Taking off

Well, I'm off on me vacation for the next three weeks, so posting will be spotty at best. Here's a barn-burner from Pat Condell to keep you going - unusually good even for him!

Pointless rambling, with backache

So here I am, sprawling half crippled in what passes for my easy chair because a bout of seasonal cleaning and decorating has put my lower back into continual spasms. Did my Creator design my spine badly, or is it an appropriate punishment for the lack of religious motivation in my decorations, or did evil enter my sacral vertebrae when some ancestor nicked an apple, or am I just an ape not totally evolved for the postures involved in mopping floors? I have my suspicions that it's the latter, so rather than begging for forgiveness or whatever I'm just carefully lying as comfortably as possible and slurping down rum and eggnog while I watch Matrix Revolutions.

Could the best question of all be why am I watching that particular waste of celluloid? Doubtful, but it's probably the best one I currently have the concentration to answer with anything approaching coherence. That's amusing, in a small way, since a certain lack of coherence is one of the primary defining characteristics of this category of film. That, in turn, is because I'm the one who is categorizing the films, and I chose that as a defining characteristic of Fetish SF (tm) films.

The reason I'm watching this turd third Matrix movie is more or less the same reason I forced myself through the sickened second one: I need the references. My primary cultural milieu is techno-geek, and for better or worse this trash is a primary source; I don't have to like it, but not having seen it is a bit like being a cultured upper-class Englishman of the Great War era who didn't know his Ovid or Homer. (Those guys wouldn't have had to look up the meaning of the "Temet Nosce" sign in the Oracle's house for example, and I'm glad my old Latin master wasn't anywhere near my ear just now.)

Ow ow ow ow... that's it, it's Mr. Cousins tormenting me from beyond the grave because I never could translate my Cicero, non gradus anus rodentum .

The rot set in right from the farced first one in the series. The initial concept, that all we see is a computer simulation and we're actually slaves to a machine civilization, was cool. It's a schtick that in its roots goes back millennia (with illusionist gods like Mara or Lucifer providing the simulation rather than machines, obviously). Philip K. Dick based his entire oeuvre on the question "How do you know what's real?"

It's a great question and can lead to all kinds of wonderful plot devices, plus it lets you pull iin the echoes from all the similar stories where heroes discover strange worlds behind the everyday one - down the rabbit hole we go, you're not in Kansas any more. Young man aided by an older Mentor travels to a strange world outside the known, braves dangers, comes back to save his home from the previously unseen danger. Classic Joseph Campell stuff, like much good science fiction, and giving it a plausible mechanism makes it compelling.

So why, oh why, oh why, did they have to give the machines such an utterly boneheadedly wrong motivation? Humans are being used as batteries, power supplies for the machines? What retarded dipstick somewhere in the process failed to understand basic physics? The damn people are consuming food, organic fuel administered via tubes; it would have been much more efficient for the machines just to burn the fuel to generate electricity. Besides, it fails even to provide a motivation for what the machines essentially do; why would they have to provide the elaborate artificial environment of the Matrix if that's all the humans are supplying?

What would have made more sense, and been just as ironic, would be if the machines were using the people in the vats as information processing units, taking advantage of our brains having evolved to recognize patterns even in incomplete data. That's a difficult thing to simulate in a computer, it would explain why the machines needed to maintain (and constantly modify) such a computationally expensive illusion, and there could be endless fun building analogies between what is happening in the real war and how the machines represent it in the Matrix.

Machine vulnerabilities could be mapped to problems facing the vat people in their eternal dreams. Hackers messing with the Matrix model could subvert the machine strategies, perhaps by making the machines overlook their own vulnerabilities by taking the pain out of the vat people's simulated backaches...

Ah, but that would have involved trusting the audience to understand a subtlety or two; I'd almost be willing to bet that something along those lines was in the original plot, but when it got Hollywood-ized some producer lost the nerve to do it that way. Maybe the same one who got all excited when the idea of tapping universal mythic structures partially penetrated, and felt compelled to throw in the utterly unnecessary and deeply boring prophecy subplot.

I should give style points, I suppose, for the powerful oracle being portrayed as a frumpy middle-aged housewife, but hell, style is the one thing these movies do have in abundance. In the Matrix everybody's obliged to wear designer sunglasses and fetishistic leather coats, and there's always a lovely shine on the rain of brass casings that fall from the guns which can't actually hit anyone if their choreography skilz are strong enough to overpower the local physics simulation. Be sure to pinwheel across the open space, and don't forget to hover for a second before that big kick! Fashions are pretty sizzlin' in Zion too, and great care is taken with the presentation of the huge variety of tasty treats our heroes are presented with there. It's downright odd how it's only on board the ships everyone wears threadbare rags and eats undifferentiated gruel.

I suppose in the end that's what so deeply disappoints me about this series of movies, and about the love my fellow technogeeks shower on it; it's the unworthy veneration of style over substance, and of emotion over reason, and the way my techie brothers and sisters eat that sad and threadbare techno-woo crap up as avidly as they do, just as long as you dress it up a bit. I always hope for a bit more skepticism; I don't know why, I so rarely get it. I just want the fanboys to wonder for a moment why the software program Agent Smith has such intense emotions. (Is it a simulation routine gone bad?)

At least they mostly do know it's fiction, unlike the morons who read that "Left Behind" shite.

And there goes the end of the movie, with the Oracle responding to the the Last Exile Child:

"Did you always know?"
"No, no I didn't. But I believed."

Oh, yeah, chalk one up for foundationless belief, that's a good moral for the story. Much better than "No, but great ends require taking great risks" or something like that. Ow.

Great, now I have a backache and a headache. I definitely require a reboot, if I can get my futon unfurled without deeper injury.

What I hate about Christmas

Hint: If you're thinking it's Christ, you're way off base.

No, actually I've always rather liked the Baby Jesus bit. The idea of the King of the Universe manifesting as a helpless baby, with parents of modest means, being born amid the farm animals... yeah, it's mawkish, but it's also the good half of the God-becoming-Man myth, the All-Powerful self-humbled to share our travails... well, it's mawkish and flamingly illogical to boot, fine, but at least it's not yet the psychotic guilt-trip the story morphs into later on. It'd be a harmless and somewhat cute myth if it wasn't for all the baggage associated with it.

I'm not one of those who dreads the obligatory getting together with family either. I don't often get the chance, actually, as scattered as my family is, but in any case we're not a dysfunctional lot and we genuinely enjoy each other's company - even the in-laws, within reason. I wish we could do more of it.

I love ham, and turkey, and stuffing, and cookies, and brandied pudding... (/me wipes drool).

Christmas music... meh. I could use a little more variety and I wish it didn't start at Halloween, but I can hang with it.

I don't even hate the present hunt. Sure, I cringe at the money I find myself spending by times, but then I do that around most paydays. (I'm a spendthrift before and a cheapskate after, sadly.) I enjoy the thinking about what I can get for my loved ones, the anticipation of their pleasure. It's fun. Sure, it gets a bit manic, but that's what commerce does, and I can even enjoy the rush of the crush when I gets me sales boots on.

