient ability and drive - and tricks whose workings can be comprehended by anyone.

Interestingly, he doesn't accuse these people of insincerity. I think that's good to know, too. Because I don't think that they are being insincere, either. I think that even when people do start out as insincere, over time most of them teach themselves to think that this is what magic and psychic powers really are. In my own personal dealings with magicians, that is very much the case. They talk about how they're doing magic, but they're often just engaging in confidence scams - sometimes with themselves - and attributing the mundane to the supernatural. But they are sincere. They don't want to, and will not, see evidence that is contrary to their worldview.

Which, he very rightly points out, is what we all do. If I was in that room where he converted people by touch, I would have been intensely skeptical, because I think laying on hands and the like is very much just charisma and psychological manipulation of crowds (which was certainly the case with Jesus in Simon Peter), and I would be looking for the trick. And, looking, I would have seen it, how the crowds were self-selecting (people who don't have doubts about their skepticism wouldn't normally attend something like that), the people first selected I would conclude were either outright shills or people who were displaying emotional distress over what he was saying, and then once a couple of soft-targets had been used to prep the audience the mass conversion at the end would have been simple group psychology - no one there would want to openly criticize the "leader" of the group, and after you do that ridiculous falling down thing what are you going to say? How many people will really go "oh, damn, I was caught up in a sick group dynamic and totally got scammed", especially in public? Who would be willing to shame themselves thus? Few - particularly because they could easily be branded as weak hypocrites for coming out.

On the other hand, a Christian viewing the same event would likely draw the conclusion that their god was personally involved. That it was a miracle.

Which is a message I wish more people would internalize - that we're all gullible in some way.

Still, it was a nifty little show.

Whacky monarchy stories

2008-05-31T23:47:00.000-07:00

The Internet confuses and yet amazes me at the same time. In my last post, I said that monarchy is stupid and sort of embarrassing, and I believe that's true. I also said that I consider the Dalai Lama an imposter, a monarchist who found populism only after being dethroned, which I also think is true. I had been quite a bit prepared to respond to supporters of the Dalai Lama who were offended at me pointing out his feudal past and the class-based repression of the Tibetan state before modern Chinese rule.

What I got instead was the Radical Royalist. So, instead of getting the reasonably common defense of the Dalai Lama, I got this nutjob who thinks that monarchy is preferable to democracy. I mean, WOW!

Or, as he puts it, himself, "These are troubled times, but I guess monarchists have something to say and something to offer as a possible solution for many problems that shake the world. That's why I call myself "radical royalist" because I am unashamedly in favour of a monarchy - anywhere!"

So, I will give you my FAVORITE MONARCHY STORY.

Around about 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand got assassinated by anarchists from Serbia. He was the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was basically the rump state of the Holy Roman Empire. By the early 20th century, it was also in serious decline in relative power, the wars of the late 19th century proving it to be politically, economically and militarily decadent. So great was the misrule of Austro-Hungary that there was widespread low-level civil strife throughout it, and eventually some (reasonably incompetent) anarchists managed to blow him away.

Obviously, Austria was pretty pissed about this. So, they asked Germany, ruled by Kaiser Wilhelm II . . .

OK. Let me back up. Willie the Second was what is technically called "an idiot". One of his more odious habits was a deep love of dressing up in military uniforms. It was observed during his own life the reason he increased the size and power of the German Navy was because he wanted to wear an admiral's uniform. He also decided to throw out Bismarck, amongst the most brilliant (if evil) politicians of the 19th century, and all-in-all believed that he was German Emperor because of God's personal intervention, and proceeded to act as though his least whim was therefore divine. Which largely meant provoking European powers. An idiot with unimpeachable authority that was literally claimed to be divine. (Think about that the next time some Western power accuses somewhere else of being backwards - not too long ago European monarchs were claiming absolute divine authority. Maybe I'll follow this blurb up with something about Leopold II of Belgium.)

So, Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, asked Willie the Second if they could attack Serbia, from where Ferdinand's assassins came. Germany, thinking it would be a brief war, said, "Sure, go ahead."

However, unbeknowns to anyone, Peter I of Bosnia - another hereditary monarch - had a deal with the Russian Czar Nicholas II. They had a secret defense pact.

OK, a brief word about Nick the Second. Also an idiot. He was a weak man ruled by his wife (I don't mean that as sexism, but kings can't afford to be ruled by anyone) who was in turn largely ruled by Rasputin who had power over the the Russian heir, Alexei, who was a hemophiliac due to aristocratic inbreeding. Rasputin seemed able to control Alexei's suffering, which endeared him to the Tzarina, who in turn had immense power over Nick the Second.

Nick the Second's misrule had, by 1914, already been clearly demonstrated through many bone-headed plays, including the Russo-Japanese War (which was deeply humiliating for Russia) and the 1905 Revolution.

So, this idiot had a secret defense treaty with Serbia, saying if Serbia was attacked that Russia would come to Serbia's aid . . .

OK. Think about that for a second. Secret self-defense pact. Now, who in their right mind makes a secret self-defense pact. What fucking good is a self-defense pact if no one knows about it?! The whole point of deterrence is that your presumptive enemies know that you've got a big stick! But, no, the idiot Nick the Second of Russia and Petey the First of Serbia decided what would be really clever was to hide the fact if you attacked Serbia you'd also be attacking Russia.

So, the Austrians attack Serbia - thinking that they'd have a jolly little war, teach those Serbs their place and be home by Christmas - but it activates the secret self-defense pact that Serbia had with Russia, which activates the treaties that Austria had with Germany, which activated the treaties that Russia had with France . . .

And now you've got World War I.

But, really, monarchy is the solution to the world's ills.

Evicting a king and ruminations about monarchy and Tibet

2008-05-30T23:56:00.001-07:00

Gyanendra, formerly King of Nepal, has not only been stripped of his crown but been evicted from the formerly royal palace.

Cool.

I think there is no such thing as a good monarchy. They range from the absurd - like the Brits have - to considerably worse, such as the House of Saud in Arabia which rules the country like a personal possession in a brutal, fundamentalist and despotic rule. In this day and age, the only good monarch is the one that actively works for the destruction. Which makes King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck of Bhutan the only decent monarch in the world. He is destroying the monarchy. Good for him. But all the rest of them range from ludicrous and decadent reminders of past brutality and excess - again, Queen of England and your ilk, I'm looking straight at you - to despots like those scattered through the Middle East.

The BBC article elaborate concern for the deposed monarch and his family. Where will former prince Paras live?! And what about former queen Ratna? WHERE WILL SHE STAY?! Golly, maybe Paras will have to go out and get a job and pay rent like everyone else! And certainly Gyanandra won't abandon his dear sweet stepmom, right? And even if Gyanandra does toss her out on her bum (possible - he's a complete and utter fucktard widely believed to have supported his brother's bloody palace coup), I mean, she'll get treated just the same as everyone else in that situation . . . which should call attention to the atrocious way Gyanandra ruled. To think otherwise is to take the absolutely absurd and morally preposterous position of thinking that a person used to luxury should be provided for it on the basis of their former wealth. Horrible things happen to poor people all the time with absolutely no comment, kick one former queen on her ass and the BBC sheds tears for you. Preposterous.

But what this mostly makes me think of is Tibet, really. Nowadays, the Dalai Lama does pretty good for himself going around talking about the injustices of the Chinese rule in Tibet. What he forgets to mention is that before he was the kindly, sainted fighter for the rights of the Tibetans he was their primary oppressor of the Tibetan people as the absolute monarch of that country. Perhaps if he'd fought for the freedom of the Tibetan people before 1950 - say in the fashion of King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck of Bhutan - I might give a fuck what this feudal monarch thinks. But it was only after he lost his own magnificent palace that he discovered the need to fight for Tibetan freedom. That really fails to impress me.

Which is not to say that there isn't race based bigotry on the part of the Chinese government. There is. It is abominable and should stop. But, hey, the Chinese didn't keep the Tibetans in feudal bondage to the land as the Dalai Lama did. Should we forgive or ignore the class based discrimination and crimes of the Dalai Lama's misrule simply because of Chinese misrule? As we all learned as children, two wrongs don't make a right.

All monarchy is bad. All. Including the Dalai Lama's. The only monarchs that aren't evil bastards are the ones actively seeking to get rid of the monarchy. Which means King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck of Bhutan. Who is pretty cool.

Proof religious people are stupid! Or at least ignorant. Well, I have a CHART.

2008-05-29T14:31:00.000-07:00

I know, divisive title for the blog. Razib at ScienceBlogs.com made this post where he correlates IQ and Biblical literalism by religion, hehe. (Which I in turn got from The Friendly Atheist.) And it's not really strong proof - what it is is a simple correlation between IQ values charted to religion. I, myself, don't think that IQ tests for intelligence so much as a particular kind of education . . . so if anything, this is a measure of the education of religious people (which is, itself, of course, very interesting data).

OK, then. Granting that it's not a study, and it's not really measuring intelligence but how well the people took IQ tests, it's still pretty lovely, hehe.

Isn't that lovely? Razib is personally aware at the limitations of the chart. While the data is legitimately gotten from reputable sources, it is, in the end, just a chart, so we should remember that correlation is not causation.

However, correlation suggests causation. What IQ tests were initially intended to do is locate people inside a given society that have special needs. If Pentacostalists as a group are doing poorly on IQ tests, it is legitimate to ask why. At a guess, it isn't the religion, but their education, which is likely bad not because of their religion (tho' that might play a role in it, esp. with science education - Bible literalists are known to have some contempt for science, after all) but because of issues like poverty and social status. Indeed, it isn't precisely news that fundamentalist religion goes hand-in-hand with poor, low status groups whereas non-theism is largely amongst the best educated people with secure careers (y'know, tenured scientists).

But for me the real pleasure is just seeing it charted out how Biblical literalism is heavily correlated to outright stupidity, hehe. I have to admit.

Cyborgization continues - "brain pacemakers"

2008-05-28T15:06:00.000-07:00

Apparently, good work is being done by using "deep brain stimulation" to help some seriously depressed and obsessive-compulsive people.

I know that my own depression is not the same as the kinds of depression this device works on - severe depression is the realms of utter madness, often including delusions and hallucinations, and is utterly crippling. It is ghastly. So, knowing that, even I can't help but feel some real joy at the notion that work is being done that can successfully treat depression as a purely material problem. (Because it is, of course. The "mind/body problem" is only a problem if you think there's a difference between your mind and your body. Which there isn't. "Mind/body problem" makes as much sense as "heart/body problem". Your mind is part of your body, located primarily in your brain. Duh.)

Of course, what particularly fascinates me about this is that it's a mechanical, electronic solution. You stick some wires in your head and, zap, 4 out of 6 severe patients feel better.

It makes me wonder when someone will say to themself, "Self, if it works for them, might it not work for me. Oh, I know that I don't suffer depression, but if it helps my mood, makes me feel happier, be more productive, allows me to more fully express the person I want to be, why not?" then I'll be particularly fascinated. (People already do this with mood medication; taking anti-depressants as "mood brighteners". I should note I'm mostly for this. What's wrong with people being in good moods?)

But we're all on the verge of becoming literal cyborgs. I find all of this very fascinating and await all of this with bated breath.

For the most part, I will add, I don't think that this will lead to some dystopian future with people being modified or drug addicted to become the mindless drones of the state. The reasons for this are two:

1. In the end, humans will prove more useful if they are allowed to pursue their interests where it leads them. Since machines are taking over all our physical and even some of our intellectual labor, creative labor is about all we've got left as we begin this new period. Enslaving people through these techniques would be a disaster, good for no one.

2. The techniques, themselves, will lead those who use them to benevolent conclusions. I have long wondered how much of human civilization has been the results of literally madness - how many lawmakers have been mentally ill, and how has that effected our society? I think quite a bit. (I also think that since the average life expectancy of early civilizations was about 18 years old that civilization was created by teenage boys - and shows it.) I believe that clarity of thought makes it intellectually and emotionally difficult for tyrants to be tyrants. The cruelty and stupidity of what they are doing will be clear, not only to themselves, but others, because of people's intellectual clarity.

Conservapedia YouTube vid and general comments

2008-05-28T12:58:00.000-07:00

More about Conservapedia! Here's a lovely YouTube video of Andy Schlafly and a member of his "world history class" that created Conservapedia going on about the project:

Great video. I love it, hehe. What I love the most about it are the pans of the kids in Schlafly's home schooling class. Not only are no minorities represented, I don't think I saw a single kid who was so much as dark haired. No kidding! I was spooked by the way these kids looked like recruitment posters for racial purity. They weren't just white, they were pale.

The other thing that struck me is how there's an automatic equation between conservative Christian beliefs and real truth. Again and again, they talk about a liberal bias while frankly saying that Conservapedia is from the point of view of fundie Christians. To them, that's not bias. That's truth. Fundie Christian bias is truth to them.

One of the things in particular I found amusing is when the young woman that served as the mouthpiece of the students said that one of the reasons they founded Conservapedia was because they couldn't go edit Wikipedia's evolution article to talk about creationism and intelligent design. What I found funny is that Wikipedia's portal about creationism is vastly superior to Conservapedia's rather anemic article about the same subject. Conservapedia, as a source of information even about what is their stated reason to exist is far inferior than Wikipedia's articles about the same subject matter. If you want to learn about creationism, you're much better off going to Wikipedia than Conservapedia. I doubt that they'll grasp the irony there.

Conservapedia article of the year is atheism!

2008-05-27T12:08:00.000-07:00

Woo woo! The Conservapedia article of the year is their article on atheism!

It is, of course, a totally dismal article. The larger part of it is actually debunking atheism, saying everything from that atheists are fascists to saying we have worse health than people who believe in religion. The list of reasons why atheists are atheists is fascinating, itself:

* Rebellion: Atheism stems from a deliberate choice to ignore the reality of God's existence.
* Moral depravity: Moral depravity has been demonstrated in the atheist community through history and through various studies. The Bible asserts that "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good." (Psalms 14:1 (KJV)). The biblical fool is said to be lacking in sound judgment and the biblical fool is also associated with moral depravity. For example, the biblical book of Proverbs states: "A wise man is cautious and turns away from evil, But a fool is arrogant and careless. A quick-tempered man acts foolishly, And a man of evil devices is hated. The naive inherit foolishness, But the sensible are crowned with knowledge."(Proverbs 14:16-18 (NASB)). The book of Proverbs also has strong words regarding the depravity of biblical fools: "The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul: but [it is] abomination to fools to depart from evil." (Proverbs 13:9 (KJV)). Regarding the deceitfulness of fools Proverbs states: "The wisdom of the sensible is to understand his way, But the foolishness of fools is deceit." (Proverbs 14:8 (KJV)). Noted Bible commentator and clergyman Matthew Henry wrote regarding atheism: "A man that is endued with the powers of reason, by which he is capable of knowing, serving, glorifying, and enjoying his Maker, and yet lives without God in the world, is certainly the most despicable and the most miserable animal under the sun."
* Superficiality: Noted ex-atheist and psychologist Dr. Paul Vitz has stated that he had superficial reasons for becoming an atheist such as the desire to be accepted by his Stanford professors who were united in disbelief regarding God.
* Error: Some argue that atheism partly stems from a failure to fairly and judiciously consider the facts.
* State churches: Rates of atheism are much higher in countries with a state sanctioned religion (such as many European countries), and lower in states without a sanctioned religion (such as the United States). Some argue this is because state churches become bloated, corrupt, and/or out of touch with the religious intuitions of the population, while churches independent of the state are leaner and more adaptable. It is important to distinguish "state-sanctioned churches," where participation is voluntary, from "state-mandated churches" (such as Saudi Arabia) with much lower atheism rates because publicly admitted atheism is punishable by death.
* Poor relationship with father: Some argue that a troubled/non-existent relationship with a father may influence one towards holding the position of atheism. Dr. Paul Vitz wrote a book entitled Faith of the Fatherless in which he points out that after studying the lives of more than a dozen leading atheists he found that a large majority of them had a father who was present but weak, present but abusive, or absent. Dr. Vitz also examined the lives of prominent theists who were contemporaneous to their atheist counterparts and from the same culture and in every instance these prominent theists had a good relationship with his father. Dr. Vitz has also stated other common factors he observed in the leading atheists he profiled: they were all intelligent and arrogant.
* Division in religion: According to Francis Bacon, atheism is caused by "divisions in religion, if they be many; for any one main division addeth zeal to both sides, but many divisions introduce atheism."
* Learned times, peace, and prosperity: Francis Bacon argued that atheism was partly caused by "Learned times, specially with peace and prosperity; for troubles and adversities do more bow men’s minds to religion."
* Negative experiences with theists.
* The advance of scientific knowledge: Science has in many ways become a new God.

I mean . . . wow. And the whole article is like that - just filled with a great and directed anger towards atheists. I am serious when they compare atheists to Hitler, literally Hitler, saying we're mentally ill, etc., etc., but I think this list of reasons - taken straight from their site - does a good job of nailing on the head what they think of atheists. Atheists are morally depraved, or have had bad relationships with our fathers (just our fathers? having a shitty mom doesn't make one an atheist?).

But, really, my favorite is that education, peace and prosperity are one of their factors leading to atheism, hehe. I love that one. I mean, there's some truth to it (but just some, the growth of atheism in Europe was vastly facilitated by the World Wars - many Europeans rejected god because of the horrors of those wars, feeling that no god could allow such terrible things to happen), in terms of education in particular. Education allows one to see all the stupidity of religion, yes. But nested with all the rest, all those hideously insulting, superficial reasons, that one shines out because I think that they put it in there like they put in all the others, as a sly, anti-intellectual barb - and don't understand how they saying that poverty, war and ignorance are the causes of religion is high praise to atheists.

Laughing a bit at religious homophobic, racism and sexism - also warning labels on the Bible and Koran

2008-05-26T13:28:00.000-07:00

Recently, I was contacted by some people who have a neat little video that makes fun of religious sexism, racism and homophobia:

It's a fun little song - in French, but it has English subtitles - that brings up the serious and very real point about how morally backwards the Bible and Koran are, but does it with humor and is a nice little ditty. Everyone should watch it. Pertutti wants their names out there, so I'm gonna give a little help. ;)

The people who made the video are also suing people, initially in France but now more broadly, to put warning labels on the Bible and the Koran for it's racist, sexist and homophobic content. I love the idea of that, because I believe that religious works (and organizations) should be treated like any other work (or organization). There is nothing special about these books, or these organizations, and I think it's bad for governments to accord them special privileges. They should be held to the same standards that any other human work or enterprise is held. I think that's obvious. So I'm fascinated and glad that people are working to remove the special status of religions. Anyway, here's a video (also in French with English subs) about their attempt to sue the French government to get warning labels put on the Bible and Koran:

From letters with the makers of the video and subjects of the news story, I was told that the case was dismissed in France because the plaintiffs were ruled not to have legal standing ("because it should have been done by a group who considered being globally discriminated by the books, like homosexuals for instance") which is one of the standard legal tricks that governments use when they don't want to deal with a sticky issue like this. It has the air of a stupid procedural rule being used to avoid what would certainly be a contentious issue. On the good side, it's at the European Court of Human Rights and some people have come forth to possibly resubmit the case in France with legal standing of the globally discriminated groups.

They're also writing "le livre athée", an atheist's book, to lay out the case for atheism in clear and accessible language. I fully support that kind of project as well. A big problem, I feel, with atheism is that it is not particularly gentle to people without fairly traditional advanced educations. Atheists often have trouble speaking to people who aren't college educated, so a clear and simple book about the subject I think is a very good idea.

So, take a look at the things Pertutti is doing! :)

Liberals and Guns

2008-05-25T11:28:00.000-07:00

My blog is verging on becoming a political blog! Oh, no! I'll write about something different soon, I promise, hehe. But I'm using this journal to vent some frustration, and, hey, it's not like anyone actually reads it, except for a few Europeans. ;)

One of the reasons I can't identify as a liberal is that, well, they're not very liberal. Take this "liberal" posting about why gun restrictions are bad. In my experience, this is pretty much the standard American liberal line about firearms - that, y'know, because most gun owners never blow anyone's head off, it's OK to ignore it when other gun owners do blow someone's head off. Because, okay, the quote is too good: "Guns are a tool, like anything, can be used to harm….or they can be used for fun, like most gun-users do."

For fun.

Around 10,000 people a year in the USA are murdered with firearms. That's 68% of all murders, not to mention 42% of all robberies and 22% of the assaults in the US involved guns. About 16,000 people a year kill themselves with guns. There are around 40,000 firearms injuries per year where hospitalization was sought. There are over half a million crimes a year committed with guns. A gun is eleven times more likely to be used in a suicide or suicide attempt than home defense!

But the justification is that guns are fun. And on the strength that people like guns, we are justified in turning our eye away from the 26,000 people a year who die because of guns, the forty-thousand who are seriously injured with guns, and the hundreds of thousands of gun-related crimes committed each year.

I have difficulty expressing how morally vacant I find that argument. I prefer the conservative argument, for even tho' I don't agree with it, and I think it is ignorant, it is not wholly morally vacant. To say that we need guns to kick the government's ass if it becomes tyrannical is a little crazy, but not morally vacant given that governments do become tyrannical. But the argument that guns are fun, or cool, or whatever, is so blindingly empty, so vile and backwards and stupid that I have trouble imagining how an intelligent person could hold to such an evil idea. It baffles me.

Additional Comment: One of the "guns are cool" group on the post that spurred my post has gone on to say how we should boycott bananas because of how awful and destructive United Fruit (aka Chiquita) is.

So, we should stop eating bananas because United Fruit is a horrible corporation but it's okay to supports the arms industry. Because "guns are cool". At least bananas are healthy. Oh, I think she's got a point about United Fruit - it is a horrible company, without doubt, but at least the product that United Fruit produces, bananas, are actually good for people.

I mean, how can you support firearms, the fucking arms industry, the death merchants and then criticize any other corporate entity for being horrible? And do support the most murderous - overtly, literally murderous and literally war mongers - group of corporations on earth and then get your knickers in a twist over bananas?

The piece de la resistance is, of course, that United Fruit's horrible policies would be impossible without the arms industry - the arms industry makes oppression possible. So, y'know, don't eat the banana, but support the company that makes the oppression of the farmers who grow the bananas possible.

It's insane.

"Buy this car and I'll throw in a FREE PISTOL!"

2008-05-23T11:05:00.000-07:00

Max Motors in Butler, Missouri, have decided to give away a handgun with every car purchase. And it's all Barack Obama's fault, or at least that's what owner Mark Mueller says: "He said all those people in the Midwest, you've got to have compassion for them because they're clinging to their guns and their Bibles. I found that quite offensive. We all go to church on Sunday and we all carry guns."

I mean, let us ignore the fact that this sorta demonstrates Obama's point. But, man, am I the only person who finds handing out pistols with cars is kind of like handing out quarts of Jack Daniels with cars?

Mark suggests a Kel-Tec .380 pistol, which he describes as "a nice little handgun that fits in your pocket". Because, you know, what a great idea! A gun that fits in your pocket! Because, you know, needing a pistol in your pocket at all times is not clinging to your guns because of your ignorance.

Missouri has the 14th highest murder rate in the Union, which is the 27% percentile for murder. Good going, guys! Exactly what a state like Missouri needs, more people carrying guns in their pockets.

The depths of this irresponsibility stagger me. Unlike Obama, I don't think that they should be pitied. I think they should be stopped. Before they kill again.

