Inscrutable

Illinois state Rep. Monique Davis has apologized to Rob Sherman, who has graciously accepted her apology, for attempting to deny him his civil rights in a public hearing that he was invited to testify before last week.

Apparently it's OK to be a bigoted, unconstitutional, theocratic asshole if you're having a bad day.

Here's a link to an entry I posted on the blog for a play I'm in at Forum Theatre in Washington, DC. The play is The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, and I think it's a terrific piece of theatre:

http://forumtheatre.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/notes-from-the-cast-frank-m...

If you're in the area, give it a shot.

(I wasn't planning on cross-posting this from my blog, but it took a rather philosophical turn, and upon reflection what I have to say has a lot to do with why I am an atheist. So, I thought I'd share. -Jim )

There is one thing, absolutely, that you know - but most people don't really believe it. That you are alive, and that you are going to die.

"Wait!" you say, "That's two things!"

No, it's not. Life and death are two aspects of the same thing. It is the fundamental duality of our nature. Now, the first part of that equation is generally accepted, but the second part is widely denied - hence the desire to split it into two separate items.

But it hasn't always been like this. Most of human history, people have understood the connection - they were familiar and comfortable with death (even if it wasn't to be desired). I'd even go so far as to say that much of the world today is still this way. It is really only in the last couple-three generations that those in the richer countries have lost a day-to-day connection with death.

It's official. Huckabee wants to amend the Constitution to bring it into "God's standards".

[link] "[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it's a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that's what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards," Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Huckabee often refers to the need to amend the constitution on these grounds, but he has never so specifically called for the Constitution to be brought within "God's standards," which are themselves debated amongst religious scholars. As a closing statement he asked the room of nearly 500 supporters to "pray and then work hard, and in that order," to help him secure a victory in Tuesday's GOP primary.

We are in deep trouble if this lunatic gets elected. Get out and vote, folks. Anyone is better than this guy. It absolutely floors me that in this day and age a Presidential candidate can make a statement like this - and be dead serious. This country is teetering on the brink, and will self-destruct if a religious fanatic like Huckabee is elected to the Presidency. It is up to us to stop it.

Damn. This scares the crap out of me.

(Video below the fold.)

Now and again I wonder whether I am just simply missing some critical little bit of biology, if there was a small glitch in my development that left out the ability to "sense God". You know, somewhat like how someone with color blindness suffers from a slight defect in their physiology, and is able to see most of the things that the rest of us see, but just can't make out some crucial differences that allow us to make subtle distinctions. I wonder about that.

So, it seems, does Sam Harris. From a Time article dated last Friday titled "What Your Brain Looks Like on Faith", reporting on a recent scientific paper by Harris (and others):

Mitt Romney appeared on Meet The Press with Tim Russert, and immediately Russert hammered him with the atheist/atheism question. Romney stumbled a bit, but managed not to wedge his foot too firmly in his mouth, I thought.

But what in the heck is this "common bond of humanity" he says that he shares with atheists? Is the Mittster a Humanist now? He's trying too hard. He seems to be trying to be all things to all people, and that's just a recipe for disaster.

Transcript below the fold...

I suffer from a mild form of bipolar disorder, as I have written about previously. Looking back, it started in adolescence, though I didn't understand what was going on until my mid-20s. It is mild, though, and I have never suffered either a hypomanic or major depressive episode (though I have had some very dark periods), and have been able to control the disorder with minimal impact on my life. In this sense, I guess you can say that I am a little bit crazy - nothing major, nothing which requires hospitalization or heavy pharmaceuticals, nothing which puts my life at risk. I'm just a little bit crazy.

Maybe you're like me. You go to a hotel while on business or vacation and you find another one of those damn Gideon's Bibles. What to do with it?? Well, as a newly minted member of the Abimelech Society, I replace it with a nice novel (usually classical literature) from my local paper back exchange store.

I learned about the Society from this link:

http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/abimelec.htm

The article reads in part -

The Abimelechs are an association of Atheist commercial, business, and professional men and women who have as one of their objects: The removal from circulation of the so-called Word of God or Holy Bible, from hotels, motels, hospitals, school classrooms, university dormitories, penal institutions, and many other places, and by the confiscation of New Testaments from school children, service personnel, and nurses.

"When does this plane land?"

"Mom, this is your home. Not an airplane."

"Well, I don't want to lose my glasses. I'll need them."

"I'll make sure you have them."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

My wife and I have both noticed a lot more "journeying" reference from my MIL in the past few days. From such things as above, to stories of people waiting for her to return, to news that she is going "on a trip".