No, what I really hate and resent is the commercialization of Santa Claus.

When I was a kid he was a cute and harmless myth (harmless because unlike Jesus no one actually expects you to carry it into adulthood). I remember listening enthralled to the reports on the radio of his sleigh being spotted... I really did lie awake listening for sleigh bells and hooves clopping on the roof. I was spellbound at the idea of the jolly old guy who lived at the North Pole and spent all year with his elves making toys, then flew around the world in a single night in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer (and I knew all their names) bringing toys to all the children. (We didn't dwell much on the lump of coal in my family.)

And when I cottoned on it wasn't a bitter thing, because above all Santa was a generous myth, one where parents and grandparents were willing to give up the credit for gifts they'd bought in order to make the season a bit more magical. What's not to love in that?

Now? Santa's huckstering for every retailer out there. Ho-ho-ho, Santa suggests you spend your money buying this cell phone, that television, the other bit of jewelry. Coca-Cola. Feh! He's not giving anything away, he's selling shit, and it isn't the least bit magical no matter how many CG twinkles and sound effects they add.

I miss the old Santa. Maybe he wasn't 'real' in other than the "Yes, Virginia" sense, but this new guy is just depressingly fake through and through.

Surely The Winning Idiocy

It's always a tough field to pick from when you try to pick out the stupidest or most pandering comment made by a Presidential candidate in any given election season. With the stellar* quality of some of the candidates, especially on the Republican side, it may seem hubristic to declare a tentative winner with so long left in the ever more interminable contest, but it really is difficult to see how anyone could top "Mitt" Romney's idiocy from yesterday's speech:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. [...] Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

I have followed politics reasonably closely for all my adult life, and therefore bear little respect for any politician, and certainly the toxic meltdown** of the Republican party over the last few decades has produced many a jaw-droppingly stupid soundbite; I have also made a lifelong study of religion, and therefore bear little respect for any given religion, and certainly the Mormons are second only to the Scientologists in the jaw-dropping stupidity of their precepts.

Still: what the FUCK? Did that consummate ass just manage to out-stupid Shrub? I believe so.

I recognize that the kind of simple-minded unreasoning faith that Shrub espouses*** is sadly endemic to much of American culture; the proportion of voters who consider the ability to believe in pregnant virgins and re-animated corpses to be an asset in the person who gets to control the nuclear (or even nucular) weapons is truly retch-worthy.

I also recognize that the word 'freedom' is valued by politicians, particularly American politicians and most especially neoconservative Republican politicians, more for its value as a knee-jerk trigger to jingoism than for any actual semantic content. Still, I thought the blatant misuse of the term pioneered by Commander Codpiece would set the standard for some time; after all, justifying the rapid-fire reduction of actual American freedoms by claiming an existential threat from "those who hate our freedoms" takes an appalling level of chutzpah.

His would-be successor may well have outdone even that hypocrisy, though. Look at it again:

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. [...] Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

By this logic repressive theocracies simply don't exist; how could Iranians, for example, lack freedom when they are so deeply religious? Obviously the complete lack of open homosexuality noted by President Ahmadinejad is a completely free choice coincidentally shared by all Iranians, and the draconian prison sentences inspired directly from the hadith are simply an amusing cultural irrelevancy.

There must also be a terrifically inconspicuous subculture of strongly religious people hiding in countries like the Netherlands, to enable their manifest freedom. The easy attitudes toward drugs, sex, and political activism in Amsterdam, for example, must surely be the result of deeply committed (and deeply hidden) religious zealots.

You may wonder why the Founding Fathers, being the fans of freedom they were, were so perverse as to make a big point of separating church and state; didn't they know that religion and freedom are inseparable? Perhaps they simply lacked the perspective of being members of the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter-Day Saints, a creed which was forced to abandon a major precept of their faith (polygamy) by force of law - backed up, as always, by force of arms - because it conflicted with the religious precepts of their more numerous and powerful neighbors.

No, of course not. It is simply that they were by and large rationalists, products of the Enlightenment who weren't in those days impelled quite so strongly to pander to the demented fuckwits who prefer faith to reason no matter what the cost in thwarted scientific progress, in domestic disharmony and division, and in endless needless wars abroad.

It's 2007, and here in America (the land that likes to consider itself the vanguard of the future) we can't even consider the idea that it might not be necessary or even desirable for our supreme leader to believe in millennia-old agrarian myths. No, we have to spend our time debating whether we can accept an overlay of transparent deception from a more recent era on top, or whether we must insist on leaders who acknowledge only the purest of old hokum in this age of science and reason.

That is the actual issue which grips what passes for minds amongst the great American public; not whether we can accept as a leader someone who espouses lunatic idiocy, but only whether the particular style of lunatic idiocy is sufficiently mainstream. The inertia of popular irrationality is all that saves us from an acolyte of L.Ron Hubbard getting hold of the levers of power. and I still don't doubt the sheeple would pick a Scientologist over a rationalist.

After all, what's 'free' about examining the evidence the world presents you with, applying your best reason and logic to it, elucidating for yourself how it all works, then independently deciding what to do about it?

No, 'free' means you believe in a religion; that unity lies in believing your church is right and the others are wrong, heretical; that freedom lies in submitting to the inabrogable commands of a supreme being; that truth lies in accepting the precepts of your faith despite any evidence.

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.

Feh.


* For this purpose, 'stellar' includes black holes; strange beyond reason, dense beyond belief.

** Of course, the "Grand Old Party" has tended generally downward since Lincoln's tenure or thereabouts, but the rate of descent has markedly accelerated in recent times.

***Shrub's sincerity is known only to himself; I've never been able to decide if he's a shrewd bastard who pretends to stupidity for tactical advantage, or possibly through sheer love of duplicity, or if it's simply that his idiocy is so profound as to mimic genius.

Thanks

When it comes to the emotional bases of religious belief we atheists tend to talk most about the theist's attempts to avoid disasters, especially that whole death thing, by sucking up to the invisible superbeing(s). (Then there's the piling on of the imaginary after-death disasters, but that's another issue.)

There is a somewhat less puerile reason for wanting there to be a Big Sky Daddy who made it all, though. This is a pretty amazing universe full of totally cool phenomena, and many feel a strong need for someone to thank for it all.

You have to admit, that's kind of cute, if naive - downright adorable in a child, in fact. In an adult it's a little callow, but essentially harmless and springing from a good impulse. The universe is definitely something to appreciate, and I suppose it's easy to blur the line between that and gratitude. Giving thanks to nothing for everything is probably not a satisfactory substitute, emotionally speaking.