One of the key differences between the Republicans and Democrats

2008-05-22T22:54:00.000-07:00

The Louisiana legislature is going to cripple the teaching of evolution. Not exactly a thrilling story in modern America - I mean, shocker, some Deep South state government is pissing in the face of science education and separation of church and state. Who knew? Oh, right, anyone conscious. For me, while tragic, and obviously everyone should do everything they can to stop this kind of nonsense from happening, it is a reason to reflect on one of the biggest differences between Republicans and Democrats.

Here it is: Republicans don't give up. Let me repeat that: Republicans don't give up.

Democrats, on the other hand, do.

I reflect on this because, I mean, I'm going to bring up three words that no one had heard of in years, and some of you perhaps never: Equal Rights Amendment. The amendment was simple - to guarantee all Americans equal rights regardless of race or gender, and giving Congress the power to make laws to insure this. It wasn't ever ratified, and it is dutifully reintroduced - in a purely symbolic way - every year since '82, but I can't remember the last time that someone actually talked about it.

On the other hand, the Republicans are fighting, still fighting, the Scopes Monkey Trial - and that was in 1925. They're still fighting the New Deal. They're still fighting Roe v. Wade. I can't think of a single issue that the Democrats have fought for like the Republicans have fought on those three issues. Year after year, they just haven't given up. They have this view of the way the world should work, and they fight for it. Tirelessly. Relentlessly. Without cease.

Because the Democrats, who routinely mistake compromise for appeasement, do give up fighting for things like the New Deal (much less the Great Society), the ERA and for the progressive humanism of government, the debate can be controlled by the Republicans and conservatives. Because they do teach their children, and their children's children, that destroying the New Deal, secular education, civil rights, etc., are the highest political values. Even when the Democrats have been right, they . . . have given up.

Which is probably why I'm not a Democrat (oh, god, I'm not a Republican, either!). Even when they've been right, rather than tirelessly fighting for what is right, they've allowed "political expediency" to shape their politics and policy.

Witches burned in Kenya

2008-05-21T14:31:00.001-07:00

Apparently, a province in Western Kenya has been burning witches. Eleven of them, even.

The odd thing I find about this story is that the religion of the witch burners isn't discussed. All the time, and I think we've all had this experience, whenever something terrible happens in a Muslim country the news is very quick to point out the religion of the perps. But here we have a shocking, religiously motivated crime that happens in a Christian country - about 70% of Kenyans are Christian, meaning that Kenya is roughly as Christian as the United States (and Kisii, itself, seems to be dominated by Catholics and 7th Day Adventists) - the religion of the perpetrators isn't mentioned.

Of course, this happens all the time. Christians perpetrate vile offenses, often quite a bit religiously motivated, but their religion isn't discussed. Whereas with Muslims, even when their religion is only tangential to the deeds, is often discussed. In this fashion, the media is perpetrating a lot of discrimination and bigotry against Muslims, allowing people who read the news to easily infer (so easily that I can't believe it's unintentional) that Muslims are far more crime prone than their Christian neighbors. Given the heightened state of cultural tensions between Christians and Muslims (even ignoring the war in Iraq, which obviously has religious connotations - Bush is an evangelical fundamentalist who has explicitly said that his god urged him into this war against an overwhelmingly Islamic nation), the racism and/or irresponsibility of the media makes me pretty pissed off.

My favorite "not a gang" - the CIA

2008-05-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

My favorite "not a gang" is definitely the CIA. In 1996, a San Jose Mercury News reporter by the name of Gary Webb wrote an expose of the CIA using Nicaraguan contras to run drugs into Southern California in order to fund CIA activities in Nicaragua. Yes, you read that right - the CIA were drug runners. They did this because their funding for Nicaraguan black ops had been defunded but it was a priority of the Reagan administration to support the Contras. Very ugly, very nasty stuff.

Gary Webb's career was destroyed. He was called a conspiracy theory nutjob. He couldn't get work. In 2004, he committed suicide after deep depression stemming from, in part, how his work was viciously attacked and he was forced out of a job.

However, eventually, almost every conclusion that Webb reported about was found to be correct by the CIA Inspector General Fredrick Hitz. The Hitz report talks about how the CIA protected over 50 Contra drug dealers who sold crack cocaine in Southern California and how money from these drug deals were laundered and used by the CIA for their illegal Nicaraguan operations. Rep. Maxine Walters had entered into the Congressional Record a memorandum of understanding between the CIA and Justice Department where the Justice Department said the CIA would be free of any legal culpability arising from their drug trafficking operations - the mechanism through which the CIA was able to protect those Nicaraguan drug dealers. Pretty much everything Gary Webb said about the CIA drug dealing was correct - but his career was still destroyed.

However, it is without a doubt that the CIA was one of the biggest crack cocaine distribution gangs in the 80s, their drugs and money fueling not only war in Nicaragua but also in the streets of LA and my hometown, Las Vegas, as gang wars spilled over into neighboring communities.

Interesting to note, too, that out of these investigations, absolutely no indictments were handed down, much less trials and jail time for the CIA gangsters that distributed massive quantities of crack cocaine to Southern California.

I suspect in the not too distant future, we're going to learn a lot about the CIA's activities in Afghanistan concerning heroin. Because no serious accounting has been done to find and persecute the drug dealers of the 80s (or how Air America - the CIA's air program during the Vietnam War - was used to smuggle heroin out of Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s), I think anyone who doubts that the CIA isn't smuggling black tar out of Afghanistan right now is being intensely naive. It's almost impossible to find a conflict in the past 50 years where the CIA has been involved where they haven't smuggled drugs.

Definition of gangster

2008-05-19T13:48:00.000-07:00

Now, I've been reading a fair bit about gangsters in the United States because I'm going to write what is more and more becoming a psychohistorical fiction than a straight up crime novel. Or maybe I'm just being a pretentious ass about that. But in doing the investigation I've really come to the conclusion that the term "gangster" is deeply racist.

You'd think that it wouldn't be, that any person in a gang would be a gangster. I mean, I will right here acknowledge the definition of a gang is a pretty blurry concept in a lot of areas. Many "legitimate businessmen" are involved with "gangsters" and many "gangsters" own "legitimate businesses".

It's part of every MBA grad school in America that you have an outside man - a person not formally connected with your business that can do the things you can't do in order to help your business. So, when a "legitimate businessman" uses an outside man (say, a ruthlessly unscrupulous private investigator) to dig up dirty on a business rival and drops evidence that could ruin that person's life or marriage off to that person with unstated hints about accepting the business deal - that's just business, right? I mean, no joke, that's a standard business practice. Perhaps its legality is tenuous, but how is that any different than a couple of gorillas going into a place of business and saying that the owner should take out an insurance policy because it would be terrible if there was a fire in his nice store. And that's not even talking about the specific connections that people in a great many businesses need to have in order to get things done. In Las Vegas, where I'm from, all the big owners of all the big casinos, and definitely all the owners of the little casinos, have connections with a number of organized crime figures. Yet . . . those businessmen aren't ever called gangsters, despite for decades working hand in glove with "gangsters" - helping them to steal billions of dollars.

So, all the time these books will focus on people with Italian or Jewish names as the gangsters, but the people with the Anglo names that are equally part of the criminal activity won't be called that. Indeed, I can't think of a single "Anglo gang" - gangsterism in America seems to be defined by some sort of ethnic identity. You can have an Italian gang, or a Jewish gang, or a black gang, but a non-ethnically identified white gang? Nope. It doesn't happen. White kids don't do organized crime. When they behave the same way as gangsters, it's just called business.

Researching a new book, gangsters and anecdote

2008-05-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

I am doing research for a new novel I'll be writing, and since it'll be set in Las Vegas and deals with Vegas' gangsters, I'm reading a lot about gangsters. Mostly what I've learned about gangsters is all their spiel about honor and stuff is nonsense. Even "made men" are generally, in the fullness of time, killed by other gangsters.

The other thing I'm learning is the definition of gangster is pretty narrowly defined to include some crooks and not others. So, when reading about the legendary skim at the Stardust Hotel, Lefty Rosenthal and, of course, Tony Spilotro are ID'd as gangsters, but all of the guys with Anglo-Germanic names aren't - including, y'know, the people who created, maintained and used the machines that allowed the skim to occur. I know some of the reasons behind this must be because the Italian and (to a lesser extent) Jewish mobsters had fairly elaborate rituals and formal organizational structures, whereas other gangsters equally organized didn't have all the ritualism or formality of organization. Some of it also has to do, of course, with the sensantionalization of Italian and Italian-American gangsters in Hollywood, but it seems that many writers in many ways define gangster to exclude a . . . lot of violent Anglo-American crooks.

Still, a lot of the stories are so much fun. Take this one: in 1951, Estes Kefauver went after organized crime, particularly illegal gambling, in televised Senate hearings. At one point, he had Virginia Hill on the stand. Virginia Hill had been the main squeeze of the then-deceased Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, largely considered the person to have brought modern casino gambling to Las Vegas.

Hill's income at the time was, uh, in the form of gifts by rich men, a Chicago physician, a couple of New York gangsters, Ben Siegel when he was alive, a Mexican millionaire, a concert violinist, all of whom were giving her money.

Kefauver asked her, "How come that's the case, Miss Hill?"

Hill: "Senator, are you sure you want to know why these men give me money?"

Kefauver: "Of course I want to know, Miss Hill."

Hill: "Senator, they give me money because I'm the best damn cocksucker in the United States!"

The answer knocked the toupee off of one of the Senators. It was televised live on TV, all the three big national channels. Classic!

Continued cyborgization of athletics!

2008-05-15T17:34:00.000-07:00

Apparently, Japan's Olympic swimmers were in an uproar because of bathing suits. Speedo has something called an LZR Racer swim suit. Since the LZR's launch, 29 swimming records have been broken, and twenty-eight of those records had people wearing the LZR. Japanese swimmers must use Japanese products, so they were pissed off about this, likening using the LZR to doping. The LZR was developed, in part, by NASA's advanced materials division.

Of course, trying to beat Japan with technology is askin' for a smackdown, so now Yamamoto Corp. has created what they say is an even faster swimsuit. Just in time for the Olympics, so Japanese swimmers can glide exclusively to victory!

The cyborg aspect is, of course, that the high-tech suits serve as a second, almost frictionless skin. Everywhere the swimmer's body propelling a swimmer serves as drag to slow them down. Reduce drag and you get a faster swimmer!

Now, none of this has anything to do with the athletes. The quality of the athletes is now less in question than the clothing they wear. To break records, swimmers now need super-slick bathing suits.

Which, of course, makes me wonder when the concept of physical sports will go away entirely. The shoes you wear, the clothing you wear, whether or not you have mechanical feet - all these things are technological developments, not training and exercise developments. I wonder how long it will be before we're forced to acknowledge that we are, as a whole, more interested in the technology than the athletes, in the swimsuits and not the swimmers.

If I had a billion dollars, I might think about that sort of thing. Leagues where I don't care if you dope, or use shoes that make you jump higher and faster, and just focus on creating the most kinetic athletic entertainment experience possible. Like pro-wrestling with gadgets!

Atheists and the argument of epistemological uncertainty

2008-05-13T00:48:00.001-07:00

Fairly often, I come across some atheist who rubs me the wrong way because I am sure there is no god and then says, tut tut, dear fellow, you can't be epistemologically certain about anything, therefore you can't really say there's no god. I hate that argument. It's so silly!

While I acknowledge epistemological uncertainty in this life, everyone I know makes pretty absolute statements. They say "the earth exists". They will also say "Batman doesn't exist". Which is the more interesting point for me. Because . . . how do they know? Have the really scoured the entire universe and checked every possible place Batman might exist? No. Because there is a sufficiently compelling narrative to explain the existence of stories about Batman without having to search everywhere in the universe. The same is true with god - we have compelling historical, sociological, psychological and archeological evidence about the creation of religion all over the earth. We know the process, have seen the process happen again and again, through which religion is created, we know much about the historical events around the creation of all major religions which fit into this pattern. We all these powerful and consistent facts that explain everything about the development of religion - include the idea of god - that fit in with the broader tapestry of human knowledge. But then what we're expected to do is ignore all of this human knowledge because of a smidge of epistemological uncertainty.

And, almost always, because these people are unbelievers, they do not actually believe in any god enough to be religious in any sense. So, I often bring my brows together with confusion. If they don't believe in any god enough to act on this knowledge, where is their claim to believe in the possibility of this god? Because, y'know, if you admit to the possibility of god, then Pascal's wager makes quite a bit of sense. Sure, maybe the Christian (or whatever other god you might choose) might not exist, but maybe they will, and you really improve your odds of not burning in hell or whatever from nothing to "a slim chance you chose right". But yet there they go, living their atheistic lives without the possibility of god's existence entering their mind when choosing a choice of behavior. Except to annoy other atheists who are just a fraction of a percent more certain than they are about the non-existence of a god.

So, perhaps it is more ultimately accurate for me to say I don't believe in a god to the limits of epistemological certainty. But that seems cumbersome. In normal speech, I just don't believe in god and think that quibbling about arguing about the limits of epistemological certainty is generally quite a bit off target - especially coming from admitted non-believers!

Interestingly, this is the argument that religious people, themselves, often use. They'll try to say the epistemological uncertainty about the origin of the universe, for instance, justifies belief in god and then improperly generalize that to mean their god. This is, of course, the god of the gaps, which is a intellectually cowardly and insupportable notion. But it is to be expected from religious people - it's when atheists admit to the possibility of a god because of those gaps that make my eyebrows knit together.

The Archbishop of Westminister wants Christians to play nice with the godless!

2008-05-10T01:56:00.000-07:00

The Archbishop of Westminister wants Christians to treat atheists and agnostics with deep esteem. I laughed and laughed.

I mean, obviously, it'd be nice to be respected by Christians. I like being treated with respect! And I feel the reason I'm so militant is largely because after years of trying to be respectful to Christians I got deeply tired of their lack of respect so I started getting more and more aggressive until, y'know, I wrote Simon Peter.

I find this statement as a backhanded way of saying that, y'know, it's just a well-known fact that religious people don't respect or esteem non-beleivers. So, at some level I know it'd be nice for Christians to treat atheists respectfully.

But so long as Christianity is a religion, that can't really happen. The problem isn't one of respect, in the end, but that sincere religious people feel morally compelled to act on their religion. And no religion is based in honest reason. In the end, all religions take certain facts for granted - unalterably for granted. The usually take the physical existence of their god as a fact beyond dispute, and they usually take their primary religious works as truth beyond critique or reproach. The problem is that religious people use religion to make decisions that effect me, and they make these decisions on grounds that are beyond reason.

For instance, the Archbishop of Westminister is against gay marriages, against birth control, abortion, stem cell research, human cloning and a bunch of other things. Not because they hurt people. Indeed, they sometimes provide considerable help to people. Like condoms. They protect people against STDs. And they allow people to rationally plan families. How is this bad? Even vaguely? Even if you take the position that "fornication" is immoral, how can protecting yourself and your partner from a disease be immoral, too? Or explain how gay marriage is immoral? In all of these things, ultimately, they have to say that their god believes them to be wrong and it doesn't matter the rational explanation. They're wrong because Jehovah said so. And these people are advancing these positions because of their religion. In my democracy!

So, even if they pretend to listen to what atheists say, and say "please" and "thank you", well, there's a deeper problem than that, once that can't be fixed by superficial politeness. These religions, based on arbitrary authority, are doing things to the world. Things that need to be stopped. And so long as religious people believe these things based on their invention of divine authority, atheists will attack religion itself. Because religion is a stumbling block to making the world a better place. Which is the real problem with respect between atheists and religious people.

Another pervert messiah! And a contest!

2008-05-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine posted this news story on their blog about a pervert messiah being arrested. My friend's post mentioned my research for Simon Peter into this area so I suppose it's relevant to this blog, it being very close to the central premise of one of the books I've written.

Many of the founders of religions are deeply twisted people. Because of how religions whitewash the founders of their religion, this can be hard to see. We can see this whitewashing in progress in, say, Scientology, a cult that managed to survive it's insane founder. All of L. Ron Hubbard's human flaws are being culled by Scientology to create a mythology of him being this enlightened, benevolent person working for the good of all humankind - standard messiah stuff.

Likewise, when looking at any so-called messiah, it is important to remember that none of them say that they're crazy perverts, money-grubbing frauds or deeply disturbed people in need of psychological help. They all say they're around for the good of everyone, full of love and peace. It's pretty predictable stuff.

But pretty much every religious person that you can actually study in history has been deeply sexually twisted. I'll give a couple of examples.

Muhammad, founder of Islam, had thirteen wives or concubines. Thirteen. One of the people he married, calling Aisha a "woman" is a stretch, was six years old. Even Muslims admit that he consummated the marriage when Aisha was nine or ten years old. This is the stuff that's in the historical record, this is what we know about.

Even so, it is brushed off by many historians - even non-Muslim ones. The most interesting argument is when they talk about his first marriage to Khadija - he was loyal to her until she died. It was only then, when he was about fifty, that he freaked out and starting marrying and engaging in concubinage, when he was the leader of a large and growing religion that regarded him as a sacred being. I think this supports the idea that messiahdom makes a person insane - it wasn't until Khadija died and all his ties with the fallible, mortal Muhammad were gone that he felt comfortable reveling in his godhead, which had grown huge by the time of her passing.

The actual historical record of Muhammad is scant, too, coming almost entirely from Muslim sources. There are some Persian and Byzantine documentation of his life - he was definitely a real person - but they dealt only distantly with Muhammad and largely with his political life. His personal life comes to us from Muslims, exclusively, and even there we find this man who engaged in sex with children and kept concubines.

Jumping ahead to an American case, we have Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism. In his religion, against the standards of his time, he created a religion of polygamy. Compared to Joe Smith, Muhammad was pretty tame. Joseph Smith had around thirty-four wives. Thirty-four. Joseph Smith damned to hell those wives who did not except polygamy! Joe Smith also married women who were married to other men. He told the first woman he bullied into this position, Zina Jacobs (at the time), that unless she married him that god would take away Joseph Smith's authority. Must be nice to be able to tell a woman you want to fuck that god himself said that she must fuck him. He'd do this time and again, and so would Brigham Young, who had something like fifty-four or fifty-five wives. He occasionally demanded that wives married to other men should be divorced so he could marry them! .

With L. Ron Hubbard, not only did he repeatedly seduce wives of Scientologists, but when he started the Sea Org - a flotilla of ships that operated in international waters after various pressures of government forced Hubbard into hiding - he would have "messengers" do his bidding. They were pretty young girls of around 14 years of age. Occasionally, Hubbard would sleep with them. Naked. I don't know if it's more or less perverted that he didn't have sex with them. But he did it, which is deeply weird.

Other so-called messiahs, like David Koresh or Jim Jones, would do things like outlaw marriage except to the messiah, and openly have sex with all the women they wanted in their little twisted compounds.

As far as I can tell, sexual abuse and messiahdom attend each other. I don't know of a single religious messiah that wasn't a pervert, who didn't do some really twisted, sick thing with sex.

So I want to know what my readers think! Or readers anywhere. Is there a messiah who existed in history that wasn't a pervert? I won't accept a messiah whose life is only recorded by religious people, there's got to be some legitimate history out there about the person. Has it ever happened that a messiah hasn't been a sexual weirdo?

Depression and not-depression

2008-05-05T22:25:00.000-07:00

This is about the most personal post I've ever made on a blog! Here it is. I suffer depression. Personally. Immediately. And after taking medication for it, it is clearer than every how crippling depression is.

I'm saying this because, well, I mean, honestly I know I'm not risking anything, as about five people will ever read this, but I am sorta daring people to take umbrage with the idea of depression. A lot of my life, a lot of people close to me have said that the problem has been a character failing. A form of weakness, and if I just applied myself more and better that's all it would take. Man up, cowboy! Stuff like that. This was told to me by some members of my family and some previous close friends. It's easy to believe when you're told it. And for years my mind has told me that depression and mental illness are real, and that people who claim mental illness are not weaklings or "faking it", that they are not to blame. They're not. But while I sincerely believed that, for my own part, I didn't take those words to heart. I persisted in believing that the troubles I have in my life - such as the crippling anxiety and depression about the process of getting published as a writer, and the various problems I've had with authority, employment, etc. - were not because of some stupid chemical in my brain working improperly. I bought into the myth that I could only be held responsible for my "failings".

But now, in light of what I am feeling here and now, it is clear to me the anxiety and depression I felt, the terrors in my head of both success and failure, were at least in part a disease. Something in my brain doesn't work right, the wiring is messed up a little bit, creating a powerful dread that spirals into a hard and dark depression without rhyme or reason. It is difficult for me to describe the change in my mood - the improvement. All the drugged experimentations of my youth are nothing compared to the profound change that has overcome me these past few days without any of the mental confusion of drugs. (Tho', to be honest, the way I feel now is very like the day after I've taken LSD. I feel cleared and focused and unafraid, intellectually energetic and curious. Which I think is very interesting.)

But I'm saying this because I will not feel any shame for this disease I am suffering under, so I'm gettin' it out there. Mental illness is real, it's more crippling than many physical illnesses or injuries (for instance, I find depression far more debilitating than any physical injury I've had; I'd much rather have a broken leg than depression!) and it can be treated.

Where are the anti-Christians?

2008-05-04T17:23:00.000-07:00

So, where are the anti-Christians?

By anti-Christians I don't mean people who hate Christians or atheists. I'm taking about the Christians who accept the truth of Christianity but fail to worship the Christian god. I don't even mean Satanists who think that Christianity is bogus, but the people who go, "Yes, the metaphysical order of the universe is as the Christians describe it, but I am taking a principled stand against god. Even if it condemns me to hell."

Because the way I see it, there's a lot to object to concerning the Christian god's ordering of the universe. Even beyond the absurdity of an all-benevolent omnipotent being allowing random pain and suffering into the world, what with all the natural disasters and cancers or whatever, but the total two-faced nature of religious literature. Where are the people who accept that Jesus died for our sins but . . . don't consider that being worthy of worship?

Where are the anti-Christians?

An IDer lays it on the line about faith and reason!

2008-05-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

Over at Stardust's blog she posted about the movie Expelled. Like pretty much all atheists, she's offended at the links between Hitler's genocide and evolutionary biology. I'm offended! It's offensive! It's a terrible slur and not true.

But this is about Stardust's post about Expelled, right? Right. Well, her blog was trolled by a a fundie Christian who thought Stardust was being ridiculous. It's . . . amusing. The fundie is a young woman of about 17 years of age who is full of vim, vigor and idiocy. I will let her speak for herself:

And, in response to your question, "What are ID's scientific predictions, what are its unifying principles, and what experiments have been done to support your ID theory? WITHOUT THE MYTHOLOGY BOOK." Alright, telling me to do so without the Bible is like telling you to prove one of your bunk theories without the world or without your brain.

WHOA! I mean, you don't get it much clearer than that! When I read this quote to my wife, she said, "That's your primary objection to religion in a nutshell." Yes. You have this person who's saying that the problem with evolution is that it relies on our knowledge of the world, and that is irrelevant to what's in the Bible.

So, no, she can't prove intelligent design without the Bible. Which means it's not science, of course. On the other hand, what's in the Bible is more important than the mere world and reason.

I laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

A bit of a rant on cultural imperialism

2008-05-02T00:14:00.001-07:00

After reading The World Republic of Letters, I was pretty horrified. The basic thesis of the book is that international literature is largely formed by a small group of editors in Paris and to a lesser extent in London and New York. That these editors decide what bits of literature the world over are internationalized.