Yeah, that's probably right.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

There's a phenomenon familiar to those who deal with Alzheimer's. It's called "sundowning". There are a lot of theories about why it happens, my own pet one is that someone with this disease works damned hard all day long to try and make sense of the world around them (which is scrambled to their perceptions and understanding), and by late in the afternoon or early evening, they're just worn out. You know how you feel at the end of a long day at work? Same thing.

So we usually don't worry about it when my MIL gets hit by this. Still, it'll catch you completely off guard if you let it.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

(This is an excerpt from a much longer post on my blog that deals with some related topics. However, I thought this bit best fit UTI, so am posting it as a separate item. - JD)

There's another possibility, of course. This one can best be summed up as being that life is "a dream within a dream". The latest popular version of this is "The Matrix", wherein life is an artificial reality construct, designed to keep the human 'power cells' docile. But this too is an idea extensively exploited in Science Fiction, with many different variations on the theme. Of late, this idea has been more and more tied to the concept of a 'Singularity' , with speculation being that we are just some version of post-human research/recreation as a computer construct. And in a piece published yesterday in the NYT titled "Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy's Couch" this gets the mainstream religion treatment:

Some years back, as a bit of a joke one of my friends got me officially ordained in some quickie-online church. Yes, I am officially and legally a minister of some church or another. I should track down the certificate and frame the damned thing.

Anyway, if you too want the power to officiate at weddings, put one of those nifty little "Clergy" signs in your car window, and have all the other dubious benefits of being a legal minister, but are just a little too laid back to go to the effort to find an online church and get ordained, here's what you need:

The Church of the Latter-Day Dude.

Now, let's do this like an official church - I want a % of all money you get for officiating as a Dudeist priest. I have ministry expenses, you know.

Jim Downey

Some recent comments and revived posts have had me thinking about altruism. Which is a little odd, since it isn't usually a subject that I give much conscious consideration. And then a bit of coincidence yesterday prodded me to think on the matter further.

Yesterday morning, I wrote a bit on my blog about a fellow who has constructed a 'Hobbit House' as a library to store his collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts and artifacts. It was an interesting bit of news, and brought together several of my lines of interest in life: Tolkien, architecture, books & book conservation, craftsmanship. I didn't expect that it would prompt this comment last evening:

Nice. I only hope the client is making lots and lots of charitable contributions to promote the health, education and welfare of Americans living in poverty. Otherwise this bit of self-indulgent excess is going to drain the fuck out of his/her karma. Hope he/she doesn’t mind being reborn as e. coli.

"I need a toothpick."
"No, mom, you had a toothpick after dinner. You picked your teeth for 40 minutes."
"I need a toothpick!"
"Why?"
"'Cause there's something stuck between these front teeth."
"You just brushed your teeth. There's nothing there."
"I can feel it."
"Let me look." (Looks. Nothing there.) "There's nothing there but your gum, swollen from picking at it so long earlier."
"I need a toothpick!!"
*sigh* Whisper, that only I hear. "Oh, not this again."
"I need a toothpick!!"
"Mom, there's nothing there. I just looked. Really."
"But I can feel it!!"
"No. You picked at it so long..."
"When?"
"After dinner. You had a toothpick for over 40 minutes."
"Really?"
"Yes, really."
"But there's something there! I know it."
"Mom, I just looked. THERE IS NOTHING THERE. You just brushed your teeth, and rinsed..."
"I did? When?"
"Just now. Just two minutes ago."
"But I know that there's something stuck there..."

Jim Downey

(Cross posted to CommunionBlog.)

To lighten the mood a bit...

We will worship mighty Cthulhu
H. P. Lovecraft's big old hoodoo
(1930's fiction voodoo....)
But that's good enough for me!

And there's a whole lot more, with many religions featured, from That Real Old Time Religion.

Jim Downey

This is a repost from 2005. Happy Easter, folks! -Brent

Happy Easter! May the big, fluffy divine Easter Bunny deliver unto you colored eggs from His own body saying, "Eat of these tasty hard-boiled treats, for this is My flesh."

*shudder*

That was definitely a visual I didn't need.

Easter weekend always seems to be the time when Christians all over the planet lose what's left of their collective minds in an orgy of religiosity where they commemorate the torture, death, and resurrection of one of their gods, Jesus Christ.

Nominal, "Jack-Christians" -- who never, ever go to church, or read the Bible, or pray, or think about their religion at all during the rest of the year -- strap on their God-Gear™ and troop off to the nearest church with their families in tow to show off how very pious they are to their neighbors - and if they play their cards right, maybe get them a little Jesus Juice. They attend local Passion Plays and weep and pray fervently, asking the bloody zombie god up there on the cross to please, please please forgive them for not praying during the whole last year so that he won't, uh, eat their brains or something. I dunno. It's very complicated, apparently.

