How Green I Am (not)

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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.