The horror came over me because I realized how homogenizing this must be - and, indeed, I find international literature to be very much of a particular cast. I mean, take magical realism. It is very much the sort of thing that white middle class people like - it's about extraordinary renditions of fairly ordinary things but with shades of the exotic. Some time later I recall talking to a South American - I don't even know who he is! - about magical realism and though I do not remember the person, I remember what he said very well. He said, "That's not what South Americans really read." He told me that science-fiction is huge in Latin America. I read science-fiction so I said I'd never heard of it, and he said that almost none of it has been translated. Then my mind veered towards this world republic of letters. A group of college educated middle-class Frenchmen (and almost certainly most of them are French men) would have little interest in Spanish language science fiction. What those French editors want is literary fiction - the same stuff that literary fiction writers in the US, and England, and France write, but written exotically. The quality of international literature is being defined as nothing more than what appeals to Western educated French people. It was right then that I really understood what cultural imperialism meant - the attitudes of those white well-to-do Western college educated French men were defining world literature and by doing it, they would create a self-fulfilling system. The more they define "international" literature as what appeals to white well-to-do Western college educated French men the more the continuing standard of quality will be so defined. Like how it's impossible to talk about English literature without someone bringing up Shakespeare, even tho' . . . he's not that good by today's standards, and even by the standards of his day he was . . . sorta . . . shallow. But you can't say that, because Shakespeare has come to define English language literature.

The only place that I have a good idea of what I'm missing is Japanese fiction. Due largely to the efforts of a small group of Japanophiles in the United States, to some extent the "republic" of letters - which is a misnomer, really, it's far more like the oppressive racist aristocracy of letters - has been circumvented. Japanese animation has brought over Japanese comic books which is now translating into bringing over Japanese popular literature. But it's limited, and rare. What goes on, even in fields I'm very interested in, like science-fiction, remain opaque to me.

The same thing happens everywhere. So, the Wikipedia article of the day - yeah, yeah, I know some of you don't like Wikipedia, but I do in large measure because it is way more likely to have information I want than a traditional encyclopedia, like up-to-date comic book summaries - they have it an Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray He does stuff like the Apu trilogy, Ghare Baire and Shakha Proshakha. He would influence people like Mrinal Sen.

Ray's movies are . . . I mean, they're what almost all foreign movies I see are. They're these personal and family dramas! Look at what Ray did, what Sen did! Nothing but personal and family dramas. And with both directors the articles will go on and on about how wonderful and splendid they were and I found myself thinking that we're back in the territory of the international republic of letters. That what we praise is what art house movie people praise.

I know what Indians actually watch - and it isn't these movies! Indians watch a lot more stuff like Dhoom 2 than they do the Apu trilogy. Who watches stuff like the Apu trilogy? Well-to-do Western educated Indians, who contact their well-to-do Western film contacts and international acclaim is given to movies that are not representative of India cinema.

What I feel is going on is that . . . they're not interested in Indian cinema. They're interested in seeing the reflections of the Western artistic aesthetic outside of the West. What Indians are actually interested in isn't nearly as important, to the people who decide what the world sees about all of the parts of the world, as a narcissistic reflection of their own aesthetic. It's a racist pat on the head. We'll acknowledge Indian cinema, or South American literature, if it conforms to the standards of a tiny section of Westerners - almost all of whom are rich, college educated white men. We'll be glad to let them into our circle if they act like us.

I hate that, and I just had to say something.

May Day or, as we call it in America, the National Day of Prayer

2008-05-01T12:18:00.001-07:00

In much of the rest of the world, today is May Day or the International Workers Day. It's what the rest of the world has instead of Labor Day. It has socialist and communist roots, so Americans don't celebrate it - instead we were given Labor Day. I don't like Labor Day. I do like May Day. It won't be until workers unite that we'll have any real chance of changing the world.

For a long time, May Day was nothing in America. Most Americans didn't, and still don't, even know that this is a big worker's holiday in most of the rest of the world. But recently it's become the US National Day of Prayer.

It's one of those holidays that really twists in my gut. First, it does that thing that happens when religious folks get defensive about religion - it lumps them all together. Sorta forgetting that virtually every religious person in the world is condemning people of other religious fates to a variety of horrible events, mostly in the form of eternal punishment. But for little get togethers like this, the first thing that everyone pretends to do is forget that folks in those different religions hate each other's guts, too. But I guess they hate and fear atheists more, which is absurd, because atheists aren't the people going door to door or standing outside of churches trying to convert people to their cause.

The second thing that is actually happening is that the National Day of Prayer is being hijacked by fundamentalist Christians. PZ Myers had a link on his website that linked to this little article about how the multi-faith NDP celebrations have been taken over by the fundies in the form of Shirley Dobson. Which is what people with brains in America knew would happen from the outset. One of the things I repeat again and again in religious discussions with moderates is that the face of religion in America is fundamentalism - because moderates spend all their time trying to convince atheists that they're not like those nutjobs, they aren't spending too much time trying to convince their co-religionists to stop being nutjobs (which would be a more effective way of getting us atheists to shut up, if religious people had the guts to clean their own house, by the way). Tho' I guess that makes sense, too. Fundies are crazy. Us atheists might be adamant, but there's not any chance we'll burn your house down or kill you, which isn't a guarantee with fundie nutjobs.

Still, I obviously loathe everything about the "National Day of Prayer". It was founded in bad faith and intellectual deceit and has been taken over by stupid reactionary religious fundamentalists.

Religious child abuse in Wisconsin

2008-04-29T11:26:00.000-07:00

Recently, I blogged about a family that prayed while their daughter died. It appears that, now, the parents are going to charged with second degree reckless homicide.

You idiots, the "Lord" was not "testing your faith". Your little girl had diabetes. God doesn't cure amputees and also not diabetes! The family said, according to the police report, that they do not believe in modern medicine. When her parents noticed that her legs were "skinny and blue" they decided it was a "spiritual attack" and "prayed nonstop". Even as their daughter was completely uncommunicative, semi-comotose and refusing to take even liquid, one of their friends urged the parents to get her to a physician but the father remained "steadfast and confident" that prayer would work.

Interestingly, the Wisconsin DA that's pressing ahead with the case is making a stand. For some bizarre reason, Wisconsin has a law that protects child abusers if their child abuse is religious in origin. To put it like the newspaper did: "Wisconsin state law appears to allow an exemption from child abuse charges for parents who engage in treatment by spiritual means through prayer." An exemption from child abuse? The DA says that law doesn't apply to murder. I'm disgusted that it applies to child abuse.

For some time now, on this blog, I've been saying that it is normal for American religions - and many religions worldwide - to abuse children. What with all that hell business. I have opined that society protects religious child abusers in a way that they would not protect anyone else. Even I had not been cynical enough to look for actual laws that protect religious child abuse. I would apparently be wrong. In Wisconsin, it's on the books that if you deny a child medical treatment it isn't child abuse - who cares if the child writhes in agony with shattered limbs or whatever. Wouldn't want to infringe on the parent's religion!

Still, I hope the Wisconsin DA in this case overcomes that legal hurdle and smashes this law and ends the very idea that religion can be a defense, on any level, for child abuse.

Another "theological" argument I really hate - "it's because of free will"

2008-04-25T00:24:00.001-07:00

Man, when religious people make the free will argument, I about want to scream. I think that if humans have free will, we only really have a tiny amount of it. Not only are we limited in the things we can actually do (say, we can't kill with our minds or travel backwards in time or whatever it is that flips your switch), now imagine all the things you'd like to do but are prevented doing and if you can muster it try to imagine how many more things there are to do that you can't imagine (it's easier to imagine all the things a person considerably dumber than you can't imagine, and then imagine how much more things a person that much smarter than you could imagine for you, hehe). I mean, at any given time, our options are pretty few. I think they're getting bigger because of education and technology. Cave men simply didn't have the option to play video games, for instance, or work on magnetohydrodyamnics. So, human will (if it exists at all in some larger sense) is nevertheless limited by our biology (what we are physically capable of doing), our technology (the number of additional options our big brains and opposable thumbs give us) and our imaginations (discovering new ways to use our biology and technology). I think that if people really think about it, they'll find this to be true concerning free will - we don't have a lot of it, really.

But all the time, Christians will use the free will argument. "Why is there evil?" "Because god doesn't want to interfere with human free will."

It makes me think of force. One person can force another to do it. I don't even mean hold a gun to their head and give them a choice. I mean grab them and drag them away. Or I can just kill someone. They might not want to die, their free choice is screaming for life, but the minute I chop off their head - that doesn't mean anything. So, obviously, humans don't have unlimited free will. People are physically forced to do things all the time - they're beaten, raped, killed, kidnapped, arrested, imprisoned, the list goes on and on. Most of the time, it's terrible when it happens. But it does happen. But I'm supposed to believe that god really cares about human free will - that he cares so much that he doesn't interfere with it . . . but has created the world where other people can interfere with my free will.

Ah, ha, the religious person will say, all of that can happen because god doesn't want to interfere with their free will, either! They will argue that if the god interfered with people's ability to hurt one another. We're free to do whatever we biologically and technologically can do, even to other people and even if it violates their free will.

This is such a vapid argument that I find it terribly embarrassing when people make it - but it gets made all the time. The reason it's vapid is because we are already limited in our ability to violate the free will of others. You can't kill someone with your mind. You can't go back in time and kill their grandfather. If religious people are right, their own god has innumerably limited their ability to violate another person's free will. How would a few more rules, not moral rules, but physical ones that prevent people from hurting each other with their bodies be any different than all the rules that prevent us from hurting other people with our thoughts? We're already so massively limited, what would a few more limitations - limitations that would enhance expression of free will - really hurt? And, of course, some people can't even hurt people with their bodies. Say, people born without limbs. Sometimes, their god does choose to deny some people the ability to even hurt other people - do those people not have free will? The argument is preposterous. Before you know it, you've got so many exceptions and caveats that it's obvious that free will, as religious people describe it, is a chimera.

The other thing I hate about free will is that "will", generally, can't be demonstrated to exist. I know people who will study up a storm, but won't eat right and exercise (indeed, it is true that I am one of them, hehe). I know athletes who will look after their bodies, but can't read about the sixth grade level. Heck, how many pro-athletes have the "willpower" to become top athletes, but then can't control their spending? How many people go to work, work hard, and then cheat on their spouses? So, what is this general quality called "will", anyway? Can you show me where it exists, what it really does, who has it and who doesn't? No, you can't. No one can. It, like many aspects that apertain to describe a mental state actually just describe the biases of the people or culture who invented and use the term.

I can't think of any good arguments involving human will or free will. People should feel free to try to come up with some. ;)

John Freshwater teaching creationism in an Ohio school, and Pharyngula's bizarre reaction

2008-04-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

Recently, PZ Myers of Pharyngula brought up the case of John Freshwater. He's a science teacher who keeps a Bible on his desk.

He also, "When Freshwater taught students about electrical current, he used a device to leave a red mark in the shape of a cross on the forearms of some students". He used electricity to do what?!

Some parents describe the "red mark" in a little more detail:

The News received a fax Tuesday from attorney Jessica Philemond of the law firm Isaac, Brant, Ledman & Teetor, who issued a statement from her clients, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of their child being retaliated against.

The fax stated, “We are religious people, but we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child. The burn was severe enough that our child awoke that night with severe pain, and the cross remained there for several weeks. ... We have tried to keep this a private matter and hesitate to tell the whole story to the media for fear that we will be retaliated against.”

That "make a red mark" on the child's arm was a burn. This sonofabitch was burning children. That he was doing it with the cross is adding insult to injury, but PZ Myers, the Columbus Dispatch and the Mount Vernon News are focusing on the religious implications of this and they're sort passing by that students were intentionally burned by this teacher!

If this guy was puffing on a cigarette and asking kids over and snubbing it out on their arm, that would be the story. The story would be about how this guy is a child abuser who snuffs out cigarettes on student's arms. But because he uses a gadget to brand children with the cross, it's about . . . religion?!

I have said before that most religions are systemized child abuse. I have said before that religion gets a free pass in our religion to abuse children. I have said that even atheists still believe that religion is somehow exceptional and should be held to different standards than other beliefs and organizations. That not even PZ Myers can see that this is child abuse and that child abuse is way more important than the church and state religion, and the fact that seemingly everyone else is missing the fact this guy is branding students I think amply displays all of this.

C'mon, guys, this is about the child abuse!

Fight fight fight at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre!

2008-04-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

Sometime I'm amused, hehe. Apparently, last night my time, there was a fight in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Orthodox Palm Sunday.

See, first, "Israeli police had to break up a fist fight that erupted between Greek and Armenian Orthodox clergymen at one of Christianity's holiest sites." And then "an Armenian priest forcibly ejected a Greek priest from an area near the tomb of Jesus. They say the attacker felt the Greek priest had spent too long at the tomb."

Here is the best part EVAR: "When police arrived to break up the fight, some were reportedly beaten back by worshipers using palm fronds."

Apparently, as the article relates, the rivalries between the churches that control the site date back to the "aftermath of the Crusades". Wikipedia reports that the six churches that control the Holy Sepulchre (Eastern Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Ethiopian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox) were basically played off against each other by the Sublime Porte during Ottoman Imperial days. I guess that's what the BBC referred to as the "aftermath of the Crusades".

Interestingly, the doors of the church is in the hands of two Muslim families, dating from 627 CE.

So intense is the rivalry between churches that control the Holy Sepulchre that the rivalry "often leads to the neglect of badly needed repairs when the communities cannot come to an agreement among themselves about the final shape of a project. Just such a disagreement has delayed the renovation of the edicule, where the need is now dire, but also where any change in the structure might result in a change to the status quo disagreeable to one or more of the communities."

I couldn't help but find myself thinking that this is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It is the tomb of Jesus and one of the chief sites of Christian pilgrimages since ancient days, since at least the third century of the common era. The people who control this, one would hope, would be amongst the holiest of people that their respective churches could find.

But despite all of that, they can't come to accommodations. Fist fights are common occurrences. Rivalries prevent needed repairs from being done. They have a cycle of abuse about one of the holiest sites of their religion.

I mean, for crying out loud, it'd be like France and England still bugging out over what happened during the Hundred Years War! Could you imagine the French President saying to the British PM, "Because of the cruel fashion that your people engaged in the Black Prince's horse raids, we decided to not repair the Channel Tunnel on our end"? Or the various people at the United Nations using centuries old conflict to let parts of the UN building in New York crumble into decay?

It's insane. Religious people are so jealous - I mean, isn't that a sin? isn't pride like that a sin?! - of their special privileges that they can't even agree to keep Jesus' tomb tidy! They can't figure out a way to refrain from fist fights at the site of the resurrection!

Though I did find the bit with the cops being attacked by palm frond waving Christians to be comedy gold, hehe.

Spiritualist fraud in England and God is for Suckers

2008-04-21T17:32:00.000-07:00

Great Britain is enacting a law that makes it possible to sue "spiritualists" for fraudlent claims that they make by allowing consumers to sue psychics under currently existing consumer protection laws. Psychics and mediums, of course, are freaking out that they might have to prove that they can do what they claim to do, or at least be very clear that they're purely entertainers or clearly state that their results are unreliable. Also unsurprisingly, they're not trying to claim protection as a religion.

I, myself, am all for this. I don't think that religions should be given special protection. A law is a law, and fraud is fraud regardless of the religion or spirituality of the fraud. If I whip up some snake oil in my kitchen and claim it cures all ills, I'd be arrested and put in prison. Why should a faith healer be able to make similar miraculous claims? I think it's silly for them to claim that we should ignore that they lie to gullible people because their con has a religious gloss to it.

And if we should find that religion, itself, is fraudulent . . . well, I think that's a very good question. I largely do think religion is fraudulent with people making a lot of money manipulating the needy, credulous and gullible for their own personal gain. If anyone doubts that religious people can live like kings, look at where the Pope lives - his huge palace is supported by supernatural claims that take money, often from the world's poorest people. I think that this should be gotten out into the open.

But that's not really the thrust of this post. What strikes me as odd is that, at first blush, most atheists do not take this position. Over at God is for Suckers there's a post about these people being subject to consumer protection laws. Oddly, the original poster and most of the comments are . . . pro-religious.

Stardust says, "As much as I would love to see a rational and secular world, I am just not sure if this is the right way to go about it. Obviously, if spiritualists do such a booming business, it is just giving the public something that it wants to pay for." What a bizarre line of argument. I find myself wondering at Stardust's opinion of heroin - the public wants that, too. Or other consumer protection laws - should snake oil salesmen once more be allowed to sharp people? Should despicable people be allowed to take advantage of people in serious illness to make money because "they want it"?

In the comments section: "You can’t legislate morality. And you can’t legislate to prevent humans from acting stupidly. Buyer beware." That's from Old Viking.

And newsamus says, "Why should we care what kooks want to spend their money on?"

Tony Dee says: "This law smacks of 'Big Brotherism' and that scares me. As they say a sucker is born every day and we can’t change that. Can we!"

Then roger ramjett says, "Don’t care if someone wants to pay for advice. They can get it for free from me though. It is entertainment and shouldn’t be banned."

I mean, these people are supposed to be atheists! But time and again they seem to be saying that it's okay for these "spiritualists" to commit fraud.

This is a larger problem, generally, with atheists. It's pretty hard, for instance, to find an atheist - even an atheist - who'll say that Jesus was an idiot. That he made no goddamn sense, that the very few nifty things he said are completely swallowed by bile against women, condemnations against people who wouldn't suck his proverbial cock and frivolous battles with the Pharisees, inane stories and the like. That he said nothing particularly original and didn't even say it in a particularly original way. It is my experience that almost all atheists will struggle with great energy to find reasons to praise the person of Jesus.

Likewise, atheists will be abstractly anti-religious but often have trouble leveling specific critiques against specific religions. Most atheists would rather keep the discussion on the fairly abstract level - in my experience, most discussions about atheists and religious folks are almost totally decontextualized of specific religious content. They'll talk about how the science behind the big bang theory is better than creation mythology, or deconstruct the god of the gaps, or argue that intelligent design is not true. What they won't do is confront religious people who argue with them about their own religion. They won't say, "Sorry, I'm not going to let you weasel out of talking about the details of your faith" and then attack the specific ways their specific religion is racist, sexist, classist, makes mystical claims waaaaay behind anything that can be hidden in the god of the gaps (like how this guy was brutally executed and stayed dead for three days and got up - that's not intelligent design hiding behind irreducible complexity, that's just silly and impossible and not any god of the gaps business). But discussions about religion almost never go in that direction.

Indeed, it is my experience when asking a person what their religion is in a religious discussion, I'm almost always questioned why I feel that's important. Which in addition to being a silly question (it's like getting into a political discussion and hiding what party you're in - why would anyone even want to do that?), it seems to me to demonstrate how taboo specific critiques against religion are - the question itself is odd. (For what it is worth, moving the discussion to the person's particular religion is a very powerful tool for advancing an atheist's point - it's much easier to discuss why the Bible is absurd than to say why metaphysical uncertainty about the origin of life or the cosmos is not justification for belief in an abstract god.)

I feel that the reluctance of a good portion of atheists over at God is for Suckers to be of a piece with that. While being personally atheist, they nevertheless still want to give religious people special treatment. Because there is a vaguely religious component to spiritualism and mediums and astrologers and faith healers, they should be treated differently than secular frauds. Religion, in the minds of many atheists, is still special.

For my own part, I'd like to see that attitude done away with at all levels of society. Religion is just a thing that people do. It is not a special thing. So long as it is a special thing, protected by society and laws in a number of ways, they will continue to do terrible things because they'll be able to get away with it. Like the Catholic Church's official position on pedophilia inside the Church to hide it, to cover it up, and obstruct justice - or faith healers discouraging ill people to seek real medical treatment while picking their pockets. This is real stuff that they get away with, and it hurts real people. It hurts little kids and cancer patients - and that's not even hyperbole! End special treatment for religions today!

The the award to the new big social evil goes to . . .

2008-04-21T12:05:00.000-07:00

Religion! According to a poll taking in Great Britain by Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a Quaker institution that in 1904 created a list of the biggest social evils (at the time, slavery was on top of the list) decided to update it. Nowadays? The biggest social evil, as seen by the 3500 Britons who participated in their poll, is religion.

"The researchers found that the 'dominant opinion' was that religion was a social evil'. Many participants said religion divided society, fueled intolerance and spawned 'irrational' educational and other policies." And, "A poll by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation uncovered a widespread belief that faith - not just in its extreme form - was intolerant, irrational and used to justify persecution."

Obviously, I think that's true. I mean, right now, Europe is going through a new phase of religious intolerance. Right wing forces are aligning to introduce new immigration policies, including making it harder for foreign residents to gain citizenship, in large measure because of fears that Muslims are going to trash the country. The response is strongest in European fundamentalist religious circles (often leeches on big business, of course - that's the traditional fascist methodology in Europe) against this "Muslim threat". Or, rather, again, we have religion tearing apart society. Who knew? And it isn't like the US' war in Iraq doesn't have powerful religious components, and obviously 911 was primarily a religious act, and it isn't like anti-Semitism has gone anywhere.

Still, it's interesting to see England - a country that still has an official Christian religion - basically just going, "Yeah, religion is a problem." I approve, I approve.

Pope Rat and Pedophlia

2008-04-20T12:00:00.000-07:00

Over here in America, Pope Rat deigned to talk about the pedophilia scandals that have rocked the US Catholic Church. What he said is very interesting. He said that the Catholic Church would not tolerate pedophile priests. He said that the real problem was the complicity of the Church hierarchy.

Well, what was his position, then, when he was in position to say? When it was in his hands. Well, let's find out. Apparently, in 2001, the Observer newspaper got a secret memo from then Cardinal Ratzinger, a letter sent to every bishop in the world, when he was chief in the Inquisition – the Catholic Church organization which oversees these things. The memo “asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood.”

Huh.

“Ratzinger's letter states that the church can claim jurisdiction in cases where abuse has been 'perpetrated with a minor by a cleric'.”

Huh.

“It orders that 'preliminary investigations' into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger's office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals in which the 'functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests'.

“'Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,' Ratzinger's letter concludes. Breaching the pontifical secret at any time while the 10-year jurisdiction order is operating carries penalties, including the threat of excommunication.”

Huh.

So, at least in 2001, Pope Rat was, on possible pain of excommunication, which is the worst thing that can happen to a Catholic and is functionally (in their eyes) a ticket to eternal damnation, ordering church officials to obstruct justice in the cases of pedophilia. Is it just me, or is this not the problem? That these cases are secrets of the Catholic Church, and even the victims are sworn to secrecy under threats of the most dire punishment possible from the Catholic Church?

I mean, if you want, read the memo! It's . . . fucked up.

On page 2 it has a real gem. After talking a bit in Catholicese about how it's the responsibilities of the Church to punish the rapists, they actually advises the bishops (to whom the letter is written) to “transfer him to another [assignment]” if the rapist priest isn't doing the penance directed by the Church! Wow.

On page 3 on bullet point 11, it says that everyone in the Church that knows about the rape, again under threat of excommunication, must forever be silent about the crimes.

It just goes on and on. It repeatedly stresses the secrecy of everyone involved, including the victim, it has creepy stuff like . . . if two witnesses can't be found not only do the accused get away scot-free but all evidence is to be destroyed. I read it and grow more horrified!

On page 11 on point 52, okay, I'm not making this up, it says, “In every way the judge is to remember that it is never right for him to bind the accused by an oath to tell the truth”! I have rarely read such a depraved document.

But, there, that's the story behind the story. This sonofabitch comes here and pretends that everything is nice, everything is wonderful, but he's personally given orders that the Catholic Church is to obstruct justice, swear everyone to secrecy under the most dire threats, transfer guilty priests around.

