Obama Lights Up: Ruminations from a Fellow Addict

Will the stunning revelations never cease? When pressed during an interview with Tom Brokaw, Barack Obama waffled a bit before admitting that he hasn't been entirely successful in kicking his nicotine addiction. He still lights up from time to time, but he's promised that he won't do it in the White House.

During his interview with NBC News' Tom Brokaw over the weekend, President-elect Barack Obama acknowledged that he has had some trouble kicking his smoking habit but promised that the White House would remain a smoke-free zone.

"There are times where I've fallen off the wagon," Mr. Obama said when asked if he had stopped smoking...

— Source

Let's get the obvious out of the way. Smoking is bad. Kids, don't try this at home. Everybody tells you this stuff, so why should I repeat it? In most ways, this item is a non-story. The last eight years of radical misgovernment have left many aspects of our nation's well-being in smoking ruins. A smoking Executive? If he can pull America out of its historical nosedive and make repairs to our economy, infrastructure, international relations and commitment to education, I don't care if Obama likes to pound nails up his nose while singing the theme song from Bonanza at 3:00 in the morning in drag. Really, really bad drag. Get over yourselves, snap snap.

So while I'll readily admit that a smoking president might not be the greatest thing in the world, it's far from the worst. I say this as a smoker myself, and one who, like Obama, has made repeated and unsuccessful attempts to kick the habit. In light of that, my first bit of advice to the President-Elect, were he listening, would be to stay away from Chantix. It did weird things to me when I tried it, and I got my hands on a prescription the week after it went on the market. Chantix impaired my memory and caused me to have multiple episodes of sleep paralysis that left me an utter wreck after about two months on the stuff. We can't risk having that in a president. All things considered, he's better off sneaking out to the Rose Garden for the occasional smokebreak... and so are we if he stays away from varenicline.

So, even though I am painfully aware of how addictive cigarettes are and have a pretty thorough understanding of how and why they're so bad for you, I'm going to play the optimist here and speak about the upside of this nasty habit. Yes, there is one and no, it's not worth the health consequences and no, this isn't an endorsement of inhaling particulate matter. Still, the guy already smokes. Let's think about the lung being half-full for a moment.

In one way, I've benefited from being a smoker. Because we smokers are banned from indulging our habit indoors in the workplace (and rightfully so), we have to step away from whatever else we're doing every so often in order to pump a little sweet, sweet nicocrackatein into our bodies in order to be able to maintain our concentration and evenness of mood. It's boring to do that by ourselves, so smokers naturally form little cliques that take breaks together. From experience, I can say that these little sessions have allowed me the opportunity to learn about all sorts of things — useful things — from other smoking colleagues. This is as true now that I am studying biology as it was when I was a headhunter. It's hard to get time from people to simply learn from them what they know; everyone's days are pretty full. Those smokebreaks make it happen. I've learned about everything from inside information regarding the executive teams at high-tech startups to the problems with designing primers for insect mitochondrial genes from fellow junkies.

Might Obama reap the same sort of benefit from amongst the negative consequences of his unhealthful indulgence? He might. You know, he might not be the only world leader, or staffer employed by a world leader, who smokes. He might not be alone out there on the White House steps puffing away in the dead of winter. Who knows what breakthroughs might come when he's joined out there by some government official from another country? What inside knowledge might he gain from sharing a few tar-tawnied moments with a staffer traveling with the Prime Minister of Brunei? Scorn if you must, but these smoke session are intimate in a way that the inside of an office or conference room can never hope to be. You're removed from that environment. You're outside. Maybe you're cold and feeling a little alienated. It's natural that such a situation breeds candor amongst those involved. Obama's health might suffer just a little, but we as a nation might just come out ahead because of it.

I have another common trait I share with Obama, or at least I like to think so. Both he and I are highly educated and possessed of a level of intelligence markedly higher than the outgoing president. The latter is, in and of itself, not saying very much, I know. Still, from my own experience I can state that my own awareness of both the costs of smoking and my inability (so far) to quit is a rather humbling thing. It reminds me of my own frailties and it probably does the same for Obama. Such weaknesses are intrinsically humiliating things to anyone with even a modicum of self-awareness, and Obama's waffling in the interview likely demonstrates that he has experienced a similar awareness and its consequent humbling effect. I've long maintained that anyone narcissistic enough to think they ought to be president probably shouldn't be elected, so it's a hopeful sign that Obama gets this periodic thump upside his head with the two-by-four of an unresolved character flaw. He's aware that he's not perfect, that he can do wrong by himself. He's not likely to wave that silly banner of divine right and council like some Chief Executives we know. I'm aware that plenty of people will disagree with this notion that I prefer my humans both flawed and aware of their flaws. Lots of folks think that a president should be a spiritual leader of some sort, a shining paragon of white knight rectitude. Me, I like to see that the guy knows there are some chinks in the armor. It's hard to be humble when one thinks of themselves as perfected. Besides, as embarrassing a habit as smoking is, is it really any more humiliating than


I think not.

Now, look, the fact that Obama is going to sneak off for a cigarette when the pressure is on every so often is not something to be celebrated. Still, presidents have done a lot worse in recent memory. I'll take smoke-n-choke over shock-n-awe any day of the week.

So, Mr. President-Elect, smoke 'em if you got 'em until you don't need to get 'em anymore. From one smokin' schmuck to another, you have my sympathy on this. It must hurt to have the press and the naysayers jabbing their fingers into this bullet wound in your self-image. I'm sure Michelle gives you as much grief over the habit as LL gives me; I also can't smoke in my home or in my office and I'm quite acquainted with the winter winds of New England as one result. Still, maybe you can leverage this for our benefit somehow. Whatever it takes. If I'm ever in DC and see you out having a dose of the bad stuff, I'd love to come and join in your act of enlightened self-destruction. I've got a few thoughts on research funding, and so do you. We can talk about it while we die just a little.

See? Smokers' optimism.

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Onward Christian Shoppers: Ironic? No.

I was half asleep after the long drive home from Pennsylvania and fully asleep by 7:00 PM. Because of that, I woke up at 2:00 this morning and wound up watching CNN. As I watched the Prime News program anchored by Mike Galanos, I saw the following segment. The pay-off quote here comes at about the 1:35 mark:

Guest and forensic psychologist talks about how the trampling death of Jdimytai Damour at a Valley Stream, NY Wal-Mart on Black Friday was a typical case of herd mentality resulting from the loss of personal responsibility and the anonymity of a crowd situation, but then he notes at 1:38 that there is an "inescapable irony" that the tramplers were Christians. The psychic dissonance at work here was enough to stop me dead in my tracks. How can this event be both typical and ironic? Russell seems to be making the case that we should expect some special behavior from those who consider themselves (and are considered by others) to be members of a particular religion, as if a religious belief would immunize someone against typical human psychology.

I have my doubts about Russell's contention that the crowd that killed Damour, injured his co-workers, and couldn't be bothered to let the police try to rescue the hapless temporary worker, let alone stop their shopping frenzy long enough to lend their own aid, were typical. I'm not a psychologist nor even a particularly observant student of human behavior. He may or may not be correct in making that assertion. I can state from personal experience that I have been in a violent crowd situation, saw someone get knocked down and stopped to help that person get back on their feet and avoid injury. If that isn't typical behavior, in a crowd or otherwise, it's a sad statement about human nature. I didn't stop and think about doing it; I just did it because that's my own instinct. I'd hope that someone else would do the same for me if I needed it. I may not be typical, though. That small gesture might represent abnormal behavior. Perhaps there's something wrong with me.

The notion that one would expect Christians to behave differently, though, that a consciously-adopted belief should alter social behavior, is ludicrous. I don't find anything particularly ironic in Christians trampling someone, at least no more so than I'd find it ironic that Jews, Hindus or atheists would trample someone. Brian Russell seems to want it both ways; what's typical for everyone else is somehow atypical for Christians. Is there some evidence that he, as a psychologist, can present to back up this statement? He doesn't mention any in his discussion with Mike Galanos, and so the statement comes across as rather glib to my ears.

