A Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow

Ode to Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T08:19:00.002-05:00

Today is the day that all bloggers traditionally post lists of things to be thankful for. To me, this sounds empty and hollow. I find it much more meaningful to contemplate things that we, the more fortunate people on our earth, have left to do to give the rest of the world things to be thankful for.

Much of the world lives in abject poverty and misery.

In some countries running water, where it exists at all, is implemented by paying people two cents an hour to run down to the polluted river and dip buckets full of filthy water and carry them up to the attic to fill a tank, from which water is siphoned to the rooms.

Roads, where they exist at all, consist of places the local gentry permit you to drive your car, if you've got a car at all, but it's up to you to figure out how to get your car through.

Police protection, where it exists at all, consists of heavily armed trigger-happy goons whose primary interest is protecting their own hides. It seems as though we've got some of that here in America, too.

Low-cost housing, where it exists at all, consists of cardboard boxes in the woods, on somebody else's property, where the dwellers therein run a risk of being discovered by the property owner and run off, if not indeed shot outright.

Medical care, where it exists at all, consists of volunteer nurses smuggled in by welfare agencies in wealthy countries, and these nurses run a risk of being deported or possibly executed by the local authorities.

Shoes, for the few people who have shoes at all, are made of rags and old tires.

Agriculture is often done with no tools but hoeing mattocks, and often a whole village owns only one of them and they've got to share it, and they have to hide it when the tax assessor comes around.

Meanwhile back in the U.S.A., today's Washington Post came with an enormous plastic-wrapped bundle of advertising hogwash that more than quadruples the total weight of the newspaper. Every bit of it advertises stuff I don't need. None of it is going to get read. All of it is going straight into our paper recycling cannister to be loaded into Nelson the Nissan for my next trip to the recycling center.

Many countries don't even have recycling centers. They have dumps. With people living in them. People who eat, wear, and live in trash that rich people throw away.

And our stores are so eager to sell us junk we'll just throw away next year if not sooner, that they're opening at midnight tonight, thus requiring at least a few of their employees to curtail their thanksgiving holiday and bunk down early just to open the store so late revelers, often drunk, can rush out and buy luxuries nobody needs. Target, Macy's, and Kohl's, just to name a few I happened to notice, are among the offenders.

But anyhow, enjoy your turkey. Or whatever you're having. Oh by the way, I've known vegetarians who are in better health than I am, having found perfectly satisfying substitutes for America's traditional gluttonous carnivorous fare.

Halal Turkey

2011-11-23T12:09:00.003-05:00

This almost has to be a joke. Halal turkey is evil somehow? Oh well, it comes from Weird Nut Daily, which is about the same as The Onion except that The Onion at least admits it's a satire.

So what if something has been blessed in honor of Allah instead of God? Allah is an Arabic word, cognate with the Hebrew word in the Old Testament that's translated into English as God. So, Allah is simply the Arabic name for the same make-believe sky fairy that we call God. In fact, some Muslim friends of mine actually use the word God instead of the word Allah when they're speaking English instead of Arabic.

To the best of my knowledge, (correct me if I'm wrong, those of you who know better) Halal slaughter is essentially similar to Kosher slaughter except for the exact pronunciation of the mystic incantation involved. And I challenge anybody to come up with a scientific laboratory test to identify which, if any, mystic incantation was used in the turkey's presence during slaughter.

My wife has already bought our turkey, and I'm not sure it occurred to her to check on which religion's canonically valid procedure was used for the slaughter. Personally, I'd rather have pork roast for Thanksgiving anyhow. From what I've heard, there supposedly isn't any Halal method of slaughtering pigs. The inventors of the Halal ritual allegedly consider them unclean.

So if you like turkey, don't ask, don't tell, just enjoy it.

Debt Limit

2011-08-03T08:04:00.002-04:00

Here's a hypothetical situation. I receive a bill for $10,000 but I'm able to identify $5,000 to pay it. I'm in trouble. But I didn't get in trouble just now, I got in trouble a month ago when I signed the deal committing me to pay $10,000 when I knew up front that I would only have $5,000 available when the bill came due.

So why does our government commit itself in advance to pay more than it knows it will have on hand when the bill comes due?

Besides, the debt limit is not the problem. The debt is the problem. And the way we incurred the debt is the real problem.

Here's how our capitalist economy appears to be working. We levy taxes on productive enterprise in order to provide speculative opportunities to supposedly boost the economy. Income tax, sales tax, import tariff, property tax mostly on buildings, this sort of thing. The primary result of these taxes is to provide investment opportunities, but only for investments in which the location component of property value is a major component.

So now everybody's trying to invest in land, or some derivative of land value. Nobody's trying to invest in productive enterprise. The result is less productive enterprise and lower job opportunities and increasing unemployment.

The longer we try to support this idiotic program with deficit spending, the higher the national debt is going to rise, and the more unemployment we'll have.

Now, what if we tried to lower taxes on productive enterprise, such as income tax, sales tax, property tax on buildings, etc., and raise taxes on speculative investments such as location components of land values?

I suppose the first thing that would happen is that the "economy" as we know it would totally tank. The stock market, based, as it is, primarily on asset values (largely land values) owned by corporations, would plunge through the cellar. Investors would lose their shirts.

But the next thing that would happen is that the Phoenix would rise from the ashes. Productive enterprise, freed from burdensome taxes, would thrive. Land, if the location component were taxed adequately, would be nearly free to acquire initially, and the taxes paid on land would be no higher than the taxes currently paid on productive enterprise for the privilege of having your property values artificially jacked up.

Of course, by most currently popular measures, the "economy" would suffer horribly. Financial institutions who depend on loaning huge sums for land purchases would go broke. Real estate speculators would go broke. Everybody would have to go out and get real jobs for a change. But real jobs would be available.

Location components of land value are entirely the result of the doings of the community in general, not the doings of the individual owner, therefore it's only fair that the entire location value of land should be taken as tax for public benefit.

And it might even help reduce the national debt! But then again, maybe not. Maybe reducing the national debt is too much to ask.

Gods and Creators

2011-07-23T11:20:00.002-04:00

Many years ago a student wished to enter a certain project in a science fair. A portion of the project was to consist of the Pascal's Random Distribution Machine, that arrangement of pegs through which marbles are dropped. This project would demonstrate the pattern-forming tendency of randomness.

The science fair administrator nixed the project. Why? Well, the lame excuse was that randomness is something like gambling, which is immoral, and therefore not to be permitted on school property or at any school-sponsored event.

I think there was a deeper reason. There are many things such as randomness, chaos, truth of the axioms, workability of mathematical functions, and so forth, which could conceivably exist on the Primordial Realm of the Uncaused, without the kind intercession of any sort of God to have created them. These things have distinct results that would occur even without the creative action of any God.

For instance, the Pascal's Random Distribution Machine causes a distinctive pattern, varying only slightly from one trial to the next. The axiom that if A=B and B=C then A=C causes the measurability of all dimensionally definable things. The mathematical functions that we call Sinusiods have all sorts of interesting results.

So here we have a rather large group of things that can function as uncaused causes, but they're not God. I think that many school administrators are afraid of the outcry that might be raised by deviously powerful religious groups if students were encouraged to study these non-God uncaused causes and come to realize that there are many possible causes for the universe to exist, not just the one promoted by religion.

Just think! A few students might even become (gasp) ATHEISTS (shudder)! Wouldn't that be horrible!

Two Kinds of Ideas

2011-04-25T06:57:00.002-04:00

I shall suggest that there are two kinds of ideas: those that can be addressed rationally, and those that cannot. Well, yes, there are many other ways of evaluating ideas, but let's go with this one for now.

What would you call an idea that cannot be addressed rationally? I call it insanity.

Let me present this idea. I think that Jupiter's moon Europa is populated by purple moon monkeys who eat green cheese and ride pink unicorns. You're laughing, I'm sure. But I'm perfectly happy for you to laugh at this idea since it's apparent that I just dreamed it up out of thin air on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, so laughing is actually a form of rational response.

Other forms of rational response are also possible. We could discuss the estimated cost of a space probe to Europa and the chance of ever getting funding. We could discuss what other priorities there might be for spending that funding. I'm perfectly happy to see any and all such responses to my seemingly wacky idea, so therefore my idea is not insane, even though it's most likely not true.

Now let's observe that many others have presented the idea that Jesus Christ is the Savior of the World and that anybody who doesn't believe it is doomed to roast in eternal fire and brimstone. They support this idea with bumper stickers that say, "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it!" They are, by their attitude, blocking out all possibility of rational response to their idea, therefore the idea is, by definition, insane.

Now let's consider this news article about a high ranking clergyman complaining about something he calls secularism. What he's actually complaining about is people who attempt to address religious doctrine rationally. Religious people consider rational discussion to be a form of disrespect.

It looks to me like religious leaders are paying the utmost disrespect to rational thought. And then they have the gall to accuse me of disrespect to their religion. They are, by their own attitude, proudly declaring that all religions are actually forms of institutionalized insanity. Hey, how could I possibly disagree with them about that?

Why bother to vote?

2010-11-02T09:35:00.002-04:00

Yes, I voted but I'm not sure why. All the candidates appear to present the same proposals in different colored wrappers, especially in their ideas of how to fix the economy.

Back in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith suggested that the economy ought to be based on land, labor, and capital. He then dealt with the fallacy that money is wealth by explaining that money is not wealth, it is an instrument for dealing with wealth.

Then in the nineteenth century, Henry George agreed with Adam Smith's contention that the economy ought to be based on land, labor, and capital. He then dealt with the fallacy that land is property by explaining that land is not property, it is a place to put property.

But none of the candidates on the ballot are willing to give up either of these fallacies, thus rendering it impossible to base the economy on land, labor, and capital.

Instead, we have an economy based on a monumental pyramid of derivative investments piled on top of a Ponzi scheme of endlessly escalating land prices, which is inherently unstable. The game of Monopoly was originally invented to provide a hands-on demonstration of the instability of such an economy.

Here's what appears to be happening. Increasing prices for building sites require businesses to borrow ever higher piles of money to acquire new sites when doing so would improve efficiency, thus lapse into lower efficiency. Workers need higher and higher wages just to pay the ever-increasing mortgages on their homes, the increased house prices being the land, not the houses. Businesses lapsing into lower efficiency lay off a few of their workers, who then default on their mortgages, and get their homes foreclosed, and the whole scheme collapses.

A very few economists (Fred Foldvary and Mark Wadsworth, just to name a couple) appear to be aware of what's going on. They realize that in order to base an economy on land, labor, and capital, the parties that provide these elements need to receive the benefits of what they're providing.

The value of land is provided by public agreement as to who owns what plot, and the value is enhanced by public improvements and other government action, therefore this value ought to be recovered for public use, perhaps by a land value tax as proposed by Henry George.

The value of labor is provided by the laborer, and therefore ought to be all his, not tapped off by income taxes.

The value of capital is provided by those who willingly give up a portion of their wealth in order to provide means of improving the efficiency of the laborers, and ought to be all theirs, not tapped off by sales taxes, "capital gain" taxes (Hey, who are we kidding here, capital doesn't gain, it depreciates!), and such like.

But none of the candidates I just got finished voting for has got a clue. Every last one of them is proposing ethereal fantasy plans for keeping the Ponzi scheme going a bit longer, usually at the cost of increasing the national debt. I have no idea who even owns our national debt. For all I know, maybe China, or Iran, or Afghanistan, or Venezuela, or somebody else who doesn't like us.

I feel like a mouse who just voted for what color of cat is going to get to eat me.

Book Report: The Grand Design

2010-09-23T09:35:00.002-04:00

As soon as I discovered that there was another book out by Stephen Hawking I immediately went over to Bay Books to get a copy of The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. They had sold out of their first shipment on the first day, much to their own amazement at the book's unexpected popularity, so they added my name to the back-order list. When they called me to say the new shipment was in, I immediately went over and bought one.

It's an easily-readable book, highly understandable to anyone with the slightest knowledge of physics and mathematics, and partially understandable even to someone with no science background at all.

The book briefly traces the history of our knowledge of theoretical physics from the days of the ancient Greeks, through the Renaissance, and up to modern times. Most of the major contributors are mentioned: Archimedes, Pythagoras, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Michelson and Morley, Einstein, Feynman, etc.

Each contribution is briefly and understandably described. When they get to quantum theory, of course, there's no such thing as a correct but easily understandable non-mathematical description. Quantum theory simply can't possibly make any intuitive sense at the human scale of perception. Hawking and Mlodinow do their best, however, and it's at least as good as anybody else has ever done without plunging into the inscrutable depths of advanced mathematics.

Now here's the part that religious leaders are upset over. Our current scientific knowledge still has many large gaps, but the God Of The Gaps concept is no longer viable because the gaps aren't God-shaped. There are just too many logical and mathematical possibilities for the universe to have come into existence without the kind intercession of a conscious decision-making creator.

The burden of proof is now upon theologians to come up with a sufficiently drastic modification of their theology to be compatible with our present-day knowledge. I don't think they're up to the task. All I've heard so far from the theological community is impotent bleating about how Stephen Hawking doesn't understand theology. But why should he even try to understand make-believe? He's done a great job dedicating his life to understanding reality.

Burning Korans (yawn)

2010-09-10T07:29:00.002-04:00

For now, it appears that a scheduled Koran-burning party down in Florida somewhere has been put on hold. Is it because the sponsor simply wimped out? Is it because he struck a deal of some sort? Is it because he suddenly realized that book-burning is symbolic of censorship, which is un-American?

Whatever the reason, I'm not sure I care. In our modern era of mass printing, purchasing a few Korans just to burn them has no practical effect except to increase the profits of Koran publishers. While we're at it, throw in a few Bibles, Rig-Vedas, Torahs, copies of The Shack, the Book Of Common Prayer, hymnals, and whatever religious hogwash you can afford to waste. On the other hand, please don't. It's wasteful and environmentally harmful.

I'm all in favor of religious crybabies of all stripes inciting each other to throw tantrums. It's great entertainment. But I wish we, as a social order, wouldn't be so wimpy with them when nonparticipants are caught in the crossfire.

Here's my modest proposal. Establish a judicial principle whereby anyone convicted of a crime for which a religious motive can be identified must serve out his sentence without being allowed to possess any religious artifact, receive visits from any religious leader, nor participate in any religious ritual.

I'm all in favor of freedom of religion as long as it's nothing more than peaceful fellowship. In fact I even participate in the Episcopal church for that reason. But it's time to stop giving religions any special treatment and begin recognizing them for the mere institutionalized mental disorders they really are. Yes, including the Episcopal church, which I feel qualified to criticize because I know it from the inside.

Random Thoughts About Randomness

2010-09-03T07:47:00.003-04:00

If there were no God, could things happen randomly?

If there were no God, could things happen chaotically?

Oh by the way, randomness and chaos are mathematically different. In a random sequence, each event is independent of all other events. In a chaotic sequence, each event is highly dependent on all previous events in an incomprensibly complex pattern. Not that this difference is much noticed by the common folk, you understand.

If there were no God, would logic be valid? Or to put it another way, if there is a God (or several Gods) would his omnipotence be restricted from doing anything self-contradictory or otherwise logically impossible?

If there were no God, would the principles of arithmetic still be valid even if there was nothing to do arithmetic on?

If there were no God, could mathematical functions, such as conics, sinusoids, exponentials, etc. be conceptually meaningful even if there was nothing for them to describe?

If all the above questions can be answered "yes" and I suspect they probably can, but I can't prove it, then doesn't that suggest that everything that all known laws of physics are based on can exist without God?

If all that's true, then in the absence of God, what could stop the universe from existing?

When radio was first invented, radio hams began noticing that the laws of physics describing how their radios work bear a striking mathematical similarity to the laws of physics applicable to other topics in physics.

Then a Nobel Prize winning physicist named Richard Feynman came along and wrote a series of lectures on physics in which he explained how all the laws of physics in all the topics in physics are based on these same few mathematical principles.

And just yesterday I read something about how Stephen Hawking has said essentially the same thing in a new book, based on even more evidence than Richard Feynman had available to him. I haven't yet read Stephen Hawking's new book, but I'm looking forward to doing so.

Property Values

2010-09-02T08:47:00.002-04:00

In the area around Huntingtown, Maryland, about 25 miles north of my place, the electric company is putting in additional lines which require new poles. These poles are larger than the old poles and have a new and unusual appearance. Personally, I think they look just fine.

But the residents of Huntingtown are complaining that the new poles are horribly ugly and will depress property values. I have two comments.

First, think what would happen to property values if the electric company were prevented from putting in the new service, and adequate electric power delivery became unavailable to their community.