To me, that memo proves that Pope Rat is a criminal, guilty of a massive obstruction of justice, of massive criminal conspiracy including racketeering. He shouldn't be lionized. He should be arrested.

The Two Sides – Atheism vs. Religion . . . Oh, Really?

2008-04-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

In my experience, most folks, when they talk about atheism do so from a position that I am considering increasingly, well, bizarre. It's the position of religion on one side and atheism on the other. What strikes me as bizarre is that ignores the actual way that actual religions behave. Because it isn't really that it's atheism vs. religion, or not just that, it's that it's Jews vs Muslims vs Christians vs Hindus vs all the other mutually incompatible systems that exist out there. Atheism is really just one more into the mix – we reject religions pretty much to the same extent that they reject each other. (This is even ignoring how members of the same broad religion often reject their co-religionists. It happens all the time on this blog - “Oh, but they're not real Christians”. Or Scotsmen. Or whatever.)

Oddly, however, save when they're in the presence of an atheist. Then, it's like they're somehow presenting this unified front to atheism. So, religious people talk about religion like it's this one, singular unified thing with this single, unified worldview against which atheism is its chief opponent. Which is foolish. A Muslim rejects a Christian's worldview as much as an atheist. If that Muslim is correct, the Christian is going to fry in the same grease I do. I don't even know what's going to happen if the truth is that Zeus is up in Olympus shaking his head at how stupid we all are for ignoring his divine power. I guess it'd be Tartarus for the lot of us. My point being that most of the world's religions are pretty mutually incompatible, so it's pretty hypocritical to act like it's really atheism vs. religion. It's more like atheism vs. [a bunch of people who also hate each other's guts, as evidenced by all the religious conflicts going on in the world].

Interestingly, most atheists are also caught up in this – we often forget that people who defend religion aren't really defending religion in a generic sense, but are really defending their particular religion under the umbrella of some generalized, and almost wholly non-existent generalized religion.

What this allows them to do is argue from a position of false generalization. All religious people believe in their god or gods from a very particular viewpoint that is not generally served by the very idea of a defense of religion. The fact that there might be someone, somewhere who has a brand of religion that isn't logically incompatible with rationalism doesn't mean that almost all actually religious people belong to a heavily supernaturalist religion, generally believing in one or more anthropomorphic divine beings to which superhuman magical powers are routinely attributed. But not the same ones, not the same beings, not even the same superhuman magical powers.

Indeed, someone who believes in “god” in the sense that it is the universe, whatever that universe might be, is far closer to the position of atheism than to fundamentalist Christian religion. But it also ignores the fact that public face of religion isn't a materialist pantheist who doesn't believe in supernaturalism and calls the universe and laws of nature god, but largely Christians, Hindus and Muslims who believe in all manner of supernaturalist claims. It's curious that even atheists often let this slide and argue a position that almost no one who engages an atheist in discussion actually holds. They do not defend “religion” in some generalized, holistic sense, but their own religion - after all, almost all of them condemn each other to some form of misery at least as much as they condemn atheists.

So, I think atheists should stop that. We should clearly ask what religion a person belongs to before engaging them in conversation about religion. I think that's fair. It'd be nice to know what you're really talking about, right?

Another little pet peeve in language!

2008-04-17T12:13:00.001-07:00

One of the things that vexes me most when getting into discussions about religion is how many religious people will totally ignore that 3/4ths of the world's population belongs to three religions (Christianity, Islam and Hinduism), and talk about how small to fringe religions are as socially meaningful and important as the big three.

It drives me nuts! Yes, I know that Baha'i people aren't particularly crazy as religious people go. Too bad there are only about six million of them. I know that Unitarian Universalists aren't whack jobs. Too bad there are so few of them, then! To act as though these small, politically impotent and socially irrelevant faiths (sorry, all you Baha'i and UU people out there, it's . . . true) are the normal way religion gets done in the world, or America, is nuts. Absolutely nuts.

It is also this total conversation stopper! Because, well, if I was Baha'i or a UU member, I'd be clear in distinguishing how my religion is different from those other crazy people religions out there. I would say, "Well, while it is true that currently religions are parochial and close-minded in large, that does not have to be the case" or something like that. I wouldn't defend religion generally by pretending my tiny minority religion somehow represented religion overall.

But it one of my linguistic pet peeves. How religious people defend the whole of religion by acting like mainstream Christianity, Islam and Hinduism don't exist or aren't particularly meaningful to general discussions about religion. It is a dirty trick that decontextualizes discussions about religion in absurd ways.

Disappointed in Sam Harris . . . by which I mean he's a gutless chicken

2008-04-15T20:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not very fast with the news, sometimes. I don't like reading the news, because I feel most of it is just retreaded lies. Even tho' it makes me quite a bit behind the times, I like reading about things in books where people have had the time to actually get data rather than producing copy for the news cycle. However, it has come to my attention that noted atheist proponent Sam Harris has opined about the Democratic nomination contest.

Apparently he supports Barack Obama. The article is What Barack Obama Could Not (and Should Not) Say. It's a fascinating article. I'm easily fascinated by newspaper pieces, but some of this stuff just really thrills me.

Being a reasonably insightful person, Harris makes some astute observations - in particular the extent to which American politicians feel obliged to bow down to fundamentalist religious figures.

The stultifying effect of religion is everywhere to be seen in the 2008 Presidential campaign. The faith of the candidates has been a constant concern in the Republican contest, of course--where John McCain, lacking the expected aura of born-again bamboozlement, has been struggling to entice some proper religious maniacs to his cause. He now finds himself in the compassionate embrace of Pastor John Hagee, a man who claims to know that a global war will soon precipitate the Rapture and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (problem solved). Prior to McCain's ascendancy, we saw Governor Mitt Romney driven from the field by a Creationist yokel and his sectarian hordes. And this, despite the fact that the governor had been wearing consecrated Mormon underpants all the while, whose powers of protection are as yet unrecognized by Evangelicals.

Like every candidate, Obama must appeal to millions of voters who believe that without religion, most of us would spend our days raping and killing our neighbors and stealing their pornography.

Absolutely true. I wouldn't care about religion at all - any more than I care about various other delusions and fantasies that people have - except for the tremendous social power religion has in America. Including the fact that even very secular candidates like Obama have to kowtow before some religious nutjob. Religion twists the social fabric of America into bizarre knots.

Yet, Harris goes on to say . . .

The problem of religious fatalism, ignorance, and false hope, while plain to see in most religious contexts, is now especially obvious in the black community. The popularity of "prosperity gospel" is perhaps the most galling example: where unctuous crooks like T.D. Jakes and Creflo Dollar persuade undereducated and underprivileged men and women to pray for wealth, while tithing what little wealth they have to their corrupt and swollen ministries. Men like Jakes and Dollar, whatever occasional good they may do, are unconscionable predators and curators of human ignorance. Is it too soon to say this in American politics? Yes it is.

Ignoring for a second that I feel the biggest problem with religion isn't the ignorance and false hope, but the promotion of fantasies above the evidence of one's senses, one's experience and reason (which isn't the same as ignorance - but something beyond it, I feel), he says that religion is run by poltroons for profit, that it's generally bad, it's obviously and demonstrably bad but . . . Obama shouldn't say it. Because it's "too soon".

Man. What a gutless load of crap! This is the problem with the Democratic Party - they're a bunch of gutless fucking wimps that won't fight for what they believe in! I mean, here's Sam Harris, who's career is basically pointing out how horrible religion is - that nothing religion does can't be done better without religion, who points out that religion is organized delusion, that it's responsible for innumerable horrific acts around the world, blah, blah, blah. And this man, this deeply atheist man, this man who in every other way I can find is committed to atheism is willing to, because of Presidential politics, abandon his principles.

To me, that's abandoning them when you need them them most! Here he is, in the position to come out and take a stand, but the stand he takes is, basically, atheists shouldn't bother to stand up for their political beliefs because "America isn't ready". How gutless! Rather than calling on atheists in the Democratic Party to band together to stop this craven toadying to religion, he says America isn't ready.

How long do atheists have to wait? He's not even proposing some sort of plan. He's not saying, "Well, thirty percent of the Democratic Party is atheist or strongly agnostic, and if we gather that energy up into a voting bloc, we can really get something done in the party - really make them notice us." No. He just praises that chump Obama and says we've gotta wait.

He knows the stakes. Not just those profit preachers, but the extent to which America's military actions around the world are guided by religion - fundamentalists just love it that good Christian soldiers are over there fighting Islam. There are lives at stake - thousands, maybe millions, over the next four years. But we've got to wait. Disappointing, weak and hypocritical.

Interestingly enough, the religious right in America doesn't have that attitude. They don't go to their constituents, "Wait." They go, "Now is the time, because now is always the time to stand up for what you believe." And it's worked splendidly for them. So, y'know, in addition to be weak ass hypocrisy, it's also not good advice for atheists to wait. No one gets anything by waiting, not in politics, and everyone knows it.">

Edit: Apparently the Friendly Atheist is also in the camp of atheists who justify voting for a religious man. In this case, it's because he has a gut feeling about Obama. Perhaps that gut is right and Obama is not terribly religious (few Presidents are in any meaningful sense), but that's almost as bad, hell, maybe worse than if he was religion. If he's not religious, Obama's a hypocrite. If Obama won't stand up on this, what else won't he stand up on?

Increasingly, it also reminds me of the utter denial of the anti-war people last time around. I remember, time and again, from anti-war people and organizations such as MoveOn.org how, despite Kerry's words to the contrary, Kerry was the anti-war candidate. It's insane how people are willing to ignore the words and deeds of candidates to invest them with all their hopes and dreams!

I mean, hell, we don't have much of a choice. If you're going to hold your nose and vote for any of the major party candidates, at least say it because, y'know, you're more concerned about Iraq, or health care, or the environment, than you are about religion. Say that, despite your atheism, the religion of the candidate isn't that important. Don't ignore the candidates words and deeds, tho'. That's crazy.

Chav

2008-04-15T14:08:00.000-07:00

My new favorite word is chav. Someone used it in a response to me and I didn't know what it was, so I had to look it up. A chav refers to people "who mainly derogatory slang terms in the United Kingdom for a stereotype fixated on low quality or counterfeit goods". What a great word. I can see the exact sort in my mind's eye - some kid with more money than sense mindlessly aping hip-hop culture at the food court of the local mall.

It apparent derives from the Romani word chavi, meaning child. Related is the the word charva which means prostitute. Anyone with real experience with urban culture then should know immediately the deep meaning of the word as a spurious rip-off. A fake. A poseur. Someone who superficially adopts the outwards signs of a misunderstood culture in order to be seen as hip by equally clueless people.

These are the kinds of words I love. Things with Latin and Greek roots and eat me - all those guys who pepper their speech and writing with Latin and Greek words are total chavs. :)

JK Rowling is Crying

2008-04-15T01:37:00.000-07:00

JK Rowling is in America to testify on the publication of an unofficial encyclopedia of Harry Potter material, as found here in this BBC article. The case is about this fella who runs a Harry Potter website and wants to use the compiled material from his website to publish his unofficial encyclopedia of Harry Potter-ana.

The article is fascinating. It almost completely ignores the question of the legitimacy of unofficial guides of published material. Hitherto, it has been commonplace for there to be a plethora of unofficial guides, encyclopedias and the like published. Go down to any bookstore in America, and you'll probably be able to find a dozen different guides to Tolkien's works. Go to the philosophy section of any school library and you'll routinely find third party analysis of published philosophical writing that is also copyrighted. Honestly, insofar as I can tell, it's a pretty simple issue. Third-party guides to literature have been commonplace since before the printing press. Which doesn't mean that Rowling is going to lose. She's got a billion dollars, and the overwhelming trend in copyright law is to give more and more power to the owners of copyright.

What I find fascinating is the utterly emotionally manipulative character of the article. So, we leap straight into it. In paragraph two, "She said she had stopped work on a new novel because her legal concerns had 'decimated my creative work'." And then in paragraph three, "'I really don't want to cry,' she said as she gave evidence in her copyright infringement case against writer Steve Vander Ark and his publisher RDR Books." OhmyGOD. Are we really supposed to feel sorry for this billionaire?! I mean, that's what she is. A billionaire.

Well, in paragraph four we get, "Ms Rowling, who denied the case was about money, accused Mr Vander Ark, a librarian, of 'an act of betrayal' in using her fiction as the basis for his guide." It's a guide about HARRY POTTER . So, yes, it's going to use her work as it's basis. That's what literary guides do. They use the literature that they pertain to guide as the basis for the guide. It's sort of like using France as the basis for a guide about France. What else are people who are going to write about Harry Potter supposed to use as their guides? But also note the note of manipulation. It's betrayal. Like these people owe her something? Who betrayed her and what was the betrayal? Especially she she claims it's not, oh no, not about money - even tho' the guide has largely existed on the Internet for years, it isn't an issue until it's to be printed, but it's a betrayal and not about money. Ugh.

And then, "The author said she is not sure if she now has 'the will or the heart' to write her own definitive encyclopedia, the proceeds of which she had intended to donate to charity." So, in addition to again harping on how emotionally effected this billionaire woman is, they have to throw in the suggestion that in addition to the publishers of the proposed guide being horrible people who have badly hurt that nice Ms Rowling woman, they're also going to starve babies. If they hadn't hurt her so, she really, really would have donated the proceeds from those book sales to charity.

It is only in the last two paragraphs of the article, after wading through the rest of that dreck, that it was mentioned that . . . maybe the other side has a point. That the publication of literary reference guides is normal, and if Rowling wins it'll broaden copyright protection to include reference guides to published material. That, despite Rowling's tears that she dabs away with solid fucking gold handkerchiefs, there are actual legal issues to be addressed in this case, and it simply isn't those nasty colonials wanting to betray Rowling (remember, it's not about money . . . even though the very idea of copyright protection is very much about money and always has been, but let's not bring that up, either) but maybe, just maybe, there is an actual legal issue at stake.

Still, I'm pretty amazed at the shoddy coverage and blatant emotional manipulation of the piece. And, more generally, I think it's representative of the sort of free pass that Rowling gets in the media, which is largely responsible for her success, I feel. She can do no wrong. Somewhere along the line, it simply became meaningfully impossible to talk about Rowling in anything other than the most glowing of terms - and if one does chance to dislike her (deeply mediocre) books, it's not that you just dislike her books, it's that you're a terrible curmudgeon trying to ruin everyone else's fun. Likewise, if you do something that stands against the Harry Potter financial empire - an empire of increasingly Star War-esque dimensions - it isn't just a legal proceeding with the other party merely disagreeing, you're hurting JK Rowling's feelings! I mean, go and read the article! It's mostly about how all of this has hurt her feelings. All of this, of course, serves to increase my intransigence towards her on all levels. I think she's a deeply mediocre author that has just happened to be used by publishing firms as a vehicle for them to make a lot of money, so right from the onset she represents what I dislike about the publishing industry. But over and above that, she is apparently a whiny little girl who substitutes pouting for reason.

Religious folks who believe in evolution and why I think they're basically . . . silly

2008-04-04T22:04:00.000-07:00

Now and again, I'll get someone who says to me something along the lines of, "Not all religious people are like those crazy people who want to throw evolution out of schools. We are the intelligent, reasonable religious people and nothing like those other people." Then they almost always go on to say that since there are some religious people who believe in evolution it is unfair and/or illogical for atheists to say religion is ridiculous.

A freely concede that some religious people believe in evolution, but the rest . . . doesn't follow. The reason why atheists - or at least this atheist - oppose religion and think it's goofy isn't because some religious people are intellectually dishonest about evolution. It's annoying when they are, and not just because they're religious but because they all too often outright lie and manipulate in order to justify their absurd beliefs. But, really, in any big movement you're going to have some lousy people who lie and twist things around. Atheists have them, too, the mouth-breathers who have read Nietzsche with all the comprehension of a fundamentalist flipping through the Bible, or middle-class kids who just ohmygod love Stalin or whatever.

What really gets me aren't the silly, stupid and unscrupulous people, but the absurd beliefs. Even if a religious person agrees with evolution, they're still believing in some other equally absurd miracle!

I mean, it's wrong to think that their god intervened in the manipulation of genetic material to create human life, but it's okay to believe their god is an omnipotent being that created reality? What religious people who believe in evolution are saying is, "Oh, our miracles are better than the miracles of the people over there. They have silly, stupid miracles, as opposed to our splendid and amazing miracles."

It's daft! The giant sky pixie argument is daft for whatever it is they use it for, equally daft in all cases, because there's no proof that any god exists or has existed. That is the real problem with religion - that on the basis of some generally pretty lousy book people are saying that things you can't see, and make no real sense, are more important and more real than things you can see and things that do make sense.

So, c'mon, guys, just because you believe in religion doesn't mean that you should get any slack. All the miracles are stupid. All of them.

Sometimes I get showed up . . . religious folks stick to their guns

2008-03-31T11:19:00.000-07:00

One of the flip things I say about the relative levels of real faith attributed even by believers between science and religion goes thus: "When you get sick, you might pray, but you go to a doctor for the cure." Well, apparently, not everyone does. This family let their little girl die because rather than taking her to the doctor the decided to let her wallow for about a month in agony as diabetic ketoacidosis with such fun symptoms as stomach pain, muscle wasting and air hunger. Instead of going to the hospital or contacting the family doctor, they instead decided to pray and when that didn't work they prayed a little more. And their their daughter died.

If they'd taken to the hospital? Not a problem. Diabetic ketoacidosis responds very well to treatment and almost all patients make a full recovery.

Which does mean I'm wrong now and then. At least some people will just pray to Jesus instead of see a doctor . . . but what will happen is treatable conditions became fatal. They apparently still have faith that their god will raise their daughter from the dead.

What I find most fascinating is that the case has merely been referred to the DA's office. In any rational society, when parents pray while their child dies a slow wasting death would obviously be a sign of the most grotesque form of child abuse. They have other children, too. I mean, if an atheist did nothing while their child wasted away from this terrible illness when all they had to do was take the kid down to the hospital - I mean, this was not a quick death, either, but a slow, lingering one where the kid's last days would have been agonizing, the whole sweaty sheets gasping and clutching at the bed business, for days - I don't imagine for a moment that anyone would doubt it's child abuse and that the parents would not only be arrested but their other children taken away from them. But religious folks? Hey, they can murder their little girl, but because they believe in magic sky fairies there's a good chance they'll get off scot-free. Because religious child abuse is the norm in America, and much of the rest of the world. Religions are allowed to consistently abuse their children, because they they are treated differently than any other organization on earth. They're special. And because of that murderers are now walking free, immediately threatening at least two other children.

Hypocrisy with intelligent design proponents?! NO WAY, right? RIGHT? There's no way they'd lie . . .

2008-03-18T17:10:00.000-07:00

For several months I've known that Ben Stein, a hack of an actor, has decided to get into the intelligent design craze by making a movie, Expelled, which purports that biology is keeping intelligent design out of biology. Well, duh. And astrology is kept out of astrophysics but why is it no one has a problem with that? ID isn't science, so, duh, ID proponents are being kept out of science. Part of what science does, when it works, is separate the crazy nut jobs from scientists. When ID does something scientific, folks will change their mind. I mean, OK, you people think that some designer introduced genetic changes into terrestial life - prove how, when and/or where and then you'll be taken seriously. Until they, just continuing to assert that a designer exists is going to be thought of as religious whitewashing of evolution, something that's been going on for a hundred and fifty years! So, duh, intelligent design is being kept out of science by scientists.

Beyond the inane concept of the movie, itself, is the tricks they thought they had to pull to get scientists to talk to them. On his blog, PZ Myers explains how they tricked him. One of the producers of Expelled contacted him under false pretenses, asking to do an interview for a totally different movie.

I just love it that people think that intelligent design isn't a total chimera invented by religious people to give specious credibility to their corrupt and decadent archaic worldview.

But wait, there's more! This NY Times article says that several scientists were contacted under exactly the same false pretenses, including Richard Dawkins and Eugenie Scott.

According to the NYT interview, Ben Stein said that there were no false pretenses and "no one asked what the movie was about." Of course they didn't! They'd already been told what the movie was about, it's just that they were lied to.

I love this stuff. Just the pure chutzpah of it. The absolute contempt not only for the truth, but the subtext that the truth just isn't important. I mean, if I was Ben Stein and I'd just learned that my producers had lied in order to get people to agree to be interviewed for this movie, I'd be sorry. I'd be mortified. Instead, he's, like, "Oh, they never asked." Fuck you. They didn't ask because your producer told them. What a mealy mouthed little twerp!

But, hey, I guess when you so clearly have nothing resembling the facts on your side you've got to do something else. Just the level of contempt for the truth and trickery is astonishing to me, even after all these years of it.

Attack on the Idea of Religious Diversity

2008-03-08T11:49:00.000-08:00

Given the link between belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic hygiene. There are still a number of cultures in which the germ theory of disease has yet to put in an appearance, where people suffer from a debilitating ignorance on most matters relevant to their physical health. Do we “tolerate” these beliefs? Not if they put our own health in jeopardy.

Even apparently innocuous beliefs, when unjustified, can lead to intolerable consequences. Many Muslims, for instance, are convinced that God takes an active interest in women’s clothing. While it may seem harmless enough, the amount of suffering that this incredible idea has caused is astonishing. The rioting in Nigeria over the 2002 Miss World Pageant claimed over two hundred lives; innocent men and women were butchered with machetes or burned alive simply to keep that troubled place free of women in bikinis. Earlier in the year, the religious police in Mecca prevented paramedics and firefighters from rescuing scores of teenage girls trapped in a burning building. Why? Because the girls were not wearing the traditional head covering that Koranic law requires. Fourteen girls died in the fire; fifty were injured. Should the Muslims really be free to believe that the Creator of the universe is concerned about hemlines?

Sam Harris
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

I think this is a very interesting point. ;)

Democracy in the Democratic Party?

2008-03-07T15:20:00.000-08:00

I don't want to become yet another person who does nothing but chatter on on their blog about politics. How many people have to give their disorganized, grabasitic opinions about politics on the Internet? Geeze, I know it's the right of every American to bitch and moan about our government . . . but the madness must end somewhere. Well, apparently, not with me.

Because, well, I just found out that the Democratic Party doesn't believe that all Americans should get to vote in their primaries. What happened, it appears, is Michigan and Florida decided to move up their primaries and the Democratic Party didn't like that - so they stripped the states of their primary candidates!

Even barring such issues as the Democratic Party's superdelegates . . . how can anyone think that this "election" is democratic (in the small-d sense) when they are discluding almost ten percent of the US population. How can this Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama thing have even a shred of legitimacy when ten percent of the US population is barred from voting in it! And how can this be even vaguely legal?

And the controversy right now, how I learned about this, isn't that people are outraged that tens of millions of Americans have been disenfranchised - but that there's a furor over whether it's right for those votes to be counted (or re-cast, even) because of the closeness of the Clinton-Obama struggle! I have found no articles (maybe they exist - if you know where they do, send them to me!) condemning the anti-democratic nature of excluding 10% of the American population from part of the process whereby voters determine who the next President will be. That ten percent of voters are denied their franchise seems irrelevant to newspapers.

I believe this is allowed to happen because people do not see the political parties as being, well, part of the government. I think much damage is done to the American political process because, while obviously being part of the government, they claim to be separate from it. Even now, many people reading this are going, "Well, they aren't part of the government! Political parties aren't part of the government."