It hasn't been my experience with those who subscribe to the Christian belief set that they act much differently from anyone else. They may ascribe different motivations to their behavior and they may see a different significance to events than others, but aside from some very superficial and intentional things, I've never noticed much of a difference.

One thing that Russell says which I do find myself in agreement with is that the Black Friday homicide of Damour says something about our culture which is profoundly disturbing. That is, according to Russell, it demonstrates a fundamental devaluation of the well-being of others and a synchronous elevation of self-gratification as the highest good. Russell notes several other recent events that he connects with the Wal-Mart trampling, such as the recent online suicide of a Florida teenager during which nobody intervened and the hit-and-run victimization of an elderly man in Connecticut which saw the injured left lying in the street without anyone helping him. One could compile a huge list of such inhumanities, of course. It's easy to do in a country in which a large fraction of the populace can't afford health care.

We live all too much of our lives in customized bubbles now, I think. We have so much technology connecting us in superficial ways that we're losing our ability to connect in unmediated ways. We're suffering not from a lack of religion but from a lack of the real basis of morality. We're losing our empathy, our ability to understand without cogitation that others feel what we feel, are hurt by what hurts us, and have the same needs that we do. That the trampling took place at a Wal-mart is not insignificant; Wal-mart is perhaps the cheapest outlet in America for the purchase of the very devices that mediate our experience of the world, so the death of a human being in the clamor for inexpensive access to mediating, customizable, sensually titillating gadgets is precisely the message that we need to take away from this. These push-button self-gratifications have taken on a life of their own for much of our population, not in the way that another human being might be loved but in the way that our own hand, our own eyes, our own bodies have meaning to us. As we become more fused to the toys and technology that we place between ourselves and the fleshy, carbon-based world in which we should be living, we retreat further into this silicon cocoon. Empathy is abstracted, sympathy is viewed as some sort of deficiency, and "self-reliance" becomes a shorthand for "I'm getting what's mine, screw the rest of you."

Far from being resistant to this mindset, religious belief may make it easier. It allows the use of "God's will" to explain away the unthinkable, but more to the point it is a handy way of dividing people. It's one of the fissures among many that allow one group of people to see some other as less valuable, less good, less acceptable. Witness this statement by the very recently deceased George Docherty, the man largely responsible for cramming the "under God" bit into the US Pledge of Allegiance:

An atheistic American is a contradiction in terms," he said in his sermon. If you deny the Christian ethic, you fall short of the American ideal of life.

— source

Given the willingness that exists amongst the religious to denigrate others in this manner, why on earth should we expect, as Brian Russell seems to do, that they wouldn't be prone to the kind of behavior that occurred at Wal-mart and claimed one life? I am seizing on Christians here because that is the religion mentioned in the segment from CNN linked above, but I don't consider them a special case in this regard. I certainly heard the same sort of talk from Jews when I was growing up in a Conservative to Orthodox Jewish family, for instance. I was once informed by a Hindu priest that I couldn't be allowed to enter a temple at certain times because I was a mleccha, a term which I later learned translates roughly into English as a "barbarian" as well as a class label considered to be even more untouchable than the classic Untouchables. Need the caste system even be brought up in this context?

Such divisiveness is an inherent part of all religions, and the division always implies the lesser value of some human lives as compared to others if it doesn't state it explicitly. That value is assigned largely on the basis of belief. By adopting Christianity, the belief goes, one is forgiven at the outset and can obtain an unlimited number of future dispensations. Christians don't believe this is true of non-Christians, of course, and an atheist... well, an atheist can't even be an American.

It is ironic, though, that a forensic psychologist, who is at least nominally a scientist, should make the kind of statement that Brian Russell made about Christians without the least bit of empirical evidence to back it up. Christians are plenty violent, plenty callous, and just as much afflicted by the empathically deadening effects of consumer culture as anyone else. It was, after all, a Christian contingent that brought us the so-called Culture War in this country. If Christians are capable of declaring war against non-Christians, why should it seem ironic that some of them are capable of killing someone, too? Don't wars usually involve that sort of thing?

Jdimytai Damour was just collateral damage, an inanimate object in the minds of those who killed him and injured those who tried to save his life. This isn't about Christian or non-Christian, believer or non-believer. This isn't about Valley Stream, New York and it isn't about Wal-mart. This is all about America. This is what we're becoming.

Shock and awe hasn't even gotten off the ground yet. Watch out for we Americans; we're capable of anything, and we don't even understand why.

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A Few Irreligious Thoughts to Ponder

You've probably heard by now about a certain presumptuous jackass of a columnist named Jim Griffith who writes for the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald. Griffith has achieved 15 minutes of Internet infamy by penning a column entitled "A few religious thoughts to ponder." In it, he explains how terrible Thanksgiving is for atheists:

Thanksgiving must be a terrible time for atheists. They have no God to thank.

They do not have the privilege of gathering with family and friends to express gratitude by saying: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." An atheist on his deathbed faces serious uncertainties. Gazing upward, he pleads: "Oh God, if there is a God, please save my soul -- if I have one."

The column was found out and replied to by a series of atheists objecting to such nonsense and, after less than two days, the newspaper saw fit to close the comments so that no more respondents could rake Griffith over the coals for being, as I said, a presumptuous jackass. I've checked other items in the newspaper, including other columns by Griffith, and none of them have had their comments closed after many days or weeks. Just this one. Apparently, the Newnan Times-Herald didn't want too many atheists to have the chance to debunk Griffith's garbage by mentioning how they celebrate Thanksgiving — at least not in a forum that locals were likely to see. It just won't do for a newspaper to report inadvertently that atheists celebrate the holiday in much the same way that non-atheists do and that the atheists are, after all, human beings with families, affections and gratitude. At least, it won't do for the small-time newspaper to reveal these truths to the residents of Newnan, GA.

As a result, those of us who didn't have the chance to respond to Jim Griffith's "few thoughts," which I suspect are a very few, at the paper's website during the 36 hours in which the opportunity to do so was available will have to do it elsewhere. I'll do it here.

I have a lot of things for which to be thankful this year, and not a single iota of it requires or has anything to do with any deities whatsoever.

Like many people across America, regardless of their beliefs, I will be joining my family to celebrate the holiday. LL and I will be leaving within the next couple of hours to head to north central Pennsylvania, just as we did last year. You may not see it readily, but there's a lot of gratitude embodied in that last sentence.

First off, I'm thankful for having gotten through another year during which a blindly religious president mismanaged the country in which I live into numerous hardships. I survived that year despite the existence of religious radicals in other countries who would like to see people like me dead... and when I say "people like me," I mean Americans. They want to inflict pain upon us because their religious fundamentalism calls for violence against people with whom they disagree. I'm thankful that this faith-stuffed anti-intellectual will soon be a former president and that his replacement might actually turn out to be a person of intelligence and ability who could wind up improving things, even if only a little. 2008 hasn't been a very good year for my country and I'm glad it's almost over. I'm thankful to the 7,000,000 people, too, who may well have changed the course of history during the last election. We shall see what really happens in the months and years ahead, but I'm thankful for at least having the hope that it won't be the same as what's gone before.

I'm thankful that I'm getting to spend another Thanksgiving with my sister, niece and brother-in-law. My sister and I had no contact at all for more than a decade, and this was in no small part due to religious belief. My parents found much to hate about the world and about differences of opinion and about people who are different from them thanks to their faith, you see, and they disowned first me in part because of that faith. They told my sister that I was a drug addict, that I was in jail and probably dead, to make as sure as they could that she wouldn't try to find me. When I finally tracked her down, I learned that she had been similarly disowned for the grievous sin of falling in love with someone of a different faith than that of our parents — even though neither my sister nor he practiced any religion at all. When they got married, nobody from my family came to the wedding other than myself. I gave the bride away. Tomorrow, we'll celebrate Thanksgiving together, along with my rather precocious niece and the rest of our non-traditional clan, none of whom are particularly religious and several of whom are outright non-believers. How could I not be grateful for this? The only involvement of a deity here, at least the imagining of one, was to drive people apart.