Second, the component of the property values being affected is the location desirability, not the actual property built on the location. This should make it obvious that the change in property values, be it up or down, is not the doing of the owner, but the doing of others in the community, and therefore the location desirability is not really the property of the owner, but something the owner ought to be paying the community for.

The problem would resolve itself if our property taxes were shifted off of actual property, that is, the property the owner actually put there (or paid to have put there), and onto the location component. This would automatically compensate the owner with a tax break for anything beyond his control that made his location less desirable, and charge him extra for any doings of others that made his location more desirable.

Henry George proposed something like this clear back in the nineteenth century, and it sounds like a good solution to problems like the good folks of Huntingtown are experiencing.

Gun Control

2010-08-16T08:04:00.002-04:00

During the fourth century A.D. when Christianity was rising to power and shoving Europe back into the stone age, there arose an agreement between the clergy and nobility. All education was to be under the control of the clergy and all bearing of arms was to be done under the command of the nobility. Thus the "unwashed masses" had no access to either of these two important sources of power.

This situation dominated most of Europe and a bit of Asia until the Renaissance, when a few people began rediscovering the glories of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Then in the 17-th and 18-th centuries, philosophers began basing their philosophies on the enlightened principles of the ancient Greeks.

The American constitution was written in accordance with these enlightened principles. Democracy. Elimination of the nobility. Elimination of special privilege for the clergy. Education for all. Right to bear arms for all.

And thus the Second Amendment was added to the Constitution, giving the right to bear arms to all citizens, not just the nobility (which there wasn't any of any more), thus "thumbing our nose" at established Christianity which was adamantly opposed to such an amendment.

And now in the 21-st century, the Second Amendment, with its totally anti-Christian sentiment, seems to be most strongly supported by those who claim to be staunch Christians. I have no idea how this strange turnabout occurred.

But whether the Second Amendment is supported by Christians or non-Christians shouldn't have any bearing on how it is interpreted nor on whether it is even a useful amendment in the modern era. For that, we must look at the Preamble to the Constitution.

The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments, was added to enumerate the rights that would contribute to the purposes stated in the Preamble. Each right was to be granted in the specific form that would enhance those purposes.

Thus, all citizens should be granted the right to specific forms of arms-bearing that would help us form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, as stated in the Preamble.

Does this mean we should all go around with Saturday Night Specials concealed in our boots everywhere we go? Well maybe, maybe not. There's room for differences of opinion here.

The pro-gun-control crowd believes that more guns will cause more gun crimes. This is hogwash because the people who are going to use guns to commit crimes will find a way to get guns no matter how illegal they are. If somebody is not deterred by a law against some crime, why would they be deterred by an additional law against possession of the implement for committing the crime?

The anti-gun-control crowd believes that the presence of armed law-abiding people deters crime. This is hogwash because the person committing the crime will probably get the jump on the law-abiding citizens who won't be able to reach their guns in time.

A very few instances have actually happened where armed law-abiding citizens have used their guns to prevent a crime. These few instances have been re-told and re-re-told so many times, with a few variations each re-telling, that you get the impression that such occurrences are commonplace. They aren't.

So how can I take sides when the arguments for both sides are hogwash? I can't! Personally I've never owned a gun because I've never had an actual use for one. On the other hand I've never been threatened by law-abiding citizens with guns but I've occasionally been threatened by non-law-abiding citizens without guns.

Overall, I don't see how gun control laws make much difference.

Is America a Christian Nation?

2010-07-05T08:30:00.002-04:00

Now that my life's sixty-seventh Independence Day has passed, with all the hoopla about God And Country, it's time to reflect on whether America is a Christian nation.

First, read the Declaration of Independence. The only clear reference to anything religious is an assertion about being endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. This is a Deist-Humanist concept, definitely not Christian. Deism is actually more of a metaphysical world-view than an actual religion.

Next, read the Constitution. No mention of any religion until we get to the First Amendment, which states, essentially, that we have no official national religion and that all people are free to participate in any religion or non-religion of their choosing.

The original Pledge of Allegiance did not contain the phrase Under God. That was added during the 1950's under the mistaken delusion that it would distinguish us from those Godless Communists. In reality, Communism and Godlessness have nothing to do with each other.

Here's the story. At the end of World War II it became apparent that the USA and the USSR were not really allies, we were competitors to see how hard we could stomp on the remnants of the defeated Germany. Both major powers were interested in reaping the spoils of victory and furthering our own empires. The practical difference between Communism and Capitalism is very slight, actually, only a few minor details as to the exact composition of the elite class that has the privilege of oppressing the rest of us.

The USSR tried to suppress organized religions because they were competing power structures, not because Communism had anything against religion. In fact, old Joe Stalin was on-and-off religious himself!

There are two kinds of government that are to be avoided at all costs: Those that try to suppress religion, and those based on religion. Our Founding Fathers made an attempt to avoid either extreme. I think we ought to follow that tradition.

Religion Has All The Answers

2010-06-20T10:06:00.003-04:00

How did the universe come into existence? Is our universe all that exists, all that has ever existed, and all that will ever exist? Does our universe exist on a substrate of Ultimate Reality that also hosts many other universes? Is our universe the result of a confluence of uncaused causes within the Primordial Realm of Uncaused Nothingness? Is our universe one of the many dimensional manifestations of a body of Absolute Truths? Is our universe merely the current state of affairs in an ever-changing infinite sequence of prior causes?

We don't know, and we probably can't know until we find a way of discovering things beyond our universe, if there is any such thing as a realm beyond our universe.

But our religion has the answer. God is the Uncreated Creator of everything. God is tacitly presumed to possess some sort of conscious decision-making intelligence. But there are at least four credibility gaps with this answer.

First, an Uncreated Creator has to be uncreated, but our theology offers no decent plausibility argument to explain how the Primordial Realm of the Uncreated could even host the existence of God, let alone consist entirely of nothing but God.

Second, a creator must have creative powers, but our theology fails to suggest any attributes for God that would clearly imply creative powers. We simply declare God to be omnipotent, a logically meaningless term that sounds more like a cop-out than a real attribute.

Third, our theology offers no credible motive for why God would want to bother with creating any universe, let alone our particular universe.

Fourth, no reliable and repeatable observations have ever been presented to support the theistic view, and logical arguments in support of it are massively flaw-ridden.

So, with all these difficulties, why do we insist on believing in God? I think it must be because we've been systematically educated from birth to be too stupid to imagine any of the far more plausible alternatives.

But we've hardly started! On top of this already implausible belief, our Christian religion claims that God suffers from some sort of chronic three-way identity crisis called a Holy Trinity. At this point, we've wandered another order of magnitude into implausibility.

One of the alter-egos of this Holy Trinity identity crisis is supposedly a man named Jesus who went strolling round and about Merry Olde Palestine doing wonderful deeds, teaching profound truths, and gathering quite a following of admirers. At one point he caused the local authorities to become emotionally disturbed, which probobly wasn't too hard considering the politics of the era, so they executed him, but then he magically got alive again and zoomed off to heaven.

Then, every bit of the vast quantity of writings written about him during his lifetime in his own native language completely vanished without a trace, in spite of the enormous efforts of many people to preserve them. Historians have never been able to explain the total evaporation of such a vast body of literature.

But wait! There's more! About fifteen or twenty years later, some people who lived a long ways away from Palestine, didn't know much about the place, and didn't even speak the same language, suddenly started knowing all about Jesus, with no credible audit trail as to how they found it out. Not only that, but what they knew about Jesus bore an astonishing similarity to several man-god myths that had been part of Indo-European mythology since at least the 23-rd century BC, and the teachings they attributed to Jesus bore an astonishing resemblance to twisted misunderstandings of scattershot fragments of Greek philosophy.

At this point, I'd be willing to entertain the conjecture that perhaps there was no such historical person as Jesus, but that he was simply made up by primitive stone-age Indo-European tribespeople who had recently come under Roman rule and into contact with Greek civilization. Now, at this time the entire Roman empire was merrily festooned with rumors of the many misdeeds of the hopelessly incompetent Pontius Pilate who had recently been removed from the procuratorship of Judea under highly scandalous conditions. Perhaps these tribespeople figured that Pontius Pilate would be a credible earthly authority to have crucified their mythical man-god, so they embellished their existing myth accordingly.

I can think of at least four glaringly obvious pointers to a completely non-Jewish and totally Indo-European origin for Christianity.

First, we call our man-god hero by the title Christ, which comes from a Greek word and has cognate forms in all Indo-European languages, and doesn't sound very Jewish.

Second, we haven't picked up any Jewish holidays. Our two most important holidays, Christmas and Easter, are so thoroughly Indo-European that we've even retained the Indo-European names for them, making no attempt to conceal their completely non-Jewish origins.

Thirdly, the earliest known Christian writings that we're fairly confident they were written within the Christian community itself and not by outsiders, are the Epistles of Saint Paul. All of them were, as far as can be known, originally written in Greek, and all except Romans were addressed to people in Greek-speaking communities ina fringe area of the Roman Empire where Roman rule had recently put several primitive stone-age Indo-European tribes into close contact with Greek civilization. None of Saint Paul's epistles were written to any place with a significant Jewish population.

Fourthly, when the early Christians decided they needed some Jewish literature to establish credibility for their pretense of Jewish origins, they used the Septuagint as the basis for the original Old Testament. The Septuagint was a scholarly compilation of Greek translations of Jewish traditional literature but was never accepted by any Jews as canonically sacred. If there had been any Jewish Christians in early Christianity, don't you think they would have caught that little boo-boo?

So what more evidence do you need that all of Christianity is total hogwash? Hey, read the New Testament and try to guess how much of it was written by anybody with a Jewish background, or had ever even met any Jews in their lives. To me, it looks mostly like a combination of primitive Indo-European mythology and stone-age misunderstandings of bits and pieces of Greek philosophy with a twisted parody of Judaism hastily grafted on as an afterthought.

Sorry, but I don't think religion has any of the answers to anything.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

2010-05-20T06:52:00.003-04:00

Today we celebrate Everybody Draw Mohammed Day. Here's my submission:

Why are we doing this? For centuries, religious lunatics have been dreaming up, purely out of thin air, arbitrary theological taboos specifically for the purpose of becoming artificially offended by any violation, inadvertent or intentional. They then respond with threats and sometimes acts of violence.

These ridiculous taboos include such things as drawing pictures of Mohammed, gay people smooching in public, depictions of Jesus having happiness with Mary Magdalene, sticking rusty nails into tiny snickets of stale bread, and a near-infinity of other totally harmless acts.

In the interest of freedom of speech and freedom of artistic expression, this bullying has got to be stopped. One of the ways to stop it is to join together and flood the media with deliberate and severe violations of these taboos, so as to overwhelm the bullies and dilute any possible threat they could present.

But shouldn't we respect these taboos? NO! Definitely not! Respect must be reserved for that which is respectable. The way an idea gains respectability is to be submitted to intense scrutiny, criticism, and ridicule, and let it rise above all criticism on its own merit. Religious ideas have not done this. They've been protected under the title "sacred" and can therefore never undergo the process required to become respectable.

But how about the Golden Rule, you say? In my opinion, the highest application of the Golden Rule is to treat artists and opinion-holders the way we'd like them to treat us, namely, unite behind them and stand firm against these bullies. It certainly isn't good for anybody to let these insufferable crybabies rule the world.

At least one whole country (Pakistan) has responded by decreeing, in effect, that Islam is not really a religion, it's a severe mental disorder. They've apparently blocked the entirety of Facebook simply because the event for Everybody Draw Mohammed Day has been hosted primarily on Facebook. At latest report, it appears that some other Islam-dominated countries may be following suit. In doing so, they're removing themselves from any semblance of respectability.

I've even heard it said that all religions are really nothing but institutionalized mental disorders. That idea may actually have some partial merit.

International Day of Reason

2010-05-06T07:52:00.002-04:00

Today we celebrate the International Day of Reason. I really don't expect this to be a very popular celebration.

Reason requires logic, not necessarily formal mathematical logic, but at least logic in the classical sense of putting your thoughts in order.

Formal mathematical logic has never been rigorously proven valid. Several of the most famous attempts at proving the validity of logic involved the mathematical technique of recursive invocation. Bertrand Russell showed that the use of recursive invocation requires the definition of such a thing as the set of all sets that are not members of themselves which raises the question of whether this set is a member of itself or not. If it is, that proves it isn't. If it isn't, that proves it is. Thus recursive invocation in logic is actually a convoluted form of circularity.

Several more attempts at proving the validity of formal logic were based on attempts to determine the attributes of a premise set that is both complete and consistent, in the mathematical sense. Kurt Godel then proved that the validity of logic itself would render such a premise set impossible.

So we don't really know whether logic is actually valid, that is, necessarily workable in all possible realms of reality, or only a created feature of our universe.

We can all think of a realm in which logic doesn't work: Your dreams, in which you might be able to make a whole pot of coffee with only one teaspoon of water, you might be able to build a multi-lane bridge across the Chesapeake Bay using nothing but recycled Post-it notes, you might be able to feed five thousand hungry people with five biscuits and a couple of sardines, or whatever.

But is dreamland a realm of reality? Well, define it any way you please. If you regard your dreams as real, then obviously logic is not valid by that definition.

But even without the use of formal mathematical logic at least you can put your thoughts in an understandable order. Some folks can't even do that. Almost every presentation I've ever been to, during the Q & A session there's always at least one question-asker who can't see fit to ask the question as briefly as possible and then listen for the answer, but has a personal need to ramble incoherently, yakking over the presenter and leaving no chance for an answer.

In my personal life I stand astraddle of the Episcopal Church and Secular Humanist communities. The Episcopal Church is currently attempting to promote a set of presentations called Living The Questions, which attempts to reconcile Christian doctrine with rational thought, which is impossible. I've been sitting through these sessions and thinking, you know, we'd achieve rational thought much more quickly if we'd follow the Secular Humanist lead and totally abandon the primitive stone-age superstition that the entire universe is being secretly masterminded by an invisible sky-fairy named God who suffers from a chronic three-way identity crisis caled a Holy Trinity.

It looks to me as though the entire notion of a Day of Reason is likely to be forgotten in the wake of a string of conflicting court decisions as to the constitutionality of a National Day of Prayer. It's unlikely that reason will play a part in any of these court decisions.

Humoring Crybabies

2010-05-02T07:29:00.003-04:00

Does the Golden Rule require that we humor the whimsies of insufferable crybabies? What if these whimsies stand in opposition to all reason and tradition?

Here's an example: A Muslim whimsy is the forbidding of the portrayal of Muhammad. Western tradition holds that important historical figures, including Muhammad, must be portrayed in art. Another hallowed Western tradition is that sheer idiocy, such as that occasionally exhibited by a few Muslim extremists, must be mercilessly lampooned in cartoons.

Certain Muslims are upset because unflattering portrayals of Muhammad have appeared entirely outside of Muslim private domain, where such portrayals are appropriate. Of course it would be a grievous breach of etiquette to post a cartoon of Muhammad on the property of the Islamic center in Prince Frederick, and neither I nor any civilized person would do such a thing. But in the public domain do we have a duty to violate our own time-honored traditions just to avoid upsetting these crybabies?

Recently there's a Facebook event established for May 20 called Everybody Draw Mohammed Day (deliberately using the traditional Western misspelling of Muhammad that irritates some Muslims). The inventor of this event is trying to wimp out and say, now folks, we really didn't mean it, let's not really draw Muhammad but let's be nice and follow the Golden Rule. So what do you think?

Here's another example: A Roman Catholic whimsy holds that communion wafers be treated with special reverence during the church service. Everyone probably remembers an incident a while back where someone at a Roman Catholic church service took the wafer back to his seat instead of eating it at the altar. This was, of course, a breach of etiquette, which he shouldn't have committed. But apparently somewhat of a mini-riot ensued, far beyond the reaction that would seem to be justified.

So, one of the more popular bloggers on the Internet posted a rather lengthy entry about the event, referring to the communion wafer as "just a frackin' cracker" and suggesting that if anyone could score him a communion wafer he'd desecrate it. A few weeks later he posted an entry showing a picture of a desecrated wafer.

Now, within a church service, decorum is important. But outside of a church service, in your own domain and on your own nickel, you can buy your own communion wafers from C.M. Almy or any of several other sources for about eight or ten bucks a thousand and do anything you please with them. So, do Roman Catholic crybabies have any business getting upset over this blogger's entry?

And now for a hypothetical example: Suppose you have a relative who, by means of a lifetime of horribly unhygienic habits and maliciously hostile attitudes, destroyed her own health and alienated everyone around her, so now she's in the hospital and has no friends. She's making excessive demands on you, wanting you to visit her daily even though you live a couple of hours drive away, and wanting you to bring her things but is never clear about exactly what she wants until you arrive with the wrong thing, and making all sorts of unreasonable demands.