I think that this is a naive position to hold. You have two groups to which virtually every politician in America are beholden. Each of these groups receives between tens of millions to hundreds of millions of dollars from the US government every year (depending on what kind of elections are taking place). The government uses its own polling facilities to take their votes. How, after all of this, after the massive and direct influence they have over virtually every politician in America, the amount of money that they take in from the public treasury, and way that their entire apparatus is supported by public infrastructure, can they not be considered part of the government? But I think that's what people think - that the disenfranchisement of tens of millions of people by the Democratic Party in Florida and Michigan is some sort of procedural thing, a simple party matter. I think it is a sign of the extent to which Americans don't give a damn about meaningful democracy.

So, well, I'll say it because it's true. Given the disenfranchisement of Florida and Michigan, I do not believe any person who takes democracy seriously can believe that the Democratic presidential primaries have even a shred of legitimacy. I think that there should be a national - no, international outcry against the theft of millions of American's right to vote. I think it is astonishing, and a testament to the weakness of American democratic institutions, that this is allowed to happen.

Tony Blair, Professions of Faith and JP Morgan

2008-03-07T15:18:00.001-08:00

Tony Blair is to teach "faith" at Yale University. During the time when he was the prime minister of one of the world's most powerful countries, he mostly kept a lit on his religious faith - but, now? Well, he's getting all sorts of appointments. He is, apparently, starting something called the "Faith Foundation". What is it? Who knows. The only Faith Foundation I could find was started six or seven years ago to help the "abused and neglected". Tony might want to know that the name is taken.

I, myself, am deeply creeped out that for the long years of his ministership of Great Britian he hid his faith. I mean, I . . . am pretty strongly of the opinion that's the sort of thing that people need to know. I know it was an open secret, but the fact he intentionally hid his religious faith while starting wars against primarily Muslim nations, as well as Britain's internal legislation that affected the millions of non-Chrisitans in Britain, is deeply disturbing. (It also, of course, is the personal link between Blair and Bush.)

But that's not the reason I'm making this post. This is. In the BBC article, there is this lovely quote, "Mr Blair's other appointments have included as a Middle East envoy and an adviser to investment bank JP Morgan."

A religious teaching job at Yale, starting a religious foundation, okay, these are of a piece. Envoy to the Middle East . . . well, now we're getting into a little sketchy territory. I mean, an envoy to a place where many of them regard him as a war criminal? It seems a bit foolish to me, but not incompatible with the other things, right? But then, y'know, working at a huge investment bank.

I mean, just . . . just . . . wow. How do these guys do it? This verbal devotion to religious faith and then working for JP fucking Morgan? "Oh, I devote my life to Jesus Christ . . . and reposssing people's houses." Which, due to the housing crash here in America, is precisely what JP Morgan is doing at an unprecedented rate.

It absolutely boggles my mind how they can regard themselves as Christians and how other Christians can regard them as Christians when their acts are so utterly at variance with their professed faith.

The election season is upon us - Democrats, Republicans, Tigers, oh, my!

2008-02-26T12:11:00.000-08:00

As you may have noticed, I don't often opine about political matters. But it's election season here in America and I am feeling the urge to weigh-in on the subject.

The Republican candidacy is more or less insured in the person of John McCain from Arizona. I'm going to say this out loud so people, particularly the Europeans that read this blog, can get it straight and clear: McCain is in a lot of ways to the right of George Bush. Arizona is perhaps the most viciously pro-business state in the Union. Their entire industry revolves around grinding Arizona down to sea level, throwing the rubble in a hopper and pouring cyanide over it to leech out metal. This is the same Arizona that has vigilante patrols going back and forth along the border with Mexico to keep all the brown people out, while on the other hand paying them pennies on the dollar to do the worst work in Arizona. Like, one of the county prisons in Arizona is open air in the desert where the sheriff brags that it costs thirty cents a day to keep prisoners in tents feeding them a starvation diet of beans. Arizona is it's own world, especially outside the cities. But it's the state from which McCain comes, and Arizona has a tradition of right-wing libertarianism and fetishizing the rights of property owners. It has a tradition of literally murderous racism towards Indians and Mexicans, and is one of the most stratified societies in the US.

Above this, McCain is quite open in his belief that the US doesn't flex it's military muscle enough. If McCain is elected, he will seek more imperialist wars that will kill millions. He will drain America's treasure to secure military action abroad, and if he is allowed to do this for the life of me I can't see how a draft won't be enacted.

On the Democratic side, things are still up in the air between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. To me, they're the difference between red and blue Play-Doh. Their differences are superficial. I will vote for neither of them, because I think their brand of liberalism is ultimately worse for the world than the rightism of McCain and Bush. I came to this conclusion during Bill Clinton's term in office when he lead America into a savage attack on welfare in American history and got away with it without a peep from anyone. He did other things, too, like fuck up the environment by continuing the Reagan-era deregulation of industry, not to mention NAFTA which is as regressive a treaty as anything on earth, designed to make sure that US manufacturing jobs vanish to other places . . . which has, I should add, exactly what was happening. So, I learned some time ago that Democrats like Obama and Hillary Clinton are largely just conservatives who can give y'all a kiss and a dance before they fuck you. You'll get fucked, mind, and fucked hard, but the Democrats will give you a kiss and a dance first. They'll say how pretty you look in that dress before pushing it up over your head. So, I won't vote for them, either.

And even if I could vote Democratic, it wouldn't matter. Red and blue Play-Doh. Hell, with McCain they constitute red, blue and green Play-Doh. They're all candidates that have been vetted by the Powers That Be and been found acceptable. They all go in front of the cameras and say one thing and then meet behind closed doors with billionaires to insure them that they'll play ball where it counts.

That said, I am finding the contest between Obama and Clinton to be intensely interesting. To me, what is important about this is the US is deciding who they're more comfortable with - a black man or a white woman. And the answer is . . . a black man!

In my political opinion, all other things being equal, Obama is more likely to be elected President. Why? His lack of a record. People will talk about that like it's inexperience, and it is, but there's an interesting epiphenomenon that goes on with senatorial candidates. The very process of being a senator is one of compromise. It's the way the system is designed to work. But during Presidential elections, the compromises of senators looks like weakness. Obama, lacking a substantial record, is largely invulerable from that direction. They attack his "lack of experience" because they can't attack his record. Both Clinton and McCain are vulnerable on their much longer and more involved records (and McCain most of all). But all other things aren't equal. The Clintons - meaning both Bill and Hillary - can run a mean campaign (as Obama is now finding out). As if any of that was the reason why people are selecting Obama!

They are choosing Obama because people would rather have a man than a woman in office. No one I've spoken to about the subject has bothered to explain to me what opinions or policies that Obama has that they prefer to Clinton's opinions or policies. And I have heard a lot of chatter that boils down to "she's a bitch". Which, translated, means, "I don't want a woman as President."

And the press! Oh! My! God! There have been a few times I've felt bad for Clinton, the way the press has been trivializing her and building up Obama as Jesus fucking Christ. You'd see articles with titles like "Barack Obama continues to walk on water" and then "Hillary's hair-do is frumpy". That's exaggeration, but just a little. Now, in the past few days she's been playing the role of cast iron bitch, playing into the stereotype and that's a good idea. For entirely too many people, bitch means "strong". When she was trying to play it above board, keep it to the issues, act from a position of experienced dignity, she was ignored and trivialized. Not any more! Still, the sexism was interesting to see, especially absent any of the race baiting I expected from the press.

(My friend Becky opined that the reason people are preferring a black man to a white woman is that women are really poised to take everything over. That women, generally, are socialized to do those things that need to get done in the modern world. They work together well, they do well in school, more of them are going to college and succeeding in college than men. Entire professions that were once exclusively male domain are under immediate and direct "assault" by women as they succeed in the system obviously better and in greater numbers than men. So, since they can't keep women out, anymore, with an argument of ability, they're striking back in other ways. I think there's quite a bit of truth to this, I should add.)

By which I have concluded that the Americans would, generally, rather have a black man than a white woman as President. It would have been ugly any way it went down - one of them should have backed off until the next damn election rather than do as they've done and driven a wedge between what passes for progressives in the Democratic Party - but the way it is ugly I find fascinating.

Of course, Clinton isn't just going to roll over. The next couple of weeks will be interesting - stuff like with the turban, which was catastrophically mismanged by Obama's side; one of the truths of election politics that even if there is sexism or racism directed at you, if you mention it, you're looking like a weak whiner.

But, still, that's the election as I currently see it.

Christian Science Monitor and me!

2008-02-07T16:38:00.000-08:00

For what it is worth, I'm in this article in the Christian Science Monitor about GodTube. Briefly. In the back. The article, itself, is a fairly unremarkable piece about that less than thrilling phenomenon, GodTube, where the author opines (correctly, I feel, for what it's worth) that GodTube will never be a good mechanism of ministry, but rather simply confirming what Christians (and even non-Christians) already believe about Christianity. The people who go there will go to be confirmed in their biases, either for or against Christianity.

I almost think *I* should write an article for CSM about GodTube, hehe, as it exists in a continuum where conservative Christians are increasingly opting out of secular society altogether. I think that's the more important message behind GodTube, how many Christians are together giving up on anything that isn't overtly and publicly Christian, and a sign of increasing defensiveness and closemindedness amongst particular conservative Christian populations. Tho', I suspect, that sort of gig isn't what the Christian Science Monitor is about.

Still, I'm mentioned!

Corporate Speciation Events

2008-01-22T01:20:00.000-08:00

In many ways, writing science-fiction and historical fiction is my literary destiny. What is futurism but applying what one has learned from studying history into the future? So, as a fiction writer, it makes sense that I'd be interested in historical and science fiction.

Historical fiction is easier in the sense that I don't have to create a setting. But one of the fascinations about science-fiction is precisely that. But for a long time, I have been daunted by the task of writing space opera - with coming up with a setting appropriate for space opera. Futurism gets in the way, or it has, tho' I think I'm breaking through with that. But it was getting in the way because imagining what technology in the future will actually so, after a certain point, is a fool's errand. The promises of even robust technologies like computers might not go where we want - it does very much depend on the actual nature of intelligence and whether we can actually make a computer intelligence. We just might not be smart enough. Much less the ultimate possibilities behind things like nanotechnology, biotech, or emerging neurological sciences.

So, I decided to come at it from the social dimension. After all, technology is hardly the only human art to improve - government and economics will change, too, tho' again there's the question of "into what?"

Then I mashed all this up in my head, and I came out with one of the creepier ideas I've had in a while: corporate speciation events of humans.

Now, one of the more common sci-fi government types is a corporatocracy, of course. But . . . I reflected that different corporations are good at different things. Now, if space flight is expensive to the extent that only corporate governments are capable of affording it, they'll spread their corporate values through the space they own, and it being corporate driven, they will lay material claim to stars and worlds for their corporations. Then I imagined that through great time and distance, these different corporations, who did different things well, would be responsible modifying their employees into the transhuman world.

It hit me. Corporations responsible for the way that humans evolve. I bet I could write something with that setting feature.

Cyborgs out of the Olympics!

2008-01-14T16:19:00.000-08:00

Cyborg Oscar Pistorius isn't going to the Olympics. The IAAF ruled that his carbon fiber feet constitute unfair advantage. This is actually what I expected, tho' I admit that I didn't think the ruling would be so soon. Even if Pistorius' legs do not constitute an unfair advantage (and I, personally, don't think that they do because the technology is currently pretty crude) if he was allowed in one of the things that would happen is additional research into such technologies. Indeed, para-athletics are used for precisely such research, and to showcase it, but right now it's relegated into the ghetto of "special Olympics" or whatever. And moving this sort of thing into "normal" athletics will - and already has - given it a higher profile and probably helped the company that makes the prostheses more money.

I mean, I regard this all as hypocrisy. The distinction between elaborate high-tech training programs in advanced countries routinely give their athletes a technology based advantage over athletes from poor countries. But this sort of thing challenges the macho body image of traditional athletics in a way that personal nutritionists and computerized performance evaluations do not. But the ruling, itself, I do not find surprising as an attempt to preserve the traditional image of athletics.

Still, the genie is out of the bottle. We are entering the initial days of the cyberpunk world. I wouldn't be too surprised if in the next couple of decades some people start to intentionally replace at least some body parts with mechanical parts that enhance performance.

Christmas isn't a Christian religion

2008-01-13T14:22:00.000-08:00

Fairly often, when I tell people I don't celebrate Christmas because I'm not a Christian, people are mystified. They will say something like "oh, by everyone likes getting presents". Not on Christmas I don't. Then they'll say that Christmas isn't really a Christian holiday. Obviously, it is. It's sorta right there in the name. I have opined before about how that lie - that Christmas isn't a Christian holiday - is one of the chief ways for Christianity to retain its social importance as well as a continual lure to people to join their cult.

So, why am I bitching and moaning about Christmas a full month after Christmas? Because of H.R. Res. 847: Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith. Whereat our supposedly secular government says:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives--

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;

(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and

(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world.

It seems that our good ol' government doesn't miss a trick with this one. They seem to grasp the link between Christianity and Christmas. Mind you, they do a resolution like this basically every year. They get in session and, bam, they make a stupid little resolution that, legally, means nothing, except to affirm how spiffy Christianity and it's chief holiday, Christmas, is! I love nonsense like this.

Thought about Hobbes and civilization!

2008-01-08T00:57:00.001-08:00

I had a thought that is worth sharing. One of my reasonably guilty pleasures is the comic Action Philosophers. They're brief descriptions of various philosophy set in humorous comic form! I like them because I like philosophy and I find them funny. In reading number nine - the last, alas - they had a bit about Hobbes and, of course, quoted his bit about without civilization that life was brutish, nasty and short.

My first interesting thought - interesting me at any rate - is that Hobbes is wrong. We are extremely lucky to live in civilization during the period that it works. It took about ten thousand years for civilization to actually work. Humans, generally, were much better off in a pre-civilized state. The average paleolithic human lived to be in their fifties. The average ancient Hellene? About eighteen. This would creep up as time went on, but even when Hobbes was writing those paleolithic humans were better off in terms of diet, longevity, freedom from disease and general quality of life. Interestingly enough, they were also much freer. It takes a pretty organized society to seriously oppress people. Hobbes was just factually wrong, which I find interesting. I've long disliked Hobbes, and it's nice to realize that he's factually wrong.

My second interesting thought is about the nature of intelligence. If humans were just a trifle bit less intelligent than we are, just a little less clever with things, our civilization would never have gotten to the point where the median lifespan was greater than those paleolithic hunter gatherers.

To me, this begs the question if we are seed AI - an intelligence smart enough to make itself smarter indefinitely. For reasons of ego, if nothing else, I'm inclined to think that the answer is "yes", that we are smart enough to get better and better. Saner, smarter, more prosperous, etc. But it wasn't until today, right now, that I realized how close we were to never getting to that point. If we had just been a trifle less intelligent, we could be stuck in a perpetual dark age.

Which might not be much of an original thought, or even very original, but it's the one I had.

Pope still a stupid creep . . . his New Year's mass!

2008-01-01T21:10:00.001-08:00

In his New Year's Mass, Pope Rat apparently said that a traditional family is the foundation of peace. It's all part of the focus his Papacy has "traditional family values". You know, no premarital sex, no divorces, definitely no gay marriages, one biological man and one biological woman in neat nuclear family arrangements. I, myself, have something of contempt for traditional family values, because I've known, both personally, through research and anecdotally, that too many families are actually pretty horrible. As in literally abusive. I think it's only sensible that people leave abusive relationships, or unhappy and unhealthy ones, and I certainly don't think that love could or should be limited to one biological man and one biological woman. Plus, y'know, traditional family values haven't been terribly effective, thus far, in stopping war. In times past, the amount of warfare in the world was even worse than today, even though that's difficult to imagine. But for much of human history, every summer and fall, most of the civilized world was wracked by armed conflict. So, even through simple observation, it's pretty easy to see that traditional families and war can pretty easily co-exist. Unsurprisingly, I think the Pope is wrong, spewing out a religious message without any real evidence to back it up . . . but evidence isn't precisely religion's strong suite.

But what I found more interesting is the last bit of this BBC article. The Beeb says, "His New Year prayer included a plea for renewed global efforts to dismantle nuclear weapons and curb the arms trade." Which sort of highlights the insanity and stupidity of this whole "family is the basis of peace". He spends most of the service talking about the importance of family values but then, at the end, slips in some bit about how we should get rid of nuclear weapons and firearms.

The message is clear. Fags are more dangerous to peace than nuclear weapons. So, fuck you, Pope Rat.

The Eternity Artifact Review

2007-12-31T13:34:00.000-08:00

I mostly don't review the books I read. Most are simply not worth the effort, for me at any rate, of writing down what I feel about them. They're sorta . . . average, hehe. But every so often I read something that is so good or bad that I feel motivated to comment about it.

I'm most of the way through The Eternity Artifact by L. E. Modisett. On Amazon it has four stars. It makes me wonder the criteria that people use to review books.

Roughly speaking, the book is a waste of paper. It's bad in a complex and multi-faceted way that I'll try to get across. I'm going to say what the book is about, now, so this is a spoiler alert. Stop reading now if you don't want to have the plot sketched out for you. The book is about four people, an artist, a pilot, a professor-slash-commando who has kept up with his "commando moves" and a fundamentalist Christian spy and assassin who are part of a mission to outside of our galaxy because there's a stray planet that has an ancient alien city on it. Humans are the only known sentient life in the universe, and their culture is riven by conflict between secular and religious societies.

Calling it "slow paced" isn't accurate. The word is "boring". The story is told from four different first person perspectives, each perspective obviously and consciously attempting to give a different and distinct voice to the characters. Which, I guess, is successful (tho' I'll be talking a bit more about that later), but it means that almost everything that happens in the book is repeated four times. So, for instance, there is a space battle. It is first narrated by a shuttle pilot who is tangentially involved in the fight, but at least has a good seat for it. Then, in the next three chapters, the battle is narrated by the other characters, none of whom are involved on any level, and none of whom have even a good seat for it. It is literally them sitting in couches fiddling with controls or doing something else to distract them from the fact they have nothing to do during the battle. This is not a joke. This happens in a variety of ways with a variety ways, such as finding an alien city with nothing in it it is nevertheless important for three different characters to describe the various details of this alien city with nothing in it.

Indeed, whole chapters pass by, the upshot of which is they find nothing in this alien city. When something "exciting" happens it is literally finding out how the alien windows work for finding a shallow depression in the floor. But many of the chapters are quite literally the characters finding nothing of interest, but doing it from multiple perspectives!

I wonder at the narrative justification for this. I understand the urge to describe things, but he's open that nothing is happening, which makes me wonder why he's writing it down, then.

Part of the problem is, of course, the multiple and redundant points of view. Fairly recently, I posted about one of the cheap tricks writers will use to pad books is multiple points of view. This book is the patient zero of that behavior. One would think that the point behind having multiple points of view would be to illustrate different aspects of your story, and with one of the character's that's almost true, and the characters do, largely, have distinct personalities - but there's nothing to really illustrate because nothing happens. I mean, it's hard to say how little happens because it isn't happening! That the book takes a hundred and twenty pages to even start the expedition to the focal point of the story, that they spend another hundred and twenty pages finding nothing, with a couple of brief action scenes. For the differences of the characters to illustrate different things the story would have to have things happening. It doesn't. Those distinct voices have nothing to say.

Or, more precisely, very little to say. At a number of points the characters make absolute pronouncements. With writers it is, of course, often difficult to tell when it's the character or when the author is using a character to express a personally held point of view. But in any event, these pronouncements are often silly to the point of being juvenile. One of the more remarkable ones is the false dilemma that Modesitt brings up with education. One of the characters is a college professor and he says that individual computer education was a dismal failure, even as he teaches in a lecture class. His justification is that computers present a one-size fits all educational paradigm. This is downright goofy in two different ways. The first is that computer education is already as good as teachers in some subjects, and is rapidly improving. So it's observationally wrong. Second is the notion that a computer teacher would only have one educational strategy, which is nonsense. Different students would be able to use different programs and models to get results, and with even modest levels of learning the robotic teacher would become increasingly better at teaching a particular student. But what really, really made me laugh is that Modesitt's character praises lecture hall. More than any other kind of education, lecture hall is one-size-fits-all education, and it's pretty much the worst way to teach a given subject - indeed, it's often worse than no formal education at all. So, to say that computer learning has failed (when the evidence suggests the contrary) while praising what we know to be the worst system of education that there is . . . it's daft, and shows that author is sounding off when he should be shutting up.

I mean, to say it differently, the characters are just dumb. For instance, the book revolves around finding this "eternity artifact", the product of a highly advanced civilization that is no longer around, in the form of a city that is abandoned. The characters all seem to believe, for instance, that the aliens that created the city are "gone" because they haven't found any "evidence" of them in the centuries of human colonization of the galaxy. And I found myself thinking, "If they're able to build artifacts that work after billions of years of inattention, why are you presuming that they're gone? I'm pretty sure that if they don't want you to find them, you won't." All of this while the characters are even guessing that that aliens are from a different galaxy. OK, then you're basically saying that, yeah, you have no way of knowing if they're around or not. But then they turn around and make these presumptions about them. (It turns out that that the aliens left because the universe had changed. So they made a new one and went there.)

Annoyingly, it's also obvious that whenever a character admits that they're making a wild, specious guess that they'll be almost 100% right. Ugh. But, generally, if you're going to have your characters make absolute pronouncements, it might be a good idea to have at least basic reasoning skills, which the book does not demonstrate.

The book is also flawed with those individual first person voices of the main characters. In particular, one of the characters really leans on his thesaurus and his first person voice is this pretentious and stilted narrative. The character never uses a small word when a big one will do. The upshot is that one of the voices of the narrative is downright ugly. One-fourth of the book is quite intentional uglification of language in order to create an individual voice for the character. Well, okay, success in the sense that the voice is immediately identifiable. But like fingernails on a chalkboard, there's no compelling reason for it. It would have been splendid if instead of wearing out his thesaurus that Modesitt had instead insured what the character said was worth saying. (The character is also supposed to be quite clever, but when a person uses big words on one hand and fails repeatedly at basic reasoning skills on the other hand, what comes across is very far from intelligence, but idiotic pretense.) So, bad literary decision. It's generally a good thing to avoid making 1/4th of your book ugly to read.

The author also has the (fairly standard, alas) sci-fi praise for the military. "Military" as short-hand for "competence" is pretty vexing. Military training isn't better than other training (and in some ways it's worse - military education is . . . I mean, if viewed in terms of educational theory, pretty much the worst of possible models - long, authoritarian based lecture sessions is basically anti-education). Military people aren't any more moral, or responsible, or "honorable" than civilians (indeed, poverty, crime and rates of mental illness are lamentably higher amongst soldiers than the general population). But, again and again, sci-fi authors treat the military like the best depository for a society's cultural values, and as a short-hand for honest, honorable and competent, and it vexes me.

In particular, the military sci-fi shorthand of "commando" for "invincible in combat" is annoying. Elite soldiers are, of course, going to be pretty tough, but they're trained for fairly specific sorts of combat - small unit tactical combat with advanced weapons against military targets. You know, go behind enemy lines and blow up a bridge scenarios. It is what they train to do. (I won't opine about the effectiveness of commandos, generally. I know that there are two schools of thought on the subject - one is that they're absolutely necessary and the other that they're a waste of resources. I suspect the latter is more true than the former, but it's only a suspicion, hehe. I do know that their effectiveness, itself, is in doubt by experts in modern military theory. Even in the real world the correlation between commando and unbeatable badass is questionable even for those situations for which they are trained.) Most commandos are not martial arts experts, for instance. Martial arts plays, at best, a tangential role in commando actions. They have guns. The Rangers, for instance, during training spend two hours practicing what could broadly bet termed "martial arts" during their training. But inevitably these commandos are expert martial artists, tho' that style of fighting has almost zero place in a modern (much less futuristic) battlefield.