LL is coming with me, of course. This year, we celebrated our twelfth anniversary together. LL comes from a country in which religious differences led to a generation-long civil war in which members of her family and friends of her family died in terrible and inhumane ways. Her cousin, for example, was detained by a Syrian-backed militia, hauled away to Syria, and tortured for years. She spent long stretches of time huddled with her family in an underground parking garage hoping to avoid being shot or blown up by Syrians and Israelis and their proxies — all on the basis of ancient religious divisions. Survive it she did, though, and this year she became a US citizen and voted in an election for the first time in her entire life. I am thankful that LL is here with me, relatively safe and about to enjoy the holiday. I'm thankful that she survived a long and terrible war, that she made it to the US, and that she's stuck by me all these years, through the best of times and the not-so-good.

I'm thankful to the university I attend and to the people there who give of their time and knowledge as I grind away at earning a graduate degree. There was a time in my life, not so long ago, during which I never thought that I could get this far. I worked hard and here I am, but the opportunity had to be offered by others, too. I have that opportunity and am grateful for it.

I'm thankful that Tycho, a lizard who has practically been family, has survived another year, despite last year's unwarranted death sentence. He's sitting near my shoulder as I write this, probably wondering when breakfast is coming. Alas, the weather is too cold for Tycho to make the trip to Pennsylvania with us this year. He's going to be rather bored with no humans to entertain him for the four days we'll be gone. Tycho has worked out a lot of things in his long lizard lifetime, but how to work the TV remote isn't one of them. I expect that he'll spend much of his time asleep. In any case, he's exceeded the average lifetime of a member of his species in captivity by nearly a third now and is still in good health. Thank you, Tycho, for sticking around for so long. There will be lobster roaches and macaroni and cheese when we return. I suppose someone could argue that some deity is allowing Tycho to go on living. You know, Lizard-Jesus or HerpAllah or something. That would be a very childish person, but I'm sure someone who will read this will have the thought cross their mind.

Which brings me to another bunch for which I'm thankful, and that is the many people who have fought and are still fighting to reverse the ever-threatening flood of irrationality that might otherwise engulf us all and snuff out the light of the Enlightenment. They keep us progressing, sometimes at great cost. They're the ones who hope to remove the motivations for these religious wars and faith-based familial decay, who object to and dissect and defeat all the magical thinking that is only a hair's breadth away from complete ascendancy at times. I'm grateful to the teachers, the scientists, the historians, the living human memory-banks who remember the past and dedicate themselves to our not repeating it.

There is more — much more — but I have to get ready now to hit the road. It's a long drive from here to there. All things considered, I'm thankful to be making that six hour schlep today.

And you know what, Jim Griffith of the Newnan, Georgia Times-Herald? I'm even grateful to you today. You've given me one more reminder of how low we humans can sink if we decide to measure the worth of others with yardsticks designed and built of our own narrow views. You're a good cautionary example of just how wrong we can be, and thus how wrong whole societies can go, when our eyes get so full of our own self-esteem that we place ourselves in judgment of the rest of the world based on nothing but the desire to be thankful to anything other than that little fraction of humanity it is our privilege, and sometimes our burden, to actually know.

Like the majority of Americans, I'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with a ridiculously large meal on Thursday evening. Like those millions of other Americans, there's something else I'll be doing early on Friday morning. It's then that I will be thinking most of Mr. Griffith.

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Ann Coulter's Jaw Wired Shut

Wow... I'm actually having a crisis of non-faith over this one.

It seems that Ann Coulter had a little accident and, as a result, has had her jaw wired shut.

Notably, none of the people who like blaming painful events upon divine retribution against liberals, pagans, homosexuals, etc., have come forward to state that Ann Coulter has been given the back of the invisible hand.

Still, I think we can all be grateful that the world has become less shrill for a few weeks.

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Non-Belief in America: A Rising Tide of Reason?

I find a recent story in The Wall Street Journal encouraging (hyphal tip to Greater Worcester Humanists for the lead). It talks about the growth and emergence of the secular movement in the USA and the rather humorous, panicky attempts by religious extremists to push back against it.

Atheists Reach Out -- Just Don't Call It Proselytizing

Nonbelievers Think the Time Is Right to Better Organize Their Nonreligion and Swell the Membership; 'Reason's Greetings'

...During the past three years, membership has grown in local and national associations of nonbelievers. Books attacking faith as a delusion shot up best-seller lists. For the first time, the faithless even raised enough funds to hire a congressional lobbyist.

Building on that momentum, nonbelievers have begun a very public campaign to win broad acceptance. On billboards and bus ads, radio commercials and the Internet, atheists are coming forward to declare, quite simply: We're here. And we're just like you...

Not so fast, religious leaders respond. They point out that the vast majority of Americans believe in God. A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life earlier this year found 71% of American adults are absolutely certain God -- or some sort of universal spirit -- exists, and a further 17% said they were fairly certain. Only 5% said flatly that they don't believe.

Atheists "are talking to a very small slice of the population," said Mathew Staver, a leading Christian conservative and law-school dean. "In some ways, they're really just talking to themselves..."

Of course Staver would say that. Staver says a lot of things that don't make much sense. As far as his being a "law-school dean," that's technically true... if you consider Liberty University a school instead of a religious indoctrination center. That's a hard case to make in light of their doctrinal statement and the statement of belief that all faculty there is required to sign, though.

In this case, Staver is twisting facts to suit his argument when he says "only" 5%. Even if that figure were true, 5% is not an insubstantial number of people. To put it in context, the Pew Forum's most recent U.S. Religious Landscape Survey shows that only 1.7% of the population follows Judaism and 1.7% is Mormon. Unless Staver wishes to argue that Jews and Mormons have no impact on the rest of America, that they are "really just talking to themselves," then the same can't be said about nonbelievers. I wonder how these other groups feel about Staver suggesting that they should be ignored?

Secularist groups say their membership began to surge in 2005, when Congress sought to prevent Terri Schiavo's husband from removing her feeding tube. Many new members said they hoped nonbelievers could serve as a counterweight to religious influence in political affairs...

Bingo. As is noted later in this article, the rational community is by no means homogeneous and, by its very nature, is not particularly prone to organizational efforts for that reason. Still, the increasing stranglehold of those who believe that their religion should serve as the blueprint for law over political discourse in this country has served as a goad for nonbelievers to put aside differences and come together to push back against the American shariah movement. We can have rational arguments about those areas of disagreement later; they're just not as important in light of a much greater challenge. To do otherwise is tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Rather than renew old battles, such as the symbolic fight to remove "In God We Trust" from currency, members are mobilizing to repair what they view as breaches of the wall between church and state -- such as federal funding for faith-based charities and teaching of intelligent design in science class. They believe many others sympathize with their views -- but are too timid to commit.

I have to admit that as much as I usually dislike having "In God We Trust" on currency, there's a certain irony to the slogan that I can enjoy during the current economic meltdown.

The new ad campaigns and other public-relations efforts are designed to raise comfort levels about atheism by making the point that nonbelievers are "just as ethical and moral as anyone else," said Lori Lipman Brown, who lobbies Congress on behalf of the Secular Coalition for America.

As Doug Krueger, a philosophy professor in northwest Arkansas, put it: "Step one is for people to know we're not crazy, we're just regular people [who have] perfectly satisfactory lives without believing in God."

There's an irony, too, in the necessity for people who don't believe in an invisible, omnipotent being and its winged, praise-singing minions to demonstrate that they aren't crazy while belief in divine intervention and incorporeal evil spirits is the norm. Sarah Palin can talk about an immaterial divine hand "opening doors" for her to "plow through" and much of America nods its head in agreement that such things happen, but if we contend that no bearded man from a parallel dimension provides opportunities, that we humans are responsible for the state of our own and one another's lives, we're a bunch of misfits!