What duty do you have toward this relative? How far do you need to go in catering to her needs? What do you think?

Basically, I think the Golden Rule needs to be tempered by a bit of rational thought. Do unto others what you reasonably might want sane and rational people to do unto you. Oh by the way, I'm perfectly aware that the Golden Rule appears to have been a part of moral philosophy as early as the eighteenth century BC, long before it was ever accepted into any religion.

If Aliens Exist

2010-04-27T13:09:00.002-04:00

If aliens exist, should we be eager to meet them? Maybe, maybe not.

Obviously, in order to get to Earth, inhabitants of a distant planet would require a technology vastly beyond anything we Earthlings, at present can conceive. But advanced technology does not imply cultural enlightenment. What if they have the technology to conquer us but no civilized culture to offer?

Witness the sixteenth century on Earth, when Europeans had the most advanced military technology in the world but were culturally still in the Stone Age. They went around the world conquering, colonizing, and enslaving the culturally more advanced civilizations of Africa, American and Asia, simply because these people didn't have the military might to defend themselves.

The results are still with us today. Most of the world is dominated by two primitive stone-age religions, Christianity and Islam, each of which is determined to obliterate the other, not to mention they both want to get rid of the more enlightened ideas of nonbelievers.

So it's conceivable that somewhere out in the galaxy there might be an alien life form whose entire intelligence is devoted to domination of the universe, with no cultural enlightenment whatsoever. If they conquer us, we're doomed. We'll all be enslaved and converted to whatever primitive religion they've got, although I find it hard to believe there could be any religion much more primitive and unenlightened than Christianity and Islam.

God is a Hyperconstinated Transonome

2010-03-15T08:02:00.002-04:00

When I was in graduate school, our nuclear physics class was held in a classroom in which the previous class was meteorology. This was nice for our nuclear physics professor, whose hobby was meteorology. When he entered the room he'd always take a minute to read the blackboard before erasing it.

One day the meteorology class ended a bit early, so several of us students observed that the blackboard had some sort of weather chart consisting mainly of three wavy lines, so we erased the labels and re-labeled the wavy lines "Hyperconstinated Transonome", "Mesoconstinated Transonome", and "Infraconstinated Transonome". Then we filled the rest of the blackboard with a lengthy description of what these fabulous new mathematical discoveries were supposed to be, all in terms of equally ludicrous and utterly meaningless made-up words. At no point did we ever tie the description to anything observable, logically derivable, or otherwise meaningful.

So when our professor entered the room, he took his usual minute or so to read the blackboard, and immediately realized that we were jerking him around.

Now, let's compare this bit of jocularity with the definition of God, who is supposed to be omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, perfectly benevolent, and eternal, the Five Traditional Attributes of medieval theology. These attributes are totally make-believe, not based on anything observable, logically derivable, or otherwise meaningful.

When religious people come to church, they hear all about this make-believe God, but they've suspended their powers of rational thought, so, unlike our professor, they don't realize they're being jerked around.

As a college undergraduate, I attended a religious college and had to take a required religion class. I think one of the very few meaningful things the professor said was, "The God with these Five Traditional Attributes was just a God that was simply cooked up out of thin air." Unfortunately, from that point on, he proceeded to totally obfuscate the character of God until it made no more sense than our make-believe Hyperconstinated Transonome.

Theology still makes absolutely no sense to me. I'm now realizing the truth of the only other intelligent thing our religion professor ever said, and that was, "The primary reason most of us go to church is to indulge our egotistical delusions that we can boss God around by reciting mystic incantations at our own belly buttons." Unfortunately, he was unable to provide us with any better reason to believe in any religious doctrine.

Oh by the way, I actually somehow got a passing grade in Religion. My A-plus on my term paper (on the book of Job) raised my total grade for the semester to a C-minus.

Global Warming

2009-12-12T08:53:00.001-05:00

Here's the main body of a letter from Frank de Jong to a newsgroup I belong to.

"Climate change is again at the top of the global agenda. Hopefully this time the nations of the world will take concerted action.

Two points:

1. Conventional wisdom states that addressing climate change will cost huge amounts of money. The climate change defenders say it would be money well spent, while the climate change deniers say it would be a waste of money. But this entire premise is incorrect.

Climate change can and should be addressed at zero cost, by using the tax structure as a policy tool, through tax shifting, i.e. untaxing jobs and business and up-taxing resource use, land values and the privilege of polluting. Green tax shifts are revenue-neutral and cost taxpayers and governments nothing. In fact they benefit the economy by rewarding value-added, labour-intensive, resource-efficient, clean production and punishing ecologically destructive manufacturing and life styles.

2. Switching the source of government revenue from personal incomes and business profits to levies and fees on the use and abuse of the global commons, should become policy whether climate change exists or not. There are multiple benefits to green tax shifting, including more jobs, a more prosperous economy, less sprawl, more walkable neighbourhoods, increased economic viability of local food and clean energy, resource conservation, nature preservation, less poverty, less cancer, heart disease, diabetes and asthma.

These points obliterate the arguments of the climate change deniers by presenting a fiscally responsible, politically attractive market mechanism that will address climate change by dramatically reducing the human impact on the Earth without unfair subsidies or punitive compliance legislation."

I think he has some good ideas here. What do you think?

Limits of Logic

2009-08-11T10:08:00.002-04:00

In yesterday's Demented Diary entry I posed a riddle and promised the answer today, but the DiaryLand entry page is down, so the answer will have to wait until tomorrow.

Here's the riddle.

Once upon a time a certain king offered to open his castle to any visitor who could provide the doorkeeper with a logically meaningful statement of what he wanted to do in the castle. If the visitor's statement was true, he was tobe granted the privilege of completing his business. If the visitor had lied, he was to be executed.

A certain visitor told the doorkeeper, "I'm coming to the castle to be executed for lying about why I'm here." The doorkeeper let him in.

The executioner was puzzled. If the visitor is not executed, he would have lied so he would need to be executed. But if he is executed, he would have been telling the truth so he can't be executed. So the executioner consulted the royal wizard.

Here was the wizard's advice. Execute the doorkeeper for admitting the visitor who had not provided a logically meaningful statement of his purpose.

Now, as pointed out by a couple of loyal readers of my Demented Diary, a better solution would have been to get the king to take everybody out for a round of margaritas.

I think everyone knows by now of Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem proved in 1931, even though nobody understands it and everybody tries to draw implications that simply aren't there. It states that there's no such thing as a premise set that is both complete (all statements within the bounds of the premises can be proved either true or false) and consistent (no statement within the bounds of the premises can be proved both true and false).

An obvious corollary is that within the bounds of all human knowledge there are truths that can't be proved. Theologians are welcome to make any sort of hay they please out of this. Theology is nothing but hay that's already been used by livestock anyhow. If you can't know something, the best thing to do is quit worrying and go join your buddies for a drink.

Cops and Folks

2009-07-27T06:42:00.002-04:00

A black professional person gets arrested by a white policeman for breaking into his own home. Racism? Well, maybe.

But there's often a totally different side to such stories.

The police receive a report of a disturbance of some sort. They have to respond, because that's what they're being paid to do.

When the officers get to the scene, they have to start somewhere, usually by trying to interview anybody they can find, sometimes even people who know nothing about wat's going on, and they need to obtain the precise identity of everybody they talk to, so that the same people will still be findable if any follow-up investigation is needed.

But citizens often do not realize this, and get upset because they think the police are hassling them, and often the policeman's interview technique is not exactly according to Emily Post. So a scuffle ensues.

Here's an incident I was involved in about 1970 or 1971 or thereabouts. I lived in a neighborhood that was not always uniformly peaceful, and drove a Fiat 124, a car that needed frequent maintenance.

I got home just after dark one evening, and decided it was just about time to do a valve adjustment, which was supposed to be done with a warm engine. So I opened the hood, went indoors and got out my tools and strung my drop-light, and a police car rolled up and the officer got out and said he wanted to talk to me.

So I said, "Hey, I live here, this is my own car, and I'm adjusting my valves, not stealing it! What's this all about?"

He told me he was responding to a disturbance in the neighborhood, and since I was the only person out and about, he needed to check me out. So I showed him my drivers license and vehicle registration and said I have no knowledge of any disturbance. Eventually he was satisfied and he left.

Well, it turned out later that there had been a gang-fight in somebody's front yard two doors over from my house, and it had apparently broken up just a minute or two before I had gotten home. I knew nothing about it until the next day, and even then, only rumors and hearsay.

I suppose if I had been just a bit more upset and the officer had been just a bit more trigger-happy, I could have been arrested. Oh by the way, the officer and I were both white, and as far as I know the gang fighters were also all white, whatever difference that makes.

Wholly Buy-Bull

2009-05-03T18:02:00.001-04:00

As an undevoutly irreverent Christian, of course I revere the Bible as my traditional mythology. In fact, once when I was very small I even read it cover to cover, an exercise in monumental boredom for which I was highly praised by the Sunday school teacher. You see, I wanted to find out for myself the truth of that cute little ditty that we dutifully sang every Sunday morning. Unfortunately, the experience was so mind-numbing that I never really did grasp the proof of that wondrous truth. The Bible sounded like so much hogwash, but I was such an ignorant fool for thinking such a thing.

Then, several years later, I decided to try to understand the Bible. For this wondrous venture in utter futility, I turned to the preacher, a grandiose visage in his gorgeous vestments, claiming to have received Profound Knowledge by the magic of Apostolic Succession, standing in the pulpit and proclaiming all sorts of wonders. Even with all his patient help and support, the Bible still sounded like badly written mass confusion and this Apostolic Succession business was beginning to sound like a bunch of charlatanry, but I was such an ignorant fool for thinking such a thing.

Try to imagine reading the Bible without the background of a Christian upbringing but with knowledge of the mythological background of the societies in which the various parts of the Bible were first written. Basically, the Bible seems to describe a sort of development of the God idea from the initial concept of the primitive tribal war god. Ancient tribes used to carry large wooden or golden idols into battle as good-luck charms. Some ancient tribes (perhaps the Hebrews were first, I don't know) figured out that they could dispense with their idols by simply proclaiming to their enemies, "Our True God is more powerful than all your false gods because He is strong enough to carry Himself into battle and what's more, He is magically invisible to you. We are the only ones who can see him!" Of course, they won all the battles because they didn't need to use up half their soldiers lugging their stupid gods around.

The Bible appears to be just loaded with bad ideas. Let's begin at the beginning. (Where else?) In Genesis 1:26 man has been given dominion over everything in sight, justifying environmental destructiveness. In Genesis 2:21-23 woman is created as a mere accessory to man, justifying male domination. Throughout Genesis, God is consistently portrayed as a bungling ham-fist who just can't quite get his creation to run right and keeps needing to destroy portions of it and start over. The created beings are consistently rewarded for groveling in abject obedience and punished for exercising their powers of rational thought. For example, check out Genesis 22:1-12, where Abraham is getting ready to sacrifice Isaac. Anybody who thinks even for a moment that some sort of god is ordering him to slay his own son is certainly navigating with a bent rudder.

The highlight of Exodus is the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2-17), that favorite document of the Righteous Reich. The first four of these commandments have nothing at all to do with moral values, they're nothing but expressions of primitive tribal superstition. Two of the other commandments have no meaning outside the bounds of one specific family heirarchical structure. The other four, worthy though they may be, are too small in scope to form any sort of general code of moral behavior. So this is the bit of drivel that's gonna keep guns out of schools? Yeah, right.

Moving on to Leviticus, we see in chapters 18-21 an example of primitive tribal hatred at its finest. The Egyptians and the Canaanites are being accused of all sorts of strange and uncouth misdeeds just so the Children of Israel can pride themselves on being ever so superior in giving themselves laws against these things. But some of these proscribed practices are, like who cares? Leviticus 20:13 demands that gay people be put to death. What sense does that make? Why should I even exclude gay people from my circle of friends, let alone hate them or commit acts of violence upon them?

Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, and Judges are a total crashing bore, filled with monotonous genealogies, more utterly senseless laws and commandments, and tribal battles in which the Children of Israel smite their neighbors and rape women and murder children, all with the blessing of their tribal god as long as they perform the correct rituals of cruelty to animals thinly disguised as sacrifices.

Ruth is sort of a cute little story except for its poor literary quality and maddeningly crummy readability.

In the Books of the Kings (called I&II Samuel and I&II Kings in most Protestant versions of the bible) we see the beginnings of anything that can be historically verified. This historical period begins about the middle of the 11th century BC, a time in which, elsewhere in the Near East, non-religious humanist philosophy is making its debut, with its moral standard based on Love Thy Neighbor As Thyself and its intellectual standard based on Seek And Ye Shall Find. (Betcha didn't know these ideas originated outside of any religion, didja?) Nowhere in the Books of the Kings do we see anything substantially resembling this level of enlightenment.

In I&II Chronicles we see little more than a stale and eminently unreadable rehash of earlier books. Skip them and you aren't missing anything.

Ezra and Nehemiah appear to be mere extensions of the Chronicles, just as badly written and just as historically inaccurate, although several passages in Nehemiah have been historically verified.

Esther is the Hebrew version of a widespread legend of passionate intrigue and assassination. The Persian and Babylonian versions are much more well-written and lots more fun to read.

Job is an incredible fantasy story that portrays God and Satan playing games with each other, apparently not with a full deck. Do you really want to believe in that sort of God? Oh by the way, when I was in college I did my Religion class term paper on the Book of Job. I got an A+ on it, not that anybody cares.

Now we come to the Psalms. They are, for the most part, rather nice poetry, and some of them sound pretty good set to music. Musical arrangements of many of the Psalms are published in Psalms Made Singable edited by Keith Shafer, available from Church Music Services. The ideas found in the Psalms, however, are vaporously devoid of substance.

Proverbs and Ecclesiastes contain a few bits of reasonably good advice here and there, but if you're a basically sensible person you're probably following that advice already. Besides, the good advice is so thoroughly interspersed with meaningless sequences of random words and Rah Rah God cheerleading that it's hardly worth wading through to find it.

The Song of Solomon would be pretty nice to sing while strumming upon your dulcimer outside your lover's window on some romantic moonlit night. Hey guys, try it sometime! You'll probably send the poor lady into gales of uproarious laughter.

Now we come to Isaiah, the most glorious aggregation of gobbledygook I've ever seen in a single setting! Isaiah appears to be a conglomeration of several ancient myths and legends, with all sorts of grandiose imagery of God and all the Celestial Attendants, gruesome scenes of the horrible things that happen to disobedient folks, wondrous visions of the delights that await the righteous, and vast quantities of incomprehensible nonsense. Much of this imagery is taken to be a prediction of the coming Messiah, although to me it looks like the typical fortune teller's ploy of predicting everything in sight, then whatever happens you'll have gotten something right. A rather interesting highlight is the phrase in Isaiah 7:14 where the English translation (King James version) reads "Behold, a virgin shall conceive". This accurately follows the Greek Septuagint version. The Hebrew version translates as "Behold, a young woman shall conceive", and a similar Persian myth says "Behold, an independent woman has conceived". Scholars more knowledgeable than I am disagree as to who mistranslated whom. I suppose the unreformably male-supremacist Children of Israel, speaketh they Hebrew or Greek, had no comprehension of what an independent woman could ever be. To Isaiah's credit, at least he slips in a few small pleas for social justice, the first mention in the Bible of this radical new idea that had already been a mainstay of most non-religious humanist philosophies for several centuries.

Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel are more or less similar to Isaiah except the mystic imagery is a bit less gaudy and the social justice theme is a bit stronger. In the Episcopal Church we do many of our standard Bible readings from these books, primarily because of the social justice issue.

Daniel is a fantasy myth similar to many other Near Eastern myths of the period. Daniel 1:8-15 is sometimes used as a biblical justification for a vegetarian diet, but most of my vegetarian friends don't seem to depend on biblical justification.

Hosea, Joel, Amos, and Obadiah are short but rather dull little treatises about largely nothing. Well, I suppose there are a few pleas for social justice and fairness, but they're embedded in such monumental hogwash that they're easily overlooked.

Jonah is another fantasy myth with many parallels in Near Eastern mythology.

Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi could probably be accidentally left out of the Bible and hardly anybody would notice. This is rather sad, I think, because it is in these books that most of the Bible's calls for social justice and fairness are stated most eloquently.

Some versions of the Bible, including the one we officially use in the Episcopal Church, contain a group of several books called the Apocrypha. If your Bible does not have the Apocrypha, fret thee not, for thou doth be indeed not missing much.

Did Jesus Christ ever actually exist on earth as a living person? Well, I suppose he probably did, but you certainly can't tell it from the Gospels. They're nothing but rather sloppily written accounts of just another warmed-over version of the same stale old man-god myth that has been a recurring staple of eastern and central European and Near Eastern mythology since time immaterial.