The professor-slash-commando character is problematic for me on a lot of different levels. Not only is he given the absurdly pompous voice, and commando is used as a generic term for competent (ugh, literally in the last twenty pages the author invents a new commando competence for the character as a pathetic deus ex machina, it is just magically revealed, so the author can now explain the parts of the plot that made no sense rather than having them be revealed over the course of the novel, which is a bit of crappy writing right there, but to have his explainer explain things the commando has to magically get another complex and technical skill which really has nothing to do with being a commando; it turns out that in addition to everything else, commando means "computer hacker" - no kidding, in the last twenty pages it's revealed he's a computer hacker, ugh). But the character is also involved, in a banal and predictable way, with the female pilot of the story. The romance between the two characters is . . . terrible. It is dull and neither of the characters show anything like real human emotions. But the most frustrating moment is when the characters realize that his arrogant langauge and her terseness are a way to keep others away from them, that they're defense mechanisms to protect their hearts. I started to get interested. A good turn could make me completely re-evaluate the characters. In particular, the awful langauge of the professor-commando needed to come apart. At some point in the book, in battle fury or lust, his voice should have changed into something barely human, I felt, because it was obvious that all of his exercise and mental discipline was to control himself. The ugly language might have been justified if it broke down, if the character cut loose or was torn apart. And then, in this banal romance, the pilot asks the professor-commando, "Why did you stop being a commando?"

I thought, this is it! Here's where he breaks down! But . . . I was wrong. He went on a scholarly tirade about how effective violence encourages power structures to more violence, which is true, but it isn't a human emotion. I waited for him to say, "They turned me into an attack dog. I left because I hated kill people" but it never came. And then they "made love", by which I mean they literally held hands and started into each others eyes. So, in addition to being emotionally retarded, they're also eunuchs. (I'm not sure they actually have sex in the entire book. They hold hands and gaze longingly at each other, and they cuddle, but I don't think they ever actually have sex.)

So the character, who is supposed to be the hero of the book, breaks down on every level. It's rather sad that this is the standard of characterization of award-winning science-fiction novelists.

The book is also supposed to be about fundmentalist religion, in part. But it's not. All the religious characters, so far, have been either literal suicide bombers (and Muslim, at that, ugh) or hypocritical murderers. It presents a powerful false dilemma. You go out of your way, on one hand, to emphasize the honor, egalitarianism and fairness of secular society by presenting the best of that society, while on the other hand show their foes as being little more than orcs. Holy false dilemma! I mean, it is legitimate, of course, to talk about the narrowmindedness and violence of religiously fundamentalist societies But it sort of ignores that even in most fundamentalist societies that the overwhelming majority of the people are, themselves, victims of the religion and the leaders. That most of them accept it because they literally have no other choices than obedience to their theocracy or death. (Which is a far greater horror than the violence they externally impose, I feel.) It's like . . . to make the point that "religions are bad" he has to create these straw men that are virtually caricatures of what they are supposed to represent.

You might want to think about what I said in that previous paragraph - think about it is that it is I who said it. Even fairly casual readers to my blog must get it that I'm not particularly religion friendly. But the way that Modesitt represents fundamentalist theocracies is downright childish.

The other major theme of the book is the dangers of any single-mindedness. When the professor-commando is revealed to be a crackerjack hacker to compel the explainer to explain things, it's all supposed to be dramatic and cool and demonstrate the author's political awareness or whatever. It ends up being pretty goofy. I mean, any time there's an explainer . . . that's generally a bad sign. If you've got to have the last twenty pages filled with a character filling in the plot holes, you're doing something wrong, and when you've got to whip out a deux ex machina to get the explainer to explain, and have the character spew out his plot like he was a comic book supervillain, you might want to rethink your profession. But, anyway, the explainer is a spy who has manipulated the fundamentalist religious forces to attack this alien world and seek the alien artifact knowing that it would destroy the fundie's fleet and provoke a big war with them that the secular forces could win. Wow. Something actually interesting. Too bad it happens only in the last twenty pages of the book, and then instead of being revealed it's just explained. Then there is some tsking and the explainer gets to go free. After all, as he points out, he did nothing illegal. Which is true. He didn't make the fundies attack anything, he just let them know that their enemies were going to make a discovery which they author believed would COMPLETELY CHANGE THEIR SOCIETY FOREVER . . .

Oh, yeah, the discovery of aliens is predicted by the characters to utterly and forever change fundamentalist society or something. It was pretty stupid, and one of those cases where the author doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about. The reasoning here is that if becomes common knowledge that aliens exist, technologically superior ones at that, religion could collapse because of the evidence that humans weren't special. Because, as we all know, that's what happened when science proved that life evolved naturally, or the universe was created without divine intervention, religion just collapsed and died off. Right? Religions would not merely form specious arguments to justify away the find, nope, while maintaining all the cherished religious truths. Ugh. It's idiotic. Long before we start exploring outside of our solar system, religions are going to have in place all the arguments they'd use if we find a technologically advance alien species.

After all, the Bible contains numerous non-human intelligences, already - angels and demons. Islam has angels, demons and djinn, who are capable of being good Muslims; Islam already has a position about aliens, functionally. They should be Muslim, hehe. Which is what universalist Christian religions would agree on, too, once they agreed the aliens had a soul, which would almost certainly happen because they'd be technologically advanced and at least as smart as we are. Dead aliens, like in the book, might keep the question up in the air, but fundies would go, "So what if there was life before humans? It says in the Bible there was. Humans were created last. Next question." It wouldn't be much of a big deal. But it gets invented into this HUGE, ENORMOUS THING and I'm scratching my head about it because it isn't that difficult a question to address, theologically speaking.

But . . . I'm done. The book is actually worse than this. There's the whole business with the fundie spy that I won't get into, tho' the upshot is that the character is meaningless. Just . . . meaningless. The whole story that involves the character sputters out to a stupid conclusion. The character could have been totally removed and the book would have lost nothing. So, it's worse than even my review suggests. It's bad. Don't read it. And I'm going to smack the guy who gave it to me, hehe.

Defending Christianity and Christmas

2007-12-24T14:57:00.001-08:00

Part of the reason I wrote Simon Peter is because a lot of atheists have this respect for the person of Jesus that I find bizarre. Even when they reject the supernaturalist claims of religion, they often think that Jesus is this wise man, or legitimate social reformer, or all these high sounding positions with all these lofty goals. In my reading of the Gospels, Jesus is just another fake as liar pretending to have supernatural powers to satisfy his ego, who (like most other "messiahs") committed suicide by challenging the state to a contest of wills. And when atheists and those opposed to the inevitable excesses of Christianity then turn around and support Jesus they're supporting Christianity.

Now, the same seems to be true with Christmas, too. If a person actually rejects Christianity, why do almost all atheists I know, usually without any real comment, celebrate the chief religious holiday of the Christian faith?

When pressed, the only even semi-good answer that is given is that Christmas is actually pretty secularized. (The answer that it is tradition is nonsense. At one time, for all atheists, all of religion was traditional, and there are lots of things that were traditional - slavery, monarchy, whatever - that we're better off without. The answer of "it's tradition" is, to me, deeply . . . ill-considered.) Of course, to some extent that is true. But it's like atheists who take Jesus "seriously". Sure, you can secularize the message of Jesus, claim he was a wise man social reformer against Jewish and Roman corruption who spoke in religious terms because that's the paradigm he existed in. And, yes, Christmas can be secularized to be about . . . whatever it's supposed to be about. Honestly. I can't take seriously that it's about anything other than greed once divested of religion.

But at the same time that we're secularlizing Christmas, Christians are using that as a justification to intrude their religion into public social spaces, for instance. Because Christmas is for "everyone" - because non-Christians have bought into it being "secular" - you have public nativity scenes, Christmas trees, a complete barrage of religious themed music that permeates every level of society, and a whole month where religious people are allowed to shove their faith down everyone's throat.

It seems to me that if atheists are serious about rejecting Christianity, they should be serious about not celebrating the primary religious holiday of the Christian faith. And I think that this is a no-brainer. I've even got some suggestions about the subject.

First, tell your friends and family about your disinterest in celebrating the holiday. Second, suggest an alternative. Say . . . New Year's. It's as celebrated as Christmas is, in the same season, all that.

Some people will argue that it's about "family". It's a time for family to get together. That's an argument of emotional blackmail, I think. And, let's not forget, that just a month earlier there was another family holiday in the US, Thanksgiving. And a week after Christmas there is another holiday that could easily be turned into a family holiday, that being New Year's. It would be trivially easy to make any one of another holidays about the same bonding issues that happen in Christmas, say Labor Day. I like Labor Day. People could get together in a spirit of solidarity with their friends and family to exchange gifts, emotionally bond, all that, in peace and harmony. There is no good reason, I think, for atheists to continue to celebrate this overtly religious holiday that, even when secularlized, gives Christians a justification to thrust their religion onto our public life and society with atheists aiding and abetting them.

Down with Christmas!

Christmas is a lousy time of year - objectively!

2007-12-23T18:38:00.000-08:00

I don't like Christmas. Not just because I'm an atheist and I dislike, intensely, how often this holiday gets shoved down my throat - even by non-Christians and other atheists - but because it objectively sucks. There. I said it. Christmas objectively sucks.

Two words: Christmas depression. Rates of depression skyrocket at Christmas. Two more words: Christmas crime. Crime rates also skyrocket during Christmas. Two more words: Christmas accidents. Lots of boozed up motherfuckers are on the road getting into deadly accidents. Every year, "Christmas cheer" is bought in the lives and blood of other human beings, makes others madly depressed, and also creates the environment for seasonal crime sprees.

The cheer of Christmas is forced. It's a stressful, ugly time marked by increased fighting, mood swings, recriminations, theft and bloody accidents. Everything that Christmas is "supposed" to be about, well, it is about none of those things. It is not a time of happiness and joy for large portions of the population, and the brief joy it does bring is attended by misery.

Equally frustrating is the denial people are in about these simple truths. OK. It's merely fact that Christmas is a time of depression, crime, auto accidents, family arguments, money stress, blah, blah, blah. But it is my experience that when you bring this up, people still cling to Christmas. It boggles me. If we stopped "celebrating" this season - or at least changed the way it was celebrated - people would be happier, there'd be less crime, fewer accidents on our roads, less money stress and things of that nature. Weirdly, this is at least as true of most of my atheist and agnostic friends as the religious people I know. I mean, I know why Christians won't abandon the holiday, it's one of the key holidays of their religion. Sure. I get that. But even people without religion, who have no religious connection to the season, almost inevitably defend the holiday - even tho' it objectively sucks. Which I admit to finding somewhat frustrating.

Anyway, that's my yearly "I hate Christmas" post. I don't hate it merely because it is shoved in my face, though I hate that, but also because because even amongst those that celebrate it it is a season of misery.

Conflicts between science and religion - bring 'em on!

2007-12-23T15:12:00.000-08:00

Adrienne said something particularly clever about religion and I'm going to pass it on. We were talking about the touch of flames on this post, the fiery touch being about, unsurprisingly to those who read my blog, intelligent design. Which I, of course, think is deeply stupid and a pretty pathetic attempt to insert supernaturalism into science.

For my part, I was opining why intelligent design folks decide to take on the best scientific theories. In the above discussion, the point wasn't evolution, but cosmology. The gent with whom I was talking was making some bizarre points like . . . because physical laws are uniform throughout the universe that's proof of intelligent design. Which is a bizarre argument. I mean, also false, but additionally bizarre. Even if it was true - and it's not, say, inside a singularity, or in the very early universe, or the differences between quantum effects and relativistic effects, there's plenty of reason to think that the universe isn't the same everywhere - I don't know why that's suggest an intelligent designer. I mean, couldn't the same reasoning be applied regardless of how the universe is? But one of the specific things that the person said is that there is no scientific theory, even a bad one, that explains the origin of the universe. This is very wrong. Not only does science have a theory about the origin of the universe, the big bang, but it is amongst the strongest theories in science. The big bang theory is science working very much how science "should" work - the theory of general relativity suggested that far enough back in time that all matter and energy would achieve infinite density and there would be a beginning to space and time. From that reasoning, there have been numerous experiments that validate the big bang. There are few scientific theories with the level of proof we have for the big bang, both theoretical and observational. The same is true of evolution. The proof for it is staggering, overwhelming. If supernaturalists want to challenge science these are not the theories they should be challenging. I mean, much better would be . . . gravity. We don't know what the fuck it is, hehe. It's downright confusing and there is simply no connection between quantum gravity and relativistic gravity theories, and gravity behaves in certain unique ways that make it the odd-man out of physics. Or electricity. Or turbulent motion. All these things science is having trouble addressing. But, no, they always go after evolution and cosmology, which are particularly strong as theories go. Adrienne opined, certainly correctly, that the reason they go after those two is because they challenge the narrative of religion.

Then Adrienne said, and this is the clever thing, that some religious apologists will try to reconcile religion and science by saying that they cover entirely different subjects, different parts of the human experience, but that's a lie. And it is. The reason why science and religion are brawling is because both of them talk about . . . how humans came into existence, how the universe came into existence. No major religion lacks a creation myth. But this isn't discussed very well, that so long as religions have creation mythology there is going to be considerable antagonism between religion and science. Because, y'know, science says that the universe came into existence because of quantum flux in an instanton around fifteen billion years ago causing the big bang, and religious folks say that a supernatural being that transcends time and space willed the universe into existence. These are conflicting narratives, mutually exclusive, so the people who say that religion isn't about the same things as science are wrong. They are, and evidently so, and people don't much talk about that as being the essence of the conflict, because it is a conflict. Science says one thing, religion says another.

And even beyond cosmology and the origins of life, there are still conflicts. Religious people all make supernatural statements. Even if you're the species of religious person who says that the big bang and evolution are the way that god created the universe, almost all of those people will still cling to supernatural events to justify their belief. So a Christian might say that evolution is the method that god created life, but what about Jesus rising from the dead and physically ascending into heaven? Even religious folks who are willing to concede the creation myths are allegorical or whatever nevertheless make statements of fact. They say, "Jesus rose from the dead". They say, "He physically ascended into heaven." Even when they avoid the biggest issues, they make all these statements that simply cannot be physically true. They still are saying that supernatural agents are at work amongst us.

Which is back to intelligent design. That's what intelligent design is - saying that supernatural agents work amongst us, but do so invisibly. In the case of ID, the invisible is the bogus concept of irreducible complexity. Otherwise, it is invisible amongst the annals of history - which are, of course, woefully incomplete. A Christian says that, you know, supernatural events are only recorded in religious texts because they are otherwise lost to history. Sometimes they can sorta get away with this, like the census that supposedly took place at the time of Jesus' birth. We know the Romans did a number of censuses whose records did not really survive. It becomes less plausible, of course, when you're talking about the graves giving up their dead and zombie prophets walking around Jerusalem, or the Nile turning into fucking blood, or the destruction of two large cities by angels, or . . . you see the point by now, I think. That the only records of the innumerable supernatural events that occur in all religions seem to be recorded only by members of that religion. So, we entirely lack Babylonian accounts of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, or any other of these supposedly supernatural events (save when one religion copies a story from a second religion, like with the Biblical Flood).

(Yes, I know there are a smaller section of Christians who believe all supernatural events in the Bible are allegorical and treat Jesus simply as a wise man or whatever, but this isn't really addressed at them and they are a very, very small portion of Christians and most other Christians would say that they're not Christians, so even calling them Christians is fairly problematic.)

I think that non-religious people should stand up more to religious people who are trying to slip it in, then, that "science and religion aren't about the same things". They are. Religions have creation myths that explain the origin of the universe and of life, and these are in direct contradiction to scientific theories. Religions also include supernatural events which also contradict science in a number of ways (being that science, by definition, can't have supernaturalism in it). The people who say that religion and science are about "different things" are ignoring the cases when science and religion do discuss the same topic and are at odds.

Eights!

2007-12-22T14:22:00.000-08:00

Stew over at A Night on the Tiles tagged me for this, like, two months ago. I am slow, but I get there, hehe. ;)

Eight things I am passionate about

1. My wife. I love her with a deep and abiding passion.

2. Writing. It's the about the only thing I'm really good at, which is OK because I'm really good at it. It's one of the few things that I can keep up with, including finishing big projects with it. In some fashion or the other, I'm really writing all the time. Even when it is about some of the other things I'm passionate about, I often do it, or over-do it, through writing.

3. Role-playing games. We're being honest here, and this is my oldest hobby, and I'm still strong at it. Between writing and role-playing games you might have an idea that I've got an involved fantasy life. Oh, wait, there's more, there's more, hehe.

4. Reading. Which kind of goes with writing if you think about it. I can get really worked up about books. I was going around in a daze for days after I finished A Deepness in the Sky because I knew that there was something I was missing and I needed to work out what it was. (As it turned out, what was working me up is that it wasn't really a very good book, but it wasn't a very good book in a complex way. I had to think it out.)

5. Politics. Adrienne knows I'm actually up when I start to bitch about politics. I have to limit how much news I read or I'll spend all day getting upset over the crap I read in various papers.

6. Weight lifting. All these other things I'm passionate about take a great deal of mental energy, and I can obsess and dwell on them. Weight lifting is how I clean out all that crap. A few minutes with the weights and all I'm thinking about is the next set. And between workouts there's all this planning and such to do! New exercises to sort out, new routines, all that fun stuff.

7. Comic books. Boy, I spend a lot of time reading comic books, and talking about comic books, and generally doing stuff related to comic books. Not "graphic novels", comic books. The medium has created some of the most enduring icons of American culture - more people know who Batman is than know Santa Claus. Mmmm. Comic books.

8. Cooking. I am a goddamn good cook. I used to be a pretty lousy cook, but when we were in Maine I often wanted Indian food and there was no place around that made Indian food, so I started to make Indian food. Now I can pretty much make anything, but prefer, like, this band of food that starts in Greece, goes through the Middle East, picks up India and Southeast Asia, zooms across the Pacific to get Mexico, the Caribbean and the American South. Also, Russian food. Russia has really great cuisine, hehe.

Eight things to do before I die

1. Live long enough not to die. No, seriously! There's a pretty good chance that people that are alive today will see every medical advance that extends their life to the point to the next medical advance that extends their life! I want to be one of those people.

2. Get a goddamn novel published. I'm working on that one - indeed, I'm doing this as a break from doing that - but it'd be nice if it actually happened, y'know? In the end, I write for myself, but some recognition would still be pretty spiffy.

3. Settle down. It'd be nice to be part of a community and know you were gonna stay for a while, hehe.

4. Learn to make efficient use of my time. Ohmygod, I'm so mentally disorganized it hurts.

5. Travel extensively. I mean, there are so many things I want to see but haven't. And things I've barely seen that I want to see more of. Glaciers and mountains and monuments and architecture, you name it, I probably want to see it. And I want to eat their food. Food is very important to me. See above.

6. Write something that will last the test of time. Now, I know that the "test of time" is largely determined by a bunch of white middle class guys for whom I have more than a trivial contempt. But it'd still be nice to write something that people, centuries from now, will still talk about. They'll say, "Oh, but Bradley" - you always talk about writers using their last name like that - "added a quivering nuanced realism to the art" or something like that. It'd be cool.

7. Calm down! I can get worked up. I've made good strides towards calming down, but I have many yet to make.

8. Tell a head of state - preferably a monarch - to fuck off. I really want to do this. You have no idea. I plan for it in my head. ("Why are you talking? Kings are about as useful as tits on a bull. The decadent remnants of a pathetic and discredited political system with no use or meaning in the modern world, childishly clinging to archaic titles. Fuck off, 'your royal highness'." Like that, hehe.)

Eight things I say a lot

1. "D'oh!"

2. "Fuck off."

3. "Well, really . . ." Followed by how absolutely wrong the other person is. Probably about something that's deeply important to them, hehe.

4. "I'm bigger than you." One of my humorous arguments of last resort. We should do what I want because "I'm bigger than you". Meant as a joke.

5. "I'm right because I'm a philosopher." Another humorous argument of last resort, usually ironic because I think most modern philosophy is pretty cowardly.

6. "In [insert place I used to live] . . ." I am always comparing where I once lived to where I currently live. So, I'm always, "In Las Vegas" or "In Maine" or "In South Carolina" or whatever, hehe.

7. "You suck."

8. "Don't make me kick your ass." I have several humorous arguments of last resort, and this is another one of them, hehe.

Eight things I have read or am still reading

1. The Legion of Superheroes. Who doesn't love Braniac 5?! If you don't who Braniac 5 is, you suck! See? I told you I said it a lot.

2. Probability Sun. By Nancy Kress. That's the list of things I'm currently reading, so I guess I'll just list my favorite types of books, then, hehe.

3. L. A. Confidential by James Ellroy.

4. Dune by Frank Herbert.

5. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.

6. Watership Down by Richard Adams.

7. Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

8. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I could go on this vein, but I shall stop, hehe.

Eight songs I listen to over and over

An ever changing list if there ever was one! But I shall name the eight that come to my head.

1. Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull.

2. Fly by Blind Guardian.

3. When Will They Shoot by Ice Cube.

4. Shut 'Em Down by Public Enemy.

5. One by Metallica.

6. Veteran of the Psychic Wars by Blue Oyster Cult.

7. The Anvil of Crom by Basil Pouledoris.

8. Battle Without Honor or Humanity by Tomoyasu Hotei. Preferably the extended remix.

Eight things that attract me to friends

1. Humor.

2. Intelligence.

3. Contempt for religion.

4. Ability to endure my whacky political and intellectual digressions.

5. Laughs at my jokes.

6. Shared hobbies.

7. Being a geek.

8. Likes eating my food.

Eight people who should do this

Oh, golly gee, I don't know eight people online anymore! Hehe. I will leave it up for people who read this to just assume that they're selected. This does mean you, hehe.

NaNoWriMo and me!

2007-11-10T12:03:00.000-08:00

J. M. F. Grant has something of a rant about NaNoWriMo. So I figured I'd weigh in about the phenom of National Novel Writing Month.

For those of you who don't know, and don't care to read their site, NaNoWriMo is a largely online event that gets people from all over the world, but mostly America, hehe, to spend a month writing a novel (for these purposes defined as any prose text 50,000 words or longer, which is more likely a novella than a novel, but, hey, what the hell, right?). What NaNoWriMo attempts to get people to do is write. I first read this in an essay by Ray Bradbury, and as I've gone on I've increasingly realized it's truth, that an author's greatest barrier is their critique - many people don't think they're good enough to write a novel, or publish one, or whatever, so they don't give it an attempt.

So, in that vein, I'm a fairly large supporter of the concept of NaNoWriMo. But, to be honest, when you read their statement of intent it's . . . pretty awful. They say stuff like, "Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft . . . It's all about quantity, not quality." Ouch. If that doesn't sound sufficiently like inveigling against "painstaking craft" here's another little bit, "To be able to mock real novelists who dawdle on and on, taking far longer than 30 days to produce their work."

On, that's the context of Grant's rant. He has, apparently, published several books (he did not say if they were novels) and he seems offended that there's this program that gets people to do what they do at the expense of what he does - that planning and craft is somehow a . . . barrier to writing a novel, instead of a way to write a better novel. And I have some sympathy for this. I also fall fairly strongly into the pain-staking craft department. Both Condotierri and Simon Peter are about BIG, IMPORTANT things, and I want to say a variety of things and use the medium of a novel to do that. In some ways it's difficult to even say how long it took to write them, because they both arose from years of thought about social, technological and theological issues. In many ways, they are the culmination of everything I've learned since I was ten years old and wrote my first story, and I'm guessing my next novel will also be all that . . . with the greater knowledge and experience I've gained writing my first two novels.