So the American Humanist Association is spending $42,000 to plaster buses in Washington, D.C., with ads asking: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake." FreeThoughtAction and its local affiliates have put up billboards all over the country asking: "Don't believe in God? You are not alone." Eight billboards are going up this month in Denver...

Organizers of such efforts generally say they aren't trying to evangelize. Instead, they say their goal is to make the public more comfortable with the concept of atheism and give fellow nonbelievers a sense of community.

In seeking the spotlight, the movement risks a backlash. Some Christians find the billboards deeply offensive, especially at this time of year. In recent weeks, press releases from the religious right have accused atheists of "mocking" and "insulting" Christmas. In rural Chambersburg, Pa., one Christian group responded to an "Imagine No Religion" billboard with a giant sign of their own, asking: "Why Do Atheists Hate America?"

Ah, there's the humorous part. It hearkens back to the days of 2003, when 83% of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq and those of us who thought it a bad idea were confronted with that stupid question, "Why do you hate America?" If any empty-headed question is symbolic of blind faith, of going along with the crowd simply because it's the majority, that's the one. And just as we in that 17% minority spoke our minds then not because we hated America but because we hoped to steer it away from a direction we thought bad for it, those of us in the 5% that Staver insists is talking to itself are trying to change the course of America toward one that leads to greater reason, to policy based on empirical reality rather than wishful thinking, and to a better future in general. It has nothing to do with hating anything, whether it's a religion or a country, and everything to do with simply being rational. If we have to organize to do that, if we have to reach out to others who have no connection to other nonbelievers in their own localities, so be it.

Still, leading activists say nonbelievers tend to be just as wary of organized atheism as they are of organized religion -- making it tough to pull together a cohesive movement.

"A pastor can say to his flock, 'All rise,' and everyone rises. But try that in an atheist meeting," said Marvin Straus, co-founder of an atheist group in Boulder, Colo. "A third of the people will rise. A third will tell you to go to hell. And a third will start arguing....That's why it's hard to say where we're going as a movement."

No kidding! Independent thought doesn't necessarily lead to agreement; it often results in the opposite. Aside from the core idea behind secular thought — that theology shouldn't be the basis for policies that affect the lives of all Americans — there's plenty of disagreement and debate about the particulars and priorities beyond. That very debate, though, is what reason should encourage. It's how a society learns, changes and progresses. If you find ten nonbelievers in a room agreeing with one another about some aspect of social policy, you can bet that they've been in that room for at least a couple of hours and half of them will probably have exhausted their voices. The very fact that we can change our minds is a strength.

If the theocratically-inclined find this offensive, if they believe that their religions are under attack because we put up a billboard expressing dissent against it and offering some other way of thinking, too bad. It's going to keep happening and all indicators point to it becoming more widespread, not less. That's America for you, and that very freedom is one of the reasons that I, and other secularists, believe it's worth inciting the outrage of those who would take it away. It's a risk we're willing to take on behalf of our country.

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Skeptic vs. Cynic

The difference between a skeptic and a cynic:

A skeptic treasures rationality and empirical evidence, wielding them as a razor to slice away at unfounded belief in an effort to improve the lives of others. A skeptic will deliver a long, detailed argument about facing reality in an effort to overcome ignorance.

A cynic treasures rationality and empirical evidence, wielding them as a cudgel in order to improve his comfort level with his own life, regardless of the impact upon the lives of others. A cynic will deliver a long, detailed argument about facing reality in an effort to overcome ignorance to your relatives as they gather around your deathbed. He's likely to have a cost-benefit analysis of your funeral arrangements in his pocket.

If mercy's a business, I wish it for you
And more than just ashes when your dreams come true.

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On the Significance of Numbers

Sometime in the next couple of hours, Hyphoid Logic will receive it's 33,792^nd visitor since I started keeping track with Sitemeter.

Is that more, less or equally significant as compared to the 30,000^th and 40,000^th visitor?

Idle thoughts, really. Just waiting for an electrophoresis gel to finish running. Gel of the Day coming soon.

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Rocky Twyman Blasphemes and Will Be Smited by Norman Fell

If you're a poor slob like me who still drives a car despite the high price of gasoline (high for Americans, anyhow), you've certainly noticed by now that the price has come down just a little bit in the last couple of weeks. As you may also recall, Rocky Twyman, a Jesus-freak and Oprah Winfrey self-help guru, launched a series of pray-ins at gas stations when the price began to sky rocket back in April. His "Pray at the Pump" campaign was intended to invoke divine assistance in making gas cheaper so that Americans could once again exercise their apparently god-given right to drive Hummers. At that time, I started praying, too, but I prayed to the One True God — the Ghost of Norman Fell. Moreover, I prayed that the price of gas would go up during the period from April 27 until the beginning of June. It was a test I devised to see whether the Ghost of Norman Fell was, in fact, more powerful than Twyman's "Jesus," whom some readers may have heard of before. For those that haven't, Jesus, also known as "Christ" and "Son o'God" and "Jehovah Junior" is a particularly popular ghost amongst certain Western religious sects, said to be the disincarnate spirit of a Middle Eastern prophet and part-time carpenter executed by Roman authorities around 30 CE. You can find out more about him and some of the more popular myths propounded by cults based on his alleged exploits on Wikipedia.

So here we are in mid-August and Rocky Twyman and friends are now claiming credit for a decrease in the price of gasoline:

Petrol pump pilgrims keep faith
By Greg Wood and Sandra Shmueli

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.

Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80...

"We were down in Huntsville, Alabama. We finished praying," Mr Twyman said. "Immediately the owners came out and changed the gas prices. They brought it down. We had marvellous success down in St Louis, Missouri."

This week the group returned to the site of their first prayer meeting to celebrate. Singing "We shall overcome," they changed the words of the well-known hymn to "We'll have lower gas prices".

Mr Twyman is sceptical that market forces might be responsible for the lower prices...

Oh, really?

First off, the article is wrong. The US national average price for a gallon of gas when Twyman started his "Pray at the Pump" drivel wasn't $4 but about $3.30; it didn't hit $4 per gallon until Memorial Day weekend, which is at the end of May, or more than a month after Twyman started trying to get Jesus involved and I brought down the power of Norman Fell upon America's gas stations. The price of gas went up, not down, demonstrating that Norman Fell is, indeed, far more powerful than this Jesus fellow.

Moreover, the price of gas continued to climb until peaking in July, or a month after I stopped beseeching Mr. Roper's Holy Spirit to stop increasing it. In all that time, Jesus was unable to reverse the mighty, mighty force of Spectral Fell. In fact, even with the recent decline from the peak price, the average price is still about $3.80 per gallon. That's 15% higher than it was when Twyman started blubbering to his false idol.

Still, I could be making all of this up, couldn't I? Well, here's a graph charting the national average cost for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline for the period beginning in February 2006 and ending in August 2008. It is based on information compiled by the US Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration. I took the original graph and added a red "x" to the point at which Twyman started his pray-ins and a green "x" at that which I stopped praying to Norman Fell. As you can see, Twyman's praying was clearly ineffective, and the price of gas decreased only after Norman Fell's divine power to raise prices was no longer invoked:


In case there were any doubters left out there, this is graphic proof of the superiority of Norman Fell to Jesus Christ of Nazareth. For Twyman to continue to claim otherwise is nothing short of blasphemy, a crime against the Holy Roper for which he will surely be punished in the most severe manner.

Death to the Infidel! The power of Fell compels you! Abandon ye your wicked ways of worshiping the wheezing, wonky Jesus and take the step that is new. Get down on your knees for Norman!

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Bible Colleges: Keeping America Ignorant and Fearful

Liberty University may be America's best-known madrassa, but it is by no means the only one. Fundamentalist institution with the same sort of rancid flavor dot our landscape, working every day to insure that fresh crops of the fearful and ignorant will always be available to hold back progress and keep our nation bellicose and hypocritical.