Here's the story. One of the gods decides to come and live on earth in human form. He causes some poor unsuspecting virgin to conceive and bear him, typically under very humble circumstances such as perhaps in a stable, where a makeshift bed is fixed up for him, perhaps in a livestock feeding trough. The birth is announced by various celestial means, such as a magnificent star, or choirs of angels on high. Visitors come bearing such unlikely gifts as gold, frankincense, and myrrh, suitable for a god, I suppose, but of no conceivable use for a normal baby. The sacred birth catches the attention of the local king, who then, perceiving a threat to his dynasty, has all boy babies in the kingdom put to death. However, the newborn man-god escapes via a mystic warning delivered to his earthly parents. The typical man-god myth generally contains very little detail of his childhood and youth. Then, in adulthood, he rounds up several disciples, typically twelve, although the number varies in some versions. He then goes around performing the same old miracles that are the stock-in-trade of every myth-maker, preaches the same old stuff that is already a part of existing philosophy, and retells the same old parables that everyone already knows by heart. Then he gets arrested by the local ruler, often through the perfidy of a disloyal disciple, and is put to death by some gruesome means such as crucifixion, but then he is resurrected and spends a few days strolling around and chatting with his disciples, then zooms off to Heaven or Valhalla or the Land of Happy Hunting or wherever.

The writers of the Gospels certainly had no shortage of source material because several dozen of these man-god myths were already familiar to Greek-speaking people of central and eastern Europe and portions of the Near East, and they could always place the scene of the action in some unfamiliar place like Palestine. Read the Gospels sometime with an ancient map of Palestine in hand. It's good for a lot of laughs. For instance, in the fifth chapter of Mark Jesus steps off a boat directly into the Country of the Gadarenes, about thirty miles from the nearest body of water big enough to float a boat. Wow, man! Jesus Christ Superstar of the Olympic broad jump team! And then when he's in that country he encounters a guy who's infested with demons and he casts out the demons and causes them to enter some pigs, a species that has never existed in that country because they can't survive the climate.

And just look at all these references to the Pharisees but not a single mention of the Essenes. The Pharisees were very prominent among the Greek-speaking Jews of Asia Minor, Greece, and Egypt, but barely noticed in Palestine. The Essenes were just all over the place in Palestine but almost unknown elsewhere. And this lovely little town of Nazareth is not mentioned in Roman maps and tax records of the era. It's very unlikely that the greedy Romans would have overlooked the taxation opportunities of any town big enough to have a carpenter shop. Oh by the way, the present-day town of Nazareth was founded in 135 AD as an unnamed community and received the name Nazareth in 254 AD. That oughta be enough to tell you that the Gospels were written by Greeks who had very little knowledge of the geography of Palestine and the customs of the Jews. Well, so much for trying to find profound truth in the Gospels.

The Acts, almost certainly written by the same author who wrote the Gospel of Luke, is a creative new twist on the man-god legend. It contains more of the same standard miracles of classic mythology such as speaking in tongues (Acts 2:1-11), healing (Acts 3:2-8 and Acts 5:15-16) and conversion (Acts 9:1-9), but it attributes these miracles to the human followers of the man-god after the ascension, a relatively unusual twist on the usual myth. The author also gets in a few of his own political views, such as communal living (Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:34-35) in seeming oblivion to the universal failure of communal living arrangements whenever they've been tried throughout history, and the idea of assigning underlings to do the real work while the high and mighty keep their delicate little paws clean (Acts 6:2-4). Not only that, but he includes a few actual historical people in his narrative, possibly at the request of those people themselves, so that we can't be sure what's fantasy and what's history.

The Epistles of Paul the Apostle are primarily flights of fantasy with all sorts of talk about salvation and redemption and all those other esoteric concepts of Christian dogma, but the one thing that really stands out is that this guy has got a rather serious circumcision fetish (Romans 2:25-29, Romans 3:30, Romans 4:9-12, I Corinthians 7:18-19, Galatians 2:7-9, Galatians 5:2-3, Colossians 2:11,13, and many many others). In addition, he seems to be some sort of sex-hating pervert (I Corinthians 7:7-9,32-34) like maybe he was some sort of nerd that women didn't like and he was jealous of the fun everyone else was having. He also expresses a negative view of the created world (I Corinthians 2:12) and bodily existence (Romans 8:1-3, Romans 13:14, and Galatians 5:16-21). He is a gay-basher (Romans 1:27 and I Corinthians 6:9), a male supremacist (I Corinthians 11:3,8-12, I Corinthians 14:34-35, Ephesians 5:22-24, and Colossians 3:18), a hair length fetishist (I Corinthians 11:14-15), and a hat fetishist (I Corinthians 11:4-7). To Paul's credit, he recognizes the legitimacy of human differences (Romans 12:6-8, Romans 14:2-6, and I Corinthians 12:8-11), and he recommends loving thy neighbor (Romans 13:8).

The other Epistles (including I&II Timothy and Titus, often erroneously attributed to Paul) are more flights of fantasy but with much less of Paul's weird hangups, although male domination rears its ugly head (I Timothy 2:11-12 and I Peter 3:1) with the interesting new twists that women should not wear jewelry and nice clothes (I Timothy 2:9 and I Peter 3:3) and widows shouldn't be allowed to have any fun (I Timothy 5:5-6). James is to be commended for recognizing that action rather than faith is what gets things done (James 2:14-26).

When Revelation was first published, it was uniformly denounced by the Christian community as the rantings of a madman. Emperor Theodosius insisted that it be included in the Bible so that he could use its freakish imagery to fabricate frightening boogeymen to spook the superstitious population into meekly accepting his tyranny. Hey folks, it's still the rantings of a madman.

I suppose I am misinterpreting the Bible. If that's the case, then maybe we ought to think about rewriting the Bible so people like me can understand it. If the Bible, as it stands now, is the inerrant Word of God, then God must be a miserable muddle-head. But I am such an ignorant fool for thinking such a thing.

Merry Christmas

2008-12-25T09:16:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas, everyone! Celebrate as you please! Newton's birthday (by the old Julian calendar)! Hanukkah (or however you spell it)! It's the Winter Solstice, a time when celebration is needed to ease the gloom of winter.

There are two classes of people I do not tolerate very well, sorry.

One is the anti-religion nerd-grinch who refuses to celebrate Christmas because it's the mythical birthday of an imaginary man-god that no sane and rational person could ever believe in.

The other is the religion spastic who bleats, "Put Christ back into Christmas," which is really double-speak code for, "Shove everything else out of Christmas."

Our winter solstice holiday season, complete with the make-believe man-god's mythical birthday, is believed to have dated to the 23-rd century BC if not indeed earlier, if certain ancient Sumerian and Elamite writings eventually prove to be genuine. With a tradition like that, no person in their right mind would refuse to celebrate.

Bailing Out the Auto Industry

2008-12-10T11:16:00.002-05:00

Cars, the most hopelessly inefficient form of transportation ever invented, have done wonderful things for us.

Car ownership has enabled people to live in the outer suburbs, far from their jobs, stores, schools, and places of social life. This makes outer suburban land more potentially useful and therefore more expensive, thus feeding the forces of land speculation.

As a byproduct, this car dependence has required large parking lots in inner cities, thus requiring stores, industries, schools, etc. to acquire more land for these parking lots. This feeds the forces of speculation in inner city land.

So now that we've become so totally dependent on cars for all our transportation needs, our dependence appears to justify propping up the car industry when they begin falling victim to the very same land speculation that they, themselves, encouraged.

Perhaps we might change our perspective a bit. Maybe we could go ahead and let the car companies fail. Then many people will become unemployed and many dwellers of outer suburbia will be stranded in their remote luxury mansions without cars.

That would be horrible! But look! There's an obvious solution! Modify our tax structure to increase the location component of property taxes and decrease taxes on buildings, incomes, sales, and everything else.

This would cause land usage patterns to become more dynamic, enabling people to move closer to their work, stores, schools, etc. so that walking and bicycling would become practical for more of their transportation, thus decreasing their need for cars. The more dynamic land usage patterns would also permit the establishment of business forms that are more relevant to people's actual needs, thus re-employing the workers displaced by the failure of the car companies.

This tax shift, described in the nineteenth-century book Progress and Poverty by Henry George, looks like it would be very easily implementable within almost any reasonable governmental form. When I receive my property tax bill every September, the location value and building value are already separated out and re-added back together again, so implementing the tax shift looks like it would involve leaving a step out rather than adding a step. And if the income tax could be eliminated, yet another burdensome administration could be eliminated.

Hey, don't tell me it can't be done!

Seeds of Destruction

2008-12-07T10:22:00.002-05:00

Back when world communism was alive and well, the communists taunted us and warned us that capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. Their observation is true, of course, but they failed to notice that communism also sows the seeds of its own destruction, the very same seeds, in fact, and by pure chance their seeds germinated first.

So what are these seeds of destruction?

Every elementary economics textbook begins by explaining that all wealth is made from land, labor, and capital. When an entrepreneur first establishes a business, he spends his initial investment on land and capital, then hires employees to perform the labor.

This initial investment lumps land and capital together and refers to the composite as the Means of Production. Capitalism places the Means of Production under corporate control and communism places the Means of Production under government control. Is one inherently better than the other? Should we care?

The need for the entrepreneur to lump land and capital together for investment purposes leads to the error of failing to see the fundamental difference between land and capital. Land is part of the universe. No human being, alive or dead, made it. It's a Gift of God (if you're a believer) or a Fact of Nature (if you're a non-believer). Capital is made by living people, and the quantity of it is a product of human decisions, thus capital bears a much closer kinship to labor than to land.

And therein lies the Seeds of Destruction. Whenever land and capital are treated identically for taxation and administrative purposes, land becomes subject to uncontrollable price inflation that eventually renders land such a large percentage of the corporate assets that it becomes more profitable to cut back production instead of increasing production. Downsizing happens. People lose their jobs. Newly unemployed homeowners default on their mortgages and banks are left holding the bag with properties that can't be sold for the amount of the outstanding balance.

In short, we have a depression.

Is the current economic downturn a mere recession that will soon turn back up again? Are we headed for a depression that will take years to pull back out of? Is this the depression that will cause total collapse of the entire world order as we know it? I'm not going to make a prediction, and I'm not going to believe any prediction anybody else makes, either.

Whatever the next presidential administration tries to do to fix our economy, it's doomed to fail unless something is done to rein in land speculation. The land value tax suggested in the nineteenth-century book Progress and Poverty by Henry George would be a very good place to start.

Now, if we do finally get wise and find a way to stop uncontrollable land-price bubbles, should the government own and administer major capital investments, as recommended by communists and socialists? In some cases, perhaps yes, but in other cases it won't make any difference.

The Uncaused First Cause

2008-11-18T08:28:00.003-05:00

Everything must have a cause, therefore there must be an uncaused first cause, which must be God. Right?

First flaw: Many alternatives are possible, which the promoters of this proof commonly either handwavingly dismiss without an adequate explanation or leave entirely unexplored.

Second flaw: In order for something to be uncaused, it must be part of the primordial realm of the uncaused, consisting of only things that exist only because their nonexistence does not exist. I've never seen any description of what sort of God might be plausibly included in this realm.

Third flaw: In order for something to be a cause, it must have causative powers. I've never seen anything in our theology that explicitly credits God with any specific causative powers beyond the hand-waving statement that God is omnipotent, which is meaningless.

The primordial realm of the uncaused might plausibly include such things as the validity of logic, the truth of the axioms, the workability of mathematical patterns, the feasibility of certain dimensionalities, and many other things which, if true, would have precisely the sorts of causative powers needed to cause at least some of the features of our universe, but theologians have unexplainably omitted these attributes from their various concepts of God.

Theologians, you've got a lot of work yet to do!

An Open Letter to Our Next President

2008-10-31T12:52:00.000-04:00

Dear Next President, whoever may win this election:

Prepare ye this day for the monumental challenge of the century, our economy. For this, I have two suggestions.

First, converse with a few real estate salespeople. Take note of the many times they recite the ever-popular real estate mantra, "The three most important things about a location are location, location, and location."

Next, read the nineteenth-century book Progress and Poverty by Henry George, which explains what all this location business is all about.

You see, all human activities, without exception, have one thing in common, that is they require a location. At a minimum, in order to do anything you have to be someplace while you are doing it. Some locations are better than others for certain activities.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that all meaningful investments contain a major component consisting of the market value of their location. The influence of land speculation artificially jacks up this location value component, making the entire investment appear more valuable than it really is, thus we end up with investment "bubbles" of various sorts.

When the location value component reaches a certain point, land usage patterns become less dynamic because of the greater amount of money that needs to be borrowed for a land sale, thus decreasing the efficiency of industry and leading to economic stagnation.

Mr. McCain, your party has traditionally believed that the Invisible Hand envisioned by Adam Smith will, if government simply butts out, magically cause more wealth to be created. How do you expect this to happen if the Invisible Hand is chained to the dungeon wall of land speculation?

Mr. Obama, your party has traditionally believed that there's plenty of wealth and all that's needed is equitable distribution. If you redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, how do you propose to prevent the forces of land speculation from re-redistributing it back to the rich?

Mr. Next President, whichever of you should win, you've got your work cut out for you!

Same-sex Marriage

2008-10-14T08:52:00.000-04:00

It's time for me to present my opinion of same-sex marriage, a topic of which I know nothing, so I'll freely admit that my own opinion is total hogwash.

I know nothing about gay people, so I have no idea whether the institution of marriage is right for them. That's for them to decide. I'm not qualified to deny them something that might or might not work for them.

All arguments I've ever seen against same-sex marriage appear to fall into three categories: first, it's not the way we imagine marriage was done a thousand years ago therefore we can't do it now; second, somebody's religion says homosexuality is an Abomination Unto The Lord (or some such theological jibberish); and third, extending marriage to a new category of people will destroy it in some vaporously unfathomable way. I consider all these arguments utterly spurious.

Now I'll admit that same-sex marriage is quite a jolt to my concept of what's usual, but I see no material harm in it. Now I realize that the institution of marriage has been custome-fine-tuned for the benefit of opposite-sex couples, but whether or not it would be workable for same-sex couples is something only gay people can decide. If we let them try it, and if they try it, and if they find it doesn't work for them, then fine, they'll at least have the opportunity to find out for themselves whether they can make it work.

I suspect it'll be quite a few years before Maryland considers legalizing same-sex marriage, but if it ever does come up for a vote during my lifetime I'll vote for it. I'm not qualified to vote against it.

Now, whether same-sex couples should have children either by adoption or by donor insemination depends on how the children will be raised. That's a topic for sociologists to examine scientifically, and that's outside of my field of expertise. I'll abstain from presenting any opinion.

Terrorism or Religion?

2008-10-13T11:09:00.000-04:00

Suppose a headline reads, "Hoodlums smear bloody gang symbol on government property!"

Wouldn't we be outraged?

Well, what if the "hoodlums" are nuns and the "gang symbol" is a cross? Here's the story.

It appears that religion is receiving a special privilege here. Tax exemption is another special privilege. The right to ring those out-of-tune gongs in church steeples on Sunday morning without getting arrested for excessive noise is another special privilege.

And in my community, every year at noon on Good Friday, a group of Episcopal and Catholic priests and parishioners block traffic for a cross-carrying parade without bothering to get a parade permit. They've never been arrested.

The first of the rights promised in the First Amendment is freedom of religion. To me, that means freedom to practice your religion, not freedom to annoy other people with your religion.

Now, what do you make of our religious politicians? It doesn't bother me a bit for politicians to be religious. What bothers me is that they fall all over each other trying to prove how religious they are in order to get votes. That's not a reflection on the politicians' integrities, it's a reflection on the moronic mentality of the American public.

If an atheist, or a Hindu, or a Muslim, or a believer in Zorb the Sacred Crocodile were to run for public office, he'd barely get a vote, no matter what the superiority of his qualifications may be.

Now, I'm all for freedom of religion. But I'm not for special privileges for religion.

Bail-out?

2008-10-06T08:28:00.000-04:00

When sane and rational people try to bail out a sinking boat, they bail the water out. When our fine government economists get in on the act, they bail more water into the boat.

Here's what appears to be happening. Banks loan money to homeowners to buy houses and the land the houses are sitting on, and to businesses to buy business equipment and the land to locate it on.

When the forces of land speculation raise the prices of land, more of the money loaned goes to buy the land instead of the houses and business equipment. It becomes more expensive to become a homeowner or home renter, and more expensive for a business to start up, expand, or relocate.

So land speculation becomes a sort of Ponzi scheme which can only go so far. There comes a point at which home ownership becomes impossible for most people, and at which businesses can no longer be profitable, and whoever has bought a piece of land at the latest price, expecting to make a profit when the price goes even higher, is left holding the bag. If the landowner defaults on the payments, the bank is left holding the bag.