Still, it's not as if there aren't plenty of places to put gratitude. Family, friends, teachers, pets... why try to add gods or honest politicians? No need for it, really.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Missing and Maintaining

So yes, kids, I did indeed miss another Quote of the Day. Since at this stage I have a readership of maybe two or three, I doubt that anyone's world foundation is rocked by my failure, but who knows?

After all, as I was just reminded today by one of those million dollar bills which Way of the Master devotees use to get out of leaving real tips (and, less intentionally, for demonstrating that even the most classic of jests can have all the humor sucked out of them by ideologues), if one has ever even once in the course of a lifetime lied or stolen or had an impure thought about a woman who 'belongs' to another man, then one is a LIAR and a THIEF and an ADULTERER, and can only be redeemed by the One Who Mastered Sin, yadda yadda yadda.

(I've noticed, by the way, that WoM-men always lay a huge emphasis on on how they are particularly prone to the latter sin. Even in their rejection of what they consider sin, they want to borrow the cachet of that one to deflect any perception which people may have that they are girly-men - apparently there's something about declaring one's self utterly pwn3d by a virgin pacifist who got his ass nailed to a tree two millennia ago which threatens the machismo. It's always phrased unashamedly as "lusting after another man's woman" too, not "disrupting a relationship" or anything modern like that. The unconscious troglodytism is truly appalling.)

I can understand the appeal of this line of thinking, truly. When I was studying for my associate's degree I got all A grades up until my final semester. The pressure I put on myself to maintain the 4.0 was intense and only grew more intense with each passing semester. I finally blew a B in my last semester and screwed the whole thing up... because half my credits were transfers it meant I could only graduate magna cum laude instead of summa cum laude. Oh, the Humanity! (The Science? AS, not AA.)

Then I went on to work on my baccalaureate degree. There I got a B in Data Structures in the first semester (by virtue of wiping my entire final project with a misconfigured makefile after making no backups), and the relief was enormous! The As I got afterward were by virtue of enjoying the learning rather than in order to maintain an artificial and unsustainable (by me) perfection. Note that I did get As, I wouldn't want you to miss that even though I don't consider it a sin! Oh, I got laid too, honest I did! Really!

So I do understand the trick, but I also see through it. Makeout artists, I'm told, use a similar technique called 'negging' to get women to have sex with them ('score'); they begin the evening by insulting the targeted woman, preferably in connection with whatever aspect of themselves the women consider most attractive to men. The idea is that the women are then compelled to prove to themselves that they are, too, attractive, by pursuing the dickwad who insulted them. Apparently it works quite well on women who have been emotionally wounded to the point of being temporarily or permanently crippled (sadly a not uncommon state in our society), and hucksters from the Way of the Master or the Church of Scientology are trained and eager to exploit that kind of weakness in men and women alike.

Guilt is a tremendous, out-jutting handle on our psyche, and one which can be exploited easily by any ruthless bastards with insight into its workings. Poor, sick, can't look after your kids? It's because you didn't follow the teachings of the Church, or the Party, or your Mother. Life's good? Well, you know you don't really deserve it, and a hard rain's a-coming if you didn't follow the teachings of the Church, or the Party, or your Mother...

That's not to say that guilt itself has no uses; the very reason I instituted my regular features of the Daily Quote, the Friday Frog and the Monthly Poem was to guilt myself into maintaining this blog. It has more or less worked, too; I've been much better about keeping this thing alive since I instituted those. Several QOTDs piled up makes me nervous; two FFs too close together are a Big Red Flag; if I get two MPs separated only by quotes and frogs, Parliament likely wants dissolving (and then where would the country be?).

Guilt is not in itself a bad thing, then; it is a tremendously useful neurological reminder that we have not met goals which we consider important. (The important thing is not to let others decide what is important!) If we don't keep to our diet, exercise, take out the trash on time, recycle, refrain from theft, let a person handicapped by age or pregnancy or simple tiredness take the free seat on the bus, forgive our cat for testing his claws on our air mattress... guilt.

That last - you may have guessed, you clever minxes - is one I recently experienced personally. Oh I was mad! I was steaming. I fumed pretty badly, until my boy reminded me "Don't be too mad at her, Daddy, because she does love you, after all." He's confused about the cat's gender, of course, but his instincts about the cat's wrongdoing and my reaction were spot on.

The saying goes, "To err is human, to forgive divine." Bullshit, says I; forgiveness is entirely human also. The impulse to call it divine is only a reflection of this absurd idea that we have no inherent goodness in ourselves, that the good in us comes always from some divine Master - not our selves which are, and can only be, sources of weakness and evil. What utter crap! Some of the nicest people I have ever known have been human beings, and some of the nastiest people I have read of were gods.

So I missed a QOTD again; admit it, the previous sentence isn't a bad quote in itself, if I say so myself! ;) So I'll put that one up to stand in for yesterday, and a real one for today, and I trust you'll forgive me - because I really do love you, after all.

A Child Can See It

Theists are fond of claiming that morality can come only from an absolute overlord laying down the law; that there is no other possible source for moral behavior. My ten-year-old son proved them wrong.

It's not, of course, that he came up with some brilliantly convoluted theological argument; he's bright and all, but he's just an ordinary kid, and far from being steeped in theology, he's been kept well clear of it. He has a variety of religious viewpoints around him, from a quite religious sister to a strongly atheistic father, but none of us proselytize him - we are all letting him be until he expresses an interest, and then he will be free to make up his own mind.

No, what he did was demonstrate the basis of morality, by insisting that he wanted to invite all the kids in his class to his birthday party, even the ones he didn't know, because "it's no fun not to be invited." Simple as that.

That, my friends, is where it all comes from. Not from Big Sky Daddy standing over you with a cat-o-nine-tails in one hand, a ticket to Candyland in the other hand, and a stone-clad rulebook in the gripping hand, but from simple human empathy for how others will feel.

"But-but-but... What's to stop an atheist from doing anything, raping and killing included, if there's no Cosmic Cop? How can you have absolute morality without an absolute master telling you what's moral?"

The answer's right there; my son did the Right Thing not because of any fear of punishment - he was actually being encouraged to limit his guest list, not expand it - because he empathises with his fellows, and cares about how they feel. That's not new, or deep, or unusual, by the way; every normal human child cries when hearing crying, laughs when hearing laughter. Most of it's inborn, and a judicious application of reward and punishment (saying "What a good boy!" and "I don't like it when you act that way." is sufficient in most cases) produces human beings who
behave morally without the necessity of either coercion or reward.

As for absolute morality - there isn't one, if by that you mean a set of absolute rules which, if followed absolutely, are absolutely always moral. Absolute rulebooks usually end up causing misery and resentment and hatred, and by their fruits are therefore evil. Guidelines are a
much better way to go, and every normal child understands the most important one instinctively; do unto others as you would have them do unto you. (Am I using enough Biblical language to get through here? There's good stuff in there too, you don't have to get stuck on the
sexual hangups and bigotries of the authors.) It's no fun not to be invited, so invite everyone you can; that's a good moral decision, reached by a kid applying a very simple principle - not blindly
following a rule, but using his empathy and common sense to decide how to behave. If resources were too limited to invite his whole class (luckily not the case), then he'd have to figure out a fair compromise, but again, he'd be figuring out a realistic moral choice without the need for supernatural supervision.