Such an institution is Tennessee Bible College of Cookeville, Tennessee. Amongst its core values are that Islam is the work of Satan and condones the sexual molestation of children; that Catholicism denigrates Biblical teachings and that clapping one's hands in church is anti-Christian. Make no mistake, this is one hardcore Fundamentalist institution; students won't even be admitted before they've passed a test of their Biblical knowledge (TBC Catalog, Admission Requirements, page 14).

It comes as no surprise, then, to find that this purveyorship of spooky learning is offering a course that teaches, amongst other nonsense, that the acceptance of evolutionary biology as scientific fact is the equivalent of murderous intent and amorality:

Creation VS Evolution To Be Taught

It's an issue being addressed in a new biology course offered this fall at Tennessee Bible College with guest instructor Ray Tenpenny of McMinnville, who'll be on the Cookeville campus Mondays from 1-4 p.m., Sept. 8-Nov. 19.

Tenpenny holds bachelor's and master's degrees in biology from Tennessee Technological University, as well as a bachelor's degree in religious education from Tennessee Bible College. He has taught biology and science at various schools, including Motlow Community College in McMinnville, Freed-Hardeman University in Henderson, and high schools in Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta, Ga. He has also worked for the Centers For Disease Control in Atlanta.

"With his background in both biology and the Bible, Brother Tenpenny is well qualified to teach this course at Tennessee Bible College," said TBC dean Kerry Duke...

"If you think, as the atheists do, that life arose spontaneously — that we all evolved from a single source and there is no God — then what real basis do you have for saying that it's wrong to kill a human being but okay to kill a mouse or a fly?" Duke said. "If you look at it from a biblical point of view, you realize that life is a gift from God and that human beings are above the animals."

He added, "Things have changed so much in this country. It used to be against the law in Tennessee to teach the theory of evolution. The Scopes Monkey Trial (Dayton, Tenn., 1925) is a good example of that. But now it's against the law to teach creation in public schools..."

I have no idea what Ray Tennpenny might have done for the Centers for Disease Control; a search of the CDC website as well as one of PubMed turns up nothing at all with his name on it. For all I know, he was likely a lab technician or perhaps swept up after hours, but he doesn't appear to have his name on any publications. I did find a rather crackpot osteopath named Sherri Tenpenny, however, who talks about using "inside information" from the CDC to justify not having children vaccinated. I have no idea if there's any connection between Ray and Sherri Tenpenny, though, so I'll steer back from this diversion and just address the purely Biblical crackpot.

That Tennessee Bible College should offer a course given by a crank comes as no great surprise, and whether or not he has some degree in biology isn't really relevant to the issue at hand. The fact is, it doesn't appear he's done much with it and, in fact, he's spent at least the last decade not studying or working in biology at all. Instead, he's been taking Bible courses at TBC and even established a scholarship there in his own name expressly to "assist people in learning more about the Bible." Rather than being a scientific investigator, Tenpenny "...attends Bethany Church of Christ in McMinnville and sometimes fills in as preacher." Whatever degree he may have earned long ago, Tenpenny isn't a scientist and hasn't been one in decades (if ever). The other four-year college listed in the article is also a madrassa. Freed-Hardeman University, like TBC, is a Church of Christ outfit that, to put it mildly, places a premium on religious obedience. Tenpenny — and I'm sure his classes are worth exactly what his name implies, scientifically speaking — has been at this Creationism bit for a long time.

In doing so, his course will raise the usual ignorant, fear-inspiring and hypocritical question about evolutionary theory and atheism. That is, if one doesn't posit a special place for humanity insured by the act of special Creation by Jehova, then one is a potential killer who doesn't see human life as qualitatively different from that of insects. It's the same constantly-repeated religious insistence that morality can only exist with a specific religious basis. It's a garbage charge that's been answered time and time again, but Tenpenny and Tennessee Bible College and various skyghost-insisting fruitcakes keep flinging it about as if nobody's ever been able to answer the question. They thus insure the existence of an enemy, a big, bloody-fanged boogeyman that diverts attention away from the big, bloody-fanged boogeyman that they worship.

So, what the heck, let's answer this idiocy one more time.

The basis of human morality is not religion, but the evolution of social behavior. Even the great apes have a degree of morality, which in turn is based on empathy. The evolution of the prefrontal cortex in humans has allowed us to take this to a greater degree of development precisely because it has allowed us to think in abstract terms in ways that other animals cannot. That is to say, both humans and other primates are capable of empathy. We can respond to the emotional states of our fellows by taking cues from their facial expressions, body language, sounds, etc. The big leap in humans is that we can imagine the ramifications of our actions before we actually take them and what the emotional state of another human being will be because of those actions. This is a wonderful byproduct of the evolution of social behavior as a key to the success of humanity as a species. In addition to our tool use and generally big brains, we have neural circuitry devoted to nothing but mirroring the emotions of others, and we put that circuitry into play not only when we've actually done a thing but when we merely contemplate doing it.

That isn't to say that we don't have purely selfish, even animalistic, drives. We clearly do, and there are individuals among us who are deficient in their ability to empathize. Such people don't feel guilt for harming others. We call them psychopaths. No amount of religious training turns a psychopath into a decent human being; they will always act selfishly and will cause harm to others so long as they believe that they derive some benefit. Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader, and most recently Alabama preacher Anthony Hopkins are all very good examples of such people. The existence of such people demonstrate that the ability to empathize is pre-requisite to morality, whether or not moral lessons are delivered by religion or any other external source.

Now, I can only use myself as an example. I won't presume to know what goes on in the mind of another as well as I know what happens in my own mind.

When I feel anger toward another human being, when I feel jealousy or lust or any other emotion, I don't simply act them out. The rising of such feelings is accompanied by the consideration of what acting upon them would do to another person, and that consideration is, in turn, based upon my own knowledge of how I would be affected if someone else took the same action upon me. All of this happens without effort on my part; I don't force myself to think about it. The process initiates itself. Thus, when someone angers me, there's a primal part of me that says, "Let's pick up a rock and bash that son of a bitch's head in." On the other hand, there's another part that says, "That person is more than a target for your momentary rage. He also feels pain. He loves others and is loved by others. Other people depend on him, just as they depend on you. You, too, sometimes inspire anger in others, and they may want to bash your head in from time to time. How would that feel? What would it do to the people who care for you?" The net result is that I have never killed anyone and, unless absolutely forced to, I doubt that I ever will.

Note that I don't take time out to pray about this. The internal dialogue that I've written out above isn't a literal thing; I don't hear a little voice that says words to me. It happens as quickly as the speed of thought. Nor is there a fear of external authority, including but not limited to some omnipotent deity watching everything I do and dangling me over some eternal stewpot like a piece of meat. Real morality, and real free will, comes from the ability to see the value in another's life, not from concerns over reprisal. Even the most amoral psychopath in the world will restrain his actions if he believes that he'll be caught and punished. That's not morality, that's simply fear.

I find it rather telling, though, that this Fundamentalist version of morality doesn't see the value in the lives of creatures which aren't human. The short answer to Duke's charge that someone like me doesn't see a difference in killing a human and killing an animal, and that it's "OK" to kill a mouse or a fly, is that he doesn't have the first notion of what he's talking about. In fact, I don't think it's "OK" to kill any animal. It may be a necessary act when done to provide food or to gain access to knowledge that will benefit not only my species but others as well, but it isn't something that I, as a person who routinely sacrifices a few insects to get a better idea of how their species came to be and live in the world today, think is "OK." I don't simply go about randomly killing even the smallest of creatures based on my not seeing value in their existence; I take what is necessary and hope to benefit what is not in the course of my research.