Now, business stock prices are based, in part, on the business's total assets, including land. If land prices get to the point where further rise is impossible, stock prices tumble, leaving the current investors holding the bag.

So, along comes Big Daddy Government with seven hundred billion dollars to buoy up the banks so they can stay in business to loan even more money and enable land speculation pressures to jack the price of land up even higher, thus imposing even greater burdens on homeowners, home renters, and businesses.

Nobody seems to be noticing that the only people profiting are the financial institutions loaning money to land speculators, and to those few land speculators lucky enough to sell before the Ponzi scheme crashes.

You'd think we ought to bail water out of the sinking boat by taxing the location component of land values, not pouring more water in by funding increased land speculation. Such a tax, gradually imposed, could eventually replace portions of our current taxes on income, sales, imports, and property imporovements.

I'm not sure any of our current leading presidential candidates ever heard of such a thing. Well, maybe Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader, but they seem to be out of the running at the moment.

How do you shake a hole?

2008-02-24T17:51:00.000-05:00

When radio was first invented, radio hams noticed that the laws of physics describing how radio works appear to be mathematically similar to the laws of physics describing many other topics in physics. Several years later a Nobel Prize winning physics professor named Richard Feynman wrote a set of physics lectures based on the mathematical analogies among all the laws of physics.

Here’s just one example of how the laws of physics appear to be mathematically analogous across many topics in physics.

Several years ago a tornado ripped through my back yard and took out one of my 90-foot-tall spruce trees. By some astonishing miracle, the house, garage, and both cars parked outside, were untouched. The fence on the far side of the property had one 8-foot section smashed out by the tree falling on it, and that was easily repaired.

Getting rid of the tree was easy. I simply spread the word round and about the community that there was a vast quantity of firewood available to anyone who could cut it up and haul it away. A few days later, a caravan of pickup trucks and chain saws rolled up the driveway and into the back yard and within a few hours the tree was gone.

But how do you get rid of a stump? Well, I suppose you dig. So I dug, thus giving me a five-foot-deep ten-foot-diameter hole with a 1000 or 1500 pound stump sitting at the bottom of it. But now, how do you get a stump out of a hole?

When you shake a can full of rocks, marbles, wood chips, and other random objects, the lowest-density things rise to the top, and, within a density range, the largest things rise to the top. I had all the dirt that was dug out of the hole, and I had a large quantity of chips of old concrete and fragments of old bricks that I’d just love to get rid of. There was certainly plenty of stuff to fill the hole if I could just pour it all in and just shake the hole somehow.

So I began putting just a few concrete and brick fragments and shovelfuls of dirt at a time into the hole, and using my digging bar as a pry-bar to rock the stump back and forth. With each rocking action, the stump was lifted a bit higher, just a fraction of an inch at a time. In about two hours, the stump was sitting on top of level ground, ready to be rolled over to wherever I wanted it.

Now I realize this example doesn’t prove much, but I was led to the method by the realization that there are many similarities between seemingly different things. Any conjecture I might make about metaphysics or theology needs to take into account the observation that the universe appears to have some sort of dimensional unity and is unlikely to be the result of some sort of God making separate decisions about how to design the different parts of the universe.

How Green I Am (not)

2008-01-27T11:01:00.000-05:00

I really ought to insist that my family become more environmentally gentle. Our lifestyle is simply too gluttonously wasteful.

First of all, our house is much larger than we really need. Although it has full insulation and storm windows, it's a very old house and still has many leaks and cracks. We heat with conventional air-source heat pumps, more efficient than most other heating systems, but less efficient than ground-source heat pumps. We keep our house temperature in the low-to-mid sixties in the winter, and mid-to-upper seventies in the summer. We try to tip off visitors in advance that it would behoove them to dress for the season. At least we manage without heat for the garage.

We've replaced some of our light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs, but several of our fixtures require candelabra base bulbs, for which wattages sufficient for our needs are not yet available in compact fluorescents.

We have five widely separated water-using zones: kitchen, laundry, and three bathrooms, all served by a single water heater, thus requiring lengthy water-running before the hot water comes. Attempts to insulate the hot water pipes have proven futile because of the high population of mice, groundhogs, and opossums, all of whom just love the delectable flavor of water-pipe insulation.

We own two cars, neither of which gets particularly great gas mileage. At least with careful driving we're getting about ten to fifteen percent better gas mileage than the EPA estimates.

We've been trying to do most of our shopping using canvas shopping bags brought from home to minimize getting plastic bags at the stores, but some stores simply insist that we must take their plastic bags instead. For the most part, we don't argue much.

We make some modest effort to sort out the trash that our local landfill defines as "recyclable" and put it in the recycle bins, but I'm not sure they really recycle it. I think they just weigh it to determine some arbitrary "percentage of trash recycled" for eligibility for some sort of federal funding, and then just throw it back together with the general trash.

We compost rottable kitchen garbage. So far, the neighbors haven't complained.

So, are we doing our part? Basically, no. Better than some people perhaps, but still not enough. Somehow, we need to improve.

Religion, moderate or extremist?

2007-12-21T08:17:00.000-05:00

Recently at a presentation by the Washington Area Secular Humanists, the speaker was Don Evans, who spoke on the topic of whether religious moderation is as harmful as religious extremism. Here's an article by him on the same topic. Fortunately for me, he took the side that religious moderation is okay. That's good, because I participate in an organized religion and consider myself moderate.

But okay, so what's moderate? When we look at somebody else's religion, for instance Islam, from the outside, it's easy to decide that moderate Muslims, including all of the dozen or so Muslims that I know personally, are the ones who use their religious practice to form a fellowship, and do not expect anybody else to agree literally with their theology.

Why, then, can we not apply the same standard to our own religion? Here's an essay by John Shelby Spong, whom I consider to be a religious moderate. But within the Episcopal church, Spong is considered to be somewhere out on the fringe. We simply can't accept the idea that belief in the literal truth of the Nicene Creed is actually an extremist view.

In other words, the Episcopal church, one of the most progressively moderate of all denominations, is still about 80% extremist.

I won't bother to go very far into most other denominations because I really don't know what's happening within them, but perhaps the Roman Catholic church should be addressed. From its inception in 325 AD, the Roman Catholic church has been the most extremist of all denominations, in fact, they even excommunicated Bishop Arius for trying to introduce a few slight shreds of moderation. In modern times, Pope Benedict XVI has gone to extremes to reaffirm the extremist position and squelch the few small voices calling for moderation.

However, there's one area in which the Roman Catholic church, at least in the United States, has slipped out of extremist control in recent years, and that's in their parochial schools.

Back in the 1950's and 1960's, children entering public high schools from Roman Catholic parochial schools had a tough time of it. They were several years behind, and had a tough time catching up. People entering college from Roman Catholic high schools had it even worse. They had been so steeped in theological doctrine that the very concept of rational thought was total culture shock.

Since then, that situation has changed drastically. Recent graduates of the Roman Catholic parochial school system now actually have a significant edge over most public high school graduates when they enter college. Obviously, the proponents of moderation and rational thought have somehow intruded into their school system.

In church, I try to stay out of crybaby contests with the many extremists among my fellow congregation members. That would just damage the fellowship that I believe to be the fundamental purpose of religion. I believe that making decisions according to rational thought gets things done, and if others don't have time for rational thought because they're too busy trying to use theological magic, they're the losers.

Terrorism and Attitudes

2007-11-26T11:39:00.000-05:00

Here's a letter that appeared in last Friday's Calvert Recorder. (link here) I wish I could say it's a parody, but I'm afraid it isn't. The abject willful idiocy and hate-mongering bigotry are exactly what you'd expect to see on the True Christians Unite parody role-playing site.

Right off the bat, the writer begins by bragging about her education, which the rest of her letter proves she doesn't have. Then she moans about how horrible it is that her granddaughter is getting an education on topics of importance in the modern world.

Her seething hatred for Muslims is so intense that she even thinks that using correct grammar to talk about them would honor them undeservedly.

Then she claims she's been through something called "a revised history book" without finding any reference to Christians. I have no idea what sort of history book she's talking about.

She decries the death, destruction, lack of respect, and violence in the modern world, utterly oblivious that it's attitudes like hers that are causing it.

She claims the students are not allowed to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I have no idea what school she's talking about. Recitation of the Pledge is a regular thing in all of our public schools in this county.

Then she claims the students are not allowed to say the Lord's Prayer. Hogwash! Of course they can, as long as they don't try to cram that primitive tribal war chant down the throats of differently-believing classmates.

She complains that freedom is no longer. The only freedom that's lacking is her freedom to cram her religion down everybody else's throats.

Somehow she believes that the Constitution has been abolished. She sounds like one of these people who mistakenly think the Constitution is a Christian document, blissfully unaware that the founders of our nation were of various religious beliefs, with Humanism and Deism predominating.

She doesn't believe that Muslims, almost 25% of the world's population, are a fit topic for study by children who are going to have to deal with them.

And then she mumbles something about God, the American Flag, and the Constitution all in one breath, and tries to claim that the Bible is the greatest book ever written, ignoring that other perfectly law-abiding citizens believe the same about other holy books.

And in other news, there's a terror alert active for the state of Maryland. (link here) It appears to be faddish nowadays to blame Muslim extremists for all the terror in the world. We forget that our nation is full of Christian extremists who are only one small step away from terrorism.

Evolution of the Blog

2007-11-16T10:05:00.000-05:00

I've been tagged by Greta Christina. The meme is "Pick out five blog posts that illustrate the evolution of your blog, link to them, and comment on them."

First, a bit of background. In about 1997 or thereabouts, I began chatting in several Talk City chat rooms, using more than a dozen different nicknames. For each registered nickname, Talk City gave you a tiny little one-page web site. Since then Talk City has quit giving out web sites, so all of those web sites have vanished. I still use four of those nicknames in other places, however.

In most places I use OrneryPest.

In bicycling and physical fitness forums I use RollFaster.

In religion-parody role-playing forums I play the part of Reverend Howell N. Shreack, the Bible-thumping fire-and-brimstone preacher of a make-believe church called the Fundamental United Celestial Kingdom.

In swashbuckling adventure role-playing forums I play the part of Admiral Worthington Scrimshaw, Esquire, the supreme commanding officer of Her Majesty's fine battleship HMS Neverfloat.

When all of the Talk City web sites vanished, I started web sites on Geocities, Fortune City, and Tripod. Geocities proved to be by far the most satisfactory host. I don't even know if the Tripod and Fortune City sites are even there any more. I suspect probably not.

So, now to address the meme.

First post (or group of posts): Opinions. Since religion and politics are the two areas in which my opinions differ drastically from the mainstream, these were my first two topics.

Second group of posts: Poetry. Ridiculous little doggerel-verse ditties, actually. I think my favorite one so far is The Ballad of the Purloined Throne. I've also got a little essay about how to write poetry.

Then I discovered internet diaries, and put up one at DiaryLand. Nothing memorable here, but it got me into a community of diarists.

Third group of posts: One of my fellow diarists (who appears to be no longer on-line) got me interested in Fugue, a sort of essay-of-the-month club. Here's my first entry.

Nothing happened for a long time. My Demented Diary was happily swing along, nothing memorable being posted. Then about last July or thereabouts, Michael Gerson published an astonishingly twisted and upside-down version of where he thought moral values came from.

Fourth post: Finally, I had something memorable to post in My Demented Diary. A commentary on what I thought about Michael Gerson's monumental ignorance level.

That got me to thinking. Serious commentary is out of place in My Demented Diary. Maybe I ought to set up a more serious diary. That thought sat there and smoldered for a while, until one Sunday in church the preacher preached a sermon that exposed, in a most spectacular way, the total inability of the Christian religion to address anything realistically. So, says I, a more serious diary it shall be, and this blog was born.

Fifth post: My response to that sermon, the first Real entry in this blog.

And now, since no one has responded to my earnest pleas for volunteers to be tagged, I'll just tag five of my favorite diarists.

Poolagirl

LA The Sage

Sue

Sarah

Bozoette

Religion and Discrimination

2007-11-09T09:11:00.000-05:00

An applicant applies for a job in a hair salon. The owner states up front that one of the job duties is for the worker to show off her own hair-do. The applicant holds a religious belief that she must keep her hair covered in public. The owner says, sorry, but it's a job requirement and if you're unprepared to perform the duty then you're not qualified for the job. The applicant then files a lawsuit for religious discrimination. (link to story)

Several cases have arisen recently where pharmacy workers have refused to fill birth control prescriptions because their religion opposes birth control. In most cases, another worker is available to take over and fill the prescription. But what if another worker were unavailable? Would the pharmacy be justified in firing the employee for nonperformance of duties?

Some grocery stores sell wine and beer. Is a cash-register person whose religion opposes booze consumption justified in refusing to deal with a customer who wants to buy some?

Suppose a job (police officer, hotel desk clerk, airline reservation agent) requires a uniform which conflicts in some way with a religiously mandated item of clothing. Is the employer required to make a special exception for that one employee?

I think that if you can't or won't perform the job duties, for whatever reason, religion or otherwise, then you're unqualified for the job and have no business applying for in the first place. If you really want the job, then change your religion.

As soon as a few religious leaders start realizing that their strange doctrines render True Believers unqualified to get jobs, maybe they'll start receiving mystic revelations from God to change these doctrines. Strange things like that have happened in history, you know.

A Modest Proposal

2007-11-04T17:21:00.001-05:00

In the Episcopal church, a great fuss is made over how the communion wine gets consecrated for use, as though properly consecrated wine has magic powers of some sort. If these magic powers could be verified, it would probably qualify for James Randi's million-dollar prize. I'm sure there's room for a cool million in just about any parish budget.

I propose, therefore, that the magic powers be tested. Several steps are involved.

Step one: A panel of theologians (approved by the Archbishop of Canterbury, of course) shall define precisely what these magic powers are and precisely how they can be verified, and shall design the exact test procedure.

Step two: A case of wine (twelve bottles) shall be purchased from the usual supplier. Thirty-six canonically valid communion wine cruets shall be obtained from an approved supplier of religious products. The cruets shall be marked numerically, and selected at random for the following step.

Step three. Each bottle of wine shall be divided equally into three cruets. One cruet shall be consecrated by a priest in the canonically approved fashion. Another cruet shall have the consecration ceremony performed upon it by a lay-person, thus constituting an invalid consecration. The third cruet shall remain unconsecrated.

Step four: A record shall be made of which cruets were validly consecrated, which were invalidly consecrated, and which were unconsecrated. The record shall be sealed into an envelope and delivered to a bank safe deposit box.

Step five: Some people who did not witness the consecration ceremonies shall carry the cruets to the testing space where they will be tested by other people who did not witness the consecration ceremonies.

If the magic powers conferred by consecration are genuine, the test team should easily pick out the twelve validly consecrated cruets. If, however, the twelve invalidly consecrated cruets also have these magic powers, we'll immediately know that an ordained priest is not needed to perform the consecration.

Now, since it will be theologians instead of scientists determining the test procedure, that should squelch any bogus excuses by theologians that theological claims are not scientifically testable. The only thing we'll require is that the consecrated cruets be correctly identified.

And now, Dear Theologians! Are you up to the task? There's a cool million bucks on the table for your church budget!

Holy Spirits and Hogwash

2007-10-24T09:54:00.000-04:00

During the seventeenth century when alchemy was beginning to give way to chemistry, it was becoming obvious that the traditional theory of four elements, earth, water, air, and fire, wasn't working. For one thing, fire was discovered to be a process, not an element.

But just what sort of process was it, anyway. Well, the new proto-chemists decided that whatever the elements were, one of them was phlogiston, and fire consisted of driving the phlogiston out from the other elements.

But there were problems with the phlogiston theory, so the new alchemists-becoming-chemists set up some careful observations to watch how this phlogiston was behaving, and discovered that the entire phlogiston theory was hogwash.

By contrast, when the Holy Trinity was defined, a dispute arose about whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from both the Father and the Son, or from only the Father and not the Son. However, instead of following the very successful example of chemists who made a discovery by making careful observations, theologians simply divided the Christian religion in half on the basis of their disagreements. If they should bother to set up careful observations to watch the Holy Spirit proceeding so they'd know which is true, they would probably discover that the entire Holy Trinity is just as imaginary as phlogiston.

A further controversy arose as to whether the Substance of the Son and the Substance of the Father are the same, alike, similar, or different. Theologians dare not try to analyze these substances for fear of discovering that they don't even exist.

In fact, if we made careful observations of all our religious doctrines, we'd soon discover that our entire cast of characters is no more real than imaginary fairies and leprechauns.