If people concentrated less on trying to divine some absolute set of stone rules, and put more effort into figuring out how best to be kind and fair, even if that involved adapting their responses to fit specific cases, this would be a happier, more harmonious and yes, more moral
world. Perfect, no; people will always find a way to talk themselves into mistakes, even if you do try to predetermine their every allowable move. And no, I am not recommending anarchy; a society needs rules, laws, and enforcement mechanisms for them, and the decision of what to
allow and what to outlaw always involves moral as well as practical concerns.

None of that requires a ghostly overlord, though; simple human empathy and common sense are all that is needed. Don't hurt people. Make their lives better and happier where you can. If they're not hurting others, leave them alone.

Is that so hard?

Help Thou Mine Unbelief?

One of the things that often puzzles me in conversations with theists (which, given my location, mostly means Christians) is their insistence that they can choose to believe in the face of all logic and evidence. Is that really possible?

A person can choose to profess a belief, and act on a presumption that something is true, and even predicate upon such an assumption a line of thought or an entire philosophy. Is that really belief, though, or only the trappings of it?

I thought at first that the answer was obviously the latter, but I'm no longer so sure. I think I have been misled by a quirk of my own personality, one which I seem to share with an inordinate percentage of my fellow nonbelievers; I place an immensely high relative value on factual truth and on the mental processes which reveal it. Applying logical analysis to statements, parsing out chains of inference, meting out and continually revising estimates of reliability to putative facts - these habits of mind are so deeply ingrained and of such long standing that I'm scarcely aware of using them anymore, unless I make a special effort.

Most people simply don't have those priorities built into the way they look at the world. If an idea is rewarding emotionally, that is more important than its truth value. Even people who are well trained in the threshing out of data from anecdota and sound argument from sophistry will simply refuse to apply such methods to the claims they are determined to believe. Such fundamental dishonesty toward one's own self seems to me to be nothing short of a mental illness. Fellow proponents of irrational beliefs will often try to use the legitimate authority which such split minds have earned in one field (by applying sound methods of thinking) to lend a spurious legitimacy to another field (to which they have not applied those methods). It is a signature thinking flaw of irrationality, of course, to think that the legitimacy derives from the person rather than the methodology.

That isn't to say that truth has no value to them, but that value seems to lie more in the perception than in the reality - naming it truth rather than proving it true. I often pass a church sign that says "Avoid Truth Decay - Read your Bible" and have to add mentally "But for God's Sake Don't Think About It." The Christian bible does in fact have a story which is directly on point, a quote from which forms the title of this essay.

The story in Mark 9:14-30 tells of a man who is filled with desperation over his son, a boy subject to seizures, and begs Jesus to heal the boy with his magic powers. Jesus responds with the standard faith healer's escape clause, "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." (To those of us with a skeptical cast of mind it's a very neat way to make sure it's the victim's fault if the healing doesn't take.) The desperate parent cries through his tears "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!"

Jesus does see the boy through a seizure, of course, and some Christians are wont to take this and only this as the point of the story. More sophisticated Christian readers generally focus more on the same factor that commends the story to my attention; the fact that the father despite his declaration quite obviously wasn't really able to believe, but in his desperation was willing to try to believe, and asked Jesus to help him do so. He was basically begging Jesus, if belief was necessary to save his son, to help him believe.

Most Christians I've discussed this story with tend to take this in some mystical fashion, as asking for Jesus to use his Godly power to infuse the man with faith - a mystical brainwashing,if you will. I'm reminded of Winston Smith's exchange with his torturer in the novel 1984, when told that he must see that 2+2=5:
"Do you want to convince me that you see five fingers, or to see them?"
"To see them! Really to see them!"

One can certainly empathize with a parent willing to compromise the integrity of his thought, if the alternative is the continued torment of his child. It seems to me at least an equally compelling interpretation, though, that the man was expressing more a willingness to accept a hypothesis (that Jesus could help him) provided that a cure was actually forthcoming, in order to help his unbelief. It's notable, though, that like many a modern-day faith healer Jesus and his crew quickly and quietly departed the area. There is absolutely no indication that the boy was actually permanently healed, and one may certainly doubt that the father's 'belief' long survived the departure of Jesus if the boy subsequently continued to have seizures!

Given how many and deep are the contradictions between the claims of the bible and the observable evidentiary facts of the universe around us, not to mention the internal inconsistencies in the collection itself, I most certainly am not willing to accept the claims of Christianity at face value and without evidence. (Just to pre-empt, yes, Zombie Jesus supposedly said to Doubting Thomas Didymus, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." Well, that doesn't say that Thomas wasn't blessed as well, now does it?) If my belief that God is other than imaginary is important, I'm going to need some serious help for my unbelief; given my firmly entrenched habits of thought, I'd humbly suggest that providing some evidence would be a simpler route than a mystical brainwashing. I'm unlikely to ask for the latter out of my free will.

I value my mind too much to willingly maim it by holding beliefs I can't honestly examine.

On the uses of monogamy

On the Facebook group 'Government + Religion = Disaster' Nigel Austin posed the question: "Why do many insist on monogamy in a serious relationship if it is against the long term survival of our species?"

Interesting question! I'm going to take a stab at a reply, and I'll be cross-posting it to Quarkscrew (http://quarkscrew.blogspot.com).

The long term survival of the species is not relevant because genetic selection doesn't normally operate on that scale. An expressed trait will be selected for if it benefits the spread of the gene via an individual's reproductive success, even at the expense of the group. An expressed trait which benefits a kinship group may be selected for if its presence aids the kin who are also likely to carry the gene. Genetic advantage or disadvantage to the species as a whole is built up from local choices, if it is built at all; there is no Genetic Planning Central Office to enforce wise policies at species level.

We humans are unique on this planet in having a very effective secondary information channel, though; as well as our genes we have our memes.

As with genes, the successful meme is one which propagates and survives, and monogamy has been quite successful. This is at least partially due to its association with the memeplexes (-plexi?) of the dominant monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. (Islam permits but discourages multiple wives). It's probably worth examining how monogamy fits into them, and whether and how the monogamy meme works with them to perpetuate itself and them.

One of the dominant themes of the big three monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) is domination by male authority. (This is also true of the big remaining polytheism, but I'll leave out a deeper analysis of the similarities and differences in the hope that someone more expert on Hinduism will take on that task.) While Judaic tribal identity has until recent times been transmitted matrilinearly, oddly enough, property rights and other legal authorities have traditionally always been held and passed through the males.

That being the case, it is of paramount importance that paternity be unquestioned, if power and property are to be passed father to son. This is obviously simplified if the reproductive capacity of any given woman is officially owned by a given man, and to a lesser extent if his is in turn owned by her (this is especially important at the higher ends of social pyramids; bastards who can't inherit their kingdoms often opt to conquer them instead).