When there is a fly in my house, I open a window and shoo it outside. When there is a spider in my house, I let it be. When there are wild animals coming to my door, I'm more inclined to toss them a cookie than I am to put a bullet in them or scare them off. The more I understand of the history of life on earth, the more I come to know of the commonality that we humans share with all other life on this planet, the clearer it becomes to me how connected all of it is. I see the value in all life, even that which doesn't directly benefit me and for which there would be no penalty in its destruction, whether from legal authorities or religious hobgoblins. Every living thing on this planet has some role, some value, to the whole. Some of them seem to have value to one another. Birds and mammals appear to even love one another in many cases. Rather than placing humanity above other living things, then, I have come to see my species as one mode of existence on this planet that has a particular value which is strongest to me because it is most like my own (in fact, identical). It isn't a matter of being set apart by some special act of a deity; I understand it on an individual level and I therefore place a value in it. I thus do my best to cause as little harm to my fellow man as I possibly can and, instead, aim to provide some good with the tools I have at my disposal. This is what it is to be human, I think, or at least to be a good human.

By the same token as Duke and Tenpenny's fear-mongering question, which I hope I have answered, I pose another one. If life on earth is simply a dress rehearsal, a test for the afterlife, why is it wrong for the pious to kill one another? Part of the test is certainly suffering (see the Book of Job for more); why prolong that suffering? The pious undertake all sorts of actions in the belief that they do so as instruments of God's will. Why not just send one another to heaven, that perfect and unchanging Utopia where, according to the New Testament, "Him that believeth on Me shall never die"?

Thinking this way, it would become clear — were I a hypocrite of the calibre of Dean Duke or Ray Tenpenny — that all Christians are potential murderers, liable at any time of thinking that it was time to dispatch the righteous to their reward and the unrighteous to their punishment. For the most part, I don't have to live my life in such fearful circumstances, however, because I have the knowledge — not faith, not mystery, not prayer, not dusty books and raving preachers, but knowledge — that the vast majority of humans, be they Christian or atheist or Muslim or Jew, have been equipped by evolution itself with the ability, even the drive, to empathize with one another, at least to the degree that prevents us from running wild with torches and bludgeons through the streets. The "golden rule" is not a product of imposed authority but of the very stuff that makes us up. Only those who are deficient in this basic ingredient of what it is to be a fully functional human being need the fear of punishment and the commensurate parental surrogate to not be murderers, rapists and thieves.

When people put forth this question of morality, then, we are really hearing one of two things. Either they are telling us that they themselves are deficient in their ability to empathize with their fellow man and need to be warned away from doing terrible things, or else they are attempting to inspire fear in us of some of our fellows. The latter case doesn't exclude the former, of course, and the sowers of discord may well seek to reap benefit by causing harm to others, also demonstrating their own deficiency, their own substantial weakness, their own lack of humanity.

I don't know into which category Ray Tenpenny might fall, but I have no doubt that one or both describe his motivation in his continuing quest to mislead others. For so long as we humans believe that we need fear to inspire morality, there will always be men like Tenpenny who exploit the rest of us and there will always be those among us willing to be so exploited. When the day comes that our species finally sheds supernatural awe — and it will come someday — in favor of natural empathy, the Bible Colleges and churches and mosques will be preserved perhaps as archaeological curiosities, as illustrations of architecture, as primitive tokens of what mankind can accomplish when we work together as rational and empathic beings, even when we don't know why we're compelled to do so in the first place.

I won't be here to see it, and neither will you, but I think it will come someday. It will come without regard to the efforts of all the Bible Colleges and Fundamentalists and psychopaths in the world. These things are but fleeting moments in a much, much greater history that is far more beautiful, far more awesome, and far more accessible than anything dreamed up by religion.

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Amazing Mycological Fact

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She Dinna Have Enough Power

The rocket that was supposed to carry the ashes of Scotty, James Doohan, dinna have enough powerrr to make it into orbit and was lost. Somebody must have forgotten to charge the dilithium crystals.

Launch of Private Rocket Fails; Three Satellites Were Onboard
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

A privately funded rocket was lost on its way to space Saturday night, bringing a third failure in a row to an Internet multimillionaire's effort to create a market for low-cost space-delivery.

The accident occurred a little more than two minutes after launch, and the two-stage Falcon 1 rocket appeared to be oscillating before the live signal from an on-board video camera went dead...

The rocket was also carrying the ashes of 208 people who had paid to have their remains shot into space, including the astronaut Gordon Cooper and the actor James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, the wily engineer on the original "Star Trek" television series...

Considering the line for which James Doohan is most famous, the spacecraft not making it into orbit seems an even more fitting tribute to Scotty than if it had.

Besides, Scotty should have been beamed up, not shot into space aboard some primitive wessel.

Hyphal tip to Wormtown Taxi for the heads-up on this story.

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Sacrilege Before Sleeping

I am very, very tired and despite an interesting conversation or two currently ongoing that I would very much like to continue, I really must get some sleep. LL's jet lag is proving a little bit contagious; the poor thing's inner clock is still set to Beirut time and since my schedule today has revolved entirely around hers, I think that my own timing may be located somewhere in the longitude of Mauritania right now.

Be that as it may, I can't let the day end without mentioning The Great Desecration undertaken today by PZ Myers. After sharpening up horns and pitchfork, twitching his barbed tail a few times and uttering the Lord's Prayer in amazingly flawless reversed Latin, he produced a tableau that included not only a magical cracker but also a copy of the Quran and one of Dawkins' The God Delusion thrown in for good measure. He accompanied this with quite a long and well-thought-out explanation of why he's done it. If you haven't seen all this by now, I strongly suggest that you check it out on Pharyngula.

I can't add anything to what he's written, of course. I can only say that if nobody had ever done this sort of thing and thereby demonstrated the impotence of supernaturalism, we might all well still be assiduously avoiding setting foot on the shadows of priests and having our governments chosen by divine right. As it is, reports indicate that Myers has neither burst into flame nor been transformed into a pillar of salt. Minnesota has not been wiped from the map. Bill Donohue has still not become sane. The world has not changed.

And now, six hours of unconsciousness.

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The Very Long Sunday

It's 9:35 PM as I write this. It's been a long day. My sequences, however, are ready to go on the plate in the morning. I hope it's worth it. If I'm really lucky, I may find a mutation at the primer binding site of one or two species under tribe Diaperini when I get the reads back on Tuesday. If there is one there, it could turn out to be a very useful character in reconstructing Tenebrionidae phylogeny.

Or it could all be pure chance.

Like a slightly schizophrenic ex-girlfriend of mine once told me on an evening when her pupils were the size of basketballs, "You never know until you find out."

Me, I've got a scotch and soda in one hand and a remote control in the other. Time to turn the brain off for the night.

My day ended with an act of great generosity being made toward me. I ran out of cigarettes hours earlier but I was too busy with DNA-related stuff to leave and get some. On my way out the door, I bumped into CaKh, the Argentinian entomologist/biogeographer. He insisted on giving me 3/4 of a pack of Marlboros for the ride home. That might not be a big deal in some places, but in Massachusetts I believe that qualifies as a dowry.

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Amplify Naked: In the Lab on a Sunday

I'm here at the lab this afternoon. See?

You can tell it's a lab because there are microscopes and other sciencey-looking things in the picture.

It being Sunday, I'm the only one in the lab, which is a bit lonely but also very nice. During the week, we have an undergrad here on a summer project in which he's working under the supervision of a post-doc to sequence a whole bunch of Boletales specimens from another university to make sure that they're actually what they're supposed to be. Most type specimens were collected before the days of molecular analysis and so in many cases nobody is as sure of their identities as they could be. It's a worthwhile project, but with everybody else doing their molecular thing, too, the clean lab is often at capacity. I have a sizable experiment I'm working on, testing a couple of primer sets for my so far-elusive cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 genes under a new protocol on the thermocycler. It's not that complicated a project, really, but getting it all set up requires a bit more physical room than is usually available. I'm just now waiting for the cycler to finish before I run a gel and hope that I actually get some bands. Then I'll be able to see if one of the primer set works better than the other, if both sets work well and the difficulty has been all about the annealing temperature, or if the whole thing just isn't going to work for some reason. I suspect the combination of a new, family-specific primer set and a different thermocycler regimen will solve the problem. We'll see.