Stodgy, uninteresting Christian Philosophers in particular shine during Easter weekend. I mean, the news agencies need to to find some "expert" to quote. They are writing these incredible, unbelievably silly stories about the wacky Filipinos nailing themselves to crosses and the the confluence of torture, blood, colored eggs, bunny rabbits, and resurrection. It's a tough weekend to be a reporter, let me tell you! So, they go and talk with the Respected Christian Philosophers™ like Alvin Plantinga to get a juicy quote or two and attempt to legitimize these weird, wacky stories that are popping up all over the place like banner ads at a porn site.

Alvin Plantinga delivers, of course. He's a brilliant, brainiac philosopher, after all. Alvin says sexy, quotable things like,

[link] [movie star Raquel Welch] "enjoys very little greatness in those worlds in which she does not exist."

That's gold, baby!

However, Brilliant Philosopher™ Plantinga - and his embarrassing, not-so-bright cousin, Pretend Philosopher™ D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Ft. Lauderdale Florida - also have quite a bit to say about the "evidence" and the possibility of the physical resurrection of their incarnated god-man, Jesus Christ.

We'll start with D. James Kennedy. In a recent article, Mr. Kennedy, citing exhausted, retired, possibly senile new deist Anthony Flew, and a 19th-century law professor, concludes,

[link] After more than 40 years of inquiry, it is my firm conviction that the scope and strength of the evidence for the resurrection is such that one cannot both reject the resurrection and, at the same time, believe in any ancient event.

Huh.

In the same vein, Alvin Plantinga has this to say about a specific miracle like Jesus' Resurrection,

[link] According to Mr. Plantinga, the initial probability of any such claim is low, though it would obviously rise if Christians are right that Jesus "is the incarnate second person of the Trinity."

Alvin Plantinga. Brilliant Philosopher™, Master Of The Obvious.

Two can play at that game, Plantinga! *shakes fist*

"The initial probability that I am an alien from Planet Zebulon IV is low, though it would obviously rise if my followers are right about me being an actual alien from Planet Zebulon IV."

[link] The external evidence, assessed by Oxford's Richard Swinburne and others, includes the Apostles' Easter testimonies and the dramatic spread of their belief. Mr. Plantinga finds this convincing: "Maybe it's not knockdown, drag-out 100 percent conclusive evidence, but it's pretty strong evidence."

How is this strong evidence of anything that they claim? What the heck happened to the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" rule of thumb? Parsimony demands that we look for simpler solutions first, Alvin, and that we do not immediately jump to the most ludicrously complex and convoluted explanation of the facts. Christ on a pogo stick. Sir Ockham must be spinning in his grave.

Okay, let's look at the "evidence" that Christians claim as evidence of the bodily resurrection of their incarnate god-man.

• The "dramatic spread" of the Christian belief.

The Christian faith didn't start spreading significantly away from it's starting point until a few score years after Christ's alleged death. This is perfectly consistent with the way a new meme or idea would spread without mass communication. The religion of Mithraism spread in much the same way - through person-to-person communication.

• The Easter Testimonies of the disciples.

Dan Barker's Easter Challenge has conclusively shown that the contradictory mish-mash of accounts of the Easter story given in the Bible are not evidence of anything at all, except confusion - and maybe and ancient version of the "Telephone Game".

• The empty tomb.

*sigh* What's the more likely scenario? You make the call!

1. The human person named Jesus who accidentally became a religious figurehead in the early first century (Follow the shoe!) was executed by the ruling government and the dominant religion's leaders for sowing sedition and discord among the populace. After he was executed, his followers removed his body from the tomb (for whatever reason) by perfectly non-supernatural means. Then, they tacked on the title "Christ" to his name, played up the martyr angle, and told each other increasingly fantastic stories about their savior's magical powers. It was great fun. After a while, they even deceived themselves into thinking that it was true! Centuries of telling and re-telling of the story, combined with human's incredible propensity to exaggerate and elaborate on a sensational, attention-getting tale, plus our species' noted interest in the religious, created a myth that eventually became the centerpiece of the Christian religion.
2. God exists. He incarnates Himself by making a human virgin pregnant, then having her deliver Himself in a barn on Christmas Day. He wanders the Middle East and preaches common platitudes and morality stories in mysterious parables, doing miracles and talking to Himself. Then, in a fit of pique at the stupid dunderheaded nonsense that His creations believe in and do to each other and themselves, he sees that they are all a bunch of evil sinners (even though He created them that way), and sacrifices Himself to Himself to break the rules that He Himself wrote. He dies in agony and torment on the cross to make His sacrifice to Himself more poignant and thrilling for 21st-century Movie watching Christians, and also to reward His faithful servant Mel Gibson with hundreds of millions of dollars. He is dead, placed in a tomb, then is physically and bodily resurrected by Himself to full life using his special God magic. Two thousand years later, Filipinos repeat His courageous act without any God magic and get infections from the rusty nails. God thinks that they're pretty god damned stupid to be doing that without any God magic, so he heals their infections, but lets them bleed all over each other because, let's face it, blood's pretty cool. Mel agrees with him. He looks down approvingly at the tormented Terri Schiavo, comforting her silently as she is starved and thirsted to death because She will be the New Messiah, His Only Begotten Daughter. He lovingly answers every one of President George Bush's sincere Christian prayers to Him because America is Under God, dammit, regardless of whether or not some cranky atheist doctor/lawyer or a few dozen idiot atheist bloggers agree. To Hell with them! Literally!