A slew of reinforcing factors come into play once the pattern is established. Women who generally lack property or power are isolated and infantilised, increasing their need for a male protector, and an entire commerce builds up around dowry systems. Once the inheritance of power and property are dependent upon recognized official marriage ceremonies, the groups controlling marriages gain ever stronger societal influence as a result. Families and clans which manage their marriages well develop prosperous networks; those which are slapdash, less well.

What kinship groups are to genes, societies are to memes. Male-dominated authoritarian societies have had distinct advantages over rival societies up until very recent times, mostly because they are much apter to develop effective warrior classes and organized armies. Add to that the unifying effect of recognized, recorded familial marriage relationships binding powerful families together and you get strongly unified cultures with common values, inherent organization, and aggressive tendencies. That has been a powerful formula for success, historically, for many societies... albeit perhaps not for the species as a whole.

That's an attempt at an explanation as to why monogamy may have become such an integral meme in historic Western and near-to-middle Eastern societies. Are all these reasons still completely valid in their 21st Century counterparts? I would say no, not completely, and I would expect the meme's influence to decline further given the trends of societal change.

For starters, most of the former intrinsic value of monogamous marriage was intimately bound up in inheritance issues which no longer exist. Women now own property in their own right as a matter of course; inheritance of property is typically more and more egalitarian, rather than passing father to son; paternity can be established with certainty; militaries are professional enterprises, not clan-based; strictly family businesses are rarer with nuclear families because of the variety of roles a modern business needs filled, and so on. The simplification of default inheritances (probate) and familial rights (spousal hospital access and the like) is also no longer as necessary due to computerized record keeping.

Indeed, it can easily be argued that if the primary purposes of marriage are to care for children and conserve common assets, then polygamous marriages have a number of advantages - it is very difficult for children of such group marriages to be entirely orphaned, for example, and it may be easier to set up a family-based business. Marriages of this type, with multiple wives and husbands, work well in some cultures (e.g. the long-barge marriages in Borneo).

I would anticipate that serial monogamy will remain the dominant form of long-term relationship and marriage for generations to come; it still does have advantages (such as simplicity!) and of course societies have inertia, and there's a long train of inertia behind monogamy.

Nevertheless, I already see the beginnings of acceptance that there can be other patterns that work for individual relationships, and I anticipate an increasing amount of experimentation and change in 21st century norms. As for those countries which are currently stuck in norms from much earlier centuries (you know the ones I mean)... well, just as genetic variety benefits kinship groups, I believe that those memetic monocultures will eventually be outcompeted.

My Original Sin, and Innocence

Although it would take decades more for me to fully separate myself from my Catholic faith, the first crack from whence the chasm grew came about when I was thirteen or so.

Fittingly, perhaps, it was the story of the Original Sin which did it.

That was my third (or possibly fourth - long ago, gentle reader, and I didn't keep a diary) year at a Catholic secondary school in the English town where my father had decided to finish out his career with the USAF. (Both my parents held dual Irish and American citizenships, so there was no barrier to his retiring there.)

Prior to that I had experienced only secular American schools on various Air Force bases, and the change had actually made me rather devout. I was even an altar boy (and no, I was never sexually abused, nor to the best of my knowledge were any of the other boys). Even more significantly, now that I was taking Religious Education classes I began to read the Bible thoroughly, and apply a great deal of thought to what I read. That, and a dab of the deadly sin Pride, were to be the beginning of my downfall or liberation, depending on your point of view.

The story of the Original Sin, the Fall from Grace, was a natural fit for a class full of gawky adolescents struggling with puberty, I suppose. It was the first subject for which we were required to write a lengthy essay expressing our own thinking on a religious matter, and we were to concentrate on how it related to our own onrushing adulthood.

As it happened the subject was one I'd already been worrying at outside of class, because something about the story bothered me. What bothered me was this: Adam and Eve (and all their descendants, which also bothered me but that's another story) were punished for disobeying God. That was the Original Sin. This is the fundamental story of humanity's relationship to God, and it seemed to me then, and still seems to me now, that there's a gaping hole in the narrative logic which I have never seen addressed.

My concern was this: We were told that Adam and Eve were given the choice between good and evil, and chose evil by disobeying God... but at the time they did not know good from evil, not having eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, so how could they possibly know it was evil to disobey God?

It seemed utterly wrong to me, because we were otherwise told that sin follows the intent - that to consider adultery was to have committed it, for example. To punish Adam and Eve (incredibly harshly) for doing something which by definition they couldn't know was wrong seemed impossible to justify, like holding a pre-verbal child to the standards of an adult.

(I hope I've made my objection clear; I have rarely if ever gotten a religious Christian to understand it, or at least to admit they understood it.)

Now, the Catholic Church does not in modern times insist on taking the Bible completely literally, which does save them from having to explain some of the more obvious impossibilities. (Then they dispose of the advantage by declaring the Pope infallible ex cathedra but that's yet another story.) Acceptance of (suitably theistic) evolution was allowed even thirty years ago, and the Eden story could be regarded as a parable, an allegory, a story essentially but not literally true. (Unlike, say, virgins getting pregnant or three-day corpses returning to life, but that's yet another whole collection of stories.)

So, since it was just a story, I decided to rewrite it. My version, somewhat condensed, went something like this:

There were in Eden two Trees, a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge. God, who was knowing*, did not want Adam to become as God was, and therefore warned Adam that if he ate of the latter he would surely know death.

Now it happened that the serpent, who was one of God's earliest creations, found himself becoming too slow to obtain his customary food. The serpent therefore ate instead the fruit of the Tree of Life, and that night to his astonishment he shed his skin and became young again.

Eve saw the serpent and, amazed at the transformation, asked the serpent how he had become so beautiful. The serpent duly told her that he had eaten the fruit of the Tree, and had shed his skin during the night, and been made clean and new by it. Eve decided therefore to eat from the Tree also, thinking to make herself beautiful for the pleasure of Adam's sight.

Unfortunately, she plucked the fruit of the wrong Tree; she ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and not the Tree of life.

Adam came upon Eve just as she ate, and he was horrified at the thought that his heart's love would die, simply because he'd failed to pass God's warning on to her. When Eve explained to Adam that the serpent had already eaten of it, that it would not kill them, and that in the morning they will have beautiful new skins, Adam wanted so mightily to believe her that he began to doubt his memory of God's warning.

In any case he did not want to live without Eve, if she were to die, so Adam bit into the fruit also.

Alas, when the sun rose their skin was not made new as the serpent's had been, and for the first time it appeared ugly to them, for they saw how it had the beginnings of age upon it. Ashamed for the first time of their nakedness, they set about making new skins for themselves out of leaves and thread. Thus it was that when God came looking for them, they were hidden in the forest by their clothes. Their shame had hidden them from God's sight, and when God realized this His Heart filled with angry grief.