Because there's nobody else here today, though, I also got to watch an old Del Tenney drive-in flick after getting the thermocycler set up. I watched the amazingly goofy Horror of Party Beach in a conference room. There's something particularly gratifying about kicking one's feet up and watching a cheezy flick about radioactive jellyfish-zombie-monsters that eat only nubile young beach party girls and the scientists trying to devise ways to destroy them when one is sitting in a biological science center and waiting for PCR products to be amplified. You can always tell the scientist in a 1960's rubber suit horror flick; he's the guy in the white coat, smoking a pipe and saying things like, "The organs of these beings are too decomposed to retain oxygen so they've been replaced by sea anemones. They're giant protozoa!" Errrr... yeah. I hope I don't give an answer like that when I take my quals.

I did want to get this experiment run today for another reason, too. With LL coming home, I won't be here most of next week. If I get everything ready for the sequencer by the end of the day today, I can have it on a plate tomorrow and get my sequences back on Tuesday. Or I can have it ready for the plate on Tuesday and then download them and toss them into an alignment next Monday. Either way works, really.

34 more minutes left on the thermocycler now. You know, if I'd have known I'd be the only person here today, I'd have amplified naked.

Nobody touch that line. It's going on a t-shirt.

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Transcendance Without Faith: a Reply to Richard Scruton

On RichardDawkins.net, an article by Richard Scruton entitled "The Return of Religion" has been under discussion. Without going into much detail, Scruton’s article is a typical Creationist long-winded rehashing of the same old arguments from personal belief and anthropic fine-tuning. There’s one statement he makes, however, that particularly bothers me. It’s not new, but whenever I see it I can’t help but want to address it.

Scruton states,

…human beings have an innate need to conceptualise their world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane. This need is rooted in self-consciousness and in the experiences that remind us of our shared and momentous destiny as members of Kant's 'Kingdom of Ends'. Those experiences are the root of human as opposed to merely animal society, and we need to affirm them, self-knowingly to possess them, if we are to be at ease with our kind. Religions satisfy this need. For they provide the social endorsement and the theological infrastructure that will hold the concepts of the transcendental and the sacred in place…

Allow me to explain why a statement like this compels me to make a counterargument.

What Scruton is asserting boils down to the notion that is necessary to posit supernatural causation in order to experience one’s existence as something transcendental. That is, there must be some divine intelligence behind reality that assigns meaning to the vastness of existence in order for we mere mortals to understand that we are a part of something much greater than ourselves that goes on within us and without us. It may be a handy apologetic justification for the supposed necessity of religion, but why should we accept it?

I submit that there is no necessity to imagine a phenomenon beyond nature in order to view one’s existence as transcendent. What we know of nature is more than sufficient, and to understand it in terms of a consistent vision of the universe it is knowledge, and not faith, that is necessary.

Each of us carries within each of the many billions of cells that compose our bodies a history of life. This has been passed down to us by a progression of the ancestors spanning billions of years. It is not, of course, an exact copy of anything that has gone before us or will come after us. These strings of molecules are at once similar to and different from every other living thing that has ever been or ever will be. They have been configured by chance meetings, by intentional machinations, by times of famine and periods of plenty, by gamma rays from distant suns and by the smoke of fires long since extinguished. This infinite network of coincidences that conspired to create each of us as individuals should inspire humility and awe in that it demonstrates how we are little more than the result of a billion billion circumstances that had nothing to do with us. Yet there is nothing supernatural here; this is just how nature works. What could more transcend our apparent individuality? Certainly not the idea that we were planned and so, rather than being free to create meaning for ourselves, have had the significance of existence dictated for us in the first place. That may make us feel special, but it is nothing transcendent. To the contrary, it is in prison with the walls that limit us from the outset and fix us in place and surely as a hammer drives nails into wood.

Still, there is much, much more. At every moment bits of us are flying off, leaving what we like to think of as a constant body, and becoming parts of everything else. Matter that moments ago was a part of me is now a part of the chair in which I sit. That which was a part of this “me” only yesterday is now some building block in the cell wall of a bacterium, or of a crow’s feather, or a tiny bit of the concrete poured for the foundation of a new building nearby. Moreover, the words you are reading now began their journey to your brain as a ray of sunshine a thousand years ago that found its way eventually into a sandwich that I had for lunch yesterday. That energy bound together some tiny bits of matter that I in turn broke apart to release that ancient sunshine which I then incorporated into myself. I stored it in my liver as a bond between glucose molecules and this morning have released it again as the energy that powers my jaw muscles as I speak these words to my computer. My computer captures that ancient sunshine as an electrical charge which it will send off to some other machine. You, having found this archived bit of a sunny day from the previous millennium, turn it into an experience that you will remember for a few minutes, at least, today. This “me,” it turns out, is at this moment nothing more than a vehicle for an electromagnetic wave that began its journey from the heart of the star so long ago to find its way to you. This was not preordained by some creator, it is not supernatural, it is just what happened. More accurately, it is only my interpretation at this moment of what has happened based upon the general knowledge of how energy is captured by the chemistry of living things. It matters not one bit whether I, you, or anyone else believes it to be the case. There’s no faith here, only knowledge.

Is this not transcendence? Is this not a profoundly satisfying vision of myself as one small agglomeration in the great matrix of everything that was, is and will be? Does it not free us all from the constraint of ritual and the fear of displeasing some invisible trans-cosmic surrogate parent inspecting our thoughts and behaviors at every moment and thereby deciding our ultimate destiny for us?

As soon as one hears the words “eternal mysteries,” one can rest assured that nothing of transcendence will be spoken thereafter except to cover the snares of religion, a word rooted in the Latin words re ligare, meaning “a return to bondage.” One cannot be simultaneously bound and experiencing transcendence. Lest this statement be misconstrued as referring solely to Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — let me say clearly that the mystery schools of Hinduism and Buddhism collectively termed Tantra are also included herein. Tan tra translates from the Sanskrit as “a string upon which something depends” quite similar to the Latin root of “religion.” Religious mysteries are precisely the opposite of transcendence. Belief in the supernatural is not transcendence but limitation, the very binding referred to by the words long ago chosen to signify it. Religion imposes duty to the object of belief; transcendence allows us to decide for ourselves to what we shall lend our allegiance. Freedom and mystery are not only incompatible but are diametric opponents.

Richard Scruton’s piece is not only hackneyed but is ultimately incoherent. He has made a case only for the abandonment of the personal responsibility that comes as a necessity with the experience of one’s own existence as transcendent. Pastors, priests and popes and the religious rules they promulgate never have led a single human being to a transcendent vision… and neither has he.

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Things Jesus Didn't Do: The Clerical Stupid, It Burns

George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, delivered a monumentally stupid line at a press conference regarding the Vatican's World Youth Day:

Jesus didn't run around handing out condoms, we preach what Jesus taught.

— Source

Maybe I shouldn't be too surprised at the profound intellectual vacuity of such a statement. World Youth Day is itself six days long, after all. People who can't count to six shouldn't be expected to have enough of a grasp on logic to realize that making a statement like Pell's is the equivalent of saying that Thomas Jefferson never owned a television so the devices ought not be purchased by Americans. Jesus couldn't have run around handing out condoms, assuming he was a real historical individual at all, because he didn't have any to hand out a couple of thousand years ago.

Still, it's fun to speculate on some other things that True Believers shouldn't do because there are no stories of Jesus having done them.