And that, folks, is why science has given us good things and religion has given us reasons to refuse to get along.

Lame Apologetics

2007-10-20T13:04:00.000-04:00

In general I find Christian apologetics rather dull, but I found this piece rather amusing. It's called What Atheists Kant Refute by Dinesh D'Souza.

He starts out in the usual fashion, by fabricating a belief out of nowhere and pretending it's what atheists believe and base their arguments on. In this case, it's the Fallacy of the Enlightenment, the belief that human reason and science can, in principle, eventually understand all of reality. This was a popular Enlightenment belief but much less popular now. In the first place, it may not necessarily be a fallacy, and in the second place, I've never met an atheist who believes it nor bases arguments on it.

Next, he brings up Critique of Pure Reason by Kant. He appears to be blissfully unaware that this monumental tome was the beginning, not the end, of a 150-year-long massive revolution in our understanding of logic.

Then he claims that Kant proved that our knowledge is limited by our limited sensory apparatus, utterly unaware that technological gadgets, even in Kant's day, were already available to detect and measure things far beyond the scope of human senses. I'm sure Kant was aware of these scientific instruments, but D'Souza appears not to be.

Then he observes (correctly, for a change) that atheists routinely dismiss religious claims for lack of evidence. Of course they do! Lack of evidence is grounds for eagerly seeking further knowledge, not for believing silly doctrines dreamed up out of thin air!

Somehow he has concluded that Kant's philosophy "opens the door to faith," which admittedly, Kant himself apparently claimed. I'll admit I can't figure out how Kant justifies this conclusion. It sounds like a suspiciously close relative to Pascal's Wager, which is not taken seriously by very many people any more.

D'Souza then dismisses what he calls the "ignorant boast" that atheism operates on a higher intellectual plane than theism. Since theism, as far as I can tell, operates on the intellectual plane of children in their playpen arguing over whether their imaginary fairies are wearing pink dresses or blue dresses, I don't see why it's an ignorant boast to recognize your own intellectual superiority.

At last, in his final sentence, D'Souza strongly implies, without quite actually saying, that theistic belief offers a mystic pipeline to a form of knowledge beyond the scope of science. I don't think so. If something can't be known by methods accepted by science, it can't be known by mere humans. Science uses observation and logic, the primary components of rational thought. Theism uses doctrine and faith, the primary components of hogwash.

And now I'd better punch the Publish Post button so I can sit back and finish laughing at Dinesh D'Souza's jibberish.

Happy Birthday Sylvia Browne!

2007-10-19T09:22:00.000-04:00

The world-famous Sylvia Browne turns 71 today, according to publicly available sources. She's been pretending to be psychic since about 1974 according to this Wikipedia entry but her track record appears to be no better than random chance. Anyone who keeps up on current events could do at least as well. Nevertheless, she continues to receive incredibly high fees for psychic consultations and is apparently booked up solid for months.

James Randi has offered her his famous million-dollar prize if she can prove under scientifically acceptable conditions that she's really psychic. But really, she's got no reason to take him up on it. She'd never win the million, and her failure of the test might risk cutting into the megabucks she's raking in now.

She joins a long list of make-believe psychics, each with their own gimmick.

Uri Geller claims to use psychic powers to bend spoons, a feat accomplished regularly in school cafeterias by students using only their fingers. I should think that straightening spoons back out again would be a more useful talent.

Jeane Dixon used to flood the mystery fan media with predictions of everything imaginable, then no matter what happened she'll have gotten something right. Soon after President Kennedy's assassination, she announced that she had predicted it. Nobody has ever found the publication in which the prediction supposedly appeared, but that didn't stop her from becoming the Official Psychic Advisor to Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

Edgar Cayce is alleged to have used his psychic powers to cure people by telepathy. None of his supposed cures has ever been verified.

Psychic power has been a generously funded area of scientific research since about the middle of the nineteenth century. No evidence of psychic power has ever been verified. I don't think it's ever going to be, either.

I can already hear the shrill voices of True Believers whining, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!" Sorry, True Believers, nice sound bite but total hogwash.

Global Warming

2007-10-18T09:58:00.000-04:00

Now that global warming has happened, what do we do about it?

Sea levels are rising. Do we spend billions on dikes and levees? Or do we encourage lowland-using activities to relocate to higher ground?

Major rivers are likely to change their courses. Do we spend billions on trying to confine the rivers? Or do we relocate our river-dependent industries?

Agricultural zone boundaries are much farther north than they were forty years ago. Do we spend billions trying to force nature to do our bidding? Or do we learn to grow different crops, and grow our old crops in different places?

Formerly well-watered places are now arid, and formerly dry places are now suffering excess rainfall. Same pair of questions. Spend billions on dubious technology or learn to relocate?

Our current tax structure and land-ownership pattern makes relocation unduly difficult. Land is too expensive to buy but too cheap to own for long term. Relocation means abandoning now-worthless land that was initially bought at great cost, and buying new land at even greater cost.

Landowners are not making much from this scheme. The only winners are banks who loan ever-increasing amounts of money for bigger and bigger mortgages.

What if we got smart and levied high real estate taxes on the location value of land, thus making it impractical to own land that's not immediately needed? It seems that initial purchase prices of land would be greatly decreased. Land that becomes worthless to to changes in the natural world would be much easier to abandon because new land could be more readily bought elsewhere. The only losers would be banks, who would no longer have a market for huge land-purchase mortgages.

Of course there's still a need to curtail human activities that needlessly result in unnecessary global warming, but a more dynamic land usage pattern is going to be a necessary part of any solution.

New version of Opera

2007-10-17T16:09:00.000-04:00

I'm just trying out this newly downloaded version of the Opera browser to see if it can be used to post my entries here. The earlier version didn't work so I used Microsoggy Intermuck Exploder which I hate. In fact, the only worse browser on the market is Netscrape Navelgazer.

It appears to be working. Okay. Now I'll hit "Publish Post" and if you can read this entry, it worked.

Getting old

2007-10-15T17:14:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, a friend of mine who is a semi-retired psychologist presented a small seminar on aging. Since I'm only seven and a half months short of 65, the magic age at which one becomes a Senior Citizen, I decided to attend. It was very interesting.

First of all, aging is not purely biological, it's biosocial. Social experience can accelerate or retard aging. Many researchers have noticed that members of churches, Rotary clubs, philosophy circles, bicycle clubs, or whatever, appear to live longer than the general population. Party hearty! It's good for you!

Aging is also dependent on the quality of mental activity you choose for yourself. An epidemiologist named Dr. David Snowden (sorry I can't cite the exact reference) studied a large group of elderly people who had written their biographies in their 20's. He found that people who expressed themselves clearly, grammatically correctly, and with high "idea density" (presenting a maximum of ideas with a minimum of verbiage) aged with much less senility. A possible reaction to this finding is, "Oh, my God, it's all in the bag by the time you are in your 20's!"

Actually, I certainly hope my fate wasn't all in the bag forty years ago. I fondly hope there's still room to continue changing my attitude and lifestyle for the better.

And now for the bad news. Medical technology now exists for keeping people alive for months or years after they've suffered ailments that would have been fatal a century ago. Sometimes the person experiences a very high quality of life after the event, sometimes not.

A woman in her sixties suffers a stroke. She's rushed to the hospital, and after a few months of recuperation, returns to a highly satisfying quality of life. Then in her eighties, she suffers a relatively minor accident, is saved temporarily by high-tech measures, only to die in a nursing home after several months of expensive but pointless care. What if the doctors treating her twenty years earlier had decided she's gone anyway, why bother, thus cheating her out of twenty good years?

A man in his eighties is beset by a variety of ailments that weaken him and require progressively more and more medical intervention. Several years ago he was taking five pills a day and walked with a cane. After a few years, he required ten pills a day and walked with two canes. After a few more years he needed twenty pills a day and was just barely able to struggle along with a wheelie-walker. Now he's up to forty pills a day and needs expert help getting back and forth amongst his bed, wheelchair, shower, toilet stool, car, dining table, and so forth. At what point should he simply chuck the pills, forget the doctor appointments, and splurge on a wild party and go out in a triumphant blaze of glorious celebration?

These decisions are not easy to make. An ailment or an accident occurs for which an expensive cure is available. Will it restore the patient to full health, or will it simply prolong the pain and agony? Is it ever ethical to withhold the cure from a patient on the grounds they'll never recover anyway? Is it ethical to saddle society with the costs of expensive treatments that seldon work, just on the chance that this patient might be the rare one who'll recover?

So here I am at 64. Just short of Senior Citizenship. I'm taking only one pill a day, I needed a cane briefly for a few weeks for an ankle injury about three years ago, I can still dig my own garden, ride a bicycle, bench press 1/3 of my body weight, (Okay, laugh, you tough young dudes!), and generally do pretty much everything I've always done. I feel great! I'm also under the delusion that I'll still feel great in twenty more years. But then, the guy on forty pills a day described in a previous paragraph felt that way too, twenty years ago.

A Great Cosmic Accident?

2007-10-11T07:42:00.000-04:00

A popular pulpit-sport among Christian preachers is to dream up utterly preposterous notions out of thin air and then claim that these ideas are what atheists believe. One such idea is that the entire universe must have just randomly popped into existence as the result of a great cosmic accident. I have never heard that idea expressed by anyone in the atheist community, but it might be worth examining anyway.

Randomness is a well-studied mathematical subject. Mathematicians and theoretical physicists have used the principle of randomness to aid in describing many of the phenomena of the universe. Now, does this mean that randomness alone could have caused the entire universe to exist? Of course not, and no rational person could believe it. However, if randomness is part of Absolute Truth, it is capable of being an uncaused cause of a few of the features of the universe, and these features have been well-defined.

Chaos sounds a lot like randomness to me, but competent mathematicians have assured me that it's an entirely different principle. It, too, has been well-studied, and, if it's part of Absolute Truth, it's also a possible uncaused cause of certain well-defined features of the universe.

Is logic valid! Nobody has yet succeeded in publishing a rigorous logical proof that logic is valid, but an enormous body of empirical experience exists to overwhelmingly support the contention that logic is valid. If logic is valid, then all axioms derivable by using the principles of logic as the only premises are absolutely true in all possible realms of reality, and can be uncaused causes.

For instance, consider the axiom, "If A=B and B=C then A=C." If this axiom is true, then it is the uncaused cause of the measurability of all dimensionally definable things. For instance, everyone realizes that you don't need to take your entire washtub to the hardware store to buy the right size drain plug, you only need to take your little pocket ruler, after having measured for the size you need. A is the size of the drain hole, B is the mark on your ruler, and C is the size of the plug. (If that axiom is not a part of Absolute Truth then maybe there's another universe in which rulers do not work, but let's not go there just yet.)

Many other axioms are also derivable from logic itself, and these, too, are uncaused causes and their effects are known and have been well-studied.

Many apparently non-axiomatic mathematical principles are behind many of the laws of physics. We don't know whether these principles are part of Absolute Truth and thus are uncaused, or whether they are only true in our universe and thus have unknown causes. But at least we know that they have effects, and we know what many of the effects are.

Now, are randomness, chaos, logic, axioms, and non-axiomatic principles enough to account for the existence of the universe? Well, probably not, but at least we do know that these things have been empirically observed in ordinary reality and their effects are definable without resorting to supernatural explanations.

Can our esteemed clergy make equivalent claims about this God they so dearly want us to believe in? I don't think so. Every theologian's description of God is different, and none of them are supportable by observations. Except for a vaporous assertion about something called "Omnipotence" (a poorly defined weasel-word at best), no theologian I know of has ever provided a description of God that includes attributes that imply creative powers.

The explanation "God created the universe" sounds suspiciously like the Great Cosmic Accident that our preachers take such great delight in accusing atheists of believing in.

Now, don't get me wrong! I'm perfectly aware of the possibility that Ultimate Reality may consist of a non-materially hosted conscious intelligence of some sort. But I see no justification for believing any such thing until it's been verifiably observed by enough people to at least agree on a few of its attributes.

Judeo-Christian tradition?

2007-10-09T12:57:00.000-04:00

Just what is this Judeo-Christian tradition anyhow? Did Christianity even have any Jewish origins at all?

Christianity appears to be largely based on man-god mythology, a recurring theme in Indo-European mythology, especially Celtic, pre-Zoroastrian Persian, and Indus Vally mythology. The idea that any God could ever appear in human form is utterly alien to Semitic mythology and downright blasphemous to Judaism.

Now, let's look at this list of more than half of the groups to whom Saint Paul addressed epistles: Colossians, Corinthians, Ephesians, Galatians, Philippians, Thessalonians. Notice anything special about these groups? Yes, they're all in the fringe zone where Greek and Celtic civilizations overlapped. (In fact, the Galatians were entirely Celtic.)

Now, sometime when you haven't got anything to do that's worth doing, sit down and read these epistles. One of Paul's main aims appears to be to get them all to agree on a set of beliefs. It appears that all these groups had already developed their own separate man-god mythologies and Paul saw some value (perhaps political) in uniting them.

Here's another hint: the early Christians used the Septuagint as their version of the Jewish scriptures. The Septuagint was written for the benefit of Greeks wanting to learn about the traditional literature of their Jewish neighbors, and was never considered canonically sacred by any Jews, not even Greek-speaking Jews. There were other Greek translations of Jewish scriptures in use by Greek-speaking Jews.

And yet another hint: all four Gospels were written by people who appeared to have a rather poor knowledge of the geography of Palestine and the customs of Aramaic-speaking Jews in Palestine.

Here's my conjecture, which I'll admit I can't prove, but I think it sounds plausible. Soon after 36 AD when Pontius Pilate was relieved of his political career under highly scandalous circumstances, a number of existing Greek-Celtic man-god cultists (who had, for more than a century, been using the Greek title Christ, meaning Anointed One, to refer to their man-god) decided that Pontius Pilate would be the perfect ruler for their man-god to have been crucified by. Therefore, they had to make a few hasty modifications to their myths to give their man-god a Palestinian Jewish identity. Their meager knowledge of Jewish things was just barely good enough to fool the uneducated masses who formed the entirety of early Christianity.

So, it looks to me like Judaism was simply crammed onto the front end of Christianity as a convenient afterthought.

Fellowship or bigotry?

2007-10-01T09:51:00.000-04:00

The Episcopal church is in a bit of turmoil right now. Does anybody care?

The conservative factions within the denomination are, on the basis of about a dozen vaguely worded Bible verses, denouncing homosexuality as sinful. The liberal factions are, on the basis of other equally vaguely worded Bible verses, moving toward accepting gay people into the fellowship.

Here's one issue: At least one openly gay person has been selected as a bishop. The conservatives are rejecting Bishop Robinson because of the sinfulness of his lifestyle. The liberals are supporting him to try to pacify the gay rights community. Nobody is bothering to notice whether he's managing his diocese correctly.

Here's another issue: Some liberal leaders are proposing to introduce rituals to celebrate same-sex commitments for gay people, apparently just to make points with the gay rights folks. Conservatives are opposing these proposals on the basis of a few Bible verses. Nobody is concerned with improving the quality of the church's fellowship.

The worldwide Anglican Communion is, for the most part, siding with the conservatives.

Should the Episcopal church break away from the Anglican Cmmunion? Should the Episcopal church split apart and part of it stay with the Anglical Communion?

This is the sort of thing that's bound to happen to an organization based on nothing. Yes, I'm calling the Bible "Nothing" because it's simply a haphazard collection of primitive mythologies of various bronze-age nomadic tribes. Nobody is examining it in the light of modern knowledge.

Continuing examination of relevant facts would enable us to come to a consensus, and later to modify that consensus when more facts become known. But we can't do that. It would involve regarding the Bible as being of merely historical interest.

Contrast this with Darwin's Origin Of Species and the modern theory of evolution. We now recognize that Origin Of Species contains many factual errors, as Darwin, himself, predicted would be found. As a result of scientists' willingness to examine new observations, the theory of evolution has been greatly strengthened.

Now actually, I think it would be good for Christianity to break up into as many squabbling denominations as possible. It would eliminate the possibility of religion regaining the immense monolithic oppressive power it had during the Dark Ages.

If that means that our church can no longer provide viable fellowship, I'll just quit. No heartburn, no hard feelings. Fellowship can be had elsewhere.

Symbology

2007-09-28T08:45:00.000-04:00

Several decades ago the Navy built a barracks complex designed to make efficient use of the available space and to provide convenience for the troops. Recently, somebody noticed that a Google satellite map of the complex shows it to bear a vague similarity to a swastika, so the Navy has allocated $600,000 to modify or disguise the shape. Stories at http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/46586 and http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-swastika26sep26,0,2973328.story?coll=la-home-center .