God then proceeded to tell them that they would now know death, and age, and sorrow, and pain. God was not imposing punishment on them by this; rather, those things had already existed in their lives, but they didn't know those things. They were unconscious of the meaning of death, in their innocence, but now they knew death, just as God had originally warned Adam he would.

By eating of the Tree of Knowledge, they had indeed become like God; they had become adult, in fact, and not even God could ever return to them the Eden of their former innocence.



---
* Not, you'll note, all-knowing, any more than he was in the original.

I was rather pleased with my effort. Not only did it avoid holding the first people culpable of evil despite their innocence from evil, and not only did God come off less of a vindictive bastard, but even the serpent caught a break from the blame-fest... yet it still retained and even expanded upon the themes of natural justice, of the loss of innocence and the shouldering of responsibility, plus it put in a good deal more about the nature of love.

Did I mention the school practiced corporal punishment? My ass was bruised for a week.

The physical beating was nothing compared to the guilt trip they put on me, though. Rewriting a bible story? I learned it was the blackest sort of heresy, and my soul was a hair's breadth from being used as Lucifer's cigar lighter. Oh, I can joke about it now, but I believed then, and the idea terrified me to tears, even more than the idea of them calling my parents in. I avoided both fates by agreeing to hie me to the church to confess and repent directly after school, which I did. And yet, and yet...

It did not escape me that I was suffering dire punishment, and threats of more punishment, infinitely worse punishment, for doing something I hadn't even known was wrong, and with the best of intentions. More, in the course of haranguing me and batting aside my explanations, my teachers had made clear to me that hellfire awaited many, many innocents - millions of them, in fact, millions guilty only of not knowing what God considered a crime, not knowing what God wanted.

It also didn't escape me, upon reflection, that God could have avoided all that, by being just the teensiest bit clearer in his wishes and evident in his presence... and therefore he must have wanted it to be that way.

As I said in the beginning, it took decades more to get where I am; one decade to fully shake the belief, I'd say, one to shake the belief in belief, and this last one to fully commit myself, publicly and proudly, to fighting the evil skewing that religion does to the minds of even - dare I say it? - the innocent.

Two Gods: The Irrelevant And The False

Believing in something for which there is no evidence is not deluded, it's just a rather silly way to waste your time and mental energy.

That is why believing in the deist's god, who set the universe in motion but has no further interaction with it, is not deluded but simply pointless. The very reason the notion can't be disproved is because it makes no practical difference whether such a god exists or not. A universe with a deistic god is indistinguishable from one with no god at all; that being the case, the deistic god can neither be proven nor disproven, nor is it useful in any way for explaining why the universe is the way it is.

The deistic god is therefore, scientifically speaking, profoundly irrelevant.

Believing in a proposition which the available evidence, including internal consistency, contradicts is delusion. The god of the Abrahamic faiths falls into this category.

The characteristics normally ascribed to that god, alone - omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence - cannot logically exist together. Omnipotence is self-defeating; an omnipotent being cannot create a force which that same being cannot defeat, i.e. God can't make a rock so heavy even He can't lift it. Omniscience is incompatible with any power at all, because it includes the ability to foresee an action which can then be prevented, meaning the prophecy was invalid. Omnibenevolence, in conjunction with omnipotence and omniscience, is incompatible with the world containing needless suffering; a god which sees the suffering, is able to prevent it and does not do so is obviously not loving in any recognizable sense of the word, unless you are a particularly talented sado-masochist.

I say suffering rather than evil because the doctrine of free will, which is the best answer theodicy has to offer, does not cover agentless suffering. In the specific case of the Abrahamic god, the distinction is largely superfluous, as most of the actions described as taken by the Abrahamic god in the sacred texts can only be described as deeply and directly malevolent. The unprevented agentless sufferings of humanity outside those texts are simply icing on the cake of disproving that notional omnibenevolence.

These are not new observations by any stretch of the imagination; the problem of suffering certainly predates Christianity and Islam, and probably Judaism but the archaeological record gets scarce that far back. Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologians have been struggling to answer the paradoxes for near enough the entire time the faiths have existed, and have not yet been able to do so.

In science, it is perfectly permissible for a theory not to explain everything; at this stage of our development it would be ludicrous to expect anything else. The best and most mature theories will explain an abundance of observable facts, and that is enough to make a theory credible but not useful; to be useful a theory must predict facts before they are demonstrated. A complaint many physicists have about string theory is that while it explains many things it has not yet provided any disprovable predictions. The theory of evolution by natural selection is an example of a theory which is both mature and useful, and not just for enraging creationists either.

What is not permissible is for a theory (or even a hypothesis) to be internally inconsistent or to directly fly in the face of the evidence. The technical term for a hypothesis that does that is false.

The Theist's Moral Advantage

The existence of a God automatically creates an ultimate standard of right and wrong because whatever God (often through His priestly class) declares to be right or wrong, is so. Even things which any normal human being would instinctively consider abhorrent, such a mutilating the genitals of a child, become moral if they are commanded by God.

This is very attractive to people who aren't very comfortable working things out (thinking) for themselves, which covers most theists. They don't have to put any real consideration into the morality of their behaviour; it suffices that they do as they're told by the people they consider moral authorities.

If the Pope tells them to campaign against condom use in AIDS-stricken regions, or the God-anointed Tsar tells them to ghettoize and starve Jews, or the local parson tells them to chain and drag a homosexual behind their pickup truck, then they'll obey, because obedience to the Word Of God is the greatest virtue, as is demonstrated time and again in the holy books.

There is no better exemplar than Abraham, who is accounted most holy because of his unquestioning willingness to kill his beloved child because the voice in his head told him to, prior to changing its mind at the last minute. (Pity it didn't change its mind before all the other childslayings and genocides, but ours not to reason why, eh?)

That voice in his head was actually the voice of the LORD GOD ALMIGHTY; we know this because Abraham did rather well for himself afterward, and was even promised that his descendants would be looked after also, as long as they obeyed a few simple rules mostly about diet and genital mutilation. Had Abraham or his descendants done badly at any point, we'd have known that he was just a nutcase after all.

Do you see how superior this system is, compared to that of the rationalist? You never need spend any mental effort wondering what is the right thing to do, because a kindly priest or anointed king is always there to inform you. There's even an automatic feedback system, because if it turn out that they're false priests or kings then it will be obvious when God foils their plans.

The poor atheist, on the other hand, is beset with uncertainty, having to constantly think about what the best course of action is, with no guarantee from authority that they are right; the atheist has to actually consider what is best for everyone, has to see the situation from everyone's point of view, not just their/the priests'/God's preferences.

It's exhausting, really. Small wonder that theism tends to attract the morally as well as the intellectually lazy. Who wants to go to all that trouble of gathering evidence and thinking and testing the validity of your beliefs, when you can just outource it all to God and/or His representatives?