One of the other things that NaNoWriMo says and this is . . . this is terrible, because it's very much a lie, is that writing the first draft is "the hard part". In some ways, for me at least, finishing Condotierri was the hardest thing I'd ever done. I was nearing the end and I realized that, right here, right now, I've got to make the previous 100,000 words make sense. All lose ends must be tied off, all conflicts resolved, it's got to end. In other ways, that was also immensely satisfying. As opposed to re-writing and editing? I'd rather end a novel every day of the week than edit, hehe. Editing isn't hard, mostly, but it is deeply dull. It's easy to keep energetic about the creativity of the first draft. But the second time through? Well, that's satisfying because you can do it and go, "Yeah, this came out pretty cool." The third time? It's just boring. The fifth time? You want to die.

But even that isn't the hardest thing. Because, after that, there's seeking publication. Which is where you beg people you don't know to deign to publish your book, using standards that are designed to weed out 999 in 1000 manuscripts. The odds are wicked stacked against you, you have no clear way of knowing what they're looking for any given day (or even if they're looking for anything at all), you have no way of knowing what magical combination of words will catch the eye of a publisher. (Indeed, the mood of the publisher, agent, editor, etc., is probably a bigger factor than anything you can write; whether they liked they lunch or not is probably a bigger factor than the objective quality of your work once it has reached the stage of being polished.) And then there's the deep and abiding pleasure of getting the FOAD letters, those politely, and distantly, worded rejections to your life's work.

Compared to all that? Writing the first draft is easy. And fun. It's all creative. After that? It becomes a slog through work you're already over-familiar with, and then the walk of shame that is getting published. The way that NaNoWriMo gets around this is by . . . don't mention doing that! Say that they're done writing the first draft, which is like saying that the food is read after the reaping is done. There's still a long way to go between "first draft" and "completed work".

So, while I understand why someone might be bothered by the cavalier attitude that NaNoWriMo evinces for the ideas of painstaking craft in writing, at the same time it's pretty clear their tongue is in their cheek in the first case, and in the second they're trying to get people to write. Where I have trouble with the project is that they encourage people to stop immediately after the first draft but nevertheless encourage people who are successful to call themselves novelists. Which is akin to running a mile and calling yourself a marathoner. A first draft is a necessary condition for being a novelist, but it is far from a sufficient condition. There's definitely more to it! And NaNoWriMo wholly ignores these other things, handwaving them away as merely devotion to craft and foolishness other writers do.

So, I guess I'm somewhat ambivalent about NaNoWriMo, hehe. But that's the extent of my thoughts on it.

Manna and Robo-Burger

2007-11-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

Something sort of weird happened. In the comments of this post, one of the people who fairly regularly posts - and I deeply appreciate his posts because he often disagrees with me, but does so intelligently and respectfully, which is the perfect kind of disagreement for me! - and he said this, "I've seen other articles and books on the topic - including a novel/screed by a futurist that posited automation happening first in a fast-food joint and spreading globally at the speed of light. The title escapes me but it's on the tip of my tongue."

The weird thing is, I thought he was talking about me. Several years ago, I wrote a short story called Robo-Burger. You can go read it! It posits that automation starts in fast food and spread rapidly creating widespread social upheaval.

In truth, what Brian was talking about was the online novella Manna. (Calling it a novel is an exaggeration. It's eight short chapters.) It is in part about how automation starts in fast food and spreads rapidly creating widespread social upheaval and a second part that is utopian, the same technology used benevolently. Oh, there are lots of differences, but the similarities were sufficient to make me check to see if the author, Marshall Brain, could have plagiarized me. (The answer is "no". I actually wrote Robo-Burger after he wrote Manna; I wrote Robo-Burger after learning that the US Army was deploying robot soldiers in Iraq back in 2005 and was still struggling with science-fiction writing prior to writing Condotierri. I actually considered Robo-Burger a failure as a story, but you decide. Re-reading it, I liked it reasonably well.)

Now what's interesting to me, and I find this utterly fascinating, is that we both decided that a labor crisis would follow in the wake of fast food automation! I'm really geeking on that! I have been thinking all evening about why we might both come up with so similar ideas. That fast food is symbolic of low wage, low prestige work. That fast food is nigh universal in our society. Fast food would be (and will be) reasonably easy to automate, as it is largely doing a number of easy tasks without creativity or innovation. And, mostly, really, who hasn't had the experience of have your order wrong after dealing with a rude employee in a filthy restaurant? But you're on this schedule, on your own pathetically short lunch break, and it's either eat what's in the damn bag or not eat at all. Who hasn't dreamt of fast food restaurants always being clean and the service always being accurate and friendly?

But I've never been this much, so immediately, part of thinking the same thoughts that someone else has been thinking at roughly the same time! What I am wondering, now, is if fast food chain CEOs are thinking these thoughts about total automation of their restaurants. The problems, even at this point, would be largely engineering; the technology already exists.

Tricks to make books long

2007-11-07T23:59:00.000-08:00

Now, a unpublished or barely published novelist is expected to write books that are 100,000 words long. However, once you're successful, you're expected to write quarter million word tomes. So, recently, I've been thinking about how to change a book from a hundred thousand words to three times that length. What I've ended up identifying are, well, they're really just two tricks authors use to make the book longer - I feel (tho' I suspect many will disagree) that these tricks add virtually nothing to the actual narrative in most cases, save to make it longer. (Some people will think that length, in a good book, is always or almost always a desirable end. If you like the writing, a long book provides more "book value" than a short book. I disagree. It's like saying that a novel is "better" than a short story. They're not. Short stories can have a precision and elegance that a novel can't, really, possess, but I think most of the people reading this agree with that, already.) I should also go on to say, like with all things artistic, presentation is everything. They can be done well, and they can be important to the story, but largely they are not, I feel. But, here are the tricks:

Multiple point of view characters. Why write a book about one person or event when you can write a book about two or three! Like I said, this is largely a trick. You're functionally writing two or more stories that only tangentially have anything to do with each other, only becoming unified somewhere down the road - often quite a bit farther down the road. The reason that this is a trick, and rarely provides for good narration is that it . . . really spoils suspense! Because you are going back and forth, you almost always know everything there is to know! It also nearly completely destroys foreshadowing - because you know. It's an easy way to make a novel longer with making less good, diminishing suspense and often making foreshadowing irrelevant.

Flashbacks. Put some terrible secret or other back story on your protagonists and you've got good chapter fodder. If you give all your POV characters elaborate back stories, you can do this again and again. This is a trick because, mostly, the audience just doesn't need to have that many details about the past event. Sure, the character might be a super-bad ass commando ninja cyborg - but going back for length origins is usually irrelevant to the plot.

Like I said, they can be done well. But I think what has largely happened is it's become simply a way to write longer books without a lot of consideration of what it does to the overall structure of the narrative. How changing POV really distorts other techniques a writer might use, like foreshadowing and suspense, and how flashbacks are often simply irrelevant to the pacing of the narrative. That both are, well, filler. Or, perhaps more accurately, both are employed as filler in a great number of cases.

Still, I'm curious what people think.

Robot Drivers, the US Army and . . . You?

2007-11-05T16:54:00.000-08:00

In most ways, Forbes is a horrible magazine, who's sole purpose is to make rich people feel good about being rich. It's pretty sad, really. But this story about the DARPA robotic vehicle contest I found interesting in a couple of ways.

First, it said that the US DOD wants 1/3rd of it's fleet of vehicles automated by 2015. That's eight years away, folks. I don't know if they'll get a full third of them automated, but I'm sure that the technology for automated vehicles will be pretty robust by then. Indeed, I suspect robot drivers by then will be better than human drivers.

I went and looked at a number of other articles about the subject. Most of them, like the Forbes article, are of the "ooooh, robots are cool" school of journalism. And, well, yeah, robots are cool. Not a single article mentioned any possibility of, say, social consequence because of this. Such as, in industrialized countries, in the next ten years or so the entire industry of long distance driver might be completely wiped out. Once it is demonstrated that these vehicles are safer than human drivers . . . well, I'm pretty sure that it's already the case that it'd be cost effective to replace human drivers with machines. They're just not good enough yet, but they will be in the next several years.

There are around 1.3 million long haul truckers in America. In twenty years, I'd be surprised if any of them have jobs. Robots will just do what they do better and cheaper than they could ever do it. Many short haul jobs will also be totally automated, too.

Sometimes I feel like I'm talking science-fiction when I say, "The biggest labor problem that industrialized countries are facing is that in the near future there will simply be no jobs." Already, three in four of American jobs are service jobs, most of them low end, near minimum wage jobs. I mean, screw artificial intelligence as the technological singularity. I mean, maybe at some point AI will also make intellectual human labor wholly obsolete,but the day is nigh when most people will simply . . . not be needed for labor purposes. Just not needed. Most low end service industry jobs will just be done by machines. (Even for many interaction jobs, you won't need real artificial intelligence to do them - just enough verbal skills to negotiate specific problems. Like tech support. When you're calling up to troubleshoot your TV, the robot doesn't need to be able to talk about the weather, just identify what the problem is and clearly tell the person how to fix it. The automated menu systems that some tech support places have is a crude form of this, of course. So even jobs where direct communication is important can be automated without invoking some possibly mystic goal of artificial intelligence.)

Is there anyone beyond a couple of sci-fi writers and futurists who are even talking about this? Seriously. I want to know. Because this is not some hypothetic possible future problem, but something that's very much right around the corner - the US military wants 1 in 3 of it's drivers automated away in eight years. But I can't think of a single politician who is even tangentially addressing what is likely to be the biggest labor problem of the 21st century. That most of us won't be needed.

Intelligence Singularity, Futurism, Some Rambling Thoughts

2007-11-04T01:42:00.000-07:00

A fair bit of my science-fiction work has to deal with, broadly, issues of futurism. I just got done reading A Deepness in the Sky, and I liked it tolerably well (in the long run, I suspect my biggest problem with Vinge is his anarcho-capitalism; I sorta like it because he's addressing what is one of my biggest pet peeves amongst sci-fi writers - that while they'll spend a hundred thousand words on technobabble most can't be arsed to talk about what post-democratic governments look like . . . indeed, my sci-fi settings have political systems that are actually backwards, stuff like monarchies; the problem is that I think anarcho-capitalism is so deeply and obviously stupid that anyone can take it seriously, and, yet, many in the sff set do precisely that) and the writer of the book, Vernor Vinge, is one of the proponents of a technological singularity.

It's an interesting bit of futurism (to the extent it is futurism), but I think that Vinge is doing what many futurists have done before (and many will continue to do, no doubt also including myself), which is basically attributing to the future the qualities of the present but merely in a more energetic form. So, in the 50s, when futurists (which is a term almost identical with "science-fiction writer" at the time) discovered lasers what they did was project that technological innovation into existing technology - the future would have ray guns! Of course, what actually did happen with lasers is nothing like that. We found that, instead, that lasers were much more useful as sensors, information storage, things like that. Many of us use lasers every day! In CD players, video game consoles, DVD players, blah, blah, blah. Lasers as ray guns? Still waiting on that one, and are likely to be waiting quite a while.

So, the idea behind an intelligence singularity is that some day a computer will be so powerful it'll be smarter in every meaningful way than any biological human. Since it is more intelligent by definition, it'll be able to make even more intelligent machines that we can, and those machines will make even MORE intelligent machines, etc., etc. The scenarios on this range from doomsday-esque Terminator-like scenarios (except the computers win because they will be, then, by definition more intelligent than humans) to Utopian fantasies where super-intelligent computers see to our every need.

I think that's, basically, doing what folks in the Fifties did with lasers but with computers, instead.

I mean, I'll out the first flaw - that human intelligence is singular, itself. Well, human intelligence is now, and always has been, a network. A technological singularity won't start until a technological system is more intelligent than the then existing human intelligence network. It is still, of course, an open question if we're smart enough to make seed AI in the first place. But, those little caveats aside, I suspect we are.

But, y'know, I think the idea of an intelligence singularity is a very crude sort of futurism. Like with lasers, or computers, or the radio, what ends up happening with them will likely be pretty . . . different than what we imagine. For instance, and I think this is non-trivial, as I said, human intelligence already exists in a network. Right here, right now, I'm actually using that network. The network started before we were even human - what animal species does not have some form of communications network? Artificial intelligence will merely be adding onto the system of which we're already a part - and it'll be designed to do that. The technique that the IS people are using seems to me analogous to the laser-ray gun situation: that the future will be like the present, just faster and with more energy. We are thinking that the goal of AI is to have computers . . . engage in human style thought, just do it much better than we do.

I doubt that'll be the case. Technological development goes into weird places. No ray guns, but dig that shiny new HD-DVD player. I suspect it'll be that way with AI. Rather than just doing what modern intelligence does better than modern intelligence, I suspect it'll go over in interesting tangents, and I've said the main one: it will be used to augment the existing human information network in novel and interesting ways. (Furthermore, AI will pick up the biases of their creator's behavior. A fundamentalist religious AI might not be the first AI ever made, but it's likely to be the second, with stuff like literal interpretations of religious work built into its architecture and low-level programming. AI might well be constrained by the irrationality of human belief system . . . like I said, tho', it's an open question if we're smart enough to pull this off!) I don't think that just proposing that machines in the future will do things that happen not much better and faster than happen today is very useful, because it is likely to be wrong.

On the other hand, we need to talk, I think, about futurism. This is a current and quite awful problem. I mean, for instance, right now the lack of intelligent futurism is creating a world wide global climate change event. Since almost no one bothered, at the early stages of the industrial revolution or, really, at all very seriously until recently, to talk about the climatic changes inevitably wrought by world-wide industrialization we're now on the verge of a very nasty, possibly Black Death-like problem. If people had been interested in accurately forecasting the changes wrought by industrialization and the like, global industry would look much different than it does. The same should be true of any new technology! But it isn't. So, with biological engineering, virtually every corn plant in the world is now genetically altered as pollen from genetically modified plants go to unmodified plants. Great going. We have permanently modified the DNA of corn. That was not, I should add, the plan, but it's what happened, and even though some people did try to stop it, it went ahead anyway. And there are some fairly intense technologies that could happen in the next couple of decades - AI, radically improved genetic engineering, and the unlimited promise of nanotechnology.

Of course, some people are working on it, like The Singularity Institute of Human Intelligence. The trick here is we need to start listening. But more than that, I am calling for more ingenuity in talking about futurism. I think we need to go beyond the idea that the future will be like the present with more horsepower! We need to create learn the hazards (particularly) of a given technology before we unleash it on the world. We need to ask ourselves questions like "what will seed AI mean to us?" Not just in the sense that they might become our computer overlords (benevolent or not), but also in the sense of, say, what will a post-labor world look like? What happens when machine intelligences destroy all human labor value?

I am, of course, optimistic about these things. I think our computer overlords will be benevolent. Indeed, because I suspect that they'll be part of the information network we already possess, I suspect we're just going to merge with them. We'll think what they're doing it so spiffy that we'll want to do it, too, and we'll suss out a way to do it! I don't think it'll be the computer overlords caring for us like we were children, or controlling us like we were cattle, or destroying us like we were rabid dogs - I think they will be us.

I also think that we should - and this is certainly what organizations like the Singularity Institute of Human Intelligence is involved in - take steps to guide, thoughtfully and with some care, where we want our technology to go. We do not, after all, want to create a computer tyrant by accident! More than just trying to predict the future, I am calling on people to understand that we are also making the future. And if we want human beings to have a meaningful say in this future, we will have to make a future where they have a meaningful say. Which is, I think, something that we don't really want to address, but it is perhaps the biggest social problem facing the developed world: advances in travel, communication and automation are are showing more and more clearly that there is less and less meaningful work to be done. In the US, for instance, three in four people work in some service industry. It won't take a seed AI to replace most of those workers, too. (I suspect that most of them could be efficiently replaced right now, if we had a mind to do it - the problem would be an engineering problem, not a theoretical or technological one.) But rather than the future filled with hypercompetent people that one sees in, say, most science-fiction literature, what we are instead creating is a huge body of poorly trained servants. Not precisely a shiny future. But, like with global warming, this is happening because no one is bothering to seriously consider the consequences of technological development or try actively to guide human development into a world where we, in fact, all are the hypercompetent future people seen in sci-fi novels.

So, as it developed, this post is two-fold. The first is to call on futurists to think beyond the concept of the future being "the present by harder and faster", and in the second case for people to take futurism seriously - because we need to do it! Because we have not done it, we're on the verge of a huge labor problem, a huge energy problem and a huge environmental problem. We really need to start planning for the future now, and we need to be aware of the extent to which we actually get to decide what kind of future we will have.

Bill O'Reilly - Rap Star!

2007-10-12T13:25:00.000-07:00

From Illdoctrine, a hip-hop video blog, comes this splendid video that compares Bill O'Reilly to a gangster rapper because of his grandiose self-promotion, his vicious attacks of his peers, and generally getting paid for spreading hate and bigotry. It's good stuff!

Observations on Internet Publishing and Distribution - Radiohead, Trent Reznor, Madonna, etc.

2007-10-11T15:05:00.000-07:00

There's been a fair bit of Internet buzz about how Radiohead and, apparently, Nine Inch Nails and Madonna are "dumping the record industry". Some have called it the "last nail in the coffin" of the record industry. I have a couple of points to make about that, as well as some comments about Internet distribution replacing traditional distribution channels.

First, all these bands that are getting this news have the record distributing business to thank for their traditional commercial success. They are all reasonably mainstream (mainstream for their genre?) acts that have reputations built on the many, many years that they recorded and were distributed under major labels. In many ways, their ability to do this is dependent upon the advertising and promotional work that they benefited from during the early years of their careers. So, the music industry as it exists made them. We wouldn't know that these people existed if not for the record industry. Their success away from labels is BECAUSE of the record labels. I think it's important to remember that.

(Generally, the only people who can successfully get away from traditional distribution systems are artists who have a following because of their success in the traditional distribution system. Not just musicians but artists in all media.)

Second, saying that the Internet will magically cure the problems of traditional distribution also ignores the realities of getting successfully distributed and promoted on the Internet. What it does is externalize all the labor of production, promotion, advertising and distribution. It's basically saying to the artist, "Well, in addition to mastering the extremely demanding skills of creating art, you have to not master a bunch of additional skill sets that have nothing whatsoever to do with artistic creation. Now, you've got to prepare files for download, create websites and master the arts of promotion and advertising - all without any real help" or it says, "You've got to have substantial capital investment to hire the people to create your website, promote you and advertise your work."

I mean, this is what I struggle with. I have two skillfully written, interesting novels, but to be successful outside of traditional media distribution channels requires mastering a lot of skills that have nothing whatsoever to do with writing. To be financially successful as a novelist would require convincing thousands of people to buy a book that I wrote. I mean, I have a number of stories and a screenplay up on my site. The feedback I've gotten from my writing is overwhelmingly positive - recently someone told me that my screenplay for The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is one of his favorite pieces of literature. But my site statistics do not show me having anything like thousands of people downloading my stories - much less being willing to pay me for it. Even when I included a way to have people pay me for my material, in over two years, no one bothered to do so.

And far from being an apocryphal story - I mean, maybe it's my own fault, maybe my website sucks, maybe I don't do enough promotion or the wrong kind of promotion, whatever - it is typical for artists in all media. It requires the success that comes from being distributed to get to the point where you don't need their distribution in all but a tiny handful of cases. I mean, take Cory Doctorow who has managed to become a successful novelist under alternate systems of distribution. He has an amazing resume, with access to organizational skills and social networking far, far outside the reach of the average (or even quite talented) writer. (It isn't a particular secret that skillful artists often have poor organizational skills in many areas, I think.) Almost no one has the kind of organizational, social skills, contacts and education of someone like Cory Doctorow.

And that is . . . that's really the bar. You have to have skills, contacts and education similar to Cory Doctorow's to make it as a writer without support from the traditional distribution system. This is, I believe, similarly the case with other artists who have managed to make it outside the traditional distribution system - they have these amazing resumes, tremendous organizational skills, social skills and contacts that make it possible for them to succeed.

I don't think a world where, in order to succeed as an artist, you've got to have a skill set like Cory Doctorow's or Immortal Technique's is superior to the one we currently have. It is externalizing the production, distribution, promotional and advertising skills and it also means that almost no artist will "make it". The system that seems poised to replace the traditional distribution system is at least as effective in keeping out artists as the one it seeks to replace.

Back from camping!

2007-10-01T19:02:00.000-07:00

Adrienne and I got back from Redwood National Park. We took pictures! But what was best about the park could not be photographed. In Fern Valley the were "fairy waterfalls". Fern Valley is a narrow ravine - calling it a valley is excessive, really - with sheer sides fifty feet high and the whole place is covered with ferns, all up and down the ravine. It was dim and quiet and fey. It was so dim that taking pictures was . . . problematic, and fairy waterfalls simply can't be photographed. At points in the ravine, tiny rivulets of water cascaded over the edge of the ravine so it came down in tiny droplets that glistened like diamonds in the wan light, and the wall behind was covered with tiny, bright green moss like tiny leaves where the droplets clustered. It was magical, and tiny, and beautiful. The ferns, too, were strikingly green against the black of the ravine walls, forming incredible patterns. None of those pictures came out, either, hehe. It was beautiful. We also visited the mouth of the Klamath River, and there are pictures of that, as well as some elk! I saw elk! I'd never seen elk before.

Indeed, the park had Elk Radio. All elk, all the time! No kidding! It was 1610 on the AM dial. There were signs for Elk Radio! Tho', in truth, it was a looping recording telling people that, y'know, elk are dangerous wild animals, and not to approach them. PLUS, fall is mating season, so unless you want to be gored by a rutting bull elk it's extra special important to stay away from them. But, still, Elk Radio!

We also have a new (for us) car, a 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid. The trip was also an excuse to put the car through it's paces. It's a very nice car! It also gets very good gas mileage, even on hills and in town. It's a little weird to drive, though. It's a stick shift, which is fine, I drive stick shifts quite well, but because it has an electric motor assisting a lot of times where in another car I'd downshift to accelerate (like, to pass), you don't need to. Also, and this was fun about passing, after you pass and slow down, again, you can watch the power going back into the battery! Neat! Still, I'm really loving the Civic. It's a great little car and I heartily recommend it to anyone who wants a good hybrid and finds the cost of a Prius just a wee bit too expensive.

Simon Peter is done and plans for the future

2007-09-25T13:16:00.000-07:00

It's been a while! The big news is that I have finished the first draft of Simon Peter. Unsurprisingly, it ends shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus. I had wanted to go on a while more establishing a power struggle between Simon Peter and Mary Magdalene, but in the end I decided that would lessen the narrative impact of Simon Peter's role in Jesus' execution - which is obviously the focal event of any book that includes the Passion, it being one of the central narratives in Western Civilization.

I even have an idea for a sequel - a book about Paul and the struggle between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians which is the focal point of Acts and, certainly, an event at least as culturally important as the story of Jesus, himself. Without the early decision to actively seek Roman converts, Christianity would have just been another sect of Judaism and probably destroyed in the events following the Bar Kochba Revolt. Hell, it's actually even more pivotal than the Jesus story. That had been around for a couple of hundred years. But the struggles of Paul against the Jewish Christian church has lots of points I could make, especially about how Paul of Tarsus was from the very place that Roman Mithraism was formed and how Christianity is really just a Judiazed Roman Mithraism (yes, incorporating elements of other Roman faiths, too, such as Magna Mater, not to mention Judaism itself, hehe). So, I think that has good sequel potential.