The swastika has been a symbol of peace and good will for many centuries. It appears in Hindu art, Grecian urns, Navajo pottery, Inca basketry, Persian rugs, monks' robes, cathedral floors, Celtic monuments, Nordic runes, Gothic architecture, and many other places.

For a short period during the twentieth century, the swastika appeared on the flag of an oppressive regime in Germany, the only known evil use of this symbol in all recorded history. For this reason it has now become a reviled symbol of hate. We have short memories, don't we?

Somebody's symbol of good will is likely to be offensive to somebody else. A five-pointed star (with a single point on top and two on the bottom) inscribed in a circle is a good-luck symbol to a certain minor religious cult but a symbol of evil to certain gospel-gobbling Christians. Another five-pointed star (with two points on top and one on the bottom) with a goat's head fancifully inscribed in it is another such symbol. There have actually been cases of people fired from their jobs for wearing simple ordinary jewelry containing one of these symbols.

The traditional Christian cross is a shape that was first introduced as a crucifixion device in 64 AD and therefore couldn't have been used to crucify Jesus. Exactly how it came to be the standard Christian symbol, nobody knows. It may have originated as the symbol of something else. Anyhow, it's offensive to people who remember Christianity as the main oppressive ruling regime during the Middle Ages. Wear a small cross as a piece of jewelry while visiting a Muslim country and see what kind of reception you get!

I'm sure I could find, amongst my earthly possessions, at least a dozen things whose shapes are offensive to somebody. All I can say is, sorry, but go stuff it. I can't reshape all my possessions to satisfy everybody.

I see no reason for the Navy to spend so much as a nickel trying to remodel its barracks complex.

Does Christianity have foundations?

2007-09-27T12:23:00.000-04:00

"For more than eight hundred years, the Order has preserved an ancient cache of documents that could shake Christianity to its foundations." (An excerpt from the back cover blurb of The Testament, a novel by Eric van Lustbader.)

That got me to thinking. Just what are the foundations of Christianity, and what could shake them?

The Bible, specifically the New Testament, is usually accepted as the primary foundation of Christianity. It's a hodgepodge of poorly written mythology. The Gospels (including Acts) look like sloppy fairy tales, quite likely largely plagiarized from previous man-god myths. They look nothing like credible biographies at all. The Epistles don't really add much understanding, in fact, most of them appear to have been written by people who didn't even know anything about the Gospel stories. Revelation appears to be the rantings of a madman. So much for the Bible.

Scholarship-minded Christians can find a number of other ancient Christian writings, of which an impressive collection is listed at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/ . None of these writings are very informative.

Who was Jesus? We don't know. No contemporary mention of him has ever been found. The Gospels seem to describe him as, for the most part a nice guy, but little more than a confused dimwit whose most memorable accomplishment was to wangle twelve gullible morons to go traipsing round and about the countryside with him. Everything else written about him is pure fantasy. It's tempting to think he may be entirely fictional.

Who was Saint Paul? A Greek-speaking Jew in Tarsus? A supplier of tents to the Roman Army? A one-time student of Rabbi Gamaliel in Jerusalem? Assigned to persecute the new cult of Christians but then experienced a mystic conversion and decided to join them?

The pieces don't fit. What sort of Jewish community was there in Tarsus? What was his role in that community? Why would the Romans, who considered the Jews to be troublemakers, buy tents from a Jew. Why would any Jew, who would have considered the Romans to be oppressors, supply tents to their army? Where's the evidence that Paul had any knowledge of anything Rabbi Gamaliel would have ever taught? Who in a position of authority, before 50 AD, would have ever bothered to assign anybody to persecute the nearly unknown cult of Christians?

Who was Saint Peter? A poorly educated fisherman in Galilee who would have been fluent and possibly slightly literate in Aramaic and may have spoken a slight bit of Greek, later somehow makes it to Rome, where he would have needed to be fluent and at least semi-literate in Latin in order to become the leader of the Roman Christians? Seems somehow unlikely.

And then we have the Nicene Creed, based on pure imagination, not supported by any observation nor logical derivation.

And there you have it. Nothing but unsupported vapor. But Christian belief is unshakable. If an ancient document or physical object were to turn up proving that Jesus was a bigamist, married to both Mary Magdalene and Martha of Bethany, or perhaps a fraudulent camel-merchant who cheated all his customers, or maybe a Roman tax-collector in disguise, no modern-day Christian would accept it, no matter how well attested. Nobody's belief would be shaken.

Oh, but The Testament was a rather nice book anyway.

Relics

2007-09-26T12:47:00.000-04:00

A cassock worn by Pope John Paul II is being cut up into 100,000 pieces to be sold as relics, so says a recent news report. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article2525151.ece

I have no idea why anybody would ever pay for such a thing. But then, veneration of relics is a venerable old tradition. Every chapel, no matter how small, poor, or insignificant, has a secret treasure trove including a few small envelopes, each labeled Tertiary Relic of Saint Somebody of Somewhere (or something to that effect) and if you look inside the envelope you see a tiny fragment of some unidentifiable substance. If you should replace this fragment with a bit of dryer lint, nobody would know the difference. In fact, for all anybody knows, these fragments might actually be nothing but dryer lint.

Documentation of the Catholic Church is ambivalent as to whether these relics have magic powers. Officially they say no, a lesser (material) cause cannot have a greater (spiritual) effect. But somehow, the official wording gets twisted and obfuscated to mean yes, if you pray in the presence of a relic your prayer is answered faster. The Episcopal church closely follows Catholic practice, and the Orthodox churches appear to be even more heavily into relics. Most Protestant denominations try to downplay the importance of relics.

Now, here's the hilarious part. Apparently several fraudulent relic-mongers are all set to cut up just any old cloth and sell the pieces as relics from the late Pope's cassock, and the Catholic church is warning believers to beware of these fakes. But how can you tell of you've got a fake? Can its magical powers be scientifically tested?

Veneration of relics is not limited to religion. In the famously over-hyped Tour de France bicycle race, for instance, when a rider finishes all the water from his water bottle he flings it aside and his team's support van pulls up alongside and the support person hands him a new bottle of water. Meanwhile, the spectators pounce on the empty bottle in a mad melee and tear it to shreds (not to mention coming close to tearing each other to shreds in the process) just to possess a piece of it. I have no idea what it would be good for. Suppose somebody shows me a small unidentifiable scrap of plastic and brags, "This is a piece of Lance Armstrong's ninth water bottle from Day Seven." Am I supposed to be impressed?

Now some relics make sense. Pictures of long-dead ancestors, if you know who they are. Sports trophies that represent actual victories. Framed diplomas, if you earned them the honest way. Perhaps maybe nails and bricks, retrieved from the ashes of college buildings destroyed by fire, handed out as mementoes to alumni who have made donations for the replacement building.

But a tiny snicket of cloth alleged to be a piece of some dead pope's cassock? Come on! You'll never sell me one!

Pavement

2007-09-24T08:27:00.000-04:00

A visitor's comment to my Urban Sprawl entry has expressed concern as to how much of the earth's surface is now paved and how much the pavement causes run-off, resulting in rising sea levels and decreasing groundwater availability. That's a legitimate concern, although I think that pollution carried by the run-off is of far greater concern.

In my neighborhood, because I live less than 600 feet from the tidal zone of the Patuxent River just before it flows into the Chesapeake Bay, we have a zoning regulation that prohibits more than 25% impermeable coverage of my property. Impermeable coverage includes buildings with foundations, sidewalks, and paved driveways. It does not include non-foundationed sheds, isolated decorative rocks, and separated-brick or cobblestone walkways and driveways. That sounds, superficially, like good sense.

But is it really good sense? A family requires a certain size house and garage, and enough impermeable surface to park cars. (Most car-owners are aware of the rust problems that quickly develop on the underside of a car that's regularly parked on a permeable surface, especially grass or weeds.) This means that, in effect, you need to own at least four times the area you're going to build on. For many people, no problem, because you'd like to own that much area anyway.

But some people (non-gardeners, disabled people who can't participate in outdoor activities, etc.) could get by with less land area if the law would allow.

Now, here's the effect of requiring a certain minimum property size. Houses and businesses need to be farther apart. Driving distances are increased, thus increasing the need for more (and sometimes wider) paved roads. Fewer trips can be made by walking. More families need two or more cars, thus further increasing their own need for room to park them. Businesses need larger parking lots because higher percentages of their customers arrive by car. So, the total per-capita pavement area of the community is increased.

So it looks to me like the impermeable-surface restriction has backfired.

Here's another problem: over-dependence on cars for personal transportation and trucks for commercial long-haul. This demands paved roads. Even if semi-permeable pavement (far more expensive and shorter-lasting than conventional pavement) is used, the total impermeability of the pavement could be greatly decreased if as much as possible of our transportation could be done by railroads, which require very little impermeable surface for the railbeds.

What's the answer? Opinions, anybody?

Is a church really a charity?

2007-09-22T10:34:00.000-04:00

When we do our income taxes, we can deduct charitable giving, including giving to our church, and the church itself pays no taxes. But is a church really a charity? Does it really do anything for the community, or is it merely a self-indulgent social club?

Right now I have before me our church's budget summary for Fiscal Year 2007, trying to ascertain how much of it is actually used for charitable benefit to the community.

47.70% of the budget is for salaries and benefits to a full-time preacher, a part-time assistant preacher, an organist, and an office manager.

What do the preachers do? Primarily, they put on a grandiose show for us. They lead the Sunday morning services, attend our social events, and may perform some administrative duties. Nobody outside of the church sees any of this. It's all for the benefit of the church members. The preachers also serve as figureheads for the church in our dealings with our community, but for the most part, the people outside of the church barely know that the preachers exist. Hardly any charity here.

The organist greatly enhances our enjoyment of the church service, but that has no impact on anybody outside the church. No charity here.

The office manager is necessary for the administration of the church, but does nothing except help keep the church in existence. No charity here.

36.20% of the budget is for operating expense. It's just to keep the church in existence. No charity here.

12.47% of the budget is for buildings and grounds. Two chapels, a parish hall, a graveyard, and about eleven acres of land to do maintenance on. No charity here.

2.42% of the budget is for insurance. A necessary expense, to be sure, but it's not charity.

0.83% of the budget is for ministries support. That serves certain special needs of the congregation members, so I suppose that, by some stretch of the definition, it could be called charity, but it's only for church members, not the community at large.

0.37% of the budget is for outreach. This could be construed as charity of sorts, but it's primarily intended to extend invitations to folks to join the church, not to actually do much good. Charity? Well, maybe.

(I think the remaining 0.01% is the result of arithmetical rounding.)

In addition, some church members participate in a charity called SMILE which is run by a consortium of several of the churches of the community. None of the churches' budgets contribute anything to SMILE, however.

My conclusion is that our church is an almost purely self-indulgent social club, and we've done a masterful con job into hoodwinking the IRS into exempting the church from taxes. The tax break is actually an outright gift from the state to the church, thus constituting a breach in the traditional separation of church and state. Personally, I feel a bit guilty participating in this blatant fraud.

Urban Sprawl

2007-09-18T16:52:00.000-04:00

Waldorf, Maryland is an extreme example of urban sprawl. It began as a few widely spaced truck stops, motels, and sleazy bars along several miles of U.S. 301. Then in 1949, slot machines were legalized and all the sleazy bars put them in. Land speculators, seeing the influx of visitors attracted by the slot machines, immediately gobbled up the vast tracts of vacant land between the sparsely spaced businesses.

No sidewalks or crosswalks were ever built, so walking anywhere was difficult, and driving everywhere was necessary. Traffic got congested. More businesses were built, and they all had to have huge parking lots because all their customers arrived by car, none by walking.

The combination of rampant land speculation and the need for huge parking lots forced the businesses to be far apart, thus increasing driving distances and congesting traffic even further. The city planners in their wondrous wisdom built wider roads instead of sidewalks and crosswalks.

The increased width of the roads used up land that would have otherwise been useful for businesses, thus forcing businesses even farther apart, thus increasing everyone's driving needs even further. Traffic became even more congested. Land speculators made a killing.

The city planners in their wondrous wisdom thought the slot machines were to blame, so they banned all public gambling in 1968. That made no difference whatsoever.

U.S. 301 is now up to ten lanes wide in some places. Many businesses were relocated in the process of widening it. The businesses had to be rebuilt even farther out, increasing driving time for everybody even further, and the vicious circle continues.

About 95% of the land area in Waldorf is now roads, parking lots, and giant weed patches owned by land speculators. Only about 5% is available for homes and businesses. Widening the roads even more is no longer possible because there's no available land to widen them onto.

There seems to be two things nobody has ever thought of. First, adjust real estate taxes to bear more heavily on location value of the land and more lightly (if at all) on the buildings, thus putting the land speculators out of their nefarious trade. Second, build sidewalks and crosswalks.

Do you know of any community suffering from urban sprawl? Would these same two solutions be applicable to your community?

Absolute Truth

2007-09-17T13:36:00.000-04:00

Is there such a thing as Absolute Truth? I'm inclined to think there probably is. I'm also inclined to think that logic is probably valid and that the validity of logic is probably part of Absolute Truth.

I realize that mathematicians have been unable to prove logically that logic is valid. Every proof of the validity of logic that's ever been published in peer-reviewed mathematics journals has at least one non-rigorous step. However, we have an immense body of empirical experience showing that logic always works, and it appears that the most reasonable explanation is that logic is valid.

If logic is valid, then everything that can be proven using the principles of logic as premises must be necessarily true in all possible realms of reality, and therefore must be part of Absolute Truth.

The ancient Greeks presented the concept of the Logos, a body of truth so absolute that even the gods, if they exist, must be bound by it. They can't do anything that's logically impossible. Anyone bound by anything cannot be a Supreme Being. The Logos itself cannot be a Supreme Being either, because it must remain forever unchanged, and must do only what its nature destines it to do.

Early Christian theologians were very displeased at the thought that a Supreme Being is impossible. Therefore, they invented a new form of Logos, the Word of Truth spoken by God. This means that the Logos is dependent on God, instead of God dependent on the Logos.

The ancient Chinese presented the concept of the Tao, the Way of All Things. All things must conform to the Tao. Ancient Chinese thought appears not to possess any well-defined concept of God, therefore the relationship between God and the Tao is not a part of Chinese Philosophy.

The Tao appears to have had little or no impact on Christian theology. Christian thought, in general, regards the Tao as quaint and amusing, but unimportant.

Physicists have noticed that most of the laws of physics appear to be based on a strikingly small number of mathematical formulations. You can see this readily in Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics. Whereas most physics textbooks have separate chapters on static forces, dynamic motion, optics, acoustics, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, quantum theory, etc., Richard Feynman jumps back and forth amongst these various topics to show that the same mathematical constructs, with different window-dressing, appear at the root of all the laws of these various topics in physics. Therefore, these few mathematical constructs must describe the basic dimensionality of the entire universe.

Now, just who or what could have created such a universe? Could the universe be the necessary result of a body of Absolute Truth? Could the universe exist because its nonexistence would be logically self-contradictory? I find this a very intriguing possibility.

A few junior wanna-be theologians have suggested that God is Absolute Truth, but that idea has apparently not met with much favor in the general theological community. It would imply a powerless God who is incapable of making any decisions, but is absolutely constrained to create what must be created. Such a God would not be anything to whom congregations would sing hymns and recite prayers.

But the existence of Absolute Truth, at the present state of human knowledge, has not been proven. As Richard Feynman has said, our current knowledge of the universe is still not sufficient to determine whether a conscious decision-making God was needed for its creation. (Richard Feynman was Jewish, but he didn't let his religion get in the way of his intelligence.)

So that leaves us all free to believe that the universe was arbitrarily zapped into existence by the capricious whimsy of a conscious decision-making God. Personally, I have trouble believing any such thing.

Property taxes

2007-09-15T17:11:00.000-04:00

September is property tax month in my county. I just paid mine. It has gone up substantially since I had my new garage built about a year and a half ago. The garage replaced a decrepit shack that was a neighborhood eyesore and possibly somewhat of a safety hazard, thus ripping it out and replacing it with a decent building was a service to the neighborhood, so I get rewarded with a tax increase.

We're all accustomed to property taxes. The more property you own, the more tax you pay. Fair? Well, perhaps not. The commodity we call "property" is actually two separate things: land and buildings. I don't truly "own" land. I only possess the privilege of putting my house, garage, and garden on it. It's right that I should pay taxes for this privilege, even if I didn't actually exercise the privilege.

It's much better for the community if I keep my buildings in good shape and replace them when they become decrepit, but if I'm penalized with higher taxes for doing so, that rather decreases my incentive, doesn't it?

All of my neighbors except one have had new garages built in the last fifteen years. All except that one have gotten their property taxes increased. The one neighbor who hasn't done so is thinking about it, but his budget is tight and he's not very eager for a tax increase on top of the building cost.