And after all, how far wrong could we go in just following orders we've been assured are lawful?

Moral Relativism

Every society has some constellation of predispositions considered good, and some bad. In this sense, good is defined simply as conforming to societal expectations, bad as not; the specifics may be viewed as arbitrary since they are defined entirely within the societal system itself, i.e. they are ultimately self-referential.

If no universal standard can be applied to judge between sets of societal predispositions (which is to say between societies), then no society can be usefully judged except in its own terms; this is the view known as moral relativism. Taken to its logical extreme, the reductio ad absurdum, moral relativism carries all the flaws it is accused of; murder is indeed equivalent to jaywalking, to a hypothetical detached intellect judging the two.

However, there are at least three standards which can be applied across societies which are useful for comparing them irrespective of the specific tenets of the compared. Our hypothetical detached intellect may still, without moral judgment, scale any two given societies (sets of interacting presuppositions) on the bases of internal consistency, of adaptability to change both external and internal, and ultimately of utility in terms of survival.

The former may be judged by the degree to which an individual member of a society can think and act within the society's precepts without conflicting with others doing likewise. A society which values only adherence to a given set of self-consistent values would always score highly on such a scale, and need never fear destruction from within; destruction from without would always be a danger.

Most religions score pretty badly on internal consistency; this is why they either split incessantly into smaller schisms, or actively suppress societal mechanisms (such as widespread literacy) for examining their precepts. The latter tactic badly degrades societal adaptability.

Contrastingly, science by its core methodology incorporates any novelties of data or ideas into its core. Basic inconsistencies, such as the conflicts between general relativity and quantum mechanics, are not suppressed or ignored but rather actively worked upon. Nothing is sacred except the methodology itself, and if you could empirically convince scientist that tossing chicken bones worked better they'd probably order all further lab lunches from KFC.

Adaptability is thus built right into the foundation of science. Contrarily, since religion relies strongly upon revelation for content, and such revelation is normally decreed unquestionable (one might almost define religion in such terms), the bases of any given religion are by definition unchangeable and thereby inapt for adaptation either internal or external.

The remaining criterion by which our hypothetical detached intellect might judge societies is simple ability to survive. The Darwinian viewpoint prefers the society that survives best, but there is no inherent guarantee that the society which survives best prefers the Darwinian viewpoint. It could well be, as you imply, that some particular set of non-true societal assumptions might work better than the truth, and even that some non-scientific societal processes might better serve any given good, including survival. With respect, though, I consider it very unlikely; I have to confess, of course, that what makes me consider it unlikely is largely the application of the scientific method itself.

While the body of societies which have appreciated the scientific method (of testing ideas against reality) is necessarily small compared to those which had no such notion, the former have been far more successful, not only in traditional terms of population and wealth but in terms of adaptability to changing circumstance.

Without knowing it for an inconcontestible fact, I therefore believe that a secular society based on evidence-based inquiry is 'better' than a religious society based on authority-based faith., where 'better' is based on societal survival. Is it possible that a society based on unfounded assumptions and unsound (or no) methods for testing them would be better suited for survival than a society which valued truth and logic?

Well, possibly, but I'm not betting on it. Show me a study, or a disprovable theory.

Choosing beliefs

In common with more prominent atheists I'm often asked why I "choose not to believe in God"; I must confess the question makes very little sense to me as expressed.

I didn't choose not to believe in God, any more than I chose not to believe in Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny. I'm not being flippant in the comparison; in all of those cases I once believed but no longer do. In each case what caused me to abandon my belief was the lack of real evidence for, and the abundance of logical evidence against, what was in the end a ridiculous proposition. The only distinguishing factor between them is that a majority of putative adults profess still to believe in God, and at that some of them still profess a belief in Santa Claus as well.

That is also, incidentally, the reason why I maintain my small campaign against belief in God, but not against Santa, the Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. My son is in little danger of retaining his belief in the latter three, because they are conspiracies amongst the Illuminati; the spurious 'evidence' of money beneath the pillow, of baskets full of fertility-themed candy, and of presents beneath the tree (and the occasional radio report of flying reindeer sightings) are all set up by adults who know full well that it is just a lark, a bit of fun we allow ourselves to perpetuate on the kids.

Not so the equally ridiculous tales of religion. These are perpetuated by adults who really, genuinely believe in them, even though they describe events like virgin births and dead people getting up and strolling about, events every bit as ridiculous as a rabbit laying pastel-coloured eggs. Kids are necessarily ignorant of how the world really is, but they are not stupid, and they are very very good indeed at detecting adult sincerity, and they give great credence to any
stories which their adult teachers sincerely believe. My son respects my sincere and hard-won beliefs, but his respect for my beliefs butts up against his respect for the contradictory beliefs most of the other adults in his life express.

The only reason I'm okay with that is that my strongest belief is that the best thing for a human being to learn is not a fact but a robust process of evaluating facts, and most of the other adults in Speed's life agree with that, even though they often don't apply it to their religious beliefs. I have faith (based on evidence) that my kid can think for himself, given half a chance.

Which returns me to he beginning of this essay; why, even in the face of overwhelming social disapproval, do I "choose" to disbelieve in God?

It's because it isn't a choice. I don't choose what to believe; I believe what seems to me to be true. I suspect that's true of us all, but all too many of us accept as true what we are told as a child is true, right up to the point where our parents admit to putting the money under the pillow. If we never learn to think for ourselves, then we simply look around us and gather a gestalt of what our neighbors believe to be true. If the majority of them believe that a six-armed goddess controls our lives then we do too; if the majority believe a Jewish carpenter born of a virgin rose from the dead and is therefore our only chance of salvation, we do too.

I am so constituted that the opinions of my neighbors, even of my family, is secondary; by the grace of sheer luck in my genetics and environment, I ended up with a mind incapable of believing anything which is internally inconsistent or which contradicts the world around
me. It's actually difficult for me to see things from the point of view of someone who can; I have friends and coworkers who freely acknowledge that the tale of Noah's Ark is literally impossible, but who "choose to believe" it anyway, in the face of the inherent contradictions and impossibilities. This is literally incomprehensible to me; I acknowledge that it is true they do, but I cannot comprehend it. HOW can someone believe a tale which their own understanding denies the possibility of? It is utterly beyond me.

Many a theist takes the position that this is a deficiency in me rather than them; that 'faith' is an absolute good, that to believe in things for which there is no evidence is a true ability, and not a disability of the normal functioning of a rational mind. In the short term that may
even be true, I think; a society which can produce suicide bombers has a tactical advantage against one which cannot, and a society which enforces a uniformity of viewpoint on any given ethical dilemma will be able to react more quickly than one which does not.

Nevertheless, the history of science shows that the society which is able to abandon bad ideas in favor of new and better will outstrip the society which insists it already has all the right answers; at one time that was the Islamic world outstripping the Judeo-Christians because they were more open to new ideas, later in the Enlightenment it was the Judeo-Christian outstripping the Islamic sciences for the same reason. Today it is the secular world which outstrips both, bogged down as they are in Iron Age texts bound up in outdated cosmogonies.