Jesus didn't fly around on airplanes.
Jesus didn't visit Australia during his lifetime.
Jesus didn't eat cheeseburgers.
Jesus didn't wear rubber-soled shoes.
Jesus didn't use a laser pointer while delivering his sermons.
Jesus didn't own a computer.
Jesus didn't wear eyeglasses (you're going to hell for that one, Cardinal Pell.)
Jesus didn't go to shopping malls.
Jesus didn't talk on his cell phone while driving.
Jesus didn't run into burning buildings to rescue those trapped inside.
Jesus didn't invest his money in mutual funds.
Jesus didn't hang up on telemarketers.
Jesus didn't vote Republican.
Jesus didn't zip up his fly.
Jesus didn't go to the dentist.
Jesus didn't pay for MP3s.
Jesus didn't study calculus.
Jesus didn't file for unemployment.
Jesus didn't drive around in a vehicle that burned fossil fuel.
Jesus didn't attend PTA meetings.
Jesus didn't take people's temperature with a thermometer when they were sick.
Jesus didn't barbecue on a gas-fueled grill.
Jesus didn't use monofilament fishing line.
Jesus didn't buy cheap plastic toys at Wal-Mart.
Jesus didn't write things down.
Jesus didn't use a power drill.
Jesus didn't do the Macarena.
Jesus didn't eat tofu.
Jesus didn't eat Jello.
Jesus didn't brush with flouride toothpaste.
Jesus didn't do medical research.
Jesus didn't go to a seminary.
Jesus didn't call himself Catholic, or even Christian.
Jesus didn't use nail clippers.
Jesus didn't use toilet paper.
Jesus didn't wear socks.

The list could go on forever, much like clergy tends to do. In the end, we'd all have to deal with hordes of devout, stinky, long-toenailed, toothless, mathematically-illiterate believers, but at least the highways would be safer and George Bush wouldn't be president.

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Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

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Is It Time for a New American Dream?

I must preface this mad mentation with a full disclosure. I have never been one to subscribe to what has classically been termed "the American Dream." That is, it has never been a priority of mine to own property and to acquire things. At various points in my life, I've been well-off financially and I've been flat broke (which is my current status). I haven't rejected wealth when it has come my way, but by the same token it hasn't been my "dream" to own a home.

Nonetheless, it would be utterly foolish to recognize that many, and probably most, Americans do hold property ownership as the highest aspiration of their lives. It would be as heartless to not feel terrible for those people when their dreams are smashed to bits by economic reality which, in the current circumstances, is happening at an ever-accelerating rate.

U.S. Foreclosures Rose 53% in June, Bank Seizures Almost Triple
By Dan Levy

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. foreclosure filings rose 53 percent in June from a year earlier and bank repossessions almost tripled as deteriorating property values and higher payments on adjustable mortgages forced more people to give up their homes.

More than 252,000 properties, or one in every 501 U.S. households, were in some stage of foreclosure, RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Arizona had the highest foreclosure rates.

"The foreclosure problem is getting worse and will stay with us well into the next decade," Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an interview...

About $3.5 trillion in homeowner equity has been wiped out since the spring of 2006, when housing prices were at their peak, Zandi said...

"The year-over-year increase of more than 50 percent indicates we have not yet reached the top of this foreclosure cycle," James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, said in the statement. Bank repossessions, which increased 171 percent in June, are rising at a "much faster pace" than default notices and auction notices, he said.

About 53 percent of borrowers with subprime loans, those with poor or incomplete credit histories, will have negative equity in their homes at the end of the year, and the number will rise to 63 percent in 2009...

Continuing to tout property ownership as "the American Dream" seems cruel in the face of all this. It's bad enough that people who bought into this in the first place have now lost everything. Have their lives become less meaningful because they've now been denied ownership in such a heartless, market-machine-efficient manner?

Perhaps one thing that may come out of this disaster is a new set of priorities. Instead of stressing acquisitiveness, maybe it's time to rethink our aspirations. Maybe it's time to redefine the American Dream as leaving a positive mark upon the world through some sort of service not only to America but to humanity as a whole. Instead of a split-level ranch in some drab suburb, why not discover or invent something new without concern for how much profit it might net?

The old American Dream benefited markets greatly, at least for a long time. We see now, however, what happens when dreams confront economic realities. Nothing grows forever; all material things, we know, must come to their end. The idea of eternal growth driving an economy, and this being translated into the greatest good for individuals, is a fallacy in the end.

So maybe it's time for a new American Dream that isn't based on, in biological terms, something quite like cancer. Is it impossible to find meaning without the ownership of a house? I don't think so. We should learn from this crisis and find something more humane in its essence.

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America is the Greatest Country on Earth

Spain has just passed legislation extending basic rights to apes.

Spain's parliament voiced its support on Wednesday for the rights of great apes to life and freedom in what will apparently be the first time any national legislature has called for such rights for non-humans.

Parliament's environmental committee approved resolutions urging Spain to comply with the Great Apes Project, devised by scientists and philosophers who say our closest genetic relatives deserve rights hitherto limited to humans...

As an American, my reaction to this is... big deal. We've had an ape running this country for nearly eight years.

Once again, America leads the way. USA! USA! USA!

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Prominent British Witch-Doctor Warns of Pandemic Possessions

Watch out, folks! Your yoga instructor is an agent of Satan. The gateway to Hell opens through the pages of your local newspaper. You may think you're having a nice back rub, but in reality that masseuse is injecting tiny demons under your skin. Won't somebody think of the children?

Yoga and horoscopes can lead to possession by Devil, claims Cardinal's exorcist
By Jonathan Petre

...Father Jeremy Davies, exorcist for Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the leader of Catholics in England and Wales, says that activities such as yoga, massage therapy,
reiki or even reading horoscopes could put people at risk from evil spirits.

In a new book, he also argues that people with promiscuous lifestyles could find themselves afflicted by demons.

And he says that the occult is closely linked to the scourges of 'drugs, demonic music and pornography' which are 'destroying millions of young people in our time'.

The 73-year-old Catholic priest, who was appointed exorcist of the Archdiocese of Westminster in 1986, was a medical doctor before being ordained in 1974.

He has carried out thousands of exorcisms in London and in 1993 he set up the International Association of Exorcists with Fr Gabriel Amorth, the Pope's top exorcist.

In Exorcism: Understanding Exorcism In Scripture And Practice, which is published by the Catholic Truth Society, Fr Davies compares militant atheists to rational Satanists, and blames them for a rise in demonic activity...

I have to admit that I write this blog because I'm on Beelzebub's payroll. Every electron streaming onto your monitor as you read this article has a very small imp riding upon it at the speed of light. They jump from the screen to your eyes and ride your optic nerves straight into your brain and wham! that's another 50¢ commission check from Tarterus in my bank account.

As long as we're on the subject, I feel that I, as a master of the Black Arts, should reveal to you a few ways that Father Davies probably doesn't know of by which you can be possessed. You've already traded in your soul by reading this blog and it's only fair that you get some value out of it.

• If you listen to Judas Priest's 1979 album Hell Bent for Leather (Buy it at Amazon), you instantly become Beelzebub's plaything.
  
• If you walk backwards under a ladder while swinging a black cat around your head on a Thursday, you will become possessed by Phalgrenazoth, the demon who makes people point and laugh at his victims.
  
• Ever noticed that pistachio ice cream doesn't taste much like pistachios? That's because there aren't any in the stuff. It's green because of the slime oozing from the skin of the demons it contains. You know those softish chunks in pistachio ice cream? Those are the demons. One lick of that unnaturally green ice cream cone and Lucifer has reeled you in by the short-and-curlies.
  
• Tivo is the tool of the devil. It's OK to record on it, but if you don't want to get possessed then you must never, ever watch anything you've recorded. That little clicky-beepy sound it makes, when recorded and slowed down to 1/8th speed, is revealed to be a snippet of the Lord's Prayer in Latin being recited backwards. Of course, anyone who has ever tried doing this has listened to something recorded on Tivo and so has become possessed and will never tell you. I'm an insider and I know. That's why I don't own a Tivo. I'm only in the soul racket for the money.

There you go, dear victims readers; four ways to get possessed that nobody else is ever going to reveal to you. Of course now that you've read this, you're already possessed, so really, who gives a flying Mongolian cluster-hump anymore, right?

Time to go play some Priest for grandma, boils and ghouls. Rock on!

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