But I won't be starting it immediately. What I'll be spending the next year or two doing is . . . getting published. I have two completed novels. Not one. Two. They are both good books. I want to get published, so I'm going to have to work on doing that. It is . . . I am not good at this part. Self-promotion is something I have never excelled at for a variety of reasons, even when I can look at the work I've done and say, "This is really good material. As good as anything published in America today." And I can say that about Condotierri and Simon Peter. But, even knowing this, I have trouble advancing myself in that way. Indeed, it's easy for me to use writing as a way to avoid having to do what I need to do to get them published. Advice and assistance is both welcome and appreciated. ;)

I will be doing short writing projects. When I can look the characters from Simon Peter in the mouth, again, I'll be writing additional material about them, like I did with Immaculate Conception, about which I've gotten generally glowing feedback. However, before that, I have decided to master the art of writing comic book scripts! I like comic books. You should, too, hehe. American superhero comic books have incontestably produced the most enduring American cultural icons.

It also is fitting into my developing plan about getting published. Maybe it's wacky. But I realized that Simon Peter and Condotierri are two different kinds of novel in the minds of publishing firms. Simon Peter is historical fiction. Condotierri is science-fiction. I'll be sending material to two entirely different groups of people, rather than going to the same people with different material. With comic books, it would be another entirely different group of people.

But, that's my post. I should be posting more now that Simon Peter is written.

Papua New Guinea Cannibal Descendant Apologies Plus Yet More Religious Guilt

2007-08-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

I am not pro-cannibalism by any stretch of the imagination, but this story in the BBC News really got me scratching my head. A village where murders, and cannibalism, happened literally over a hundred years ago are apologizing for the murder-cannibalisms. Thousands attend.

Then, from the article:

The head of the mission, English pastor George Brown, avenged the killings by taking part in an expedition that resulted in the deaths of a number of tribespeople and the torching of several villages.

But, then:

PNG's Governor-General Sir Paulias Matane praised the early missionaries for making the country Christian - and called for more people to follow its guiding principles.

So, the villagers killing the Christian missionaries, who were Western imperialists, is bad and you need to have a reconciliation ceremony a century later but the Christians who enacted reprisals to those murders, which killed an unknown number of people but is recorded as having destroyed whole villages, are to be praised for, ironically, bringing the Ten Commandments to the island. The same commandments those missions honored more in their breach than their observance.

And where are the Methodists to come forward and say, "Golly, uh, maybe . . . village destroying reprisals was wrong." Why aren't Christians taking any responsibility for the vast suffering their cultural imperialism has inflicted on the people they "converted"? I'm not just talking cultural damage, either, but stuff like murders and villages burned -- the actual material cost of the horrors of this missionary work, work that continues to this day? Where are the Christians coming up and saying that it was a terrible thing what their ancestors did, that the work was attended with huge violence, and it was vicious and arrogant to go into other people's societies and through fraud, force and intimidation change their societies -- often, at the same time, extracting both cheap labor from the people and resources from their land? I'm not going to hold my breath for that one.

Still, it caught my attention of the fundamental hypocrisy of Christianity. The people who were viciously colonized by Christians are apologizing because they violently resisted colonialization, they praise the people who invaded them, killed their people, destroyed their culture, but Christians are silent about what they did to the people they attacked, killed and whose cultures they destroyed.

Masamune Shirow, Hierarchy and Science-Fiction

2007-08-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

Masamune Shirow, Cyberpunk and the Big Man

In many ways, Masamune Shirow, the Japanese manga artist who writes such titles as Appleseed and Ghost in the Shell, is the finest living cyberpunk author. More than just about anyone, he envisions a world where the awesome organizational skills of computers are interleaved in real time with physical action. In all obstacles the characters face, they are addressing both a hyperspeed information battle between their electronic brains and highly organized physical action.

But there's something that has long bothered me about Shirow's futurism, and I just thought out what it was -- it is a trait that is shared by many cyberpunk authors and, more generally, many science-fiction authors. The problem is the problem with the hero.

In Shirow's books, the protagonist is almost always a person who is the apex decision maker in the multi-layered confrontations I was talking about above. The underlaying proposition is that computer technology will further centralize decision making processes in powerful authority figures, that we'll become increasingly hierarchical by advances of computer technology. Perhaps this is merely a decision that Shirow (and other science-fiction authors) make to highlight things narratively, but it I think the facts bear out that technological innovation, broadly speaking, decentralizes decision making processes -- even extremely technical ones.

What this reminded me of is the nature of technological innovation in the United States. After World War II, the government built several huge laboratories to develop military technologies. But these highly centralized facilities were inefficient at creating better scientific information -- they decentralized scientific development to universities.

One of the key things to keep in mind that decentralized does not mean disorganized. Science, broadly speaking, is a highly organized endeavor and the decentralization of science was made possible by increases in organization. You're reading this very article on one of the key technologies that allows decentralization without disorganization -- the Internet. The deepening penetration of information technology into all levels of society allowed people to operate both independently but in an organized fashion, more rationally distributing workloads across more and more people. The speed with which consensus forms is shocking when the pressure is on.

So, for instance, in the disaster of 911, the people who survived were not those that followed instructions but those that used various wireless technologies -- such as Blackberries -- to create their own escape strategies. So, what I'm talking about isn't merely on the level of speculation. In a real world hazardous environment, decentralized decision making strategies lead to a better physical survival rate than obeying a centralized authority.

But Shirow, and most other science-fiction authors, don't even try to address this. Rather than decision-making being a consensus effort of many different elements, decision making is always a tightly controlled endeavor done by a powerful authority figure.

Going hand-in-hand with this is the believe that the people "in charge" have better and more reliable information than we do. Even today, for those of us who are online, that's not actually the case in most things. At one time, yes, centralized authority figures had a better overall picture of things than most people. In 14th century France, the king had ministers who were responsible for being knowledgeable about things of national importance, who learned what they knew, generally, through letter writing campaigns with various aristocrats. It took a tremendous amount of energy to get even general information to the King of France, and impossible to get everything the King of France knew to all of his subjects. Now, it is easy for a person to say something and have it be available to millions . . . to anyone that wants to get it. And, increasingly, we have comprehensive indices of information, allowing a person to more and more easily find relevant and concise information about whatever questions they want to ask. Additionally, of course, everyone can just talk to everyone else, now. It's trivially easy to strike up conversations with people all over the world, completely circumventing any hierarchical information networks entirely. I want to know what the situation on the ground in Baghdad is, I can write a Baghdadi, read their blogs and community news services. And that information will be at least as relevant for an understanding of the news as anything I read in The New York Times (indeed, considering how politically compromised newspapers are, I'd consider a blog of a Baghdadi to be considerably more relevant than the NYT or any other traditional newspaper). Lateral connections produce at least as good of information as hierarchical information providers. (I would even go so far as to say that, on whole, they produce much better information because they lack the institutional agendas of big news organizations.)

Indeed, I question the validity of all secret information because it passes through so few hands. The very value of secret information is, theoretically, that no one knows you have it -- but there's a flip side to that. You can't really check it out too well, either, because to do so reveals what you're looking for. So who corrects the data? Who knows! We don't even know the criteria for checking it. But when that same information is make public, everyone can check it, it can be debated, discussed, analyzed, proven or disproven. Indeed, this is the traditional model of scientific progress, which has been wonderfully successful -- by putting information out in public, it improves because people can either refute or support it. Secrets? You can't do that.

So, given that horizontal, lateral information connections are at least as valid as hierarchical information channels, the untrustworthiness of secrets, and the ability of decentralized by highly organized units to create meaningful consensus more swiftly than a top-down hierarchical command structure, the whole premise of Shirow's work, to my eyes, teeters. Perhaps it is merely the legacy of traditional narrative structure, where a key protagonist does everything. But I think the evidence is overwhelming that technology is decentralizing information and decision making processes, not embedding them in a hierarchy.

This is a common trend in science-fiction, though. How many science-fiction works have literal monarchies as the preferred government of the future? I understand that most people view their own culture as being the pinnacle of human achievement and never even try to imagine a superior form of government, but saying that in the future that monarchy will a viable form of government is akin to saying that in the future people will be using wood burning spaceships! Wood! The energy of the future!

And even when they don't have that sort of absurdity, the story almost always takes place around some tight hierarchical organization. So, even in the original Star Trek the socialism of the setting was undercut by the overt militarism of Starfleet. It's like . . . if you don't belong to some sort of top-down hierarchical organization, science-fiction writers (as a whole) aren't interested in writing about the characters or situation. Which doesn't seem to be the actual trend. The actual trend is for less hierarchy.

Still, that is my science-fiction observation for the day.

Pacifist Bashing and Violent Political Fantasies

2007-08-09T15:07:00.000-07:00

One of the more interesting things that happens from time to time, is when someone . . . picks on pacifists. In this case, it's fantasy writer Steven Brust who for some reason bashes pacifists.

Me, I don't get attacking pacifists. Mind you, I'm not a pacifist (because I believe in immediate self-defense), but, man, I really, really want to live in a world where pacifism works. I think that pacifism should be part of the goal of any sane political and social order, because of the obviousness with which war and murder are horrific. I think it's a great shame that I can't be a pacifist and I think pacifists are a shining example of much of what is best with humanity. If they ere, they ere on the side of love and peace . . . and I do not think they ere. I think they are simply before their time, but I think their presence helps to create the time that will suit them.

Almost all people who attack pacifism use some of the same arguments. One of them is that, sometimes, you need to use a little violence to stop a greater violence. Inevitably, what is brought up is World War II. Hitler would not have been stopped with non-violent confrontation. The . . . nuttier amongst them will bring up the sorts of things Brust does. Allow me to quote:

Had the social democrats used the violence of the state that was put into their hands in 1918, Hitler could not have come to power. Had the Stalinists not withheld arms from the Spanish working class in Madrid, Franco would have fallen early and the Spanish Civil War would not have dragged on.

The "if someone had used violence against Hitler, or the fascists, early on then the bad person couldn't have come to power and the world would have been a better place". This reasoning I've always found to be intensely childish, but common. It is a slight variation of the "if we'd stopped Hitler in Munich" argument, but it requires a hell of a crystal ball.

Who is to say that if the social democrats used violence in 1918 that they wouldn't have killed even more people than Hitler. I could pretty easily invent scenarios where this would occur. The social democrats, reacting to the anti-German sentiments of England and France, turn to Stalinist Russia to find a political ally. Disgusted with their mistreatment due to the Treaty of Versailles, a German-Russian military alliance forms that throws the world into an even more murderous war -- indeed, probably possessing the same anti-semitic elements of Nazism as Hitler didn't invent German anti-semitism and Stalin was, himself, quite the sponsor of Jewish genocide. Why not that instead of "and they lived happily ever after"? I know that a lot of historians feel that World War II happened, in part, because of unresolved issues of World War I and it was part of the time, unfortunately, to ethnically cleanse populations. A military intervention in German would not have addressed those issues, because they were embedded in the international culture of the time. Or, perhaps, the government of the social democrats would have been as unstable as the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi Party would have come into power, anyway.

More directly, often these little violent insurrections don't turn out as planned. I'm almost 100% if Lenin hadn't started the communist revolution in Russia, and the democracy it supplanted turned out to be tyrannical that Brust would be saying amongst his examples, "If Lenin had taken the chance offered to him . . ." It was impossible to tell at the beginning of the Russian revolution that Stalin would come out on top. Lenin was cut from an entirely different cloth than Stalin, after all. Indeed, the same is true of the Weimar Republic -- there was no way to tell that it would, eventually, produce Hitler. But the assumption that is made is if, y'know, the social democrats had gained power in Germany then everything would have been peachy keen. We don't know that. The history of various revolutions suggests that a large part of the time, things are worse after the revolution.

And it's just that the history of "liberal" military interventions is so . . . bad. They almost never go well, whether it be in the Philipines, Vietnam, Iraq . . . Haiti is a virtual study in the malevolence of supposedly humanitarian interventions. Eventually, it becomes clear that these violent interventions don't help the damn situation. They are the problem, not the solution! But the improbabilities of successful liberal military intervention actually producing peace, and the frequency with which it creates untold horrors, is never touched on by the people who think that mass murder helps a situation.

But, y'know, to justify military intervention it's impossible for someone not to bring up Hitler. They justify their love of violence by saying, "We could have stopped Hitler!" But they never say, "But what would have happened? How do we know that what happened wouldn't have been just as bad, or worse?" The answer is, of course, we don't.

(Indeed, I feel the argument depends on the demonization of Hitler. Hitler was a monster, obviously, but he has been built up into being a monster so bad that we can't imagine a world where there would be a worse monster or more horrible situation. This ignores that, in the 20th century, Hitler was the third biggest mass murderer, not the first. The one and two slots belong, respectively, to Stalin and Mao. And there are other monstrosities that are always left out -- such as the roughly two million Southeast Asians killed during the Vietnam War . . . but I never hear people saying that, you know, if the Republicans had taken the opportunity after the death of JFK, then millions in Southeast Asia would have been saved. But the idea is that Hitler was so bad that anything would have been better, but that's not true, the truth is that we don't know what would have happened and that if a person tries it's pretty easy to imagine more horrific scenarios, such as a war being deferred until Germany had nuclear weaponry.)

For me, well, it seems to me that the real way we should have stopped Hitler is instead of subjecting Germany to a humiliating treaty that stripped them of dignity and all their wealth, we could have tried rebuilding the German economy and included Germany fully in the international community, allowing them to keep their dignity. (One of the things that people forget is the extent to which Germany was ravished by the Treaty of Versailles. During the 20s and 30s, Berlin was an international sex tourism destination, for instance. Fathers were pimping their wives and daughters in the streets! It's the sort of thing that engenders bitterness.) Which is my last argument about the stupidity of saying that Hitler could have been prevented to coming to power through violence. It never addresses the reasons why Hitler was popular in the first damn place! That Hitler's rise to power was because of social conditions that could be predicted and ameliorated non-violently. (Indeed, many people were opposed to the Treaty of Versailles on the grounds that it would merely lay the foundations for a new war.)

Or, people like Brust act as if there was no viable peaceful solution in the years working up to WWII that could have avoided the war, and that any violent option would have avoided the war. Which is in addition to being untestable, barbaric. It is vile to think that violence would have honestly improved the situation and it is vile to not even consider non-violent options as being legitimate. And they never put as much effort into trying to imagine peaceful solutions as violent ones.

But, y'know, pacifists are the problem. *grits my teeth*

Religion and Funerals

2007-08-06T21:06:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me the other day how . . . opportunistically religions use funerals. How it's part -- a very important part -- of the scam that religion is. Think about it. Right when a group of people are particularly emotionally vulnerable a priest comes forward and promotes their faith. They cast the life of a human -- frequently a person they don't know at all, I should further point out, save perhaps in the limited context of religious observances which is a very distant and formal association, really -- in purely religious terms. The value of the person's life, and death, rests in the "next world". Isn't that really wicked ghoulish?

Now, obviously, religious people are going to say that, even beyond the existence or non-existence of god or heaven or whatever, religion at a funeral with its pablum about better worlds and eternal life is comforting. First, this is a false dilemma. The argument is that the comfort that religion provides can't be provided, and better, without religion. The choice isn't between no comfort and religion.

Second, it assumes religion is actually comforting. I, myself, do not find it to be comforting, not in the lease. The pablum of a priest and a bunch of sacred words ignores that, well, in virtually all religions that paradise is far from assured. Even as we all tell each other that so-and-so is in heaven, religiously speaking, we are also fearing that they're in hell. After all, we don't know. But I know that, for my own part, even when I was Christian that funerals always were difficult because the same grief that makes us grasp for concepts of non-physical immortality also make us consider the alternative. So, the comfort of religion is, itself, pretty thin -- offering, as it does, both heaven and hell. That your loved one might be roasting in the fires of hell isn't precisely comforting.

Third, there's the predatory element. If I came to a funeral and started preaching politics, saying that so-and-so might have lived if we had public health insurance, most people would think I was really tacky, using that moment to preach politics. But isn't that precisely what happens? Churches are very human institutions. By their presence at a funeral, they're doing what they can to insure the continuation of both their church and religion, generally, by stressing that religion is what's really important when someone dies. To my eyes, this is viciously opportunistic, a kind of sick promotion. And that stuff about grief and comfort is just the mask that religion uses to tart up it's intrusion into people's private grief.

Thoughts on Fantasy and Historical Fiction

2007-08-03T12:14:00.000-07:00

I am finding it reasonably challenging to write long projects like Simon Peter. Yeah, I know, I know, who knew that writing a novel might be hard work? One of the biggest problems I face is getting tired of the situation and characters and start to think about different situations and characters. So bad is this that I largely have to avoid reading too many novels, especially in fields different than what I'm writing about, because it can completely destroy my will to write what I need to write -- but to some extent it happens anyway. This post is largely working out this idea that's been getting in Simon Peter's way so I can focus back on that without distractions for a while.

Tho' Simon Peter is definitely a historical fiction, and I am enjoying writing historical fiction, I still primarily regard myself as a science-fiction and fantasy writer, but I've been having a lot of conceptual problems with fantasy for a while, now. The root of the "problem" comes from the reality that most fantasy is, explicitly or not, basically Western Europe in the High Middle Ages with some "system of magic" and a number of monsters fairly crudely slapped on. The magic is generally not particularly well integrated into the social fabric of society, and I find it reasonably tedious (even as I have largely done it) that fantasy "societies" are inevitably some real human culture (or, more often, a pastiche or parody of it).

This creates what a friend of mine coined, to my knowledge, as the generic fantasy template. We all know it. The story takes place in a parody of a Anglo-French feudal monarchy, there are elves in the forests, dwarves in the mountains, and guys in pointy hats know magic. Slight variants of the generic fantasy template rule fantasy with an iron fist.

For a while, now, my mind has been trying to pick out why this is the case. Some of it is enculturation, laziness and expectations. Most fantasy writers I know are, after all, members of what we loosely call Western civilization, so they're inclined to write about things with a Western motif, it's easier to write about Western motifs than to research outside of your culture or come up with something new, and . . . in the end most fantasy audiences expect it and want it.

The same goes with the poor integration of intelligent non-humans and magic into the setting, with some slight twists. For instance, in the GFT, elvish civilization is more advanced than human civilization in all ways -- technologically, magically and culturally. But no fantasy writer I know of writes about human civilization being an aspect of elvish colonization, even when humans actively ape elvish culture and civilization. (I've actually considered writing a fantasy novel where it would be largely about humans trying to free themselves of the thousands of years of elvish cultural imperialism and colonization as a kind of post-colonial fantasy novel and going all out. Y'know, the reason why people think that blond, blue-eyed people are more beautiful is due to their resemblance to elves, and the heroes are all "ugly" people because they're thick-bodied and with dark hair, skin and eyes, with the Aryan aristocracy emplaced by the elves keeping down the non-white humans, armed with elven weapons and such to do it.) But that doesn't happen, just as it never happens that people consider the justice behind, say, slaughtering goblins or orcs, or even the moral and legal issues of attacking a dragon.

Magic is equally poorly grafted on most of the time, without real social consequences. If you can magically heal someone, I mean, that's probably what you'd spend all your time doing, right? Or blessing fields or whatever. It is rarely integrated well into the setting.

(This is not universal, of course. Indeed, I wouldn't mind people giving me novels where all of this is false! I'm all down with people pointing me in the direction of cool books.)

So, I was thinking about how to settle these issues for myself, unique to myself as an artist. What I was tending towards was to write historical fiction with a fantasy element, with the magic and monsters being subtle enough that it might be objectively impossible to say "that was magic" . . . though I found myself then wondering why I wouldn't just write historical fiction. I wasn't sure that the distinction between historical fiction and historical fantasy would be interesting enough to make me write historical fantasy -- I might get too interested in the history.

But I was recently talking with a friend about fantasy role-playing games and what I disliked about a lot of gaming settings, and the same is roughly true of fantasy literature (even a lot of stuff that isn't the GFT). Specifically, we were talking about the Dungeons & Dragons setting of The Forgotten Realms. Forgotten Realms basically defines the generic fantasy template, really, and cranks it to 11. There are wickedly powerful wizards, awesomely powerful supernatural creatures, thousands of years of advanced non-human civilizations and loads of literally divine intervention, but human society managed to look superficially like northwestern Europe, and is the politically dominate force in the setting.

Part of what drives me batty about the setting is how it tries to ecologically justify things. A monster is never a freak of nature that exists, as they often did in mythology, for instance, on a remote island or as a single creature -- but there are whole species of them, with mating habits, society, culture. Which just worsens it all, because they're all these little independent things that have little bearing with each other, each considered in a weird vacuum!

During the course of the conversation about fantasy settings, I opined that I'd much prefer that monsters be freaks of nature one-shots -- and given the structure of D&D where there are literally hundreds of different monsters and scant reason to reuse most of them, this isn't even a problem -- or having a small number of them living in some remote location than try to justify a global ecology and economy and political structure as poorly as Forgotten Realms does it, constantly drawing my attention to how very stupid the setting is on whole.

So, I started to think about a setting where the world doesn't have the same base presumptions of our own world. What came to my mind was a game my wife ran for a while set in the Dreamlands (the one invented by H.P. Lovecraft). In the Dreamlands, you never worried about how things "really were". Why was there an ancient city in the jungle? Because ancient cities in jungles are . . . dreamy. You don't have to even try to follow the logic present in the material world. The Dreamlands follows dream logic.

Which got my mind working about a setting where, well,the operating principle wasn't what the various laws of physics might decide would happen, because there aren't any objective physical laws, but the universe would reward people for creating interesting narratives in the same way that our universe rewards people who tease out "the way things work".

So, a merchant who tried to prosaically find the wind and wave to create a reliable trade route would fail, or come back with paltry pickings, but the person who sailed off to explore the strange worlds beyond the edge of the ocean would come back laden down with loot. The same would be true of everything. An architect would try to make every building a statement because, well, that's more interesting than identical, prosaic buildings -- the universe would find that less interesting than a unique structure built of great passion.

And then I imagined that there would be ancient and alien narratives still hanging around. That the narratives of the protagonists -- which would be largely human narratives because I am a human -- might act in opposition to these alien narratives that are much older and, potentially, of greater significance than what humans think is interesting.

I acknowledge that there is a metafiction element to this. What determines "what should happen" is literally my thoughts about what constitutes "interesting" to the audience, that the narrative logic is an artificial construct of interesting determined by my private interpretation of modern American culture. I'm feeling terribly modern, hehe. I'm also thinking that . . . this has been coming for a while, artistically speaking. In some ways, I'm creating a justification to write like superhero comic book writers -- where "what would really happen" almost always comes in a distance second to "what is interesting to happen".

I've also been realizing that part of the function of human consciousness will create a narrative out of any facts that are presented. Consider conspiracy theory. A conspiratologist will take statements (many of them not facts, even) that are logically unrelated to each other and create a narrative out of them. Thus the innumerable bizarre theories concerning the assassination of John Kennedy, or even the American public's initial acceptance of the administration's narrative that Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction" even over the objections of the UN arms inspectors that were in the best position to know. Statements were presented in proximity to each other and people's minds just created a narrative. Meaning is something humans insert into a narrative. So, by presenting a number of statements in proximity to each other, I hope to create a compelling fantasy narrative despite the proposed narrative making no real sense at all.

So, when I'm done with Simon Peter, I suspect I'll be writing a couple of proof of concept stories to see how it works out.