Why do I reject the idea of God, a supernatural, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent being who is nevertheless concerned with my personal well-being? Come on, why would I *not* reject it? Do you take me for a fool?

Ah, yes, perhaps you do. "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God." Well, it's easy to call names, of course, but does the evidence back it up? Who is truly the fool, the one who accepts childhood teachings and sticks by them despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, or the one who admits that ideas can be wrong, even when they are traditional, or popular, or comforting? Who is the fool, the one who changes his or her views in the face of the evidence, or the one who puts on blinders to avoid seeing an inconvenient truth?

I have often heard, in the course of debates on atheism, the idea that it takes more 'faith' not to believe than to believe. That is simply a lie, but I see its root; it does take more *courage* to tell your neighbors and family that they are being fools than to simply go along with the conventional wisdom. I have absolutely no doubt that my son has and will have the ability to see through the illogicalities and irrationalities of all the silly stories he is told, from the Easter
Bunny to the Tooth Fairy to Santa Claus to Jesus; my hope in so publicly opposing Christianity and all other religions is that he will learn from me, by example, the courage to be honest about disbelieving even the most popular nonsense.

--
Blasphemy is a victimless crime!

On magic mustard seeds

A dear friend sent me this cute little story:

The Mustard Seed

Once there was a woman whose only son had died. In her sorrow she went to ask a wise holy man is there a way to bring her son back to life. "Fetch me a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow. We will use it to bring your son back to life." He said to her instead of sending her away or try reasoning with her.

At once she quickly set off looking for that elusive mustard seed. The first place she came to was is a huge mansion. Knocking on the door, she asked "I am looking for a house that has never known suffering. Is this the place? It is very important to me."

"You have come to the wrong place" they told her. They begin to pour out all the tragic things that have befallen upon them.

"Who is better to be able to help these poor unfortunate souls than I who has experience sadness and can understand them?" she thought. Therefore she stayed behind and consoled and comforted them before going to another house that has never known sorrow before.

However, wherever she goes, from huts to palaces, there is never one without tales of sadness and misfortunes. In time to come, she became so involved in listening to other people's sad stories that she forgot about her quest for that elusive mustard seed. By listening to other people, she had actually driven the grieving out of her life.

Author Unknown

Now this seems a heart-warming little tale of redemption through good works, and no doubt that's what appealed to my friend, who is a woman of good heart. Alas, I am a cynic and an overly analytical one at that, and my reaction was different:

"Stupid woman should have gone to a brand new housing estate and found a couple of newlyweds who'd just moved in. Sorrow is bound to come to any household in time, so the only solution is to find the brand-spanking-new home before the first tears fall. Since newlyweds always go bonkers on the spice rack, she'd have had the magic mustard seed in no time.

"Of course then she'd have found out that so-called holy men are usually liars, and their claims of being able to resurrect the dead are always bogus. Any wise man could have directed her into helping others, since her natural inclination obviously lay that way - why was the deceit necessary? Was it just so the "holy man" could maintain his reputation for being capable of summoning miracles?"

The source of the story, by the way, was properly cited by my friend. I refuse to do likewise because it links to a bunkum website offering the gullible and desperate help for "everything from the common cold to cancer" (yes, that's an actual quote) in return for $60 a DVD (there are nine in the set, and if you still seemed burdened with extra money you can take workshops). I'll be damned if they'll get any PageRank love from this blog, though.

It's an old formula: get a charismatic "holy man", mix the placebo effect with some obscurantist jargon, optionally throw in a claimed connection to Ancient Wisdom (tm), and above all avoid actual scientific study like the plague, and you too can make enormous profits off the desperation and misery of sick people.

The same basic technique has worked for freelance Hindu fakirs selling their urine as medicine, and for profitable shrines of the Catholics like Lourdes and Knock, and for various brands of faith healers for centuries. It now forms the entire backbone of cults like Christian Science and Scientology.

In the age of the InterWubs, it's just easier for the snake-oil salesmen to reach their market. It remains to be seen whether the countervailing abundance of information debunking these charlatans will override that effect. Sadly, I have my doubts; most people, and especially the poor desperate saps the charlatans prey on, prefer a comfortable lie to a hard truth.

Holy men are generally lying toads, or at best deluded, but their traditions can contain wisdom. Shorn of the untruth, there's wisdom in seeing that a compassionate attention to the living is both a palliative for the grief of losing your loved ones, and perhaps the best of all ways to honor their memory.

In the end, though, your dead remain dead, and a magic mustard seed is only a condiment. To say otherwise is a despicable and unworthy fable.

Credulity

Why do people fall for stuff like this?

Fwd: FREE Laptops!...
The Ericsson Company is distributing free computer Lap-tops in an attempt to match Nokia that has already done so. Ericsson hopes to increase its popularity this way. For this reason, they are giving away the new WAP laptops. All you need to do to qualify is to send this mail to 8 people you know. Within 2 weeks, you will receive EricssonT18. But if you can send it to 20 people or more, you will receive Ericsson R320.

Make sure to send a copy to: anna.swelung@ericsson.com

It's sad when people can't be bothered to do minimal research like typing a few keywords into Google; "Ericsson free laptop" would instantly pop up a slew of debunkings, showing amongst other things that those model numbers are for discontinued cell phones, not new laptops.

Truly, though, this shouldn't even require research. It's obviously baloney on the face of it. Ericsson is going to give away their laptops to try and "increase its popularity"? What's the point in becoming popular if you're going to go bankrupt in the process? Whatever the cost of a laptop, exchanging it for 8 or 20 email forwardings is unlikely to be the most efficient use of the advertising budget.

Nevertheless, this kind of pointless spam is likely to be immortal. The cost of forwarding it is low (one can just paste it into a 'Reply All' to one of those annoyingly pointless forwards clueless friends keep wasting everyone's time with), apparently much lower than the cost of a moment's critical thought. Trying to clue a critical mass of people into ignoring it is a task both Sisyphean and usually thankless; people will accuse you of being a killjoy when you point out how ridiculous it is.

I've found, though, that being persistent about exposing the logical flaws has resulted in most of the worst offenders leaving me out of the address field. The majority of those, in turn, still include me in the mailings which I don't find obnoxious; I still get the jokes, the viral videos, the cool slideshows, and the interesting articles. I like getting those things, both because they break up a dull day and simply because they're gifts from my friends, who are precious to me in more ways than they know.

It gives me hope that if I continue pointing out the absurdity of pregnant women claiming to be virgins, water turning into wine without benefit of grapes and fermentation, and dead people coming back to life, I'll be able to both keep the benefit of my religious friends and avoid their embarassing attempts to 'save' me. Who knows, maybe I'll even get one or two to do a little critical thinking and research.

B.T.