My property sits on a whopping five eighths of an acre, about twice as much as I really need. I suppose I could subdivide half of it off and sell it, but why bother? The legal manipulation would eat up most of the profit and the decrease in my property tax would be insignificant. Besides, it'll probably be worth more next year anyhow.

Just think of what would happen if my neighbors and I paid much higher taxes on our land and little or none on the buildings! We'd all have more incentive to upgrade our houses, garages, and gardens to the max, thus improving the appearance of the community. Those of us with large lots would have more incentive to sell off the excess, allowing a more densely built community with less urban sprawl.

Opinions, anybody? What do you think is fair?

Science versus Religion

2007-09-13T17:16:00.000-04:00

Are science and religion compatible? That question seems to be all the rage this year, so I thought I'd speak up and prove that I don't have the answer.

Anybody who claims that science and religion are compatible probably doesn't understand science. Anybody who claims that science and religion are incompatible probably doesn't understand religion. I don't understand religion.

Stephen Jay Gould once claimed that science and religion address non-overlapping magisteria, therefore compatibility between them is irrelevant. I think I can probably agree with that. Science addresses reality. I don't know what religion addresses.

At a banquet that my wife and I attended a few years ago, we were seated at a table with several clergy people and other religious leaders of several denominations. The conversation turned to the philosophical implications of the difference between the two versions of the Nicene Creed, whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son, or only the Father and not the Son.

I, in my ignorance, asked, "Has anybody ever conducted an observation to watch the Holy Spirit proceeding, so we'd know which is true?"

One of the clergymen tried to explain, "The proceeding of the Holy Spirit isn't something you observe, it's derived from the equilateral symmetry of the Trinity."

I asked, "But how was the equilateral symmetry of the Trinity measured?"

Another clergyman answered, "The equilateral symmetry of the Trinity isn't measured, it's deduced by means of faith."

I asked, "But how do you do that?"

Another clergyman then tried to explain, "First you must believe, so that you may experience the Trinity in action, then you'll understand the sacred mystery. Read the works of Saint Anselm, who explained it all quite clearly."

At this point, my wife knew what I was about to ask next, so she began poking me under the table, so I figured it was time to drop this utterly futile line of questioning.

I thought, what's this? I'm supposed to believe before I can understand? I thought I had to understand before belief was justified.

Before Galileo could get people to believe that Jupiter had moons, he had to help them understand that a telescope was a tool to extend human vision, not an implement of satanic delusion.

Before Alfred Wegener could get people to believe that continents drift around, he had to help them understand that there was a lot more to it than the coincidental similarity of the shapes of the Atlantic coastlines of Africa and South America.

Before Einstein could get anybody to believe the Theory of Relativity, he had a tremendous amount of explaining to do. The Theory of Relativity still appears to have some holes in it.

And before Saint Anselm can get me to believe anything, well, he can't. He couldn't explain anything in a logically coherent manner when he was alive, and I doubt he'll do it now that he's dead.

Religion is an utterly alien world to me. I only participate because the natural progress of my life has placed me in the Episcopal Church social crowd and it would be needlessly hateful of me to refuse to participate.

So, am I a hypocrite for going through the motions of a religion in which I hold not the slightest belief whatsoever?

Remembering 9/11

2007-09-11T14:28:00.000-04:00

Does anybody really know what happened on September 11, 2001? I don't, and I doubt that anybody else has the straight story either.

I don't believe any of the conspiracy conjectures, but I don't believe any official reports I've ever heard either. All I believe is that the official investigation was inexcusably sloppy and crude, and that the official explanation is miserably incomplete.

There are too many inadequately answered questions. How could a mostly aluminum airplane, built no more heavily than absolutely necessary, cause the total collapse of a massive steel and concrete building intended to withstand every imaginable onslaught for centuries? What caused the upper parts of the collapsing buildings to fall almost as rapidly as if the lower parts were not there? Why do photographs of the wreckage show material breakage patterns of a sort that would result from explosives?

Let me offer a humble conjecture. From having spent thirty-two years working in various sorts of office buildings and helping to install systems in some of them, I know a bit of how they're built. They have easily removable lift-out floor plates, quick-drop ceiling tiles, and often easily removable wall panels, all for the purpose of facilitating easy installation and maintenance of phone systems, computer networks, interoffice communication systems, security camera systems, and whatever.

Installation and maintenance technicians are always around the building somewhere, doing something to one system or another. The office workers pay them little mind for the most part, and sometimes even lend them a hand.

Suppose, in the weeks before the 9/11 disaster, a few dozen Al Qaeda operatives showed up disguised as installation technicians, bearing forged credentials and a believable story about what they were going to install. They could easily bring in explosive devices disguised as system components. No one would question them. They would be free to plant the explosives in full view of everybody, and no one would ever insist on double-checking what's inside of the black boxes.

Could this be what happened? I don't know. I have no evidence. But at least I think it's believable. Opinions, anyone? What do you believe?

Recyclomania

2007-09-10T17:38:00.000-04:00

Is recycling worthwhile?

Since my community lacks reliable trash collection service, we take our trash to the local trash depository. In addition to the large compactor for non-recyclable general trash, there are also bins for various types of recyclable materials.

One huge bin is for mixed metal cans, glass bottles, and plastic containers, all mixed together. Does that make any sense? Is somebody going to sort through it, piece by piece? If they don't, what in the world could they use the mixture for?

Perhaps the job might be eased slightly, but not much, with an array of magnets. Then in one pile they'd have mixed stainless steel cans, tin-plate cans, zinc-plate cans, nickel-plate cans, and stray miscellaneous hardware in one pile, and mixed aluminum cans, clear glass, brown glass, green glass, milk glass, lead-crystal glass, and six formulations of plastic in the other pile. Nope! All the magnets in the world won't do much.

I'd almost be willing to bet that they simply weigh the mixed materials, apply for a federal grant of some sort based on percentage of total trash recycled, write a letter to send out to the public praising us for the great job of recycling we're doing, and send the mixed materials on to the landfill along with the non-recyclable trash.

Another huge bin is for mixed paper and cardboard of all types. Newspapers, magazines, books, catalogs, phone directories, cardboard boxes, all together. Actually, it's imaginable that there may be a few industrial uses for that mix without sorting, since all paper and cardboard products are more or less similar in chemical composition, so paper recycling might not be a total loss.

There's a large receptacle for used but still wearable old clothing for donation to charity. Now that would make sense, in principle, except that sorting items by size and style and getting them to needy people is very time-consuming. It probably is done by volunteers.

There is a large drum for used motor oil. Now that makes good sense, I think. I'm not sure what they refine used oil into, but at least it's possible to dispose of it without contaminating soil or water, even if actual recycling is not feasible.

There's a place in the landfill to dump bulky yard waste, but there's a dumping charge for that. Why? I don't know. It's compostable, whereas most other trash is not. In fact, I compost my own yard waste, and throw kitchen scraps in with it. Better than paying good money for garden fertilizer!

Used cooking oil can be cheaply converted into high-quality diesel fuel, and some estimates have been made that as much as one eighth of our nation's diesel fuel cosumption could be supplied by the used cooking oil from fast-fooderies. However, collecting the stuff would be prohibitively expensive. The typical American community has one or two fast-fooderies every three or four blocks, and each fast-foodery throws out only a gallon or two a few times a day. It would be a monumentally costly to have a collection truck loop around the circuit of fast-fooderies, collecting only a small trickle each stop. No wonder it isn't done except by a few diehard individuals out to prove something!

Now, back to metal, glass, and plastic. If none of it is ever recycled, we'll soon be mining our landfills. I really don't see how that would be bad at all. If all of it is recycled, we'll be mining our landfills almost as soon. For the most part, I think we ought to invest in landfill-mining technology instead of wasting time recycling.

Maybe recycling is just a feel-good thing, to make us feel patriotic.

How do you stand? Opinions, anybody?

Cognitive Dissonance

2007-09-08T18:38:00.000-04:00

Since I've just spent the morning in a church-sponsored Bible-reading seminar and the afternoon in a presentation by the Washington Area Secular Humanists on the twin topics of religious freedom and separation of church and state, it's a perfect evening to bring up the topic of Cognitive Dissonance, the disparity between what you can see is true and what you're expected to believe.

As we observe the universe, we perceive regularity at the most basic level. All electrons (as far as we know) have the same unit charge, the speed of light in a vacuum is constant, physical laws appear to be unchanging, logic always works, and so forth. This strongly suggests, to me at least, that the universe must be the result of a body of absolute truth of some sort, of which only a small portion is currently known.

But in the Christian religion, we are asked to ignore all this, and accept the utterly preposterous and totally unsupportable contention that the universe was just magically zapped into existence by the capricious whimsy of some sort of invisible sky-zombie named God. The method used by this God is held to be a sacred mystery we're not supposed to ask about.

Without the slightest evidence that such a God even exists, we've conjectured his detailed anatomy. He's presumed to have the form of an impossibly convoluted three-headed mini-pantheon called a "Holy Trinity" consisting of a "Father", a "Son", and a "Holy Spirit". The precise arrangement of these parts is disputed. Some denominations insist that the Holy Spirit "proceeds" from both the Father and the Son, and others say no, only from the Father and not the Son. Nobody has ever conducted an observation to watch the Holy Spirit proceeding so we'd know which is true. And then there are controversies over whether the "Substances" of the Father and the Son are alike, the same, similar, or different. No one has been able to analyze these "substances" so we'd know which is true. There are many other controversies over even more trivial and utterly unprovable details.

From this point on, the doctrine just gets weirder and weirder. Since nobody has ever detected the slightest evidence of this unlikely monstrosity, we've conjectured that he must live in some unchartable yonder realm called "Heaven" but he's really omnipresent. He's also omnipotent except that we can pretend to boss him around by reciting mystic incantations at our own belly buttons in a strangely useless ritual called "Prayer".

Different denominations have different attitudes toward the combination of careful observation and rigorous logic generally referred to as the Scientific Method, but all agree on insisting that there is a Higher Truth that's beyond the scope of mere science, and that higher truth can only be perceived by standing in ranks and chanting mystic incantations in four-part harmony while merrily vestmented dignitaries stroll down the aisle carrying awkward ceremonial gadgets.

Is it any wonder that our religion has never contributed anything of major value to the world?

To me, religion has only two saving graces. First, we at least pay lip service to the Golden Rule, although most of us have no idea that we plagiarized it from non-religious moral philosophies of about the eleventh or twelfth century BC or earlier. Second, we have a nice fellowship of friendly people as long as you're careful to avoid participating in the crybaby contests sponsored by the resident drama queens of the congregation.

Book review: The Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw

2007-09-06T10:35:00.000-04:00

Copyright 1998, Random House, ISBN 0-375-50202-5

This is a book from my parents' vast collection of books, which I obtained soon after my mother passed away and my father is divesting himself of many of his earthly possessions as he moves from their home of more than 45 years into an assisted living home.

This book is about the generation of people who lived their teenage years during the Great Depression and arrived at adulthood during World War II. This is my parents' generation. Although one might argue rhetorically whether any generation can rightfully be called greater than any other, it's obvious that the unique crucibles of depression and war shaped the attitudes and characters of the people of this generation, sometimes for the good, and sometimes otherwise.

Living during the depression can affect a person any of several ways. It can instill a lifelong attitude of frugality, or it can condemn a person to a lifetime of defeatism. The frugal survived, the defeatists didn't.

World War II was a war we had to win. Had we lost, we'd probably all be speaking a German-Japanese pidgin dialect of some sort and living under unspeakable tyranny. The people fighting this war and contributing to the war effort, both on and off the battlefield, learned dedication to duty. That sounds trite, but Tom Brokaw does an excellent job of explaining how this dedication built character.

The people described in the book are, of course, exceptional people. They're the people who later became politicians and industry leaders. But the same forces that shaped their lives also shaped the lives of the whole generation of plain ordinary folks nobody will ever remember.

Reading the book has given me a better understanding of why my parents were like they were, and why they raised me like they did.

They insisted on frugality, for instance. Why pay extra for a double-dip cone when a single-dip satisfies, even if you've got the money? Why throw a tantrum demanding fancy toys when a few pieces of scrap wood nailed together, supplemented by the fertile imagination that every kid has got, will do just fine?

They taught devotion to duty. Get that geography lesson learned, not because there's any immediate tangible reward, but because it's the right thing to do. Go help Grandma do her grocery shopping, not because she'll give you a candy bar, but because she needs help.

Many people of this generation have built up substantial pots of savings, which their children (my generation) will inherit. Do I deserve to inherit anything? Of course not! I feel like a vulture even thinking about it. I hope my father uses his money for his own enjoyment during his remaining years. He inherited absolutely nothing whatsoever from his parents, and he's already given me everything a parent rightfully owes his children. I've got no right to ask for more.

Tom Brokaw has, in my opinion, somewhat whitewashed the descriptions of several of the political and industry leaders. He's glossed over the miserable failings of several politicians who, as we've read in newspaper articles, messed up scandalously. But that's okay. He's provided me with an understanding of how societal forces can shape people.

Perhaps I'm unduly arrogant, but I think I'm a bit smarter for having read the book.

A sermon on poverty and hunger

2007-09-04T16:45:00.000-04:00

At a recent church service, the sermon topic was poverty and hunger. After the obligatory weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the amount of poverty and hunger in the world, the preacher presented a comparison between Herbert Spencer and Jesus Christ. Naturally, in accordance with the Christian Party Line, the conclusion was that Jesus Christ had the True Answer. We must increase our charitable giving.

Herbert Spencer was a nineteenth-century English philosopher and political theorist who, upon reading Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, concluded that natural selection leading to the survival of the fittest applied just as well to human society. Give the poor nothing, he said. They're poor because they're less fit. Allow them to starve, and the next generation will be stronger and wealthier because the weaker members will have died without leaving descendents.

Spencer was, in principle, correct, except for one problem. The laws of his time, like the laws of our own time, grant certain people unnatural advantages because they've been born into positions of special privilege, or had the good luck to move into positions of special privilege. If fitness were the primary determining factor of wealth, Paris Hilton would probably be a homeless waif sleeping on steam grates and begging crumbs.

So I think we can safely dismiss Herbert Spencer's proposed solution. But did Jesus Christ really do any better?

We Christians love to think that Jesus was the Supreme Humanitarian. Unfortunately, there isn't much in any of the Gospels to support that view. Although he was a pretty nice guy in most of the Gospel stories, he really doesn't appear to have been particularly intelligent. He appears to have had no idea that poverty is caused primarily by legally enforced special privileges, leading to inequality of opportunity. Charitable giving was all he could think of, utterly ignoring the underlying injustice.

There is one thing that all human activities, without exception, require, and that is a location, a place to be while you are doing it. You can just about hear the real estate salesperson in the background, whispering, "Location, location, location." Food can be grown more easily on land near where strong people live to till the land, and near where hungry people live to eat the food, and people move around for various reasons and their needs and wants change with the seasons.

Our present laws treat land, that is, locations, as property. It doesn't work that way. A location is part of the world, not manufactured by any person, and its value is determined by the activities going on around it, not by anything the owner does. The law of supply and demand simply drives the price up to the point where land is difficult to buy and sell, but easy to own on a long-term basis. We can't just build another factory to make more land and ship it to anywhere we need it, the way we do with automobiles or refrigerators or whatever.

When a piece of land is very expensive to purchase initially but very cheap to hang onto once you've got it, it changes hands very slowly. However, the need for dynamic usage of land is very great. It must change hands frequently as society's needs change.

Therefore, we've got to think of some way to make land very cheap to purchase initially but very expensive to hang onto, in order to dump currently unused, underused, misused, and inappropriately used land onto the market priced for a quick sale. A variety of methods have been proposed, but the simplest approach appears to be to adjust real estate taxes to bear more heavily on the value of the location and more lightly, if at all, on the buildings. Perhaps other taxes, such as income taxes and sales taxes, can also be reduced.

But would our religious leaders ever think of anything like that? Well, it's been about two thousand years and they haven't thought of it yet.

Now, don't get me wrong. Charitable giving and welfare programs will still be needed. But the fundamental justice provided by dynamic land usage patterns is a prerequisite for any sort of charity to be effective.

Welcome

2007-09-03T18:55:00.000-04:00

Welcome to my new blog. In this blog I hope to post lengthier and deeper opinions than would be appropriate in my frivolous Demented Diary over at DiaryLand. I really don't expect my DiaryLand buddies to spend much time over here, nor any of the readers of this blog to have much interest in the silliness over on the Demented Diary.

Oh by the way, does anybody know why the Opera browser can't be used to post here? I've resorted to Microsoft Internet Explorer and it works fine. Opera, my favorite for most of my web surfing, runs into a variety of errors.