It's more than likely that the Jesus myth contains a seed of truth somewhere at it's core. There was probably a 1st-century teacher or religious figure named Jesus. He was probably executed by the local Roman government. Even this is not really certain, but it's at least believable and probable.

However, just because he might have existed does not mean that god exists, that Jesus was the literal physical human manifestation of this god, that he died and rose from the dead, or any of the rest of it. People want to believe in something greater than themselves. They always have, and sadly, they probably always will. The Jesus myth simply happens to be one of the most common and widely-practiced versions of "believing in something greater then themselves", for the last two thousand years. To us short-lived humans, this seems like an eternity, so this particular magic god-man myth seems eternal.

It's not.

If we had lived in Sumeria five thousand years ago, the god Enki would seem like an eternal truth to us. We seem to be wired for it.

Ah, well. Happy Easter anyway, folks. I hope you and your families get together and spend time with each other. Because that's the real important thing about holidays. Sharing your time and yourself with the people you love. I do it every chance I get, regardless of the origin of the holiday.

Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail. . . Yes. Much better than buckets of blood and torture. Let's go with that.

This morning's This I Believe essay is by someone who is an engineer but with a solid science background, and it outlines how he went from belief in some kind of fundie religion (unspecified, but references in the essay make it clear it was some kind of 'Biblical Inerrancy' cult) to Deism (though he doesn't come out and call it that - I suppose it is possible that he doesn't know the history behind his current belief.)

You'd think that God would have a better sense of workmanship. Guy's so sloppy, he left a big chunk of the crust missing, exposing the mantle:

Scientists have discovered a large area thousands of square kilometres in extent in the middle of the Atlantic where the Earth’s crust appears to be missing. Instead, the mantle - the deep interior of the Earth, normally covered by crust many kilometres thick - is exposed on the seafloor, 3000m below the surface.

But I'm sure the religious will explain how it was all part of "His Plan". They make excuses for shoddy work by this clown all the time.

Jim Downey

So, let's see...tonight there's going to be a Total Lunar Eclipse, the first in over two years if memory serves.

Now we understand the phenomenon, thanks to science. But I'm sure in the past many pre-scientific people turned to religion for an explanation, and there were likely various types of sacrifices offered to the gods to appease them and bring back the Moon.

So, two thoughts occur to me - first, that this is a good opportunity to point out how science has killed off most of the old superstitions...and that maybe people should draw the conclusion that their new superstitions are really no better. And second, I need to research the favorite drink of Nicolaus Copernicus, and raise a glass of whatever it is this evening as my own personal tribute/sacrifice to the man who brought us the heliocentric model of the solar system. Anybody know?

Jim Downey

...into the land of "They don't *really* believe that, do they?", I present to you:

EARS: Evidence of Alien contact Revealed in Scripture

Yup, shades of Eric von Daniken, who I thought was fascinating - when I was about 12.

Modern day events such as UFO sightings and breakthroughs in technology help us "plug it in" and really see what it was designed to teach us. The book itself has been around for years, but reading it now, in the light of the current world situation, helps shed a new kind of understanding on its content.

In your journey through the following pages, I invite you to join me in taking a new look at the contents of the Bible. I'll present the evidence, you play the role of the jury. Most of all, I hope you enjoy the ride and at the very least collect some good food for thought.

One of the reasons that I'm now an atheist is that I began really thinking about some of the things that I was taught in church over the years. I wasn't yet reading the Bible in full...my full reading came only after I started having doubts. I'd like to share now one of the first of my revelations I recall it.

I was taught that God (the Christian god for clarity) was an angry god a loving god and was omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. It was the angry/omniscient/omnipotent that really got my attention. There's plenty of Old Testament evidence that Jehovah is an angry god. The Garden of Eden and The Flood are two pretty good examples. My problem with it came when I started thinking about how an omniscient god could get angry. If you know everything, nothing can surprise you.